Page:Four Victorian poets; a study of Clough (IA fourvictorianpoe00broorich).pdf/162

 utterly gone out of it. This was the state of things even in 1847 when Rossetti began to write poetry, much more in 1853 when his first poems were finished, still more in the sixties of the last century.

It was a state of things which the artist nature rebelled against, as, not in identical but in similar circumstances, Keats had rebelled. A whole tribe of young men, to whom Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelite movement and afterwards Morris, Burne-Jones, and others, gave expression, were weary to death of all the turmoil round subjects which (as they were presented to them at the moment) did not interest them at all, much less excite or impel them. All that Arnold. wrote about with so much intensity, all the waters of thought in which he struggled, were as little to them as all the ideas which Byron and Shelley wrote of were to Keats. They broke away from them, like Keats, into another world—a new world of beauty and art.

The theological contests were outside of their theology which was concerned, when it existed, and for a time it did exist, not with doctrine and its battles, but with the inner mystic relation between the personal soul and the divine, between the saints, angels, and spirits of the universe and their own spirit here on earth. They were, in their early career, and especially Rossetti, mystics by nature and grace. Doubts did not trouble them at all. They either believed or disbelieved. Historical criticism and science bored them to extinction. They cried: "Away with these