Page:The Poetry of Dante Rossetti by Hall Caine.pdf/10

 only who follow it with ardour and constancy. Poets, it is true, who have attained excellence in epic and lyric forms of verse, and who have found short and rare solace, merely, in this order and composition, have nevertheless sometimes written sonnets of the highest excellence. Milton wrote eighteen only, many of them defective in artistic finish, and wanting in earnestness of theme, but one of them is the rich sonnet on the slaughtered saints. Keats wrote scarcely more than twenty sonnets, but that thing of pure beauty, beginning "The poetry of earth is never dead," is of the number. The sonnet never moulded itself freely to the hands of the elder Coleridge, but from that magician in lyric art came the grandly-conceived sonnet to the "Autumnal Moon." Shakspere and Wordsworth wielded a great mastery in this domain of art because they pursued it with more ardour; but Mr. Rossetti seems to me often to surpass both in unity of design, symmetry of outline, pungency of appropriate phrase, and chiefly in that rare gift,—variety of construction. Finish of execution is everywhere characteristic of the art of the pre-Raphaelites, and Mr. Rossetti has put more than half his dexterity of hand into his sonnets.

Again, the sonnet should be solid, not spectral, concrete, not ideal in theme. A poem marred by slovenly manipulation and built upon some vaguely spectral subject, should take any form but that of the sonnet, to which such dishonouring and false treatment is peculiarly hurtful. The noblest English and Italian sonnets are essentially concrete; witness Wordsworth's "Earth has not anything to show more fair," and Michaelangelo's "If Christ was only six hours crucified." Solidity of theme distinguishes pre-Raphaelitism, the chief of whose gifts is a gift of reality, and the foremost of whose virtues is a disposition for looking sternly the sober facts of the world in the face. Mr. Rossetti's sonnets are solid rather than spectral, but of a solidity nearer akin to that of Michaelangelo than to that of Wordsworth. His is the reality of vision, not the solidity of fact. His sonnets embody at once the spirit of the sensuous and the sensuousness of spirit.

I have now only a few pages to add to my brief monograph, and it is on the second of the two aspects of Mr. Rossetti's mind I spoke of. Setting him up against all other art in order to get some idea of his final place amongst artists—what is the school of his genius? Perhaps his genius is too individual to be classed or placed anywhere; perhaps it is the characteristic of genius that it refuses to be disposed of by classification.