Hall Caine

“ Rossetti should be read, I answer—as it was written—lovingly. Life, not art, is the great giver and teacher; we can see only that which we bring with us eyes to see, and without the instinct and impulse, the spirit and sense which life can give art is an idle thing. But when "the world's great heart of rest and wrath" begins first to touch us, art is a fructifier of august thought, a purifier of exquisite emotion. Wait then, the ardent impulse to turn the leaves of these poems. ”

“ Ballad poetry requires lyric finish, narrative power and dramatic insight. The dialogue and burden should be fluent and fervent. "Eden Bower" is strong, serious and perfect, but "Sister Helen" is the one great ballad of the century. Its imperial theme cut out of some shapeless chronicle into modern, not mediaeval form, is the old, old sad story of beauty and love, betrayal and sorrow, revenge and death. Its weird sorcery makes the blood run cold. Its blacker shades resemble the bolder lines in the "Ancient Mariner," but the human passion in it is stronger. ”

“ But the manner of doing a thing can never be more than a part of the work done, and art has never been followed for its own sake without involving other meanings, purposes and results. Look broadly at the mediaeval ages for evidence of this enforced marriage of manner and meaning; or look specially, if you will, at the age of the Renaissance. The artist has never at any time divorced his moral nature from his artistic instinct, and cannot. The ethical significance may have been always the accident of his work, but it has been always the essence of his nature ”

“ Through the eyes of others we can see her, and in our vision of her she is beautiful. But it is the beauty of fair cheeks from which the canker frets the soft tenderness of colour; the loveliness of golden hair that has lost its radiance; the sweetness of eyes once dripping with the dew of the spirit, now dry, and cold, and lustreless. In her face we may see the mark of a great wrong, and, as visible, the relentless vengeance that pursues the faithless. ”

“ Rossetti makes no conscious compromise with the puritan principle of doing good, and to demand first of his poetry the lesson or message it has for us, would be wilfully to miss of pleasure while we vainly strove for profit. He is too true an artist to follow art into its byeways of moral significance, and thereby cripple its broader aims. But at the same time all this absorption of the artist in his art lives and works together with the personal instincts of the man. ”

“ Again, when the pathos of life comes strongest and love is seen betrayed and youth traduced; when the "golden ruin of some rich soiled hair" is found, where Rossetti painted it, at the wayside, thrust out from the lap of luxury, into the night of want, desolate, houseless, wet and matted after a pelting and pitiless storm, then read "Jenny." ”

“ Every poet should be first a singer; song should be the basis of his art. It is idle to urge that some poets who have attained excellence in sustained and elaborate forms of verse, have been deficient in purely lyrical quality. Actors have succeeded in Hamlet who would not have been tolerated in Horatio, and the result has been due to a flood of auxiliaries not their own. None the less is it an actor's business to learn to sustain the weight of subsidiary characterisation, or the poet's art to bear the burden of sweet music. ”

“ We are all endowed always with a great gift for apprehending positive and physical reality; and hence we can always appreciate the work in which the hold of fact is firmest. But emotion is liable to become too subtly attenuated for our commoner moods, in creations in which the poet unites to the weft of his inventive imagination only whatever of fact is serviceable to the truth of art. And so we may at any time without danger read the poets in whom the deepest thing is philosophy, or romance, or fact ”

“ His art cannot escape the colouring it gets from the human side of his nature, because it is in the essence of art that it appeals to its own highest faculties largely through the channel of moral instincts: that music is exquisite and colour splendid, first because both have spiritual significance, and next because they respond to sensuous passion. But it is one thing to pursue art for its own sake with an over-ruling moral instinct that gravitates towards conduct, and quite another thing deliberatively to absorb art in moral purposes. ”

“ Rossetti's poetry, there will be no need for "the poor fine arts to take themselves away" from before the face of aggressive puritanism, if artists will look closely to it that the personal nature which, without purpose of their own, permeates their work is such as will bear fruits of good meaning. After that, art for art, by all means, both first and last, and art will assuredly be good on other grounds as well as good on her own. ”

“ But where the even current of men's lives knows nothing of the fluctuation of their subtle emotion, the charm of their art and magic will not fail. After the high pressure of serious labour they bring clearness and brightness and glow, and their pure beauty haunts again the heavier hours with the radiance of its presence.
And now I wish to traverse hastily a few general considerations on two aspects of Mr. Rossetti's genius. First, a few thoughts on Mr. Rossetti as an artist. The volume of his poems contains songs, narrative pieces, ballads and sonnets. ”

“ Rossetti's art involved and included in being good on its own.
And those who assert that the manner of doing a work is the essence of the work done, may claim to be the perfect artists by right of their passion of pursuit. They are assuredly imperfect men. Their work may be of supreme value to certain byeways of art, but their narrowed aims make as feeble an effort as puritanism ever advanced to cover the whole domain of art. ”

“ Solidity of theme distinguishes pre-Raphaelitism, the chief of whose gifts is a gift of reality, and the foremost of whose virtues is a disposition for looking sternly the sober facts of the world in the face. Mr. Rossetti's sonnets are solid rather than spectral, but of a solidity nearer akin to that of Michaelangelo than to that of Wordsworth. His is the reality of vision, not the solidity of fact. His sonnets embody at once the spirit of the sensuous and the sensuousness of spirit. ”

“ Poets suffer specially from this feeble and lifeless treatment, and the poets' poets most of all. They ask in their readers a sympathetic attitude of mind, an impulse that is fervent, an instinct that is right. When under other conditions and amidst other influences we mingle discordant tones with languid hand amongst the sonorous fluctuations of their harmonies we complain with peevish irritation that they do not sway the passions we have not got or touch, as with the point of a spear, the problems of life and joys of living we do not know and feel. ”

“ That vengeance shall know no ending until the time doth come when the naked soul shall flee from hence more fast than the waxen knave she burns; and when the Judge of all things shall do right. Fire, then, shall forgive him as she forgives, whose heart for his pleasure fared the same. Her love has turned to hate ”

“ Nevertheless, all art is essentially self-conscious, and between two such opposite aims and forces as operate in the art of Cowper, and in the art of Rossetti we see only certain differences of kind and measure of self-consciousness. ”

“ When then we come to the study of our author we bring with us certain special expectations, evolved by power and individual bias out of the citation we have seen. If by chance, rare and unmerited, we have had struck for us the key to the harmony of his mind it is well. If on the other hand we have caught up, as is most probable, only some stray notes in the fretting, disappointment or even disgust ensues. ”

“ The colour of the picture and the music of the poem belong to the manner of the artist, and appeal first to our affections, but the pleasure, or even exaltation of soul, we derive from them is due not to any virtue in themselves so much as to their own spiritual significance and suggestiveness. ”

“ Rossetti has part or lot with those false artists, or no artists, who assert without fear or shame that the manner of doing a thing should be abrogated or superseded by the moral purpose of its being done. ”

“ First, we meet in periodical literature with some mention of his name; next, we see some allusion to his work; then we read some citation from his writings, such as touches our imagination with a gentle pressure; afterwards we revolve in our minds considerations of the market value to us of a full and complete acquaintance; and finally we determine to obtain the praise and the pudding that come of utter mastery of the man as soon as opportunity may allow. ”

“ There are many ways in which a poet may be read; and of these the unpractised reader is always certain to adopt the worst. The channel through which usually we come to know a contemporary author is one that makes us peculiarly liable to misunderstand him, or fall short of full perception of his worth. ”

“ A banished young patriot in Italy's days of trouble finds a child whom famine has caused to be deserted by her parents; he brings her up as his own, and in the progress of years is startled to discover that his affection for the child develops into love for the woman ”

“ Through and in his poetry, as in his painting, we may see that to him, as an artist, the first thing is to do his work supremely well for its own sake, while the accident is the ethical result which follows. ”