ss
of poppies in autumn. It is probable enough that of the circumstances
attending the unexampled early success of this first volume only
the remarkable fact is still remembered that, from a bookseller's
standpoint, it ran a neck-and-neck race with Disraeli's _Lothair_ at
a time when political romance was found universally appetising, and
poetry, as of old, a drug. But it will not be forgotten that certain
subsidiary circumstances were thought to have contributed to the former
success. Of these the most material was the reputation Rossetti had
already achieved as a painter by methods which awakened curiosity
as much as they aroused enthusiasm. The public mind became sensibly
affected by the idea that the poems of the new poet were not to be
regarded as the emanations of a single individual, but as the result of
a movement in which Rossetti had played one of the most prominent parts.
Mr. F. Hueffer, in prefacing the Tauchnitz edition of the poems with
a pleasant memoir, has comprehensively denominated that movement
the _renaissance of mediaeval feeling_, but at the outset it
acquired popularly, for good or ill, the more rememberable name of
pre-Raphaelitism. What the shibboleth was of the originators of the
school that grew out of it concerned men but little to ascertain; and
this was a condition of indifference as to the logic of the movement
which was occasioned partly by the known fact that the most popular of
its leaders, Mr. Millais, had long been shifting ground. It was
enough that the new sect had comprised dissenters from the creed once
established, that the catholic spirit of art which lived with the
lives of Elmore, Goodall, and Stone was long dead, and that none of the
coteries for love of which the old faith, exemplified in the works of
men such as these, had been put aside, possessed such an appeal for
the imagination as this, now that twenty years of fairly consistent
endeavour had cleared away the cloud of obloquy that gathered about it
when it began. And so it came to be thought that the poems of Rossetti
were to exhibit a new phase of this movement, involving kindred issues,
and opening up afresh in the poetic domain the controversies which had
been waged and won in the pictorial. Much to this purpose was said at
the time to account for the success of a book whose popular qualities
were I manifestly inconsiderable; and much to similar purpose
will doubtless long be said by those who affect to believe that