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.
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