Page:The Poetry of Dante Rossetti by Hall Caine.pdf/7

 piercing than in "The Last Confession," and "Dante at Verona?" The prurient "Giaour" has nothing to match the power and Othello-like passion of the first of these poems, and in vigour of handling the second stands side by side with the " Revolt of Islam."

A song should catch the note of some single and simple emotion: it cannot attempt to follow the growth of any complex feeling. It may represent the double facet of a thought and echo, the undulating swell of a sensation, but its scope and scheme, its meaning and purpose are bounded by these limitations. A narrative poem, on the other hand, may not only follow the progress of incident, but indicate the origin of emotion, observe its rise and trace its development. In this sense "Jenny" is essentially a narrative poem. It tracks the growth of a feeling more real than fact. The movement of incident cannot anywhere be more eager, sustained and absorbing than the change of emotion from the warm picture of the sweet child, radiant with joy, leaping with the love of life, lying in the meadows, looking far through the blown grass and wondering where the city is of which they tell her for a tale, to the cold, dark study of the weak, erring girl who knows the city now, its pride and woe, yet while "nothing tells of winter" steels her heart against its sorrow and shuts her eyes to its shame. But Mr. Rossetti's highest mastery of the narrative form of composition is seen in "The Last Confession." Scott and Byron knew well how to sustain the flood of story, but Scott's great gift of reality inclined him merely to reproduce the material furnished by his eye and memory, without regard for its ethical significance; and Byron's pruriency of instinct forbade his vivid perception to sound the depths of passion. The grandeur of moral impulse which runs through Mr. Rossetti's story is such as never entered into the mind of either to conceive. The incidents are simple ones. A banished young patriot in Italy's days of trouble finds a child whom famine has caused to be deserted by her parents; he brings her up as his own, and in the progress of years is startled to discover that his affection for the child develops into love for the woman; finally he slays his beautiful ward to save her from dishonour. The passion of the poem grows out of the exile's suspicion of the base unworthiness of his dear idol. The slight and secret artifices by which this feeling steals into his soul, the imperceptible advantages which it gains there, the means by which it renders all other feelings subservient to its purposes until (as Lessing, has said in a