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Pre-Raphaelite School. Her poetry has been incessantly compared with that of Dante Rossetti, from whose somewhat sultry romanticism her own art was very far removed. The very name Rossetti had about it to most readers a suspicion of melodrama; they recalled vague tales of a startling marriage, of chloral, of exotic beasts frisking about long-haired poets in Chelsea, and of poems coffined with a dead wife. Considered merely as the gentle sister of her amazing brother, Christina Rossetti could hope at best only for such mild interest as is elicited by a Byronic heroine, some Medora, let us say, wanly clinging about the picturesque iniquity of her hero. Moreover, the name of Dante Rossetti is inseparably connected with the fame of a conscious and deliberate literary movement; but Christina's connection with that movement is hardly more than accidental. She had no theories and no sources. Hers is not, primarily, the literary and pictorial art of the Pre-Raphaelites. Her verse betrays no noticeable literary influences; here and there, to be sure, she makes use of a quotation from the Italian, and her sonnet-sequence, Monna Innominata, is avowedly modelled on Petrarch and on the Sonnets from the Portuguese; but resemblances do not go beneath the surface, and her whole literary indebtedness is of the slightest.

There was, similarly, no professionalism in her life, no hankering after fame, no pride in her achievement, no gnawing ambition, and no dreams of rivalry. She had no theories about woman's place in life, and promptly declined to be drawn into the feminist movement. Least of all had she any wish to move in the brilliant circle of painters and poets into which her brother might easily have introduced her. She was scarcely accessible to visitors. Her family sufficed her, and even within that narrow circle—a circle which was ever narrowing-she maintained a certain reserve. The few who were privileged to meet her there speak of the gravity and aloofness of her manner. She was like a pillar of cloud, says Mr. Gosse, "a Sibyl whom no one had the audacity to approach." Her brother, William, tells us that there was a stately courtesy even in the closest of her family relations, which she displayed from early childhood.

66

The Poetry of Christina Rossetti

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BY CHAUNCEY BREWSTER TINKER, PH.D.

OW beautiful a thing to be no more than five years old," wrote Christina Rossetti of one of her nieces. "How beautiful a thing," some admirer of Miss Rossetti's verses might say, "to be thus perpetually childlike in spirit." Poets have a way, sometimes, of seeming to defy the process of the years, carrying with them, often into old age, the simplicity and the spontaneous gentleness of the young child. It was so with William Blake; it was so, within much shorter limits, of the boy Chatterton; it was so with Christina Rossetti. Such childlikeness of spirit as is found in these authors is not always recognized as a high literary quality, and to write of it is no easy task. It is to recommend the obviousthough not the obviously popular-and it is to incur, perhaps, the charge of recommending a kind of beauty that may safely be left to take care of itself. What has the critic to do with simplicity? It is his business to analyze; and simplicity and gentleness, being elemental qualities, are not susceptible of analysis and do not repay the student of literary origins. In the case of Miss Rossetti simplicity is linked with an exalted spirit of renunciation and an abnegation of self that is peculiarly difficult of appreciation in an age that has consistently sought individualism in life and art. To dwell on its charm is like pointing out the beauty of a November landscape to one who has known only the gaudier charms of May and October. In this day of noisy art, when poets are splashing their canvases with emerald and scarlet, when repose has been forgotten and the whole creative realm is generally anarchic, it is no simple task to speak of the beauty of quiet tones and of the joy of a noble conformity to what an earlier generation believed to have been proved historically best. It is to seek peace and ensue it.

Even in her own day Christina Rossetti was not always loved for what was most characteristic of her genius. She suffered somewhat, I imagine, from the connection of her name with that of her brother and from her early identification with the

Pre-Raphaelite School. Her poetry has been incessantly compared with that of Dante Rossetti, from whose somewhat sultry romanticism her own art was very far removed. The very name Rossetti had about it to most readers a suspicion of melodrama; they recalled vague tales of a startling marriage, of chloral, of exotic beasts frisking about long-haired poets in Chelsea, and of poems coffined with a dead wife. Considered merely as the gentle sister of her amazing brother, Christina Rossetti could hope at best only for such mild interest as is elicited by a Byronic heroine, some Medora, let us say, wanly clinging about the picturesque iniquity of her hero. Moreover, the name of Dante Rossetti is inseparably connected with the fame of a conscious and deliberate literary movement; but Christina's connection with that movement is hardly more than accidental. She had no theories and no sources. Hers is not, primarily, the literary and pictorial art of the Pre-Raphaelites. Her verse betrays no noticeable literary influences; here and there, to be sure, she makes use of a quotation from the Italian, and her sonnet-sequence, Monna Innominata, is avowedly modelled on Petrarch and on the Sonnets from the Portuguese; but resemblances do not go beneath the surface, and her whole literary indebtedness is of the slightest.

There was, similarly, no professionalism in her life, no hankering after fame, no pride in her achievement, no gnawing ambition, and no dreams of rivalry. She had no theories about woman's place in life, and promptly declined to be drawn into the feminist movement. Least of all had she any wish to move in the brilliant circle of painters and poets into which her brother might easily have introduced her. She was scarcely accessible to visitors. Her family sufficed her, and even within that narrow circle-a circle which was ever narrowing-she maintained a certain reserve. The few who were privileged to meet her there speak of the gravity and aloofness of her manner. She was like a pillar of cloud, says Mr. Gosse, "a Sibyl whom no one had the audacity to approach." Her brother, William, tells us that there was a stately courtesy even in the closest of her family relations, which she displayed from early childhood.

Her verse-writing was, even for the family, a thing apart, and no one ever saw her in the act of composition. Thus in her general retirement of life she is more like her sister, Maria Francesca of the nunnery of Saint Margaret, than like a high priestess in the more pagan sanctuary of Pre-Raphaelitism. Like William Cowper, the shy recluse of Olney, she was probably better known to her readers than to her few visitors; and those who aspire to know her today will learn much more from her poems than from the volume of familiar letters published by William Michael Rossetti, or the eloquent biography of Mr. Mackenzie Bell. The perusal of the letters leaves a reader baffled, with a feeling that he has not penetrated beyond the outworks of her personality; but to read the poems is to experience an intimacy of association and a lively affection such as one feels for the memorials of a friendship that has been closed by death. There are intimacies in her work which make the reader catch his breath, a sharpness of outline, a verisimilitude in his association with the author which is only strengthened by the intense simplicity of her utterance, by what some might call its commonplaceness-were it, indeed, commonplace. It is as though one had discovered a spring welling up into life at his very door.

It would be a mistake to convey the impression that the familiar note in Miss Rossetti's work is in any sense domestic. She admits us to the intimacy of her spirit, not to that of her home. But there was nothing of poverty or dullness in her spirit. The first discovery that the reader, newly admitted to that intimacy, has to make is that he is in the presence of a woman endowed with a sense of the richness of the material as well as of the spiritual world. If she came to feel that the heavenly world was fairer and more desirable than the earthly, it was certainly not because of any dullness to the material glories of this world. She had a highly developed love of color, of perfume, and, above all, of the joys of the sense of taste. There was probably never a poet who referred more often to the delightful lusciousness of fruit. Crivelli himself hardly rivals her in the depiction of

Currants and gooseberries,

Bright, firelike barberries,

Figs to fill your mouth,
Citrons from the south,

Sweet to tongue, and sound to eye.

It is not only in Goblin Market, that glorification of the goddess Pomona, that we find such lines; wherever we open her volumes we run upon her favorite orchard similes:

Was my love less worth

Than apples with their green leaves piled above?

O fruitful vine amid a land of dearth.

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There lurk a hundred subtle stings
To prick us in our daily walk;
An apple cankered on its stalk,
A robin snared for all his wings.

There is thus in her work a much simpler delight in the more obvious aspects of nature than we find in the Pre-Raphaelite poets with their sense of enclosure in palace chambers far away. She could, on occasion, adopt a manner like her brother's, and erect a glowing throne fit for a Beata Beatrix:

Raise me a daïs of silk and down;

Hang it with vair and purple dyes;
Carve it in doves and pomegranates,
And peacocks with a hundred eyes;
Work it in gold and silver grapes,

In leaves and silver fleurs-de-lys.

But in general there are few poems that seem to align her definitely with the Pre-Raphaelites. The only noticeable one is the perplexing poem about which no two critics have been found to agree, the Prince's Progress, and her experiment with this type does not lead us to regret that she did not care to try her skill at it a second time. In the end it will probably be found that the Prince's Progress owes its life to the lovely designs made for the poem by Dante Rossetti and to the lyric

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