ROBERT WILLIAMS BUCHANAN (1841 - 1901)
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ROBERT WILLIAMS BUCHANAN (1841 - 1901) |
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{The Fleshly School of Poetry and Other Phenomena of the Day 1872}
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THE nucleus of the following Essay was published last October in the Contemporary Review, with the signature “Thomas Maitland” affixed to it (without my knowledge), in order that the criticism might rest upon its own merits, and gain nothing from the name of the real writer. At the time of the publication I myself was yachting among the Scottish Hebrides. As the obscure “Thomas Maitland,” however, happened to have uttered an unpleasant and startling truth, the fleshly gentlemen moved heaven, earth, and Jupiter Pluvius in order to create a storm, and (carefully eschewing the real literary question) they have used all the means in their hands to demonstrate that the criticism was the malicious and cowardly work of a rival poet, afraid to strike in broad day or under his real name, and adopting a pseudonym to conceal his real identity. For the correspondence on this subject—for Mr. Rossetti’s own defence and the opinion of Mr. Rossetti’s friends, as well as for my own simple explanation of the facts of the case—the reader is referred to the Athenæum newspaper for December 16th and December 30th, 1871. “In this and all things will we show our duty!”— exeunt in all humility.In a subsequent scene they return, and Voltimand, the other gentleman, makes a speech, while “Cornelius” stands in the usual “utility” attitude, with one leg bent and one hand laid gracefully on his hips. This is the proud character I am accused of arrogating to myself in the grand list of contemporary performances! Surely, if I had been ambitious of obtruding my own merits, I might at least have gone in for Fortinbras or the First Gravedigger! “I was a child beneath her touch—a man and merely think them sweetly pretty. It is hard to think ill of one’s relations; but the mature females in question must be either very obtuse, or—very, very naughty! ROBERT BUCHANAN.
1 “Shakspere’s an infernal humbug, Pip! I never read him. What the devil is it all about, Pip? There’s a lot of feet in Shakspere’s verse, but there ain’t any legs worth mentioning in Shakspere’s plays, are there, Pip? . . . . Let us have plenty of leg pieces, Pip, and I’ll stand by you!”—DICKENS’S Martin Chuzzlewit.
THOUGH this is a generation of great poets and teachers; though Tennyson, Browning, Victor Hugo, Carlyle, Emerson, and Walt Whitman are still amongst us, while Dickens (essentially a poet) and Landor have not long left us; though much of our public teaching (and notably that of the public press) is lofty and clean, there are not wanting signs that Sensualism, which from time immemorial has been the cancer of all society, is shooting its ulcerous roots deeper and deeper, and blotching more and more the fair surface of things. Coming this winter from a remote retreat in the Highlands to this great centre of life which men have named London, moving from street to street and from house to house, seeing all that a man with eyes can see, what are the objects which most impress themselves upon me? Not the old immemorial squalor of the slums, the hideous famine of the by-streets and lanes, the gaudy misery in numberless human faces (that is no novelty!); nor the fatuous imbecility and superficiality of the moneyed vulgar, and the shapeless 2 ugliness of women who feed high and take no exercise (that, too, is familiar, though not perhaps on so large a scale); nor the dark blotches of life where disease squats for ever, nor the follies of the last new fashion, nor the hideousness of the last new public building. All these things are passed on one side, as I approach a phenomenon so strange and striking that to a superstitious mind it might seem a portent, and so hideous that it converts this great city of civilisation into a great Sodom or Gomorrah waiting for doom. Look which way I will, the horrid thing threatens and paralyzes me. It lies on the drawing-room table, shamelessly naked and dangerously fair. It is part of the pretty poem which the belle of the season reads, and it breathes away the pureness of her soul like the poisoned breath of the girl in Hawthorne’s tale. It covers the shelves of the great Oxford-Street librarian, lurking in the covers of three-volume novels. It is on the French booksellers’ counters, authenticated by the signature of the author of the “Visite de Noces.” It is here, there, everywhere, in art, literature, life, just as surely as it is in the “Fleurs de Mal,” the Marquis de Sade’s “Justine,” or the “Monk” of Lewis. It appeals to all tastes, to all dispositions, to all ages. If the querulous man of letters has his “Baudelaire,” the pimpled clerk has his Day’s Doings,* and the dissipated artisan his _____ * Publications of this sort are at last being taken seriously in hand by the Society for the Suppression of Vice. As I write, the following appears in the weekly journals:—”THE ‘DAY’S DOINGS’ AGAIN.—At Bow-street police-court on Thursday, Frederick Shove, the publisher of the Day’s Doings, an illustrated paper, appeared to a fresh summons, granted by Sir Thomas Henry, charged with publishing indecent prints and printed matter. Mr. Besley (instructed by Mr. Collette, of the Society for the Suppression of Vice) prosecuted; Mr. Laxton, as before, defended. Mr. Besley said that a promise was made when the defendant was last summoned at this court that all matter or prints suggestive of indecency should be withdrawn for the future. He produced five copies of the Day’s Doings, from which he read different articles of an obscene and vulgar nature, and pointed out a print of a nude woman, which was, in his opinion, even more objectionable. Mr. Laxton contended that the nude figure referred to was a copy of the work of a well-known artist, and to decrease its nudity drapery had been added to the figure. Sir Thomas Henry said the drapery was suggestive of even greater indecency. Sir Thomas Henry decided upon committing the case for trial, but said he would accept bail for the appearance of the defendant at the sessions, two sureties in £80 each, and the defendant’s recognizances in £150.” _____ 3 Day and Night. The streets are full of it. Photographs of nude, indecent, and hideous harlots, in every possible attitude that vice can devise, flaunt from the shop-windows, gloated over by the fatuous glint of the libertine and the greedy open- mouthed stare of the day-labourer. Never was this Snake, which not all the naturalists of the world have been able to scotch, so vital and poisonous as now. It has penetrated into the very sweetshops; and there, among the commoner sorts of confectionery, may be seen this year models of the female Leg, the whole definite and elegant article as far as the thigh, with a fringe of paper cut in imitation of the female drawers and embroidered in the female fashion! _____
“Whilom the sisters nine were vestal maids . . .
THE true history of European poetry is the history of European progress, from the narrow microscopic pedantry of mediæval culture to the large telescopic sweep of modern thought and science. It is no part of my present plan to attempt the historical subject, except in so far as it affects the phenomena of the present day; and I need only indicate, therefore, how the ever-broadening poetry of humanity has flowed to us in one varying stream of increase since the day when, as Denham sings— “Old Chaucer, like the morning star, Chaucer and his contemporaries were, as all readers know, under deep obligations to the poets and romancists of 9 mediæval Italy and it is a most significant token of Chaucer’s pre-eminent originality that, while Gower and the rest had only been inspired to imitate what was bad in the great models, he, on the contrary, merely derived inspiration and solace from their music, assimilated what was noble in it, and carefully prepared a breezier and healthier poetic form of his own. What is grandest and best in Chaucer is Chaucer’s exclusively. No better proof can be had of his merit as the morning star of the modern school than a careful comparison of him, first with Boccaccio, then with Dante. All the limpid flow of narrative, the concentration and pomp of subject, all the lighter humour and sparkle, are to be found in the “Decameron.” All the dramatic intensity, the quaint but tender realism, are (with mighty qualities super-added) to be discovered in Dante. But the quaint saline humour, the universality of sympathy, the childlike love of nature, and the supreme piteousness of modern poetry, dawned with the divine author of the “Canterbury Tales.” Chaucer was emphatically the poet of the bourgeoisie, just as Shakspere and his brethren were the poets of the feudal idea; but with all these writers alike, with the author of the “Wife of Bath” as well as with the creator of Falstaff, humanity was beginning to get such a hearing for itself, and notably on the humorous side of the question, as would be certain in the long-run to blend both ideas, that of feudalism and that of the bourgeoisie, into the great modern sentiment of popular rights, duties, and affections.The great dramatists of the reign of Elizabeth, following in Chaucer’s footsteps, appear, under some awful demoniac influence (for individually these men were destitute of beneficence), to have prepared for modern contemplation an unequalled gallery 10 of human faces and souls—a gallery all-embracing in its range, photographing the meanest as well as the highest, and revealing to us, under all the dazzle and glitter of a sumptuous feudal style, the instincts which all men have in common, the compensations which each owes to the other, and the fair world in which each has an equal and indisputable share. Simply to picture men “in their habits as they live,” no matter under what motive, was the highest possible beneficence; and this, in the golden dawn of our poetry, was done inimitably, with a beauty of thought and a wealth of resource unknown to any poet that has appeared since. _____ * These verses are worth studying, as showing how the only effect produced on the “poet of the period” by the sight of a little female child was the regret that the infant was not yet old enough “to be made love to.” _____ 15 Then indeed poor England shook off her taint, and felt her heart beat with a truer, freer pulse,— “For a sweet wind from heaven had come Hope had come at last—more than a gleam,—a glorious azure burst. It was sad to think how many centuries had been wasted; but the invalid-literature of this country was not quite dead. _____
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE. “Je cherche le vide, et le noir, et le nu!”
I HAVE before me, as I write, the portrait of Baudelaire, the memoir by Gautier, the original edition of the “Fleurs de Mal,” and the collected edition of Baudelaire’s works, published since his death. “Son aspect nous frappa: il avait Ies cheveux coupés très ras et du plus beau noir; ces cheveux, faisant des pointes régulières sur le front d’une éclatante blancheur, le coiffaient comme une espèce de casque sarrasin; les yeux, couleur de tabac d’Espagne, avaient un regard spirituel, profond, et d’une pénétration peut-être un peu trop insistante; quant à la bouche, meublée de dents très-blanches, elle abritait, sous une légère et soyeuse moustache ombrageant son contour, des sinuosités mobiles, voluptueuses et ironiques comme les lèvres des figures peintes par Léonard de Vinci; le nez, fin et délicat, un peu arrondi, aux narines palpitantes, semblait subodorer de vagues parfums lointains; une fossette vigoureuse accentuait le menton comme le coup de pouce final du statuaire; les joues, soigneusement rasées, contrastaient, par leur fleur bleuâtre que veloutait la poudre de riz, avec les nuances vermeilles des pommettes; le cou, d’une élégance et d’une blancheur féminines, apparaissait dégagé, partant d’un col de chemise rabattu et d’une étroite cravate en madras des Indes et à carreaux. Son vêtement consistait en un paletôt d’une étoffe noire lustrée et brillante, un pantalon noisette, des bas blancs et des escarpins vernis, le tout méticuleusement propre et correct, avec un cachet voulu de simplicité anglaise et comme l’intention de se séparer du genre artiste, à chapeaux de 18 feutre mou, à vestes de velours, à vareuses rouges, à barbe prolixe et à crinière échevelée. Rien de trop frais ni de trop voyant dans cette tenue rigoureuse. Charles Baudelaire appartenait à ce dandysme sobre qui râpe ses habits avec du papier de verre pour leur ôter l’éclat endimanché et tout battant neuf si cher au philistin et si désagréable pour le vrai gentleman. Plus tard même, il rasa sa moustache, trouvant que c’était un reste de vieux chic pittoresque qu’il était puéril et bourgeois de conserver.”—Œuvres de Baudelaire, précédées d’une notice par Théophile Gautier, Paris, 1869. This interesting creature, with his nose sniffing “distant perfumes,” his carefully-shaven cheeks, and his general air of man-millinery, was in earnest conversation with the “model” Maryx, who, with the immobility acquired in the studio, was reclining on a couch, resting her superb head on a cushion, and attired “in a white robe, quaintly starred with red spots resembling drops of blood!” Hard by, at the window, sat another superb female, known as “La Femme au Serpent,” from having sat to Clevinger when he painted his picture of that name. The latter, having thrown on a fauteuil “her mantle of black lace and the most delicious little green hood that ever covered Lucy Hocquet or Madame Baudraud, shook her yellow lioness-locks, still humid, for she came from the swimming school (L’Ecole de Natation), and from all her body, clad in muslin, exhaled like a naiad the fresh perfume of the bath!” In the same company were Jean Fenchères, the sculptor, and Jean Boissard, the latter with “his red mouth, teeth of pearl, and brilliant complexion.” One scarcely knows which to admire most in this description,—the writer’s fine apotheosis of the lupanar into an “artistic decameron,” or the avidity with which he seizes on personal traits and on male and female millinery. He is “up” in both under and over- clothing, as worn by both sexes. He is, moreover, candour itself. He 19 makes no secret of Baudelaire’s little weaknesses and his own. “With an air quite simple, natural, and perfectly disengaged, he advanced some axiom satanically monstrous, or sustained with an icy sang-froid some theory of a mathematical exactness; for there was a vigorous method in the development of his absurdities.” In a word, it is not denied that Baudelaire was that most unsympathetic of all beings, a cold sensualist, and that he carried into all his pleasures (until they slew him) the dandyism and the self- possession of a true child of Mephistopheles. “Hypocrite lecteur,—mon semblable,—mon frère!” He purposes, he says, on his way (the way of all humanity) down to absolute Hell, to pass in review a few of the horrors he sees on his path. His way lies— “Parmi les chacals, les panthères, les lices, And of all these monsters the most infernal is—L’Ennui! The very next poem sweetly chronicles the birth of the Poet, whose mother, affrighted and blaspheming, stretches her hands to God, crying: “Cursed be that night of fleeting pleasure, when my womb conceived my punishment!” In the next poem the poet is compared to the albatross, splendid on the wing, but almost unable to walk; and the comparison strikes me as very applicable to this poet himself, only that his whole book is a waddling, unwieldy, and unsuccessful attempt to begin a flight. In a number of short lyrics he talks of poetry, music, and life, without affording us much edification (save in a really powerful picture called “Don Juan in Hell”) till he begins to sing, not the delights of the flesh, but the morbid feelings of satiety. Accustomed to the Swinburnian female, we at once recognise her here in the original, as the serpent that dances, the cat that scratches and cries, and the large-limbed sterile creature who never conceives. She “bites,” of course:— “Pour exercer les dents à ce jeu singulier, 24 She has “cold eyelids that shut like a jewel:”— “Tes yeux, où rien ne se révèle She is cold and “sterile:”— “La froide majesté de la femme stérile!” She is, necessarily, like “a snake:”— . . . “un serpent qui danse,” &c., &c. She is, in fact, Faustine, Mary Stuart, Our Lady of Pain, Sappho, and all the rest,—quite as nasty, and to all intents and purposes, in spite of her attraction for young poets, seemingly as undesirable. “Une nuit que j’étais près d’une affreuse Juive, At another time we hear the poet saying to a fair companion—“Seek not my heart; the beasts have eaten it.” Grim and wearied as he is, our poet is not above the favourite conceits of his school:— “Tes hanches sont amoureuses And this is quite in the symbolizing style of the Italian school, of which I shall give many examples when treating of Mr. Rossetti:— 25 “La Haine est un ivrogne au fond d’une taverne, “—Mais les buveurs heureux connaissent leur vainqueur, At one time we have a poem on “her hair,” in the course of which we learn (what indeed we should have guessed) that, as other persons delight in love’s “music,” he (Baudelaire) revels in its “perfume.” He is still insatiable, and yet uncomplimentary, actually comparing his attack on her “cold beauty” to the attack of a swarm of worms on a corpse (“comme après un cadavre un chœur de vermisseaux!”) and yet crying fiercely:— “Je chéris, O bête implacable et cruelle! He finds delight in tracing resemblances between this marble person and his cat:— “Viens, mon beau chat, sur mon cœur amoureux; But it would be tedious indeed to trace all the morbid sensations of such a lover as this; at Paris or in the East, he is equally used up and yet insatiable; and after having tried all sorts of complexions, from the pale wax-like Jewess of the Parisian brothel to the black and lissom beauty of Malabar, he finds himself still wretched and disgusted with human nature. It is soon quite obvious that he is possessed by the demon of Hasheesh. Thoughts horrible and foul surge through his brain as the filth drives through a sewer. At least half of all the “Fleurs de Mal” read as if they had 26 been written by a man in one of the worst stages of delirium tremens. No one certainly can accuse him of making crime look beautiful.To him, in his own words, “La Débauche et la Mort sont deux aimables filles!” His crime is, that he sees only these two shapes on all the solid earth, and avers that there is nothing left for men but to sin and die. His dreams and thoughts are wretched. The sun rises, and immediately he pictures it shining, not into happy homes, but into dens of crime and ghastly hospitals. Night comes, but sleep comes not; and he only cries:— “Voici le soir charmant, ami du criminel; The gas-jets of prostitution are lit, and flare on the doomed faces of pale women and jaded men. Some few men sit at happy hearths, but the majority “have never lived.” On such a night, doubtless, he composed such poems as this, which I quote entire in all its morbid pain and horror:— “HORREUR SYMPATHIQUE. “ ‘De ce ciel bizarre et livide, “—Insatiablement avide “Cieux déchirés comme des grèves Truly enough did Edward Thierry say, in writing of this poetry, that “it is sorrow which absolves and justifies it. The poet does not delight in the spectacle of evil.” Still, Baudelaire broods over evil things with a tremendous persistency, a morbid satisfaction, which shows a mind radically diseased and a nature utterly heartless. In and out of season, he invoked the spirit of Horror. Jaded with self-indulgence, he had a mad pleasure in considering the world a charnel-house, and in posing the figures of Love and Beauty in the agonies of disease and the ghastly stillness of death. As a necessary pendant to his pictures of human ugliness, he delighted to add a few glimpses of divine malignity. Looking to the section of his book called “Révolte,” we find where Mr. Swinburne got his first lessons in blasphemy. In “The Denial of St. Peter” we have the following picture of the Deity, quite in the fleshly manner:— “Comme un tyran gorgé de viande et de vins, And after passing in review the horrible sufferings of Christ, he concludes bitterly:— “Saint Pierre a renié Jésus. . . . Il a bien fait!” In another poem he draws a series of contrasts between the race of Cain and the race of Abel,—in other words, between the domestic type of humanity and the outcast type,—concluding in these memorable words:— “Race de Caïn, au ciel monte 28 —words which bear a sort of resemblance, in their foolish. and reckless no-meaning, to that passage in Mr. Swinburne’s writings wherein the Devil is described as “playing dice with God” for the soul of Faustine. Next comes a piece entitled “Les Litanies de Satan,” a prayer to the evil one:— “Père adoptif de ceux qu’en sa noire colère and in conclusion a few lines called “Prayer:”— “Gloire et louange à toi, Satan, dans les hauteurs It will hardly be contended that Mr. Swinburne has surpassed this, although his effusions are wilder and more distorted; and we may well rejoice, meanwhile, that our contemporary blasphemy, as well as so much of our contemporary bestiality, is no home-product, but an importation transplanted from the French Scrofulous School, and conveyed, with no explanation of its origin, at second hand. “Quod tu cum olfacies, Deos rogabis, —and that the prayer had been actually granted. There is plenty of sensitiveness to smell, to touch, even to colour; there is even a kind of perception, neither very acute nor very exquisite, of the beauties of external form; but of that higher sensibility which perceives the subtle nuances of spiritual life and trembles to the beating of a tender human heart, there is not one solitary sign.This poetry is like absinthe, comparatively harmless perhaps if sipped in small quantities well diluted, but fatal if taken (as by Mr. Swinburne) in all its native strength and abomination. “In a rent stained raiment, the robe of a cast-off bride,” and as France, “Spat upon, trod upon, whored!” and although the blasphemy is repeated tenfold in a series of aimless attacks on a Deity who is assumed to be a shadow, there are not wanting signs that the poet is waking up from an evil dream. The Sapphic vein of Baudelaire has been abandoned to begin with. Next, let the same writer’s blasphemous vein be abandoned too. Then, let Mr. Swinburne burn all his French books, go forth into the world, look men and women in the face, try to seek some 31 nobler inspiration than the smile of harlotry and the shriek of atheism—and there will be hope for him. Thus far, he has given us nothing but borrowed rubbish, but even in his manner of giving there has been something of genius. His own voice may be worth hearing, when he chooses, once and for ever, to abandon the falsetto. _____ * I say sub-Tennysonian because these gentlemen, with all their affinities to the Italian and French race of sonnetteers, follow Tennyson in the historical sense, and touch nothing in their poetry which he has not lightly touched in some way. The ways of a great poet lead him in all directions, into all moods, while the way of a small poet is narrow and without variety. The gain of good in the Pre- Raphaelite style comes from the laureate; what is bad in it comes from Italy and France. _____ 33 knowing that something of the sort is expected from all leading performers, bare their bosoms and aver that they are creedless; the only possible question here being, if any disinterested person cares whether they are creedless or not— their self-revelation on that score being so perfectly uncalled for. It is time, nevertheless, to ascertain whether any of these gentlemen has actually in himself the making of a leading performer. It would be scarcely worth while to inquire into their pretensions on merely literary grounds, because sooner or later all literature finds its own level, whatever criticism may say or do in the matter; but it unfortunately happens in the present case that the Fleshly School of verse-writers are, so to speak, public offenders, because they are diligently spreading the seeds of disease broadcast wherever they are read and understood.Their complaint too is catching, and carries off many young persons. What the complaint is, and how it works, may now be seen on a very slight examination of the works of Mr. Dante Gabriel Rossetti. _____
MR. DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI. “Who put bayes into blind Cupid’s fist,
MR. ROSSETTI has been known for many years as a painter of exceptional powers, who, for reasons satisfactory to himself, has shrunk from publicly exhibiting his pictures, and 34 from allowing anything like a popular estimate to be formed of their qualities. He belongs, or is said to belong, to the so-called Pre-Raphaelite school, a school which is generally considered to exhibit much genius for colour, and great indifference to perspective. It would be unfair to judge the painter by the glimpses I have had of his works, or by the photographs which are sold of the principal paintings. Judged by the photographs, he is an artist who conceives unpleasantly, and draws ill. Like Mr. Simeon Solomon, however, with whom he seems to have many points in common, he is distinctively a colourist, and of his capabilities in colour I cannot speak, though I should guess that they are good; for if there is any quality by which his poems are specially marked, it is a great sensitiveness to hues and tints as conveyed in poetic epithet. On the other hand, those qualities which impress the casual spectator of the photographs from his pictures are to be found abundantly among his verses. There is 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, the same sense of weary, wasting, yet exquisite sensuality; nothing virile, nothing tender, nothing completely sane; a superfluity of extreme sensibility, of delight in affected forms, hues, and tints, and a deep-seated indifference to all agitating forces and agencies, all tumultuous griefs and sorrows, all the thunderous stress of life, and all the straining storm of speculation. Mr. Morris is often pure, fresh, and wholesome as his own great model; Mr. Swinburne startles us more than once by some fine flash of insight; but the mind of Mr. Rossetti is like a glassy mere, broken only by the 35 dive of some water-bird or the motion of floating insects, and brooded over by an atmosphere of insufferable closeness, with a light blue sky above it, sultry depths mirrored within it, and a surface so thickly sown with water-lilies that it retains its glassy smoothness even in the strongest wind. Judged relatively to his poetic associates, Mr. Rossetti must be pronounced inferior to either. He cannot tell a pleasant story like Mr. Morris, nor forge alliterative thunderbolts like Mr. Swinburne. It must be conceded, nevertheless, that he is neither so glibly imitative as the one, nor so transcendently superficial as the other. “At length their long kiss severed, with sweet smart: “Sleep sank them lower than the tide of dreams, This, then, is “the golden affluence of words, the firm outline, the justice and chastity of form.” Here is a full-grown man, presumably intelligent and cultivated, putting on record, for other full-grown men to read, the most secret mysteries of sexual connection, and that with so sickening a desire to reproduce the sensual mood, so careful a choice of epithet to convey mere animal sensations, that we merely shudder at the shameless nakedness. I am no purist in such matters. I hold the sensual part of our nature to be as holy as the spiritual or intellectual part, and I believe that such things must find their equivalent in art; but it is neither poetic, nor manly, nor even human, to obtrude such things as the themes of whole poems. It is simply nasty. Nasty as it is, we are very mistaken if many readers do not think it nice. What says the author of “A Scourge for Paper Persecutors,” in 1625, of similar literature?— “Fine wit is shown therein, but finer ’twere 38 English society of one kind purchases the Day’s Doings. English society of another kind goes into ecstasy over Mr. Solomon’s pictures—pretty pieces of morality, such as “Love dying by the breath of Lust.” There is not much to choose between the two objects of admiration, except that painters like Mr. Solomon lend actual genius to worthless subjects, and thereby produce veritable monsters—like the lovely devils that danced round St. Anthony. Mr. Rossetti owes his so-called success with our “aunts” and “grandmothers” to the same causes. In poems like “Nuptial Sleep,” the man who is too sensitive to exhibit his pictures, and so modest that it takes him years to make up his mind to publish his poems, parades his private sensations before a coarse public, and is gratified by their idiotic applause. “Time like a pulse shake fierce 39 he is “heaven-born Helen, Sparta’s queen,” whose “each twin breast is an apple sweet;” he is Lilith, the first wife of Adam; he is the rosy Virgin of the poem called “Ave,” and the Queen in the “Staff and Scrip;” he is “Sister Helen” melting her waxen man; he is all these, just as surely as he is Mr. Rossetti soliloquising over Jenny in her London lodging, or the very nuptial person writing erotic sonnets to his wife. In petticoats or pantaloons, in modern times or in the middle ages, he is just Mr. Rossetti, a fleshly person, with nothing particular to tell us or teach us, with extreme self-control, a strong sense of colour, and a most affected choice of Latin diction. Amid all his “affluence of jewel-coloured words,” he has not given us one rounded and noteworthy piece of art, though his verses are all art; not one poem which is memorable for its own sake, and quite separable from the displeasing identity of the composer. The nearest approach to a perfect whole is the “Blessed Damozel,” a peculiar poem, placed first in the book, perhaps by accident, perhaps because it is a key to the poems which follow. This poem appeared in a rough shape many years ago in the Germ, an unwholesome periodical started by the Pre-Raphaelites, and suffered, after gasping through a few feeble numbers, to die the death of all such publications. In spite of its affected title, and of numberless affectations throughout the text, the “Blessed Damozel” has merits of its own, and a few lines of real genius. I have heard it described as the record of actual grief and love, or, in simple words, the apotheosis of one actually lost by the writer; but, without having any private knowledge of the 40 circumstance of its composition, I feel that such an account of the poem is inadmissible. It does not contain one single note of sorrow. It is a “composition,” and a clever one. Read the opening stanzas:— “The blessed damozel leaned out “Her robe, ungirt from clasp to hem, This is a careful sketch for a picture, which, worked into actual colour by a master, might have been worth seeing. The steadiness of hand lessens as the poem proceeds, and although there are several passages of considerable power,—such as that where, far down the void, “this earth or that other, describing how “the curled moon the general effect is that of a queer old painting on a missal, very affected and very odd. What moved the British criticaster to ecstasy in this poem seems to me very sad nonsense indeed, or, if not sad nonsense, very meretricious 41 affectation. Thus, I have seen the following verses quoted with enthusiasm, as italicised— “And still she bowed herself and stooped “From the fixed place of Heaven she saw It seems to me that all these lines are very bad, with the exception of the two admirable lines ending the first verse, and that the italicised portions are quite without merit, and almost without meaning. On the whole, one feels disheartened and amazed at the poet who, in the nineteenth century, talks about “damozels,” “citherns,” and “citoles,” and addresses the mother of Christ as the “Lady Mary,”— “With her five handmaidens, whose names A suspicion is awakened that the writer is laughing at us. We hover uncertainly between picturesqueness and namby- pamby, and the effect, as Artemus Ward would express it, is “weakening to the intellect.” The thing would have been almost too much in the shape of a picture, though the workmanship might have made amends. The truth is, that 42 literature, and more particularly poetry, is in a very bad way when one art gets hold of another, and imposes upon it its conditions and limitations. In the first few verses of the “Damozel” we have the subject, or part of the subject, of a picture, and the inventor should either have painted it or left it alone altogether; and, had he done the latter, the world would have lost nothing. Poetry is something more than painting; and an idea will not become a poem because it is too smudgy for a picture. _____ * “Why, sir, Sherry is dull, naturally dull; but it must have taken him a great deal of trouble to become what we now see him—such an excess of stupidity is not in nature.”—Boswell's Life. _____ 43 the writer much pains. It is time, indeed, to point out that Mr. Rossetti is a poet possessing great powers of assimilation and some faculty for concealing the nutriment on which he feeds. Setting aside the “Vita Nuova” and the early Italian poems, which are familiar to many readers by his own excellent translations, Mr. Rossetti may be described as a writer who has yielded, to an unusual extent, to the complex influences of the literature surrounding him at the present moment. He has the painter’s imitative power developed in proportion to his lack of the poet’s conceiving imagination. He reproduces to a nicety the manner of an old ballad, a trick in which Mr. Swinburne is also an adept. Cultivated readers, moreover, will recognise in every one of these poems the tone of Mr. Tennyson broken up by the style of Mr. and Mrs. Browning, and disguised here and there by the eccentricities of the Pre-Raphaelites. The “Burden of Nineveh” is a philosophical edition of “Recollections of the Arabian Nights;” “A Last Confession” and “Dante at Verona” are, in the minutest trick and form of thought, suggestive of Mr. Browning; and that the sonnets have been largely moulded and inspired by Mrs. Browning, especially in points of phraseology, can be ascertained by any critic who will compare them with the “Sonnets from the Portuguese.” Much remains, nevertheless, that is Mr. Rossetti’s own. I at once recognise as his own property such passages as this:— “I looked up Or this:— “As I stooped, her own lips rising there Or this:— “Have seen your lifted silken skirt Or this:— “What more prize than love to impel thee, Passages like these are the common stock of the walking gentlemen of the Fleshly School. I cannot forbear expressing my wonder, by the way, at the kind of women whom it seems the unhappy lot of these gentlemen to encounter. I have lived as long in the world as they have, but never yet came across persons of the other sex who conduct themselves in the manner described. Females who bite, scratch, scream, bubble, munch, sweat, writhe, twist, wriggle, foam, and in a general way slaver over their lovers, must surely possess some extraordinary qualities to counteract their otherwise most offensive mode of conducting themselves. It appears, however, on examination, that their poet-lovers conduct themselves in a similar manner. They, too, bite, scratch, scream, bubble, munch, sweat, _____ * Mr. Rossetti accuses me of garbling these four extracts, and alleges that they have a totally different effect when read with their context. In reply to this, let me observe that the four poems which supply these four extracts are full of coarseness from the first line to the last, and that no extract can fitly convey their unwholesomeness and indecency. See après, p. 64. _____ 45 writhe, twist, wriggle, foam, and slaver, in a style frightful to hear of. At times, in reading such books as this, one cannot help wishing that things had remained for ever in the asexual state described in Mr. Darwin’s great chapter on Palingenesis. We get very weary of this protracted hankering after a person of the other sex; it seems meat, drink, thought, sinew, religion, for the Fleshly School. There is no limit to the fleshliness, and Mr. Rossetti finds in it its own religious justification much in the same way as Holy Willie:— “Maybe thou let’st this fleshly thorn Whether he is writing of the holy Damozel, or of the Virgin herself, or of Lilith, or of Helen, or of Dante, or of Jenny the street-walker, he is fleshly all over, from the roots of his hair to the tip of his toes; never a true lover merging his identity into that of the beloved one; never spiritual, never tender; always self-conscious and æsthetic. “Nothing in human life,” says a modern writer, “is so utterly remorseless—not love, not hate, not ambition, not vanity—as the artistic or æsthetic instinct morbidly developed to the suppression of conscience and feeling;” and at no time do we feel more fully impressed with this truth than after the perusal of “Jenny,” in some respects the cleverest poem in the volume, and in all respects the poem best indicative of the true quality of the writer’s humanity. It is a production which bears signs of having been suggested by my own quasi-lyrical poems, which it copies in the style of title, 46 and particularly by “Artist and Model;” * but certainly Mr. Rossetti cannot be accused, as I have been accused, of maudlin sentiment and affected tenderness. The first two lines are perfect:— “Lazy laughing languid Jenny, and the poem is a soliloquy of the poet—who has been spending the evening in dancing at a casino—over his partner, whom he has accompanied home to the usual style of lodgings occupied by such ladies, and who has fallen asleep with her head upon his knee, while he wonders, in a wretched pun— “Whose person or whose purse may be The soliloquy is long, and in some parts beautiful, despite a very constant suspicion that we are listening to an emasculated Mr. Browning, whose whole tone and gesture, so to speak, is occasionally introduced with startling fidelity; and there are here and there glimpses of actual thought and insight, over and above the picturesque touches which belong to the writer's true profession, such as that where, at daybreak— “lights creep in What I object to in this poem is not the subject, which _____ * Commenting on this remark, Mr. Rossetti avers that he has “never read” my poems, and that, moreover, “Jenny” was written thirteen years ago. _____ 47 any writer may be fairly left to choose for himself; nor anything particularly vicious in the poetic treatment of it; nor any bad blood bursting through in special passages. But the whole tone, without being more than usually coarse, seems heartless. There is not a drop of piteousness in Mr. Rossetti. He is just to the outcast, even generous; severe to the seducer; sad even at the spectacle of lust in dimity and fine ribbons. Notwithstanding all this, and a certain delicacy and refinement of treatment unusual with this poet, the poem is repelling, and one likes Mr. Rossetti least after its perusal. The “Blessed Damozel” is puzzling, the “Song of the Bower” is amusing, the love-sonnet is depressing and sickening, but “Jenny,” though distinguished by less special viciousness of thought and style than any of these, fairly makes the reader lose patience. Its fleshliness is apparent at a glance; one perceives that the scene was fascinating less through its human tenderness than because it, like all the others, possessed an inherent quality of Animalism. “The whole work,” (“Jenny,”) writes Mr. Swinburne, “is worthy to fill its place for ever as one of the most perfect poems of an age or generation. There is just the same life-blood and breadth of poetic interest in this episode of a London street and lodging as in the song of ‘Troy Town’ and the song of ‘Eden Bower;’ just as much, and no jot more,”—to which last statement I cordially assent; for there is bad blood in all, and breadth of poetic interest in none. “Vengeance of Jenny’s case,” indeed!— when such a poet as this comes fawning over her, with tender compassion in one eye and æsthetic enjoyment in the other! “LOVE-LILY. “Between the hands, between the brows, “Within the voice, within the heart, “Brows, hands, and lips, heart, mind, and voice, With the exception of the usual “riotous longing,” which seems to make Mr. Rossetti a burden to himself, there is nothing to find fault with in the extreme fleshliness of these verses, and to many people they may even appear beautiful. Without pausing to criticize a thing so trifling—as well might we dissect a cobweb or anatomize a medusa—let me ask the reader’s attention to a peculiarity to which all the students of the Fleshly School must sooner or later give their attention—I mean the habit of accenting the last syllable 49 in words which in ordinary speech are accented on the penultimate:— “Between the hands, between the brows, which may be said to give to the speaker’s voice a sort of cooing tenderness just bordering on a loving whistle. Still better as an illustration are the lines:— “Saturday night is market night which the reader may advantageously compare with Mr. Morris’s “Then said the king, or Mr. Swinburne’s “In either of the twain It is unnecessary to multiply examples of an affectation which disfigures all these writers; who, in the same spirit which prompts the ambitious nobodies that rent London theatres in the “empty” season to make up for their dulness by fearfully original “new readings,” distinguish their attempt at leading business by affecting the construction of their grandfathers and great-grandfathers, and the accentuation of the poets of the court of James I. It is in all respects a sign of remarkable genius, from this point of view, to rhyme “was” with “grass,” “death” with “lieth,” “gain” with “fountain,” “love” with “of,” “once” with “suns,” and so on ad nauseam. I am far from disputing the value of 50 bad rhymes used occasionally to break up the monotony of verse, but the case is hard when such blunders become the rule and not the exception, when writers deliberately lay themselves out to be as archaic and affected as possible. Poetry is perfect human speech, and these archaisms are the mere fiddlededeeing of empty heads and hollow hearts. Bad as they are, they are the true indication of falser tricks and affectations which lie far deeper. They are trifles, light as air, showing how the wind blows. The soul’s speech and the heart’s speech are clear, simple, natural, and beautiful, and reject the meretricious tricks to which we have drawn attention. “When winds do roar, and rains do pour, and so on, till the English speech seems the speech of raving madmen. Of a piece with other affectations is the device of a burden, of which the fleshly persons are very fond for its own sake, quite apart from its relevancy. Thus Mr. Rossetti sings:— “Why did you melt your waxen man, This burden is repeated, with little or no alteration, through thirty-four verses. About as much to the point is a burden of Mr. Swinburne’s, something to the following effect:— “We were three maidens in the green corn, Productions of this sort are “silly sooth” in good earnest, though they delight some newspaper critics of the day, and are copied by young gentlemen with animal faculties morbidly developed by too much tobacco and too little exercise. Such indulgence, however, would ruin the strongest poetical constitution; and it unfortunately happens that neither masters nor pupils were naturally very healthy. In such a poem as “Eden Bower” there is not one scrap of imagination, properly so called. It is a clever grotesque in the worst manner of Callot, unredeemed by a gleam of true poetry or humour. No good poet would have wrought 54 into a poem the absurd tradition about Lilith; Goethe was content to glance at it merely, with a grim smile, in the great scene in the Brocken. I may remark here that productions of this unnatural and morbid kind are only tolerable when they embody a profound meaning, as do Coleridge’s “Ancient Mariner” and “Cristabel.” Not that we would insult the memory of Coleridge by comparing his exquisitely conscientious work with this affected rubbish about “Eden Bower” and “Sister Helen,” although his influence in their composition is unmistakable. Still more unmistakable is the influence of that unwholesome poet, Beddoes, who, with all his great powers (unmistakably superior to those of any of the present Fleshly School), treated his subjects in a thoroughly insincere manner, and is now justly forgotten. _____ * Gascoigne’s verse is noticeable, like Mr. Swinburne’s, for its laboured and wearisome alliteration; but the “Good Morrow” and “Good Night” are simple and graceful enough to save his fame from utter shipwreck. _____ 55 the wonder of collegians, and fading out through sheer poetic impotence; Cowley shaking all England with his pindarics, and perishing with them; Waller, the famous, saved from oblivion by the natural note of one single song*—and so on, through league after league of a flat and desolate country which once was prosperous, till we come again to these fantastic figures of the Fleshly School, with their droll mediæval garments, their funny archaic speech, and the fatal marks of literary consumption on every pale and delicate visage. My judgment on Mr. Rossetti, to whom I in the meantime confine my judgment, is substantially that of the North American Reviewer, who believes that “we have in him another poetical man, and a man markedly poetical, and of a kind apparently, though not radically, different from any of our secondary writers of poetry, but that we have not in him a new poet of any weight;” and that he is “so affected, sentimental, and painfully self-conscious, that the best to be done in his case is to hope that this book of his, having unpacked his bosom of so much that is unhealthy, may have done him more good than it has given others pleasure.” † Such, I say, is my opinion, which might very well be wrong, and have to undergo modification, if Mr. Rossetti were younger and less self-possessed. His “maturity” is fatal. _____ * “Go, lovely Rose.”
The Fleshly School of Poetry and Other Phenomena of the Day - continued _____
[Note: Chapter IV of The Fleshly School of Poetry and Other Phenomena of the Day is substantially the same as Buchanan’s original article in The Contemporary Review of October 1871. The significant alterations are listed on the page below.] Comparison of the ‘Thomas Maitland’ article and Chapter IV of the pamphlet version.
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