can note down with picturesque force or imagine with admirable fecundity. Yet the limits of such excellence are narrow. For no man can safely go far without the guidance of reason. His long poems have no structure. . . . Even his short poems have no completeness, no limpidity. . . . What is admirable in them is the pregnancy of phrase, vividness of passion and sentiment, heaped-up scraps of observation, occasional flashes of light, occasional beauties of versification, all like—
'The quick sharp scratch
And blue spurt of a lighted match.'There is never anything largely composed in the spirit of pure beauty, nothing devotedly finished, nothing simple and truly just."[1]
Rossetti called a sonnet "a moment's monument." Fortunately he did not mean all he might have meant by it, and his own sonnets were the result of long hours of meditation, and recast again and again. His phrase, however, epitomises this theory; a moment, not a choice moment, but any single moment, is considered as worthy of an eternal monument. With this end in view the writer is more fortunate than the artist. He may record minute after minute just what words come into his head, till at last none come and his work is finished. And appreciation for such work is acquired in the same manner, by stupefying reason and yielding oneself, like the smoker of opium, to a stream of suggestions.
The out-and-out impressionist would be like a man who should strip his clothes off in order to prove that his honesty needed no disguise, and, when he was naked, must be clapped int an asylum because he had lost his wits. Instead of accumulating resources, the improviser or impressionist whittles them away; though he be rich at the
- ↑ Poetry and Religion, "The Poetry of Barbarism," p. 208.
