happiest and the wisest, is indisputably, considering the common circumstances of their successive times, the least likely to have left us the highest example of all poetry then possible to men. And of their three legacies, precious and wonderful as it is, the Englishman's is accordingly the least wonderful and the least precious. The poet of the sensible and prosperous middle class in England had less to suffer and to sing than the theosophic aristocrat of Italy, or the hunted and hungry vagabond who first found articulate voice for the dumb longing and the blind love as well as for the reckless appetites and riotous agonies of the miserable and terrible multitude in whose darkness lay dormant, as in a cerecloth which was also a chrysalid, the debased and disfigured godhead which was one day to exchange the degradation of the lowest populace for the revelation of the highest people-for the world-wide apocalypse of France. The golden-tongued gallows-bird of Paris is distinguished from his two more dignified compeers by a deeper difference yet a difference, we might say, of office and of mission no less than of genius and of gift. Dante and Chaucer are wholly and solely poets of the past or present-singers indeed for all time, but only singers of their own; Villon, in an equivocal and unconscious fashion, was a singer also of the future; he was the first modern and the last mediæval poet. He is of us in a sense in which it cannot be said that either Chaucer or Dante is of us, or even could have been; a man of a changing and self-transforming time, not utterly held fast, though still sorely struggling, in the jaws of hell and the ages of faith.

But in happy perfection of manhood the great and fortunate Englishman almost more exceeds his great and unfortunate fellow-singers than he is exceeded by them in depth of passion and height of rapture, in ardor and intensity of vision or of sense. With the single and sublimer exception of Sophocles, he seems to me the happiest of all great poets on record; their standing type and sovereign example of noble and manly happiness. As prosperous indeed in their several ages and lines of life were Petrarch and Ariosto, Horace and Virgil; but one only of these im

presses us in every lineament of his work with the same masculine power of enjoyment. And when Ariosto threw across the windy sea of glittering legend and fluctuant romance the broad summer lightnings of his large and jocund genius, the dark ages had already returned into the outer darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeththe tears of Dante Alighieri and the laughter of François Villon. But the wide warm harvest-field of Chaucer's husbandry was all glorious with gold of ripening sunshine while all the world beside lay in blackness and bonds, throughout all those ages of death called ages of faith by men who can believe in nothing beyond a building or a book, outside the codified creeds of a Bible or the œcumenical structures of a Church.

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Before I take my reverent leave of Chaucer I will express, in passing, a slight sense of regret that Mr. Rossetti should not have added to his notice of the Troilus and Cryseide" - a choice passage of exquisite analysis and panegyric, with every word of which I most cordially concur-some little note of applause for the Scottish poet Henryson's equally adventurous and admirable sequel to that poem. For truth and power of pathetic imagination, the last meeting of Troilus with the wayside leper who once had all his heart, and played it all away at the May game of light love, may be matched against the very best work of Chaucer; nor do I remember anything in it all so deeply and truly tragic as the doom of the transformed and disfigured traitress who, meeting no recognition in the eyes of her old lover as he looks on her and sighs and passes, with an alms thrown sadly as to a stranger, falls back and dies in silence.

The earnest search or labor after righteousness of judgment and absolute accuracy of estimate which always, whether it may finally succeed or fail, distinguishes the critical talent of Mr. Rossetti, is very happily exemplified in his analysis and summary of the aims and the claims of Spenser. His judgment or his sentiment on this matter may be said to strike a balance between the enthusiastic devotion of Scott and Southey, Ruskin and Leigh Hunt, and the wearied indifference or positive dis

taste of Landor. As a descendant of the great Latin race, he has naturally by way of birthright the gift which he is bound to have, an inborn sense of rule and outline which makes him instinctively aware of Spenser's shortcoming on that side, and logically averse from the luminous and fluid nebulosity of Spenser's cloudy and flowery fairyland. The lack of tangible form and line, of human flesh and breath and blood on the limbs and at the lips and in the veins of Spenser's active or passive and militant or triumphant congregation of impersonated virtues and vices, is inevitably perceptible to a scholar and evangelist of Dante, who must perforce be unconsciously inclined to measure all poets more or less after the standard of the mighty master whose missionary he was born by right at once of inheritance and of intelligence. Dante was beyond all other poets a materialist; and this, I have heard it remarked, is of course what Blake meant to convey by the quaint apparent paradox of his essentially accurate objection to the "atheism" (as he called it) of Dante, with whom the finest forms of abstract qualities that the scholastic ingenuity of medieval metaphysicians could devise and define became hard and sharp and rigid

as

tempered steel. Give Dante a moral image, he will make of it a living man; show Spenser a living man, he will make of him a moral image. It is not to the existence of allegory in Spenser that all save his fanatical admirers object; it is to the fact that this allegory, like Mrs. Malaprop's "on the banks of the Nile," is a rapacious and insatiable impostor who attracts and devours all living likenesses of men and women within reach. There is allegory also in Homer and in Dante; but prayers in Homer and qualities in Dante become vital and actual forms of living and breathing creatures. In Spenser the figure of a just man melts away into the quality of justice, the likeness of a chaste woman is dissolved into the abstraction of chastity. Nothing can be more alien from the Latin genius, with its love of clearness and definite limitation, than this indefinite and inevitable cloudiness of depiction rather than conception, which reduces the most tangible things to impalpable properties, resolves the

solidest realities into smoke of perfumed metaphor from the crucible of symbolic fancy, and suffuses with Cimmerian mist the hard Italian sunlight. Add to this the cloying sweetness of the Spenserian metre, with all its treasures of fluidity and sweet ease" (as Mr. Arnold, with his usual studious felicity of exquisite phrase, has so perfectly described it), which leaves at least some readers, after a dose of a few pages, overgorged with a sense that they have been eating a whole hive's harvest of thick pressed honey by great spoonfuls, without one halfpennyworth of bread to this intolerable deal of sweet-stuff; and it is easy to determine why the attraction of this noble poet, for all his luminous color and lovely melody, the raiment of high thinking and fine feeling, is perhaps less potent than it should be over minds first nurtured on the stronger fare of Greek or Latin or Italian song. The Tarpeian Muse of Spenser is not indeed crushed-there is too much vigorous and supple vitality in her lovely limbs for thatbut she is heavily burdened if not sorely bruised by the ponderous and brilliant weight of allegoric shields, emblazoned with emblematic heraldry of all typic and chivalric virtues, which her poet has heaped upon her by way of signs and bucklers of her high and holy enterprise in "fairy lands forlorn," through twilight woodlands and flowery wastes of mythical and moral song. With almost equal truth he might be said to have founded and to have followed the fashion of allegorical poetry which in the next generation ran riot through the voluminous verse of his disciples till it reached its head, not even in the works of the two lesser Fletchers, but—as if the names of our dramatic Dioscuri were foredoomed to poetical conjunction and unconscious fellowship on far other ways than theirs in the limitless and lampless labyrinth of Joseph Beaumont's "Psyche. Allegory was no doubt a powerful factor to be reckoned with in casting up the account of English poetry before Spenser; but in the allegories of his most notable precursors down to Sackville there is surely as much more of body, of tangible and palpable outline, than in his, as there is less of it in any of his followers. I cannot, therefore, but think that the great influence

of Spenser on succeeding poets whose lines of work lay outside the fields of lyric and dramatic verse was far from being good as well as great. Outside those fields there was no man-unless a not very significant exception be claimed for Drayton and for Daniel as narrative chroniclers of some small and partial note there was no man till the sundawn of Milton who could make head for a moment against that influence. The one great poet who might have done this also as well as the work he didthe yet worthier and surely far mightier work of founding the tragic stage of England had only time to leave us a broken sample of nobler narrative and purer power than Spenser's, in the unimitated if not inimitable model of his "Hero and Leander." And all who came after them found it easier to follow the discursive and decorative style of Spenser than the more "simple, sensuous, and passionate' manner of Marlowe.

Mr. Rossetti's critical memoir of Shakespeare is in its kind a most absolute and masterly model of simple and sufficient workmanship. The little all we know concerning the master of us all who know aught of English song is here arranged and explained with blameless care and fine lucidity of brief yet full remark. I observe only one seeming slip of memory or passing lapse of attention; his oversight of the generally noticed and obviously noticeable fact that the very first line of the anti-Lucian doggrel affixed by tradition to the gate of Charlecote Park with the apocryphal hand of Shakespeare bears the stamp on it of forgery, in the linguistic anachronism of the title or titles therein bestowed on Sir Thomas.

But the central jewel of this excellent essay, and the crowning glory of this admirable book, is the commentator's summary of opinion as to the subject and significance of the sonnets. What Coleridge, under the kindly influence of a far too indulgent mood, said "in his haste" of Weber's Beaumont and Fletcher may with simple justice be said of Mr. Rossetti's brief and perfect bit of work upon this difficult matter. We owe to him, "I will not say the best for that would be saying little--but a good" commentary on the sonnets of

Shakespeare. I speak here especially of "the second and shorter," but (as Mr. Rossetti does not, perhaps, sufficiently observe or emphasize) incomparably the more important and altogether precious division of the sonnets. Upon this question it seems to me that he, and he alone among all commentators of whom I know anything, has seen and spoken, as far as is now, or, perhaps, ever was possible to see and speak, "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth." I do not care-be it said with all genuine and cordial respect-to follow him any more than others into the fruitless and thorny ground of word-splitting debate as to the discernible personality of one will or two wills on whose name the greatest man who ever bore it has once and again rung fantastic changes of quibbling and smiling rhyme; what I recognize and what I would indicate as worthy of all praise is the writer's own recognition of the plainly probable truth, expressed in a terse and luminous exposition of the apparent evidence; to the surely quite simple and natural effect that the younger friend whom Shakespeare loved with such a tender and passionate admiration of his noble and attractive qualities— his inward and outward, casual and essential endowments of mind and person-as could only be possible to a man of radically noble and high-minded nature, and could only express itself after the ardent fashion of the sonnets in the single age and generation of Shakespeare, did wilfully or involuntarily seduce from him the not invaluable affections of a paramour who had for some time obtained a hold upon the mind as well as the senses of Shakespeare which he felt to be injurious and unworthy of his better instincts, knowing that the ill-requited affection which he bore to the friend who had won from him her heart or her fancy was yet a wiser and worthier feeling than the perverse and reluctant passion which still attracted him toward the malign and dangerous beauty of their common mistress; in a word, that the man's friendship, however far he might have been led astray by the temptress from its honest and straightforward course, was better worth his keeping or regretting than such love as could be given to either by

such a woman. So chaotic and comfortless a result of Shakespeare's ultimate relations toward a mistress and a friend may be deplorable enough for sympathetic worshippers of his genius to contemplate, but is surely neither unprecedented nor unparalleled nor improbable in itself. And we have the combined evidence of all tradition and of all his later works to show that Shakespeare, however hard he may have had to swim for a time against this sea of personal troubles, did long before his latter days succeed in taking better arms against them than those of suicide, and did, after some fashion worthier of himself, in time by opposing end them.

A name so illustrious has recently been added to the list of theirs who dispute or deny the supposition that even. in his sonnets the most inscrutably impersonal of poets did actually "unlock his heart," that it might seem negligent if not insolent to take no account of such antagonism to the opinion which to me seems so clearly just and right. Mr. Browning, perhaps in all points the farthest removed from Wordsworth of all poets in this century, cites with something of a sneer the well-known expression of Wordsworth which gives us his opinion to that effect, and, as if scornfully rejecting a supposed suggestion that he also should do likewise, retorts in a tone of assured defiance

"Did Shakespeare? If so, the less Shakespeare he!"

No, I must venture to reply; no whit the less like Shakespeare, but undoubtedly the less like Browning. In the dedication of Luria" and "A Soul's Tragedy" the exact distinctive quality of the immortal man to whom those noble plays are dedicated was defined with admirable accuracy; Landor is "a great dramatic poet,' as opposed to a great dramatist; and they are not the least ardent and studious admirers of Mr. Browning himself who think that the same distinctive definition is not less accurately applicable to his own genius also. Now, even in default of his personal and articulate evidence to that effect, we should have guessed that Mr. Browning was in no wise wont to unlock his heart with any metrical key to any direct purpose-except, as it might NEW SERIES.-VOL XXXIII., No 2

be, "for once," when exchanging, to such noble purpose, a "bronze" for a silver" instrument. But Shakespeare, not being simply not being simply "a great dramatic poet' like Browning or like Landor, but a great dramatist in the most absolute and differential sense of the phrase, might on that very account (it seems to me) be the likelier and the more desirous, under certain circumstances which for us must be all uncertain, to relieve and disburden his mind-to unload his heart rather than to unlock it—in short personal poems of a kind as alien from the special genius or spiritual instinct of Mr. Browning as the utterly impersonal gift of impersonations, not in one form. at a time but in many forms at once, by dint of more than dramatic renunciation or annihilation of himself, which makes him the greatest of all dramatists as surely as he is not the greatest of all dramatic poets.

Of Milton Mr. Rossetti speaks with less ardent reverence than might be expected from a republican, though not, it must be owned, than might have been expected from a disciple of Dante. For it is a notable and even deplorable fact that there is one great poet-though happily there is but one-whose disciples would seem to be disqualified by the fact of their discipleship from equal or due appreciation of almost any other. A Shakespearean adept may be a Miltonic believer; a worshipper of Homer or schylus, of Sophocles or Lucretius, may be a devout and loyal student of both our supreme Englishmen; but Dante would seem to be as jealous a God as he of the Jews in his most exacting and exclusive mood of monarchy. All his disciples "continually do cry, in direct or indirect fashion,

οὐκ ἀγαθόν πολυκοιρανίη· εἰς κοίρανος ἔστω,
εἰς βασιλεὺς·

and his name is Alighieri. For these Unitarians or Mohammedans of Parnassus there is but one muse, and Dante is her prophet. If we would not be reprobate in their eyes we must accept and worship as they do the idol, the whole idol, and nothing but the idol; we must not stop our noses in hell with loathing, nor distend our jaws with yawning in heaven; neither may we worship any other God. Most especi

II

ally may we not offer sacrifice to any other great Christian or cosmogonic poet; for in him is the whole and sole theogony revealed by spiritual song. This is a hard saying, and I for one cannot hear it.

If indeed the inevitable question of spiritual value and intellectual insight were to be followed out to such length and depth as alone would suffice for discussion of the relations or adjustment of the balance between these two great Christian poets, and for examination of their respective worth and weight as readers and interpreters of "the sovereign scheme and divine riddle, it would be necessary to go further; to pass out of the atmosphere of their Catholic or Calvinistic theologies and theogonies, and confront the supreme results of poetic wisdom under the influence of Christian doctrine, and within the precincts of Christian discipline, with those of the same spiritual power when working under far other conditions in the native sphere of free contemplation and solemn inquisition into natural mystery more sacred and more strange than all supernatural miracle. Immeasurably beyond contemplation of any Christian poet's capacity is the awfulness of evil and expiation as symbolized in the Sophoclean grove of the Furies. But, at the ovens and the cesspools of Dante's hill, the soul, if the soul had fingers, would snap them. The perpetuation of the infinitely little for a perpetuity of infinitely mean suffering, the degradation of eternity by the eternity of degradation, in brutal and obscene horror of abject wickedness and abject anguish, is a conception below the serious acceptance of the ancient or the modern mind-fit only for the dead and malodorous level of mediæval faith.

A single sentence of Mr. Rossetti's essay sums up in fourteen emphatic and expressive words the whole side or aspect of his opinion or feeling on the subject of Milton to which I cannot choose but take exception. "Honor,' he says, "is the predominant emotion naturally felt toward Milton-hardly enthusiasm certainly not sympathy." In that case I am simply unable by any stretch of conjecture to imagine what name among all names of patriots or of

poets may be found worthy to enkindle this enthusiasm which the mention of Milton's has left cold. Sympathy, indeed, we may well feel that we are hardly worthy to offer, for the very word implies some assumption of moral or spiritual equality; and he must indeed be confident of having always acted up to Milton's own ideal, and ever "made of his own life a heroic poem, who remembering this could think himself worthy to feel sympathy with the action and the passion of such lives as Milton's or Mazzini's. More reasonably may we feel, as it were, a righteous and a reverent delight in the sense of an inferiority which does not disable or deprive us of the capacity for adoration, a rapture of lowliness which exalts humility itself into something like the gladness of pride-of pride that we can feel and exultation that we may acknowledge how high above us are men who yet are not too high for the loyal thank-offering, not only of our worship, but surely also of our love.

Again, I must object that "to appraise Milton" is not merely "to appraise Paradise Lost ;'"' nor, "conversely, can I admit that "to appraise 'Paradise Lost' is in the main," by any manner of means, "to appraise Milton." His own preference, actual or traditional, relative or positive, for "Paradise Regained" is not properly to be dismissed with the conventional expression of astonishment at the unaccountable perversity" of its author's opinion. Much might be advanced in support or vindication of a judgment which should assign to it the higher place as a poem or complete work of art, while of course reserving for "Paradise Lost" the claim of priority in episodical excellence-in splendor of separate points and exaltation of separate passages. the central and crowning quality of harmonious and blameless perfection, the Iliad is not more excelled by the Odyssey than is "Paradise Lost" by "Paradise Regained." In either case the name of the elder poem first of all reminds us of its noblest episodes; the mention of the younger brings back upon us before anything else the serene and supreme impression of the final whole. If this, as we may well believe, was all that Milton ever said or

In