Professor Borges - A Course on English Literature

for his paintings, the figures are awkward, the colors seem to me too coarse and vivid. Moreover, they are supposed to be illustrations, illustrations sometimes of his own poems. It is an odd labor to take a poem that is decidedly visual—as are many of Rossetti’s, such as “The Blessed Damozel”—and compare it to its felicitous version in an oil painting. In the British Museum, Rossetti became somewhat familiar (at the time, reproductions as we have now did not exist) with the work of painters prior toRaphael. And he reached the conclusion—scandalous at the time and still not accepted by all—that Raphael represented not the apogee of painting as everybody then affirmed, but rather the beginning of the decline of that art. He believed that the Italian and Flemish artists before Rafael were superior to him. And along with a group of friends, William Holman Hunt,Burne-Jones, who were then joined by some famous poets,William Morris and Swinburne first of all, founded a society called the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. 6 But they were less interested in imitating the pre-Raphaelites than painting with the honesty, simplicity, and deep emotion that they saw in those men, “the early men” at the beginning, we can say. And they founded a magazine with the unfortunate title
The Germ
to spread their ideas, and that of the new painting and their poetry. I have said that aesthetic movements are rare in England. I don’t mean they don’t exist. What I mean to say is that poets and painters do not, as in France, tend to form coteries and publish manifestos. This seems to be in keeping with English individualism, and also a certain modesty, a certain bashfulness. I remember the case ofThackeray, whom some people from a magazine went to see in order to write an article about him. He was famous as a novelist, Dickens’s rival, and in answer he said, “I am a private gentleman,” and did not allow them to write about him or portray him. He thought that the work of the writer should be public, but his life should not be.
    Now, as far as poetry is concerned, the theories of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood did not differ much from those ofWordsworth, though their application, as often happens in these circumstances, was totally different, for there is no similarity at all between a poem by Wordsworth and a poem by Swinburne, Rossetti, or Morris. Moreover, Rossetti began, like Coleridge, using a deliberate and artificial medieval language, like the subjects of his paintings. In this course we have not had time to talk about the cycle of legends of Celtic origin that arose in England and were then taken to Brittany by the British who fled from the Saxon and Anglo invasions. You know these legends, they are the nucleus of Quixote’s library: the stories ofKing Arthur, of the Round Table, the guilty love between the queen and Lancelot, the search for the Holy Grail, etcetera. 7 And these subjects, which are later written about in England in a book called
LeMorte d’Arthur,
were at first the pre-Raphaelists’ favorite subjects, though many also painted contemporary subjects (several of these paintings, to their viewers’ shock, were of workers, railways, a newspaper tossed on the ground). 8 All of this was new at the time. The earlier belief, that poetry should seek noble subjects, was applied to painting. And what was noble, of course, was what had the patina, the prestige, of the past.
    But let us now return to Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s biography. Dante Rossetti has been called—after the title of a poem by Browning—“the Italian in England.” It is curious that he never wanted to visit Italy. Perhaps he felt that such a visit was unnecessary, since Italy was in his reading and ran in his veins. The fact is that Rossetti did undertake a “trip to the continent,” as they say in English, but he did not go beyond France and the Low Countries. He never went to Italy, though in Italy they would not have been able to tell that he was English. And since he was born in London, he liked to take on—this seems typical of men of letters—the dialect of the city, cockney. This would be as if he had been born in Buenos Aires and felt obliged to speak in
lunfardo
. 9 Rossetti was a man of strong passions, with a violent nature, as was Browning. By the way, Browning never liked Rosssetti’s poems; he thought they were, as he said, “artificially perfumed.” That is, that in addition to the natural passion arising from a