Pre-Raphaelite and other Poets. Lafcadio Hearn

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      I

      We must rank Dante Gabriel Rossetti as not inferior to Tennyson in workmanship—therefore as occupying the very first rank in nineteenth century poetry. He was not inferior to Tennyson either as a thinker, but his thinking was in totally different directions. He had no sympathy with the ideas of his own century; he lived and thought in the Middle Ages; and while one of our very greatest English poets, he takes a place apart, for he does not reflect the century at all. He had the dramatic gift, but it was a gift in his case much more limited than that of Browning. Altogether we can safely give him a place in the first rank as a maker of poetry, but in all other respects we cannot classify him in any way. He remains a unique figure in the Victorian age, a figure such as may not reappear for hundreds of years to come. It was as if a man of the thirteenth century had been reborn into the nineteenth century, and, in spite of modern culture, had continued to think and to feel very much as men felt and thought in the time of the great Italian poet Dante.

      One reason for this extraordinary difference between himself and his contemporaries was that Rossetti was not an Englishman but an Italian by blood, religion, and feeling. In his verse we might expect to find something that we cannot find in any other English poet; and I think that we shall find it. The facts of his life—strange and pathetic—need not occupy us now. You need only remember for the present that he was a great painter before becoming a great poet, and that his painting, like his poetry, was the painting of another century than his own. Also it will be well to bear in mind that he detested modern science and modern philosophy—which fact makes it all the more remarkable that he uttered some great thoughts quite in harmony with the most profound philosophy of the Orient.

      In studying the best of his poetry, it will be well for us to consider it by groups, taking a few specimens from each group as examples of the rest; since we shall not have time to read even a quarter of all his production. Taking the very simplest of his work to begin with, I shall make a selection from what I might call the symbolic group, for want of a better name. I mean those poems which are parables, or symbolic illustrations of deep truths—poems which seem childishly simple, but are nevertheless very deep indeed. We may begin with a little piece called "The Mirror."

      She knew it not—most perfect pain

       To learn: this too she knew not. Strife

       For me, calm hers, as from the first. 'Twas but another bubble burst Upon the curdling draught of life— My silent patience mine again. As who, of forms that crowd unknown Within a distant mirror's shade, Deems such an one himself, and makes Some sign; but when the image shakes No whit, he finds his thought betray'd, And must seek elsewhere for his own.

      So far as the English goes, this verse is plain enough; but unless you have met with the same idea in some other English writer, you will find the meaning very obscure. The poet is speaking of a universal, or almost universal, experience of misplaced love. A man becomes passionately attached to a woman, who treats him with, cold indifference. Finally the lover finds out his mistake; the woman that he loved proves not to be what he imagined; she is not worthy of his love. Then what was he in love with? With a shadow out of his brain, with an imagination or ideal very pure and noble, but only an imagination. Supposing that he was worshipping good qualities in a noble woman, he deceived himself; the woman had no such qualities; they existed only in his fancy. Thus he calls her his mirror, the human being that seemed to be a reflection of all that was good in his own heart. She never knows the truth as to why the man loved her and then ceased to love her; he could not tell her, because it would have been to her "most perfect pain to learn."

      A less obscure but equally beautiful symbolism, in another metre, is "The Honeysuckle."

      I plucked a honeysuckle where

       The hedge on high is quick with thorn,

       And climbing for the prize, was torn,

       And fouled my feet in quag-water;

       And by the thorns and by the wind

       The blossom that I took was thinn'd,

       And yet I found it sweet and fair.