sthetic" poets was an error of classification.
It seemed to me that, unlike the poets properly so described, he had
nothing in common with the Caliban of Mr. Browning, who worked "for
work's sole sake;" and, unlike them yet further, the topmost thing
in him was indeed love of beauty, but the deepest thing was love of
uncomely right. The fusion of these elements in Rossetti softened the
mythological Italian Catholicism that I recognised as a leading thing in
him, and subjugated his sensuous passion. I thought it wrong to say that
Rossetti had part or lot with those false artists, or no artists, who
assert, without fear or shame, that the manner of doing a thing should
be abrogated or superseded by the moral purpose of its being done. On
the other hand, Rossetti appeared to make no conscious compromise with
the Puritan principle of doing good; and to demand first of his work the
lesson or message it had for us were wilfully to miss of pleasure while
we vainly strove for profit. He was too true an artist to follow art
into its byeways of moral significance, and thereby cripple its broader
arms; but at the same time all this absorption of the artist in his art
seemed to me to live and work together with the personal instincts of
the man. An artist's nature cannot escape the colouring it gets from the
human side of his nature, because it is of the essence of art to appeal
to its own highest faculties largely through the channel of moral
instincts: that music is exquisite and colour splendid, first, because
they have an indescribable significance, and next because they respond
to mere sense. But it appeared to me to be one thing to work for "work's
sole sake," with an overruling moral instinct that gravitates, as Mr.
Arnold would say, towards conduct, and quite another thing to absorb art
in moral purposes. I thought that Rossetti's poetry showed how possible
it is, without making conscious compromise with that puritan principle
of doing good of which Keats at one period became enamoured, to
be unconsciously making for moral ends. There was for me a passive
puritanism in _Jenny_ which lived and worked together with the poet's
purely artistic passion for doing his work supremely well. Every thought
in _Dante at Verona_ and _The Last Confession_ seemed mixed with and
coloured by a personal moral instinct that was safe and right.

This was perhaps the only noticeable feature of my lecture, and knowing
Rossetti's nature, as since