CHAPTER XXXIII.

DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI

[Born in London, May 12th, 1828. First volume of Poems appeared 1870, and second volume, 1880. Died at Birchington, April 9th, 1882.]

WITH

ITH Tennyson and Browning in the long line of great modern poets there are other names which cannot escape mention, and foremost is Dante Gabriel Rossetti. In point of quantity Rossetti has added comparatively little to the store of modern poetry; his chief praise is that what he has given us is distinguished by high and sustained artistic quality. It may also be said that his influence on literature has been out of all proportion greater than his achievement. Years before he had himself published a single volume, William Morris had dedicated a book to him, and both Morris and Swinburne were accustomed to regard him as their master. And with Rossetti also the artist was inalienably associated with the poet. More than any other modern he has brought the art of painting and poetry-both arts of expression-into harmony. His poems were often suggested by his pictures; his pictures were an expression of the same ideas which dominated his poetry. Both as artist and poet his position is unique, and it is a matter of somewhat complex criticism to discern rightly the true bearings of his work, and the exact degree of his influence.

The environment of Rossetti's life explains to some extent this position. He was born in an artistic atmosphere. The whole Rossetti family were singularly gifted, and probably no house in England possessed such an atmosphere of artistic culture as that in which Rossetti was reared. For every power of imagination or fancy which Rossetti possessed there was the genial sunshine of a fostering sympathy. Not unnaturally the dream of the young Rossetti was to be an artist, and it was as an artist he began his life. But he was very soon to develop original ideas and methods in art. He observed that two things seemed to have utterly departed from English art, viz., the temper of religious wonder, and the power of perfect fidelity and reverence in following nature. In the earlier painters both these great qualities were supreme.. Rossetti determined to reproduce them. His ideas found good soil in the enthusiasm of Millais and Holman Hunt, both of whom at this time were on the threshold of their artistic careers. The first outcome of this enthusiasm was the formation of what was known as the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and the picture of each artist bore the magic letters P.R.B. The object of this brotherhood cannot be better stated than in the words which Rossetti used in starting the Germ, which was a small magazine devoted to the exposition of the new creed: "The endeavour held in view throughout the writings on art," he said, "will be to encourage and enforce an entire adherence to the simplicity of Nature."

Himself an Italian, with the southern sensuousness of temperament, intensity of passion, and love of art, when Rossetti began to write poetry these qualities of nature at once manifested themselves. To the colder English taste there is a warmth in the poetry of

Rossetti which is not always pleasant, and which to the fastidious might even be offensive. English poetry presents no more curious study than Rossetti's treatment of woman. He approaches her with consistent chivalry, with an almost religious reverence, and yet with a frank and sensuous admiration of her mere physical charms which would have been impossible. to a correcter taste and more masculine mind. It is difficult to express the exact feeling that this peculiar tendency of Rossetti's poetry excites in us. The older poets, Shakespeare pre-eminently, did not scruple to touch the same difficult theme with breadth and daring. But what we always mark in Shakespeare is that peculiar justness of vision which perceives all things in their natural apportionments and adjustments; that divine innocence which can gaze without shame on things which, to a prurient mind, would suggest nothing but impulses of impurity. Had Rossetti's been a more masculine mind, he would have been saved from certain errors of taste which unquestionably disfigure his poetry. Just as the healthy appetite rejects luscious and over-ripe fruit, and prefers a sharper flavour, so the healthy mind is soon surfeited with the overripe descriptions of female charms in which Rossetti's sonnets abound. We turn away when Rossetti lifts the nuptial curtain; we grow tired of "emulous ardours," "abandoned hair," and "flagging pulses." We feel that it is bad art, if nothing else; for true art is accurate art, which does not exaggerate details at the expense of general truth, and this perpetual recurrence of the mind to one theme, and that a morally enervating theme, is an evidence of a lack of intellectual poise, of an effeminating defect of character; and it is in this moral effeminacy that Rossetti's great

defect lies. One cannot speak of one who treats woman with chivalrous and almost pious reverence as immoral; but it must be admitted that Rossetti permits himself a licence of expression which a more robust nature would have rejected. His world is dominated by the "eternal feminine." He sings of woman, not of man; the praise of beauty, not the praise of courage. His sweetness is a cloying sweetness. When we enter the world of his poetry, it is like entering that sleepingroom of Rossetti's which Mr. Hall Caine so strikingly describes a funereal apartment, full of black oak furniture carved in quaint designs, of velvets and faded tapestries, of antique lamps that shed a drowsy light upon the heavy air, a room of charms and mysteries, remote and hidden from the busy life of men. At first we are irresistibly fascinated. We breathe a perfumed air, and hear the sweetest music; but presently we begin to long for the open heavens, the fresh wind, the "multitudinous laughter of the sea," the reassuring tramp of human feet. Beautiful as Rossetti's poetry is, we feel that it is something of an exotic, and that in its supersensuousness there is something enervating to the vigour of the taste and the fibre of the moral nature.

This defect of Rossetti's poetry is probably due to the fact that his life was to a large degree a morbid one. The great romance and tragedy of his history lay in his love and marriage. He was first attracted to his future wife by her remarkable beauty; it was a beauty of a very unusual type, full of stately purity and dignity, and yet characterised also by a sort of gracious sensuousness. After an engagement of many years they were married, and twelve months later she died. From that hour the glory and vivacity of life were gone for Rossetti ;

he became practically a recluse, a brooding and uncomforted man, whose days were passed in the shadow of the dead. How fully his wife's beauty filled his mind is seen in the long array of his pictures. It was her face which dominated the thirty years of his artistic toil. The features of his dead wife look out of every female face he painted; she is the Francesca and the dead Beatrice, the lady of love and the lady of sorrow. Into her coffin he thrust his poems in token of his passionate abandonment of earthly ambitions, and there for a considerable period they remained. Later on there came the terrible shadow of insomnia, and with it the confirmed habit of chloral-taking. It seemed as though Rossetti had become the living embodiment of the unhappy hero of Poe's poem of the "Raven." The rooms he inhabited were rich with the curious collections of an artistic taste; the lamplight streamed upon the "tufted floor," but "just above the bust of Pallas, just above the chamber-door," was seated the bird of evil omen, recalling vainly in his mournful cry the perished splendours of the past. Sensuous in all things, Rossetti was sensuous in his grief, and cultivated sorrow as other men cultivate happiness. The shadow that had fallen on his soul was "lifted never more." Can we be surprised that there is a lack of healthy vitality in his poems? Melody and imagination there always is; a charm that is at once weird and powerful; a heart-piercing sadness, a gloomy force, a memorable pregnancy of phrase; but there is not the robust spontaneity of a healthy mind. We are always conscious of a feverish intensity and strain. The gloom. of sorrow is overpowering, and even when the theme is not in itself sorrowful, there is something in the tone of the poet's voice that lets us know that he suffers.