Whose trembling murmurs, melting in wild airs,
Run to and fro, complaining his sweet cares.”
And so, having drifted into points of difference, we will continue. They are unlike because, although both affect the quaintnesses of mediæval art, the laureate has done little more than utilize, for poetic purposes, the antiquarian and art knowledge of a gentleman of the period with a turn that way. But Mr. Rosetti is a mediæval artist heart and soul; and, though it may not be literally true that he has no end beyond his art, he would certainly feel that he was doing evil that good might come of it if he sacrificed a point of art to any object whatsoever.
Mr. Tennyson's pictures of the middle-age, beautiful and lifelike as they are, are the less true for their somewhat formal flourish of antiquity, whereby they give themselves, as it were, a modern frame. Of course, Tennyson's knights are not modern gentlemen in the sense that Racine's Greeks are French courtiers, but anyhow they are the realized aspirations of modern gentlemen of culture and refinement, and measures of fashionable reaction against the spirit of the day.
I think the consciousness that he wants a loosely-fitting mediævalism, or, so to speak, the armor without [pg 265] any particular quality of man inside, makes Mr. Tennyson affect the hybrid mediævalism of the Round Table in preference to the genuine strain of the old chroniclers. His mail-clad knights always remind us somewhat of a common scene in a marine aquarium—a whelk-shell inspired with an energy not its own by the intrusion of a hermit-crab, who, having disposed of the original occupant, manipulates the shell at his pleasure.
It may be urged, with some justice, that a poet is no mere collector of old china and old lace. He gathers to himself of all precious things, to frame for his thought such vehicle as he wants; but he has no duties to his materials that they should be in keeping with one another or with themselves, provided they minister to his design. Yes, but it must be remembered that both these poets belong to a school which owes its success to the religious observance of such duties, even though self-imposed; and it must always remain true that the more a poet can afford to borrow wholes instead of parts or aspects, and these plead the poet's cause each in its own tongue, not his, the greater is his triumph. I am not indicating any failure on the part of Mr. Tennyson when I speak of his Arthurian poems as a splendid masque. He knows where his strength lies. He has chosen his legend as a man might choose an antique wine-cooler for his wine; but the liquor inside, though superlatively good, is not hippocras or metheglin, but port and sherry. On the other hand, if we turn to Mr. Rosetti's treatment of mediæval subjects, “Dante at Verona,” “Sister Helen,” “The Staff and Scrip,” we find that his mediæval figures live, indeed, with the intensest kind of life, but that that life, from its woof to its outermost fringe, is stained with the color of its own day and country. It is this union of purism and vitality which is Mr. Rosetti's distinguishing characteristic.
It is now time for us to examine some of Mr. Rosetti's poems in detail. “The Blessed Damozel,” the first poem in the volume, were it not for its title, would be perfect; but we confess that the ultra quaintness of the title is the one point in the mediæval dress which does not, to our mind, harmonize with the Catholicity of the subject.
The subject would be trite enough in many hands. A young man has lost his love, and dreams of her night and day, until at length the soul of his imagination pierces that heaven into which she has been received ten years ago:
“Her seemed she scarce had been a day
One of God's choristers;