Pre-Raphaelite Emblematics in the Germ

Chapter 2 “Thoughts towards Nature”: Pre-Raphaelite Emblematics in The Germ Emblematic structures, themes, and references pervade the Pre-Raphaelites’ short-lived inaugural magazine, The Germ, but the particular uses contributors made of these measures reveal a range of attitudes towards the groundedness and hence the reliability of signs. The fact that the emblem embodies both a tacit recognition of the failure of language and an attempt to redeem it makes it especially interesting as a site on which a variety of approaches to poetic representation may be seen to play out: in all its diverse forms, the emblem offers a paradigm for the practices of signification and interpretation that proposes to stabilize language in the face of representational and even cosmological doubt. By looking closely at selected criticism and poems from The Germ, this chapter will argue that reading Pre-Raphaelite literature with an awareness of its emblematic structures shows us how its poetics and verbal-visual aesthet- ics respond to ontological and representational uncertainty. As the previous chapter established, conceived on the one hand as a didactic tool in which natural objects stand in for rhetorical or spiritual truths, and on the other as a hybrid verbal-visual language that promises to supply the communicative deficiencies of both image and text, emblems are a self-conscious attempt to establish a system of signs with inherent, necessary, and stable meanings. For the Pre-Raphaelites at this early stage, the emblem is a representational tool that unites the promise of “truth to nature” – that Ruskinian ideal of an unme- diated presentation of the world – with a self-aware and sophisticated metapo- etics that reflects on the very nature of these encoding and decoding processes themselves. The Germ’s debt to emblematics is clearly established in the de- gree to which the etching-poem pair in the second issue, “The Child Jesus: A Record Typical of the Five Sorrowful Mysteries” mobilizes normative emblematic strategies and cues in order to support its typological framework. Looking closely at poems and stories by five Germ contributors, it becomes clear that unillustrated works in the magazine are also marked by a common emblematic habit of mind at work to different ends: where imagery in poems by Walter Howell Deverell, Robert Calder Campbell and Christina Rossetti purports to discover correspondences between visible signs and invisible truths, pieces by Thomas Woolner and Dante Gabriel Rossetti invoke emblems to impose stabil- ity on signs, thereby manufacturing confidence in the steady relationship of © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, �� | doi:10.1163/9789004407640_003 <UN> Pre-Raphaelite Emblematics in The Germ 49 word to thing. Yet while Woolner’s poem expresses nearly absolute ontological doubt, Dante Gabriel’s works disclose an ambivalence towards questions of faith and a yearning for the secure meaning in signs such faith would provide. As a result, Dante Gabriel’s early attempts to establish a system of belief around the transcendence of art as an alternative to Christian faith are carried out in part through the re-appropriation of Cupid and Anima figures, erotic emblem motifs Christian emblem literature had sought to convert. Thus, while emblematic discourse and habits of mind are in evidence throughout The Germ, specific strategies employed by individual contributors reflect differing degrees of faith in the connection between signs and meaning, but a common approach to the problem of representation. This approach, moreover, has its roots in the older hermeneutic tradition of emblematics, one whose ultimate purpose is to provide instruction in the practice of interpretation itself. 1 Pre-Raphaelite Beginnings The original Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, made up of seven members (paint- ers William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Fred- eric George Stephens, and James Collinson, sculptor Thomas Woolner, and fledgling art critic William Michael Rossetti) attracted a wider circle that included, among others, Coventry Patmore, Walter Howell Deverell, Robert Calder Campbell, and Christina Rossetti, all of whom contributed to The Germ. Established amid the turbulence of 1848, the group shared a sense that the decadence of the existing art establishment (i.e., the Royal Academy) was pol- luting an already spiritually bankrupt English culture. They were inspired by John Ruskin, who in 1851 and 1854 would champion the Brotherhood against their critics in letters to The Times (articulating, as Isobel Armstrong has noted, “a more coherent account of Pre-Raphaelite principles than they could themselves” [233]). The prb’s main products were a handful of paintings, conceived in a style Herbert Sussman has aptly labeled “symbolic-realist” (Fact into Fig- ure xvi) and exhibited to a “storm of abuse” (Hares-Stryker 22), and four is- sues of The Germ, a magazine intended to showcase their aesthetic principles. Although the association lacked coherence from the start and dissolved after barely two years, existing as an active but “thoroughly informal association” for all of 1849 and the first half of 1850 (W.M. Rossetti, Some Reminiscences 1: 71), its influence reaches well beyond this brief flourishing: poets Gerard Manley Hopkins and Algernon Charles Swinburne, illustrator Arthur Hughes, and painter John William Waterhouse, among others, are considered part of the broader Pre-Raphaelite movement. <UN>.

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