The Pre-Raphaelites- From Rossetti to Ruskin
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15. W. M. Rossetti (ed.), Ruskin: Rossetti: Preraphaelitism: Papers 1854–1862 (George Allen, 1899), p. 135 (referred to in subsequent notes as RRP).
16. Now known as the ‘Old Library’; the project was a failure as the paintings quickly faded because of poor preparation and technical inexperience.
17. Both Burne-Jones and Morris joined the Hogarth Club (1858–61), which organized meetings and exhibitions, allowing artists to network with each other and with patrons. Most of the PRB were members.
18. ‘Morris’s Life and Death of Jason’, Fortnightly Review 8 (July 1867), p. 20.
19. Unsigned review, Tablet 19 (April 1858), p. 266.
20. H. F. Chorley, ‘The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems, by William Morris’, Athenaeum 1588 (3 April 1858), p. 428.
21. RRP, 219.
22. Edmund Gosse, The Life of Algernon Charles Swinburne (Macmillan, 1917), p. 137.
23. Article by Sarah A. Tooley in the Young Woman (November 1894), quoted in FLM 1, 138.
24. R. H. Hutton, Spectator 35 (24 May 1862), p. 580.
25. ‘Charles Baudelaire: Les Fleurs du Mal’, Spectator 35 (6 September 1862), p. 998.
26. See David Riede, ‘The Pre-Raphaelite School’ in A Companion to Victorian Poetry, pp. 317–18.
27. W. M. Rossetti, Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads: A Criticism (John Camden Hotten, 1866), p. 7. Buchanan had anonymously contributed a poor review of Swinburne’s work in the Athenaeum.
28. FS, 337, 350 and 347.
29. FS, 335.
30. W. M. Rossetti, introduction to Praeraphaelite Diaries and Letters (Hurst and Blackett, 1900), p. 4. Buchanan’s insinuations of a homosexual milieu were wide of the mark; Pre-Raphaelitism itself was not particularly tolerant of overt homosexuality. For example, Simeon Solomon, a gay, commercially successful Pre-Raphaelite painter, was abandoned by the group following his conviction for ‘indecency’ after being arrested, along with another man, at a public urinal in London.
31. In an essay on George Meredith, Symons praises him as a Decadent poet, defining Decadence as ‘learned corruption of language by which style ceases to be organic, and becomes, in the pursuit of some new expressiveness or beauty, deliberately abnormal’. Studies in Prose and Verse (J. M. Dent, 1904), p. 149.
32. Reportedly D. G. Rossetti to Hall Caine, Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (Elliot Stock, 1882), p. 219.
33. Letter to John Nichol, 2 April 1876, quoted in Georges Lafourcade, La Jeunesse de Swinburne, vol. 2 (Oxford University Press, 1928), p. 38.
34. FLM 1, 137.
35. Letter to John Nichol, 2 April 1876.
Further Reading
COLLECTIONS OF PRE-RAPHAELITE WRITING
The first anthology of Pre-Raphaelite poetry, The Painter-Poets, ed. Kineton Parkes (Walter Scott, 1890), was compiled while some of the poets were still living, and is valuable for its inclusion of previously unpublished poems by Arthur Hughes and Ford Madox Brown, as well as reprints of poetry unseen since the Germ (January–April 1850). Derek Stanford includes prose and critical works in Pre-Raphaelite Writing (Dent, 1973), while Cecil Y. Laing concentrates on the poetry for the first and second editions of The Pre-Raphaelites and Their Circle (University of Chicago Press, 1968 and 1975). Good recent anthologies include An Anthology of Pre-Raphaelite Writing, ed. Carolyn Hares-Stryker (Sheffield Academic Press, 1997), and The Pre-Raphaelites: Writings and Sources, ed. Inga Bryden, 4 vols. (Routledge, 1998).
SHORT STORIES BY THE PRE-RAPHAELITES
Originally appearing in the Germ 1 (January 1850), Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s ‘Hand and Soul’ is regarded as a Pre-Raphaelite manifesto in fiction and can be found in vol. 3 of Inga Bryden’s The Pre-Raphaelites. Published originally in the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine (1856), William Morris’s ‘The Story of the Unknown Church’ is in vol. 1 of Bryden’s collection, but Edward Burne-Jones’s ‘The Cousins’ and ‘A Story of the North’ have not been republished, as far as I know, since their appearance in the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine. Christina Rossetti’s ‘The Lost Titian’ first appeared in Commonplace, and Other Short Stories (F. S. Ellis, 1870), and can be found in Jan Marsh’s Christina Rossetti: Poems and Prose (Dent, 1994). Vol. 1 of Bryden’s anthology also contains Oliver Madox Brown’s tale of art student antics, ‘Dismal Jemmy’.
CONTEMPORARY ARTICLES, ESSAYS AND LECTURES ON THE PRE-RAPHAELITES
Reading contemporary reviews of the Pre-Raphaelites alongside passionate defences of their work is a useful way to become acquainted with Pre-Raphaelitism’s controversies. For the best art criticism, see Charles Dickens’s review of PRB painting, ‘Old Lamps for New Ones’, Household Words 12 (15 June 1850); John Ruskin’s defence of the Brotherhood in his letter to The Times on 13 May 1851 and Pre-Raphaelitism (pamphlet, Smith, Elder & Co., 1851); William Michael Rossetti, ‘Praeraphaelitism’, Spectator 24.1214 (4 October 1851), pp. 955–7. See also John Ruskin’s lectures: ‘Lecture 4: Pre-Raphaelitism’, Lectures on Architecture and Painting (John Wiley, 1854), and ‘Realistic Schools of Painting: Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Holman Hunt’, The Art of England: Lectures Given in Oxford (George Allen, 1883). Oscar Wilde praises the PRB in his 1882 lecture ‘The English Renaissance of Art’, Essays and Lectures (Methuen, 1908). The developing Pre-Raphaelite philosophy can be glimpsed in two Germ essays: J. L. Tupper’s ‘The Subject in Art’, parts 1 and 3 (January and March 1850), and F. G. Stephens’s ‘Modern Giants’, part 4 (April 1850). For literary controversies, see W. M. Rossetti’s defence of Algernon Charles Swinburne, Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads: A Criticism (pamphlet, John Camden Hotten, 1866). See also Robert Buchanan (as ‘Thomas Maitland’), ‘The Fleshly School of Poetry: Mr. D. G. Rossetti’, Contemporary Review 18 (October 1871), pp. 334–50, and the responses to it: Rossetti’s ‘The Stealthy School of Criticism’ in the Athenaeum (December 1871) and Swinburne’s Under the Microscope (pamphlet, D. White, 1872). See also Walter Pater’s influential essay on Rossetti’s poetry ‘Dante Gabriel Rossetti’, Appreciations (Macmillan, 1890).
CRITICAL AND SCHOLARLY BOOKS ON THE PRE-RAPHAELITES
Although books such as H. Buxton Forman’s Our Living Poets: An Essay in Criticism (Tinsley, 1871) and G. S. Layard’s Tennyson and His Pre-Raphaelite Illustrators: A Book about a Book (Stock, 1894) reflect a contemporary interest in Pre-Raphaelite poetry, critical works in the following decades were few and far between. Notable exceptions are Earle T. Welby’s The Victorian Romantics, 1850–1870: The Early Work of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Morris, Burne-Jones, Swinburne, Simeon Solomon and Their Associates (Howe, 1929) and Ifor Evans’s English Poetry in the Later Nineteenth Century (Methuen, 1933). The 1948 centenary of the PRB inspired significant re-evaluations of Pre-Raphaelite poetry such as Graham Hough’s The Last Romantics (Duckworth, 1949), John Heath-Stubbs’s The Darkling Plain (Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1950), D. S. Welland’s The Pre-Raphaelites in Literature and Art (George Harrap, 1953) and David H. Dickason’s The Daring Young Men: The Story of the American Pre-Raphaelites (Indiana University Press, 1953). Pre-Raphaelite scholar, collector and enthusiast William E. Fredeman’s indispensable Pre-Raphaelitism: A Bibliocritical Study (Harvard University Press, 1965) spurred another revival of interest, which saw the publication of John Dixon Hunt’s The Pre-Raphaelite Imagination 1848–1900 (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968), Lionel Stephenson’s The Pre-Raphaelite Poets (University of North Carolina Press, 1972) and Pre-Raphaelitism: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. James Sambrook (University of Chicago Press, 1974). Recent full-length studies of Pre-Raphaelite poetry are scarce, but excellent work on Pre-Raphaelite poets can be found in The Victorian Poet: Poetics and Persona, ed. Joseph Bristow (Croom Helm, 1987), The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Poetry, ed. Joseph Bristow (Cambridge University Press, 2000), A Companion to Victorian Poetry, ed. Richard Cronin, Alison Chapman and Antony H. Harrison (Blackwell, 2002), Haunted Texts: Studies in Pre-Raphaelitism, ed. David Latham (University of Toronto Press, 2003), and Elizabeth Helsinger’s Poetry and the Pre
-Raphaelite Arts: Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Morris (Yale University Press, 2008). The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies, ed. David Latham (York University, Canada, 1977–), is also a good source of current work on Pre-Raphaelite art and literature.
GROUP BIOGRAPHIES AND MEMOIRS OF THE PRE-RAPHAELITES
More biographies have been written on individual Pre-Raphaelite writers and artists than can be included here, but there are several group biographies which provide a useful overview. William Bell Scott’s Autobiographical Notes (Osgood, McIlvaine, 1892) challenges Rossetti’s dominance of the group, as does William Holman Hunt’s Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, 2 vols. (Macmillan, 1905–6). William E. Fredeman’s edition of W. M. Rossetti’s The P.R.B. Journal (Clarendon Press, 1975) is a useful collection of contemporary papers relating to the Brotherhood, as is W. M. Rossetti’s Ruskin: Rossetti: Pre-Raphaelitism (George Allen, 1899). W. M. Rossetti also published a memoir in two volumes, Some Reminiscences (London, 1906). Twentieth-century publications include Teresa Newman and Ray Watkinson’s Ford Madox Brown and the Pre-Raphaelite Circle (Chatto & Windus, 1991) and Jan Marsh’s compelling biography of the artists’ female models, Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood (Quartet, 1985), as well as her authoritative guide The Pre-Raphaelite Circle (National Portrait Gallery, 2005). The most recent group biography is Franny Moyle’s entertaining and informative Desperate Romantics (John Murray, 2009).
A Note on the Texts
This selection is structured by author, the sequence by date of birth. First publication date guides the sequence within each individual poet’s work. Exceptions are noted on an individual basis in the Notes.
The texts of these poems are taken from the original volumes or from collected editions published within the period. In order to give a sense of literary Pre-Raphaelitism as it was unfolding, I have chosen to preserve these poems as they were first presented to the reading public. Exceptions are where poems first appeared in contemporary magazines such as the Germ and the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine. Texts of these poems have been selected from the first volume of poetry in which they appeared, or from the magazine in which they first appeared if they weren’t subsequently published in book form. Any exceptions to this are dealt with on an individual basis in the Notes. A number of poems taken from a particular publication are arranged in the order in which they appear within that publication. Poem texts taken from the Germ are from a reprint published by Thomas Mosher (1898).
A few basic elements of house style, mostly typographic, have been applied to the poem texts and any ‘American’ spellings (‘gray’, ‘splendor’, etc.) have been anglicized. Apart from this, original spelling and punctuation have been retained, including any inconsistencies, archaisms and other oddities – often deliberate on the part of the poets in order to reproduce a sense of the medieval. Any footnotes are part of the original texts.
In order to include as many authors and poems as possible, I have chosen to extract some of the longer works, for example Algernon Charles Swinburne’s Tristram of Lyonesse and George Meredith’s Modern Love. Inevitably, something of the complete poems’ richness is lost in this process, but I hope at least to draw attention to the existence and the appeal of the longer works. I particularly regret not being able to include Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s The House of Life and Christina Rossetti’s Monna Innominata in their entirety, but too much of their other work would have been left out in order to accommodate these lengthy sonnet sequences.
WILLIAM BELL SCOTT
From Rosabell
12
Down the wet pavement gleam the lamps,
While the cold wind whistles past;
A distant heel rings hurrying home,
It lessens into stillness now,
5 And she is left alone again.
The rain-drops from shop-eaves are blown
Against her face, she turns,
The wind lifts up the gaudy scarf,
Faded now, with ragged fringe,
10 And flings it blinding o’er her head.
Her lips are sharp, as if a scorn
Of all humanity had shrunk
And bitten them; her eyes
They are not sunk, for generous cares
15 Are no part of her misery:
They never weep, for she can think
Of long ago without a sigh,
But they are blind and insolent;
Then why measure tears in a cracked wine-cup,
20 Or blame the madman should he laugh
While his mother’s funeral passes?
Can the outcast retrace her steps?
Would any mourn with her although
She watered the earth with tears?
25 She cannot wash Christ’s feet with them,
For He has gone to heaven:
Perhaps she is without the pale,
And would not if she could.
Give her but heat, and food, and drink,
30 She needs no more; the sun but shines
That the shadow where she sits may be
The darker, so she feels the light
In which the insects all rejoice
Can unenlivening fall on such
35 As have a soul. But hark, she sings,
Sings a song we write not here.
Morning Sleep
Another day hath dawned
Since, hastily and tired, I threw myself
Into the dark lap of advancing sleep.
Meanwhile through the oblivion of the night
5 The ponderous world its old course hath fulfilled;
And now the gradual sun begins to throw
Its slanting glory on the heads of trees,
And every bird stirs in its nest revealed,
And shakes its dewy wings.
A blessed gift
10 Unto the weary hath been mine to-night,
Slumber unbroken: now it floats away:
But whether ’twere not best to woo it still,
The head thus properly disposed, the eyes
In a continual dawning, mingling earth
15 And heaven with vagrant fantasies, one hour,
Yet for another hour? I will not break
The shining woof; I will not rudely leap
Out of this golden atmosphere, through which
I see the forms of immortalities.
20 Verily, soon enough the labouring day
With its necessitous unmusical calls
Will force the indolent conscience into life.
The uncouth moth upon the window-panes
Hath ceased to flap, or traverse with blind whirr
25 The room’s dusk corners; and the leaves without
Vibrate upon their thin stems with the breeze
Flying towards the light. To an Eastern vale
That light may now be waning, and across
The tall reeds by the Ganges lotus-paved,
30 Lengthening the shadows of the banyan-tree.
The rice-fields are all silent in the glow,
All silent the deep heaven without a cloud,
Burning like molten gold. A red canoe
Crosses with fan-like paddles and the sound
35 Of feminine song, freighted with great-eyed maids
Whose unzoned bosoms swell on the rich air;
A lamp is in each hand; some mystic rite
Go they to try. Such rites the birds may see,
Ibis or emu, from their cocoa nooks, –
40 What time the granite sentinels that watch
The mouths of cavern-temples hail the first
Faint star, and feel the gradual darkness blend
Their august lineaments; – what time Haroun
Perambulated Bagdat, and none knew
45 He was the Caliph who knocked soberly
By Giafar’s hand at their gates shut betimes; –
What time prince Assad sat on the high hill
’Neath the pomegranate-tree, long wearying
For his
lost brother’s step; – what time, as now,
50 Along our English sky, flame-furrows cleave
And break the quiet of the cold blue clouds,
And the first rays look in upon our roofs.
Let the day come or go; there is no let
Or hindrance to the indolent wilfulness
55 Of fantasy and dream-land. Place and time
And bodily weight are for the wakeful only,
Now they exist not: life is like that cloud,
Floating, poised happily in mid-air, bathed
In a sustaining halo, soft yet clear,
60 Voyaging on, though to no bourne; all heaven
Its own wide home alike, earth far below
Fading still further, further. Yet we see,
In fancy, its green fields, its towers and towns
Smoking with life, its roads with traffic thronged
65 And tedious travellers within iron cars,
Its rivers with their ships and labourers,
To whose raised eyes, as, stretched upon the sward,
They may enjoy some interval of rest,
That little cloud appears no living thing,
70 Although it moves, and changes as it moves.
There is an old and memorable tale
Of some sound sleeper being borne away
By banded fairies in the mottled hour
Before the cock-crow, through unknown weird woods
75 And mighty forests, where the boughs and roots
Opened before him, closed behind; thenceforth
A wise man lived he all unchanged by years.
Perchance again these fairies may return,
And evermore shall I remain as now,
80 A dreamer half awake, a wandering cloud!
The spell
Of Merlin old that ministered to fate,
The tales of visiting ghosts, or fairy elves,
Or witchcraft, are no fables. But his task