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Old and New Masters, essay(s) by Robert Lynd |
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Chapter 15. Rossetti And Ritual |
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_ CHAPTER XV. ROSSETTI AND RITUAL Rossetti's great gift to his time was the gift of beauty, of beauty to be worshipped in the sacred hush of a temple. His work is not richer in the essentials of beauty than Browning's--it is not, indeed, nearly so rich; but, while Browning served beauty joyously, a god in a firmament of gods, Rossetti burned a lonely candle to it as to the only true god. To Browning, the temple of beauty was but a house in a living world; to Rossetti, the world outside the temple was, for the most part, a dead world. _Jenny_ may, seem to stand in vivid contradiction of this. But _Jenny_ was an exceptional excursion into life, and hardly expresses the Rossetti that was a power in art and literature. Him we find best, perhaps, in _The Blessed Damozel_, written when he was little more than a boy. And this is not surprising, for the arrogant love of beauty, out of which the aesthetic sort of art and literature has been born, is essentially a boy's love. Poets who are sick with this passion must either die young, like Keats, or survive merely to echo their younger selves, like Swinburne. They are splendid in youth, like Aucassin, whose swooning passion for Nicolette is symbolical of their almost painful desire of beauty. In _Hand and Soul_, Rossetti tells us of Chiaro dell Erma that "he would feel faint in sunsets and at the sight of stately persons." Keats's Odes express the same ecstasy of faintness, and Rossetti himself was obviously a close nineteenth-century counterpart of Chiaro. Even when he troubles about the soul--and he constantly troubles about it--he never seems to be able altogether to escape out of what may be called the higher sensationalism into genuine mysticism. His work is earth-born: it is rich in earthly desire. His symbols were not wings to enable the soul to escape into a divine world of beauty. They were the playthings of a grown man, loved for their owft beauty more than for any beauty they could help the spirit to reach. Rossetti belongs to the ornamental school of poetry. He writes more like a man who has gone into a library than like one who has gone out to Nature, and ornamentalism in poetry is simply the result of seeing life, not directly, but through the coloured glass of literature and the other arts. Rossetti was the forerunner of all those artists and authors of recent times, who, in greater or less degree, looked on art as a weaving of patterns, an arrangement of wonderful words and sounds and colours. Pater in his early writings, William Morris, Oscar Wilde, and all those others who dreamed that it was the artist's province to enrich the world with beautiful furniture--for conduct itself seemed, in the philosophy of these writers, to aspire after the quality of tapestry--are implicit in _The Blessed Damozel_ and _Troy Town._ It is not that Rossetti could command words like Pater or Wilde. His phrasing, if personal, is curiously empty of the graces. He often does achieve graces of phrase; but some of his most haunting poems owe their power over us to their general pattern, and not to any persistent fine workmanship. How beautiful _Troy Town_ is, for instance, and yet how lacking in beautiful verses! The poet was easily content in his choice of words who could leave a verse like:-- Venus looked on Helen's gift;
O love, my love! if I no more should see
In his use of the very mysteries of Christianity, he is intoxicated chiefly by the beauty of the designs by which the painters have expressed their vision of religion. His _Ave_ is a praise of the beauty of art more than a praise of the beauty of divinity. In it we are told how, on the eve of the Annunciation, Far off the trees were as pale wands,
Yet his influence on art and literature has been immense. He, far more than Keats or Swinburne, was the prophet of that ritualism which has been a; dominant characteristic in modern poetry, whether it is the Pagan ritualism of Mr. Yeats or the Catholic ritualism of Francis Thompson. One need not believe that he was an important direct influence on either of these poets. But his work as poet and painter prepared the world for ritualism in literature. No doubt the medievalism of Scott and the decorative imagination of Keats were also largely responsible for the change in the literary atmosphere; but Rossetti was more distinctively a symbolist and ritualist than any other English man of letters who lived in the early or middle part of the nineteenth century. People used to debate whether he was greater as a painter or as a poet, and he was not always sure himself. When, however, he said to Burne-Jones, in 1857: "If any man has any poetry in him, he should paint; for it has all been said and written, and they have scarcely begun to paint it," he gave convincing proof that painting, and not poetry, was his essential gift. He may be denounced for his bad drawing and twenty other faults as an artist; but it is his paintings that show him as a discoverer and a man of high genius. At the same time, how well he can also paint in verse, as in those ever-moving lines on Jenny's wanderings in the Haymarket:-- Jenny, you know the city now.
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