Shrivelling in the Spring of 1850, The Germ showed no further sign of sprouting for many years, though I suppose it may have been known to the promoters of The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, produced in 1856, and may have furnished some incitement towards that enterpriseagain an unsuccessful one commercially. Gradually some people began to take a little interest in the knowledge that such a publication had existed, and to inquire after stray copies here and there. This may perhaps have commenced before 1870, or at any rate shortly afterwards, as in that year the Poems of Dante Rossetti were brought out, exciting a great amount of attention and admiration, and curiosity attached to anything that he might have published before. One heard of such prices as ten shillings for a set of the The Germ, then £2, £10, £30, etc., and in 1899 a copy handsomely bound by Cobden-Saunderson was sold in America for about £104. Will that high-water mark ever be exceeded? For the sake of common-sense, let us hope not.
I will now go through the articles in The Germ one by one. Wherever any of them may seem to invite a few words of explanation I offer such to the reader; and I give the names of the authors, when not named in the magazine itself. Those articles which do not call for any particular comment receive none here.
On the wrapper of each number is to be found a sonnet, printed in a rather aggressively Gothic type, beginning, When whoso merely hath a little thought. This sonnet is my performance; it had been suggested that one or other of the proprietors of the magazine should write a sonnet to express the spirit in which the publication was undertaken. I wrote the one here in question, which met with general acceptance; and I do not remember that any one else competed. This sonnet may not be a good one, but I do not see why it should be considered unintelligible. Mr. Bell Scott, in his Autobiographical Notes, expressed the opinion that to master the production would almost need a Browning Society's united intellects. And he then gave his interpretation, differing not essentially from my own. What I meant is this: A writer ought to think out his subject honestly and personally, not imitatively, and ought to express it with directness and precision; if he does this, we should respect his performance as truthful, even though it may not be important. This indicated, for writers, much the same principle which the P.R.B. professed for painters,individual genuineness in the thought, reproductive genuineness in the presentment.
By Thomas Woolner: My Beautiful Lady, and Of My Lady in Death. These compositions were, I think, nearly the first attempts which Mr. Woolner made in verse; any earlier endeavours must have been few and slight. The author's long poem My Beautiful Lady, published in 1863, started from these beginnings. Coventry Patmore, on hearing the poems in September 1849, was considerably impressed by them: the only defect he found (as notified in a letter from Dante Rossetti) being that they were a trifle too much in earnest in the passionate parts, and too sculpturesque generally. He means by this that each stanza stands too much alone, and has its own ideas too much to itself.
By Ford Madox Brown: The Love of Beauty: Sonnet.
By John L. Tupper: The Subject in Art. Two papers, which do not complete the important thesis here undertaken. Mr. Tupper was, for an artist, a man of unusually scientific mind; yet he was not, I think, distinguished by that power of orderly and progressive exposition which befits an argumentation. These papers exhibit a good deal of thought, and state several truths which, even if partial truths, are not the less deserving of attention; but the dissertation does not produce a very clear impression, inasmuch as there is too great a readiness to plunge, in medias res, checked by too great a tendency to harking back, and re-stating some conclusion in modified terms and with insecure corollaries. Two points which Mr. Tupper chiefly insists upon are: (1) that the subject in a work of art affects the beholder in the same sort of way as the same subject, occurring as a fact or aspect of Nature, affects him; and thus whatever in Nature excites the mental and moral emotion of man is a right subject for fine art; and (2), that subjects of our own day should not be discarded in favour of those of a past time. These principles, along with others bearing in the same direction, underlie the propositions lately advanced by Count Leo Tolstoy in his most interesting and valuable (though I think one-sided) book entitled What is Art?and the like may be said of the principles announced in the Hand and Soul of Dante Rossetti, and in the Dialogue on Art by John Orchard, through the mouths of two of the speakers, Christian and Sophon. I have once or twice seen these papers by Mr. Tupper commented upon to the effect that he wholly ignores the question of art-merit in a work of art, the question whether it is good or bad in form, colour, etc. But this is a mistake, for in fact he allows that this is a relevant consideration, but declines to bring it within his own lines of discussion. There is also a curious passage which has been remarked upon as next door to absurd; that where, in treating of various forms of still life as inferior subjects for art, he says that the dead pheasant in a picture will always be as food, while the same at the poulterer's will be but a dead pheasant. I do not perceive that this is really absurd. At the poulterer's (and Mr. Tupper has proceeded to say as much in his article) all the items are in fact food, and therefore the spectator attends to the differences between them; one being a pheasant, one a fowl, one a rabbit, etc. But, in a varied collection of pictures, most of the works representing some subject quite unconnected with food; and, if you see among them one, such as a dead pheasant, representing an article of food, that is the point which primarily occurs to your mind as distinguishing this particular picture from the others. The views expressed by Mr. Tupper in these two papers should be regarded as his own, and not by any means necessarily those upheld by the Præraphaelite Brotherhood. The members of this body must however have agreed with several of his utterances, and sympathized with others, apart from strict agreement.
By Patmore: The Seasons. This choice little poem was volunteered to The Germ in September, after the author had read our prospectus, which impressed him favourably. He withheld his name, much to our disappointment, having resolved to do so in all instances where something of his might be published pending the issue of a new volume.
By Christina Rossetti: Dream Land. Though my sister was only just nineteen when this remarkable lyric was printed, she had already made some slight appearance in published type (not to speak of the privately printed Verses of 1847), as two small poems of hers had been inserted in The Athenæum in October 1848. Dream Land was written in April 1849, before The Germ was thought of; and it may be as well to say that all my sister's contributions to this magazine were produced without any reference to publication in that or in any particular form.
By Dante G. Rossetti: My Sister's Sleep. This purports to be No. 1 of Songs of One Household. I do not much think that Dante Rossetti ever wrote any other poem which would have been proper to such a series. My Sister's Sleep was composed very soon after he emerged from a merely juvenile stage of work. I believe that it dates before The Blessed Damozel, and therefore before May 1847. It is not founded upon any actual event affecting the Rossetti family, nor any family of our acquaintance. As I have said in my Memoir of my brother (1895), the poem was shown, perhaps early in 1848, by Major Calder Campbell to the editress of the Belle Assemblée, who heartily admired it, but, for one reason or another, did not publish it. This composition is somewhat noticeable on more grounds than one; not least as being in a metre which was not much in use until it became famous in Tennyson's In Memoriam, published in 1850, and of course totally unknown to Rossetti when he wrote My Sister's Sleep. In later years my brother viewed this early work with some distaste, and he only reluctantly reprinted it in his Poems, 1870. He then wholly omitted the four stanzas 7, 8, 12, 13, beginning: Silence was speaking, I said, full knowledge, She stood a moment, Almost unwittingly; and he made some other verbal alterations.2 It will be observed that this poem was written long before the Præraphaelite movement began. None the less it shows in an eminent degree one of the influences which guided that movement: the intimate intertexture of a spiritual sense with a material form; small actualities made vocal of lofty meanings.