Synopses & Reviews
GRAHAM HOUGH The Last Romantics PREFACE THE best way to explain the purpose of this book is to trace it backwards. During the war, most of which I spent as a prisoner of the Japanese, I was fortunate enough to have with me a copy of Yeatss poems and in the intervals of more pressing activities I read and thought about them a good deal. Continuing to ruminate on these matters, in pleasanter circum stances later on, I became interested in the genesis of Yeats s ideas from those of the small poetic circle with whom he associated in the nineties. They in turn seemed to owe almost everything to. Pater and the pre-Raphaelites, and from them I was inevitably led back to Ruskin. At this point I came to a stop. The new ideas about the arts and their relations to reli gion and the social order all seemed to originate somewhere in the dense jungle of Ruskins works. So I formed the inten tion, of which this book is the result, of tracing this movement of thought and feeling, and of trying to show its relevance to our own day. Occasional digressions occur into more general critical questions for I believe it is time we thought again about a good deal of nineteenth-century writing, and that in doing so we shall have to modify some of the critical canons of the last thirty years. I have necessarily involved myself in painting and the visual arts, which are not my proper business if what I have to say about them is inadequate, it may serve a limited purpose to indicate some of the connections that have been made in the last hundred years between different kinds of imaginative experience. To this end I have also had to say a little, again quite inadequate, about the influence of French literature but todeal with this topic at all fully would require a separate book. In matters of art-history I am conscious of a great debt to Mr. R. H. Wilenskis John Ruskin, Sir Kenneth Clarks Gothic vii PREFACE Revival, Mr. Michael Trappes-Lomaxs Pugin, and Mr. James Layers Whistler. Detailed obligations, to these and other writers, are recorded in the notes. I am indebted to Mrs. Yeats and to Macmillan and Co. Ltd., the publishers of W. B. Yeats Collected Poems and other works, for permitting me to quote freely from Yeats work. Part of Chapter I, part of Chapter IV, and the whole of Chapter VI have appeared in the Cambridge Journal, and my thanks are due to the editors for permission to reprint. I should also like to thank my wife for all her help in typing and pre paring the book for the press. G. H. University of Malaya Singapore Vlll CONTENTS PAGE PREFACE vii INTRODUCTION xi CHAPTER I. RUSKIN 1 1. THE EDUCATION OF THE SENSES 1 ii. ART AND THE MORAL LIFE 13 lii. ART AND RELIGION 23 iv. ART AND THE SOCIAL ORDER. THE NATURE OF GOTHIC 32 II. ROSSETTI AND THE P. R. B. 40 1. THE AESTHETIC OF PRE-RAPHAELITISM 40 ii. ROSSETTls POETRY...
Synopsis
Brilliantly written biographies of the great romantics of Europe from Ruskin to Yeats.