Again, among the latest of Rossetti’s unfinished works, we have the illustration of another passage in the “Vita Nuova,” telling of Dante’s mourning for his lady’s death. “La Donna della Finestra” (“The Lady of the Window”), better known as “Our Lady of Pity,” represents the beautiful woman who looked down on Dante from a window when, as he passed weeping through the streets, and fearing lest the passers-by should mock him, he glanced up, craving for some sign of sympathy, and was consoled by her calm and pitying gaze. Sketches for this design were made in several media, but the head in the unfinished painting at Birmingham is the most perfect of the series, and in fact ranks among the finest of the female heads in all Rossetti’s single-figure pictures. The artist has caught with rare felicity the expression so acutely described by the poet:
“Whereupon she, after a pitying sigh,
Her eyes directed towards me with that look
A mother casts on a delirious child.”
All the depth, all the tenderness, all the heroic strength of a divine sorrow that sees the end of sorrow, shines in this full-souled face. It is the ideal of the highest womanhood, and indeed of the highest humanity; of the love that has attained to be godlike, redeeming the world by infinite compassion; a love that “hopeth all things and endureth all things,” and in whose steadfast courage lies the conquering principle of the life to be. It is the companion picture—and in some respects it is a nobler, healthier version—of “The Blessed Damozel,” leaning from the bar of heaven to console the mourner on the earth below. The love that can so take hold of immortality, bring comfort even from the gates of death, and bridge over, by the sweet persistence of its ministry, by the passionate reality of its inspiration, the gulf between the physical and the spiritual world, is the love which of old was the source of the “Vita Nuova,” and which springs anew in our own age through “Our Lady of Pity” and “The Blessed Damozel.” In such designs Rossetti has restored to us all that was best in the mediæval thought of womanhood,—adding the “ever-motherly” to the “ever-womanly” of the Hellenic model, and the Divine Motherhood to the Divine Fatherhood of the Christian ideal; and enriched it with the whole wealth of psycho-sensuous beauty brought over from the region of romance. And in this consummation is justified the verdict of Ruskin: that “Rossetti was the chief intellectual force in the establishment of the modern romantic school in England.”
CHAPTER VIII.
THE POETRY OF DANTE ROSSETTI.
The “Pre-Raphaelite” in Literature—The Complexity of Talent in an Age of Re-birth—The Restoration of Romance in England—The Latin and the Saxon in Rossetti—Latin Diction for the Sonnets as Reflective Poetry—Saxon Diction for the Ballads as Dramatic Poetry—“The House of Life”—Treatment of Romantic Love—Illustrations of Sonnet Structure—Miscellaneous Lyrics—“The Portrait,” “The Stream’s Secret,” “Dante at Verona,” “The Staff and Scrip”—The Ballads—“The White Ship,” “The King’s Tragedy,” “Sister Helen,” “Rose Mary,” “The Bride’s Prelude,” “The Blessed Damozel”—“A Last Confession”—“Jenny”—Relation of Rossetti’s Poetry to his Painting.
The poetry of Dante Gabriel Rossetti lies apart from the main current of contemporary verse, both in its highly specialized quality of thought and language, and in the conditions and circumstances of its production. Inasmuch as he followed openly the profession of a painter, pursuing poetry, for the most part, as a recreative rather than a principal study (though never with less seriousness than his accepted vocation), and publishing his first volume of original poems in his forty-second year, he is exempt to some extent from the standards of criticism applied to him whose creative energies are concentrated in the field of literature. Whether Rossetti’s genius, as he himself believed, found its highest and most perfect embodiment in poetry rather than in painting,—whether the essential qualities of his art will be more evident to posterity in the modest volume of his collected poems than in the pictures now dispersed through England and America—is still an open question. It may, however, be admitted that his mastery of the verbal medium was almost always more complete, his discipline in metrical structure more thorough, and his natural habit of diction more facile, than any skill which he attained in brush and pencil. To estimate his final influence upon contemporary thought in the one realm as against the other is yet more difficult than to assess the relative merit of his actual work in either sphere: so intimately was the poet incarnate in the painter; so largely did the painter’s vision inspire and dominate the poet.
But it would be a poor analysis that should divide too finely the interwoven threads of a radiant and many-coloured genius. In an age of intellectual re-birth, of artistic and social revolution, the re-adjustment of forces and functions in the ethical and æsthetical realms is apt to produce a strange complexity of talent, not always beneficial to a single art, not always well for the diversely endowed artist, but often tending to the unification of many activities into one effective stream of purpose, moved by the impulse that infused the nation with a Time-Spirit potent for immortal things. Such a combination of talent in single personalities, in a period of rare national fertility in scholarship and creative power, reveals at the same time the basic unity of the æsthetic life and its inseparable interdependence with the moral ideal. Michaelangelo, at the zenith of the Italian Renaissance, standing at the parting of the ways, gathered up, as it seemed, the several arts into his representative genius, and left to the land that was soon to swamp the æsthetic spirit in the mire of a materialistic decadence the threefold heritage of his painting, his sculpture, and his song. Rossetti, at the zenith of the English Renaissance, drew a twofold inspiration from the struggle of the modern world, and left the double dower of painting and of poetry, to urge the coming generation to the higher issues of fine art, or to stand, the witness of rejected ideals to ages recalcitrant to the vision and the impulse of to-day.
For the first greatness of Rossetti’s poetry is that it assumes for ever the reality and the immanence of a spiritual—and more—a moral world. Not that he ever misuses the vehicles of art as tools of philosophy, or stoops to a didactic application of æsthetic truth. But his art is all moral (as Mr. Ruskin would put it) because it is all fine art. And the moral purpose of art is the better secured when art is trusted to effect that purpose in its own way. The consciously didactic poet is less sure to mould the will and character of a people, than he the form and substance of whose utterance are so perfected in truth and virility of thought, in majesty and grace of speech, as to be a fit oblation to his own ideal. Not “how can I best teach others and influence them aright?” but “how can I best express the highest things I know and feel?” is the self-examination of the true artist. Rossetti’s poetry is self-expressive, self-revealing to the very heart’s core. The ultimate test of poetry is not “what did this man intend to teach us?” but “of what sort is the manhood here revealed? what are the visions by which it lived? what the ideals in which it grew? Is such a soul’s experience wide, deep, typical, and profitable to the rest of mankind?”