in Rossetti's poetry as it culminates in his painting. The
poet who should go beyond Rossetti would pass out of the
realm of poetry into pure mysticism, as certain of his sonnets
show. Fine as are the sonnets (of which the sonnet sequence,
the “ House of Life, ” in the 1881 volume, may be specially mentioned),
it is in his romantic ballads that Rossetti (notwithstanding
a certain ruggedness of movement) shows his greatest
strength. “ Sister Helen, ” “ The Blessed Damozel, ” “ Staff and
Scrip, ” “Eden Bower, ” “ Troy Town, ” “Rose Mary, ” as representing
the modern revival of the true romantic spirit, take
a place quite apart from the other poetry of the time.
Rossetti's poetry, and his prose too, is marked by an extraordinary
fastidiousness of expression and beauty of diction;
the form and colour of his style are alike marvellous in clearness
and loveliness of language. But the dominant characteristic,
after all, is the underlying idea, the romantic motive.
By the revival of the romantic spirit in English poetry we
mean something much more than the revival, at the close of
the 18th century, of natural language, the change discussed
by Wordsworth in his famous Preface, and by Coleridge in
his comments thereon-that change of diction and of poetic
methods which is commonly supposed to have arisen with
Cowper, or, if not with Cowper, with Burns. The truth is
that Wordsworth and Coleridge were too near the great changes
in question, and they themselves took too active a part in
those changes, to hold the historical view of what the changes
really were. Important as was the change in poetic methods
which they so admirably practised and discussed, important
as was the revival of natural language, which then set in, it
was not nearly so important as that other revival which had
begun earlier and of which it was the outcome-the revival
of the romantic spirit, the Renascence of Wonder, even beneath
the weight of 18th-century diction, the first movement of
which is certainly English, and neither German nor French
in its origin, and can be traced through Chatterton, Macpherson
and the Percy Ballads.
As a mere question of methods, a reaction against the poetic diction of Pope and his followers was inevitable. But, in discussing the romantic temper in relation to the overthrow of the bastard classicism and didactic materialism of the 18th century, we must go deeper than mere artistic methods in poetry. When closely examined, it is in method only that the poetry of Cowper is different from the ratiocinative and unromantic poetry of Dryden and Pope and their followers. Pope treated prose subjects in the ratiocinative-that is to say, the prose—temper, but in a highly artificial diction which people agreed to call poetic. Cowper treated prose subjects too-treated them in the same prose temper, but used natural language; a noble thing to do, no doubt. But this was only a part (and by no means the chief part) of the great work achieved by English poetry at the close of last century. That period, to be sure, rendered obsolete the poetic diction of Pope; but it introduced something more precious still-entire freedom from the hard rhetorical materialism imported from France; it gave a new seeing to English eyes, which were opened once more to the mystery and the wonder of the universe and the romance of man's destiny; it revived, in short, the romantic spirit, but the romantic spirit enriched by all the clarity and sanity that the renascence of classicism was able to lend. Of the great movement which substituted for the didactic materialism of the 18th century the new romanticism of the 19th, the leaders were Coleridge and Scott, admirably followed by Byron, Shelley and Keats. Not that Wordsworth was a stranger to the romantic temper. The magnificent image of Time and Death under the yew tree is worthy of any romantic poet that ever lived, yet it cannot be said that he escaped save at moments from the comfortable 18th-century didactics, or that he was a spiritual writer in the sense that Coleridge, Blake and Shelley were spiritual writers.
Of the true romantic feeling, the ever-present apprehension of the spiritual world and of that struggle of the soul with earthly conditions which we have before spoken of, Rossetti's poetry is as full as his pictures-so full, indeed, that it was misunderstood by certain critics, who found in the most spiritualistic of poets and painters the founder of a “ iieshly school.” Although it cannot be said that “ The Blessed Damozel ” or “ Sister Helen ” or “ Rose Mary ” reaches to the height of the masterpieces of Coleridge, the purely romantic temper was with Rossetti a more permanent and even a more natural temper than with any other 19th-century poet, even including the author of “ Christabel” himself. As to the other 19th-century poets, though the Ettrick Shepherd in “ The Queen's Wake ” shows plenty of the true feeling, Hogg's verbosity is too great to allow of really successful work in the field of romantic ballad, where concentrated energy is one of the first requisites. And even Dobell's “ Keith of Ravelston ” has hardly been fused in the fine atmosphere of fairyland. Byron's “foot light bogies” and Shelley's metaphysical abstractions had of course but very little to do with the inner core of romance, and We have only to consider Keats, to whose “ La Belle Dame sans Merci ” and “ Eve of St Mark ” Rossetti always acknowledged himself to be deeply indebted. In the famous close of the seventh stanza of'the “ Ode to a Nightinale ”-
g “ Charmed magic easements opening on the foam Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn "there is of course the true thrill of the poetry of wonder, and it is expressed with a music, a startling magic, above the highest reaches of Rossetti's poetry. But, without the evidence of Keats's two late poems, “ La Belle Dame sans Merci ” and the “ Eve of St Mark, ” who could have said that Keats showed more than a passing apprehension of that which is the basis of the romantic temper-the supernatural? In contrasting Keats with Rossetti, it must always be remembered that Keats's power over the poetry of wonder came to him at one flash, and that it was not (as we have said elsewhere) “ till late in his brief life that his bark was running full sail for the enchanted isle Where the old ballad writers once sang and where now sate the wizard Coleridge alone.” Though outside Coleridge's work there had been nothing in the poetry of wonder comparable with Keats's “ La Belle Dame sans Merci, ” the latter had previously in “Lamia ” entirely failed in rendering the romantic idea of beauty as a maleficent power. The reader, owing to the atmosphere surrounding the dramatic action being entirely classic, does not believe for a moment in the serpent woman. The classic accessories suggested by Burton's brief narrative hampered Keats where to Rossetti (as we see in “ Pandora, ” “ Cassandra” and “ Troy Town ”) they would simply have given birth to romantic ideas. It is perhaps with Coleridge alone that Rossetti can be compared as a worker in the Renascence of Wonder. Although his apparent lack of rhythmic spontaneity places him below the great master as a singer (for in these miracles of Coleridge's genius poetry ceases to appear as a fine art at all -it is the inspired song of the changeling child “ singing, dancing to itself ”), in permanence of the romantic feeling, in vitality of belief in the power of the unseen, Rossetti stands alone. Even the finest portions of his historical ballad “ The King's Tragedy ” are those which deal with the supernatural. The events of Rossetti's life may be briefly summarized. In the spring of 1860 he married Elizabeth Eleanor Siddall, a milliner's assistant, who, being very beautiful, was constantly painted and drawn by him. From 1856 onwards he had been very intimate with William Morris and Edward Burne-]ones, who had the greatest affection and artistic admiration for him. Mrs Rossetti, whose health was delicate, had one still-born child in 1861, and she died from an overdose of laudanum in February 1862. Rossetti then moved from Blackfriars to 16 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, where for a short time George Meredith, A. C. Swinburne and W. M. Rossetti Lived with him. Mrs Rossetti's own water-colour designs show an extraordinary genius for invention and a rare instinct for colour. Rossetti felt her death so acutely that in the first paroxysm of his grief he insisted upon his poems (then in manuscript) being buried in her coffin. But in 1869 the manuscripts were disinterred, and published in 1870. From this time to his death he
