DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI.* ONE thing which this little book on

Rossetti makes very clear is that in Mr. Benson we have a new biographer of exceptional gifts of sympathy and judgment, endowed, moreover, with as serviceable a prose style as any one could need. He *rites, like all true poets, with consistent lucidity, and his periods have also an attractive cadence and dignity. With all his criticisms we may not be in agreement, but we can point to no page that is not marked by high sincerity and faultless taste. To write the record of the life of such a man as Rossetti— rebel, iconoclast, and mocker as he often was, individualist to the core, never wholly of England yet ever in it—is no easy task, in brief compass, in such a series as this. It would seem to require either full-length treatment or the mordant essay form. Yet Mr. Benson has contrived in small space to present Rossetti the man with conspicuous fairness, and to estimate his works too.

As an example of Mr. Benson's manner we could not perhaps take better passages than those which tell the story of the burial and exhumation of the poems,—one of the most curious incidents in all literature, and one needing in the narrator, at so recent a date, exceptional gifts of tact, In 1862 Mrs. Rossetti died :— " Rossetti's demeanour at the inquest and during the sad days before the funeral was extraordinarily courageous and dignified. Just before the coffin was closed he left the room in which some friends were assembled, taking with him a manuscript book of poems, and placed it between the cheek and the hair of his dead wife. He then came back and said what he had done, adding that they had often been written when she was suffering and when he might have been attending to her, and that the solitary text of them should go with her to the grave. It seems that Ford Madox Brown, who was present, thought that this impulsive sacrifice was quixotic, but at such a moment remonstrance was impossible. Rossetti evidently meant it to be a punishment to himself for sacrificing the gentle tendance of love to ambitions dreams, and for even deeper failures of duty, and the volume was buried with his wife in Highgate cemetery that day. The tale of their sad recovery will hereafter be told ; but the act has a tragic beauty when one considers what hopes Rossetti thus resigned ; and it may be doubted whether in the annals of literature there is any scene which strikes so vehement a note of sorrow and self- reproach—the abased penitence of a strong, contrite, and passionate souL"

Seven years passed, and the desire to publish became more and more pressing with the poet. Says Mr. Benson:—

"His friends had several times urged him to recover the an. ; Rossetti resisted, but at last, fretted by his inability to remem- ber the poems, he yielded. The matter was arranged with the Home Secretary, Mr. Bruce, afterwards Lord Aberdare. One night, seven and a half years after the funeral, a fire was lit by the side of the grave, and the coffin was raised and opened. The body is described as having been almost unchanged. Rossetti, alone and oppressed with self-reproachful thoughts, sat in a friend's house while the terrible task was done. The stained and mouldered manuscript was carefully dried and treated, and at last returned to his possession. He copied the poems out him- self, and destroyed the volume. But it is impossible to resist a certain feeling of horror at the episode. Rossetti was not a man to have yielded tamely to the suggestions of friends in this or any other matter ; such grace as belonged to the original act was forfeited by the recovery of the book ; and there is a certain taint about the literary ambition which could thus violate the secrecy of the grave, however morbid the original sacrifice may haVe been."

The situation seems to us to be handled in these passages with singular delicacy and courage.

Of Rossetti's verse, what strikes us first and foremost is the

• Rossetti. By A. C. Benson. "English Men of Letters." London : Mac- millan and Co. [2s. net.] eontrast of its mood with that of the present generation. The pendulum has, indeed, swung far since the day when "The Blessed Damozel," after its appearance in the Germ, was passed about in manuscript from hand to hand, a new experience in wonder :— "The blessed damozel leaned out

From the gold bar of Heaven; Her eyes were deeper than the depth Of waters stilled at even ; She had three lilies in her hand, And the stars in her hair were seven.

Her robe, engirt from clasp to hem, No wrought flowers did adorn, But a white rose of Mary's gift, For service meetly worn ; Her hair that lay along her back Was yellow like ripe corn.

Herseemed she scarce had been a day One of God's choristers ; The wonder was not yet quite gono From that still look of hers; Albeit, to them she left, her day Had counted as ten years.

(To one, it is ten years of years.

. . . Yet now, and in this place, Surely she leaned o'er me—her hair Fell all about my face . . .

Nothing : the autumn fall of leaves. The whole year sets apace.) It was the rampart of God's house That she was standing on ; By God built over the sheer depth The which is Space begun ; So high, that looking downward thence She scarce could see the sun.

It lies in Heaven, across the flood Of ether, as a bridge.

Beneath, the tides of day and night With flame and darkness ridge The void, as low as where this earth Spins like a fretful midge.

Around her, lovers, newly met 'Mid deathless love's acclaims, Spoke evermore among themselves Their heart-remembered names •, And the souls mounting up to God Went by her like thin flames.

And still she bowed herself and stooped Out of the circling charm ; Until her bosom must have made The bar she leaned on warm, And the lilies lay as if asleep Along her bonded arm."

In the present day, when we are possibly cloyed with the effects proceeding from this poem—the aesthetic movement which derived from it; all the pictures of Rossetti's imitators; the hundreds of small poets who quickly acquired a little of the seed—we find it, perhaps, difficult to understand the surprise and rapture produced in sensitive minds by Rossetti's moat characteristic and, we think, most remark- able poem. Probably the same thrill can never be known again, even by the poet's newest and youngest reader. The time has passed; Rossetti remains an exotic in English literature.

The fact is that he approximated in his own character too little to the normal man, and was too little interested in normal life and its hopes and fears, ever to be a popular poet. The popular poet must reflect the common heart ; Rossetti's concern was with his own heart only,—his own heart as it was in fact and his own heart in an imaginary world of his own creating. Love, his controlling theme, is not an English obsession. We love in the intervals of other business. Rossetti brought to bear upon his study of the passion an intensity of purpose and stability of devotion that are to be found elsewhere only in the Italian poets whom he most honoured. He went his own way as inflexibly as only a poet can (there is no such masterly selfishness as the poet's), and as thoroughly as perhaps no other poet save Wordsworth, the emperor of egotists (whom Rossetti called "good but unbear- able ") ever did. But whereas Wordsworth's way was more or less in line with that of the man and brother, Rossetti's was alien. He had no comfort to offer, no solace. In certain moods one may find in his sonnets and lyrics food for wistful reflection and not unwelcome regret; but Rossetti can never be called a friend. At the best we are tolerated ; we are

never beckoned to share his secrets, and he brings no balm. For the most part he must be read for pure aesthetic delight, and it is for this reason that his readers are few.

Hence he remains a poet's poet, his verse so full of delicious surprise and power, his courage so superb. Mr. Benson's criticisms of Rossetti's technique could not be better ; for he speaks as a craftsman too, and a very discerning one. Yet

upon poets, we should say, Rossetti has had far less influence than upon painters. As a poetical force he has never ap preached Mr. Swinburne ; and even Morris, perhaps, had more direct imitators. But as a painter his personality is traceable in every exhibition where art is general and not of the coterie. At the New Gallery this year, for example, you see it on every side ; and at the Academy it would be visible, too, if anything were visible there after five minutes.

The only side of Rossetti's nature at which Mr. Benson does not even hint is his scornful yet Rabelaisian humour, breaking out now and again into amusing if cruel epigrams or nonsense verse at the expense of certain of those quidnuncs, worthy and otherwise, whom the individualist in art must always have to meet and yet must always despise. Echoes of certain rhymed irreverences, caustic and vigorous, float through our mind as we write these words ; but whether there was any call for Mr. Benson to record them in a book in this series is a question which he has perhaps answered rightly by silence. And yet one or two, among the prose passages from the letters at the end, might have added another lamp with which to light this curious character.

From Mr. Benson's selections from the letters we quote here and there, in order to emphasise the unfamiliar practical common-sense side of that poet who, perhaps more than any other, is permitted by his readers to dwell in a sanctum apart, a creature of air and fire rather than flesh and blood :—

"Have you seen anything of W. B. Scott's volume ? I may be able to send it you sooner or later, if you like. The title-page has a vignette with the words ' Poems by a Painter' printed very gothically indeed. A copy being sent to old Carlyle, he did not read any of the poems, but read the title, ' Poems by a Printer.' He wrote off at once to the imaginary printer to tell him to stick to his types and give up his metaphors. Woolner saw the book lying at Carlyle's, heard the story, and told him of his mistake, at which he had the decency to seem a little annoyed, as he knows Scott, and esteems him and his family. Now that we are allied with Turkey, we might think seriously of the bastinado for that old man, on such occasions as the above."

" Might not Tupper say truly, Let not Man, fattening, leave his dress-trowsers too long unworn, lest a worse thing come unto him'?"

" It is an awful fact that sun, moon, or candlelight once looked down on the human portent of Dr. Johnson and Mrs. Hannah More convened in solemn conclave above the outspread sonnets of Milton, with a meritorious and considerate resolve of finding out for him ' why they were so bad.' This is so stupendous a warning, that perhaps it may even incline one to find some of them better than they are."

"I've been greatly interested in Wuthering Heights, the first novel I've read for an age, and the best (as regards power and sound style) for two ages, except Bidonia. But it is a fiend of a book,—an incredible monster, combining all the stronger female tendencies from Mrs. Browning to Mrs. Brownrigg. The action is laid in hell,—only it seems places and people have English names there."