Although the noble poet and high-souled woman we have just lost had been
ill and suffering from grievous pain for a long time, Death came at last
with a soft hand which could but make him welcome. Since early in
August, when she took to her bed, she was so extremely weak and otherwise
ill that one scarcely expected her (at any time) to live more than a
month or so, and for the last six weeks or thereabouts—say from the 15th
of November—one expected her to die almost from day to day. My dear
friend William Rossetti, who used to go to Torrington Square every
afternoon, saw her on the afternoon of December 28th [1894]. He did not,
he told me, much expect to find her alive in the afternoon of the 29th,
and intended, therefore, to make his next call earlier. She died at
half-past seven in the morning of the 29th, in the presence only of her
faithful nurse Mrs. Read. It was through her sudden collapse that she
missed at her side, when she passed away, that brother whose whole life
has been one of devotion to his family, and whose tireless affection for
the last of them was one of the few links that bound Christina’s sympathy
to the earth.
[Picture: Christina Rossetti. From a crayon-drawing by D. G. Rossetti
reproduced by the kind permission of Mr. W. M. Rossetti]
Her illness was of a most complicated kind: two years and a half ago she
was operated on for cancer: functional malady of the heart, accompanied
by dropsy in the left arm and hand, followed. Although on Friday the
serious symptoms of her case became, as I have said, accentuated, she was
throughout the day and night entirely conscious; and so peaceful and
apparently so free from pain was she that neither the medical man nor the
nurse supposed the end to be quite so near as it was. During all this
time, up to the moment of actual dissolution, her lips seemed to be
moving in prayer, but, of course, this with her was no uncommon sign:
duty and prayer ordered her life. Her sufferings, I say, had been great,
but they had been encountered by a fortitude that was greater still.
Throughout all her life, indeed, she was the most notable example that
our time has produced of the masterful power of man’s spiritual nature
when at its highest to conquer in its warfare with earthly conditions, as
her brother Gabriel’s life was the most notable example of the struggle
of the spiritual nature with the bodily when the two are equally
equipped. It is the conviction of one whose high privilege it was to
know her in many a passage of sorrow and trial that of all the poets who
have lived and died within our time, Christina Rossetti must have had the
noblest soul.
A certain irritability of temper, which was, perhaps, natural to her,
had, when I first became acquainted with her family (about 1872), been
overcome, or at least greatly chastened, by religion (which with her was
a passion) and by a large acquaintance with grief, resulting in a long
meditation over the mystery of pain. In wordly matters her generosity
may be described as boundless; but perhaps it is not difficult for a poet
to be generous in a worldly sense—to be free in parting with that which
can be precious only to commonplace souls. What, however, is not so easy
is for one holding such strong religious convictions as Christina
Rossetti held to cherish such generous thoughts and feelings as were hers
about those to whom her shibboleths meant nothing. This was what made
her life so beautiful and such a blessing to all. The indurating effects
of a selfish religiosity never withered her soul nor narrowed it. With
her, indeed, religion was very love—
A largess universal like the sun.
It is always futile to make guesses as to what might have been the
development of a poet’s genius and character had the education of
circumstances been different from what it was, and perhaps it is
specially futile to guess what would have been the development under
other circumstances of her, the poet of whom her friends used to speak
with affection and reverence as “Christina.”
On the death of her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti (or as his friends
used to call him Gabriel) in 1882, I gave that sketch of the family story
which has formed the basis of most of the biographical notices of him and
his family; it would, therefore, be superfluous to reiterate what I said
and what is now matter of familiar knowledge. It may, however, be as
well to remind the reader that, owing to the peculiar position in London
of the father Gabriele Rossetti, the family were during childhood and
partly during youth as much isolated from the outer English world as were
the family between whom and themselves there were many points of
resemblance—the Brontës. The two among them who were not in youth of a
retiring disposition were he who afterwards became the most retiring of
all, Gabriel, and Maria, the latter of whom was in one sense retiring,
and in another expansive. In her dark brown, or, as some called them,
black eyes, there would suddenly come up and shine an enthusiasm, a
capacity of poetic and romantic fire, to the quelling of which there must
have gone an immensity of religious force. As to Gabriel, during a large
portion of his splendid youth he exhibited a genial breadth of front that
affined him to Shakespeare and Walter Scott. The English strain in the
family found expression in him, and in him alone. There was a something
in the hearty ring of his voice that drew Englishmen to him as by a
magnet.
While it was but little that the others drew from the rich soil of merry
England, he drew from it half at least of his radiant personality—half at
least of his incomparable genius. Though he was in every way part and
parcel of that marvellous little family circle of children of genius in
Charlotte Street, he had also the power of looking at it from the
outside. It would be strange, indeed, if this or any other power should
be found lacking in him. I have often heard Rossetti—by the red flicker
of the studio fire, when the gas was turned down to save his
eyesight—give the most graphic and fascinating descriptions of the little
group and the way in which they grew up to be what they were under the
tuition of a father whose career can only be called romantic, and a
mother whose intellectual gifts were so remarkable that, had they not
been in some great degree stifled by the exercise of an entire
self-abnegation on behalf of her family, she, too, must have become an
important figure in literature.
[Picture: Mrs. Rossetti. From a crayon-drawing by D. G. Rossetti
reproduced by the kind permission of Mr. W. M. Rossetti]
The father died in 1854, many years before I knew the family; but
Gabriel’s description of him; his conversations with his brother-refugees
and others who visited the house—conversations in which the dreamy and
the matter-of-fact were oddly blent; his striking skill as an
improvisatore of Italian poetry, and also as a master of pen-and-ink
drawing; his great musical gift—a gift which none of his family seemed to
have inherited; his fine tenor voice; his unflinching courage and
independence of character (qualities which made him refuse, in a
Protestant country, to make open abjuration of the creed in which the
Rossettis had been reared, though he detested the Pope and all his works,
and was, if not an actual freethinker, thoroughly
latitudinarian)—Gabriel’s pictures of this poet and father of poets were
so vivid—so amazingly and incredibly vivid—that I find it difficult to
think I never met the father in the flesh: not unfrequently I find myself
talking of him as if I had known him. What higher tribute than this can
be made to a narrator’s dramatic power? Those who have seen the elder
Rossetti’s pen-and-ink drawings (the work of a child) will agree with me
that Gabriel did not over-estimate them in the least degree. All the
Rossettis inherited from their father voices so musical that they could
be recognized among other voices in any gathering, and no doubt that
clear-cut method of syllabification which was so marked a characteristic
of Christina’s conversation, but which gave it a sort of foreign tone,
was inherited from the father. Her affinity to the other two members of
the family was seen in that intense sense of duty of which Gabriel, with
all his generosity, had but little. There was no martyrdom she would not
have undertaken if she thought that duty called upon her to undertake it,
and this may be said of the other two.
In most things, however, Christina Rossetti seemed to stand midway
between Gabriel and the other two members of her family, and it was the
same in physical matters. She had Gabriel’s eyes, in which hazel and
blue-grey were marvellously blent, one hue shifting into the other,
answering to the movements of the thoughts—eyes like the mother’s. And
her brown hair, though less warm in colour than his during his boyhood,
was still like it. When a young girl, at the time that she sat for the
Virgin in the picture now in the National Gallery, she was, as both her
mother and Gabriel have told me, really lovely, with an extraordinary
expression of pensive sweetness. She used to have in the little back
parlour a portrait of herself at eighteen by Gabriel, which gives all
these qualities. Even then, however, the fullness in the eyes was
somewhat excessive. Afterwards her ill health took a peculiar form, the
effect of which was that the eyes were, in a manner of speaking, pushed
forward, and although this protuberance was never disagreeable, it
certainly took a good deal of beauty from her face.
Dominant, however, as was the father’s personality among his friends, the
mother’s influence upon the children was stronger than his; and no
wonder, for I think there was no beautiful charm of woman that Mrs.
Rossetti lacked. She did not seem at all aware that she was a woman of
exceptional gifts, yet her intellectual penetration and the curious
exactitude of her knowledge were so remarkable that Gabriel accepted her
dicta as oracles not to be challenged. One of her specialities was the
pronunciation of English words, in which she was an authority. I cannot
resist giving one little instance, as it illustrates a sweet feature of
Gabriel’s character. It occurred on a lovely summer’s day in the old
Kelmscott manor house in 1873, when Mrs. Rossetti, Christina, and myself
were watching Gabriel at work upon ‘Proserpine.’ I had pronounced the
word _aspirant_ with the accent upon the middle syllable. “Pardon me, my
dear fellow,” said he, without looking from his work, “that word should
be pronounced with the accent on the first syllable, as a purist like you
ought to know.” On my challenging this, he said, in a tone which was
meant to show that he was saying the last word upon the subject, “My
mother always says _áspirant_, and she is always right upon matters of
pronunciation.” “Then I shall always say _áspirant_,” I replied. And I
may add that I now do say _áspirant_, and, right or wrong, intend to say
_áspirant_ so long as this breath of mine enables me to say _áspirant_ at
all. Afterwards Christina, as we were strolling by the weir, watching
Gabriel and George Hake pounding across the meadows at the rate of five
miles an hour, said to me, “I think you were right about _aspírant_.”
“No,” I said, “it is a dear, old-fashioned way. Your mother says
_áspirant_; I now remember that my own mother said _áspirant_. I shall
stick to _áspirant_ till the end of the chapter.” And Christina said,
“Then so will I.”
Among Mrs. Rossetti’s accomplishments was reading aloud, mainly from
imaginative writers, and I cannot recall without a thrill of mingled
emotions a delightful stay of mine at Kelmscott in the summer of ’73,
when she, whose age then was seventy-three, used to read out to us all
sorts of things. And writing these words makes me hear those readings
again—makes me hear, through the open casement of the quaint old house,
the blackbirds from the home field trying in vain to rival the music of
that half-Italian, half-English voice. To have been admitted into such a
charmed circle I look upon as one of the greatest privileges of my life.
It is something for a man to have lived within touch of Christina
Rossetti and her mother. From her father, however, Christina took,
either by the operation of some law of heredity or from early association
with the author of ‘Il Mistero dell’ Amor Platonico del Medio Evo’ and
‘La Beatrice di Dante,’ that passion for symbolism which is one of the
chief features of her poetry. There is, perhaps, no more striking
instance of the inscrutable lines in which ancestral characteristics
descend than the way in which the passion for symbolism was inherited by
Christina and Gabriel Rossetti from their father.
While Christina’s poetical work may be described as being all symbolical,
she was not much given, like her brother, to read symbols into the
every-day incidents of life. Gabriel, on the contrary, though using
symbolism in his poetry in only a moderate degree, allowed his instinct
for symbolizing his own life to pass into positive superstition. When a
party of us—including Mrs. Rossetti, Christina, the two aunts, Dr. Hake,
with four of his sons, and myself—were staying for Christmas with Gabriel
near Bognor, a tree fell in the garden during a storm. While Gabriel
seemed inclined to take it as a sign of future disaster, Christina, whose
poetry is so full of symbolism, would smile at such a notion. Yet
Gabriel could speak of his father’s symbolizing (as in ‘La Beatrice di
Dante’) as being absolutely and hopelessly eccentric and worthless. This
is remarkable, for one would have thought that it was impossible to read
those extraordinary works of the elder Rossetti’s without being impressed
by the rare intellectual subtlety of the Italian scholar.
Of course the opportunities of brother and sister of studying Nature were
identical. Both were born in London, and during childhood saw Nature
only as a holiday scene. Christina would talk with delight of her
grandfather’s cottage retreat about thirty miles from London, to which
she used to go for a holiday in a stage coach, and of the beauty of the
country around. But these expeditions were not numerous, and came to an
end when she was a child of seven or eight, and it was very little that
she saw outside London before girlhood was past. I have myself heard her
speak of what she has somewhere written about—the rapture of the sight of
some primroses growing in a railway cutting. It is, of course, a great
disadvantage to any poet not to have been born in the country; learned in
Nature the city-born poet can never be, as we see in the case of Milton,
who loved Nature without knowing her. It is here that Jean Ingelow has
such an advantage over Christina Rossetti. Her love of flowers, and
birds, and trees, and all that makes the earth so beautiful, is not one
whit stronger than Christina’s own, but it is a love born of an
exhaustive detailed knowledge of Nature’s life.
On a certain occasion when walking with a friend at Hunter’s Forestall,
near Herne Bay, where she and her mother were nursing Gabriel through one
of his illnesses, the talk ran upon Shelley’s ‘Skylark,’ a poem which she
adored. She was literally bewildered because the friend showed that he
was able to tell, from a certain change of sound in the note of a skylark
that had risen over the lane, the moment when the bird had made up its
mind to cease singing and return to the earth. It seemed to her an
almost supernatural gift, and yet an ignorant ploughman will often be
able to do the same thing. This kind of intimacy with Nature she
coveted. With the lower animals, nevertheless, she had a strange kind of
sympathy of her own. Young creatures especially understood the playful
humour of her approach. A delightful fantastic whim was the bond between
her and puppies and kittens and birds. Her intimacy with Nature—of a
different kind altogether from that of Wordsworth and Tennyson—was of the
kind that I have described on a previous occasion as Sufeyistic: she
loved the beauty of this world, but not entirely for itself; she loved it
on account of its symbols of another world beyond. And yet she was no
slave to the ascetic side of Christianity. No doubt there was mixed with
her spiritualism, or perhaps underlying it, a rich sensuousness that
under other circumstances of life would have made itself manifest, and
also a rare potentiality of deep passion. It is this, indeed, which
makes the study of her great and noble nature so absorbing.
Perhaps for strength both of subject and of treatment, Christina
Rossetti’s masterpiece is ‘Amor Mundi.’ Here we get a lesson of human
life expressed, not didactically, but in a concrete form of unsurpassable
strength, harmony, and concision. Indeed, it may be said of her work
generally that her strength as an artist is seen not so much in mastery
over the rhythm, or even over the verbal texture of poetry, as in the
skill with which she expresses an allegorical intent by subtle suggestion
instead of direct preachment. Herein ‘An Apple Gathering’ is quite
perfect. It is, however, if I may venture to say so, a mistake to speak
of Christina Rossetti as being a great poetic artist. Exquisite as her
best things are, no one had a more uncertain hand than she when at work.
Here, as in so many things, she was like Blake, whose influence upon her
was very great.
Of self-criticism she had almost nothing. On one occasion, many years
ago now, she expressed a wish to have some of her verses printed in _The
Athenæum_, and I suggested her sending them to 16, Cheyne Walk, her
brother’s house, where I then used to spend much time in a study that I
occupied there. I said that her brother and I would read them together
and submit them to the editor. She sent several poems (I think about
six), not one of which was in the least degree worthy of her. This
naturally embarrassed me, but Gabriel, who entirely shared my opinion of
the poems, wrote at once to her and told her that the verses sent were,
both in his own judgment and mine, unworthy of her, and that she “had
better buckle to at once and write another poem.” She did so, and the
result was an exquisite lyric which appeared in _The Athenæum_. Here is
where she was wonderfully unlike Gabriel, whose power of self-criticism
in poetry was almost as great as Tennyson’s own. But in the matter of
inspiration she was, I must think, above Gabriel—above almost everybody.
If English rhymed metres had been as easy to work in as Italian rhymed
metres, her imagination was so vivid, her poetic impulse was so strong,
and, indeed, her poetic wealth so inexhaustible, that she would have
stood in the front rank of English poets. But the writer of English
rhymed measures is in a very different position as regards
improvisatorial efforts from the Italian who writes in rhymed measures.
He has to grapple with the metrical structure—to seize the form by the
throat, as it were, and force it to take in the enormous wealth at the
English poet’s command. Fine as is the ‘Prince’s Progress,’ for instance
(and it would be hard to find its superior in regard to poetic material
in the whole compass of Victorian poetry), the number of rugged lines the
reader has to encounter weighs upon and distresses him until, indeed, the
conclusion is reached: then the passion and the pathos of the subject
cause the poem to rise upon billows of true rhythm. On the other hand,
however, it may be said that a special quality of her verse is a _curiosa
felicitas_ which makes a metrical blemish tell as a kind of suggestive
grace. But I must stop; I must bear in mind that he who has walked and
talked with Christina Rossetti, burdened with a wealth of remembered
beauty from earth and heaven, runs the risk of becoming garrulous.