Pre-Raphaelite and Other Poets; Lectures (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II NOTE UPON ROSSETTl's PROSE As we are now studying Rossetti's poetry in other hours, you may be interested in some discussion of the merits of his prose?for this is still, so far as the great public are concerned, almost an unknown topic. The best of the painters of his own school, and the most delicate poet of the Victorian period, Rossetti might also have become one of the greatest prose writers of the century if he had seriously turned to prose. But ill-health and other circumstances prevented him from doing much in this direction. What he did do, however, is so remarkable that it deserves to be very carefully studied. I do not refer to his critical essays. These are not very remarkable. I refer only to his stories; and his stories are great because they happen to have exactly the same kind of merit that distinguishes his poetry. They might be compared with the stories of Poe; and yet they are entirely different, with the difference distinguishing all Latin prose fiction from English fiction. But there is certainly no other story writer, except Poe, with whose work that of Rossetti can be at all classed. They are ghostly stories? one of them a fragment, the other complete. Only two ?and the outline of the third. The fragment is not less worthy of attention because it happens to be afragment?like the poet's own "Bride's Prelude," or Coleridge's "Christabel," or Foe's "Silence." The trouble with all great fragments, and the proof of their greatness, is that we cannot imagine what the real ending would have been; and this puzzle only lends additional charm to the imaginative effect. Of the two consecutive stories, it is the fragment which has the greater merit. The first story, called "Hand and Soul," has another interest besides the interest of narrative. It co...