CHAPTER VIII.

THE HOUSE OF LIFE.

"Should he (Rossetti) complete The House of Life upon its original projection, he will leave a monument of beauty mòre lasting than the tradition of his presence."

E. C. STEDMAN, Victorian Poets.

"Above all ideal personalities with which the poet must learn to identify himself, there is one supremely real which is the most imperative of all; namely, that of his reader. And the practical watchfulness needed for such assimilation is as much a gift and instinct as is the creative grasp of alien character. It is a spiritual contact hardly conscious yet ever renewed, and which must be a part of the very act of production."

D. G. ROSSETTI.

BOTH these quotations are very apropos to the subject, the first being a concise statement of a fact that is almost beyond doubt, and the second an utterance of peculiar significance in connection with the author himself and with the famous Sonnet-Sequence called The House of Life. The latter statement is a dictum that Rossetti acted up to in the main, but which he by no means invariably fulfilled: the greater part of the House of Life does conform to the artistic requirement that the sympathetic bond between poet and reader must take precedence of ideal personalities, but not infrequently is the reader arrested by obscurity of expression, by a too subjective motif or treatment of

motif, and by an absence of certain qualities where such might have been expected. While it is beyond doubt that the poet has in this series left behind him a monument of beauty that will last as long or longer than the tradition of his presence, it must be admitted that it does not embrace one-half of what constitutes the life of emotion, and that the title is a misnomer in so far as it is meant to be an adequate representation of the life spiritual. The House of Life is too significant a name to be mainly limited only to the expression of all the varying emotions that accompany the passion of love, for nothing can then be given to the passion of the intellect, little or nothing to wider human hopes and fears, to the longings and aspirations of the individual soul and of a spirit sympathetic with the general life of humanity. So that in the beautiful work of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (for one work it is despite its composition being of an hundred sonnets, as much as the collection of lyrics called In Memoriam is a poetic unity), while we find the most subtle shades of personal pain, regret, shadowy hope, remorse, spiritual agony, love, passion, rapture, foreboding, despondency, frustration, we do not in addition find the high hope of the soul that we associate with Shelley or the joy in life so characteristic of Keats. We pass through a shadowy land,, remote from the pathways of men,

"Nor spire may rise nor bell be heard therefrom ".

where seldom the wind rises from the "secret groves" into wide, sweet, and passionate force, where the rustling leaves are like regrets and sorrows, and the flowers like remembered joys, and where the dull

monotone of a sailless sea haunts the margins as though vague and doubtful hopes and sad despondencies were blent into environing sound. Here and there we do indeed come upon a sonnet that has the effect of a sudden trumpet-note, a startling individual revelation that must affect every reader, a passionate insight that, like a flash of lightning, lays bare some new aspect of life; and nothing finer or nobler of their kind can well be imagined than such sonnets (as Known in Vain, The Heart of the Night, Stillborn Love, Barren Spring, Vain Virtues, Lost Days, Newborn Death, and others of like supremity, but those form a small minority in a hundred. But the impression, nevertheless, remains that the series is, in the main, a ✓record of individual emotions suggested by the presence and absence of embodied love and what such absence and presence individually entail, a record of such and little further, a House, not of Life, but of Love.

As the latter is it of more than great value, it is almost as precious a gift or legacy as the life-sonnets of Shakespeare or the love-record of Mrs. Browning. When we look upon these poems, not as The House of Life but as the revelations of the inner life of a great genius, we feel that in our generation a heritage has been bequeathed to posterity even more valuable than that which was the due of all lovers of art, those. sonnets of Raffaelle but once written out and irrevocably lost and not only as the heritage of a great artist or, in addition, that of one who was in the front rank of the poets of his time, but one also who by his magnetic personality influenced younger men of genius in two arts to an extent even at present widely re

cognised, and to whom is to be traced as to immediate fount the wide-spread æsthetic movement (insistence on a beautiful in place of an ugly or commonplace environment) which has so affected and changed our social life, the principle of which is still a potent influence in the formation of a great school of poetic art, and, though to a less degree, still guides or affects our higher literature.

In stating that the hundred sonnets of Rossetti to which this chapter is devoted could more fitly be entitled The House of Love, it must not be understood that sexual love only is meant, for this, though the mainspring or the central influence of the series, is not the sole motif. "I have loved the principle of Beauty in all things," said Keats; and to no man since Keats could the phrase be more applicable than to the author of The House of Life. Art in the abstract was a beautiful dream to Rossetti; in the concrete, it represented the embodiment of dreams after the beautiful; in poetry, the beautiful (with all its varying manifestations) was to him as essential as foliage to a tree; in his own life we know, as expressed in the Sibylla Palmifera sonnet, Beauty was the shrine at which he worshipped, the ideal which he pursued, the object of undivided and unfaltering praise from voice and hand. And it is this beauty that is celebrated in many of the sonnets, always intensely individual as these are, yet not applicable to the author alone. Their best possible title would have been their present sub-title, A Sonnet-Sequence; this would have been true, for the series is as much a poem of interlinked stanzas as if the latter followed each other without break of page in the manner of coherent verses; and it would also have been not only more exactly

descriptive than The House of Life, but even than The House of Love, from the fact that whatever else is in these sonnets touched upon-and we know how much in its degree this is there is but little of that inspiration, either for good or evil, which makes love the greatest factor in the evolution of individual lives and of nations. These sonnets are the record of what a poet-soul has felt, and we see that love meant with him a dream of happiness while present, a dream of regret and a sense of frustration when passed away, but not that it inspired him to action or made his ideals more impersonal, or gave his aspirations wings to escape from the desolate haunts of sorrow and despondency and vague half-real hopes. Therefore it is not so much that Love was the soul of his genius, as that his genius lived and had its being in the shadow of Love.

"The quality of finish in poetic execution is of two kinds. The first and highest is that where the work has been all mentally cartooned,' as it were, beforehand, by a process intensely conscious, but patient and silent

-an occult evolution of life." These are Rossetti's own words, and none better could be chosen in which to express the method of his own composition. Almost Vinvariably his work was mentally "cartooned " beforehand, and though in actual committal of his conceptions to paper he was not an "inspired" writer in the sense that the "glory of words" came to him almost without volition, the original "cartoon" was present in his mind from the first, fulfilling literally his own dictum as to the sonnet being "a moment's monument." His “conception" seldom underwent modification from the exigencies of rhyme or limitations of the sonnet structure, but though present in each sonnet in its entirety it

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