by Dinah Roe
Though she may have been its temporary queen, Christina had reservations about the movement that caused her eventually to abdicate her throne. She was a devout Christian, and probably objected to her brother’s habit of co-opting sacramental language and imagery for his secular love poetry. But her religious sensibilities were not the only cause of her scepticism. As both a poet and a muse (she modelled for various paintings) she offered a distinctive, female perspective on Pre-Raphaelite obsessions such as the intersection of life and art, of real and ideal love, and of creator and created.
Christina’s 1856 sonnet ‘In an Artist’s Studio’ describes the unsettling experience of viewing a male artist’s multiple portraits of one model. Each canvas evokes ‘The same one meaning, neither more nor less’ as the artist ‘feeds upon her face by day and night’, and paints the woman ‘Not as she is, but as she fills his dream’ (ll. 8, 9, 14). The concluding lines of Dante Gabriel’s 1869 sonnet ‘The Portrait’ (included in The House of Life sequence) seem like a defiant rebuttal to Christina’s poem: ‘Her face is made her shrine. Let all men note / That in all years (O Love, thy gift is this!) / They that would look on her must come to me’ (ll. 12–14). The ‘quarrel’ between brother and sister is not so much about the objectification of women as about the male artist’s self-worship. Or, to put it another way, at issue is the price paid by the imagination for the triumph Dante Gabriel celebrates, and which (in Christina’s trenchant words) limits him to ‘The same one meaning’.
Pre-Raphaelite poetry was poised to achieve mainstream acceptance, surviving even the scandalized critical reception of George Meredith’s 1862 sonnet sequence Modern Love. It is significant that this dissection of adultery and marital breakdown, set in the bedrooms and at the dinner-tables of recognizably contemporary middle-class homes, and about as far from pseudo-medieval romance as it was possible to get, was still identified as a ‘Pre-Raphaelite’ poem. The reference on this occasion was not to dreamy eroticism but to something the Spectator dismissed as a ‘confusion between a “fast” taste and what Mr Meredith mistakes for courageous realism – poetic pre-Raphaelitism’.24
In that same year, and writing in the same journal, Swinburne published a ground-breaking review of Charles Baudelaire’s verse. Its ideas about the purpose of poetry would be embraced by the Pre-Raphaelites and later by the Aesthetes. Swinburne asserted that a ‘poet’s business is presumably to write good verses, and by no means to redeem the age and remould society’. By this he did not mean that poets should be oblivious to the world around them, but rather that poetry should not be bound by a sort of Protestant work ethic which insisted that ‘a poem is the better for containing a moral lesson or assisting in a tangible and material good work’.25
Swinburne’s next significant publication, Poems and Ballads (1866), tested this theory to the limits of critical tolerance. Poems whose subject matter included sado-masochism, blasphemy, homosexuality and necrophilia certainly could not be accused of ‘containing a moral lesson’, or at least not one that recommended itself to a reading public that had barely begun to accept Robert Browning. As David Riede notes, Swinburne’s attention-seeking poetry helped to position Pre-Raphaelitism (with which he was associated) in opposition to mainstream Victorian culture.26 In Swinburne’s hands, Pre-Raphaelite close attention to detail becomes positively forensic, as is evident in ‘Laus Veneris’:
Asleep or waking is it? for her neck,
Kissed over close, wears yet a purple speck
Wherein the pained blood falters and goes out;
Soft, and stung softly – fairer for a fleck.
But though my lips shut sucking on the place,
There is no vein at work upon her face;
Her eyelids are so peaceable, no doubt
Deep sleep has warmed her blood through all its ways.
(ll. 1–8)
Withdrawn by its original publisher, Poems and Ballads was defended in pamphlets by Swinburne himself and by William Michael Rossetti, who bemoaned ‘times like ours, when the advent of even so poor and pretentious a poetaster as a Robert Buchanan stirs storms in teapots’.27 From this aside, a major literary controversy was brewed.
Buchanan, a minor poet and critic, struck back with ‘The Fleshly School of Poetry’, his infamous 1871 review of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s first volume of original poems. The book had been critically well received, though it should be noted that its reviewers were mostly Rossetti’s friends. Influenced by the medieval Italian poetry of Dante and Petrarch, Poems (1870) included the first half of Rossetti’s sonnet sequence The House of Life (published in complete form in 1881) and sonnets written to accompany his paintings. Alongside medievalist fare such as revised versions of ‘The Blessed Damozel’ and ‘The Staff and the Scrip’ were poems dealing with contemporary matters, such as ‘Jenny’, a dramatic monologue spoken by a young man to the prostitute with whom he spends the night, and ‘The Burden of Nineveh’, a Shelleyan meditation on man, his monuments and the passage of time.
Buchanan’s strongly worded review attacked both Rossetti and his Pre-Raphaelite associates, whom he dubbed ‘the fleshly school’. Comparing Rossetti’s paintings and poetry, Buchanan found they shared ‘the same thinness and transparence of design, the same combination of the simple and the grotesque, the same morbid deviation from healthy forms of life’. His poems were even worse than those of the ‘glibly imitative’ Morris and the ‘transcendently superficial’ Swinburne. The fleshly school were further condemned for ‘their droll medieval garments’ and ‘their funny archaic speech’. Their work was a contagion, spreading like ‘measles’ through younger poetic ‘imitators’ such as Arthur O’Shaughnessy, John Payne and Philip Bourke Marston.28
Pre-Raphaelite poetry was denounced for its intellectual weakness, sexual obsession and downright weirdness. The poets, in pursuit of their determination to ‘extol fleshliness’, were trying to claim that ‘poetic expression is greater than poetic thought’ and that ‘the body is greater than the soul, and sound superior to sense’. The fleshly school promoted the idea ‘that the poet, properly to develop his poetic faculty, must be an intellectual hermaphrodite, to whom the very facts of day and night are lost in a whirl of aesthetic terminology’.29
Although Rossetti wrote a stinging reply, ‘The Stealthy School of Criticism’, in the Athenaeum, the damage was done. Pre-Raphaelite poetry would be inextricably linked with the pornographic, the unhealthy, the morbid and the feminized. As late as 1900, William Michael was still emphasizing his brother’s ‘masculine traits’, insisting rather sternly: ‘He did not “yearn”.’ The more readers learned about Dante Gabriel the man, ‘the less room will be left for the notion of a pallid and anaemic “aesthete” ’.30
In some ways, Pre-Raphaelite poetry is an invention of Buchanan’s essay, which unwittingly helped immortalize it by grouping the poets together and suggesting common aims, methods and objectives. Ironically, the same ‘deliberately abnormal’ characteristics derided by Buchanan would attract Aesthetes and Decadents like Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Symons and Ernest Dowson, not to mention W. B. Yeats.31 It may seem strange that a movement founded on principles of ‘truth to nature’ should be taken up with enthusiasm by the Aesthetes, who championed the artificial and the unnatural. But it was Pre-Raphaelitism in its later stages, with its worship of beauty, fusion of the visual and the literary, and rebellion against cultural norms which held the greatest appeal. Pre-Raphaelitism had provided a bridge between Romantic poetry and the poetry of the fin de siècle. The spirit of the Germ informed magazines such as the Yellow Book (1894–7) and the Savoy (1896), publications which presented a mix of poems, prose and illustration by such figures as Yeats, Beardsley, Symons, Walter Sickert and Joseph Conrad. The Rhymers’ Club, a literary dining club begun in 1891 by Yeats and Ernest Rhys, produced anthologies of poetry in 1892 and 1894. The club’s informal, shifting membership, social nature and loose but passionate literary aims recalled the early days of the PRB.
/> In the twentieth century, the Pre-Raphaelite poets fell into disregard. Dismissed by the Modernists, they have yet to be re-admitted to the realms of serious English poetry. Pre-Raphaelitism remains widely perceived as a movement which never really grew up. Even Dante Gabriel Rossetti tried to disown it in later life: ‘As for all the prattle about Pre-Raphaelitism, I confess to you I am weary of it, and long have been. Why should we go on talking about the visionary vanities of half-a-dozen boys? We’ve all grown out of them, I hope, by now.’32 Swinburne asserted that ‘Pre-Raphaelite’ was ‘never applicable to any but the work of my earliest youth written at college’ and had ‘long ceased to be applicable … to the poetic work of my two elders [Rossetti and Morris]’.33 Both Yeats and T. S. Eliot regarded Pre-Raphaelitism as a sort of childish thing which a writer must put away upon achieving literary maturity.
If there is still no critical consensus on these issues, this is in part because there is no agreement as to the exact parameters of the term ‘Pre-Raphaelitism’ itself. The Pre-Raphaelites themselves set the tone for this debate, though some of them at least had ulterior motives for rewriting history. William Michael Rossetti (by this time the guardian of the siblings’ literary heritage) argued in 1895 that ‘the name still subsists in a very active condition – which is also a very lax and undefined one’.34 This echoes Swinburne’s opinion twenty years earlier of the ‘rather foolish and now long since obsolete word Pre-Raphaelite’, which ‘for the sake of common accuracy … should now be disused’.35 Scholars like Ifor Evans, William E. Fredeman, James Sambrook, Jerome McGann, David Riede and Isobel Armstrong have commented on this imprecision, but none has succeeded in formulating a definition with which everyone would agree. The movement’s life-span may plausibly be argued to cover one decade or six, and the body of work associated with it will expand or shrink accordingly. Those who draw a distinction between the movement’s literary and visual aspects, for example, and who at least in art-historical terms are keen to divide it into distinct chronological phases, find themselves at odds with those who see it as a broad, shifting cultural phenomenon whose development and effects should be studied holistically. With specific regard to Pre-Raphaelite poetry, the diversity of figures and the difficulty of identifying membership of a specific group (whether defined by social ties or intellectual affinity) make the drawing of boundaries seem pointless.
It is not my aim to propose a neat resolution of this difficulty. Rather, I wish to suggest that the difficulty itself offers a kind of opportunity. The commonalities of theme which are discernible in my selection (the difference between real and ideal love, the relationship of dreams to reality, the role of the artist in a changing world, the disparity between intellect and emotion, the conflict between body and soul, and the function of history in the present) are not meant to suggest that Pre-Raphaelite poetry is a unified or homogenous entity. Shared themes mask a radical diversity of style and tone, a stubborn clinging to individual vision.
Although working with roughly similar themes and ideas, the Pre-Raphaelite poets are not simply dogmatic ‘imitators’ of each other, as Buchanan’s essay would have it. Despite their shared medievalist trappings, it would be difficult, for instance, to confuse Rossetti’s languid Damozel with Morris’s defiant Guenevere. The Pre-Raphaelites were, paradoxically perhaps, a group movement that enshrined individuality. They self-consciously (some would say naïvely) strove to place individual artistic merit above other considerations of taste and belief, an aspiration sympathetic to the doctrine of ‘art for art’s sake’.
Like many Victorian projects, Pre-Raphaelitism is characterized as much by contradiction as agreement, deriving both strengths and weaknesses from its diverse, informal and kaleidoscopic membership. This movement’s continuing involvement with other arts, such as painting, illustration and decoration, adds further layers of complexity. Its approach resists our twenty-first-century practice of separating the arts into distinct disciplines. Pre-Raphaelite images and poems illuminate each other, which may suggest a more prosaic obstacle in the rediscovery of the poetry: the prohibitive cost of illustrated, colour anthologies. I have included a list of key paintings and illustrations, all widely available in book form and searchable on the internet, as a starting point for readers interested in exploring Pre-Raphaelite visual culture.
Selections have been made from both early and later works, and from both major and minor figures. Pre-Raphaelitism’s most famous poets are Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Morris and Algernon Charles Swinburne, but I have also included work by Coventry Patmore and George Meredith as well as lesser-known figures like William Allingham, William Bell Scott and Arthur O’Shaughnessy. Although most of these did not remain lifelong Pre-Raphaelite acolytes or friends, their poetry makes it plain that they all came under its influence at one time or another. A diversity of subject matter and style is represented, from the lush ballads of Swinburne to the stark medievalist narratives of Morris; from Rossetti’s erotic dreamscapes to his sister Christina’s cautionary allegories. Also included are poems which the Pre-Raphaelites wrote to and about themselves, both during their early heyday in the 1860s and in their twilight years.
Pre-Raphaelitism, based as it was on social networking and a dining-club atmosphere, was an almost exclusively male movement, which has made its near-obsession with the portrayal of women a heated topic in Victorian studies. In an era which saw an unprecedented number of women entering the literary marketplace, Pre-Raphaelitism maintained strict demarcations between women’s roles (as muses) and men’s (as creators). In this volume, poems about women have been chosen to demonstrate a range of attitudes and approaches: Coventry Patmore’s veneration of monogamous love in ‘The Gracious Chivalry’; Rossetti’s studies of women as the embodiment of the poet’s soul in The House of Life sonnets; Swinburne’s call for a kind of sado-masochistic gender equality in ‘A Match’; Christina Rossetti and Elizabeth Siddal’s critiques of female objectification in Monna Innominata and ‘The Lust of the Eyes’.
My selection acknowledges both the justice, and the limitations, of W. H. Mallock’s recipe for making a ‘modern Pre-Raphaelite poem’. All the stock ingredients have been provided. There are plenty of damozels, flowers, archaic words, stars and lilies. But I have also taken the word modern in a sense Mallock did not intend. In idiom, in voice, in poetic form, the Pre-Raphaelites were innovators as well as dreamers. Their work represented an irruption of energy, unrespectable and still resonant, if we choose to listen. What Arthur O’Shaughnessy so memorably expressed, in his 1874 ‘Ode’ on poetic ambition, stands as a tribute to the best, if not the whole, of Pre-Raphaelite poetry:
We are the music makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams; –
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world for ever, it seems.
(ll. 1–8)
NOTES
1. W. H. Mallock, Every Man His Own Poet: Or, the Inspired Singer’s Recipe Book (Shrimpton & Son, 1872), pp. 13–14.
2. Robert Buchanan (as ‘Thomas Maitland’), ‘The Fleshly School of Poetry: Mr D. G. Rossetti’, Contemporary Review 18 (October 1871), p. 349 (referred to in subsequent notes as FS).
3. Dedicated to William Michael Rossetti, Swinburne’s essay on Blake makes this doctrine explicit: ‘Art for art’s sake first of all, and afterwards we may suppose all the rest shall be added to her …’ (William Blake: A Critical Essay, John Camden Hotten, 1868, p. 91).
4. ‘Young England’ was a movement advocating a return to an idealized feudal relationship between the aristocracy and the working classes; ‘Two Nations’ refers to the rich and the poor; it is also the subtitle of Disraeli’s Sybil of 1845, a polemic novel about the predicament of England’s working classes.
5. See Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s The Annunciation
(or Ecce Ancilla Domini!) (1849–50).
6. ‘The English Renaissance of Art’, Essays and Lectures by Oscar Wilde (Methuen, 1908), p. 120. Originally delivered in New York, 1882.
7. With the exception of W. M. Rossetti, all of the Brotherhood had also been members of the Cyclographic Society, a sketching and drawing club which was the forerunner of the PRB.
8. According to William Holman Hunt, this name ‘had first been used as a term of contempt by our enemies’ (quoted in W. M. Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti: His Family Letters with a Memoir, 2 vols., Ellis and Elvey, 1895, vol. 1, p. 127; referred to in subsequent notes as FLM).
9. FLM 1, 135.
10. Holman Hunt, Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, 2 vols. (Macmillan, 1905–6), vol. 1, pp. 110–11.
11. ll. 24–5, ‘Morning Sleep’, William Bell Scott; ll. 1–2, ‘Viola and Olivia’, John Tupper; ll. 6–8, ‘The Sight Beyond’, Walter Deverell.
12. The extract quoted here is from the Germ 2 (February 1850). The poem was revised for its appearance in Rossetti’s Poems (1870), the version given later in this collection.
13. Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, ‘Poetry and Illustration’ in A Companion to Victorian Poetry, ed. Richard Cronin, Alison Chapman and Antony H. Harrison (Blackwell, 2002), pp. 246–61.
14. The Pre-Raphaelites were largely responsible for reviving Blake’s reputation in the Victorian era. Rossetti owned one of the most important of Blake’s manuscripts, his ‘Notebook’, which he bought for ten shillings in 1847 (now in the British Library, Add. MS 49460); along with William Michael Rossetti, he subsequently helped Anne Gilchrist to finish her late husband Alexander’s life of Blake (1863), the first major biography of him.