Appreciations, With An Essay on Style

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That small model of the barren earth
Which serves as paste and cover to our bones,*

the effigy clasping the hand of his youthful consort, was already
prepared there, with "rich [202] gilding and ornaments," monument of
poetic regret, for Queen Anne of Bohemia, not of course the "Queen"
of Shakespeare, who however seems to have transferred to this second
wife something of Richard's wildly proclaimed affection for the
first. In this way, through the connecting link of that sacred spot,
our thoughts once more associate Richard's two fallacious
prerogatives, his personal beauty and his "anointing."

According to Johnson, Richard the Second is one of those plays which
Shakespeare has "apparently revised;" and how doubly delightful
Shakespeare is where he seems to have revised! "Would that he had
blotted a thousand"--a thousand hasty phrases, we may venture once
more to say with his earlier critic, now that the tiresome German
superstition has passed away which challenged us to a dogmatic faith
in the plenary verbal inspiration of every one of Shakespeare's
clowns. Like some melodiously contending anthem of Handle's, I said,
of Richard's meek "undoing" of himself in the mirror-scene; and, in
fact, the play of Richard the Second does, like a musical
composition, possess a certain concentration of all its parts, a
simple continuity, an evenness in execution, which are rare in the
great dramatist. With Romeo and Juliet, that perfect symphony
(symphony of three independent poetic forms set in a grander one*
which it is the merit of German [203] criticism to have detected) it
belongs to a small group of plays, where, by happy birth and
consistent evolution, dramatic form approaches to something like the
unity of a lyrical ballad, a lyric, a song, a single strain of music.
Which sort of poetry we are to account the highest, is perhaps a
barren question. Yet if, in art generally, unity of impression is a
note of what is perfect, then lyric poetry, which in spite of complex
structure often preserves the unity of a single passionate
ejaculation, would rank higher than dramatic poetry, where,
especially to the reader, as distinguished from the spectator
assisting at a theatrical performance, there must always be a sense
of the effort necessary to keep the various parts from flying
asunder, a sense of imperfect continuity, such as the older criticism
vainly sought to obviate by the rule of the dramatic "unities." It
follows that a play attains artistic perfection just in proportion as
it approaches that unity of lyrical effect, as if a song or ballad
were still lying at the root of it, all the various expression of the
conflict of character and circumstance falling at last into the
compass of a single melody, or musical theme. As, historically, the
earliest classic drama arose out of the chorus, from which this or
that person, this or that episode, detached itself, so, into the
unity of a choric song the perfect drama ever tends to return, its
intellectual scope deepened, complicated, enlarged, but still with an
unmistakable [204] singleness, or identity, in its impression on the
mind. Just there, in that vivid single impression left on the mind
when all is over, not in any mechanical limitation of time and place,
is the secret of the "unities"--the true imaginative unity--of the
drama.

1889.

NOTES

188. *Elinor. Do you not read some tokens of my son (Coeur-de-Lion)
/ In the large composition of this man?

190. *Perhaps the one person of genius in these English plays.

The spirit of deep prophecy she hath,
Exceeding the nine Sibyls of old Rome:
What's past and what's to come she can descry.

191. *Proposing in this paper to trace the leading sentiment in
Shakespeare's English Plays as a sort of popular dramatic chronicle,
I have left untouched the question how much (or, in the case of Henry
the Sixth and Henry the Eighth, how little) of them may be really
his: how far inferior hands have contributed to a result, true on the
whole to the greater, that is to say, the Shakespearian elements in
them.

201. *Perhaps a double entendre:--of any ordinary grave, as
comprising, in effect, the whole small earth now left to its occupant
or, of such a tomb as Richard's in particular, with its actual model,
or effigy, of the clay of him. Both senses are so characteristic
that it would be a pity to lose either.

202. *The Sonnet: the Aubade: the Epithalamium.

DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI

[205] IT was characteristic of a poet who had ever something about
him of mystic isolation, and will still appeal perhaps, though with a
name it may seem now established in English literature, to a special
and limited audience, that some of his poems had won a kind of
exquisite fame before they were in the full sense published. The
Blessed Damozel, although actually printed twice before the year
1870, was eagerly circulated in manuscript; and the volume which it
now opens came at last to satisfy a long-standing curiosity as to the
poet, whose pictures also had become an object of the same peculiar
kind of interest. For those poems were the work of a painter,
understood to belong to, and to be indeed the leader, of a new school
then rising into note; and the reader of to-day may observe already,
in The Blessed Damozel, written at the age of eighteen, a
prefigurement of the chief characteristics of that school, as he will
recognise in it also, in proportion as he really knows Rossetti, many
of the characteristics which are most markedly personal and his own.
Common [206] to that school and to him, and in both alike of primary
significance, was the quality of sincerity, already felt as one of
the charms of that earliest poem--a perfect sincerity, taking effect
in the deliberate use of the most direct and unconventional
expression, for the conveyance of a poetic sense which recognised no
conventional standard of what poetry was called upon to be. At a
time when poetic originality in England might seem to have had its
utmost play, here was certainly one new poet more, with a structure
and music of verse, a vocabulary, an accent, unmistakably novel, yet
felt to be no mere tricks of manner adopted with a view to forcing
attention--an accent which might rather count as the very seal of
reality on one man's own proper speech; as that speech itself was the
wholly natural expression of certain wonderful things he really felt
and saw. Here was one, who had a matter to present to his readers,
to himself at least, in the first instance, so valuable, so real and
definite, that his primary aim, as regards form or expression in his
verse, would be but its exact equivalence to those data within. That
he had this gift of transparency in language--the control of a style
which did but obediently shift and shape itself to the mental motion,
as a well-trained hand can follow on the tracing-paper the outline of
an original drawing below it, was proved afterwards by a volume of
typically perfect translations from the delightful but difficult
[207] "early Italian poets:" such transparency being indeed the
secret of all genuine style, of all such style as can truly belong to
one man and not to another. His own meaning was always personal and
even recondite, in a certain sense learned and casuistical, sometimes
complex or obscure; but the term was always, one could see,
deliberately chosen from many competitors, as the just transcript of
that peculiar phase of soul which he alone knew, precisely as he knew
it.

One of the peculiarities of The Blessed Damozel was a definiteness of
sensible imagery, which seemed almost grotesque to some, and was
strange, above all, in a theme so profoundly visionary. The gold bar
of heaven from which she leaned, her hair yellow like ripe corn, are
but examples of a general treatment, as naively detailed as the
pictures of those early painters contemporary with Dante, who has
shown a similar care for minute and definite imagery in his verse;
there, too, in the very midst of profoundly mystic vision. Such
definition of outline is indeed one among many points in which
Rossetti resembles the great Italian poet, of whom, led to him at
first by family circumstances, he was ever a lover--a "servant and
singer," faithful as Dante, "of Florence and of Beatrice"--with some
close inward conformities of genius also, independent of any mere
circumstances of education. It was said by a critic of the last
century, not wisely though agreeably to the practice of his time,
[208] that poetry rejoices in abstractions. For Rossetti, as for
Dante, without question on his part, the first condition of the
poetic way of seeing and presenting things is particularisation.
"Tell me now," he writes, for Villon's

Dictes-moy ou, n'en quel pays,
Est Flora, la belle Romaine--

Tell me now, in what hidden way is
Lady Flora the lovely Roman:

--"way," in which one might actually chance to meet her; the
unmistakably poetic effect of the couplet in English being dependent
on the definiteness of that single word (though actually lighted on
in the search after a difficult double rhyme) for which every one
else would have written, like Villon himself, a more general one,
just equivalent to place or region.

And this delight in concrete definition is allied with another of his
conformities to Dante, the really imaginative vividness, namely, of
his personifications--his hold upon them, or rather their hold upon
him, with the force of a Frankenstein, when once they have taken life
from him. Not Death only and Sleep, for instance, and the winged
spirit of Love, but certain particular aspects of them, a whole
"populace" of special hours and places, "the hour" even "which might
have been, yet might not be," are living creatures, with hands and
eyes and articulate voices.

[209]

Stands it not by the door--
Love's Hour--till she and I shall meet;
With bodiless form and unapparent feet
That cast no shadow yet before,
Though round its head the dawn begins to pour
The breath that makes day sweet?--

Nay, why
Name the dead hours? I mind them well:
Their ghosts in many darkened doorways dwell
With desolate eyes to know them by.

Poetry as a mania--one of Plato's two higher forms of "divine" mania-
-has, in all its species, a mere insanity incidental to it, the
"defect of its quality," into which it may lapse in its moment of
weakness; and the insanity which follows a vivid poetic
anthropomorphism like that of Rossetti may be noted here and there in
his work, in a forced and almost grotesque materialising of
abstractions, as Dante also became at times a mere subject of the
scholastic realism of the Middle Age.

In Love's Nocturn and The Stream's Secret, congruously perhaps with a
certain feverishness of soul in the moods they present, there is at
times a near approach (may it be said?) to such insanity of realism--

Pity and love shall burn
In her pressed cheek and cherishing hands;
And from the living spirit of love that stands
Between her lips to soothe and yearn,
Each separate breath shall clasp me round in turn
And loose my spirit's bands.

[210] But even if we concede this; even if we allow, in the very plan
of those two compositions, something of the literary conceit--what
exquisite, what novel flowers of poetry, we must admit them to be, as
they stand! In the one, what a delight in all the natural beauty of
water, all its details for the eye of a painter; in the other, how
subtle and fine the imaginative hold upon all the secret ways of
sleep and dreams! In both of them, with much the same attitude and
tone, Love--sick and doubtful Love--would fain inquire of what lies
below the surface of sleep, and below the water; stream or dream
being forced to speak by Love's powerful "control"; and the poet
would have it foretell the fortune, issue, and event of his wasting
passion. Such artifices, indeed, were not unknown in the old
Provencal poetry of which Dante had learned something. Only, in
Rossetti at least, they are redeemed by a serious purpose, by that
sincerity of his, which allies itself readily to a serious beauty, a
sort of grandeur of literary workmanship, to a great style. One
seems to hear there a really new kind of poetic utterance, with
effects which have nothing else like them; as there is nothing else,
for instance, like the narrative of Jacob's Dream in Genesis, or
Blake's design of the Singing of the Morning Stars, or Addison's
Nineteenth Psalm.

With him indeed, as in some revival of the old mythopoeic age, common
things--dawn, [211] noon, night--are full of human or personal
expression, full of sentiment. The lovely little sceneries scattered
up and down his poems, glimpses of a landscape, not indeed of broad
open-air effects, but rather that of a painter concentrated upon the
picturesque effect of one or two selected objects at a time--the
"hollow brimmed with mist," or the "ruined weir," as he sees it from
one of the windows, or reflected in one of the mirrors of his "house
of life" (the vignettes for instance seen by Rose Mary in the magic
beryl) attest, by their very freshness and simplicity, to a pictorial
or descriptive power in dealing with the inanimate world, which is
certainly also one half of the charm, in that other, more remote and
mystic, use of it. For with Rossetti this sense of lifeless nature,
after all, is translated to a higher service, in which it does but
incorporate itself with some phase of strong emotion. Every one
understands how this may happen at critical moments of life; what a
weirdly expressive soul may have crept, even in full noonday, into
"the white-flower'd elder-thicket," when Godiva saw it "gleam through
the Gothic archways in the wall," at the end of her terrible ride.
To Rossetti it is so always, because to him life is a crisis at every
moment. A sustained impressibility towards the mysterious conditions
of man's everyday life, towards the very mystery itself in it, gives
a singular gravity to all his work: those matters never became trite
[212] to him. But throughout, it is the ideal intensity of love--of
love based upon a perfect yet peculiar type of physical or material
beauty--which is enthroned in the midst of those mysterious powers;
Youth and Death, Destiny and Fortune, Fame, Poetic Fame, Memory,
Oblivion, and the like. Rossetti is one of those who, in the words
of Merimee, se passionnent pour la passion, one of Love's lovers.

And yet, again as with Dante, to speak of his ideal type of beauty as
material, is partly misleading. Spirit and matter, indeed, have been
for the most part opposed, with a false contrast or antagonism by
schoolmen, whose artificial creation those abstractions really are.
In our actual concrete experience, the two trains of phenomena which
the words matter and spirit do but roughly distinguish, play
inextricably into each other. Practically, the church of the Middle
Age by its aesthetic worship, its sacramentalism, its real faith in
the resurrection of the flesh, had set itself against that Manichean
opposition of spirit and matter, and its results in men's way of
taking life; and in this, Dante is the central representative of its
spirit. To him, in the vehement and impassioned heat of his
conceptions, the material and the spiritual are fused and blent: if
the spiritual attains the definite visibility of a crystal, what is
material loses its earthiness and impurity. And here again, by force
of instinct, Rossetti [213] is one with him. His chosen type of
beauty is one,

Whose speech Truth knows not from her thought,
Nor Love her body from her soul.

Like Dante, he knows no region of spirit which shall not be sensuous
also, or material. The shadowy world, which he realises so
powerfully, has still the ways and houses, the land and water, the
light and darkness, the fire and flowers, that had so much to do in
the moulding of those bodily powers and aspects which counted for so
large a part of the soul, here.

For Rossetti, then, the great affections of persons to each other,
swayed and determined, in the case of his highly pictorial genius,
mainly by that so-called material loveliness, formed the great
undeniable reality in things, the solid resisting substance, in a
world where all beside might be but shadow. The fortunes of those
affections--of the great love so determined; its casuistries, its
languor sometimes; above all, its sorrows; its fortunate or
unfortunate collisions with those other great matters; how it looks,
as the long day of life goes round, in the light and shadow of them:
all this, conceived with an abundant imagination, and a deep, a
philosophic, reflectiveness, is the matter of his verse, and
especially of what he designed as his chief poetic work, "a work to
be called The House of Life," towards which the majority of his
sonnets and songs were contributions.

[214] The dwelling-place in which one finds oneself by chance or
destiny, yet can partly fashion for oneself; never properly one's own
at all, if it be changed too lightly; in which every object has its
associations--the dim mirrors, the portraits, the lamps, the books,
the hair-tresses of the dead and visionary magic crystals in the
secret drawers, the names and words scratched on the windows, windows
open upon prospects the saddest or the sweetest; the house one must
quit, yet taking perhaps, how much of its quietly active light and
colour along with us!--grown now to be a kind of raiment to one's
body, as the body, according to Swedenborg, is but the raiment of the
soul--under that image, the whole of Rossetti's work might count as a
House of Life, of which he is but the "Interpreter." And it is a
"haunted" house. A sense of power in love, defying distance, and
those barriers which are so much more than physical distance, of
unutterable desire penetrating into the world of sleep, however
"lead-bound," was one of those anticipative notes obscurely struck in
The Blessed Damozel, and, in his later work, makes him speak
sometimes almost like a believer in mesmerism. Dream-land, as we
said, with its "phantoms of the body," deftly coming and going on
love's service, is to him, in no mere fancy or figure of speech, a
real country, a veritable expansion of, or addition to, our waking
life; and he did well perhaps to wait carefully upon sleep, for the
lack [215] of it became mortal disease with him. One may even
recognise a sort of morbid and over-hasty making-ready for death
itself, which increases on him; thoughts concerning it, its
imageries, coming with a frequency and importunity, in excess, one
might think, of even the very saddest, quite wholesome wisdom.

And indeed the publication of his second volume of Ballads and
Sonnets preceded his death by scarcely a twelvemonth. That volume
bears witness to the reverse of any failure of power, or falling-off
from his early standard of literary perfection, in every one of his
then accustomed forms of poetry--the song, the sonnet, and the
ballad. The newly printed sonnets, now completing The House of Life,
certainly advanced beyond those earlier ones, in clearness; his
dramatic power in the ballad, was here at its height; while one
monumental, gnomic piece, Soothsay, testifies, more clearly even than
the Nineveh of his first volume, to the reflective force, the dry
reason, always at work behind his imaginative creations, which at no
time dispensed with a genuine intellectual structure. For in matters
of pure reflection also, Rossetti maintained the painter's sensuous
clearness of conception; and this has something to do with the
capacity, largely illustrated by his ballads, of telling some red-
hearted story of impassioned action with effect.

Have there, in very deed, been ages, in which [216] the external
conditions of poetry such as Rossetti's were of more spontaneous
growth than in our own? The archaic side of Rossetti's work, his
preferences in regard to earlier poetry, connect him with those who
have certainly thought so, who fancied they could have breathed more
largely in the age of Chaucer, or of Ronsard, in one of those ages,
in the words of Stendhal--ces siecles de passions ou les ames
pouvaient se livrer franchement a la plus haute exaltation, quand les
passions qui font la possibilite We may think, perhaps, that such old
time as that has never really existed except in the fancy of poets;
but it was to find it, that Rossetti turned so often from modern life
to the chronicle of the past. Old Scotch history, perhaps beyond any
other, is strong in the matter of heroic and vehement hatreds and
love, the tragic Mary herself being but the perfect blossom of them;
and it is from that history that Rossetti has taken the subjects of
the two longer ballads of his second volume: of the three admirable
ballads in it, The King's Tragedy (in which Rossetti has dexterously
interwoven some relics of James's own exquisite early verse) reaching
the highest level of dramatic success, and marking perfection,
perhaps, in this kind of poetry; which, in the earlier volume, gave
us, among other pieces, Troy Town, Sister Helen, and Eden Bower.

Like those earlier pieces, the ballads of the [217] second volume
bring with them the question of the poetic value of the "refrain"--

Eden bower's in flower:
And O the bower and the hour!

--and the like. Two of those ballads--Troy Town and Eden Bower, are
terrible in theme; and the refrain serves, perhaps, to relieve their
bold aim at the sentiment of terror. In Sister Helen again, the
refrain has a real, and sustained purpose (being here duly varied
also) and performs the part of a chorus, as the story proceeds. Yet
even in these cases, whatever its effect may be in actual recitation,
it may fairly be questioned, whether, to the mere reader their actual
effect is not that of a positive interruption and drawback, at least
in pieces so lengthy; and Rossetti himself, it would seem, came to
think so, for in the shortest of his later ballads, The White Ship--
that old true history of the generosity with which a youth, worthless
in life, flung himself upon death--he was contented with a single
utterance of the refrain, "given out" like the keynote or tune of a
chant.

In The King's Tragedy, Rossetti has worked upon motive, broadly human
(to adopt the phrase of popular criticism) such as one and all may
realise. Rossetti, indeed, with all his self-concentration upon his
own peculiar aim, by no means ignored those general interests which
are external to poetry as he conceived it; as he has [218] shown here
and there, in this poetic, as also in pictorial, work. It was but
that, in a life to be shorter even than the average, he found enough
to occupy him in the fulfilment of a task, plainly "given him to
do." Perhaps, if one had to name a single composition of his to
readers desiring to make acquaintance with him for the first time,
one would select: The King's Tragedy--that poem so moving, so
popularly dramatic, and lifelike. Notwithstanding this, his work, it
must be conceded, certainly through no narrowness or egotism, but in
the faithfulness of a true workman to a vocation so emphatic, was
mainly of the esoteric order. But poetry, at all times, exercises
two distinct functions: it may reveal, it may unveil to every eye,
the ideal aspects of common things, after Gray's way (though Gray
too, it is well to remember, seemed in his own day, seemed even to
Johnson, obscure) or it may actually add to the number of motives
poetic and uncommon in themselves, by the imaginative creation of
things that are ideal from their very birth. Rossetti did something,
something excellent, of the former kind; but his characteristic, his
really revealing work, lay in the adding to poetry of fresh poetic
material, of a new order of phenomena, in the creation of a new
ideal.

1883.

FEUILLET'S "LA MORTE"

[219] IN his latest novel M. Octave Feuillet adds two charming people
to that chosen group of personages in which he loves to trace the
development of the more serious elements of character amid the
refinements and artifices of modern society, and which make such good
company. The proper function of fictitious literature in affording
us a refuge into a world slightly better--better conceived, or better
finished--than the real one, is effected in most instances less
through the imaginary events at which a novelist causes us to assist,
than by the imaginary persons to whom he introduces us. The
situations of M. Feuillet's novels are indeed of a real and intrinsic
importance:--tragic crises, inherent in the general conditions of
human nature itself, or which arise necessarily out of the special
conditions of modern society. Still, with him, in the actual result,
they become subordinate, as it is their tendency to do in real life,
to the characters they help to form. Often, his most attentive
reader will have forgotten the actual details of his plot; while
[220] the soul, tried, enlarged, shaped by it, remains as a well-
fixed type in the memory. He may return a second or third time to
Sibylle, or Le Journal d'une Femme, or Les Amours de Philippe, and
watch, surprised afresh, the clean, dainty, word-sparing literary
operation (word-sparing, yet with no loss of real grace or ease)
which, sometimes in a few pages, with the perfect logic of a problem
of Euclid, complicates and then unravels some moral embarrassment,
really worthy of a trained dramatic expert. But the characters
themselves, the agents in those difficult, revealing situations, such
a reader will recognise as old acquaintances after the first reading,
feeling for them as for some gifted and attractive persons he has
known in the actual world--Raoul de Chalys, Henri de Lerne, Madame de
Tecle, Jeanne de la Roche-Ermel, Maurice de Fremeuse, many others; to
whom must now be added Bernard and Aliette de Vaudricourt.

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