The work retrieved, the will regenerate,
This soul may see thy face, O Lord of death!”
This sense of destiny it is, this keen perception—characteristic of all true romance—of the reality of the spiritual world, the transiency of earthly joys and the insufficiency of external things, that gives the persistent undertone of melancholy to Rossetti’s love-sonnets, and more or less, indeed, to all his poetry. He does not, perhaps, sustain the peculiar minor key which the resigned and pensive fatalism of William Morris imparts. His grasp of fate is firmer, and with all his despair and doubt and grief he keeps a greater dignity of front than any of his surviving brother-poets. But his pessimism, if it must be called so, had its source in a hyper-sensitive and self-conscious personality, and was drawn, as one has said of Michaelangelo, from “the struggle of a strong nature to attune itself.” It is an absorbing struggle, on which to look with reverent reserve; carried on within the sorely-shaken spaces of a spirit too proud to vent itself, as Swinburne’s, in a broad and vigorous iconoclasm; too isolated to find relief, as the poet of “The Earthly Paradise” was presently to do, in the vanguard of a social revolution promising the heaven of his dreams. Nor could Rossetti’s wayward heart find permanent rest in the fervid religious faith which sustained the poetess of the Pre-Raphaelite movement—his sister, Miss Christina Rossetti.
Yet the sadness that tinges Rossetti’s verse is nearly always of a kind that chastens without enervating, and strengthens while it subdues. Intimately personal and subtly introspective as it is, it lifts us on to the highest planes of living poetry. We feel that the writer has learnt that first great lesson which indeed Rossetti himself has urged in these sonnets,—
“By thine own tears thy song must tears beget,
O Singer!”
And by that baptism of tears he rises to the rank of those whose individual loss and grief have blessed the world, as the death of Edward King blessed it in Milton’s “Lycidas,” and in far greater measure the death of Arthur Hallam blessed it in Tennyson’s “In Memoriam.” For while sometimes the expression of personal pain may be put into such perfect art as to afford in its very poignancy of feeling a sort of æsthetic consolation, the test of the highest poetic grief is that it shall lose the smart of personal injury in a strong sense of brotherhood with fellow-sufferers, and shall translate the revolt against individual pain into a wide compassion with the sorrows of a nation or of all humanity.
Nor can we avoid comparison of “The House of Life” with the two great kindred cycles of love-sonnets in the English language,—the sonnets of Shakespeare, and Mrs. Browning’s “Sonnets from the Portuguese;” the one celebrating a hopeless and desolating passion, the other a fortunate and consummated love. Rossetti touches both these precedents, in that he knew alike the depths and heights, the hell and heaven, of that passion of which the poets say,—
“All other pleasures are not worth its pain.”
He enjoyed happiness, and suffered despair, not merely in the outward circumstances of his love, but in a more subtle and irretrievable way. The fallacy dies hard, that leads us to imagine that the unvaryingly sad and gloomy natures are the supreme sufferers of the world. On the contrary, the acuteness of pain is measured by its victim’s capacity for mirth. And there are some natures so finely organized, so highly-strung, that even joy is almost painful to them. They cannot lose themselves in a moment’s rapture, but are beset with contrasts behind and before; are haunted with the cost of every ecstasy, and rarely learn that calm and self-possessing wisdom which is the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, and through which may come at last, in many channels of temperament, in many forms of faith and duty, the power to subdue the evil to the good. Such were Shelley and Keats, Leopardi and Heine, James Thomson and Philip Bourke Marston: such also was Dante Gabriel Rossetti.