Alice: An Adultery

crystallisation or a separate and single moral idea, a clearly-defined protasis, if I may say so, in the octet: an equally clear apodosis in the sestet. To use it for narrative is absurd. A series of sonnets for a series of thoughts indeed is right. Rossetti’s “ House of Life ” is the best example of perfection in this art. He knows this well indeed, and achieves superb results now and then. The title sonnet, the 3rd, 4th, 11th, and some others are fine examples of this, though even here is a reference to the facts, a fatal fault in such jewel-work as a sonnet should be, and approaching the abyss of didacticism. Again, he is fatally obscure in many places. Often the sonnet-metre is at fault, and his un- doubtedly great gift of compression fails to compass all his ideas into the fourteen permissible lines. Some are quite unintelligible without reference to the Shakespearian ambiguity at the head ; others are still obscure unless a clear under- standing of, and sympathy with, the man’s position (and the woman’s) at the time be ever xv