Page:The Poetry of Dante Rossetti by Hall Caine.pdf/12

 of art, but their narrowed aims make as feeble an effort as puritanism ever advanced to cover the whole domain of art. The colour of the picture and the music of the poem belong to the manner of the artist, and appeal first to our affections, but the pleasure, or even exaltation of soul, we derive from them is due not to any virtue in themselves so much as to their own spiritual significance and suggestiveness.

But the manner of doing a thing can never be more than a part of the work done, and art has never been followed for its own sake without involving other meanings, purposes and results. Look broadly at the mediaeval ages for evidence of this enforced marriage of manner and meaning; or look specially, if you will, at the age of the Renaissance. The artist has never at any time divorced his moral nature from his artistic instinct, and cannot. The ethical significance may have been always the accident of his work, but it has been always the essence of his nature; and those artists who, to-day, claim the supreme place for the manner of their work are struggling either to cheapen the gifts they have not got in abundance, or more probably, to conceal the quality of the meaning in their work of which they have no moral cause to be proud.

You may know a tree by its fruit, but the fruits are not the essence of the tree, and even as an artist's moral instincts are so will his art be. His art cannot escape the colouring it gets from the human side of his nature, because it is in the essence of art that it appeals to its own highest faculties largely through the channel of moral instincts: that music is exquisite and colour splendid, first because both have spiritual significance, and next because they respond to sensuous passion. But it is one thing to pursue art for its own sake with an over-ruling moral instinct that gravitates towards conduct, and quite another thing deliberatively to absorb art in moral purposes. Cowper and Klopstock furnish well-worn examples of the trespass of unlovely morality upon the truth and beauty of art; and Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Beaudelaire of the violent abrogation of puritanism in the pursuit of manner. But the poetry of Mr. Rossetti shews how possible it is, without making conscious compromise with the puritan principle of doing good, to be unconsciously making for moral ends. This is because the basis of the poet's nature is a Hebraic craving for the correct, and as the tree is so have the fruits been. There is a passive puritanism in "Jenny" which lives and works together with the artist's purely artistic passion