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Readers wishing to refer to this essay should use the original place of publication: Bentley, D.M.R. “A Possible Pictorial Inspiration for Christina Rossetti’s ‘The Prince’s Progress.’” Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies NS 5 (Fall, 1996): 35-44.
A POSSIBLE PICTORIAL INSPIRATION FOR CHRISTINA ROSSETTI’S “THE PRINCE’S PROGRESS”
D.M.R. BENTLEY
It is well known that Christina Rossetti’s “The Prince’s Progress” had its origin in the dirge beginning “Too late for love, too late for joy” that she wrote on 11 October 1861 and, at the suggestion of her brother Dante Gabriel, extended into a narrative poem in January 1865 (Complete Poems, 1:108, 266). It does not appear to have been noticed, however, that “Too late for love, too late for joy” may itself have had its origin, at least in part, in Too Late, a painting by the minor Pre-Raphaelite artist William Lindsay Windus (1822-1877)1 that was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1859. Both as a poem in its own right (it was published as such in Macmillan’s Magazine in May 1863) and as the concluding portion of “The Prince’s Progress,” “Too late for love, too late for joy” is an indictment of deleterious male tardiness: the Prince’s loitering en route to the princess—in the narrative he is distracted on his journey first by a “wave-haired milkmaid,” then by an ancient necromancer, and finally by a bevy of attentive women— results in his arrive too late to claim her as his bride. “‘Ten years ago, five years ago, / One year ago, / Even then you had arrived in time,’” explain the princess’s attendants to whom the dirge is given in the narrative; “Then you would have known her living face / Which now you cannot know …’”
“You should have wept her yesterday, Waiting upon her bed But wherefore should you weep today That she is dead?” (Complete Poems, 109-10)
The similarities between this scenario and Windus’s painting are striking and suggestive. As described by Ford Madox Brown many years later, Too Late is an “intensely pathetic … represent[ation] [of] a poor girl in the last stage of [51] consumption, whose lover has gone away and returned at last, led by a little girl when it was ‘too late’. The expression of the dying face is quite sufficient—no other explanation is needed” (qtd. in Pre-Raphaelites, 173, and Dream of the Past, 243-44). Contributing to the pathos of the subject is the fact that the “poor girl,” whose pale face and sunken eyes testify to her fatal illness, is being embraced and comforted by a female friend or relative while her lover turns away and covers his face
A POSSIBLE PICTORIAL INSPIRATION FOR “THE PRINCE’S PROGRESS” with anguish. Accompanying the painting in the catalogue of the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1859 was a quotation from Tennyson’s “Come not, when I am dead”:
If it were thine error or thy crime I care no longer, being all unblest: Wed whom thou wilt, but I am sick of Time, And I desire to rest. (Poems, 700)
If Windus’s Too Late does indeed lie in the background of “The Prince’s Progress,” then so presumably, does Tennyson’s poem, for Rossetti was unlikely to have seen the painting without also reading the exhibition catalogue. Although she does not mention Too Late in her letters, she was in London when both the sketch and the painting were exhibited and in close contact with her brother and his circle at that time. Jan Marsh notes that in the early 1860s the Portfolio Society of which Christina may at that time have been a member suggested “Too Late” as one of its themes for “verbal and visual treatment” (274-75). Even if Christina’s poem was a response to this suggestion, this need not preclude Windus’s painting as a source of inspiration, particularly if it made the sort of impression on her that Sidney Colvin would later categorize as unforgettable.2 As an interpretive tool, the identification of Too Late as a possible presence in “Too late for love, too late for joy” has only modest reach, but it does raise the intriguing possibility that tuberculosis provides one of several frameworks in which to view the suffering and death of Rossetti’s Princess, a figure who “‘watches in one white room, / And is patient,’” whose “‘white brows often ached / Beneath her crown,’” and for whom the tardy Prince brings too late from the necromancer “a phial” that he believes to contain the “Elixer of Life” (Complete Poems, 95, 109, 102, 100). If nothing else, the resonances between Too Late and “The Prince’s Progress” serve as a reminder that in describing the poem’s Princess as “Wasting on her bed” Rossetti used a word that throughout the nineteenth century was all but synonymous with “consumption” (OED, 4). [52]
NOTES
My thanks to Mary Arseneau for her helpful suggestions and to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for its support.
1 I n his still useful entry on Windus in the DNB, Frank William Gibson describes Too Late as the painting by which he was “best known” (694). A Liverpool trained and based painter who came under the influence of the Pre-Raphaelites in 1850 when he saw John Everett Millais’ Christ in the Carpenter’s Shop (Christ in the House of His Parents) at the Royal Academy Exhibition that year, Windus excited the admiration of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and, through him, John Ruskin with the painting that he exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1856. “The finest thing of all in the [R.A. Exhibition of 1856],” Rossetti told William Allingham in May of that year, “is a picture by one Windus (of Liverpool), from the old ballad of Burd Helen, another version of Childe Waters” (Letters 1:301). The sketch for Too Late that is now owned by Dr. Dennis T. Lanigan of Saskatoon, Canada, was exhibited in 1857-58 at the Hogarth Club (of which Dante Gabriel was an officer and to which Windus belonged), and may have been seen there by Christina. The painting itself, which is now in the Tate Gallery, was very harshly treated by Ruskin in his Academy Notes (see Works, 14:233-34, 239) to the Exhibition of 1859, and perhaps in consequence (and as a result of personal tragedy: his A POSSIBLE PICTORIAL INSPIRATION FOR “THE PRINCE’S PROGRESS” wife of four years died in 1862), Windus’s career as a painter was sadly curtailed. For further discussion of Too Late, see the entries in Ironside (27), The Pre-Raphaelites (173), and Dream of the Past (242-45). 2 A lthough the quotation from Tennyson in the exhibition catalogue gives a strong intimation of the relationship between the principal figure in the poem, other aspects of its implied narrative are by no means as clear as has been implied by such commentators as Colvin. “‘Too Late’ was enough to give one a sinking of the heart, and to send one out of the Academy with introverted eyes and a haunting reminiscence for days or years,” wrote Colvin in the 1870 volume of the Portfolio; “it showed a young lady who, having been deserted by her affianced lover, has sunk into a fatal decline, in which hopeless condition the lover, now at last ‘too late’ remorseful, finds her, and hides his face from the unutterable sight. The speechless, pathetic, fading, death-stamped beauty of the girl startled like a timid and stricken fawn at her slayer’s apparition, and the equally speechless agony of the man, who weeps hot stormy tears into the hands which hide his features and confess his shame, are not in the category of forgettable things” (qtd. in A Dream of the Past, 243).
WORKS CITED
A Dream of the Past. Catalogue of the Exhibition of Pre-Raphaelite and Aesthetic Movement Paintings, Watercolours and Drawings from the Lanigan Collection at the University of Toronto Art Centre, April 8 - September 22, 2000. Toronto: U of Toronto Art Centre, 2000. Ironside, Robin. Pre-Raphaelite Painters. London: Phaidon, 1948. Marsh, Jan. Christina Rossetti: A Literary Biography, London: Jonathan Cape, 1994. The Pre-Raphaelites. Catalogue of the Exhibition at the Tate Gallery, March 7-May 28, 1984. London: Tate Gallery/Penguin Books, 1984. Rossetti, Christina. Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti: A Variorum Edition. Ed. R.W. Crump. 3 vols. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1979-91. Rossetti, Dante Gabriel. Letters. Ed. Oswald Doughty and J.R. Wahl. 4 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1965-67. Ruskin, John. Works. Ed. E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn. 39 vols. London: George Allen, 1903-12. Tennyson, Alfred, Lord. Poems. Ed. Christopher Ricks. Annotated English Poets. London: Longman, 1969. [53]