Poet Lore

A Magazine of Letters

EDITED BY

CHARLOTTE PORTER

HELEN A. CLARKE

COMPILED BY

FRANK R. HOLMES

Volume 7

1895

AMS REPRINT COMPANY

NEW YORK, N. Y. 10003

man; in the absence of which no 'Jenny' had been possible. Surely it is the mission of Art not to hide, or to drape in bewildering allurements, but to reveal the reality; and this is what Rossetti does in the poem we are considering. He takes his stand from within and describes the emotions that may occur to a thoughtful man who, finding himself acting on the impulse of the merely animal, is suddenly confronted with soul: Jenny's body may be sold to the first bidder, - but Fenny's soul!

Here the poet takes his stand: he is within- and from within he looks without; and as he gazes on the wounded, bleeding heart of Jenny, all the pity of it is made manifest, and the man is awakened from his debasing dream of mere animalism by the spirit of Love, proclaiming that only when the threefold chord is touched is the music of life wrought into one harmonious whole; that the true union is that of body, soul, and spirit; and that only when this is made possible, will Jenny's prototype become impossible. Thus Art, working from this inner standpoint in describing the outer, makes it evident that here, and here alone, is the antidote to the "great sin of great cities." No Acts of Parliament, no repressive legislation, will avail here: the act must proceed from the heart of man; the repression be born with the awakening throb of outraged nature asserting that only in this threefold chord is the complement of Being to be found. Thus Art is vindicated, and thus is he the true artist, who, working maybe amid the wrecks of Humanity, goes into the Deeps himself, probes the secrets of our manifold nature, and, working from within, shows the results as they are apparent without, shows them, not clothed in the conventional garb of Mrs. Grundy, but in the hideousness of their everyday attire. Then, the aroused nature, seeing in the work of the artist things as they really are, rises above himself, tramples the ape and tiger under foot, and lo! he himself is the repressive legislator as is shown in the concluding lines of the poem :

I Well, of such thoughts so much I know:
In my life, as in hers, they show,
By a far gleam which I may near,
A dark path I can strive to clear."

And so Art fulfils its true function.