Born in London, and early in his professional career modified his name into Dante Gabriel Rossetti. He was the brother of Christina Georgina Rossetti, and son of Gabriele Rossetti, an Italian poet-patriot, who escaped to England as a political exile after the failure of the Neapolitan insurrection in 1821. In 1835 Dante Gabriel entered King’s College School, where he remained for eight years, when he studied first at an Art academy, and afterwards at the Royal Academy Antique School. He left the academy in 1848, and the following year exhibited his first picture, “The Girlhood of Mary Virgin.” In 1848 he associated with Holman Hunt and Thomas Woolner in founding the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and two years later contributed “The Blessed Damozel” to The Germ, which had been started as the official organ of that movement. In 1856 he became one of the contributors to The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, which also advocated Pre-Raphaelite principles. In 1860 he married Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal, his model and pupil, who died two years later, under tragic circumstances, being found dead in her bed from the effects of an overdose of laudanum. Under stress of deep grief, he impulsively buried in his wife’s coffin the manuscript copies of both his published and unpublished poems, which he eight years later permitted to be exhumed at the earnest solicitation of his friends. The poems thus recovered were revised for publication, and appeared in 1870. It was this volume which inspired Mr. Robert Buchanan’s article “The Fleshly School of Poetry,” in The Contemporary Review. The strictures of this critic, followed by others equally harsh, served to make Rossetti, always retiring in his habits, almost a recluse. Shortly before the publication of Mr. Buchanan’s criticism, he had resorted to chloral as a remedy for insomnia, and his disturbed condition of mind caused by the hostile reception given to his poems led him into such excessive use of the drug, as to ultimately cause his death. He published “The Early Italian Poets” (translation, 1861;) “Poems,” 1870, and a new edition 1881; “Dante and his Circle” (translations), 1874; “Ballads and Sonnets,” 1881. A collected edition of his poems and translations, edited by his brother, Mr. William Michael Rossetti, was published in 1887.

Personal

  Called on Dante Rossetti. Saw Miss Siddal, looking thinner and more deathlike and more beautiful and more ragged than ever; a real artist, a woman without parallel for many a long year. Gabriel as usual diffuse and inconsequent in his work. Drawing wonderful and lovely Guggums one after another, each one a fresh charm, each one stamped with immortality, and his picture never advancing. However, he is at the wall, and I am to get him a white calf and a cart to paint here; would he but study the golden one a little more. Poor Gabriello.

  While I write, my heart is sore for a great calamity just befallen poor Rossetti, which I only heard of last night—his wife, who had been, as an invalid, in the habit of taking laudanum, swallowed an overdose—was found by the poor fellow on his return from the workingmen’s class in the evening, under the effects of it—help was called in, the stomach-pump used; but she died in the night, about a week ago.

	What wreath have I above thy rest to place,
	What worthy song-wreath, Friend—nay, more than friend?
	For so thou didst all other men transcend
	That the pure, fiery worship of old days—
	That of the boy, content to hear, to gaze—
	Burned on most brightly, though as lamps none tend
	The lights on other shrines had made an end
	And darkness reigned where was the festal blaze.
	Far from us now thou art, and never again
	Thy magic voice shall thrill me as one thrills
	When noblest music storms his heart and brain.
	The sea remembers thee,—the woods, the hills,
	Sunlight and moonlight, and the hurrying rills;
	And Love saith, “Surely this man leads my train!”

  During the last eight years of his life, Rossetti’s whole being was clouded by the terrible curse of an excitable temperament—sleeplessness. To overcome this enemy, which interfered with his powers of work and concentration of thought, he accepted the treacherous aid of the new drug, chloral, which was then vaunted as perfectly harmless in its effect upon the health. The doses of chloral became more and more necessary to him, and I am told that at last they became so frequent and excessive that no case has been recorded in the annals of medicine in which one patient has taken so much, or even half so much chloral as Rossetti took. Under this unwholesome drug his constitution, originally a magnificent one, slipped unconsciously into decay, the more stealthily that the poison seemed to have no effect whatever on the powers of the victim’s intellect. He painted until physical force failed him; he wrote brilliantly to the very last, and two sonnets dictated by him on his death-bed are described to me as being entirely worthy of his mature powers.

  His interest was entirely engrossed by his work; although well read and an excellent talker he shrank from general society, but he was a warm friend to his friends and there was about him that curious personal fascination so frequently found combined with creative genius.

  Naturally the sale of Mr. Rossetti’s effects attracted a large number of persons to the gloomy old-fashioned residence in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, and many of the articles sold went for prices very far in excess of their intrinsic value, the total sum realised being over £3,000…. But during the sale of these books on that fine July afternoon, in the dingy study hung round with the lovely but melancholy faces of Proserpine and Pandora, despite the noise of the throng and the witticisms of the auctioneer, a sad feeling of desecration must have crept over many of those who were present at the dispersion of the household goods and favourite books of that man who hated the vulgar crowd. Gazing through the open windows they could see the tall trees waving their heads in a sorrowful sort of way in the summer breeze, throwing their shifting shadows over the neglected grass-grown paths, once the haunt of the stately peacocks whose mediæval beauty had such a strange fascination for Rossetti, and whose feathers are now the accepted favours of his apostles and admirers. And so their gaze would wander back again to that mysterious face upon the wall, that face as some say the grandest in the world, a lovely one in truth, with its wistful, woful, passionate eyes, its masses of heavy wavy auburn hair, its sweet sad mouth with the full red lips; a face that seemed to say the sad old lines:

	“’Tis better to have loved and lost,
	Than never to have loved at all.”

  And then would come the monotonous cry of the auctioneer to disturb the reverie, and call one back to this matter of fact world which Dante Gabriel Rossetti, painter and poet, has left.

GOING! GOING! GONE!

  The main features of his character were, in my apprehension, fearlessness, kindliness, a decision that sometimes made him seem somewhat arbitrary, and condensation or concentration. He was wonderfully self-reliant…. His work was great, the man was greater. His conversation had a wonderful ease, precision, and felicity of expression. He produced thoughts perfectly enunciated with a deliberate happiness that was indescribable, though it was always simple conversation, never haranguing or declamation. He was a natural leader because he was a natural teacher. When he chose to be interested in anything that was brought before him, no pains were too great for him to take. His advice was always given warmly and freely, and when he spoke of the works of others it was always in the most generous spirit of praise. It was in fact impossible to have been more free from captiousness, jealousy, envy, or any other form of pettiness than this truly noble man.

  Rossetti had buried the only complete copy of his poems with his wife at Highgate, and for a time he had been able to put by the thought of them; but as one by one of his friends, Mr. Morris, Mr. Swinburne, and others, attained to distinction as poets, he began to hanker after poetic reputation, and to reflect with pain and regret upon the hidden fruits of his best effort. Rossetti—in all love of his memory be it spoken—was after all a frail mortal; of unstable character: of variable purpose: a creature of impulse and whim, and with a plentiful lack of the backbone of volition. With less affection he would not have buried his book; with more strength of will he had not done so; or, having done so, he had never wished to undo what he had done; or having undone it, he would never have tormented himself with the memory of it as of a deed of sacrilege. But Rossetti had both affection enough to do it and weakness enough to have it undone. After an infinity of self-communions he determined to have the grave opened, and the book extracted. Endless were the preparations necessary before such a work could be begun. Mr. Home Secretary Bruce had to be consulted. At length preliminaries were complete, and one night, seven and a half years after the burial, a fire was built by the side of the grave, and then the coffin was raised and opened. The body is described as perfect upon coming to light. Whilst this painful work was being done the unhappy author of it was sitting alone and anxious and full of self-reproaches at the house of the friend who had charge of it. He was relieved and thankful when told that all was over. The volume was not much the worse for the years it had lain in the grave Deficiencies were filled in from memory, the manuscript was put in the press, and in 1870 the reclaimed work was issued under the simple title of “Poems.”

  As to the personality of Dante Gabriel Rossetti much has been written since his death, and it is now widely known that he was a man who exercised an almost irresistible charm over most with whom he was brought in contact. His manner could be peculiarly winning, especially with those much younger than himself, and his voice was alike notable for its sonorous beauty and for a magnetic quality that made the ear alert whether the speaker was engaged in conversation, recitation, or reading. I have heard him read, some of them over and over, all the poems in the “Ballads and Sonnets,” and especially in such productions as “The Cloud Confines” was his voice as stirring as a trumpet tone; but where he excelled was in some of the pathetic portions of the “Vita Nuova,” or the terrible and sonorous passages of L’Inferno, when the music of the Italian language found full expression indeed. His conversational powers I am unable adequately to describe, for during the four or five years of my intimacy with him he suffered too much from ill health to be a consistently brilliant talker, but again and again I have seen instances of those marvellous gifts that made him at one time a Sydney Smith in wit and a Coleridge in eloquence. In appearance he was if anything rather over middle height, and, especially latterly, somewhat stout; his forehead was of splendid proportions, recalling instantaneously to most strangers the Stratford bust of Shakespeare; and his gray-blue eyes were clear and piercing, and characterised by that rapid penetrative gaze so noticeable in Emerson. He seemed always to me an unmistakable Englishman, yet the Italian element was frequently recognisable; as far as his own opinion is concerned, he was wholly English. Possessing a thorough knowledge of French and Italian, he was the fortunate appreciator of many great works in their native tongue, and his sympathies in religion, as in literature, were truly catholic. To meet him even once was to be the better of it ever after; those who obtained his friendship cannot well say all it meant and means to them; but they know that they are not again in the least likely to meet with such another as Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

  In the early spring of the present year there passed away at Birchington-on-Sea, in Kent, one of the most original painters and most gifted poets who was ever sent to lend light and leading to a perverse generation. A man unique in this particular—that he passed through good and evil report with serene indifference to mercenary reward or social successes; and that, while exercising an unusual influence on the higher culture of his age, and living in the very midst of a busy and somewhat pertinacious artistic circle, he remained personally unknown to most of his contemporaries as well as to the public at large…. Even fairer than his artistic or literary fame was the love and admiration he awakened in all who knew him…. When I remember how truly great he was—in that best greatness of modesty and meekness of soul, when I think how patiently he laboured at his beautiful art and how little golden praise men gave to him; when I contrast his gentle life with the strenuous lives of noisier and more prosperous men, it seems strange to think that, at any period of his career, any writer could be found blind enough or hard enough to criticise him adversely. Yet, that cruel things were written of him, and by one who should have looked longer and known better, we all know. He has been called a “fleshly” person, a sensuous, even sensual poet; he who, more than perhaps many of his contemporaries, was the least objective, the least earthly, and the most ideal.

  I know not what friend of Rossetti’s can assume the judicial attitude when speaking of him. I know not who shall render in words a character so fascinating, so original, and yet so self-contradictory. At one moment exhibiting, as Rossetti would, the sagacity of the most astute man of affairs, and the next the perversities and the whimsical vagaries of a schoolboy; startling us at one moment as he would startle us with the brilliance of the most accomplished wit, at the next with a spontaneous tenderness like that of a woman or else with some trait of simplicity and naïveté like that of a child—it is no wonder that misconceptions about a character so Protean should prevail. Nor is it any wonder that to us who loved him, the name of Rossetti was a word of music that never suggested the works but always the man. I say “to us who loved him,” and the category contains all who knew him, for he was a man whom it was impossible to know without deeply loving, and I will not deny that it was necessary that he should be deeply loved before he could be fully known. Perhaps the strongest proof of this is that, notwithstanding all those “weaknesses” upon which the garish light of the public press has lately been flashing—notwithstanding the seclusion in which, of late years, he lived—“the jealous seclusion,” as an illustrious painter has phrased it—which shut out at last not merely the outside world, but even the men of genius who had shared with him those youthful and noble struggles for art which have come to such a great fruition—notwithstanding all this, I say, these early friends of Rossetti’s never lost their affectionate regard for him.

  I have neither drawing nor picture by Rossetti. I am sorry for it, for some of his work which I have seen elsewhere I admired very much. Nor have I any letter from him, nor do I remember his being present when I was reading the proofs of “Maud.” Indeed I would willingly have known so fine a spirit more intimately, but he kept himself so shut up that it was all but impossible to come at him. What you call “intimacy” never advanced much beyond acquaintance.

  Few brothers were more constantly together or shared one another’s feelings and thoughts more intimately, in childhood, boyhood, and well on into mature manhood, than Dante Gabriel and myself…. He was always and essentially of a dominant turn; in intellect and in temperament a leader. He was impetuous and vehement, and necessarily, therefore, impatient; easily angered, easily appeased, although the embittered feelings of his later years obscured this amiable quality to some extent; constant and helpful as a friend where he perceived constancy to be reciprocated; free-handed and heedless of expenditure, whether for himself or for others; in family affection warm and equable, and (except in relation to our mother, for whom he had a fondling love), not demonstrative. Never on stilts in matters of the intellect or of aspiration, but steeped in the sense of beauty, and loving, if not always practising, the good; keenly alive also (though some people seem to discredit this now) to the laughable as well as the grave or solemn side of things; superstitious in grain, and anti-scientific to the marrow. Throughout his youth and early manhood I considered him to be remarkably free from vanity, though certainly well equipped in pride; the distinction between these two tendencies was less definite in his closing years. Extremely natural, and therefore totally unaffected in tone and manner, with the naturalism characteristic of Italian blood; good-natured and hearty, without being complaisant or accommodating; reserved at times, yet not haughty; desultory enough in youth, diligent and persistent in maturity; self-centred always, and brushing aside whatever traversed his purpose or his bent. He was very generally and very greatly liked by persons of extremely diverse character; indeed, I think, it can be no exaggeration to say that no one ever disliked him.

  Hamlin, the hero of Vernon Lee’s novel “Miss Brown” (London, 1884), is said to represent Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the poet.

  When I saw Rossetti in his prime, a healthy man, he was the noblest of men, and had a heart so good that I have never known a better, seldom its equal. Illness changed him, but then he was no longer himself…. Rossetti was a charming companion; he spoke well and freely on all subjects, literary and artistic, and with much knowledge of contemporary writings. His studio was a favourite resort of men whose names were on title pages, to whom he showed the work he had in progress; and, to his intimate friends, he would sometimes read a poem in a rich and sonorous voice. He had a very just mind. When an author was discussed, whatever might be said against him, he would insist on his merits being remembered. From rivalship and its jealousies he was absolutely free, and his hospitality was without limit. Above all, he was ready at all times to serve a friend, and to exert his influence to that end.

  I remember my wild delight in starting for London; and, arrived at Euston, how bewildered and amazed I was with the bustle and excitement of the station. My brother soon discovered me, and we drove off to Mr. Rossetti’s house, No. 16 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea. The house seemed to my childish fancy big, heavy and dull. We passed into the hall, which was spacious but rather forbidding at least, to childish fancy—so sombre, so dark. The floor was of black and white marble. About everything there was an atmosphere of departed grandeur, so that I was not surprised to learn that the house had once been tenanted by a lady who ascended the throne of England. To the right hand as we entered was a door leading to what I learned to be the dining-room, but as Mr. Rossetti always had dinner in the studio, the dining-room was never used, and in the course of years it fell into neglect. On the left was the breakfast room, but as Mr. Rossetti breakfasted in bed, this apartment would have similarly fallen into disuse had not my brother made it his study. Round about in the dark hall were one or two statues, but in still darker corners I could dimly discern old oak cabinets. I had never met a man so full of ideas interesting and attractive to a child. Indeed, now that I look back on it, I feel that Mr. Rossetti was wondrously sweet, tender and even playful with a child, and I am the most struck by this as I reflect that, except for his own little niece and nephew (now, like myself, no longer little), he was not very much accustomed to their troublesome ways and noisy chatter.

  For Rossetti I had great regard, though I saw not much of him. He seemed to me to be rather an Italian than an Englishman; an Italian of the time of the Medici, not without thoughts and superstitions of that period, a man of genius both in art and literature; one, however, hindering the other, the literary preponderating, and by which he will be best recollected.

  The life of one of Blake’s greatest admirers, D. G. Rossetti, must be forgiven in the light of his achievements, but cannot be forgotten as one of the most dark and shuddering tragedies ever played upon the human stage.

  For the rest it is singular how lovable a man Rossetti appears in his letters here published, and it is not more fair to say that, in his correspondence with Madox Brown, which I have had occasion to study rather minutely, it is difficult to discover anything calculated to make an ordinary reader seriously dislike him. Of the two men who have attacked his person, the one, “Thomas Maitland,” has recanted, and the other, the late W. B. Scott, has so liberally negatived the virtues of everybody with whom he came in contact that his Mephistophelean gibes would pass for little in any case. Mr. W. Rossetti has, however, so amply confuted most of his allegations that their negative value is increased in a considerable degree.

  Deverell accompanied his mother one day to a milliner’s. Through an open door he saw a girl working with her needle; he got his mother to ask her to sit to him. She was the future Mrs. Rossetti. Millais painted her for his Ophelia—wonderfully like her. She was tall and slender, with red coppery hair and bright consumptive complexion, though in these early years she had no striking signs of ill health. She was exceedingly quiet, speaking very little. She had read Tennyson, having first come to know something about him by finding one or two of his poems on a piece of paper which she brought home to her mother wrapped round a pat of butter. Rossetti taught her to draw. She used to be drawing while sitting to him. Her drawings were beautiful, but without force. They were feminine likenesses of his own.

  Rossetti the man was, before all things, an artist. Many departments of human activity had no existence for him. He was superstitious in grain and anti-scientific to the marrow. His reasoning powers were hardly beyond the average; but his instincts were potent, and his perceptions keen and true. Carried away by his impulses, he frequently acted with rudeness, inconsiderateness, and selfishness. But if a thing could be presented to him from an artistic point of view, he apprehended it in the same spirit as he would have apprehended a subject for a painting or a poem. Hence, if in some respects his actions and expressions seem deficient in right feeling, he appears in other respects the most self-denying and disinterested of men. He was unsurpassed in the filial and fraternal relations; he was absolutely superior to jealousy or envy, and none felt a keener delight in noticing and aiding a youthful writer of merit. His acquaintance with literature was almost entirely confined to works of imagination. Within these limits his critical faculty was admirable, not deeply penetrative, but always embodying the soundest common-sense. His few critical essays are excellent. His memory was almost preternatural, and his knowledge of favorite writers, such as Shakespeare, Dante, Scott, Dumas, exhaustive. It is lamentable that his soundness or judgment should have deserted him in his own case, and that he should have been unable to share the man of genius’s serene confidence that not all the powers of dullness and malignity combined can, in the long run, deprive him of a particle of his real due.

  Rossetti was one of the most fascinating characters I ever knew, open and expansive, and, when well, he had a vein of the most delightful talk of the things which interested him, mostly those which pertained to art and poetry, the circle of his friends and his and their poetry and painting. To him, art was the dominant interest of existence … and he tolerated nothing that sacrificed it to material or purely intellectual subjects. I remember his indignation at the death of Mrs. Wells, the wife of the Royal Academician, herself a talented painter, who died in childbed. “A great artist sacrificed to bringing more kids into the world, as if there were not other women just fit for that!” The artist was to him the ultima ratio of humanity, and he used to say frankly that artists had nothing to do with morality, and practically, but in a gentle and benevolent way, he made that the guiding principle of his conduct. Whatever was to his hand was made for his use, and when we went into the house at Robertsbridge [Stillman’s own] he at once took the place of master of the house, as if he had invited me, rather than the converse, going through the rooms to select, and saying, “I will take this,” of those which suited him best, and “You may have that,” of those he had no fancy for…. He declined to put himself in comparison with any of his contemporaries, though he admitted his deficiencies as compared to the great Venetians, and repeatedly said that if he had been taught to paint in a great school he would have been a better painter, which was no doubt the truth; for, as he admitted, he had not yet learned the true method of painting. He refused to exhibit in the annual exhibitions, not because he feared the comparison with other modern painters, but because he was indifferent to it, though I have heard him say that he would be glad to exhibit his pictures with those of the old masters, and they would teach him something about his own…. The only painter of note I ever heard him speak of with strong dislike was Brett, whom he could not tolerate.

  Rossetti’s nick-name among some of his intimates at that time was the Sultan. For, as a mutual friend explained, everyone flies at the least sign to work for Rossetti. And there seemed to be a suggestion of the original in his inimitable air of easy indolence, his small, finely shaped hands, his supple diction, colloquial yet dignified, and always expressive. No one smoked; the conversation was rapid…. Towards the latter part of Rossetti’s life he rarely left his house and garden. He depended upon a close circle of friends for society, and in his own way was a sociable man, but he preferred to see his friends and acquaintances by appointment, and woe-betide the too intrusive stranger…. Rossetti was an excellent man of business, who held his own with merchants and the great world, yet he seldom stirred from his hearth.

Art

	One face looks out from all his canvases,
	One selfsame figure sits or walks or leans:
	We found her hidden just behind those screens,
	That mirror gave back all her loveliness.
	A queen in opal or in ruby dress,
	A nameless girl in freshest summer-greens,
	A saint, an angel—every canvas means
	The same one meaning, neither more nor less.
	He feeds upon her face by day and night,
	And she with true kind eyes looks back on him,
	Fair as the moon and joyful as the light:
	Not wan with waiting, not with sorrow dim;
	Not as she is, but was when hope shone bright;
	Not as she is, but as she fills his dream.

  A mystic by temperament and right of birth, and steeped in the Italian literature of the middle age, his works in either art are filled with a peculiar fascination and fervour, which attracted to him, from those who enjoyed his intimacy, a rare degree of admiring devotion.

  On Easter-Sunday, the day of joy and resurrection, a great artist left us—one of those whose glorious task it is to create beauty, gladness, pity, and sympathy in a world that would else grow hardened in suffering. This Easter was clouded for many by reason of his death; but his works shall live when the fashion that praises them and the fashion that decries them are alike forgotten; shall live, a possession of ours that was not before our time; created for us to give perpetual pleasure, to bring new joy, and raise fresh feeling for all of us who have eyes and see, and for all who have ears and hear.

  First and foremost, then, Rossetti was not British. Whether he was born in England, or whether he visited or did not visit Italy, matters little. His nature was a transplantation, not merely from Italy, but from Mediæval Italy. He breathed time with the pulse of perhaps the most cosmopolitan city in the world, but he lived centuries away…. He was with us, but not of us. Without effort, almost without consciousness, we associate him with Madonnas, illumined manuscripts, altar-pieces, and cloisters where work was done not so much for earth as for heaven, where there were no such drums and trumpets and journals, where art was so much nature that it was praise and prayer, uninfluenced by private opinion made public, by the coins of a realm, a ribbon of honour, or the initials of an Academy however Royal—an example surely is the fortified manner of his purpose and work which many of us might follow with personal and public advantage. His devotion to his art, his abnegation, his patient waiting for that tide which did not seem to have a flood, and his endurance of what after all was but a local reputation—his whole work in short was a vitalised reproach to much of the paragraph literature and art abroad, and he had, must have had, a greatness of soul worthy the grove which harboured the much enduring Carlyle and the faintless George Eliot.

  On Thursday I managed to get to the Rossetti exhibition in Savile Row. If you care for my opinion, it is that the pictures are horrors, without a single merit. Layard calls them “women with cadaverous bodies and sensual mouths.” I say, that part look as if they were going to be hanged, wringing their hands and poking out their chins—and others look as if they had been hanged, and were partially decomposed. It is disgraceful to hear so much nonsense talked by people who know nothing of art, but it is exactly those who are the most presumptuous. People don’t talk law to lawyers, or medicine to doctors, but their conceit about art is incredible.

  To summarise roughly his achievement purely as a painter, he must be said to have been a splendid but unequal colourist; draughtsman so imperfect that it is only in a few of his pictures that his failure in this respect is not painful, despite the poetry of their intention; and that his sense of composition was equally defective and painful also in his larger works, but it was to a great extent redeemed by the finely decorative arrangement of accessories.

  It is in the earlier work of Rossetti that the true vindication of his fame will ultimately be found, work executed without reference to the public, and for the present somewhat eclipsed in importance by the more disputable achievement of later years…. Rossetti influenced most powerfully those who were at the time best prepared to receive his influence—men who could distinguish the newly-discovered principles of his art from its imperfections, and who, feeling deeply the worth of what he followed, knew also the difficulties which he had to encounter in the quest, and could therefore make the right allowance for all defect in the result. To his individual fame as an artist the long interval that has passed between the execution of his best work and its publication to the world has doubtless been a grave disadvantage. On a sudden, and with scarce any time for preparation, we are asked to take the measure of a man who brings a new message of beauty, and who brings it encumbered with certain imperfections of style and practice such as the least inspired members of our school can now find a way to avoid.

  The Rossetti note is the note of originality, the note of artistic creation. He invented his own style in poetry as surely as Shelley invented his; he invented his own style in painting as surely as Titian invented his; he invented his own new type of female beauty as surely as Lionardo invented his. Hence it is that, apart from his own direct personal achievements, Rossetti’s reflected influence throughout the entire world of English taste has been as potent almost as the influence of Darwin throughout the entire world of English thought. Not only in our poetry and our painting, but in our decoration, our household furniture—even in our taste for blue china and in the binding of our books, may the spirit of Rossetti be traced directly or indirectly. Whether this influence is to be a permanent force or a fugitive fashion may be a disputable point, but beyond all disputation is its present potency.

  In the future, Rossetti will stand less as a painter-poet than as the leader of the great artistic movement of England in the nineteenth century; his work will be regarded and prized more for what it effected than for its intrinsic merit. As we get a little further removed in time from the controversies which have raged round the modern schools of poetry and painting it will be seen that this was the central figure of the combat, his hand raised the standard round which the foemen rallied.

  In Rossetti’s pictures we find ourselves in the midst of a novel symbolism—a symbolism genuine and deeply felt as that of the fifteenth century, and using once more birds and flowers and stars, colours and lights of the evening or the dawn, to tell of beauties impalpable, spaces unfathomed, the setting and resurrection of no measurable or earthly day.

  He painted with the highest truth that is consistent with beauty. His is not the vulgar realism which copies just what it sees, but the artistic realism of a Greek statue as compared with the first chance model. It is affirmed, moreover, that he suggests varied thought, the only meaning I can attach to the words “symbolically suggestive.” Entering, then, the rooms where Mr. Rossetti’s pictures hang, with these instructions as to what we ought to find there, what is it that we see? I, for my own part, see, first of all, monotony; the same face, the same stare, nearly the same attitude, on every wall. I leave aside for the moment the value of these things in themselves, and note only that they do not vary. To me that seems at once, and completely destructive to Mr. Rossetti’s claim to be considered other than a most limited artist…. There are variations of degree according to the date of the picture, but never differences of kind…. Nothing in Mr. Rossetti’s pictures is, however, so interesting as the enquiry why we should be called on to admire them. Not, be it observed, because they are good works, and because he painted as other artists the wholesome beauty of the world; but because, in spite of acknowledged faults, weaknesses, and affectations, he has something to say which no other man has said. What that message is nobody tells us.

  His art is as remote from realism on the one hand, as it is from commonplace artistic fiction on the other; it is at once acutely original, and almost exclusively poetical and imaginative…. Rossetti was essentially romantic: I have even heard him express a doubt whether familiar themes and surroundings, and every-day passions and affections, were capable in the modern world of yielding effective material to art at all. At any rate his own instincts lead him irresistibly to the choice of material of an opposite kind; and if his work differs from that of other romantic artists, it is chiefly in that he was more than they were to the manner born. In the midst of the Nineteenth Century he belonged by nature rather than by effort to the Middle Age, the age when colors of life are most vivid and varied, and of the sense of supernatural agencies most alive. Dante Rossetti was thus truly and not artificially akin to the master after whom he was named. His genius resembled that of the real Dante, not indeed in strength, yet in complexion. He had the same cast and tendency of imagination as inspired the poet of the “Vita Nuova” to embody all the passions and experiences of the human heart in forms of many-coloured personification and symbol: he was moreover driven by something like the same unrelaxing stress and fervour of temperament, so that even in middle age, which he had almost reached when I first knew him, it seemed scarcely less true to say of Rossetti than of Dante himself, that

	“Like flame within the naked hand,
	His body bore his burning heart.”

  The companionship of Rossetti and myself soon brought about a meeting with Millais, at whose house one night we found a book of engravings of the frescoes in the Campo Santo at Pisa. It was probably the finding of this book at this special time which caused the establishment of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Millais, Rossetti, and myself were all seeking for some sure ground, some starting point for our art which would be secure, if it were ever so humble. As we searched through this book of engravings, we found in them, or thought we found, that freedom from corruption, pride, and disease for which we sought. Here there was at least no trace of decline, no conventionality, no arrogance. Whatever the imperfection, the whole spirit of the art was simple and sincere—was, as Ruskin afterwards said, “eternally and unalterably true.” Think what a revelation it was to find such work at such a moment, and to recognize it with the triple enthusiasm of our three spirits. If Newton could say of his theory of gravitation, that his conviction of its truth increased tenfold from the moment in which he got one other person to believe in it, was it wonderful that, when we three saw, as it were, in a flash of lightning, this truth of art, it appealed to us almost with the force of a revolution? Neither then nor afterwards did we affirm that there was not much healthy and good art after the time of Raphael; but it appeared to us that afterwards art was so frequently tainted with this canker of corruption that it was only in the earlier work we could find with certainty absolute health.

  The religion of Rossetti’s art lies certainly in its spirit rather than in its particular subjects. It is above all things, as Mr. Ruskin says, “romantic” art, as distinct from classical art like Leighton’s or Poynter’s.

  All these paintings, and many other productions, are masterpieces; but they are the fruit of a mind which always worked, and could only work, alone. No painter owes less to the influence of either contemporary or past art; and whatever they may lose by the rejection or lack of that influence, they evidence a nature strong enough to both conceive and construct an art of its own. Each is choice and rare, or splendid, in inventive colour; and, however odd the drawing sometimes is, the thought or emotion is always vividly given.

  His inability to grapple with the technicalities of painting was especially unfortunate, inasmuch as it encouraged him to evade them by confining himself to single figures, whose charm was mainly sensuous, while his power, apart from the magic of his colour, resided principally in his representation of spiritual emotion. The more spiritual he was the higher he rose, and the highest of all in his Dante pictures, where every accessory and detail aids in producing the impression of almost supernatural pathos and purity.

  While the then better-known members of the Brotherhood were enduring a ruthless persecution in public, and achieving large measures of renown, Rossetti was taking his part in the strife, but in a quite different manner, and, as suited his idiosyncrasy, addressing a small but choice and potent circle of men of light and movement. It was not, in fact, until his death many years after that the true position of the artist of “The Beloved” and “Proserpine,” of “Dante’s Dream” and a score more pictures of the highest art and rarest inspiration was manifest to “the general,” and Rossetti’s unique honours as painter-poet and poet-painter were acknowledged as they are now.

  Any adequate attempt to review the characteristics of Rossetti’s own wonderful achievement, and his influence on art at large, would necessarily be lengthy; no brief note would suffice to convey a true appreciation of the originality and the power of this wayward and self-centered genius. The influence he exercised on contemporaries and successors was by no means inconsiderable, in spite of his life having been spent outside the world of art and letters. The position that he occupied in the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood has already been alluded to, and what share was actually his in their vivifying crusade may never be really known. But it is admitted that it was he who had the penchant for propaganda and proselytising, that his was the fiery soul that was the source of so much poetic aspiration; without him the Brotherhood as such would probably not have come into being, and the existence of the Brotherhood converted the sporadic (and possibly futile) efforts, which the others would doubtless have singly made on their own initiative, into a systematic attempt to introduce a healthier tendency into our national art, an attempt which has had the most far-reaching results. The intense activity of to-day, in all branches of art, as compared with the lethargy and torpidity of fifty years ago, can be traced very largely to the stand made by these young men and their associates. But, besides the effect that Rossetti had on art, through Pre-Raphaelism, and besides the school of direct followers that have arisen inspired by his work (a group to be treated of later), there is the influence of his own strange ideals and his unique achievements to be traced in the work of many and diverse artists.

  The year 1848 marks his transition artistically from boyhood to adolescence, a gracious adolescence adorned by many qualities that we too often look for in vain in an age of tricky cleverness and pernicious skill; an adolescence in which depth of feeling and height of aspiration transcended the power of accomplishment, and no artificial or showy mannerisms obscured the honest endeavour and deep-set seriousness of purpose that characterized, not him alone, but the whole of the small band of workers with which he presently became associated.

  We may call Rossetti a genius; we cannot call him a master…. Rossetti never mastered his instrument. He had a great gift of sympathy, and great talents of expression; but for mastery he substituted an erratic handling of his material. His one settled habit as a painter was to attempt impulsively, ardently, or pertinaciously, to render whatever pleased him, without the supreme instinct for what his technique could accomplish…. One thing at least is certain. Rossetti’s must have been an impressive figure, or it would not now be a topic unto the second generation.

The Blessed Damozel, 1850

  This paradisal poem, “sweeter than honey or the honeycomb,” has found a somewhat further echo than any of its early fellows, and is perhaps known where little else is known of its author’s. The sweet intense impression of it must rest for life upon all spirits that ever once received it into their depths, and hold it yet as a thing too dear and fair for praise or price…. No poem shows more plainly the strength and wealth of the workman’s lavish yet studious hand.

  The nearest approach to a perfect whole is the “Blessed Damozel,” a peculiar poem, placed first in the book, perhaps by accident, perhaps because it is a key to the poems which follow. This poem appeared in a rough shape many years ago in the Germ, an unwholesome periodical started by the Pre-Raphaelites, and suffered, after gasping through a few feeble numbers, to die the death of all such publications. In spite of its affected title, and of numberless affectations throughout the text, the “Blessed Damozel” has great merits of its own, and a few lines of real genius. We have heard it described as a record of actual grief and love, or, in simple words, the apotheosis of one actually lost by the writer; but, without having any private knowledge of the circumstances of its composition, we feel that such an account of the poem is inadmissible. It does not contain one single note of sorrow. It is a “composition,” and a clever one.

  The “Blessed Damozel” is a very highly imaginative subject—as far removed indeed from “realism” in the vulgar sense as possible; and yet, in imagining it, the poet never seems to have lost sight for a moment of the colour and detail of his thought.

  For pathos, and purity, and mediævalism of the most exquisite kind, this poem may fitly be compared with the missal-paintings of Fra Angelico.

  “The Blessed Damozel” is perhaps the most complete vision of flesh and blood which ever was transported into the heavenly dominion; her arm warms the bar upon which she leans as she looks down from the sky to see her lover wandering forlorn on the earth. For this very reason, no doubt, as well as for the poetry, this poem achieved the conquest even of the general reader, to whose halting imagination so much help was given. The difficulties of framing a paradise which shall respond to the highest aspirations of the mind has been very largely acknowledged.

  Whether considered in itself according to its qualities of intense passion, spirituality, and imaginativeness, or as the work of a youth of eighteen, may be said to stand alone in modern poetry.

  Of Rossetti’s lyrical verse one poem has had the good or ill fortune to attain something like popularity,—a popularity due, it is to be feared, to its picturesque and quaint phraseology rather than to its high and beautiful imaginative quality. “The Blessed Damozel,” written at nineteen, remains one of the most captivating and original poems of the century,—a lyric full of bold and winning imagery and charged with imaginative fervour and glow; a vision upon which painter and poet seemed to have wrought with a single hand; a thing of magical beauty, whose spell is no more to be analyzed than the beauty of the night when the earliest stars crown it.

  Is the most spontaneous and convincing of all his shorter poems. It seems to have sprung straight from the heart of the boy-poet in a sort of prophetic rapture, ere he knew the sorrow which he sang, and which his song should ease, as the most perfect art can sometimes ease, in other souls, for generations to come. Its strength lies in the very acme of tenderness; its source in the purest strain of common human feeling—the passionate, insatiable craving of the faithful heart for the continuity of life and love beyond the tomb, and the deep sense of the poverty of celestial compromises to satisfy the mourner on either side of the gulf that Death has set between. Here again is the true romantic note—the insistence of the joy and glory of the physical world, the delight in the early manifestations of affection, and the awed, plaintive conflict of impatience with resignation under the mystery of parting and transition to an unknown state.

  Rossetti’s “Blessed Damozel” is not based upon the scientific knowledge of his time…. Rossetti is not in a condition to understand, or even to see the real, because he is incapable of the necessary attention; and since he feels this weakness he persuades himself, in conformity with human habit, that he does not wish to do what in reality he cannot do. “What is it to me,” he once said, “whether the earth revolves around the sun or the sun around the earth?” To him it is of no importance, because he is incapable of understanding it. It is, of course, impossible to go so deeply into all Rossetti’s poems as into the “Blessed Damozel;” but it is also unnecessary, since we should everywhere meet with the same mixture of transcendentalism and sensuality, the same shadowy ideation, the same senseless combinations of mutually incompatible ideas.

  Besides the touching emotion of the poem, the wonderful beauty and reach of its imagery, it has a melody sweeter and more sensitive than Rossetti ever attained afterward.

Sister Helen, 1870

  In “Sister Helen” we touch the key-note of Rossetti’s creative gift. Even the superstitions which forms the basis of the ballad owes something of its individual character to the invention and poetic bias of the poet. The popular superstitions of the Middle Ages were usually of two kinds only. First, there were those that arose out of a jealous Catholicism, always glancing towards heresy; and next there were those that laid their account neither with orthodoxy nor unbelief, and were purely pagan. The former were the offspring of fanaticism; the latter of an appeal to appetite or passion, or fancy, or perhaps intuitive reason directed blindly or unconsciously toward natural phenomena. The superstition involved in “Sister Helen” partakes wholly of neither character, but partly of both, with an added element of demonology.

  “Sister Helen” is a poem to which no extracts can do justice. It must be read as a whole. Each verse is practically inseparable from the other, and the slow accumulation of scarcely defined horror is part of the mystery and might of the poem. Slight as are the changes of the burden, they are weighty in significance, and the answers of the heroine, with their grave acquiescence in the soul’s death, which she knows is the price of her deeds, have dramatic force that is indescribable.

  In weirdness and pathos, tragic suggestion and word wizardry, this ballad is unsurpassed. Its forty-two short verses—originally only thirty-three—unfold the whole story of the wronged woman’s ruthless vengeance on her false lover as she watches the melting of the “waxen man” which, according to the old superstitions, is to carry with it the destruction, body and soul, of him in whose likeness it was fashioned. The innocent prattle and the half-ignorant narrative and the questioning of the “little brother,” who watches and reports the incidents attending the working of the charm that “sister Helen” has contrived, helps immensely in giving shape and strength to the poet’s conception; and the dirge-like refrain makes the ballad indeed a splendid example of what Mr. Theodore Watts has aptly, if somewhat pedantically, called “the renascence of wonder.”

  Of course the time must come when the poetry of England is melted down and merged into an anthology, and it is probable that the “Sister Helen,” as being the strongest emotional poem, as yet, in the language, will be among the most lasting works, and escape dissolution for a long time to come; perhaps will survive all change. And here a very remarkable fact thrusts itself before the mind; a representative one, which is that if Rossetti had written not another line besides this poem, his genius would have appeared all the greater: for lesser work is a fatal commentary on greater.

Jenny, 1870

  I just hear from mamma, with a pang of remorse, that you have ordered a copy of my Poems. You may be sure I did not fail to think of you when I inscribed copies to friends and relatives; but, to speak frankly, I was deterred from sending it to you by the fact of the book including one poem (“Jenny”) of which I felt uncertain whether you would be pleased with it. I am not ashamed of having written it (indeed, I assure you that I would never have written it if I thought it unfit to be read with good results), but I feared it might startle you somewhat.

  It is something very like morbidly gratified sexual sensuousness, too, that we discover in “Jenny,” a poem in which a young man “moralizes” a young woman of the town whom he has accompanied home from a place of amusement, and comments on her way of life and probable character and fate after the manner of Mr. Browning in his analytical moods. It is the fashion to say of such things, that, although it is difficult to see how the author contrived it, he has managed with consummate skill to avoid the intrinsic indelicacy of his subject. As a matter of fact, however, it may be doubted if the inherent delicacy is not just what he has not avoided; and whether all writers who practise this sort of morbid anatomy do not do something towards debauching the minds of a certain number of their readers. Such things tend, we imagine, to confound the distinction between morality and immorality, and have much the same effect as the prurient moral novels with which M. Feuillet, or the excellent M. Dumas fils occasionally buttresses the foundations of society.

  After reading it again and again, and ever willing to think the fault must lie with myself, I have each time come to the same conclusion, that the pathos Mr. Swinburne considers its distinctive quality is literary pathos, and not sprung in the first instance from a sorrowful heart or a deep personal sense of “the pity of it, the pity of it,” and that, in consequence, “a Divine pity” does not fill it. I am aware that such a judgment will seem to many absurd, nevertheless I still consider much of “Jenny” to be rather cold-blooded speculation, and the poem itself as a whole by no means entitled to rank as “great among the few greatest works of the artist.” This does not prevent it from being, in my opinion, still a fine poem, only I cannot admit what I feel to be an exaggerated claim for it.

  It is wisest to hazard at the outset all unfavorable comment by the frankest statement of the story of the poem. But the motif of it is a much higher thing. “Jenny” embodies an entirely distinct phase of feeling, yet the poet’s root impulse is therein the same as in the case of “The Blessed Damozel.” No two creatures could stand more widely apart as to outward features than the dream of the sainted maiden and the reality of the frail and fallen girl; yet the primary prompting and the ultimate outcome are the same. The ardent longing after ideal purity in womanhood, which in the one gave birth to a conception whereof the very sorrow is but excess of joy found expression in the other through a vivid presentment of the nameless misery or unwomanly dishonour.

  “Jenny,” perhaps, being cast in a more meditative form, lacks the poignancy and fervour of the utterance which comes, in “A Last Confession,” from the lips of the sinner himself instead of from the spectator merely, but it surpasses all contemporary studies of its kind in its bold and masterly handling of a difficult theme. Both, however, are distinct from the lyric poems in that their abruptness of movement and irregularity of structure are the abruptness and irregularity of quick dramatic thought, impatient of metrical elaboration, surcharging the poetic vehicle with subject matter; an effect which must not be confused with the ruggedness of the true ballad-form, whose broken music haunts the ear by its very waywardness and variety of rhythm, and gains its end by a studied artlessness the more exquisite for its apparent unconstraint.

King’s Tragedy, 1881

  Even Rossetti’s warmest admirers would hardly have given him credit for the power to grapple with a historic subject displayed in this remarkable work, perhaps his master piece in narrative poetry, even as “Cloud Confines” is the highest effort in the field of contemplative not to say philosophic verse.

  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.

  Is one of the most powerful of Rossetti’s poems.

  In “The King’s Tragedy” Rossetti was poaching on Scott’s own preserves, the territory of national history and legend. If we can guess how Scott would have handled the same story, we shall have an object lesson in two contrasted kinds of romanticism. Scott could not have bettered the grim ferocity of the murder scene, nor have equalled, perhaps, the tragic shadow of doom which is thrown over Rossetti’s poem by the triple warning of the weird woman. But the sense of the historical environment, the sense of the actual in places and persons, would have been stronger in his version.

House of Life

  This “House of Life” has in it so many mansions, so many halls of state and bowers of music, chapels for worship and chambers for festival, that no guest can declare on a first entrance the secret of its scheme. Spirit and sense together, eyesight and hearing and thought, are absorbed in splendor of sounds and glory of colours distinguishable only by delight. But the scheme is solid and harmonious; there is no waste in this luxury of genius: the whole is lovelier than its loveliest part. Again and again may one turn the leaves in search of some one poem or some two which may be chosen for sample and thanksgiving; but there is no choice to be made. Sonnet is poured upon sonnet, and song hands on the torch to song; and each in turn (as another poet has said of the lark’s note falling from the height of dawn),

“Rings like a golden jewel down a golden stair.”

There are no poems of the class in English—I doubt if there be any even in Dante’s Italian—so rich at once and pure. Their golden affluence of images and jewel-coloured words never once disguises the firm outline, the justice and chastity of form. No nakedness could be more harmonious, more consummate in its fleshy sculpture, than the imperial array and ornament of this august poetry. Mailed in gold as of the morning and girdled with gems of strange water, the beautiful body as of a carven goddess gleams through them tangible and taintless, without spot or default.

  Admirable as are his ballads, “The House of Life,” recording a personal experience transmuted by the imagination, is Rossetti’s highest achievement in verse. There are two other “sonnet-sequences,” and only two, in English poetry which can take rank beside it, “The Sonnets of Shakespere” and “Sonnets from the Portuguese.”

  “The House of Life,” described as a sonnet-sequence, is undoubtedly the noblest contribution in this form of verse yet made to our literature. It should be studied with Shakespeare’s sonnets and with Mrs. Browning’s “Sonnets from the Portuguese,” in order that its wealth of thought, its varied beauty of phrase, and its depth of feeling may be comprehended. It tells the same heart story, but in how different a key! The hundred and more sonnets which compose it are a revelation of the poet’s nature; all its ideals, its passions, its hopes and despairs, its changeful moods, are reflected there; and there, too, a man’s heart beats, in one hour with the freedom of a great joy, and in another against the iron bars of fate.

  We miss in “The House of Life” the spontaneity and simple charm of the early lyrics, though in recompense we gain the pleasure which comes from hearing a complex musical instrument played with mature mastership.

Sonnets

  Sonnets … unexampled in the English language since Shakespeare’s for depth of thought and skill and felicity of execution.

  Undoubtedly the greatest of living sonneteers…. Mr. Rossetti’s imaginative treatment is both spiritual and impassioned, the sensuous and the super-sensuous are inextricably blended, and when love is the theme of his utterances it is for the most part a love of which we know not the body from the soul. There is a noteworthy integrity in his love sonnets which gives them a peculiar interest and value. No element is wanting, none is unduly preponderant.

  Yet, if the qualities which I have attempted to describe as characteristic of Mr. Rossetti, lead him occasionally to fatigue us, and snare him in the pitfall of Johnsonian pomposity, these same qualities are the sources of his strength. It is by right of them that he never turns out a sonnet which is not according to his own conception perfected, and which we may not with confidence accept as stamped with his approval…. His sonnets are unrefreshing. We rise from them without exhilaration, without that sense of liberated oxygen, which is communicated by Keats, by Wordsworth, at their best. We almost invariably miss in them the feeling of reality, the freshness of the outer air, a quick and vital correlation to actual humanity. They are the cabinet productions of an artist’s intellect engrossed in self. So pungent is the aroma, so hot the colour, so loaded the design, so marked the melodies, that we long even for the wilding charm of weaker singers…. Those who still include Mr. Rossetti in what was called “the fleshly school,” can only do so by appealing to isolated phrases in his sonnets. In these, as it seems to me, some imperfect apprehension of the right relation of æsthetic language to very natural things, some want of taste in fine, led the poet to extend in habitual emphase of his style to details which should have been slurred over. His defined incisive way of writing fixes the mind repulsively on physical images and “poems of privacy.” The effect is vulgar and ill-bred. We shrink from it as from something nasty, from a discord to which education and good manners had rendered us uncomfortably sensible.

  Beautiful as some of Mr. Rossetti’s work is, his expression in the sonnets surely became obscure from over-involution, and excessive fioriture of diction. But then Rossetti’s style is no doubt formed considerably upon that of the Italian poets. One is glad, however, that, this time, at all events, the right man has “got the porridge.”

  One name, however, stands out from all others since Wordsworth and Mrs. Browning, like a pine tree out of a number of graceful larches. Dante Gabriel Rossetti is not only one of the great poets of the century, but the one English poet whose sonnet-work can genuinely be weighed in the balance with that of Shakespeare and with that of Wordsworth. No influence is at present more marked than his: its stream is narrower than that of Tennyson and Browning, but the current is deep, and its fertilizing waters have penetrated far and wide into the soil. The author of “The House of Life” thus holds a remarkable place in the literary and artistic history of the second Victorian epoch. No critic of this poet’s work will have any true grasp of it who does not recognize that “Rossetti” signifies that something of greater import than the beautiful productions of one man—the historian of the brilliant period in question will work in the dark if he is unable to perceive one of the chief well-springs of the flood, if he should fail to recognize the relationship between radical characteristics of the time and the man who did so much to inaugurate or embody them.

  Upon the sonnet he lavished the wealth of his imagination and the treasures of his research. Whatever words most noble, graceful, picturesque, or significant he could, by thought and research, add to his vocabulary were reserved for his sonnets. These he polished and recast with the same earnestness that he devoted to his pictures, and his youthful work was not seldom entirely re-shapen. The principle on which he wrote was that in each sonnet a thought should be crystallized and wrought into a gem.

  By nature and training he became possessed of great sympathy with the form and used it freely. The “Dark Glass” is one of his strongest, and in it as in many of his poems he paints love and life against a sombre background. While his sonnets are artistic, they do not linger in memory like more spontaneous utterances by Wordsworth, Milton, Keats, Mrs. Browning, etc. But it is doubtless unfair to compare him with such great poets. He was more painter than philosopher or singer, yet he felt keenly, and his lines often throb with stress and pain.

  Mr. Rossetti has written a larger number of noble sonnets than any other poet of our time. For this form he reserved the best of all his powers, and in it he achieved a success that will be absolutely unquestioned.

  These sonnets alone would suffice to insure the immortality of the poet; for they must be ranked no lower than with the greatest in the language,—with those of Shakespeare and of Milton, of Wordsworth and of Keats.

General

  I have at length had the pleasure of reading your manuscripts, but am still forced to be very brief. I hope the agreeableness of my remarks will make amends for their shortness, since you have been good enough to constitute me a judge of powers of which you ought to have no doubt. I felt perplexed, it is true, at first, by the translations, which, though containing evidences of a strong feeling of the truth and simplicity of the originals, appeared to me harsh, and want correctness in the versification. I guess indeed that you are altogether not so musical as pictorial. But, when I came to the originals of your own, I recognized an unquestionable poet, thoughtful, imaginative, and with rare powers of expression. I hailed you as such at once, without any misgiving; and, besides your Dantesque heavens (without any hell to spoil them), admired the complete and genial round of your sympathies with humanity. I know not what sort of painter you are. If you paint as well as you write, you may be a rich man; or at all events, if you do not care to be rich, may get leisure enough to cultivate your writing.

  In no poems is the spontaneous and habitual interpenetration of matter and manner, which is the essence of poetry, more complete than in these. An original and subtile beauty of execution expresses the deep mysticism of thought which in some form and degree is not wanting certainly to any poets of the modern school, but which in Mr. Rossetti’s work is both great in degree and passionate in kind. Nor in him has it any tendency to lose itself amid allegory or abstractions; indeed, instead of turning human life into symbols of things vague and not understood, it rather gives to the very symbols the personal life and variety of mankind. No poem in this book is without the circle of this realizing mysticism, which deals wonderingly with all real things that can have poetic life given them by passion, and refuses to have to do with any invisible things that in the wide scope of its imagination cannot be made perfectly distinct and poetically real.

  Opinions must differ; but the prevailing opinion, we should say, will be that we have in Mr. Rossetti another poetical man, and a man markedly poetical, and of a kind apparently though not radically different from any other of our secondary writers of poetry, but that we have not in him a true poet of any weight. He certainly has taste, and subtlety, and skill, and sentiment in excess, and excessive sensibility, and a sort of pictorial sensuousness of conception which gives warmth and vividness to the imagery that embodies his feelings and desires. But he is all feelings and desires; and he is of the earth, earthy, though the earth is often bright and beautiful pigments; of thought and imagination he has next to nothing. At last one discovers, what has seemed probable from the first, that one has been in company with a lyrical poet of narrow range; with a man who has nothing to say but of himself; and of himself as the yearning lover, mostly a sad one, of a person of the other sex…. Considered as a lyrical poet pure and simple, a lyrical verse-making lover, apart from whatever praise or blame belongs to him as a Pre-Raphaelite in poetry whose Pre-Raphaelitism is its most obvious feature, it will be found that Mr. Rossetti must be credited with an intensity of feeling which is overcast almost always with a sort of morbidness, and which usually trenches on the bound of undue sensuousness of tone.

  He is distinctively a colourist, and of his capabilities in colour we cannot speak, though we should guess that they are great; for if there is any good quality by which his poems are specially marked, it is a great sensitiveness to hues and tints as conveyed in poetic epithet. These qualities, which impress the casual spectator of the photographs from his pictures, are to be found abundantly among his verses. There is the same thinness and transparence of design, the same combination of the simple and the grotesque, the same morbid deviation from healthy forms of life, the same sense of weary, wasting, yet exquisite sensuality; nothing virile, nothing tender, nothing completely sane; a superfluity of extreme sensibility, of delight in beautiful forms, hues, and tints, and a deep-seated indifference to all agitating forces and agencies, all tumultuous griefs and sorrows, all the thunderous stress of life, and all the straining storm of speculation. Mr. Morris is often pure, fresh, and wholesome as his own great model; Mr. Swinburne startles us more than once by some fine flash of insight; but the mind of Mr. Rossetti is like a glassy mere, broken only by the dive of some water-bird or the hum of winged insects, and brooded over by an atmosphere of insufferable closeness, with a light blue sky above it, sultry depths mirrored within it, and a surface so thickly sown with water-lilies that it retains its glassy smoothness even in the strongest wind…. We question if there is anything in the unfortunate “Poems and Ballads” quite so questionable on the score of thorough nastiness as any pieces in Mr. Rossetti’s collection. Mr. Swinburne was wilder, more outrageous, more blasphemous, and his subjects were more atrocious in themselves; yet the hysterical tone slew the animalism, the furiousness of epithet lowered the sensation; and the first feeling of disgust at such themes as “Laus Veneris” and “Anactoria,” faded away into comic amazement. It was only a little mad boy letting off squibs; not a great strong man, who might be really dangerous to society. “I will be naughty!” screamed the little boy; but, after all, what did it matter? It is quite different, however, when a grown man, with the self-control and easy audacity of actual experience, comes forward to chronicle his amorous sensations, and, first proclaiming in a loud voice his literary maturity, and consequent responsibility, shamelessly prints and publishes such a piece of writing as this sonnet on “Nuptial Sleep.”

  He is thoroughly at home among romantic themes and processes, while a feeling like that of Dante exalts the maturer portion of his emblematic verse…. Throughout his poetry we discern a finesse, a regard for detail, and a knowledge of color and sound, that distinguish this master of the Neo-Romantic school. His end is gained by simplicity and sure precision of touch. He knows exactly what effect he desires, and produces it by a firm stroke of color, a beam of light, a single musical note…. His lyrical faculty is exquisite; not often swift, but chaste, and purely English…. His verse is compact of tenderness, emotional ecstasy, and poetic fire. The spirit of the master whose name he bears clothes him as with a white garment.

  Mr. Dante G. Rossetti has written some sonnets which are probably entitled to rank with the best of their kind at any time, and one or two ballads of fierce, impassioned style, which seem as if they came straight from the heart of the old northern ballad world.

  Mr. Rossetti’s new volume is not versified pseudo-philosophy; nor rhetoric simulating passion; nor factitious simplicities; nor a mannered cleverness; nor a freshly discovered affectation. The best part of it is that rare and wonderful thing, mere poetry—clustered fruit full of the scent and colour of the sun. Such a gift of beauty brings to us for a season that audacity which a sudden accession to one’s wealth or power imparts; we seem to accept life on easier and larger terms…. The ballads in Mr. Rossetti’s volume show his craftsmanship on a larger scale than anything hitherto published.

  Mr. Rossetti’s poetry is contained in two volumes, one published in 1870, the other in 1881. To begin with the first volume, you cannot open it without being struck by the marked individuality of manner, and also by the signs of poetic power which meet you on the surface. When you have entered a little farther into the precinct, you become aware that you have passed into an atmosphere which is strange, and certainly not bracing—the fragrances that cross your path are those of musk and incense rather than of heather and mountain thyme. It takes an effort to get into the mood which shall appreciate this poetry—you require to get acclimatized to the atmosphere that surrounds you. And, as you proceed, you meet with things which make you doubt whether you would much desire the acclimatization. At the same time you are aware of the presence of genuine poetic power, even though you may be far from admiring some of its manifestations…. As to the substance of the first volume, the tone of sentiment which certainly predominates is the erotic. So we call it, for it has little in common with the pure and noble devotion which the best of our older poets have immortalized. This amatory or erotic sentiment is unpleasant in the poem called “Eden Bower, or Lilith;” it is revolting in the ballad of “Troy Town.” But the taint of fleshliness which runs through too many of the other poems reaches its climax in some of the twenty-eight sonnets, entitled “The House of Life.” These sonnets not only express, but brood over thoughts and imaginations which should not be expressed, or even dwelt on in secret thought. Not all the subtle association or elaboration of words, nor dainty imagery in which they are dressed, can hide or remove the intrinsic earthliness that lies at the heart of them, and one cannot imagine why—one cannot but regret that—they should even have been composed by a man of so much genius.

  If Mr. Woolner’s is thus a sculptor’s poem, Mr. Rossetti’s work is, as we have said, distinctively poet’s work; his poems and his pictures are a poet’s. Nevertheless, his own best art of words, has always enviously gained some beauty, some riches, some lovely power, from the habit which the use of colour and pencil must have kept alive in him—the habit which as children we all possess, and generally lose as we grow older and more literary—the indistinctive habit of making definite mental pictures. He has preserved this, and yet has foregone nothing of the literary and poetic power over thought and emotion.

  Much of his best work, as we perceive without these metaphors to guide us, is chryselephantine, overwrought with jewelry. Thought and feeling do not play with him like imps imprisoned in translucent gems. He works for them a gorgeous shrine of precious wood and oriental ivory, inlays it with glossy gold, and sets it round with jewels. The limpidity which distinguishes the best Italian sonnets, the fluidity of music evolved as though by some spontaneous effort, the harmony of language produced by simple sequences of fresh uncolored words, are not his qualities, any more than is the wayward grace of the true ballad. Elaboration is everywhere apparent. Rigidity, rather than elasticity, opaque splendour rather than translucency, determine the excellence of even his noblest achievement.

  He held in all things to the essential and not to the accidental; he preferred the dry grain of musk to a diluted flood of perfume. An Italian by birth and deeply moved by all things Italian, he never visited Italy; a lover of ritual and a sympathizer with all the mysteries of the Roman creed, he never joined the Catholic Church; a poet whose form and substance alike influenced almost all the men of his generation, he was more than forty years of age before he gave his verse to the public; a painter who considered the attitude of the past with more ardor and faith than almost any artist of his time, he never chose to visit the churches or galleries of Europe.

  His work is characterised by intellectual subtlety, calm dignity of emotional reference, and pungent ideal sympathy, rather than by depth and overflow of feeling and storm and majesty of passion; while it is marked by patient elaboration and exquisite grace of finish rather than by strength of structural design and massive grandeur of form and feature. It is by the assiduous cultivation of such powers as are clearly indicated by workmanship of this kind that Mr. Rossetti has at length proved himself to be one of the finest poetical artists in our literature, and particularly one of the few really great sonneteers…. The “House of Life” is a standing answer to those that carp at the sonnet on the ground of its mechanical limitations and its little narrowness and general futility. We may object to Mr. Rossetti’s method, we may feel that the hill air is an indispensable antidote to his moving and relaxing strains, we may say that he is simply wasting words for the sake of warm glow and rich colour; but all that will not affect the excellent structure and the undoubted vitality of these sonnets.

	Oh, master of mysterious harmony!
	Well hast thou proven to us the right divine
	To wear thy name. The glorious Florentine
	Had hailed thee comrade on the Stygian sea,—
	Exiled from haunts of men, and sad as he:
	And the strong angel of the inner shrine,—
	Stooped he not sometimes to that soul of thine,
	On messages of radiant ministry?
	Thy spiritual breath was the cathedral air
	Of the dead ages. Saints have with thee talked,
	As with a friend. Thou knewest the sacred thrills
	That moved Angelico to tears and prayer;
	And thou as in a daily dream has walked
	With Perugino midst his Umbrian hills.

  Not only had Rossetti more genuine romantic feeling than any man of this century, but more knowledge of romance.

  Rossetti’s luscious lines seldom fail to cast a spell.

  With the choice of two media, in the use of both of which he was equally proficient, Rossetti made naturally frequent experiments as to which was the better adapted to his powers. To this moment the question remains unanswered. Unlike some poets, however, who have employed verse for the purpose of illustrating problems, polemical and metaphysical, with the result that they are regarded as poets among philosophers and as philosophers among poets, Rossetti has been received with enthusiasm in both capacities by both poets and painters. It may, indeed, be said that he is a painter’s painter, and a poet’s poet.

  Dante Rossetti wrote as he painted, aiming by the greatest possible expenditure of labour to obtain the most purely artistic result. The end justified the means. Some, not all, of his sonnets may be censured as too pictorial, and thus deficient in the grave simplicity of thought befitting the sonnet; but as a writer of ballads, some of quite epical proportions, he is absolutely unrivalled, and his lyrics either exhibit the novel effect of an Italian graft upon English literature or are entirely without pattern or precedent. The very exquisiteness of his poetry nevertheless limited the sphere of his influence on the world at large, which he had ample power to have moved if his æsthetic conscience would have permitted.

  In endeavoring to do justice to Rossetti it must be remembered that, though born and bred in England, he was an Italian by blood and sympathy. His acquaintance with Englishmen and English books was by no means wide. Love, the constant theme of his art, is in some of his most important poems, not the English love whose stream is steady affection and only its occasional eddies passion, and which, when disappointed, does not cease to be love though it becomes sorrow: but the Italian ardour, in perennial crisis, which stabs its rival and hates its object, if she refuses its satisfaction, as ardently as it worships her so long as there is hope. The limitations, also, which characterise Rossetti’s poetry belong to Italian poetry itself. There is little breadth in it, but much acuteness. It is therefore quite unfair to try an essentially Italian poet, like Rossetti, by comparing his works with the classical poetry of a nation which, for combined breadth and height, far surpasses the poetry of all other languages present and past, with the doubtful exception of the Greek. The English language itself is not made for Italian thought and passion. It has about four times as many vowel sounds as Italian and a corresponding consonantal power; that is to say, it differs from the Italian about as much as an organ differs from a flute. Rossetti uses little besides the flute-notes of our English organ; and, if he had made himself complete master of those notes, it would have been the most that could have been expected of him.

  Such was Rossetti as he appeared to me. I am conscious of no sins of commission in what I have set down, but must plead guilty to not a few sins of omission. The responsibility of telling the world truly and fully what manner of man Rossetti was shall not be mine. Nevertheless, I am sure that on the whole Rossetti would gain by the revelation. Looking back upon him over the interval since his death, with all painful feelings softened out, and nothing left to think of but the man as he lived, I seem to see him as a vivid personality, irresistible in his fascination, powerful even in his weakness, and with such light and force of genius as I have never encountered in any one else whatever.

  Rossetti is the most notable of all our poet-painters, inasmuch as he was so great a master in both the arts. A point in connection with Rossetti’s work may be noted, for a general misunderstanding exists concerning it. It is thought that Rossetti made poetry subservient to painting. This is erroneous. Rossetti’s poems, when they are concerned with his pictures at all, are not mere adjuncts of the pictures; they may, and indeed do, help us to see deeper into his thoughts and creations; but neither is a mere auxiliary of the other, or an exponent of the other’s meaning.

  The trick Rossetti has in representing both mankind and material objects in a pictorial or conventional form; his unconscious assumption in his poetry that the reader is conversant with the principles and even some of the technical aspects of art, is sometimes vexatious. But we may laugh now at the petulancy of the “Quarterly Reviewer” who wrote of Rossetti’s characters, “The further off they get from Nature, the more they resemble mere pictures, the better they please …” the poet of his school. We have at least learned to be grateful for Rossetti’s picture-poems. The distance from which we look back upon his poetry is too short yet to allow us to see it in just perspective; but already his name has won an honoured place among the poets of the century.

  Nowhere in Time’s vista, where the forms of great men gather thickly, do we see many shapes of those who, as painters and as poets, have been alike illustrious. Among the few to whom, equally on both accounts, conspicuous honours have been paid, none is superior to Rossetti, of whose genius doubly exalted the artists say that in design he was pre-eminent, while, on the other hand, the most distinguished poets of our age place him in the first rank with themselves. As to this prodigious, if not unique, distinction, of which the present age has not yet, perhaps, formed an adequate judgment, there can be no doubt that with regard to the constructive portion of his genius Rossetti was better equipped in verse than in design.

  He brought us a new message in his poetry; but, with all his ornate ability and technical skill, for me it has little charm, and what is poetry—or painting either—without charm? I think he might have remembered Sidney’s “Look into thy heart, and write.” His “I grudge Wordsworth every vote he gets” is significant.

  Weird and spiritual are indeed often confused in Rossetti. It is easy enough to read, between the lines of his glowing emotion and intense visual imaginings, his genuine creed; and that creed is simple. A solemn sense of vast encompassing Mystery, a conviction of the unfathomable depths of human passion,—these are its factors.

  In another very famous poem, “Eden Bower,” which treats of the pre-Adamite woman Lilith, her lover the serpent of Eden, and her revenge on Adam, the litany refrain of “Eden Bower’s in flower,” and “And O the Bower and the hour,” are introduced alternately after the first line in forty-nine strophes. As a matter of course, between these absolutely senseless phrases and the strophe which each interrupts, there is not the remotest connection. They are strung together without any reference to their meaning, but only because they rhyme. It is a startling example of echolalia.

  Those who read them will carry away some clearly marked characteristics of his poetry, one of the most obvious being a tendency towards realism. This is only to be looked for in one whose pre-Raphaelite ideas were so pronounced with regard to painting which in him we know was so closely allied to his poetry that it has been said it is questionable whether he would not have done better to paint his poems and write his pictures, so sensuous are the former, so intellectual the latter…. A third feature easily recognised in his poetry is his precision of touch, power of condensation, and emphasis. This is especially remarkable in his “Sonnets,” the form his verse so often took. Another of his chief characteristics in writing was his fastidiousness in the selection of words. He disliked so heartily anything slipshod or slovenly, or wanting in concentration, that he put off publishing anything till he had matured, corrected, recorrected, and altered it so that he himself in several cases never could decide as to the better of two words or expressions. In one of his longer poems, “Dante at Verona,” there seems to be a faint shadow of the spirit of Browning, though Rossetti is too original to be called a disciple of any other poet.

  However thick may be the mist which in places covers his poetry, when he writes in prose his thoughts and the words in which they are set forth are as clear as day.

  Rossetti takes his place in English literature as one of the six major poets of the later Victorian era, and as the oldest of the sub-group of three associated with the artistic revival vaguely known as Pre-Raphaelitism…. He possessed in an extraordinary degree both richness of imagination, and the power to pack a world of meaning into one pregnant and melodious phrase. But both his pictorial faculty and his intellectual force were tempered by a strain of mysticism, for which he has been charged with obscurity by hard-headed and dull-witted readers. He was at once the most spirited and the most material of poets; and the accusation of sensuality from which he was made to suffer could only result from inability to see more than one side of the Druid shield of his poetical personality.

  Rossetti is a poet whose work illustrates how essential breadth of view and philosophical comprehension of the world are to the highest literary worth. Here is an artist in words whose strictly artistic gifts have rarely been equalled. His ballads, notably the “Bride’s Prelude” and “Rosemary,” show him master of a weird, haunting verbal music. His sonnets show a phrasal power of weight and noble simplicity. His imagination pictures things in the concrete. He sees the scenes in the magic globe as distinctly as the girl who gazed into its cloudy depths. His conception of love as a spiritual energy transfused through the earthly passion, and, giving it elevation and immortality, shows that he comprehended, instinctively, at least, one great principle. But what shall we say of a man who believes that the world of Dante’s day is preferable to the world of to-day, who has apparently never heard of the discovery of the conservation of energy nor of the main outlines of evolution, and who thinks the form of a chair or the pattern of a brocade more important and interesting than the struggle of humanity towards higher things. His world, as it ought to be, is simply a beautiful world, beautiful in form and color and old association, but without the life of conflict. It is a picturesque rather than a beautiful world which is the ideal to which he refers for commentary on the world around him.

  In his simplicity we get a corresponding lack of simplicity and a passion for the details that render the greatest possible suggestion and association. The value of each word as an interpreter of esoteric meaning is weighed, and he had the zest of Flaubert in seeking the unique epithet to express his idea with more than Flaubert’s subtlety of sense…. In his sonnets his wealth of imagery is most striking, and to many minds obstrusive.

  So far as this mysticism is genuine and heartfelt, it works upon those even who have no disposition for mysticism. But in reading Rossetti and his imitators one seldom loses the feeling that they are addressing those whose inclination will tend in that direction. They cunningly assert in their poems all kinds of seraphic allusions in which they do not believe. The real Pre-Raphaelites, that is, the painters before Raphael, believed in their pictures; but one does not receive this impression from the English Pre-Raphaelites and poets. It is artificial artlessness, the most unsatisfactory thing both in life and in all art. Another peculiarity distinguishing Rossetti is his use of the refrain so common in popular poetry. But in him we recognize at once its misuse, we see that it is mere child’s play.