Dream days
PATRICK ANDERSON
There was more to life than the production of coal, the expansion of the cotton trade, the growth of population and the chauvinistic self- satisfaction of mill-owners and bankers. Romanticism, which had rejected the elegant rationality of one age, now winced at the smug pragmatism of its nineteenth century successor. Manchester was never, alas, to be seen 'spreading her gardens to the moonlight, and whispering from her towers the last en- e/aantments of the Middle Age.' Liverpool was not introspective, nor Bradford concerned with ,'the depiction of transient and half-understood states of feeling,' nor Sheffield much influenced by a concept of labour where 'the hand' of the carver had followed his loving heart.' Even in the metropolis, love affairs were rarely em- barked upon with the intensity of the dolce.stil nuovo; woman was not a symbol of her fiancé's soul nor their cohabitation expressive of the union with God. No wonder Carlyle exclaimed, 'The truth is, men have lost their belief in the Invisible, and believe, and hope,
and work only in the Visible; or, to speak it in other words, This is not a religious age.'
Nevertheless, many writers and artists were incapable of giving up religion. If they couldn't quite stomach Christianity, they made up creeds of their own, as did Yeats with his phases of the moon, Rilke with his angels and Lawrence with his dark gods. This new sort of Reformation refused to buy indulgences in the supermarket of agnostic liberalism, rejected the Pope of Progress, and turned every man into his own priest. Amongst the French, Baudelaire was of the whisky sort, a satanist who in fact illumined Christianity and claimed the dignity of being damned: `La vraie n'est pas dons le gaz, ni dans la vapeur, ni dons les tables tournantes. Elle est dons la diminution du Oche originel.' Mallarmee was the fastidious ritualist, 'dormer un setts plus pur aux mots de la tribu.' Young Rimbaud was the hallucinated hermit amongst the sterile rocks. Ve dis qu'il taut 'etre voyant se faire voyant.' In the romantic tradition the poet continued to turn inwards in order to find, through the uniqueness of his personal vision, a reality he missed in the ordinary world, but he also sought the confirmation of this reality in the 'passion,' heroism,"beauty,"simplicity' of other periods of history, or in the folk- lore, legend and myth he believed to be a distillation of human experience.
The problem was how to express the scarcely expressible results of his introspection, his trance and dream—and, as Miss Hayter has pointed out in her recent book, some of the -visions were drug-induced, while others, not- ably in the case of Rimbaud and Yeats, were assisted by magic. One of the answers was symbolism. The French Symbolists attempted to convey a primordial Idea not by naming it, which would have been blasphemy suppos- ing it were possible, but by clothing it in sumptuous imagery and an infinitely sugges- tive music. It was the reader's task to divine the meaning little by little. And how else should one approach the frozen swan in 'Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd'huf or Rossetti's painting of Beata Beatrix or the Byzantium of Yeats?
, In The Pre-Raphaelite Imagination Mr John Dixon Hunt describes the ideal longings of the Brotherhood and its friends; the grouping of 1848 developed into that of 1856, in which D. G. Rossetti was even more central, and continued to attract associates like Swinburne, Pater and Simeon Solomon. Stressing the similarities between Pre-Raphaelites and French Symbolists in both aims and techniques, Mr Hunt is at pains to show that 'Pre-Raphaelitism not only continued to shape imagination, but in many ways it anticipated the work of the French.' Well versed in the magazines of the 'nineties, he can prove his point not only in regard to Yeats and Symons. Wilde and Beardsley, but with quotations from a welter of minor and often forgotten writers such as Selwyn Image, Herbert P. Horne and Graham R. Tomson. Indeed, his enthusiasm leads to a certain amount of special pleading. Even the realists were affected. 'Flaming gas jets were an inevitable part of the Nineties urban decor, yet they had been so in much Pre- Raphaelite work . . . (as in Rossetti's "Jenny") where the lamps became a brilliant symbol of the prostitute's remorse.' I cannot feel that the fin de siècle emerges from his book with any increase of glamour or interest, or that he himself is altogether happy with its decora- tive langours and modish sins. However, his general description of the movement against Victorian ugliness and in- sensitivity is thorough and compelling. Here are Morris's evocations of mediaeval buildings and landscapes (often excellent) together with his quaint archaicisms (usually dreadful). Here is Rossetti caught between sensuality and the spiritual in the 'Blessed Damozel' or losing him- self in 'the soul's sphere of infinite images' in the 'House of Life.' Here, too, is Mr Hunt's critical portrait of Swinburne with his vague sonorities, his diffuse and impersonal self- revelations, his hysterical montage of ideas and emotions, especially when compared to Pater's ability to objectify himself in terms of Marius or La Gioconda.
And then there are, by way of many pages of plates, the women! Elizabeth Siddal, Jane Morris, Fanny Cornforth, all ethereally pale and melting-eyed above those massive throats, beneath those clouds of hair, so that three per- sonalities coalesce into one. A Brother ex- claimed that to him Heaven was a 'Rose Garden full of stunners,' and stunners they were indeed who posed for Water Willows and Beata Beat rix and Mary Magdalene, with their symbolic birds and flowers, but also the subtler and more pervasive symbolism of ex- pression and gesture and circumambient light.
Lady, I fain would tell how evermore Thy soul I know not from thy body, nor Thee from myself, neither our love from God.
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