[205] IT was characteristic of a poet who had ever something about him
of mystic isolation, and will still appeal perhaps, though with a name
it may seem now established in English literature, to a special and
limited audience, that some of his poems had won a kind of exquisite
fame before they were in the full sense published. The Blessed
Damozel, although actually printed twice before the year 1870, was
eagerly circulated in manuscript; and the volume which it now opens
came at last to satisfy a long-standing curiosity as to the poet, whose
pictures also had become an object of the same peculiar kind of
interest. For those poems were the work of a painter, understood to
belong to, and to be indeed the leader, of a new school then rising
into note; and the reader of to-day may observe already, in The Blessed
Damozel, written at the age of eighteen, a prefigurement of the chief
characteristics of that school, as he will recognise in it also, in
proportion as he really knows Rossetti, many of the characteristics
which are most markedly personal and his own. Common [206] to that
school and to him, and in both alike of primary significance, was the
quality of sincerity, already felt as one of the charms of that
earliest poem--a perfect sincerity, taking effect in the deliberate use
of the most direct and unconventional expression, for the conveyance of
a poetic sense which recognised no conventional standard of what poetry
was called upon to be. At a time when poetic originality in England
might seem to have had its utmost play, here was certainly one new poet
more, with a structure and music of verse, a vocabulary, an accent,
unmistakably novel, yet felt to be no mere tricks of manner adopted
with a view to forcing attention--an accent which might rather count as
the very seal of reality on one man's own proper speech; as that speech
itself was the wholly natural expression of certain wonderful things he
really felt and saw. Here was one, who had a matter to present to his
readers, to himself at least, in the first instance, so valuable, so
real and definite, that his primary aim, as regards form or expression
in his verse, would be but its exact equivalence to those data within.
That he had this gift of transparency in language--the control of a
style which did but obediently shift and shape itself to the mental
motion, as a well-trained hand can follow on the tracing-paper the
outline of an original drawing below it, was proved afterwards by a
volume of typically perfect translations from the delightful but
difficult [207] "early Italian poets:" such transparency being indeed
the secret of all genuine style, of all such style as can truly belong
to one man and not to another. His own meaning was always personal and
even recondite, in a certain sense learned and casuistical, sometimes
complex or obscure; but the term was always, one could see,
deliberately chosen from many competitors, as the just transcript of
that peculiar phase of soul which he alone knew, precisely as he knew
it.
One of the peculiarities of The Blessed Damozel was a definiteness of
sensible imagery, which seemed almost grotesque to some, and was
strange, above all, in a theme so profoundly visionary. The gold bar
of heaven from which she leaned, her hair yellow like ripe corn, are
but examples of a general treatment, as naively detailed as the
pictures of those early painters contemporary with Dante, who has shown
a similar care for minute and definite imagery in his verse; there,
too, in the very midst of profoundly mystic vision. Such definition of
outline is indeed one among many points in which Rossetti resembles the
great Italian poet, of whom, led to him at first by family
circumstances, he was ever a lover--a "servant and singer," faithful as
Dante, "of Florence and of Beatrice"--with some close inward
conformities of genius also, independent of any mere circumstances of
education. It was said by a critic of the last century, not wisely
though agreeably to the practice of his time, [208] that poetry
rejoices in abstractions. For Rossetti, as for Dante, without question
on his part, the first condition of the poetic way of seeing and
presenting things is particularisation. "Tell me now," he writes, for
Villon's
Dictes-moy où, n'en quel pays,
Est Flora, la belle Romaine--
Tell me now, in what hidden way is
Lady Flora the lovely Roman:
--"way," in which one might actually chance to meet her; the
unmistakably poetic effect of the couplet in English being dependent on
the definiteness of that single word (though actually lighted on in the
search after a difficult double rhyme) for which every one else would
have written, like Villon himself, a more general one, just equivalent
to place or region.
And this delight in concrete definition is allied with another of his
conformities to Dante, the really imaginative vividness, namely, of his
personifications--his hold upon them, or rather their hold upon him,
with the force of a Frankenstein, when once they have taken life from
him. Not Death only and Sleep, for instance, and the winged spirit of
Love, but certain particular aspects of them, a whole "populace" of
special hours and places, "the hour" even "which might have been, yet
might not be," are living creatures, with hands and eyes and articulate
voices.
[209]
Stands it not by the door--
Love's Hour--till she and I shall meet;
With bodiless form and unapparent feet
That cast no shadow yet before,
Though round its head the dawn begins to pour
The breath that makes day sweet?--
Nay, why
Name the dead hours? I mind them well:
Their ghosts in many darkened doorways dwell
With desolate eyes to know them by.
Poetry as a mania--one of Plato's two higher forms of "divine"
mania--has, in all its species, a mere insanity incidental to it, the
"defect of its quality," into which it may lapse in its moment of
weakness; and the insanity which follows a vivid poetic
anthropomorphism like that of Rossetti may be noted here and there in
his work, in a forced and almost grotesque materialising of
abstractions, as Dante also became at times a mere subject of the
scholastic realism of the Middle Age.
In Love's Nocturn and The Stream's Secret, congruously perhaps with a
certain feverishness of soul in the moods they present, there is at
times a near approach (may it be said?) to such insanity of realism--
Pity and love shall burn
In her pressed cheek and cherishing hands;
And from the living spirit of love that stands
Between her lips to soothe and yearn,
Each separate breath shall clasp me round in turn
And loose my spirit's bands.
[210] But even if we concede this; even if we allow, in the very plan
of those two compositions, something of the literary conceit--what
exquisite, what novel flowers of poetry, we must admit them to be, as
they stand! In the one, what a delight in all the natural beauty of
water, all its details for the eye of a painter; in the other, how
subtle and fine the imaginative hold upon all the secret ways of sleep
and dreams! In both of them, with much the same attitude and tone,
Love--sick and doubtful Love--would fain inquire of what lies below the
surface of sleep, and below the water; stream or dream being forced to
speak by Love's powerful "control"; and the poet would have it foretell
the fortune, issue, and event of his wasting passion. Such artifices,
indeed, were not unknown in the old Provençal poetry of which Dante had
learned something. Only, in Rossetti at least, they are redeemed by a
serious purpose, by that sincerity of his, which allies itself readily
to a serious beauty, a sort of grandeur of literary workmanship, to a
great style. One seems to hear there a really new kind of poetic
utterance, with effects which have nothing else like them; as there is
nothing else, for instance, like the narrative of Jacob's Dream in
Genesis, or Blake's design of the Singing of the Morning Stars, or
Addison's Nineteenth Psalm.
With him indeed, as in some revival of the old mythopoeic age, common
things--dawn, [211] noon, night--are full of human or personal
expression, full of sentiment. The lovely little sceneries scattered
up and down his poems, glimpses of a landscape, not indeed of broad
open-air effects, but rather that of a painter concentrated upon the
picturesque effect of one or two selected objects at a time--the
"hollow brimmed with mist," or the "ruined weir," as he sees it from
one of the windows, or reflected in one of the mirrors of his "house of
life" (the vignettes for instance seen by Rose Mary in the magic beryl)
attest, by their very freshness and simplicity, to a pictorial or
descriptive power in dealing with the inanimate world, which is
certainly also one half of the charm, in that other, more remote and
mystic, use of it. For with Rossetti this sense of lifeless nature,
after all, is translated to a higher service, in which it does but
incorporate itself with some phase of strong emotion. Every one
understands how this may happen at critical moments of life; what a
weirdly expressive soul may have crept, even in full noonday, into "the
white-flower'd elder-thicket," when Godiva saw it "gleam through the
Gothic archways in the wall," at the end of her terrible ride. To
Rossetti it is so always, because to him life is a crisis at every
moment. A sustained impressibility towards the mysterious conditions
of man's everyday life, towards the very mystery itself in it, gives a
singular gravity to all his work: those matters never became trite
[212] to him. But throughout, it is the ideal intensity of love--of
love based upon a perfect yet peculiar type of physical or material
beauty--which is enthroned in the midst of those mysterious powers;
Youth and Death, Destiny and Fortune, Fame, Poetic Fame, Memory,
Oblivion, and the like. Rossetti is one of those who, in the words of
Mérimée, se passionnent pour la passion, one of Love's lovers.
And yet, again as with Dante, to speak of his ideal type of beauty as
material, is partly misleading. Spirit and matter, indeed, have been
for the most part opposed, with a false contrast or antagonism by
schoolmen, whose artificial creation those abstractions really are. In
our actual concrete experience, the two trains of phenomena which the
words matter and spirit do but roughly distinguish, play inextricably
into each other. Practically, the church of the Middle Age by its
aesthetic worship, its sacramentalism, its real faith in the
resurrection of the flesh, had set itself against that Manichean
opposition of spirit and matter, and its results in men's way of taking
life; and in this, Dante is the central representative of its spirit.
To him, in the vehement and impassioned heat of his conceptions, the
material and the spiritual are fused and blent: if the spiritual
attains the definite visibility of a crystal, what is material loses
its earthiness and impurity. And here again, by force of instinct,
Rossetti [213] is one with him. His chosen type of beauty is one,
Whose speech Truth knows not from her thought,
Nor Love her body from her soul.
Like Dante, he knows no region of spirit which shall not be sensuous
also, or material. The shadowy world, which he realises so powerfully,
has still the ways and houses, the land and water, the light and
darkness, the fire and flowers, that had so much to do in the moulding
of those bodily powers and aspects which counted for so large a part of
the soul, here.
For Rossetti, then, the great affections of persons to each other,
swayed and determined, in the case of his highly pictorial genius,
mainly by that so-called material loveliness, formed the great
undeniable reality in things, the solid resisting substance, in a world
where all beside might be but shadow. The fortunes of those
affections--of the great love so determined; its casuistries, its
languor sometimes; above all, its sorrows; its fortunate or unfortunate
collisions with those other great matters; how it looks, as the long
day of life goes round, in the light and shadow of them: all this,
conceived with an abundant imagination, and a deep, a philosophic,
reflectiveness, is the matter of his verse, and especially of what he
designed as his chief poetic work, "a work to be called The House of
Life," towards which the majority of his sonnets and songs were
contributions.
[214] The dwelling-place in which one finds oneself by chance or
destiny, yet can partly fashion for oneself; never properly one's own
at all, if it be changed too lightly; in which every object has its
associations--the dim mirrors, the portraits, the lamps, the books, the
hair-tresses of the dead and visionary magic crystals in the secret
drawers, the names and words scratched on the windows, windows open
upon prospects the saddest or the sweetest; the house one must quit,
yet taking perhaps, how much of its quietly active light and colour
along with us!--grown now to be a kind of raiment to one's body, as the
body, according to Swedenborg, is but the raiment of the soul--under
that image, the whole of Rossetti's work might count as a House of
Life, of which he is but the "Interpreter." And it is a "haunted"
house. A sense of power in love, defying distance, and those barriers
which are so much more than physical distance, of unutterable desire
penetrating into the world of sleep, however "lead-bound," was one of
those anticipative notes obscurely struck in The Blessed Damozel, and,
in his later work, makes him speak sometimes almost like a believer in
mesmerism. Dream-land, as we said, with its "phantoms of the body,"
deftly coming and going on love's service, is to him, in no mere fancy
or figure of speech, a real country, a veritable expansion of, or
addition to, our waking life; and he did well perhaps to wait carefully
upon sleep, for the lack [215] of it became mortal disease with him.
One may even recognise a sort of morbid and over-hasty making-ready for
death itself, which increases on him; thoughts concerning it, its
imageries, coming with a frequency and importunity, in excess, one
might think, of even the very saddest, quite wholesome wisdom.
And indeed the publication of his second volume of Ballads and Sonnets
preceded his death by scarcely a twelvemonth. That volume bears
witness to the reverse of any failure of power, or falling-off from his
early standard of literary perfection, in every one of his then
accustomed forms of poetry--the song, the sonnet, and the ballad. The
newly printed sonnets, now completing The House of Life, certainly
advanced beyond those earlier ones, in clearness; his dramatic power in
the ballad, was here at its height; while one monumental, gnomic piece,
Soothsay, testifies, more clearly even than the Nineveh of his first
volume, to the reflective force, the dry reason, always at work behind
his imaginative creations, which at no time dispensed with a genuine
intellectual structure. For in matters of pure reflection also,
Rossetti maintained the painter's sensuous clearness of conception; and
this has something to do with the capacity, largely illustrated by his
ballads, of telling some red-hearted story of impassioned action with
effect.
Have there, in very deed, been ages, in which [216] the external
conditions of poetry such as Rossetti's were of more spontaneous growth
than in our own? The archaic side of Rossetti's work, his preferences
in regard to earlier poetry, connect him with those who have certainly
thought so, who fancied they could have breathed more largely in the
age of Chaucer, or of Ronsard, in one of those ages, in the words of
Stendhal--ces siècles de passions où les âmes pouvaient se livrer
franchement à la plus haute exaltation, quand les passions qui font la
possibilité We may think, perhaps, that such old time as that has never
really existed except in the fancy of poets; but it was to find it,
that Rossetti turned so often from modern life to the chronicle of the
past. Old Scotch history, perhaps beyond any other, is strong in the
matter of heroic and vehement hatreds and love, the tragic Mary herself
being but the perfect blossom of them; and it is from that history that
Rossetti has taken the subjects of the two longer ballads of his second
volume: of the three admirable ballads in it, The King's Tragedy (in
which Rossetti has dexterously interwoven some relics of James's own
exquisite early verse) reaching the highest level of dramatic success,
and marking perfection, perhaps, in this kind of poetry; which, in the
earlier volume, gave us, among other pieces, Troy Town, Sister Helen,
and Eden Bower.
Like those earlier pieces, the ballads of the [217] second volume bring
with them the question of the poetic value of the "refrain"--
Eden bower's in flower:
And O the bower and the hour!
--and the like. Two of those ballads--Troy Town and Eden Bower, are
terrible in theme; and the refrain serves, perhaps, to relieve their
bold aim at the sentiment of terror. In Sister Helen again, the
refrain has a real, and sustained purpose (being here duly varied also)
and performs the part of a chorus, as the story proceeds. Yet even in
these cases, whatever its effect may be in actual recitation, it may
fairly be questioned, whether, to the mere reader their actual effect
is not that of a positive interruption and drawback, at least in pieces
so lengthy; and Rossetti himself, it would seem, came to think so, for
in the shortest of his later ballads, The White Ship--that old true
history of the generosity with which a youth, worthless in life, flung
himself upon death--he was contented with a single utterance of the
refrain, "given out" like the keynote or tune of a chant.
In The King's Tragedy, Rossetti has worked upon motive, broadly human
(to adopt the phrase of popular criticism) such as one and all may
realise. Rossetti, indeed, with all his self-concentration upon his
own peculiar aim, by no means ignored those general interests which are
external to poetry as he conceived it; as he has [218] shown here and
there, in this poetic, as also in pictorial, work. It was but that, in
a life to be shorter even than the average, he found enough to occupy
him in the fulfilment of a task, plainly "given him to do." Perhaps,
if one had to name a single composition of his to readers desiring to
make acquaintance with him for the first time, one would select: The
King's Tragedy--that poem so moving, so popularly dramatic, and
lifelike. Notwithstanding this, his work, it must be conceded,
certainly through no narrowness or egotism, but in the faithfulness of
a true workman to a vocation so emphatic, was mainly of the esoteric
order. But poetry, at all times, exercises two distinct functions: it
may reveal, it may unveil to every eye, the ideal aspects of common
things, after Gray's way (though Gray too, it is well to remember,
seemed in his own day, seemed even to Johnson, obscure) or it may
actually add to the number of motives poetic and uncommon in
themselves, by the imaginative creation of things that are ideal from
their very birth. Rossetti did something, something excellent, of the
former kind; but his characteristic, his really revealing work, lay in
the adding to poetry of fresh poetic material, of a new order of
phenomena, in the creation of a new ideal.
1883.