Rossetti's great gift to his time was the gift of beauty, of beauty to
be worshipped in the sacred hush of a temple. His work is not richer in
the essentials of beauty than Browning's--it is not, indeed, nearly so
rich; but, while Browning served beauty joyously, a god in a firmament
of gods, Rossetti burned a lonely candle to it as to the only true god.
To Browning, the temple of beauty was but a house in a living world; to
Rossetti, the world outside the temple was, for the most part, a dead
world. _Jenny_ may, seem to stand in vivid contradiction of this. But
_Jenny_ was an exceptional excursion into life, and hardly expresses the
Rossetti that was a power in art and literature. Him we find best,
perhaps, in _The Blessed Damozel_, written when he was little more than
a boy. And this is not surprising, for the arrogant love of beauty, out
of which the aesthetic sort of art and literature has been born, is
essentially a boy's love. Poets who are sick with this passion must
either die young, like Keats, or survive merely to echo their younger
selves, like Swinburne. They are splendid in youth, like Aucassin, whose
swooning passion for Nicolette is symbolical of their almost painful
desire of beauty. In _Hand and Soul_, Rossetti tells us of Chiaro dell
Erma that "he would feel faint in sunsets and at the sight of stately
persons." Keats's Odes express the same ecstasy of faintness, and
Rossetti himself was obviously a close nineteenth-century counterpart of
Chiaro. Even when he troubles about the soul--and he constantly troubles
about it--he never seems to be able altogether to escape out of what
may be called the higher sensationalism into genuine mysticism. His work
is earth-born: it is rich in earthly desire. His symbols were not wings
to enable the soul to escape into a divine world of beauty. They were
the playthings of a grown man, loved for their owft beauty more than for
any beauty they could help the spirit to reach. Rossetti belongs to the
ornamental school of poetry. He writes more like a man who has gone into
a library than like one who has gone out to Nature, and ornamentalism in
poetry is simply the result of seeing life, not directly, but through
the coloured glass of literature and the other arts. Rossetti was the
forerunner of all those artists and authors of recent times, who, in
greater or less degree, looked on art as a weaving of patterns, an
arrangement of wonderful words and sounds and colours. Pater in his
early writings, William Morris, Oscar Wilde, and all those others who
dreamed that it was the artist's province to enrich the world with
beautiful furniture--for conduct itself seemed, in the philosophy of
these writers, to aspire after the quality of tapestry--are implicit in
_The Blessed Damozel_ and _Troy Town._ It is not that Rossetti could
command words like Pater or Wilde. His phrasing, if personal, is
curiously empty of the graces. He often does achieve graces of phrase;
but some of his most haunting poems owe their power over us to their
general pattern, and not to any persistent fine workmanship. How
beautiful _Troy Town_ is, for instance, and yet how lacking in beautiful
verses! The poet was easily content in his choice of words who could
leave a verse like:--
Venus looked on Helen's gift;
_(O Troy Town!)_
Looked and smiled with subtle drift,
Saw the work of her heart's desire:--
"There thou kneel'st for Love to lift!"
_(O Troy's down,
Tall Troy's on fire!)_
Rossetti never wrote; a poem that was fine throughout. There is nothing
to correspond to _The Skylark_ or the _Ode to a Grecian Urn_ or _Childe
Roland to the Dark Tower Came_ in his work. The truth is, he was not a
great poet, because he was not a singer. He was capable of decorations
in verse, but he was not capable of song. His sonnets, it may be argued,
are more than decorations. But even they are laden with beauty; they are
never, as it were, light and alight with it, as are _Shall I compare
thee to a summer's day?_ and _Where lies the land to which yon ship must
go?_ They have flagging pulses like desire itself, and are often weary
before the fourteenth line. Only rarely do we get a last six lines
like:--
O love, my love! if I no more should see
Thyself, nor on the earth the shadow of thee,
Nor image of thine eyes in any spring,--
How then should sound upon Life's darkening slope
The ground-whirl of the perished leaves of Hope,
The wind of Death's imperishable wing?
And, beautiful as this is, is not the imagery of the closing lines a
little more deliberate than we are conscious of in the great work of the
great singers? One never feels that the leaves and the winds in
themselves were sufficiently full of meaning and delight for Rossetti.
He loved them as pictorial properties--as a designer rather than a poet
loves them.
In his use of the very mysteries of Christianity, he is intoxicated
chiefly by the beauty of the designs by which the painters have
expressed their vision of religion. His _Ave_ is a praise of the beauty
of art more than a praise of the beauty of divinity. In it we are told
how, on the eve of the Annunciation,
Far off the trees were as pale wands,
Against the fervid sky: the sea
Sighed further off eternally
As human sorrow sighs in sleep.
The poem is not a hymn but a decorated theme. And yet there is a
sincere vain-longing running through Rossetti's work that keeps it from
being artificial or pretentious. This was no less real for being vague.
His work is an attempt to satisfy his vain-longing with rites of words
and colour. He always sought to bring peace to his soul by means of
ritual. When he was dying, he was anxious to see a confessor. "I can
make nothing of Christianity," he said, "but I only want a confessor to
give me absolution for my sins." That was typical of his attitude to
life. He loved its ceremonies more--at least, more vividly--than he
loved its soul. One is never done hearing about his demand for
"fundamental brainwork" in art. But his own poetry is poor enough in
brainwork. It is the poetry, of one who, like Keats, hungered for a
"life of sensations rather than of thoughts." It is the poetry of grief,
of regret--the grief and regret of one who was a master of sensuous
beauty, and who reveals sensuous beauty rather than any deeper secret
even in touching spiritual themes. Poetry with him is a dyed and
embroidered garment which weighs the spirit down rather than winged
sandals like Shelley's, which set the spirit free.
Yet his influence on art and literature has been immense. He, far more
than Keats or Swinburne, was the prophet of that ritualism which has
been a; dominant characteristic in modern poetry, whether it is the
Pagan ritualism of Mr. Yeats or the Catholic ritualism of Francis
Thompson. One need not believe that he was an important direct influence
on either of these poets. But his work as poet and painter prepared the
world for ritualism in literature. No doubt the medievalism of Scott and
the decorative imagination of Keats were also largely responsible for
the change in the literary atmosphere; but Rossetti was more
distinctively a symbolist and ritualist than any other English man of
letters who lived in the early or middle part of the nineteenth century.
People used to debate whether he was greater as a painter or as a poet,
and he was not always sure himself. When, however, he said to
Burne-Jones, in 1857: "If any man has any poetry in him, he should
paint; for it has all been said and written, and they have scarcely
begun to paint it," he gave convincing proof that painting, and not
poetry, was his essential gift. He may be denounced for his bad drawing
and twenty other faults as an artist; but it is his paintings that show
him as a discoverer and a man of high genius. At the same time, how well
he can also paint in verse, as in those ever-moving lines on Jenny's
wanderings in the Haymarket:--
Jenny, you know the city now.
A child can tell the tale there, how
Some things which are not yet enrol'd
In market-lists are bought and sold,
Even till the early Sunday light,
When Saturday night is market-night
Everywhere, be it dry or wet,
And market-night in the Haymarket.
Our learned London children know,
Poor Jenny, all your pride and woe;
Have seen your lifted silken skirt
Advertise dainties through the dirt;
Have seen your coach wheels splash rebuke
On virtue; and have learned your look
When wealth and health slipped past, you stare
Along the streets alone, and there,
Round the long park, across the bridge,
The cold lamps at the pavement's edge
Wind on together and apart,
A fiery serpent for your heart.
In most of his poems, unfortunately, the design, as a whole, rambles.
His imagination worked best when limited by the four sides of a canvas.