Page:The Bibelot (Volume 15).djvu/70

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.

REVIEW

His Love is not classical, not medieval, not Oriental; but it has a touch of all these qualities—the pure perfection of the classic form, the allegorical mysticism and pensive grace of the middle age, and the indescribable perfume of Orientalism, which, by the way, finds a more than usually definite expression in the last scene of this vision. Added to these general qualities we trace in this spirit of love a vague yet intense yearning, a Sehnsucht, which belongs to music and is essentially modern, If, finally, we seek that characteristic which is most truly peculiar to the poet himself, we find it to be a certain Biblical solemnity of spiritual sense inbreathed, as Milton phrases it, into the forms of art.

It savours somewhat of Philistinism to question the details of a vision and to expect an exact meaning in all the figures of so pictorial a work of imagination as this of Mr. Solomon's. Yet we may call attention to the subtlety by which he has divided the soul of the seer from the man himself, and has made that soul with purged and disembodied vision act as the hierophant of a revelation which the man in his com-

60