His Family - Letters, 1 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos, missing text or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1895. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ... unexpected and unnecessary, that gives, to hasty readers and superficial critics, such a wrong impression. And, in the same way as he charges a poem with more colour and form than it can well bear with reference to its special subject, so does he charge his pictures with a weight of idea which their form and colour scarcely realize; and in both he calls upon the spectator to be at once the witness and the interpreter of his work. From this there results in his poetry the following effect--that he is at his finest when he has to tell some plain story, or exemplify some comparatively simple thought, the insertion into which of physical facts will heighten the meaning rathe*than jar upon it; or in verses which treat intellectual ideas from a purely sensuous basis, such for instance as in those sonnets which are concerned with the passion of love. When however he seeks to treat either a purely intellectual or a purely spiritual subject, he fails almost inevitably, and that apparently in painting as well as in poetry. Like Antaeus, if he is held off the earth too long his strength fails him. It is this painter-like quality which makes his verse so puzzling; for in idea it is, almost without exception, of a singularly pure and intellectual character. Turn from his verse to his painting, and the same curious contradiction is forced upon our attention. We find continually, in his pictures where the painter's individuality is most manifest, that the reproduction of the sensuous part of his subject is, so to speak, interfered with by the strange, half-refining, half-abstract quality of his intellect. . . . All the other physical peculiarities to be traced in his works are all due to the passionately sensuous but equally passionately intellectual nature of Rossetti. They a...