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?”