In regard to unpublished manuscripts which a writer has left behind him,
the responsibilities of his legal representatives are far more grave than
seems to be generally supposed. In deciding what posthumous writings an
executor is justified in giving to the public it is important, of course,
to take into account the character, the idiosyncrasy of the writer in
regard to all his relations towards what may be called the mechanism of
every-day life. Some poets are so methodical that the mere fact of
anything having been left by them in manuscript unaccompanied by
directions as to its disposal is _primâ facie_ evidence that it was
intended to be withheld from the public, either temporarily for revision
or finally and absolutely. And, of course, the representative,
especially if he is also a relative or a friend, has to consider
primarily the intentions of the dead. If loyalty to living friends is a
duty, what shall be said of loyalty to friends who are dead? This,
indeed, has a sanction of the deepest religious kind.
No doubt, in the philosophical sense, the aspiration of the dead artist
for perfect work and the honour it brings is a delusion, a sweet mockery
of the fancy. But then so is every other aspiration which soars above
the warm circle of the human affections, and if this delusion of the dead
artist was held worthy of respect during the artist’s life, it is worthy
of respect—nay, it is worthy of reverence—after he is dead. Now every
true artist when at work has before him an ideal which he would fain
reach, or at least approach, and if he does not himself know whether in
any given exercise he has reached that ideal or neared it, we may be
pretty sure that no one else does. Hence, whenever there is apparent in
the circumstances under which the MS. has been found the slightest
indication that the writer did not wish it to be given to the public, the
representative who ignores this indication sins against that reverence
for the dead which in all forms of civilization declares itself to be one
of the deepest instincts of man.
That the instinct we are speaking of is really one of the primal
instincts is the very first fact that archæology vouches for. Of many
lost races, such as the Aztecs and Toltecs, for instance, we have no
historical traces save those which are furnished by testimonials of their
reverence for the dead. But that this fine instinct is now dying out in
the Western world—that it will soon be eliminated from the human
constitution of races that are generally considered to be the most
advanced—is made manifest by the present attitude of England and America
towards their illustrious dead. In the literary arena of both countries,
indeed, so entire is the abrogation of this most beautiful of all
feelings—so recklessly and so shamefully are not only raw manuscripts,
but private letters, put up to auction for publication—that at last the
great writers of our time, confronted by this new terror, are wisely
beginning to take care of themselves and their friends by a holocaust of
every scrap of paper lying in their desks.
So demoralized has the literary world become by the present craze for
notoriety and for personal details of prominent men that an executor who
in regard to the disposal of his testator’s money would act with the most
rigid scrupulousness will, in regard to the MSS. he finds in his
testator’s desk, commit, “for the benefit of the public,” an outrage that
would have made the men of a less vulgar period shudder. The “benefit of
the public,” indeed! Who is this “public,” and what are its rights as
against the rights of the dead poet, whose heartstrings are woven into
“copy” by the disloyal friend he trusted? The inherent callousness of
man’s nature is never so painfully seen as in the relation of this ogre,
“the public,” to dead genius. Without the smallest real reverence for
genius—without the smallest capacity of distinguishing the poetaster it
always adores from the true poet it always ignores—the public can still
fall down before the pedestal upon which genius has been placed by the
select few—fall down with its long ears wide open for gossip about
genius, or anything else that is talked about.
It was with such thoughts as these that we opened the present somewhat
bulky volume {195}—not, however, with many misgivings; for Christina
Rossetti, before she made her brother executor, knew what were his views
as to the rights of the public as against the rights of genius. And if
he has printed here every poem he could lay hands upon, he may fairly be
assumed to have done so with the consent of a sister whom he loved so
dearly and by whom he was so dearly loved. Fortunately there are not
many of these relics that are devoid of a deep interest, some from the
biographical point of view, some from the poetical.
Again, what is to be said about such part of a dead author’s writing as,
having appeared in print, has afterwards passed through the author’s
crucible of artistic revision? What about the executor’s duty here,
where the case between the author and the public stands on a different
footing? At the present time, when newspapers and novels alone are read,
it is not the poet’s verses which most people read, but paragraphs about
what the author and his wife and children “eat and drink and avoid”: a
time when, if the poet’s verses are read at all, it is the accidents
rather than the essentials of the work that seem primarily to concern the
public. At such a time an editor is not entirely master of his actions.
Doubtless, there is much reason in the wrath of Tennyson and other great
poets against the “literary resurrection man,” who, though incapable of
understanding the beauties of a beautiful work, can take a very great
interest in poring over the various stages through which that work has
passed on its way to perfection. These poets, however, are apt to forget
that, after a poem or line has once passed into print, its final
suppression is impossible. And perhaps there are other reasons why, in
this matter, an editor should be allowed some indulgence.
Here, for instance, is a puzzling case to be tried _in foro conscientiæ_.
In the first edition of ‘Goblin Market,’ published in 1862, appeared
three poems of more breadth of treatment than any of the others: ‘Cousin
Kate,’ a ballad, ‘Sister Maude,’ a ballad, and ‘A Triad,’ a sonnet. In
subsequent issues of the book these were all omitted. Mr. W. M.
Rossetti, speaking of ‘Sister Maude,’ says: “I presume that my sister,
with overstrained scrupulosity, considered its moral tone to be somewhat
open to exception. In such a view I by no means agree, and I therefore
reproduce it.” If Christina’s objection was valid when she raised it, it
is, of course, valid now, when the beloved poet is in the “country beyond
Orion,” and knows what sanctions are of man’s imagining, and what
sanctions are more eternal than the movements of the stars.
The question here is, What were Christina Rossetti’s wishes? not whether
her brother “agrees” with them. Hence, if it were not certain that some
one would soon have restored them, would Mr. W. M. Rossetti have
hesitated before doing so? For they are among the most powerful things
Christina Rossetti ever wrote, and it was a subject of deep regret to her
friends that she suppressed them. Yet she withdrew them from
conscientious motives. In ‘Sister Maude’ she showed how great was her
power in the most difficult of all forms of poetic art—the romantic
ballad. Splendid as are Gabriel Rossetti’s ‘Sister Helen’ and ‘Rose
Mary,’ the literary _aura_ surrounding them prevents them from seeming—as
the best of the Border ballads seem—Nature’s very voice muttering in her
dreams of the pathos and the mystery of the human story. It was not,
perhaps, given even to Rossetti to get very near to that supreme old poet
(not forgotten, because never known) who wrote “May Margaret’s” appeal to
the ghost of her lover Clerk Saunders:—
Is there ony room at your head, Saunders?
Is there ony room at your feet?
Is there ony room at your side, Saunders,
Where fain, fain I wad sleep?
where the very imperfections of the rhymes seem somehow to add to the
pathos and the mystery of the chant. But if, indeed, it has been given
to any modern poet to get into this atmosphere, it has been given to
Christina Rossetti. And so with the ballad of simple human passion no
modern writer has quite done what Christina Rossetti has done in one of
the poems here restored:—