Second sight

The visionary imagination in late Victorian literature

Catherine Maxwell

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780719071454
  9780719071447
• eBook ISBN:
  9781847794864
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: Literature

This challenging and important study, which examines a range of canonical and less well-known writers, is an innovative reassessment of late Victorian literature in its relation to visionary Romanticism.

It examines six late Victorian writers - Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Walter Pater, Vernon Lee, Eugene Lee-Hamilton, Theodore Watts-Dunton and Thomas Hardy - to reveal their commitment to a Romantic visionary tradition which surface towards the end of the nineteenth century in response to the threat of growing materialism. Offering detailed and imaginative readings of both poetry and prose, Second Sight shows the different ways in which late Victorian writers move beyond materiality, without losing a commitment to it, to explore the mysterious relation between the seen and the unseen.

A major re-evaluation of the post-Romantic visionary imagination, with implications for our understanding of literary modernism, Second Sight will be required reading for scholars interested in the literature of the late Victorian period.

1
‘An aching pulse of melodies’: Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s poetic magnetism

A sense of power in love, defying distance, and those barriers which are so much more than physical distance, of unutterable desire penetrating into the world of sleep … in his later work, makes him speak sometimes almost like a believer in mesmerism.

(Pater 1910, App 214)¹

Anyone who wishes to write about the poetry of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and reads the extant criticism immediately becomes aware how certain specific critical scripts and trajectories present themselves as difficult to avoid. In many respects much criticism still reflects the critical concerns of Robert Buchanan’s notorious attack on Rossetti in the two versions of his article ‘The Fleshly School of Poetry’ (1871, 1872).² Countering the favourable initial wave of criticism, which Rossetti had himself orchestrated by asking friends to review his work, Buchanan denied the mystical and symbolic content of the verse, insisting on its ‘fleshliness’ and earth-bound materiality, its narrow focus, and asserting that Rossetti as a poet was self-absorbed and narcissistic, ‘describing his own exquisite emotions’, ‘a fleshly person, with nothing particular to tell or teach us’ (Buchanan 1871 in Riede 1992a, 28, 29); ‘poetry’, he declared, ‘must deal with great issues in which all men are interested, not with the “damnable face-making” of Narcissus in a mirror’ (Buchanan 1872, 89). He also attacked what he called Rossetti’s ‘grotesque mediævalism’, his ‘affected’ use of archaisms, the promotion of style and form over any real content or meaning, and a concomitant lack of sincerity (Buchanan 1871 in Riede 1992a, 31, 35, 31). Moreover the poet was chastised for apparently turning his private life into a literary commodity – ‘a husband virtually … wheeling his nuptial couch out into the public streets’ – while there were hints that the poetry was also informed by his clandestine affair with Jane Morris: ‘there is running rampant in English society a certain atrocious form of vice, a monster with two heads – one of which is called Adultery’ (Buchanan 1872, ix, 4).³

Criticism from the mid-twentieth century onwards has reiterated many of these concerns, albeit in a more sophisticated way. The supernatural and mystical elements of Rossetti’s verse have been downplayed or seen as superficial, critics preferring to concentrate on what they see as naturalistic detail rather than symbolism, even arguing that Rossetti resists symbolism, replacing it by perception and sensation. As John Holmes has recently pointed out, Buchanan’s charge of lack of meaning or sincerity has been turned about by those who celebrate what they see as Rossetti’s absence or annihilation of meaning (Holmes 2005, 13–14). With regard to ‘fleshliness’, other commentators have focused on Rossetti’s depictions of sex and sexuality, particularly in regard to his representation of women, arguing in some cases that his writing has a pornographic or misogynistic content. Rossetti’s ‘narcissism’, his projection of himself into doubles, reflections, into the Romantic epipsyche or female reflecting beloved, has become something of a critical commonplace, although there is often an undercurrent of censure that suggests there is something narrow, limited or self-absorbed about such projections. Inevitably and perhaps more understandably Rossetti’s biography also haunts and informs many critical accounts, if in a diluted form. The picturesque, dramatic, and sensational events of his life are hard to resist, especially as there is now available a vast amount of documentation in the form of letters, annotations, commentaries, and memoirs that make it relatively easy to reconstruct particular contexts for specific poems and paintings. Rossetti’s major work, the sonnet sequence The House of Life (1870, 1881), seems calculated to pique curiosity and arouse speculation about the personal events and circumstances that may have motivated the verse. Indeed Theodore Watts-Dunton, who, after Rossetti’s death, was widely anticipated to be his biographer, remarked that any reader might know him ‘as intimately as it is possible to know any man whose biography is written only in his works’ (Watts-Dunton 1916a, 111).

Buchanan’s insinuations that personal history informed Rossetti’s poetry were fairly quickly supplemented by the potent biographical legend of the reclusive, melancholy poet, who, following his breakdown, spent the last decade of his life virtually immured in his home at 16 Cheyne Walk. ‘Melancholy … is the invariable shadow of high genius’, wrote William Sharp with regard to Rossetti in an article of 1887 (Sharp 1912, 50). As David Riede writes, ‘in the years immediately following [Rossetti’s] death it seemed as though nearly everyone who knew him rushed into print with memoirs and testimonials’ (Riede 1992a, 3). The principal accounts by Sharp and Thomas Hall Caine help make Rossetti into what we now recognise as a type of the sensitive Romantic or Post-Romantic poet, or what Frank Kermode in Romantic Image, his classic study of 1957, influentially described as ‘the artist in isolation’, a figure who still dominates much early twentieth-century poetry. The isolation of Rossetti’s later years was compounded by characteristics observable much earlier such as ‘a genuine lack of interest in passing events’ (Gosse 1882, 724). He evinced little interest in politics and matters of the day. According to Sharp, ‘Nor had Rossetti much sympathy with or knowledge of nature. The outer world of things appealed to him but slightly, finding as he did his world of imagination sufficient’ (Sharp 1912, 64). In spite of critical accounts that suggest otherwise, the sharply observed natural detail that can be found intermittently in the poems and paintings is, for the most part, symbolic or instrumental (see Maxwell 1993).

Riede suggests that ‘much of Rossetti’s influence on the aesthetes of the coming generation resulted from what seemed his exemplary, if painful, devotion to an ideal of beauty, his exemplary role as a new type of artist’ (Riede 1992a, 7), and he cites Lionel Stevenson’s opinion that Rossetti ‘“was the first English poet who entirely fulfilled the public image of the poète maudit – manic-depressive in temperament, alienated from the mores of his time, sensually self-indulgent, and disintegrating under the influences of sex, alcohol, and drugs”’ (Stevenson 1972, 77, cited in Riede 1992a, 7). Stevenson’s take on the legend is itself recognisably more of a later twentieth-century response which emphasises sensuality, addiction, and disintegration, while the immediate post-1882 reminiscences tend to see Rossetti as more spiritualised, tortured by his past, but disabled principally by his unfortunate dependency on chloral. Notably the idea of the sensually degenerate poète maudit receives a check from Jan Marsh, Rossetti’s most recent biographer, who suggests that he most likely did not lose his virginity until the age of thirty, and that, owing to his hydrocele or testicular ailment, and perhaps impotency, his relationship with Jane Morris was probably unconsummated (Marsh 2005, 202, 351, 331). She also remarks that his later chloral dependency, although severe, never seemed to interfere with his creative life to any great degree, a view corroborated by Edmund Gosse and Rossetti himself (Marsh 2005, 488; Gosse 1882, 725).

This chapter makes no claims to avoid the biography in so far as it has a particular interest and investment in the mythic type of the hypersensitive isolated poet, a type it seems that Rossetti himself deliberately helped cultivate, in spite of having many antithetical traits and characteristics noted by his friends such as an uproarious sense of humour and a ‘manly’ directness. This self-cultivated tragic aura lends a particular fascination to the verse from which it often seems inextricable. In ‘The Song-throe’, Sonnet 61 in the 1881 House of Life, Rossetti himself had insisted that only deep emotion can generate affecting poetry: ‘By thine own tears thy song must tears beget’ (Rossetti 1911, 95). As Arthur Symons comments: ‘Part of what hypnotises us in his work is, no doubt, that sense of personal tragedy which comes to us out of its elaborate beauty: the eternal tragedy of those who have loved the absolute in beauty too well, and with too mortal a thirst’ (Symons 1916, 206). The hypnotic effect that Symons notices is something routinely ascribed by early critics to both Rossetti himself and his writing. This effect is central to my discussion, which none the less aims to transcend mere biographical data to find ways of talking about Rossetti’s poetry that restore to it something of the visionary capability once accorded it by the early critics. For, if Buchanan denied the mystical and symbolic content of the verse, criticism that followed Rossetti’s death in 1882 would respond by once more reiterating the mystical and supernatural in his poetry. I refer here principally to monographs and essays by William Sharp (1882, 1887), Theodore Watts-Dunton (1883), Walter Pater (1883), F. W. H. Myers (1883), Arthur Symons (1904), and incidental but significant remarks by W. B. Yeats in a number of articles such as ‘Symbolism in Painting’ (1898), ‘The Theatre’ (1899), ‘The Happiest of the Poets’ (1902), and ‘Art and Ideas’ (1913).⁴ Buchanan himself would retract his charges in two poems, and, in a significant essay of reversal published in 1883, singled out Rossetti from among his contemporaries as ‘the least objective, the least earthly, and the most ideal’ (Buchanan 1887, 153).⁵

Of all these responses the best is Pater’s essay, originally written to preface a selection of Rossetti’s poetry in Ward’s English Poets (1883), in that he understands perfectly how Rossetti’s verse manages to be simultaneously material and spiritual. No one seems to have noticed that this beautifully considered evaluation, still rightly thought one of the finest pieces of criticism on the poet (McGann 2000, 58), is actually a subtle, extremely cogent, point-by-point correction of Buchanan’s earlier charges. Pater stresses Rossetti’s exacting, highly individualised but apposite style and vocabulary – these are ‘no mere tricks of manner adopted with a view to forcing attention’ – which marry ‘sincerity’ to ‘a sort of grandeur of literary worksmanship’ (Pater 1910, App 206, 210). He reinstates the symbolic purpose of Rossetti’s verse, explaining his use of ‘sensible imagery’, ‘concrete definition’, and ‘abstractions’, and relates these to the practice of his precursor Dante (Pater 1910, App 207, 208). He re-emphasises Rossetti’s central themes as Love and a beauty in which matter and spirit come together – ‘all this, conceived with an abundant imagination, and a deep, a philosophic, reflectiveness’ (Pater 1910, App 212, 213). Besides alluding to Swedenborg’s perception of body and soul and the fact that Rossetti in his later work sounds ‘sometimes almost like a believer in mesmerism’, Pater remarks in his conclusion that Rossetti’s work ‘was mainly of the esoteric order’ (Pater 1910, App 214, 218).

Pater aside, the post-1882 critical reaction which emphasises Rossetti’s mysticism does not seem to have cut much ice with later critics, who are unaware of its existence, ignore it, or, one assumes, regard it as a form of defensive special pleading. With some notable exceptions such as the Canadian scholar D. M. R. Bentley, critics interested in Rossetti’s spiritual and religious influences and intimations are rare.⁶ Yet the mystical and symbolic Rossetti deserves reconsideration. There is still much to be said about his use of esoteric sources, including a neoplatonism only too familiar to him through his father Gabriele Rossetti’s researches and through his own masterly translations of medieval Italian poetry in his The Early Italian Poets, later republished as Dante and His Circle (1861, 1874).⁷ F. R. Leavis’s attack in The Common Pursuit on ‘Rossetti’s shamelessly cheap evocation of a romantic and bogus Platonism’ (Leavis 1952, 47) shamelessly ignores what Pater recognised only too well when he effectively grouped together Plato, Dante, and Rossetti (Pater 1910, App 212; PP 135) for their fusion of material and spiritual, and saw that they were examples of what, borrowing from Rossetti himself, he calls ‘Love’s lovers’ (Pater 1910, App 212; PP 134–6).⁸ F. W. H. Myers also emphasised Rossetti’s Platonism in his 1883 essay ‘Rossetti and the Religion of Beauty’, though, unlike Pater, he thought it was probably unconscious (Myers in Riede 1992a, 48–9).

Henry Treffry Dunn, Rossetti’s studio and household assistant, records Rossetti’s interest in spiritualism and mesmerism, which included his participation in seances, and remarks that ‘He was of a highly imaginative nature, and everything that appertained to the mystic had a strange fascination for him’ (Dunn 1904, 55–61, 55).⁹ Some of Rossetti’s interest in mysticism probably stemmed from early influences. William Michael’s statement about his childhood home indicates its almost palpable atmosphere of arcana: ‘Our father, when writing about the Comedia or the Vita Nuova, was seen surrounded by ponderous folios in italic type, “libri mistici” and the like (often about alchemy, freemasonry, Brahminism, Swedenborg, the Cabbala, etc.).’ He tells us candidly that the Rossetti children ‘were assuredly not much tempted to take up one of his books to see if it would “do to read”’ (W. M. Rossetti 1895, 1.64), a disinclination which none the less may have been reversed as they grew older. The young Rossetti resisted his father’s interests and later ridiculed his eccentric theories about Dante, but ended up by developing his own passion for the poet. As he writes in the Preface to The Early Italian Poets, ‘Thus, in those early days, all around me partook of the influence of the great Florentine; till, from viewing it as a natural element, I also, growing older, was drawn within the circle’ (Rossetti 1911, 283–4). Rodger Drew, recalling Watts-Dunton’s opinion, reminds us that Rossetti, in spite of his reservations about Gabriele’s bizarre and idiosyncratic symbolic system, would, like his sister Christina, inherit his father’s ‘innate obsession with symbolism’ (Drew 2007, 146; Watts-Dunton 1916a, 186). Drew’s own recent intriguing monograph The Stream’s Secret: The Symbolism of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (2007) is a welcome attempt to establish Rossetti’s esoteric sources, proposing that his symbolism has its roots in neoplatonism, medieval romance, and alchemy, and in the hermetic magical tradition that developed into Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry. Drew’s account is thoughtful and provocative, although one wishes that he had tried more strenuously to anchor his speculations to Rossetti’s actual reading, as does Pamela Bickley in her fine article on Rossetti’s influence on Yeats, where she assiduously notes his reading of Swedenborg, which ‘informs “The Blessed Damozel” and some of the House of Life sonnets’ (Bickley 2001, 84, 101–2).

This chapter deals less with specific esoteric sources, fascinating though these are, and more with the visual, symbolic, and imaginative dimension of Rossetti’s visionary writing. However, as part of this exploration, it draws attention to ideas and images of hypnotic, mesmer...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• A note on the texts
• Introduction
• 1 ‘An aching pulse of melodies’: Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s poetic magnetism
• 2 Walter Pater’s ‘strange veil of sight’
• 3 Of Venus, vagueness, and vision: Vernon Lee, Eugene Lee-Hamilton, and ‘the spell of the fragment’
• 4 Theodore Watts-Dunton’s Aylwin and the reduplications of Romanticism
• 5 Thomas Hardy’s poetry: ‘the intenser stare of the mind’
• References
• Index
• Footnotes