"Domine, dilexi decorem domus tuae; et locum habitationis gloriae tuae." -- Psalm 25.
"EVERYTHING that is Romanish," wrote the liberal and sincere Bishop Wilberforce, "is a stench in my nostrils." He was a worthy man and, it need scarcely be added, given to straightforward diction; wherefore one hopes charitably that he did not altogether realize the inroads which Catholicism had made into the English thought of his time. When Darwinism and Bishop Colenso began to disturb the complacency of the British spirit with their negations, the Church was already abroad with scarcely less revolutionary affirmations. She did not always carry the day completely, and there were many who loved her garments well without ever being able to persuade themselves that she was altogether respectable. Some idea of the half-way house reached by Pusey, Keble, and others has been given; it remains to suggest the influence of the Catholic idea on one of the most influential literary movements of the nineteenth century, the movement which is sometimes called aesthetic and which at any rate began its consideration of life with a study of art. Seeing how things were in fiction, it demanded that they be thus in fact also; its chief proponents were almost Malebranches of the museum.
In a good many ways such thinking seems like putting the cart before the horse; but its great and unforgettable merit is that it really puts something before, that is, believes that the cumulative experiences and intuitions of humanity have their value. Once a man is inclined to adopt such a view of things he cannot neglect the Catholic Spirit, which is the past of Europe. Nor did the English movement we are about to examine fail to make this discovery. It may be said to have begun with John Ruskin, a very original, stormy, and sensitive man, whose career scarcely needs to be outlined here. Reared in strict Evangelism, his poetic nature was fired first by Walter Scott, then by art, and finally by the great memorials of Christian art. Perhaps it is not too much to say that Kenelm Digby was in the end Ruskin's chief teacher except in the matter of style, wherein the pupil proved magister magistrum. His doctrine, despite all errors of detail and judgment, gained everlasting effectiveness by insisting that half of life at least is beauty and that the better half. Having made it possible to speak aloud of art, he preached it vigorously to society.
Civilization, he declared, had turned aside from its ancient highway into ugly and degenerate paths. Ruskin saw clearly that there had been a break in England's history, and for him it was something like the smashing of beautiful glass. "I simply cannot paint," he writes, "nor read, nor look at minerals, nor do anything else that I like, and the very light of the morning sky, when there is any -- which is seldom nowadays, near London -- has become hateful to me, because of the misery that I know of, and see signs of, where I know it not, which no imagination can interpret too bitterly." And the aging Ruskin abandoned the examination of pictures to become the antagonist of political economy. For this he has never been forgiven by temperamental amateurs, but it was a great discovery: Ruskin understood that there had once been a connection between beauty and society, between the artist and the artisan, and that unless this were restored the crafts would remain crushing and mechanical. His practical schemes, like all such isolated expedients, made little progress; the Guild of St. George was merely an honourable undertaking. The doctrine he preached was the important matter, for its roots lay firm in human memory: it was a gospel to which the commonest man would turn by atavistic instinct and to which Christendom had been dedicated. Farther than this Ruskin never went. Looking upon nature as everyone's heritage, his egoism became social; looking upon the past, his knowledge begat collective power. He was not really a philosopher but a poet, and although poets make mistakes, their intuitions are generally correct. And while the aesthetic movement in England was not altogether dependent upon Ruskin, he remains its first parent. Perhaps that is why the younger aesthetes will have nothing to do with him. The older ones, however, who were not so far advanced, took dictation from him rather obediently. Of no one is this more true than of Walter Pater, the subdued, twilight-loving acolyte of beauty whose carefully written sayings are now strangely sought after. His voice is stronger than even Arnold's in present-day criticism, for his outlook seems more modern. If there is one thing which distinguishes Pater's mind from that of his age it is, besides his concern with beauty simply as beauty, the fact that his intellect was centripetal while others were centrifugal: that is, while his neighbors like Carlyle, Arnold, and even Newman began with a fixed idea and followed it, like some philosophic North Star, as near the confines of knowledge as they could come, Pater traveled vagabondishly through the realms of Beauty and finally reached a destination as closely resembling Truth as his mind was probably capable of dwelling in.
Being a man who has been extravagantly praised and severely satirized, and concerning whom even his two chief biographers disagree vehemently, Walter Horatio Pater's very reticent simplicity of life baffles insight into his personality. He was born on August 4, 1839, into a family whose Dutch ancestry seems to have been held in high regard and whose male members had, until the defection of Pater's grandfather, been reared as Catholics. The lad was always keenly responsive to the beautiful in his surroundings and often played at Mass, being decked out for the purpose in a set of miniature vestments. Education meant for him very largely the classics and the influence of Keble, whom he came to know at Oxford. His hard literary work, however, led him to abandon any predominant religious inclination for the cult of humanism; he studied the great French stylists, Sainte-Beuve and Flaubert, and came to sympathize earnestly with the pre-Raphaelites. Gradually his purpose in life became the writing of a few essays annually and he finally resigned even the Fellowship in Brasenose College. Pater's long residence in a few small rooms at Oxford and later at St. Giles made him a traditional university figure, although he cannot be said ever to have been an academic enthusiast. He took a friendly interest in those young men who came to him for advice, corrected their essays carefully, lectured rather loftily on philosophy, and loved the games and by-play wherein youth is always freshest and most comely. Occasionally he went to the Continent for a visit to the shrines of loveliness -- Amiens, Azay-le-Rideau, the whole of France -- and then retreated to Oxford, where he laboriously brought together his random notes for their fusion into another essay. Kindly, almost ascetic, he loved the beautiful in life only after it had been exorcised, as it were, by the tranquil intellect. Naturally such a mode of living, which after all was contemplative without any robustness of vision, made for isolation, for misunderstanding, for nonsensical imitation even. Pater's only luxuries were a bowl of dried roses, a jaunty tie, and a beautiful style; his disciples had numerous others. It was not that men could not rise to the master's level; they mistook it for a hill and leaped over. "I wish they wouldn't call me a 'hedonist'," he once remarked a little sadly to Mr. Gosse. "It produces such a bad effect on the minds of people who don't know Greek." Pater was, in fact, the anchorite of truth, striving to "burn with a hard, gem-like flame" and like the Suttee, also to do his duty. That it brought happiness he would have been the last to assert, and would probably have declared with Musset: "Je sais d'immortettes qua, sont de purs songlots."
It must not be forgotten for a moment that Pater's chief business was style, and that he succeeded in meriting Bourget's adjective, "perfect." Writing was attended for him with something like a ritual, to which he lent all the pomp denied himself in other ways. What his theory was may be gathered easily from the famous essay on style. He tried not only to rear the straight and symmetrical bell tower, but also to put into it the bell, whose melody was never brazen or triumphant but approached that perfume of sound which the mediaeval ringers are supposed to have drawn from their chimes. The method was most toilsome, being the merging of many separate thoughts into the whole, accomplished by a steady, careful meditativeness that was redeemed from servility by the artistic pleasure it gave. Somewhat humorous instances of Pater's meticulous industry are numerous; thus, upon being asked by a puzzled friend the meaning of a sentence, he studied it anxiously and then replied, "Ah, I see the printer has omitted a dash." His style, in the end, achieves both music and architecture and is charming chiefly by reason of this complexity, this interweaving of purpose, while it lacks the vibrancy, the ready healthfulness, in which English prose from Scott to Newman has been the counterpart of Attic composition. If there be any truth in the statement that the writer has the best style who seems to have none, by so much truth does Pater miss the mastery of words.
Now any consideration of Pater's ideas will necessarily involve a consideration of his development. In early youth the seductive appeal of outward form had been modified for him by a deep religious instinct which rendered the beauty of nature something like a sacrament. Later the religious side of his nature weakened under the application to metaphysics and left him the devotee of a paganism which did not dull the one leading urge of his life, intellectual contemplation. With the essay on Winckelmann Pater's thought assumed form. "Religions," he says, "as they grow by natural laws out of man's life are modified by whatever modifies his life. They brighten under a bright sky, they become liberal as the social range widens, they grow intense and shrill in the clefts of human life, where the spirit is narrow and confined, and the stars are visible at noonday; and a fine analysis of these differences is one of the gravest functions of religious criticism." Here he confesses, despite the liquefaction of dogma assumed, to two things: his perception of the continuity of the religious instinct and his great attraction to mediaeval life, which interested him most to the end. He wanted to prove that Christianity was nothing more than the natural outcropping of a vegetarian pagan sentiment in order to make it earthy and enjoyable rather than supernatural and troublesome.
This pragmatism of beauty is at its height again in the essay "Leonardo da Vinci," with its famous interpretation of La Giaconda, "the woman who, as Leda was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary"; in the later essay, "The School of Giorgine" where it is asserted that "all art constantly aspires towards the condition of music"; in fact, throughout both "Greek Studies" and "The Renaissance." Pater understood full well that the mirth of the Attic day had been lost and one need not believe that he was really much concerned with getting it back. After all, he dealt with modern complexity, "that strange perpetual weaving and unweaving of ourselves," rather than with the blithe simplicity of Homer. His avowed purpose was "to define beauty not in the abstract, but in the most concrete terms possible, to find not a universal formula for it, but the formula which expresses most adequately this or that manifestation of it." Indeed, for the contemplative without the vision of God, this is the only possible position; and Pater therefore promulgated the atomic theory of art and insight which he dignified with the title of Cyrenaicism.
A slightly different position is taken up in that most remarkable of all Pater's books, "Marius the Epicurean." The young philosopher moving from the beautiful seclusion of his ancestral estate to the center of pagan society, comes armed with an idealized form of Epicureanism and determined to find a philosophy which will quiet the restlessness of his thought. He meets the best minds that Rome can boast of -- Apuleius, Marcus Aurelius, Lucian -- but in each instance is confronted with a system that breaks down at the point of tension. Marius' reaction to the meditations of Aurelius is especially interesting; he unfolds the bands of thought in which the great Stoic is enshrouded and finds the man shivering underneath his skillful optimism, bent with the burden of inexplicable evil. Then, at last, there is Cornelius the Christian and the house of Cecelia where the mysteries of the Faith are celebrated and whence the odour of defeat seems to have been banished by mystic and eternal roses. Marius bows to the hope vouchsafed here, and more sincerely to the beauty of the ritual. Taken captive during a raid upon the Christians, he contrives the escape of Cornelius, is abandoned in a small town to die, and is attended by other Christians who, considering him one of their own, administer the last rites. With happy resignation and a temperate curiosity in the journey which he is about to undertake, Marius dies.
It is, of course, a very personal book in which Pater patiently reflected the moods of his own spirit and let it be known how near his pagan wanderings had brought him to the Christian bourne. Closer than this hopeful interest he did not come, for as is shown in his review of "Robert Elsmere" and in the final essay on Pascal, religious belief was based for him upon the assumption of a consoling probability and not upon what are termed facts. Newman might have written the "Grammar of Assent" with Pater in mind. The conclusion to be drawn from "Marius the Epicurean" is that while its hero did not accept Catholicism as truth, he accepted it, in preference to paganism, as beauty. He saw that every form of naturalistic philosophy is insufficient in the face of evil and is, therefore, too simple; that the Christian view, if one can accept it, cures the inner malady of nature with a supernatural remedy.
Any criticism of Pater must begin with a frank statement of his position. Throughout life, it was the sensuous, the physically graceful, which fascinated him most, however much he might intellectualize it. He was almost naturally a pagan, and if there is anything that distinguishes paganism from Christianity it is this: paganism is stationary and statuesque, while Christianity is mobile, adaptive. It is the difference between the Parthenon and Bourges, between the Hercules and the Moses of Michael Angelo. Now this fact is paradoxically matched with another: whereas paganism with its multitudinous contours is fluid, Christianity is straight and solid. Parmenides the static and Hereclitus the kinetic are the types of heathen thought and, in a sense, are complementary; Christendom is different because it has dogma. Now the upshot of this is that Pater's conception of art and thought was that they resembled the musk-sweet waters of music, but that they were waters which did not move, which were forceless. This, too, is what formed his style, so admirably adapted to eliminate the gulf between Helen and Mary the Maid. What spoiled the apprehension of Christianity for him was that he beheld the Mass as a tableau instead of as a drama. Marius was a marble hero, goodly to look upon but useless in battle.
This pale immobility he never escaped; in fact, the still waters were to prove themselves stagnant. In "Denys l'Auxerrois" and indeed throughout the "Imaginary Portraits," we are face to face with the unrestrained morbidity which will later mark the decadents. These are stories which demand dramatic manipulation, which cry out for a solution from angel or devil. It is rather appalling to find them treated with refined Epicureanism. Still, if he had gone a little farther, Pater might have discovered the Demon as did Villiers de l'Isle Adam. Both were egoists, but the French novelist's individualism was a sincere concern with himself in conflict with the age. Of Pater it is even possible to assert that his egoism was the result of not thinking enough about himself. A serious grasp of his own acting personality would have saved him from a too exclusive concern with his thoughts. He sat entranced beside the beautiful waters of his own mind, and nothing could have induced him to disturb their shimmering perfection by taking a swim.
In the end one says of Pater that he was a contemplative whose meditation eliminated the element of personality. With his innate nobility of character and his devotion to the beautiful, he would have become a mystic of the highest rank had he been able to feel certain of the reality of God. The reasons for his failure to do so are inscrutable. Still, his discovery of the Christian tradition as the one sufficiently beautiful idea, as the one release from the darkness that haunts the brighest places in nature, is truly remarkable. As the explorer of the outlying, resplendently purple mists of thought he had hunted one refuge for a heart whose quest was beauty. That he asked for nothing more is not his fault, but his manner. Believing that art should have "the soul of humanity in it," he tried honestly to be an artist.
Although many men have felt the influence of Pater, no disciple of his makes the same nobility of appeal as Lionel Johnson (1867-1902). Slender, graceful, impeccably neat, and earnestly recollected, this young poet was a man whose blood was that of a soldier race but whose soul was given to the priesthood of art. Admitted into the Church during his Oxford career, he caught from Pater a hunger for the stateliness of those ages which bred and saved our culture, and this he never appeased. What the master stood for in Johnson's life may be seen from an essay on the "Work of Walter Pater" and better still from the beautiful elegy:
"Gracious God, keep him; and God grant to me By miracle to see That unforgettably most gracious friend In the never-ending end."
Johnson's own work falls very naturally into two parts: "The Art of Thomas Hardy" together with shorter essays, and his poetry. The great criticism of the Wessex novelist is noteworthy for many reasons; its fairness of judgment (though the author was only twenty-seven when the book appeared), its thorough grasp of the classic spirit, and its unflagging beauty of style which, not so ornate or intricate as Pater's, has greater virility. If the volume was dedicated to a consideration of Mr. Hardy, its author was by no means averse to expressing his views on literature in general and on the work of his own time in particular.
"Great art," he declares, "is never out of date, nor obsolete: like the moral law of Sophocles, 'God is great in it and grows not old'; like the moral law of Kant, it is of equal awe and splendour with the stars. . . . In our day, many men of admirable powers love to think of themselves as alone in the world, homeless in the universe; without fathers, without mothers; heirs to no inheritance, to no tradition; bound by no law, and worshippers at no shrine; without meditation, without reverence, without patience, they utter, and would have us hear, their hasty and uncertain fancies. . . . It is the office of art to disengage from the conflict and the turmoil of life the interior virtue, the informing truth, which compose the fine spirit of its age; and to do this, with no pettiness of parochial pride in the fashions and the achievements of its own age rather with an orderly power to connect what is, with what has been, looking out prophetically to what will be."
For Lionel Johnson, then, the inspiration of Pater had led to the idea of embracing culture as a transcendent inheritance which was common as well as invaluable. He conceived of art as the living residue of a succession of immortal minds.
This view is, no doubt, that of a poet and Lionel Johnson was a master of song. But he had a straightforward, clean, unprejudiced mind that found the beauty of life largely in the moral law. No one will object to this except when it hampers the emotional glow which is poetry's priceless treasure. Johnson is always, at first, a trifle too stately and ponderously reflective for his mission as a troubadour; still, once the melody has been struck, he becomes free as any jovial singer. Such lyrics as "Our Lady of the Snows," "De Profundis," and "Our Lady of the May," are most delicate and fragrant, but best among these lyrics is, perhaps, that stirring defiance of evil, "The Dark Angel."
"Do what thou wilt, thou shalt not so, Dark Angel! triumph over me: Lonely unto the lone I go; Divine, to the Divinity."
Religious in feeling as all of Johnson's work is, he found a mighty source of inspiration in the martyrdom of a neighboring people to whom "Ireland and Other Poems" is dedicated. The title poem is a magnificent expression of sympathy, a worthy companion to Mangan's imperishable lament, "Dark Rosaleen." Johnson devoted himself to the Celtic cause with the ardent energy of Byron, but with a greater pity and love. His heart bled for Ireland because he could not help it; sympathy was the natural expression of his manhood and its motive force. "With all his deference," says Miss Guiney, "his dominant compassion, his grasp of the spiritual and the unseen, his feet stood foursquare upon rock. He was a tower of wholesomeness in the decadence which his short life spanned. . . . He suffered indeed, but he won manifold golden comfort from the mercies of God, from human excellence, the arts and the stretches of meadow, sky, and sea." After all, it was a tragically short life, broken at the end by disease and loneliness, and crushed finally by an accident in the streets of London. Nevertheless it was a sweet, full life, too, into which nothing entered that was mean or vile, which was fired by a noble understanding of the synthesis of the ages, and beautified and rendered secure by the consecration of the Church. That which Pater had sought in vain came to his disciple as a fresh and easy gift; but his possession of it found him meek even though he was a soldier.
While Lionel Johnson made the step forward which Pater could not learn, other disciples of beauty pushed the cult of paganism to a lower level and coveted the disease from which their master had shrunk. There came into English letters the voice of feverish Paris; intoxicated by the fetor of life mingled with religion's incense, hopelessly degraded because it was not altogether hopeless. Something has been said already of the enigmatic and jaundiced figure of Oscar Wilde, who in writing "whatever is realized is right" made at once a horrible epigram and a horrible lie; of Dowson and Beardsley, victims of the modern educational denial of the will. These were not so much followers of Pater as interpreters of one aspect of that humanism which he had been the first to revive in England.
Such, in brief, is the story of the men who sought a refuge in the past from the complacent industrial ugliness of England. None of them succeeded fully, and in the eyes of the world all proved themselves Quixotic. None the less, it was something to have discovered the great tradition of Beauty which the modern philistine hates worse than hell; it was even better, surely, to have felt that this tradition had been sanctified, that its roots lay in the religious spirit which Christendom had trained to the lovely service of the Cross. But in the end they were all outsiders who wrested the key to the citadel of culture as men do who realize that it has not been born into the family. In a different way there came into our nineteenth century literature a force from a land where the past was still in the soil -- Italy. With the appearance of the Rossettis, Dante Gabriel and Christina, the Dantean groves for which England so mysteriously yearned sent ambassadors to the North. Their influence, which has been large, is inextricably bound up with what is termed pre-Raphaelitism, a movement in art which has been variously described, but which may be defined tentatively as a sincere treatment of nature by the light of natural instinct. For the Rossettis it meant very truly something which antedates Raphael: the mystic fervour of Dante and Perugino, the religious art of the Catholic ages. Of course neither was actually a Catholic; both were national Italian Protestants, hot from the revolution and separated from the Church in every way excepting the one which seemed most important to them, artistic sympathy. Their strength lay in the power of their inheritance; their weakness almost directly in that which deprived them of a portion of it. With them to live was to be aesthetic, although in the case of Christina the flame burned almost too white for art.
The inspiration of Dante Gabriel Rossetti was neither constant nor sure of itself, but drew its glory from what was almost a perpetual dream. Considering life very much as if he were a stranger, this poet found in it strange deeps and heights, colours that seem unearthly and rhythms that are caught from the rising of the tide on an unseen sea. While he did not people the forests with nymphs or gods, he did commingle heaven and earth in a sort of intermediate dimness, a solid twilight, in which souls move heavy with perfume and weighted with golden garments. Rossetti may not have fully understood the symbolism of the early Christian artists, but he came nearer to reproducing it than most modern poets have come. Thompson is Gothic, masterly, structural; Coleridge more ghostly; but Rossetti the most colourful. The Blessed Damozel
"lean'd out From the gold bar of heaven: Her blue grave eyes were deeper much Than a deep water even. She had three lilies in her hand And the stars in her hair were seven,"
That is, as a matter of fact, how a soul would have been represented in mediaeval art, plastic and gorgeous. with the beauty of life. No one can write thus unless he holds as indubitable, imaginatively at least, the existence of a soul, but the intellectual grasp is weak here. The later Christian artists, while preserving the bodily form, attenuated it, made the figure represent the urge of the spirit to be delivered from its prison.
Rossetti was by nature a man of riotous enthusiasms, but his work is too quiet and pictorial. He was utterly incapable of the intellectual rigidity of Dante. Nowhere is this defect shown more clearly than in the famous poem, "Jenny." Here the man who has accompanied a girl of the street to her lodgings sits musing upon her beauty as she, fallen asleep, is sitting beside him. Gradually the sensuous exterior, golden hair, and supple bosom, mirrors her soul, and he is led into a bit of really admirable moralizing upon what may have tarnished the brightness of her virtue. Rising quietly, he places a coin where it will look pretty in her hair and tiptoes out. This poem is no doubt romantically beautiful, but it regains futile because it is inactive; as a study of human nature it may be admirable but it is not human. There is something in it that comes near to silliness. Everywhere in his other poems also, Rossetti removes the eagerness and the passion of man to a tranquil environment and views them in two dimensions. Thus, in "The Wine of Circe" he hears the
"wail from passion's tide-strown shore Where the dishevelled sea-weed hates the sea."
What Dante Gabriel Rossetti lacked was intellectual conviction, the sense of the reality of spirit as spirit and of body as body. Confusion robs his sacramentalism of the vitality which it possessed in Christian art; he tried to accomplish in philosophic twilight what must be done in believing day. A totally different stand was taken by his sister Christina who, in many ways, is the most interesting modern Englishwoman of letters. Consistently Anglican in her religious affiliations, her spirit was that of a cloistered nun dwelling humbly under the rule of Saint Clare. Intense religious conviction twice prevented her marriage; she visited Italy only once and never got over her sorrow at leaving the country of which she remained spiritually a native. Transplanted from the time and place into which she would have fitted with perfect contentment, she conveyed to English letters no note of rebellion but instead a song of perfect religious submission, of trembling eagerness to serve transcendently, mystically. Ford Madox Hueffer describes her person thus:
"This black-robed figure, with the clear-cut and olive-coloured features, the dark hair, the restrained and formal gestures, the hands always folded in the lap, the head always judiciously a little on one side, and with the precise enunciation, this tranquil Religious was undergoing within herself always a fierce struggle between the pagan desire for life, the light of sun and love, and an asceticism that, in its almost more than Calvinistic restraint, reached to the point of frenzy.
"The trouble was, of course, that whereas by blood and by nature Christina Rossetti was a Catholic, by upbringing and by all the influences that were around her she was forced into the Protestant communion. Under the influence of a wise confessor the morbidities of her self-abnegation would have been checked, her doubts would have been stilled."
Her life was a groping realization of the Catholic instinct. It is said that she was scrupulously careful not to tread upon a scrap of paper in the street, lest it should bear the Holy Name. Her writing might have been done upon her knees, and her verse is the forgotten song of Christendom, unusually plaintive, the delicate yet intensely passionate obeisance of the soul before the realities of the soul. Occasionally she could be romantic, as in "Goblin Market" with its two softly moulded girls:
"Like two blossoms on one stem, Like two flakes of new-fallen snow, Like two wands of ivory Tipped with gold for awful kings."
But it was with the questions of life taken seriously -- too seriously, in fact -- that she was usually concerned:
"Does the road wind up-hill all the way? Yes, to the very end. Will the day's journey take the whole long day? From morn to night, my friend.
But is there for the night a resting-place? A roof for when the slow dark hours begin: May not the darkness hide it from my face? You cannot miss that inn."
Writing with a beautiful earnestness out of the sadness of her isolation, Christina Rossetti has made poetry almost too grave for song. Hers is the fancy of an abnormally solemn orphan child, distrustful of yet hungering after the laughter of life. She did not influence greatly the character of modern verse, but her individuality has a solid quality that will not brook neglect. And if she did not find her way into the body of the Church, she was united with its soul, an ascetic Keble with the eyes of a wanderer to the ancient places which are forlorn. Strangely different, it is together that the Rossettis belong. He with an etherialized conception of bodily form, colour and rhythm, she with a realistic understanding of the soul, unflinching, striving, are the two sides of the artistic tradition which superseded the pagans. Unfortunately their influence has seldom been felt thus, in unity, and the splendid earnestness of the Italian spirit has been mimicked by a group of muddling aesthetes whose veins, to use Kilmer's vigorous phrase, "drip scented ink." Perhaps their best disciple is that rather unstable Bohemian, Ford Madox Hueffer, pre-Raphaelite in the Rossetti sense while being both more material and less subtly suggestive. An enumeration of others would consume too much space. Let it suffice to mention the names of Katherine Tynan and John Masefield.
On the whole the literary force which came into English letters from a perception and partial expression of the artistic ideals of Christendom emphasized the beauty of the Catholic Spirit and rebelled hotly against the sordid monotony of industrial civilization. Of only one man concerned in it, Lionel Johnson, can it be affirmed that his life was Catholic inwardly and outwardly. Nevertheless, the others in their separate ways bore testimony to the vigour and sanctity of the Church. They were great minds and great hearts, and even in the failure of Ernest Dowson there is a great deal of strength; for it is by eternal hope that men live and by the constancy of their faith in the stars.
BOOK NOTE
See, in a general way, the "Cambridge History of English Literature" and Chesterton's "Victorian Age." The most noteworthy biography of Ruskin is that by Sir E.T. Cook; note also "Victorian Prose Masters," by Brownell, and "Philosophy of Ruskin," by A.D. Chevrillon, of the French Academy. Pater's biographers include A.C. Benson, Wright, and Greenslet. See also, "Pater: a Critical Study," by Edward Thomas; "Egoists," by J.G. Huneker; "Heralds of Revolt," by William Barry; and "The AEsthetic Outlook: Walter Pater," Edinburgh Review, 1907. In connection with Johnson, see "The Irish Literary Renaissance," by Boyd, and "The Poets' Chantry," by Katherine Bregy. L.I. Guiney's essay on Johnson is to be found in The Month, vol. 100. For information concerning the Rossettis, see "Ruskin, Rossetti, Pre-Raphael-itism," by Wm. M. Rossetti, and "Memories and Impressions," by Ford M. Hueffer. The best view of Christina Rossetti is that supplied by Mackenzie Bell; on Dante Gabriel, see the monographs by William Sharp, H.C. Marillier, and A.C. Benson.