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Chapter 08: Market Failure versus Government Failure

Chapter 8: Market Failure versus Government Failure

Questions and Exercises

1. Reasons for a potentially beneficial role of government intervention include (1) to

provide for public goods, (2) to correct for externalities, and (3) to address
imperfect information.

2. The marginal social benefit of a good that exhibits positive externalities is greater
than the private social benefit because the trade results in a benefit to people
outside the trade.

3. An economist might argue about the word acceptable. Although not many people
would argue that any pollution is good, an economist who realizes that
eliminating pollution completely is probably an impossibly costly goal would find
pollution acceptable if it could be reduced to a cost-efficient level.

4. This oil tax is an example of a tax incentive program that attempts to make the
price of oil reflect the negative externality. If it works, it should provide an
incentive for the users with the lowest cost of reduction to decrease their
consumption of oil. If those with the lowest costs are significant users, there will
be a significant reduction. The effect depends on how high the tax is and the
alternatives available to oil consumers.

5. a. Assuming perfect competition, the price and quantity will be set where demand
crosses marginal cost with equilibrium price, P1, and equilibrium quantity, Q1.

b. The socially efficient price and quantity would be where demand crosses marginal
social cost, a higher price and a smaller output (P0, Q0).

6. A market incentive program is more efficient because it makes use of the

powerful force of the invisible hand, and unlike the direct regulation approach, it
gets people to equate the marginal costs with the marginal benefit of their choices.
This results in the costs of a policy being distributed in the most efficient way.
8-1
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whole or part.
Chapter 08: Market Failure versus Government Failure

7. a. Proposal A would force a downward shift in each demand curve by reducing

quantity at every price. Proposal B would raise the price at each quantity, also
shifting the demand curves down.
b. The consumers with more elastic demand can more easily adjust their usage and
therefore would favor Proposal A.
c. Those with inelastic demand are more likely to favor the tax because changing
their usage is more difficult. Their inelasticity can be interpreted to mean that they
are more willing to pay a higher price than to consume less oil.

8. a. The price of getting rid of garbage rose, but the price of getting rid of recyclables
did not. People substituted recycling for disposing.
b. The weight of garbage fell less than did volume because the fee was based on
volume; people stuffed the bags fuller, placing more garbage into a 32-gallon bag.
c. With a flat fee, the marginal cost of disposing more garbage was essentially zero,
and so in the accompanying graph, Q0 garbage pickup was demanded. With
volume pricing, the price rose to P1 and quantity demanded fell to Q1. See the
accompanying graph.

9. (1) The public aspect of safety is that if safety provides a safe environment, it is
provided for all people and one person enjoying safety does not preclude others
from benefiting from that safety. (2) Naming streets allows people to orient
themselves in towns and facilitates communication. Once a street is named, it
benefits all people. No one can be excluded from referring to that name. In
addition, one person using that street name does not preclude others from
referring to that street by its name. Before the street is named, however, if a
particular name is used to refer to more than one street, the value of that name in
providing geographic orientation will be diminished. (3) A steak dinner has no
public good aspects, since it is both rival and excludable.

10. Nonexcludability and nonrivalry both increase the ability of free riders to enjoy
the benefit of the product without paying for it.

8-2
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whole or part.
Chapter 08: Market Failure versus Government Failure

11. City parks are examples of public goods. Use by one person does not deplete their
use by others, and they are nonexcludable. Asking for voluntary contributions to
sustain city parks will result in too few parks because of the free rider problem.
Once a park was built, it would be difficult to exclude the people who did not
voluntarily contribute to its building from using it; thus, individuals do not have a
monetary incentive to be the ones to pay for it. (They may have nonmonetary
incentives such as wanting to support green spaces in their neighborhoods.)

12. a. The market demand curve is shown in the accompanying graph. The market curve
and the demand curve for A are the same from quantity 4 and up. Remember that
with public goods, the market demand curve is created by summing the individual
demand curves vertically.

b. Because people do not actually purchase public goods, their true preferences are
not revealed. Since people will not pay directly for those goods, they will tend to
overstate the value they receive from public goods.
c. The socially optimal amount of the public good at a price of $2 is four units.
d. Given the free rider problem, the answer to c is most likely an overestimate.

13. You might offer the average, $600. If sellers of cherries want $700, your $600
would buy you only lemons. If you had this information, you'd know that you had
no chance of buying a cherry. The problem is that even though all cherries are
priced higher than $700, there are also lemons priced higher than $700. You
probably would lower your asking price to reflect the fact that there are only
lemons available in the market.

14. Three examples of signaling are (1) car warrantees, (2) 90-day return policies, and
(3) academic credentials. (Other answers are possible.)

15. Automobile insurance companies don’t have complete information about a

person’s choice whether to take risks while driving. The screen is the two options.
People who drive safely will choose the high deductible because they have a low

8-3
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whole or part.
Chapter 08: Market Failure versus Government Failure

probability of getting in an accident. People who are more likely to expect to get
in an accident will chose the low deductible.

16. In a market in which buyers and sellers have different amounts of information
about the good for sale, a problem occurs that is called the adverse selection
problem. The problem is that the market for quality products disappears.
Although the question doesn't ask for an example, here's one: In commercial
dating services, the seller certainly has more information about the negative (and
positive) aspects of the product than does the buyer. We suspect that the market
has fewer “acceptable” dates than the general population.

17. Neither buyers nor sellers would have any information about the quality of the
cars, and so the mix would become a potluck and the distribution of problems
would reflect the quality and natural aging of cars.

18. To keep rates to a minimum, insurance companies estimate risk by categorizing

individuals and look for variables that are related to risk. If everyone paid the
same amount, low-cost customers would be paying for high-cost customers and
eventually change companies, leaving only high-cost customers. One would
expect that statistically, married drivers are safer drivers. Whether this practice is
fair is a normative issue.

19. The advanced degree serves the same purpose as a license. It reduces the supply
and increases the wage of the one with the license.

20. If the informational alternative is introduced, existing doctors, on average,

probably will lose, as their monopoly would be reduced. Customers who have
wider options will gain, as will individuals just starting careers in medicine who
have more options about what type of study to pursue. Some customers who have
less ability to shop around may lose if they end up going to inadequate doctors
who previously were excluded from practicing medicine.

21. The moral hazard problem in insurance will lead to higher premiums because
those who are covered will be less careful with whatever behavior is being
covered and behave in a way that is more risky. Both raise the cost of providing
insurance for the provider. Although the question does not ask for an example,
here is one: The problem will lead to higher health insurance premiums because
those who are covered will be less careful about maintaining their health and seek
medical care more frequently. Both raise the cost of providing health insurance.

22. a. No. The right number of regulations is a normative issue. One could argue that the
right number of regulations is the number that equates the marginal cost to the
marginal benefit of those regulations. Since we don't know the marginal benefit of
the regulations, just the total, we can't tell whether these regulations are optimal.
b. To the extent that the marginal costs and marginal benefits of regulations are
known, economists would use a cost/benefit analysis to decide about each

8-4
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whole or part.
Chapter 08: Market Failure versus Government Failure

regulation.

23. Whether government ought to forbid Ben from wearing a red shirt depends on
how much you support a free market and whether you believe government should
correct all externalities. One opinion is that even though Sally might dislike the
color red, she is not physically harmed in any way. Besides, Ben should also have
the freedom to wear the clothes that he wants as a freedom of expression.

24. There is no one correct answer to this question. The best answer is that it depends
on one's view of government's role in the market. Most economists consider
externalities to be one of the problems where government may have a role, though
some believe that a market will develop to address those externalities. If one does
believe that there is a role for government, tax incentive policies allow the
invisible hand to guide the trade to equate marginal social cost with marginal
social benefit. Those who can reduce their use of fossil fuel most easily will
reduce consumption the most. The opposite is true for those who face a higher
cost of reducing consumption. In this way, the tax is better than direct regulation.
A market incentive plan is another program that uses the invisible hand to lead to
the optimal use. There are other issues to consider, such as whether fossil fuels
do in fact lead to global warming and whether global warming is, on average, bad
for society.

Questions from Alternative Perspectives

1. Austrian

a. Yes, it could.

b. According to Austrian economists, the structure of the micro course is slanted

toward government action and government failure is not given sufficient focus.

2. Religious

a. There is some truth to this saying; if people were only selfish, they would lose
much that makes them human.

b. Yes, there is a conflict, although how strong the conflict is, is a matter of debate.

c. No probably not, although, again, the answer is debatable. Markets would not
work well if people were purely selfless. In many ways, the society would simply
not need markets.

3. Institutionalist

Intervention becomes acceptable if it improves the capacity of the provisioning

system to better the human condition. The result is that policies to provide things
such as universal health care are not questions of if but of how?
8-5
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whole or part.
Chapter 08: Market Failure versus Government Failure

4. Post-Keynesian

a. A number of examples are possible. Here is one: Asymmetric information is

likely to exist in the used automobile market.

b. The seller of the car could offer a warranty for the car. (There are other
possibilities.)

c. It could, since there are no barriers to entry, but it seems to be very expensive for
small firms to create such warranties, leaving a potential for government action.

5. Radical

a. Providing safe drinking water has public goods aspects to it; it benefits the entire
community, not just the individual, and many of the costs are joint.

b. This is a judgment question, and judgments differ. Most radical economists

believe that private provision of water is bad policy.

c. From a radical perspective, public provisioning of basic services makes the most
sense.

8-6
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whole or part.
Chapter 08: Market Failure versus Government Failure

Issues to Ponder

1. If economists support a tax on a specific good, it is usually because of a suspected

externality. In the case of gasoline, the likely externality involves carbon
emissions. The higher tax would encourage individuals to use less gasoline and to
switch to less polluting alternatives.

2. a. One advantage of such fees is that they reduce the quantity of animal trophies
demanded (assuming poaching can be prevented). This reduces the damage to the
stock of animals. Further, the revenue could be used to raise more animals or meet
other needs of African nations. This also provides an incentive for the local
people to preserve sufficient big game to meet the demand for the permits.
b. One argument against it is that condoning such slaughter at any price is immoral
and removing the stigma of illegal killing may even result in a greater demand for
animal trophies. A second argument is that by the time the optimal price is found,
the animals may well be extinct.

3. a. Most likely the price of all cars will rise; air quality probably would rise as well.
b. This law could possibly increase pollution if consumers hold on to their older, less
efficient but lower-cost, higher-performance gas cars and delay the purchase of an
electric car. This would increase the average age of cars on the road, increasing
pollution. Furthermore, if electric cars (the most likely candidates) were designed
to meet the no-pollution requirement, it could be that the process of generating
sufficient electricity to run the cars would produce even more pollution, at which
point even more regulation might be imposed.
c. Economists generally favor market incentive programs over direct regulation. A
market incentive program that reduces pollution by a certain percent might be to
tax drivers of older, high-pollution cars and use the tax revenue to subsidize those
who purchase the new no-pollution cars. This approach will be more likely to
equate marginal cost with marginal benefit. Another market incentive program
would be to increase taxes on gasoline, causing the demand for gasoline to
decrease as people switched to more efficient vehicles.

4. Three market failures that possibly justify national parks are as follows: (1)
National parks are possibly public goods. Use by one does not deplete their use by
others, and it is difficult to exclude people from using them. National parks are
not pure public goods because they can be gated with tollbooths at their entrances,
requiring fees to enter. However, one aspect of national parks—existence value—
is not excludable. Existence value is the value a citizen of a country derives from
the knowledge that the country has national parks. National parks create national
pride and identity. This value is both nonrival and nonexcludable, leading to
underproduction of national parks by the private market. (2) National parks create
positive externalities. People who visit national parks learn about taking care of
the environment, our national heritage, and the complexity of nature—education
that can be brought into other parts of economic life. Another positive externality

8-7
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Chapter 08: Market Failure versus Government Failure

is that they provide resources for a variety of research that provides benefits to
society. (3) National parks may experience increasing returns to scale. That is, the
larger the park, the lower the per-unit cost of maintaining it. Thus, national parks
can be seen as a natural monopoly of sorts, justifying government intervention.
(Source: “Market Failures and the Rationale for National Parks,” Journal of
Economic Education, Fall 2002.) (Natural monopolies are covered in Chapter 14
but can be introduced by the instructor to facilitate the class discussion.)

5. The FDA protects us from unsafe pharmaceuticals, but in so doing it creates

enormous bureaucratic hassles for the manufacturers of pharmaceuticals. In some
cases, by the time the FDA has approved a pharmaceutical, many potential users
are already dead. This question requires weighing the costs against the benefits.

6. Although there are benefits of licensing, it is often used as a way to restrict entry
into the profession and thwart competition. Thus, although some type of
certification program may be warranted, licensing is probably not warranted.

7. Pro: People should undergo testing before getting life insurance because a person
who is more likely to seek thrills is a greater risk to the insurance company, and
they should bear these higher costs themselves rather than having them passed on
to non-risk seekers.

Con: People should not undergo testing before getting life insurance because
whether a person is a greater risk depends on revealed behavior rather than
proclivity toward a particular behavior. We, not our genes, decide our behavior.
Undergoing such testing would result in people who have the gene but who avoid
such behavior having to unnecessarily pay a higher premium.

8. Many answers are possible, beginning with (1) the label on breakfast cereal, (2)
the roads used to get to school, (3) either the school they go to (if it is public) or
the federal funds their school receives (if it is private), (4) the taxes paid on the
snack at the snack bar, and (5) the laws that are enforced on the roadways. The
benefits of labeling are that consumers can better plan nutritional balance and are
better informed about the product they are buying. Whether this is justified is
unclear. If consumers wanted such labeling, there would be market pressure to
include that information on cereal boxes. Some labeling, such as whether the
product contains genetically modified food, could unnecessarily alarm consumers.
This would hurt companies that use genetically modified food and help
companies that don’t. Whether genetically modified food is harmful is still up for
debate.

9. The tax on oil will probably affect the pollution coming from oil, but it is possible
that users could switch to other fuel sources that result in other and greater forms
of pollution. Moreover, some types of pollution would be unaffected. Thus, the
net impact on the environment is difficult to predict.

8-8
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whole or part.
Chapter 08: Market Failure versus Government Failure

10. a. Some dairy farmers probably would argue that labeling is unnecessary since the
drugs they administer have been certified by the FDA. Dairy farmers who do not
use BST would support BST labeling because consumers may perceive their milk
as better for their health.
b. If BST were to be listed on milk containers, one could argue that all drugs and
antibiotics should be listed. However, such listing (without more information)
might cause unnecessary consumer concern. To support BST labeling but not
other labeling, one must argue that BST is different.
c. One would suspect that dairy farmers who support BST labeling would not
support the broader law that might include drugs that they do use. Only those few
farmers who use wholly organic farming would support full labeling.

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Other documents randomly have
different content
edge of a curtain is seen the foot of the approaching husband,
bringing his vengeance and the lovers’ doom. The same subject has
been more elaborately and completely treated by Mr. G.F. Watts,
whose picture shows Francesca telling her sad tale to Dante and
Virgil as they pass; and the poet who is said to have known her on
earth, and to have written the record quoted from the “Inferno” in
the house at Rimini in which she was born, is depicted sinking in a
swoon before her, overcome with pity and with awe.
Again, and in a widely different field of dramatic narrative, does
Rossetti bring this passionate sense of retribution into play. His
drawing for the never-finished picture, “The Death of Lady Macbeth,”
is full of the same half-pitiful and half-triumphant spirit of righteous
vengeance, and the same perception of inexorable penalty. The aged
and dying woman crouching on her bed has once been comely and
of commanding countenance; and in her last hour the remembered
beauty of her face, the lingering majesty of her figure, seem to
overawe her attendants, one of whom presses a sponge to her head.
In that changed face the conflict between remorse and pride,
ambition and terror, is still fierce and strong; but she is dying utterly
alone: there is no love, no tenderness, in the ministry of those who
gather round the murderess.
Still more clearly and resolutely is this perception of moral issues
sustained by the Pre-Raphaelites when they pass from history and
legend to classic mythology, to allegorical type, or to the dramatic
presentation of modern life. In the “Awakening Conscience” of
Holman Hunt, in the exquisitely pathetic “Psyche” of G.F. Watts, in
the “Hesterna Rosa,” “Gate of Memory,” and “Found” of Rossetti, the
bitter cost of sin is realized with unfaltering consistency. Rossetti’s
long-laboured and yet uncompleted “Found” may be taken as the
companion, if not the sequel, to his poem, “Jenny.” It shows us the
last humiliation of a ruined girl who is “found”—dying on the streets
of London—by the lover of her youth,—a countryman who has
driven in with his milk-cart through the chill light of a London dawn.
All the pride and struggle of the past is written on her once lovely
face, and she shrinks in shame and terror from his touch.
 “Ah! gave not these two hearts their mutual pledge,
Under one mantle sheltered ’neath the hedge
In gloaming courtship? And, O God! to-day
He only knows he holds her;—but what part
Can life now take? She cries in her locked heart,—
‘Leave me—I do not know you—go away!’”[11]

It might almost be the same sad girl that stands at “The Gate of
Memory,” watching a group of young and innocent maidens at play
beside a well.

“She leaned herself against the wall

And longed for drink to slake her thirst
And memory at once.”

A more original and striking composition is “Hesterna

Rosa”—“Yesterday’s Rose.” All the weird realism of Rossetti’s most
mediæval manner pervades this painfully impressive design;—
mediæval in spirit, and yet almost Hogarthian in its bold handling of
human degradation and debauchery. The motive is taken from
“Elena’s Song” in Sir Henry Taylor’s “Philip van Artevelde,” Part II.,
Act v.:

“Quoth tongue of neither maid nor wife

To heart of neither wife nor maid,
‘Lead we not here a jolly life,
Betwixt the shrine and shade?’

“Quoth heart of neither maid nor wife

To tongue of neither wife nor maid,
‘Thou wag’st, but I am worn with strife,
And feel like flowers that fade.’”

The scene is in a tent at early daybreak, amid a group of gamblers

and depraved women throwing dice. But one of them is a girl still
beautiful, and not yet hardened by the coarseness of her new life.
She shrinks from the kiss of the player who bends over her hand.
“Yesterday’s Rose” is not wholly faded; only her first fresh bloom is
gone; she has bartered it irretrievably for her chance in the
desperate game of passion, like the vengeful woman in “The
Laboratory,” offering her pearls to buy poison for her enemy. The
contrast between the shamed “rose” and her brutalized companions
is emphasized by the tender light of the dawn, which creeps through
the orchard trees outside, and makes the lamp within appear more
yellow and dull and weak.
Entirely modern in spirit and execution is Holman Hunt’s treatment
of a similar theme. The “Awakening Conscience” is that of a girl
idling with her paramour in a newly and luxuriously furnished room.
He has been singing to her, not noticing the change in her face, and
his hands still pass carelessly over the pianoforte keys. But the
words of the song—Moore’s “Oft in the Stilly Night”—have stirred a
sudden anguish in her heart; she has started up, tortured with long
pent memories and overcome with shame and despair. The utter
falsity of her new surroundings seems to strike her as she gazes
round the cruelly unhomelike home. A terrible symbolism confronts
her on every side; the showy tapestry is woven with a design of ripe
corn on which the carrion birds are feeding; the picture hanging
above the mantelpiece represents the woman taken in adultery. The
tragic intensity of the painting is hardly surpassed by any other of
the artist’s work.
Far back in the golden ages of classic myth, the ever-significant
story of “Psyche” suggests the same stern lesson,—of the
irretrievable loss which comes by violation of the moral law or
disobedience to the dicta of those “gods” by which the men of old
time knew the divine and imperative instincts of the soul. The fall of
Psyche has its message for to-day. It was made known to her that
the god Eros should come to earth to be her husband. In the
darkness of the night he should visit her bed, and there he should
vouchsafe to her the sacrament of his love,—but on one condition:
that she should never seek to look upon his face, or lift the veil of
mystery by which Nature shrouded the sanctities of the godhead
from her eyes. But Psyche’s curiosity overcame her reverence and
trustfulness. In her eagerness to know Love’s sacred secrets and lay
bare the holiest of holies upon earth, she took a lamp, and would
have looked boldly at her visitant. But immediately the spell was
broken; the heavenly Eros fled from her, never to return. The
widowed Psyche, in Mr. Watts’s picture, stands ashamed and broken-
hearted, knowing too late the prize that she has forfeited. Her
drooping figure is the embodiment of dazed remorse. She has dared
to trifle with the divinest things, to be familiar with that which is
rare, to probe too curiously into the mystic borderland between
earth and heaven. The devout sense of the limitations of man’s
knowledge, and of the penalty attaching to any impious familiarity
with the supernatural world, has thus its roots in Hellenism, but
attains its finest flower in the spirit of romance. It is the blending of
the sensuous dignity of classicism with the subtle tenderness of
romance that gives so fine a pathos to this poor “Psyche,”—typical as
she is of the modern age, mourning the lost mystery which its own
thirst for knowledge at all hazards has dispelled; or again, that
places Rossetti’s “Pandora” and “Proserpine” in the highest rank of
contemporary art. For Proserpine too has eaten the forbidden fruit of
the lower knowledge, whereby the higher wisdom is driven away.
She has eaten one grain of the fatal pomegranate of Hades, which
enchains her to the lower world; and only at rare seasons can her
sullied spirit attain the upper air. Her troubled face, as she stands in
the picture, in a gloomy corridor of her prison-palace, with the
broken fruit in her hand, seems to tell of the long struggle of a soul
that, having once tasted the coarser joys, has become less sensitive
to the higher, and is torn between the baser enchantment and the
pure delights which it longs to regain. A critic already quoted[12] has
pointed out that there is “always in Rossetti’s women the kind of
sorrow that ennobles affection.” The painter never loses the sense of
conflict between the dangers of the physical nature and the glories
of the spirit which it serves. The sorrow of his great “Pandora,” even
more than of the beautiful “Proserpine,” is the sorrow of a goddess
over her own infirmity. She has opened the mystic casket which she
was bidden to keep sealed, and now she stands helpless before the
witness of her deed. The potent spirits are escaping from the box,
and she can never undo the mischief she has done. “The whole
design,” says Mr. Swinburne, “is among Rossetti’s mightiest in its
godlike terror and imperial trouble of beauty, shadowed by the
smoke and fiery vapour of winged and fleshless passions crowding
from the casket in spires of flame-lit and curling cloud round her
fatal face and mourning veil of hair.”

“What of the end, Pandora? Was it thine,

The deed that set these fiery pinions free?
Ah! wherefore did the Olympian consistory
In its own likeness make thee half divine?
Was it that Juno’s brow might stand a sign
For ever, and the mien of Pallas be
A deadly thing? And that all men might see
In Venus’ eyes the gaze of Proserpine?

What of the end? These beat their wings at will,

The ill-born things, the good things turned to ill,—
Powers of the impassioned hours prohibited.
Ay, clench the casket now! Whither they go
Thou may’st not dare to think: nor canst thou know
If Hope still pent there be alive or dead.”[13]

It follows, then, that the earnest apprehension of the spiritual

sphere, and of a divine justice and retribution for sin, will give a
special power and reality to pictures dealing with a crisis of duty, or
a moment of choice between martyrdom and sin. Such a choice,
such a responsibility, is the motive of some of the finest work of
Millais’s transition period,—“The Hugenot,” “The Proscribed Royalist,”
“The Rescue,” and “The Black Brunswicker.” “The Hugenot” is
probably the most popular, as it is the most perfect, of the painter’s
earlier masterpieces. The story which it tells is explained in its full
title: “A Hugenot, on St. Bartholomew’s Day, refusing to shield
himself from danger by wearing the Roman Catholic badge.” “When
the clock of the Palais de Justice shall sound upon the great bell at
daybreak” (so ran the order of the Duke of Guise), “then each good
Catholic must bind a strip of white linen round his arm, and place a
fair white cross in his cap.” A Catholic lady is beseeching her
Protestant lover to wear the white scarf which will preserve him from
the coming massacre. Her beautiful face is drawn with anxious terror
as she tries to bind the kerchief round his arm, but he, embracing
her, draws it resolutely away; the mental struggle is not his, but
hers; in spite of the tenderness of his face, there is a certain
sternness and solemnity in it which tells that nothing will move him
from his purpose; that he is ready, and gladly ready, for martyrdom.
The girl’s love pleads vainly against his duty and his doom. In “The
Black Brunswicker,” which formed the pendant to “The Hugenot,” the
same drama of conflicting love and duty is set forth, though with
less convincing fervour and exalted passion than before. The lady
seems to be of French family, and is somewhat pettishly delaying the
departure of her lover, an officer of the Black Brunswick corps,
before the Battle of Waterloo. The converse of the choice of man
and woman between disloyalty and death is nobly given us by
Holman Hunt in his “Claudio and Isabella” (from Shakespeare’s
“Measure for Measure”), where the heroism and the devotion lie on
the woman’s side. Claudio has been condemned to death, and his
sister’s honour is asked as the price of his release. She visits him in
prison, clad in her nun’s garb, and Claudio—the human craving for
life conquering for the moment his better nature, cries out in a half
shamed appeal, “O Isabel, ... death is a fearful thing.” But Isabella,
standing before him, pressing her hands against his heart, her face
full of pity and distress, gives back her resolute answer, “And
shaméd life a hateful!”
Together with the conception of duty in its relation to romantic
love is linked the ideal of chivalry,—of the immediate glory of duty
and its supreme rewards, especially when exercised in championship
of the weak, of a defenceless foe, or of womanhood. The splendour
of physical courage tends always to give place to the power of moral
courage, as in mercy and forgiveness rather than in revenge; or if
the physical courage be brought into play, it will, in progress of
civilization be applied to deeds of helpfulness instead of cruelty. The
nobility of true knighthood, which Rossetti conceived almost
exclusively in the mediæval spirit, and presented with exquisite
verve and passion in his little sketches of “St. George” and the
“Princess Sabra,” and of which the converse—the potential
knightliness of woman—was suggested both by Rossetti and Millais
in their “Joan of Arc” designs, finds full expression in the latter’s
picture of “Sir Isumbras at the Ford.” An aged knight, clad in
splendid armour, and bearing with courtly dignity his honours and his
years, is fording a river on his war-horse, and pauses to lift up two
little peasant children who have asked him to carry them to the
other side. The simple graciousness and humility of the act seem to
transfigure the old warrior’s face, which is further lit by the rich light
of the landscape in the setting sun. By the side of this great painting
should be set the earlier, but in great measure the companion work,
“The Rescue,” in which the same artist translates the thought of
beneficent chivalry into modern and familiar life. For the knight of
“The Rescue” is a London fireman, in the act of saving three children
from a burning house. The light that suffuses his calmly heroic face
is not the natural radiance of a sunset glow, but the fierce glare of
flames around the staircase, down which he brings his precious
burden safe and sound. “The Rescue” is a poem of modern chivalry
in a great crisis: “Sir Isumbras” celebrates mediæval chivalry in
common things. The strong self-possession of the fireman in the
midst of imminent peril, beset on all sides by heat, smoke, water,
and burning brands, not callous or insensible to fear, but superior to
it, gives us, as it were, the other side of that perfect knighthood
suggested by the simple kindness of “Sir Isumbras at the Ford.” In
both these pictures, as indeed in “The Hugenot” and in Hunt’s
“Claudio and Isabella,” the impression conveyed is not merely of a
momentary heroism of choice or deed, but of the long discipline
which must have gone to produce it, and of what all goodness costs
to the life and lives behind it. It is in these aspects that the Pre-
Raphaelites portray, as we have already contended, not merely
action but character; not drama only, but the hidden forces of
human struggle and circumstance which give the drama its meaning
for all time.
But great as are these pictures in thought and emotion, excellent
as are most of them in technical quality, they are even surpassed, in
the sheer passion of romantic worship, in the purest essence of
religious chivalry, by one of the earliest and, technically, crudest
paintings of Burne-Jones in what may fairly be called his Rossettian
period. “The Merciful Knight” stands apart, in its desperate realism,
its mystic exaltation and fervour, its emotional abandonment, from
all the ethereal and chastened ideals of his imaginative maturity. It
represents a phase of feeling very transitory, for the most part, with
the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood,—a return to the most devout and
ascetic mediævalism, untempered by the larger Hellenic spirit which
re-awoke in modern romance. And, full charged as it is with the
inspiration of Rossetti in drawing and colour, its religious severity
links it rather to the manner of Holman Hunt. It tells the story “of a
knight who forgave his enemy when he might have destroyed him,
and how the image of Christ kissed him, in token that his acts had
pleased God.” Low at a wayside shrine bends the Merciful Knight,
prostrated by the spiritual struggle between magnanimity and
vengeance which he has just passed through. And as he kneels in
mingled prayer and thankfulness over his own self-conquest and
moral victory, the image of Christ, rudely carved and hanging on a
simple cross, bends down, miraculously moved, to kiss his cheek.
Rarely if ever have the Pre-Raphaelite painters surpassed in any field
the emotional power of this great design. The conflict between
loyalty to a cause and charity towards its fallen enemy was for some
years a favourite subject with the Pre-Raphaelites of every grade. It
yielded the motive, for instance, of Millais’s “Proscribed Royalist,” in
which a Puritan lady secretly conveys food to her lover, a Cavalier,
who is in hiding in a woodland oak; of W.S. Burton’s “Puritan,” where
the austere lady, walking with her lover, takes pity on a dying
Cavalier, wounded by Roundhead soldiers in a wood; and of W.L.
Windus’s “Outlaw,” similarly hurt and tended in an equally sylvan
scene. But in none of these cases is the spiritual struggle of the
ministering visitant portrayed with an intensity at all to be compared
with the exalted passion that dominates “The Merciful Knight.”
Such are the principal stages of thought and feeling through which
the Pre-Raphaelite painters pass—in no given order indeed, but with
a wholly intelligible sequence of ideas—from the first impulses of
romance—the apprehension of the supernatural, of the mystery of
fate, of the moral order, and the divine possibilities of human life—to
that highest idealism of romantic love, and of its power over death
and destiny, which we find in their interpretation of Keats’s “Eve of
St. Agnes,” and supremely in Rossetti’s imaginative treatment of the
love of Dante for Beatrice. Something of the mystical glory of a pure
and lofty passion, and of the power of perfect womanhood to raise,
as in Keats’s poem, the earthlier elements of love into the very
essence of worship, appears in Hunt’s early picture, “The Flight of
Madeline and Porphyro,” and in the triptych of “The Eve of St.
Agnes,” by Arthur Hughes; but its most complete expression, apart
from Rossetti, must be sought in Millais’s “St. Agnes’ Eve,”—in the
opinion of many, the greatest of his paintings; the consummation of
that wonderful aftermath of poetic genius which followed a full
decade later than what seemed to be his prime. For the beauty of
Madeline, by a significant paradox, is that she is not beautiful. Her
attitude is daringly simple; she is standing by her bed in the
moonlight, half-unclad; her gown has slipped from her waist to her
feet, and the keen, silver-blue rays creep softly about her slender
figure and shed a faint light into the foreground of the deep-
shadowed room. Yet with all the mellow tenderness of colour and
atmosphere that wrap her round, there is in no detail of her form or
gesture, or the aspect of her averted face, the slightest appeal to
the sensuous possibilities of the scene. There is about her an
extraordinary spiritual loveliness, born of the utter artlessness and
sincerity of her pose and the girlish innocence of her look, as if the
absolute naturalness of the situation were its own protection from all
thought of ill. Everything around her speaks of her simple holiness
and purity, and seals, as it were, the pledge of the answering purity
of Porphyro’s love.
But it is in the presence of the greatest romantic passion known to
European poetry—the ideal, immortal love of Dante for Beatrice—
that Pre-Raphaelite painting reaches, in the art of Rossetti, the acme
of its power to transfigure and interpret the highest experiences of
the human soul. With the most chastened symbolism, the finest
selectiveness of design and colouring, the loftiest fervour of thought
and expression, Rossetti unfolds to us the inmost glories of Platonic
love, as Dante knew it, and Michaelangelo; and as our own age
vaguely but with increasing aspiration seeks it through many an
error and much pain. He leads us in imagination through the sacred
course of that all-embracing worship which upheld the soul of Dante
through every vicissitude of toil and trial, from the first hour in which
the smile of the Blessed Beatrice made the boy’s heart tremble for
joy, until the solemn moment of resignation when “it was made
known to him that his beloved Lady must die.” Again and again did
Rossetti attempt the unwearying subject of “The Salutation of
Beatrice.” The most important that remain to us of those efforts,
which in one medium or another cover nearly the whole of his
artistic career, are the early water-colour sketches in which the scene
of the fateful meeting is laid in the portico of a church; the diptych
showing in one compartment Beatrice saluting Dante in a street in
Florence, while in the other she appears to him in a field of lilies in
Paradise (“Il Purgatorio,” canto 30); the triptych repeating the same
designs, but having in the centre panel a figure of Love holding a
dial whereon is marked the date (June 9, 1290) of the salutation;
and a much later version in single form, representing Beatrice,
walking alone in Florence, within sight of Dante, but watched over
by the guardian figure of Love, with crimson robe and wings. Of
these works, the triptych is perhaps the most perfect. The left
compartment is inscribed with Dante’s words, “E cui saluta fà tremar
lo core,” and the right with those of the salutation in Paradise,
“Guardami ben; ben son, ben son Beatrice” (“Behold and see if I am
truly Beatrice”).
Again we see the gracious lady passing before the eyes of her
young lover in a procession through the chapel at Bargello, while
above her is depicted “Giotto painting the portrait of Dante,”—a
portrait actually discovered five centuries later on the chapel wall.
Once more, Rossetti pictures Beatrice embarking with Dante in “The
Boat of Love.” The motive of this work is taken from Dante’s sonnet
to Guido Calvacanti, his poet-friend (who figures, together with
Cimabue, the master of Giotto, in the sketch above mentioned),
beginning:
 “Guido, I would that Lapo, thou, and I
Were taken by some skilled enchanted spell,
And placed on board a barque that should speed well
Through wind and wave, and with our will comply.”

With reverent humility and tenderness Dante is leading Beatrice into

the enchanted boat of which he dreamed. She yields her hands to
him and seems to pause beneath his earnest gaze as she steps
down. Around her are the companions of their voyage,—Guido
Calvacanti with his lady Giovanna, also known as Primavera, and
Lapo degli Uberti and his love.
“Beata Beatrix,”—“The Blessed Beatrice,”—depicts, not the actual
death of Dante’s beloved, but rather a mystic trance in which is
made known to her the nearness of her end. She sits on a balcony
overlooking the city of Florence, which is already shadowed by the
coming loss. Before her is a sundial, marking the fatal hour. A dove,
flying into her lap, carries a poppy-blossom, the symbol of sleep. The
lovely face of Beatrice is upturned, as if to greet the unseen
messenger, and full of perfect peace. She seems to have attained
the sight of blessedness, and to be yielding her spirit to a deep and
sweet content, but the earthly weariness lingers about her brows
and on her pale and parted lips. In the background, Dante and the
figure of Love are seen passing in the street below. Love holds a
flaming heart in his hands, and they both gaze in grief and awe at
the rapt countenance which the dignity of the coming death suffuses
with exquisite pathos and transcendent charm. In the features of
this Beatrice, more than in any other, Rossetti has regained and
embodied the thought that found superlative expression in
Michaelangelo,—“the notion of inspired sleep, of faces charged with
dreams.”[14]
A more familiar passage from the “Vita Nuova” is illustrated by the
largest, and in many respects the finest, of Rossetti’s completed
pictures, “Dante’s Dream;” dealing with the poet’s record of the
vision in which “it was revealed to him that the Lord God of Justice
had called his most gracious lady unto Himself.” “Then feeling
bewildered,” says Dante, writing of that strange experience, which
occurred to him at the age of twenty-five, “I closed mine eyes, and
my brain began to be in travail, as the brain of one frantic. And I
seemed to look toward Heaven, and to behold a multitude of angels
who were returning upwards, having before them an exceedingly
white cloud. Then my heart, that was so full of love, said unto me,
‘It is true that our lady lieth dead;’ and it seemed to me that I went
to look upon the body wherein that blessed and most noble spirit
had had its abiding place. And so strong was this idle imagining that
it made me to behold my lady in death; whose head certain ladies
seemed to be covering with a white veil, and who was so humble of
her aspect that it was as though she had said, ‘I have attained to
look on the beginning of peace.’” On a red-draped couch in the
chamber of death lies the Blessed Beatrice, clad in white robes, her
hands folded on her bosom, and her bright hair spread about her
pillow. Her maidens, at her head and feet, are hanging over her a
purple pall, filled with May-blossoms, the emblem of the spring-time
of her life, in which she died. The floor is strewn with poppies,
symbolizing again the sleep in which she takes her unbroken rest;
and on the frieze above are roses and violets, suggestive of the
beauty and purity of the departed soul. Over the couch hangs a
lamp, glimmering with a fast-expiring flame; and high up in air,
through an opening in the roof, is seen a flight of angels, garbed in
the deep red of a damask rose,—symbolic of the Platonic love which
should immortalize the beloved in the sight of all men,—and bearing
the white cloud that represents the life that has fled. The crimson
doves, of which Rossetti made his constant symbol of heavenly
ministries, flutter up and down the staircases on either side of the
room. Before the couch stands the figure of Love, with his flame-
coloured robes fastened at the shoulder by a scallop-shell, signifying
pilgrimage. In one hand he holds a winged arrow—his weapon for
the heart—and a bunch of rosemary; with the other he leads Dante,
who, clad in the black garb of mourning, tinged with the purple of
consecration, advances as if in a dream, and shrinks, dazed and
awed, before the beauty of the dead Beatrice. And Love, still holding
Dante by the hand, bends forward and kisses the face of the
beloved, thus making himself the mediator between Dante and
Beatrice, and the reconciler of life with death. It is as though the
poet’s life-long worship were summed up and presented at the gate
of heaven by a higher power than his own, and a benediction
wrested for him, by the very humility and devoutness of his passion,
from the glorified spirit beyond the grave. The dominant note of the
design is one of resignation and hope; the passionate, strenuous,
mystical resignation which Platonism brought into Christianity at the
dawn of the Renaissance, and hope, born of the quickened fervour
and resolution of romantic love.
In two notable subjects Rossetti deals with incidents recorded by
Dante of himself after the death of Beatrice. In a early water-colour
of singular dignity and elevation of feeling, he celebrates “The
Anniversary of the Death of Beatrice.” “On that day,” says Dante in
the “Vita Nuova,” “which completed the year since my lady had been
made of the citizens of eternal life, I was sitting in a place apart,
where, remembering me of her, I was drawing an angel upon certain
tablets; and as I drew, I turned my eyes, and saw beside me
persons to whom it was fitting to do honour, and who were looking
at what I did: and according as it was told me afterwards, they had
been there awhile before I perceived them. Then I arose for
salutation and said, ‘Another was present with me.’” The poet,
kneeling at a window overlooking the Arno, absorbed in his
memorial task, has suddenly become conscious of his visitors, and is
overwhelmed with delicate pride and shame.
“Our Lady of Pity.”

From an unfinished study.

By permission of the Corporation of Birmingham.

 Again, among the latest of Rossetti’s unfinished works, we have
the illustration of another passage in the “Vita Nuova,” telling of
Dante’s mourning for his lady’s death. “La Donna della Finestra”
(“The Lady of the Window”), better known as “Our Lady of Pity,”
represents the beautiful woman who looked down on Dante from a
window when, as he passed weeping through the streets, and
fearing lest the passers-by should mock him, he glanced up, craving
for some sign of sympathy, and was consoled by her calm and
pitying gaze. Sketches for this design were made in several media,
but the head in the unfinished painting at Birmingham is the most
perfect of the series, and in fact ranks among the finest of the
female heads in all Rossetti’s single-figure pictures. The artist has
caught with rare felicity the expression so acutely described by the
poet:

“Whereupon she, after a pitying sigh,

Her eyes directed towards me with that look
A mother casts on a delirious child.”

All the depth, all the tenderness, all the heroic strength of a divine
sorrow that sees the end of sorrow, shines in this full-souled face. It
is the ideal of the highest womanhood, and indeed of the highest
humanity; of the love that has attained to be godlike, redeeming the
world by infinite compassion; a love that “hopeth all things and
endureth all things,” and in whose steadfast courage lies the
conquering principle of the life to be. It is the companion picture—
and in some respects it is a nobler, healthier version—of “The
Blessed Damozel,” leaning from the bar of heaven to console the
mourner on the earth below. The love that can so take hold of
immortality, bring comfort even from the gates of death, and bridge
over, by the sweet persistence of its ministry, by the passionate
reality of its inspiration, the gulf between the physical and the
spiritual world, is the love which of old was the source of the “Vita
Nuova,” and which springs anew in our own age through “Our Lady
of Pity” and “The Blessed Damozel.” In such designs Rossetti has
restored to us all that was best in the mediæval thought of
womanhood,—adding the “ever-motherly” to the “ever-womanly” of
the Hellenic model, and the Divine Motherhood to the Divine
Fatherhood of the Christian ideal; and enriched it with the whole
wealth of psycho-sensuous beauty brought over from the region of
romance. And in this consummation is justified the verdict of Ruskin:
that “Rossetti was the chief intellectual force in the establishment of
the modern romantic school in England.”
 CHAPTER VIII.
THE POETRY OF DANTE ROSSETTI.

The “Pre-Raphaelite” in Literature—The Complexity of Talent in an Age of Re-birth

—The Restoration of Romance in England—The Latin and the Saxon in
Rossetti—Latin Diction for the Sonnets as Reflective Poetry—Saxon Diction for
the Ballads as Dramatic Poetry—“The House of Life”—Treatment of Romantic
Love—Illustrations of Sonnet Structure—Miscellaneous Lyrics—“The Portrait,”
“The Stream’s Secret,” “Dante at Verona,” “The Staff and Scrip”—The Ballads
—“The White Ship,” “The King’s Tragedy,” “Sister Helen,” “Rose Mary,” “The
Bride’s Prelude,” “The Blessed Damozel”—“A Last Confession”—“Jenny”—
Relation of Rossetti’s Poetry to his Painting.

The poetry of Dante Gabriel Rossetti lies apart from the main
current of contemporary verse, both in its highly specialized quality
of thought and language, and in the conditions and circumstances of
its production. Inasmuch as he followed openly the profession of a
painter, pursuing poetry, for the most part, as a recreative rather
than a principal study (though never with less seriousness than his
accepted vocation), and publishing his first volume of original poems
in his forty-second year, he is exempt to some extent from the
standards of criticism applied to him whose creative energies are
concentrated in the field of literature. Whether Rossetti’s genius, as
he himself believed, found its highest and most perfect embodiment
in poetry rather than in painting,—whether the essential qualities of
his art will be more evident to posterity in the modest volume of his
collected poems than in the pictures now dispersed through England
and America—is still an open question. It may, however, be admitted
that his mastery of the verbal medium was almost always more
complete, his discipline in metrical structure more thorough, and his
natural habit of diction more facile, than any skill which he attained
in brush and pencil. To estimate his final influence upon
contemporary thought in the one realm as against the other is yet
more difficult than to assess the relative merit of his actual work in
either sphere: so intimately was the poet incarnate in the painter; so
largely did the painter’s vision inspire and dominate the poet.
But it would be a poor analysis that should divide too finely the
interwoven threads of a radiant and many-coloured genius. In an
age of intellectual re-birth, of artistic and social revolution, the re-
adjustment of forces and functions in the ethical and æsthetical
realms is apt to produce a strange complexity of talent, not always
beneficial to a single art, not always well for the diversely endowed
artist, but often tending to the unification of many activities into one
effective stream of purpose, moved by the impulse that infused the
nation with a Time-Spirit potent for immortal things. Such a
combination of talent in single personalities, in a period of rare
national fertility in scholarship and creative power, reveals at the
same time the basic unity of the æsthetic life and its inseparable
interdependence with the moral ideal. Michaelangelo, at the zenith
of the Italian Renaissance, standing at the parting of the ways,
gathered up, as it seemed, the several arts into his representative
genius, and left to the land that was soon to swamp the æsthetic
spirit in the mire of a materialistic decadence the threefold heritage
of his painting, his sculpture, and his song. Rossetti, at the zenith of
the English Renaissance, drew a twofold inspiration from the
struggle of the modern world, and left the double dower of painting
and of poetry, to urge the coming generation to the higher issues of
fine art, or to stand, the witness of rejected ideals to ages
recalcitrant to the vision and the impulse of to-day.
For the first greatness of Rossetti’s poetry is that it assumes for
ever the reality and the immanence of a spiritual—and more—a
moral world. Not that he ever misuses the vehicles of art as tools of
philosophy, or stoops to a didactic application of æsthetic truth. But
his art is all moral (as Mr. Ruskin would put it) because it is all fine
art. And the moral purpose of art is the better secured when art is
trusted to effect that purpose in its own way. The consciously
didactic poet is less sure to mould the will and character of a people,
than he the form and substance of whose utterance are so perfected
in truth and virility of thought, in majesty and grace of speech, as to
be a fit oblation to his own ideal. Not “how can I best teach others
and influence them aright?” but “how can I best express the highest
things I know and feel?” is the self-examination of the true artist.
Rossetti’s poetry is self-expressive, self-revealing to the very heart’s
core. The ultimate test of poetry is not “what did this man intend to
teach us?” but “of what sort is the manhood here revealed? what are
the visions by which it lived? what the ideals in which it grew? Is
such a soul’s experience wide, deep, typical, and profitable to the
rest of mankind?”
In applying such a test to the writings of Rossetti, it is necessary
to distinguish between what may be roughly termed the “personal”
and the “impersonal” poems. In the one class, supremely
exemplified by the “House of Life” sonnets, but including also “Dante
at Verona,” “The Stream’s Secret,” “The Portrait,” and many of the
shorter lyrics, the personal note of love or grief, of memory or hope,
is wholly dominant; the poet’s soul is absorbed with its individual
being, and sees in all the life around him the illustration and
interpretation of his own. In the other class, in the great romantic
ballads, in “Rose Mary” and “The Blessed Damozel,” in “The White
Ship” and “The King’s Tragedy,” in “The Bride’s Prelude” and “Sister
Helen,” the imagination takes a higher and a larger range; the one
soul interprets others, waiting not to be interpreted. The art
becomes impersonal in this sense only—that the thought of self is
merged in the full and immense life of humanity, laying hold of the
universal consciousness through its own initiative experience; the
heart beats with the world’s heart, shares its eternal struggles,
contributes to its eternal growth; and the spirit knows itself one
fragment of an infinite whole. In such a sphere the art remains the
more vitally personal, in that the poet brings the mysteries of
existence, the abiding problems and realities of the conscious world,
to the touchstone, as it were, of his own spirit, and submits himself
thereby to the more crucial test,—of how he can interpret humanity
to man, and make more clear the knowledge, more possible the
realization, of his highest ideals.
With this general division of the subject-matter of Rossetti’s
poetry, the classification of its metrical cast and forms of diction will
be singularly parallel. Most of his finest compositions might be
distinguished as purely Saxon or pre-eminently Latin poems; and it is
notable that the more intimately subjective and analytic the thought
within, the more persistently does it assume the Latin garb; while as
the imagination ranges from the introspection of the hyper-conscious
self, and finds, on the heights of common human feeling and
aspiration, a larger and a freer air, the mode passes into the more
keen and rarified Saxon speech. No other English poet has resolved
the breadth and simplicity of the Gothic, and the depth and intensity
of the Italian habit of expression, into such distinctive poetic
vehicles. But at the same time few have blended the diverse
elements of the modern English tongue into the harmony and
sonority with which Rossetti’s music thrills when he tempers the
sharper Saxon with a deep undertone of polysyllabic song; or stirs
the languorous pulses of a sonnet with some swift cadence of
familiar words. He had the finest perception of national and racial
properties of form and rhythm; and discerning the characteristics of
the poetry of action in the literature of the north, and the poetry of
reflection in the literature of the south, he cast his great historical
lyrics in the highest narrative—that is to say, the ballad form; and
chose the sonnet—the most remote, chastened, and exclusive
vehicle—for the meditative, and yet sensuous, self-delineative love-
poetry.
These broad generalizations, however, cannot be closely pressed
upon the entire sequence of Rossetti’s poems. The exigencies of the
English language alone elude their literal application. They will rather
serve to illustrate the duality of his endowments, and the singular
power of his genius both to conserve and specialize the
characteristics of his Italian heritage, and also to waive them in the
Saxon mode as utterly as though the latter were more native to his
tongue.
 Nor does such a superficial distinction affect the spiritual qualities
which pervade Rossetti’s poetry as a whole. From first to last, in
dramatic description or narrative, in sonnet-argument or meditative
questioning, his verse remains full-charged with the very essence of
romance. As a poet, he is neither less nor more Pre-Raphaelite than
as a painter. The vivid and intense simplicity of his Saxon diction, the
verbal lightnings of his ballad-style, seem to correspond with the
tone and method of his water-colour painting, and the more
laboured splendour of the sonnets with the properties of his work in
oils. Nor is it difficult to detect an analogy between that stage of his
painting in which the pristine lucidity of expression was partially lost
in the painful tension of his later thought, and the tendency of some
few of his sonnets towards decadence into the over-laborious and
the obscure. Yet if by “Pre-Raphaelite” we understand that fusion of
the naïve mysticism of romance with austere Platonic Hellenism
which we discern in the best Renaissance art, Rossetti never falls in
spirit from that standard of beauty and truth; and rarely lapses,
through the very richness and fecundity of the language at his
command, into the redundant verbiage towards which his sensuous
imagery was easily led. It has remained for a brother-poet of the
romantic revival to cultivate a more marvellous dexterity of rhyme
and rhythm, and to develop the technical resources of our language
to the utmost limits of intelligible song. The lyrics of Mr. Swinburne,
like the superb decorative extravagances of the later Renaissance,
represent that culmination of mastery over the forms of expression
wherein to-day, as of yore, the purity of the thought is lost in the
splendour of the setting, and poetic power wastes itself in a magic
facility of verse.
The poetry of Rossetti, modern as it is in its passionate grasp of
human interests, its deep insight into present and perpetual things,
links itself nevertheless to an English past; takes up, as it were, the
dropped threads of Elizabethan glory; re-inspires the circling breath
of life which passed round Europe in the fifteenth century, kindling
England from the fires of re-awakened Italy in the golden age of
song. It has already been pointed out by one of Rossetti’s
biographers that “the malign influence over our literature in post-
Shakespearean times has been French.” It was reserved for a second
Renaissance, heralded by Chatterton and Blake, led by Shelley,
Keats, and Coleridge, and culminated by Dante Rossetti, to blot out
two centuries of foreign tradition and control, and take us back to
the broad simplicity and dignity of Shakespeare’s England.
Our reiteration, therefore, of the term “Pre-Raphaelite” in
approaching Rossetti’s work as a poet, leads us to expect, not
mysticism merely, but a certain robust sensuousness, as of Pagan
origin, in his interpretation of life and destiny. The romantic temper
in its highest manifestations, absorbing and transfiguring, rather
than conflicting with, the classic ideals, implies much more than
receptivity to newer beauty and truth. It has a moral basis and an
intellectual range: it apprehends the spiritual world as something
closely bound up with familiar things: it finds the human soul striving
for expression through material forms: it recognizes the divine
possibilities of individual and social life, the force and responsibility
of personal character, and the solemnity of the choice between good
and evil daily made by man.
But the controversy excited by Rossetti’s pictures has been neither
more intemperate nor more significant than that which has raged
around his poems;—interpreted by one section of his critics as a
pæan of sensuality and materialism, by another as the most spiritual
and chastened love-poetry of the age. The laureate of the Pre-
Raphaelite Brotherhood indeed summed up, in what now affords but
one volume of original verse, the inmost vicissitudes of a spirit so
rare and rich of vision as to transcend at once the canons of
conventional experience. But the personal note, in the self-
delineative poems, is struck with a peculiar dignity of reserve; and
even while the most sacred depths of individual consciousness are
laid bare, the actual ego is never intruded upon the surface of the
speech,—never portrays directly its own character, seldom describes
its own sensations as Byron or Shelley would; but veils itself, even in
the profusion of luminous imagery and searching analysis of thought
and sense.
The eternal mysteries and sanctities of sexual love, conceived in
its highest aspects and known as a revelation and a sacrament,
afford the theme of nearly all Rossetti’s autobiographic poetry. The
conditions of its production were ordained by the stern fate that
linked him afar off to Dante among his countrymen, and near at
hand to two brother-mourners among minor English bards—James
Thomson and Philip Bourke Marston—in the sad fraternity of poets
whom death has prematurely robbed of the beloved object that once
inspired their song. The exalted spirituality which marks Rossetti’s
treatment of this theme was doubtless largely due to the influence
of Dante, and especially to the fruitful inspiration and discipline of
the great literary task of his youth—the translation of the “Vita
Nuova” and kindred examples of the early Italian poets—than which
Rossetti could have hardly found a better preparation for his work
that was to come.
Into his great sonnet-sequence, “The House of Life,” Rossetti
poured the full passion of his mystic love,—partially inherent in his
own sensuous, imaginative, and introspective nature, partially
instilled at the feet of Dante; and learned—a bitter and a costly
lesson—at the school of experience also; fraught with inestimable
joy and sorrow to his own soul. “At an age,” says one writing of that
hard probation, “when most men have outlived the romances of
their youth, Rossetti was laying, in ‘The House of Life,’ the
foundations of a new school of love-poetry.” He was in fact re-
creating the æsthetic life of a nation; restoring to it, through the
alembic of mediæval and Renaissance thought, the lost glory of all
that was abidingly precious in the Platonic world. For in this
wondrous cycle of sonnets is re-coined the whole language of ideal
love. From the last echo of the “Vita Nuova” it takes up the same
pure strain, and sings again the song of Dante for the Blessed
Beatrice; hymning the very apotheosis of spiritual passion, and
harmonizing once more in English poetry the intellectual with the
sensuous world. Never, in the superb visions of “The House of
Life”—in which the soul of man is pictured sojourning awhile during
its solemn and fateful passage through eternity—never does the
physical love become the stumbling-block to the spiritual, but always
the key to it. The “body’s beauty” is only precious as the witness of
the “soul’s beauty;” the physical bond is nothing if not the symbol of
a spiritual affinity, a sacred kinship, fore-ordained, if not eternal,
sealed in Heaven and consecrated to the divinest purposes; the
sensuous rapture is but a symbolic worship,—“the outward and
visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace” which to reject or
betray is to profane the inmost sanctuary of the God of Love:

“Even so, when first I saw you, seemed it, love,

That among souls allied to mine was yet
One nearer kindred than life hinted of.
O born with me somewhere that men forget,
And though in years of sight and sound unmet,
Known for my soul’s birth-partner well enough!”

Love the revealer of unseen verities, the binder of invisible bonds;

Love the deliverer from material trammels, the opener of the gate of
life; these are to him the gracious manifestations of the same deity:

“O what from thee the grace, to me the prize,

And what to Love the glory,—when the whole
Of the deep stair thou tread’st to the dim shoal
And weary water of the place of sighs,
And there dost work deliverance, as thine eyes
Draw up my prisoned spirit to thy soul!”

In the large atmosphere of such a worship, seeing all things, as

we have said, sub specie eternitatis, the poet portrays the sweetest
intimacies of communion, soul with soul; questioning, recording,
comparing from time to time the recurring phases of joy and hope,
memory and regret. “When do I see thee most?” he asks in the
exquisite sonnet called “Lovesight”:
 “When do I see thee most, beloved one?
When in the light the spirits of mine eyes
Before thy face, their altar, solemnize
The worship of that love through thee made known?
Or when in the dusk hours, (we two alone,)
Close-kissed and eloquent of still replies
Thy twilight-hidden glimmering visage lies,
And my soul only sees thy soul its own?”

“What of her glass without her?” he cries again after the great
bereavement which has removed the visible presence of the
beloved:

“What of her glass without her? The blank grey

There where the pool is blind of the moon’s face.
Her dress without her? The tossed empty space
Of cloud-rack whence the moon has passed away.
Her paths without her? Day’s appointed sway
Usurped by desolate night. Her pillowed place
Without her? Tears, ah me! for love’s good grace,
And cold forgetfulness of night or day.”

And with what fine insight does Rossetti pierce the tender
subtleties of the woman’s responsive heart! Has any other English
poet discerned so well that retrospective instinct which clings to the
early semblances of pure and non-sexual love?

—“She loves him, for her infinite soul is love.

* * * * * *
With wifely breast to breast
And circling arms, she welcomes all command
Of love,—her soul to answering ardours fanned:
Yet as morn springs or twilight sinks to rest,
Ah! who shall say she deems not loveliest
The hour of sisterly sweet hand-in-hand?”
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