This is the only volume of Tupper's poetry that was ever published. As WMR's
“Prefatory Notice” observes, however, Tupper did publish a handful of
things, verse and prose, in The Germ
CHISWICK PRESS:—CHARLES WHITTINGHAM AND CO.
Books and writings about the
“Prĉraphaelite Brother-
hood,” which was established in
the autumn of 1848, are
by this time tolerably numerous. Among them, here and
there, occurs the name of John Lucas Tupper, and some
faint suggestion of who he was and
what he did. The
time seems to have come at last for impressing his name
more
definitely upon the public memory, and for indi-
cating—and indeed, I think,
proving—that he was a
man with a very considerable poetic gift of his own, and
highly deserving of explicit and honourable record.
I will only cite one testimony to John Tupper's claims
as a poet. In the book
which I published in 1895—“
Gabriel Rossetti, his Family Letters, with a Memoir
occurs There was a little
.”
lyric of Tupper's on the Garden of Eden in
ruinous
decay, of which Dante Rossetti thought very highly. He
compared it to
Ebenezer Jones's lyric, ‘When the world
is burning’; and said
that, had it been the writing of
Edgar Poe, it would have enjoyed world-wide
celebrity1
I include this poem in the
present selection, though it
was, I believe, published in a review soon after the date
of Mr. Tupper's death.
1 Vol. i., p. 151.
John Lucas Tupper was born in London in or about
1826. It may perhaps be as well
to say at the outset
that he had no sort of de facto connection with
Martin
Farquhar Tupper, the author of “Proverbial Philosophy,”
although it is said that the two men were “eleventh
cousins.” His
father was a lithographic and general
printer in the city of London, and the business is
still
kept up by two of John's brothers. John Tupper, ex-
hibiting an early bias
towards the arts of design, became a
student at the Royal Academy. He was, I think,
rather
undecided for a while whether he should take to painting
or to sculpture;
ultimately he settled upon the latter. In
the Academy classes he become known to the
young
artists who formed the Prĉraphaelite Brotherhood—
Millais, Holman Hunt, Woolner, Stephens, Collinson,
and Dante Rossetti: Hunt and
Stephens, and after a
time Rossetti, more particularly knew him well. My
own
introduction to him may have taken place early in
1849; by that date, without abandoning
the sculptural
profession, he had shunted himself off into a special line
of work,
being installed as anatomical draughtsman at
Guy's Hospital—an employment for
which he was ex-
ceptionally well qualified. As a young man he exhibited
a few
sculptural works at the Royal Academy, and per-
haps elsewhere—works showing
advanced studentship and
the severest tenets of truthful rendering—but nothing
of
his ever fixed the public attention. The tendency of his
mind was certainly
quite as much scientific as artistic;
and, though I conceive him to have been fully
capable of
producing sound works of art, had circumstances been
favourable, he did
in fact pass through life without realiz-
ing anything considerable in sculpture, if we
except the
Museum—a work of the most conscientious order in
realism in
intention and unsparing precision of detail.
Quitting Guy's Hospital in 1863, Mr. Tupper received,
in March 1865, the
appointment of Master of the classes
for geometrical or scientific drawing at Rugby
School;
where he was distinguished for solid and ingenious learn-
ing, zealous
devotion to his work, and successful train-
ing of his pupils. He married in 1871 (the
last day of
the year), and has left a widow and two children. At
Rugby he died on
September 29th 1879. His health
had for some years been precarious, more especially after
a very dangerous illness of a spasmodic or convulsive
kind which attacked him in
Florence in 1869, when I
was his travelling-companion.
A man of stricter principle than John Tupper, more
bent upon doing right, more
honourable in act, more
tenacious of the truth as he discerned it, has not been
known to me. He was not without ambition, founded
upon a well-justified, but always very
modest, consious-
ness of abilities—scientific, artistic, speculative,
poetical;
and yet was content with his rather secluded and incon-
spicious lot in
life. He was a steadfast and affectionate
friend, as no one knows better than myself.
Even before I knew him in 1849, Tupper had written
a good deal of verse. The
Prĉraphaelite magazine,
firm, contains the following
contributions of his: in verse,
humorous sketches,
and
Perhaps one of the most marked symptoms of the b
sions.
A scene or an object in nature, a human person-
ality or passion, is discerned, and
discerned with peculiar
vividness; but the matter does not remain there—the
perception of the eye and mind becomes an impression on
the whole individuality of
the poet, the nutriment of his
emotion, and of his fancy or imagination, which swathe
it like a lambent flame. That which entered into him as
a perception issues forth as
a transmuted entity—real, and
also visionary. I apprehend that this poetical
quality is
strongly, and even rather abnormally, marked in the verse
of John Tupper.
There is also, in various instances, a
true lyrical impetus, and a certain cosmic feeling,
to
which his peculiar turn for science (contemplated rather
in the abstract than
merely physically) contributed. A
repugnance to some aspects of modernism, whether in
the domain of physics or of mind, will be observed here
and there. A few of the
poems now collected are
humorous (these are grouped together in the latter half
of
the volume): they have, I think, a genuine mingling
of oddity and sprightliness, or what
we call quaintness.
The general tone and tenor of Tupper's poetry is summed
up not
inaptly in his sonnet “To Annie” (his wife),
where he speaks of
himself as singing of
John Tupper did not during his lifetime publish any
volume of verse; and it
appears to me that, after the
date of
poetic form, got into print, even in magazines etc. He
copied out—no light task. Her copies form the manu-
scripts which have come
into my hands. Some of the
pieces, besides being confusedly jotted down by himself,
had obviously not received his final revision; and I have
thought it not only a right but
a duty to rectify here and
there some stumble of metre or of diction, or some lapse
of rhyme. The reader may rely upon it that what I have
thus done is really a trifle, and
not such as to impair in
any appreciable degree the authenticity of the work. In
fact, while I should have regarded it as unkind to the
memory of my old friend to omit
doing what I have
done, I should have deemed it impertinence to go beyond
this narrow
limit.
Mr. Tupper was the author of two published books:
in each instance he wrote under
the fancy name of
“Outis.” These are
Stowe”
or the Void in Modern
Education”
at the time some fair amount of press notice. There are
several MS. poems besides those which I have as yet
examined; also a prose story and
various papers on scien-
tific and other subjects. Possibly some of these may yet
see
the light of publication.
In the present volume I have added a few notes, but
only where there were some
allusions etc. which seemed
not likely to explain themselves. The dates appended to
the poems are mostly correct, but sometimes only approxi-
mate.
Page 21. A Vision of Linnĉus.
This relates to Tupper's
statue of Linnĉus, executed for the Oxford University
Museum
(see the Prefatory Note, p. ix). Linnĉus is here
represented
as quite a young man, clad in skins suited for a traveller in
semi-arctic regions:
he is abstractedly contemplating a flower
which he has plucked as a specimen.
Page 66. A Quiet Evening. This, it will be
perceived, is
a piece of friendly “chaff,” relating to an evening which
three
members of the Prĉraphaelite Brotherhood—Stephens, my
brother, and
myself—spent at the family residence of the
Tuppers in South Lambeth. The date must
have been in
1850. “John” is Tupper himself;
“George” and “Aleck”
his brothers. The
“rhyme of Hell and Heaven,” which
Gabriel read, must clearly be his
ballad “
Page 74. A Grotesque. I need scarcely say
that this is
absolute intentional nonsense. One may surmise that it was
written after Tupper
had read some pieces of similar aim by
Edward Lear or by Lewis Carroll.
Page 77. Browning's
“Sordello.” This again is “chaff.”
Tupper
was always an extreme—indeed a quite passionate—
admirer of Browning, and
he revelled in “Sordello,” though it
may readily be believed that he
found the poem difficult in
parts.
Page 79. The Debit Side. This sonnet is a
burlesque of a
cover of each number of “The Germ.” “The
Debit Side”
Tupper's nominee, took an active part at the time, but I am
not at all sure.
Page 81. To my Friend Holman Hunt. Tupper
inscribed
this sonnet on the copy of “The Germ” belonging to Mr.
Hunt.
“The Germ” was published in 1850, and I give that
date to the sonnet;
but possibly its true date is later on.
Page 82. To Frederic Stephens. The date of
this sonnet
may be towards 1855, when the leading members of the P.R.B.
—I need only
specify Millais and Hunt—had triumphed over
all opposition; whereas Stephens, who
had been an art student
along with them, and otherwise a zealous co-operator, had
practically
relinquished the actual exercise of the painting
profession.
CHISWICK PRESS:—CHARLES WHITTINGHAM AND CO.