The claims of Rossetti as a painter and a poet have obtained a full and generous recognition; and he has acquired a standing in either art which will in all probability abide, though it is far too soon to attempt any estimate of his relative position in the permanent ranks of artists and writers. His thoughtfulness, and the clearness and intensity of his perceptions, do not require to be insisted upon, nor the almost unexampled way in which he has merged—and often, it must be admitted, confounded—the functions of painter and poet. This he has done to the detriment of his perfection in either art; in neither of which can he be truly said to have attained the character of mastery which may be found, more or less, in almost all other workers of equal genius with himself, and sometimes in those whose natural qualifications have been inferior to his. Little{104} of his drawing and none of his painting can be enjoyed without the drawback of some sense of manifest technical failure; and nearly all his poetry—which is more or less difficult by reason of the quick succession of out-of-the-way thoughts and images, needing the closest attention for their appreciation—is rendered unnecessarily so by language which rarely has the fluency of perfection. In the two or three instances in which his verse becomes fluent and more or less masterly—notably in the “Burden of Nineveh” and “Jenny”—it ceases to be characteristic or subtle. The “Burden of Nineveh” might have been written by Southey, or any other writer of forcible words and thoughts in somewhat commonplace rhythm. This fact, that fluency fails him as soon as he gets upon his own proper ground, renders it extremely difficult to discern and to describe exactly what that ground is. Style, which is the true expression of the poet’s individuality—the mark by which we discover, not what, but how, he thinks and feels—is almost suffocated, in Rossetti’s most characteristic work, by voluntary oddities of manner and by a manifest difficulty in so moving in the bonds of verse as to convert them into graces. If subtle thoughts and vivid imagery were all that went to make a poet, Rossetti would stand very high. But these qualities must have{105} the running commentary and musical accompaniment of free feeling, which only a correspondingly subtle and vivid versification can express, before they can be allowed to constitute a claim to the highest poetical rank. Rossetti as a versifier was as technically defective as Rossetti as a painter; his best poems and his best paintings are the outcome, not only of very high aims—which are as common as blackberries—but of very high aims deeply and characteristically felt; and his superiority to many far more technically perfect artists results from the fact that his characteristic feeling is strong enough to make itself powerfully, however indistinctly, perceived through the mist and obstructions of his mannerism and defective verse.

Like all men of strong artistic individuality combined with serious artistic faults, Rossetti has had a great influence upon the literature of his day—such an influence as comparatively faultless writers never exert, at least in their time. Many young versifiers and painters fancy they are reproducing Rossetti’s intensity when they are only imitating the most prevailing fault of his art, its tensity. His brother, William Rossetti, in his modest and judicious introduction to these volumes, tells how he and Gabriel used to amuse themselves in making bouts-rimés. William says{106} of his brother’s literary toys of this sort: “Some have a faux air of intensity of meaning, as well as of expression; but their real core of significance is small.” It cannot be denied that a careful scrutiny of much of Rossetti’s published work is open to this criticism. It is tense without being intense. This fault is his great attraction to his imitators, whose every sensation is represented as a pang, delicious or otherwise, and whose mental sky is a canopy of iron destiny compared with which the melancholy of Byron, which likewise had so many copyists, was no more than a pleasant shade.

In endeavouring to do justice to Rossetti it must be remembered that, though born and bred in England, he was an Italian by blood and sympathy. His acquaintance with Englishmen and English books was by no means wide. Love, the constant theme of his art, is in some of his most important poems, not the English love whose stream is steady affection and only its occasional eddies passion, and which, when disappointed, does not cease to be love, though it becomes sorrow: but the Italian ardour, in perennial crisis, which stabs its rival and hates its object, if she refuses its satisfaction, as ardently as it worships her so long as there is hope. The limitations, also, which characterise Rossetti’s poetry belong{107} to Italian poetry itself. There is little breadth in it, but much acuteness. Dante is to Shakespeare as the Peak of Teneriffe to the tableland of Tibet; and, as any reader of Rossetti’s translations of the minor Italian poets may see, the same proportion prevails between them and the lesser singers of England. ............