Sir Hall Caine

“ The mask is as full as the portrait of intellect and feeling, of strength and character, but it lacks something of the early sweetness and sensibility. Rossetti’s portraiture retains the salient qualities of both portrait and mask. It represents Dante in his twenty-seventh year; the face gives hint of both poet and soldier, for behind clear-cut features capable of strengthening into resolve and rigour lie whole depths of tenderest sympathy. The abstracted air, the self-centred look, the eyes that seem to see only what the mind conceives and casts forward from itself ”

“ Whose life, to its cold circle charmed, The earth’s whole summers have not warmed; Which always—whitherso the stone Be flung—sits there, deaf, blind, alone;— Ay, and shall not be driven out Till that which shuts him round about Break at the very Master’s stroke, And the dust thereof vanish as smoke, And the seed of Man vanish as dust:— Even so within this world is Lust.
Sister Helen was written somewhat later than The Blessed Damozel and the first draft of Jenny, and probably belonged to the poet’s twenty-fourth or twenty-fifth year. ”

“ The King James of The King’s Tragedy is of a righteous and fearless nature, strong yet sensitive, unbending before the pride and hate of powerful men, resolute, and ready even where fate itself declares that death lurks where his road must lie; his beautiful Queen Jane is sweet, tender, loving, devoted—meet spouse for a poet and king. The incidents too are those of history: the choice and final collocation of them, and the closing scene in which the queen mourns her husband, being the sum of the author’s contribution. And those incidents are in the highest degree varied and picturesque. ”

“ The memory of such a picture is like the memory of sublime and perfect music; it makes any one who fully feels it—silent. Fifty years hence it will be named among the half-dozen supreme pictures of the world.
Rossetti had buried the only complete copy of his poems with his wife at Highgate, and for a time he had been able to put by the thought of them; but as one by one his friends, Mr. Morris, Mr. Swinburne, and others, attained to distinction as poets, he began to hanker after poetic reputation, and to reflect with pain and regret upon the hidden fruits of his best effort. ”

“ The great painter who first took me to him said, “We shall see the greatest man in Europe.” I have it on the same authority that Rossetti’s aptitude for art was considered amongst painters to be no less extraordinary than his imagination. For example, that he could take hold of the extremity of the brush, and be as certain of his touch as if it had been held in the usual way; that he never painted a picture without doing something in colour that had never been done before; and, in particular, that he had a command of the features of the human face such as no other painter ever possessed. ”

“ Every word goes to build up the story: every line is quintessential: every flash of thought helps to heighten the emotion. Indeed the closing lines rise entirely above the limits of ballad poetry into the realm of dramatic diction. But perhaps the crowning glory and epic grandeur of the poem comes at the close. Awakened from her swoon, Rose Mary makes her way to the altar-cell and there she sees the beryl-stone lying between the wings of some sculptured beast. ”

“ What Rossetti’s idea was of the mission of the sonnet, as associated with life, and exhibiting a similitude of it, may best be learned from his prefatory sonnet:—
A Sonnet is a moment’s monument,— Memorial from the Soul’s eternity To one dead deathless hour. Look that it be, Whether for lustral rite or dire portent, Of its own arduous fulness reverent: Carve it in ivory or in ebony, As Day or Night may rule; and let Time see Its flowering crest impearled and orient. A Sonnet is a coin ”

“ There are men who feel more deeply the sense of isolation amidst the busiest crowds than within the narrowest circle of intimates, and I have heard from Rossetti reminiscences of his earlier life that led me to believe that he was one of the number. Perhaps, after all, he wandered from the world rather from the dread than with the hope of solitude. In such pleasant intercourse as the visits of the friends I have named afforded, was the sadness of the day in a measure dissipated, but when night came I never failed to realise that no progress whatever had been made. ”

“ The chamber wherein the body of Beatrice has its abiding-place is, to Dante’s imaginings, a chamber of dreams. Visionary as the mind of the dreamer, it discloses at once all that goes forward within its own narrow compass, together with the desolate streets of the city of Florence, which, to his fancy, sits silent for his loss, and the long flight of angels above that bear away the little cloud, to which is given a vague semblance of the beatified Beatrice. ”

“ On the other hand, Rossetti appeared to make no conscious compromise with the Puritan principle of doing good; and to demand first of his work the lesson or message it had for us were wilfully to miss of pleasure while we vainly strove for profit. He was too true an artist to follow art into its byeways of moral significance, and thereby cripple its broader arms; but at the same time all this absorption of the artist in his art seemed to me to live and work together with the personal instincts of the man. ”

“ I could not be much concerned about the unwillingness to give me a new sonnet which Rossetti at first exhibited, for I knew full well that sooner or later the sonnet would come. Not that I recognised in him the faintest scintillation of the affectation so common among authors as to the publication of work. But the fear of any appearance of collusion between himself and his critics was, as he said, a bugbear that constantly haunted him. Owing to this, a stranger often stood a better chance of securing his ready and open co-operation than the most intimate of friends. ”

“ It was in the autumn of 1880 that I saw Rossetti for the first time. Being then rather reduced in health I contemplated a visit to the sea-side and wrote saying that in passing through London I should avail myself of his oft-repeated invitation to visit him. I gave him this warning of my intention, remembering his declared dread of being taken unawares, but I came to know at a subsequent period that for one who was within the inner circle of his friends the necessity to advise him of a visit was by no means binding. ”

“ Shall no man hold his pride forewarn’d Till in the end, the Day of Days, At Judgment, one of his own race, As frail and lost as you, shall rise,— His daughter with his mother’s eyes!
Yet Rossetti made no treaty with puritanism, and in this respect his Jenny has something in common with Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter—than which nothing, perhaps, that is so pure, without being puritanical, has reached us even from the land that gave Evangeline to the English tongue. ”

“ But to these metrical excellencies was added an element new to Rossetti’s poetry, or seen here for the first time conspicuously. Insight and imagination of a high order, together with a poetic instinct whose promptings were sure, had already found expression in more than one creation moulded into an innate chasteness of perfected parts and wedded to nature with an unerring fidelity. But the range of nature was circumscribed, save only in the one exception of a work throbbing with the sufferings and sorrows of a shadowed side of modern life. ”

“ Very soon the wrongdoer shall reap the harvest of a twofold injury: this day another bride shall stand by his side. Is there, then, no way to wreak the just revenge of a broken heart? That suggests sorcery. Yes, the body and soul of the false lover may melt as before a flame; but the price of vengeance is horrible. Yet why? Has not love become devilish? Is not life a curse? ”

“ Of Beatrice, no such description is given either in the Vita Nuova or the Commedia as could afford an artist a definite suggestion. Dante’s love was an idealised passion; it concerned itself with spiritual beauty, whereof the emotions excited absorbed every merely physical consideration. The beauty of Beatrice in the Vita Nuova is like a ray of sunshine flooding a landscape—we see it only in the effect it produces. ”

“ The sense induced by such imagery is akin to that which comes of rapt contemplation of the deep em-blazonings of a fine stained window when the sun’s warm gules glides off before the dim twilight. And this sense as of a thing existent, yet passing stealthily out of all sight away, the metre of the poem helps to foster. Other metres of Rossetti’s have a strenuous reality, and rejoice in their self-assertiveness, and seem, almost, in their resonant strength, to tell themselves they are very good ”

“ Such was the origin of a love that grew from childlike tenderness to manly ardour, and, surviving all the buffetings of an untoward fate, is known to us now and for all time in a record of so much reality and purity, as seems to every right-hearted nature to be equally the story of his personal attachment as the history of a passion that in Florence, six centuries ago, for its mortal put on immortality. ”

“ Usually the landscape wears a cheerful aspect, but at times long fleecy clouds drive midway across the mountains, leaving the tops visible. The scenery is highly awakening to the imagination. Even the country people are imaginative, and the country is full of ghostly legend. I was never at any moment sensible that these environments affected Rossetti: assuredly they never agitated him, and no effort did he make to turn them to account for the purposes of the romantic ballad he had spoken of as likely to grow amidst such surroundings. ”

“ Sonnets of mine could not appear in any book which contained such rigid rules as to rhyme, as are contained in Watts’s letter. I neither follow them, nor agree with them as regards the English language. Every sonnet-writer should show full capability of conforming to them in many instances, but never to deviate from them in English must pinion both thought and diction, and, (mastery once proved) a series gains rather than loses by such varieties as do not lessen the only absolute aim—that of beauty. The English sonnet too much tampered with becomes a sort of bastard madrigal. ”

“ All we know with certainty is that her hair was light, that her face was pale, and that her smile was one of thoughtful sweetness. These hints of a beautiful person Rossetti has wrought into a creation of such purity that, lovely as she is in death, as in life, we think less of her loveliness than of her loveableness. ”

“ Even as a child, of sorrow that we give dead, but little in his heart can find, Since without need of thought to his clear mind Their turn it is to die and his to live:— Even so the winged New Love smiles to receive Along his eddying plumes the auroral wind, Nor, forward glorying, casts one look behind Where night-rack shrouds the Old Love fugitive. ”

“ I may here remark that I never resisted any idea of Rossetti’s at the moment of its inception, since resistance only led to a temporary outburst of self-assertion on his part. He was a man of so much impulse,—impulse often as violent as lawless—that to oppose him merely provoked anger to no good purpose, for as often as not the position at first adopted with so much pertinacity was afterwards silently abandoned, and your own aims quietly acquiesced in. ”

“ The gravamen of the charge against Rossetti, Mr. Swinburne, and Mr. Morris alike—setting aside all particular accusations, however serious—was that they had “bound themselves into a solemn league and covenant to extol fleshliness as the distinct and supreme end of poetic and pictorial art; to aver that poetic expression is greater than poetic thought, and by inference that the body is greater than the soul, and sound superior to sense.” ”