Dante Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelite movement

by Esther Wood

In applying such a test to the writings of Rossetti, it is necessary to distinguish between what may be roughly termed the “personal” and the “impersonal” poems. In the one class, supremely exemplified by the “House of Life” sonnets, but including also “Dante at Verona,” “The Stream’s Secret,” “The Portrait,” and many of the shorter lyrics, the personal note of love or grief, of memory or hope, is wholly dominant; the poet’s soul is absorbed with its individual being, and sees in all the life around him the illustration and interpretation of his own. In the other class, in the great romantic ballads, in “Rose Mary” and “The Blessed Damozel,” in “The White Ship” and “The King’s Tragedy,” in “The Bride’s Prelude” and “Sister Helen,” the imagination takes a higher and a larger range; the one soul interprets others, waiting not to be interpreted. The art becomes impersonal in this sense only—that the thought of self is merged in the full and immense life of humanity, laying hold of the universal consciousness through its own initiative experience; the heart beats with the world’s heart, shares its eternal struggles, contributes to its eternal growth; and the spirit knows itself one fragment of an infinite whole. In such a sphere the art remains the more vitally personal, in that the poet brings the mysteries of existence, the abiding problems and realities of the conscious world, to the touchstone, as it were, of his own spirit, and submits himself thereby to the more crucial test,—of how he can interpret humanity to man, and make more clear the knowledge, more possible the realization, of his highest ideals.

With this general division of the subject-matter of Rossetti’s poetry, the classification of its metrical cast and forms of diction will be singularly parallel. Most of his finest compositions might be distinguished as purely Saxon or pre-eminently Latin poems; and it is notable that the more intimately subjective and analytic the thought within, the more persistently does it assume the Latin garb; while as the imagination ranges from the introspection of the hyper-conscious self, and finds, on the heights of common human feeling and aspiration, a larger and a freer air, the mode passes into the more keen and rarified Saxon speech. No other English poet has resolved the breadth and simplicity of the Gothic, and the depth and intensity of the Italian habit of expression, into such distinctive poetic vehicles. But at the same time few have blended the diverse elements of the modern English tongue into the harmony and sonority with which Rossetti’s music thrills when he tempers the sharper Saxon with a deep undertone of polysyllabic song; or stirs the languorous pulses of a sonnet with some swift cadence of familiar words. He had the finest perception of national and racial properties of form and rhythm; and discerning the characteristics of the poetry of action in the literature of the north, and the poetry of reflection in the literature of the south, he cast his great historical lyrics in the highest narrative—that is to say, the ballad form; and chose the sonnet—the most remote, chastened, and exclusive vehicle—for the meditative, and yet sensuous, self-delineative love-poetry.

These broad generalizations, however, cannot be closely pressed upon the entire sequence of Rossetti’s poems. The exigencies of the English language alone elude their literal application. They will rather serve to illustrate the duality of his endowments, and the singular power of his genius both to conserve and specialize the characteristics of his Italian heritage, and also to waive them in the Saxon mode as utterly as though the latter were more native to his tongue.

Nor does such a superficial distinction affect the spiritual qualities which pervade Rossetti’s poetry as a whole. From first to last, in dramatic description or narrative, in sonnet-argument or meditative questioning, his verse remains full-charged with the very essence of romance. As a poet, he is neither less nor more Pre-Raphaelite than as a painter. The vivid and intense simplicity of his Saxon diction, the verbal lightnings of his ballad-style, seem to correspond with the tone and method of his water-colour painting, and the more laboured splendour of the sonnets with the properties of his work in oils. Nor is it difficult to detect an analogy between that stage of his painting in which the pristine lucidity of expression was partially lost in the painful tension of his later thought, and the tendency of some few of his sonnets towards decadence into the over-laborious and the obscure. Yet if by “Pre-Raphaelite” we understand that fusion of the naïve mysticism of romance with austere Platonic Hellenism which we discern in the best Renaissance art, Rossetti never falls in spirit from that standard of beauty and truth; and rarely lapses, through the very richness and fecundity of the language at his command, into the redundant verbiage towards which his sensuous imagery was easily led. It has remained for a brother-poet of the romantic revival to cultivate a more marvellous dexterity of rhyme and rhythm, and to develop the technical resources of our language to the utmost limits of intelligible song. The lyrics of Mr. Swinburne, like the superb decorative extravagances of the later Renaissance, represent that culmination of mastery over the forms of expression wherein to-day, as of yore, the purity of the thought is lost in the splendour of the setting, and poetic power wastes itself in a magic facility of verse.

The poetry of Rossetti, modern as it is in its passionate grasp of human interests, its deep insight into present and perpetual things, links itself nevertheless to an English past; takes up, as it were, the dropped threads of Elizabethan glory; re-inspires the circling breath of life which passed round Europe in the fifteenth century, kindling England from the fires of re-awakened Italy in the golden age of song. It has already been pointed out by one of Rossetti’s biographers that “the malign influence over our literature in post-Shakespearean times has been French.” It was reserved for a second Renaissance, heralded by Chatterton and Blake, led by Shelley, Keats, and Coleridge, and culminated by Dante Rossetti, to blot out two centuries of foreign tradition and control, and take us back to the broad simplicity and dignity of Shakespeare’s England.

Our reiteration, therefore, of the term “Pre-Raphaelite” in approaching Rossetti’s work as a poet, leads us to expect, not mysticism merely, but a certain robust sensuousness, as of Pagan origin, in his interpretation of life and destiny. The romantic temper in its highest manifestations, absorbing and transfiguring, rather than conflicting with, the classic ideals, implies much more than receptivity to newer beauty and truth. It has a moral basis and an intellectual range: it apprehends the spiritual world as something closely bound up with familiar things: it finds the human soul striving for expression through material forms: it recognizes the divine possibilities of individual and social life, the force and responsibility of personal character, and the solemnity of the choice between good and evil daily made by man.

But the controversy excited by Rossetti’s pictures has been neither more intemperate nor more significant than that which has raged around his poems;—interpreted by one section of his critics as a pæan of sensuality and materialism, by another as the most spiritual and chastened love-poetry of the age. The laureate of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood indeed summed up, in what now affords but one volume of original verse, the inmost vicissitudes of a spirit so rare and rich of vision as to transcend at once the canons of conventional experience. But the personal note, in the self-delineative poems, is struck with a peculiar dignity of reserve; and even while the most sacred depths of individual consciousness are laid bare, the actual ego is never intruded upon the surface of the speech,—never portrays directly its own character, seldom describes its own sensations as Byron or Shelley would; but veils itself, even in the profusion of luminous imagery and searching analysis of thought and sense.

The eternal mysteries and sanctities of sexual love, conceived in its highest aspects and known as a revelation and a sacrament, afford the theme of nearly all Rossetti’s autobiographic poetry. The conditions of its production were ordained by the stern fate that linked him afar off to Dante among his countrymen, and near at hand to two brother-mourners among minor English bards—James Thomson and Philip Bourke Marston—in the sad fraternity of poets whom death has prematurely robbed of the beloved object that once inspired their song. The exalted spirituality which marks Rossetti’s treatment of this theme was doubtless largely due to the influence of Dante, and especially to the fruitful inspiration and discipline of the great literary task of his youth—the translation of the “Vita Nuova” and kindred examples of the early Italian poets—than which Rossetti could have hardly found a better preparation for his work that was to come.

Into his great sonnet-sequence, “The House of Life,” Rossetti poured the full passion of his mystic love,—partially inherent in his own sensuous, imaginative, and introspective nature, partially instilled at the feet of Dante; and learned—a bitter and a costly lesson—at the school of experience also; fraught with inestimable joy and sorrow to his own soul. “At an age,” says one writing of that hard probation, “when most men have outlived the romances of their youth, Rossetti was laying, in ‘The House of Life,’ the foundations of a new school of love-poetry.” He was in fact re-creating the æsthetic life of a nation; restoring to it, through the alembic of mediæval and Renaissance thought, the lost glory of all that was abidingly precious in the Platonic world. For in this wondrous cycle of sonnets is re-coined the whole language of ideal love. From the last echo of the “Vita Nuova” it takes up the same pure strain, and sings again the song of Dante for the Blessed Beatrice; hymning the very apotheosis of spiritual passion, and harmonizing once more in English poetry the intellectual with the sensuous world. Never, in the superb visions of “The House of Life”—in which the soul of man is pictured sojourning awhile during its solemn and fateful passage through eternity—never does the physical love become the stumbling-block to the spiritual, but always the key to it. The “body’s beauty” is only precious as the witness of the “soul’s beauty;” the physical bond is nothing if not the symbol of a spiritual affinity, a sacred kinship, fore-ordained, if not eternal, sealed in Heaven and consecrated to the divinest purposes; the sensuous rapture is but a symbolic worship,—“the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace” which to reject or betray is to profane the inmost sanctuary of the God of Love:

“Even so, when first I saw you, seemed it, love,