n as good a poet as Tennyson, he would have been a
poet who painted pictures. If he had been as good a painter as
Burne-Jones, he would have been a painter who wrote poems. It is odd to
note on the very threshold of the extreme art movement that this great
artist largely succeeded by not defining his art. His poems were too
pictorial. His pictures were too poetical. That is why they really
conquered the cold satisfaction of the Victorians, because they did mean
something, even if it was a small artistic thing.

Rossetti was one with Ruskin, on the one hand, and Swinburne on the
other, in reviving the decorative instinct of the Middle Ages. While
Ruskin, in letters only, praised that decoration Rossetti and his
friends repeated it. They almost made patterns of their poems. That
frequent return of the refrain which was foolishly discussed by
Professor Nordau was, in Rossetti's case, of such sadness as sometimes
to amount to sameness. The criticism on him, from a mediaeval point of
view, is not that he insisted on a chorus, but that he could not insist
on a jolly chorus. Many of his poems were truly mediaeval, but they would
have been even more mediaeval if he could ever have written such a
refrain as "Tally Ho!" or even "Tooral-ooral" instead of "Tall Troy's on
fire." With Rossetti goes, of course, his sister, a real poet, though
she also illustrated that Pre-Raphaelite's conflict of views that
covered their coincidence of taste. Both used the angular outlines, the
burning transparencies, the fixed but still unfathomable symbols of the
great mediaeval civilisation; but Rossetti used the religious imagery (on
the whole) irreligiously, Christina Rossetti used it religiously but (on
the whole) so to make it seem a narrower religion.

One poet, or, to speak more strictly, one poem, belongs to the same
general atmosphere and impulse as Swinburne; the free but languid
atmosphere of later Victorian art. But this time the wind blew from
hotter and heavier gardens than the gardens of Italy. Edward
Fitzgerald, a cultured eccentric, a friend of Tennyson, produced what
professed to be a translation of the Persian poet Omar, who wrote
quatrains about wine and roses and things in general. Whether the
Persian original, in its own Persian way, was greater or less than this
version I must not discuss here, and could not discuss anywhere. But it
is quite clear that Fitzgerald's work is much too good to be a good
translation. It is as pers