My happy dream is finished with,
My dream in which alone I lived so long.
My heart slept—woe is me, it wakeneth;
Was weak—I thought it strong.
Oh, weary wakening from a life-true dream!
Oh pleasant dream from which I wake in pain!
I rested all my trust on things that seem,
And all my trust is vain.
I must pull down my palace that I built,
Dig up the pleasure-gardens of my soul;
Must change my laughter to sad tears for guilt,
My freedom to control.
Now all the cherished secrets of my heart,
Now all my hidden hopes, are turned to sin.
Part of my life is dead, part sick, and part
Is all on fire within.
The fruitless thought of what I might have been,
Haunting me ever, will not let me rest.
A cold North wind has withered all my green,
My sun is in the West.
But, where my palace stood, with the same stone
I will uprear a shady hermitage;
And there my spirit shall keep house alone,
Accomplishing its age.
There other garden beds shall lie around,
Full of sweet-briar and incense-bearing thyme:
There I will sit, and listen for the sound
Of the last lingering chime.
It was the beauty of her life that made her personal influence so great,
and upon no one was that influence exercised with more strength than upon
her illustrious brother Gabriel, who in many ways was so much unlike her.
In spite of his deep religious instinct and his intense sympathy with
mysticism, Gabriel remained what is called a free thinker in the true
meaning of that much-abused phrase. In religion as in politics he
thought for himself, and yet when Mr. W. M. Rossetti affirms that the
poet was never drawn towards free thinking women, he says what is
perfectly true. And this arose from the extraordinary influence,
scarcely recognized by himself, that the beauty of Christina’s life and
her religious system had upon him.
This, of course, is not the place in which to say much about him; nor
need much at any time and in any place be said, for has he not written
his own biography—depicted himself more faithfully than Lockhart could
depict Walter Scott, more faithfully than Boswell could depict Dr.
Johnson? Has he not done this in the immortal sonnet-sequence called
‘The House of Life’? What poet of the nineteenth century do we know so
intimately as we know the author of ‘The House of Life’?
Christina Rossetti’s peculiar form of the Christian sentiment she
inherited from her mother, the sweetness of whose nature was never
disturbed by that exercise of the egoism of the artist in which Christina
indulged and without whose influence it is difficult to imagine what the
Rossetti family would have been. The father was a poet and a mystic of
the cryptographic kind, and it is by no means unlikely that had he
studied Shakespeare as he studied Dante he would in these days have been
a disciple of the Baconians, and, of course, his influence on the family
in the matter of literary activity and of mysticism must have been very
great. And yet all that is noblest in Christina’s poetry, an
ever-present sense of the beauty and power of goodness, must surely have
come from the mother, from whom also came that other charm of
Christina’s, to which Gabriel was peculiarly sensitive, her youthfulness
of temperament.
Among the many differences which exist between the sexes this might,
perhaps, be mentioned, that while it is beautiful for a man to grow
old—grow old with the passage of years—a woman to retain her charm must
always remain young. In a deep sense woman may be said to have but one
paramount charm, youth, and when this is gone all is gone. The
youthfulness of the body, of course, soon vanishes, but with any woman
who can really win and retain the love of man this is not nearly so
important as at first it seems. It is the youthfulness of the soul that,
in the truly adorable woman, is invulnerable. It is one of the deep
misfortunes of the very poor of cities that as a rule the terrible
struggle with the wolf at the door is apt to sour the nature of women and
turn them into crones at the age when in the more fortunate classes the
true beauty of woman often begins; and even where the environment is not
that of poverty, but of straitened means, it is as a rule impossible for
a woman to retain this youthfulness.
In the case of the Rossettis, in the early period they were in a position
of straitened means. Nor was this all: the children, Gabriel alone
excepted, felt themselves to be by nationality aliens. Christina, though
she made only one visit to Italy, felt herself to be an Italian, and
would smile when any one talked to her of the John Bullism of her brother
Gabriel, and yet, with these powerful causes working against their
natural elasticity of temperament, both mother and daughter retained that
juvenility which Gabriel Rossetti felt to be so refreshing. So strong
was it in the mother that it had a strange effect upon the mere physique,
and at eighty the expression in the eyes, and, indeed, on the face
throughout, retained so much of the winsomeness of youth that she was
more beautiful than most young women:—
1882.
My blessed mother dozing in her chair
On Christmas Day seemed an embodied Love,
A comfortable Love with soft brown hair
Softened and silvered to a tint of dove;
A better sort of Venus with an air
Angelical from thoughts that dwell above;
A wiser Pallas in whose body fair
Enshrined a blessed soul looks out thereof.
Winter brought holly then, now Spring has brought
Paler and frailer snowdrops shivering;
And I have brought a simple humble thought—
I her devoted duteous Valentine—
A lifelong thought which thrills this song I sing,
A lifelong love to this dear saint of mine.
Although this was not so with Christina, upon whose face ill-health
worked its ravages, her temperament, as we say, remained as young as
ever. The lovely relations—sometimes staid and sometimes playful—between
mother and daughter, are seen throughout the book before us. But
especially are they seen in one little group of poems—“The Valentines to
her Mother”—in regard to which Christina left the following pencilled
note:—
“These Valentines had their origin from my dearest mother’s remarking
that she had never received one. I, her C. G. R., ever after supplied
one on the day; and (so far as I recollect) it was a surprise every time,
she having forgotten all about it in the interim.”
Mrs. Rossetti’s first valentine was received when she was nearly
seventy-six years of age, and she continued every year to receive a
valentine until 1886, when she died. Surely there is not in the history
of English poetry anything more fascinating than these valentines.
It is pleasing to see the book open with the following dedication by Mr.
W. M. Rossetti:—
“To Algernon Charles Swinburne, a generous eulogist of Christina
Rossetti, who hailed his genius and prized himself the greatest of living
British poets, my old and constant friend, I dedicate this book.”
V. DR. GORDON HAKE.
1809–1895.
I little thought when I recently quoted from Dr. Hake’s account of that
Christmas gathering of the Rossettis at Bognor in 1875—a gathering which
he has made historic—that to-day I should be writing an obituary notice
of the “parable-poet” himself. It is true that, having fractured a leg
in a lamentable accident which befell him, he had for the last few years
been imprisoned in one room and compelled during most of the time to lie
in a horizontal position. But notwithstanding this, and notwithstanding
his great age, his mental faculties remained so unimpaired that it was
hard to believe his death could be so near.
[Picture: Dr. Gordon Hake. From a crayon-drawing by D. G. Rossetti
reproduced by the kind permission of Mr. Thomas Hake]
Although, owing to his intimacy with George Borrow, Hake was associated
in the public mind with the Eastern Counties, he was not an East Anglian.
It was at Leeds (in 1809) that he first saw the light. His mother was a
Gordon of the Huntly stock, and came of “the Park branch” of that house.
The famous General Gordon was his first cousin, and it was owing to this
fact that Hake’s son, Mr. Egmont Hake, was entrusted with the material
for writing his authoritative books upon the heroic Christian soldier.
Between Hake’s eldest son, Mr. T. St. E. Hake, a rising novelist, and the
General the likeness was curiously strong. Nominated by one of his
uncles to Christ’s Hospital, Hake entered that famous school. He gives
in his ‘Memoirs of Eighty Years’ a very vivid picture of it and also a
really vital portrait of himself. From his very childhood he was haunted
by a literary ambition which can only be called an insatiable passion.
It lasted till the very hour of his death. When eleven years of age he
became acquainted with that one poet whose immensity of fame has for more
than three centuries been the flame into which the myriad Shakespeare
moths of English literature have been flying. The Shakespearean of
eleven summers did not, like so many Shakespeare enthusiasts from
Davenant down to those latest Shakespeares, Homers, and Miltons of our
contemporary paragraphists, get himself up to look like the Stratford
bust. The only man who ever really looked like that bust was the late
Dion Boucicault, who did so without trying. But Shakespeare’s wonderful
work acted on the imagination of the child of eleven in an equally
humorous way. “Shakespeare’s perfection,” he says in his memoirs, “not
only made me envious of the greatest of writers, but it depressed me in
turn with the feeling that I could never equal it howsoever long I might
live.”
Yet although this passion never passed away, but waxed with his years, it
must not be supposed that Hake suffered from what in the “new criticism”
is sweetly and appropriately called “modernity”—in other words, that
vulgar greed for notoriety that in these days, when literature to be
listened to must be puffed like quack medicine and patent soap, has made
the atmosphere of the literary arena somewhat stifling in the nostrils of
those who turn from “modernity” to poetic art. Nor was Hake’s feeling
akin to that fine despair