In 1850 an astounding thing happened in England. A little group of artists and poets, known as the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, began the publication of a magazine. It was to be given over to “thoughts towards nature in poetry, literature, and art”; and it was called The Germ.

The idea was Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s, who was then just twenty-two years old. Thomas Woolner, of the same age, and Holman Hunt and Millais, both somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty, were dragged willingly into the plan. William Michael Rossetti, aged nineteen, was made editor; James Collinson and Frederick George Stephens were added to the four original P. R. B.’s; John Lucas Tupper, Ford Madox Brown, Walter Howell Deverell, William Cave Thomas, John Hancock, and Coventry Patmore were intimately connected with the project; and Christina, then eighteen, offered her poems for publication therein.

The Germ was published for four months, and then it died. Like all serious things it could find no immediate audience; like all revolutionary things it was called juvenile and regarded with shyness; and like all original and beautiful things it has managed to stay very much alive. For, in 1899, a limited edition of The Germ in facsimile was brought out, and William Michael Rossetti wrote an extensive introduction for it in which he described minutely the whole glorious undertaking. It is these facsimiles that we have been looking through with such awe, and which tell such an interesting story.

Here was a league of “unquiet and ambitious young spirits, bent upon making a fresh start of their own, and a clean sweep of some effete respectabilities.” On the night of December 19, 1849, when the first issue of the magazine was impending, they met in Dante Rossetti’s studio at 72 Newman Street to discuss a change of title. The P. R. B. Journal and Thoughts Towards Nature (the “extra-peculiar” suggestion of Dante, according to his brother) had been discarded, and Mr. Cave Thomas had drawn up a list of sixty-five possibilities, among them The Seed, The Scroll, The Harbinger, First Thoughts, The Sower, The Truth-Seeker, The Acorn, and The Germ. The last was decided upon and the first issue came out about the first of January. Seven hundred copies were printed and about two hundred sold. This wasn’t encouraging, so the second issue was limited to five hundred; but it sold even less well than the first, and the P. R. B.’s were at the end of their resources. Then the printing-firm came to the rescue and undertook the responsibility of two more numbers. The title was changed to Art and Poetry, being Thoughts towards Nature, conducted principally by Artists; but “all efforts proved useless.... People would not buy The Germ, and would scarcely consent to know of its existence. So the magazine breathed its last, and its obsequies were conducted in the strictest privacy.”

It did attract some critical attention, however. The Critic wrote: “We cannot contemplate this young and rising school in art and literature without the most ardent anticipation of something great to grow from it, something new and worthy of our age, and we bid them godspeed upon the path they have adventured.” Others remarked that the poetry in The Germ was all beautiful, “marred by not a few affectations—the genuine metal, but wanting to be purified from its dross”; “much of it of extraordinary merit, and equal to anything that any of our known poets could write, save Tennyson....”

Well—the situation demands a philosopher. We might undertake the rÔle ourselves, except that we’re too near the situation, having just started a magazine with certain high hopes of our own.

On the cover of each issue of The Germ appeared this poem by William Rossetti, the mastery of which, some one said, would require a Browning Society’s united intellects:

Patmore’s The Seasons, Christina Rossetti’s Dream Land, Dante’s My Sister’s Sleep and Hand and Soul, Woolner’s My Beautiful Lady and Of My Lady in Death, Tupper’s The Subject in Art, William Rossetti’s Her First Season, and a long review of Clough’s Bothic of Toper-na-fuosich make up the first number. In the others are The Blessed Damozel, Christina’s An End and A Pause of Thought, Patmore’s Stars and Moon, John Orchard’s Dialogue on Art, and many other things of value, concluding with a review of Browning’s Christmas Eve and Easter Day, in which William Rossetti establishes with elaborate seriousness, through six pages of solemn and awesome sentences, that “Browning’s style is copious and certainly not other than appropriate”; that if you will understand him, you shall.

All this came to our mind the other day when some one accused us of being “juvenile.” What hideous stigma was thereby put upon us? The only grievous thing about juvenility is its unwillingness to be frank; it usually tries to appear very, very old and very, very wise. The Germ was quite frankly young; otherwise it could not have been so full of death poetry, for it is youth’s most natural affectation to steep itself in death. But The Germ might have been even more “juvenile” and so avoided some of the heavy, sumptuous sentences in that Browning review. It would have gained in readableness without any possible sacrifice of beauty or truth. In their poetry the Pre-Raphaelites were as simple and spontaneous as children; in their criticism they were rhetorical. Our sympathy is somehow very strongly with the spontaneity—whatever dark juvenile crimes it may be guilty of—in the eyes of those who merely look but do not see.