Page:The Fleshly school of poetry - Buchanan - 1872.djvu/52

 English society of one kind purchases the Day's Doings. English society of another kind goes into ecstasy over Mr. Solomon's pictures—pretty pieces of morality, such as "Love dying by the breath of Lust." There is not much to choose between the two objects of admiration, except that painters like Mr. Solomon lend actual genius to worthless subjects, and thereby produce veritable monsters—like the lovely devils that danced round St. Anthony. Mr. Rossetti owes his so-called success with our "aunts" and "grandmothers" to the same causes. In poems like "Nuptial Sleep," the man who is too sensitive to exhibit his pictures, and so modest that it takes him years to make up his mind to publish his poems, parades his private sensations before a coarse public, and is gratified by their idiotic applause.

It must not be supposed that all Mr. Rossetti's poems are made up of trash like this. They contain some fine pictures of nature, occasional passages of real meaning, much clever phraseology, lines of peculiar sweetness, and epithets chosen with true literary cunning. But the fleshly feeling is everywhere. Sometimes, as in "The Stream's Secret," it adds greatly to our emotion of pleasure at perusing a finely wrought poem; at other times, as in the "Last Confession," it is somewhat held in check by the exigencies of a powerful situation and the strength of a dramatic speaker; but it is generally in the foreground, flushing the whole poem with unhealthy rose-colour, stifling the senses with overpowering sickliness, as of too much civet. Mr. Rossetti is never dramatic, never impersonal—always attitudinising, posturing, and describing his own exquisite emotions. He is the "Blessed Damozel," leaning over the "gold bar of heaven," and seeing