William Michael Rossetti, who has just died, survived his brother, Dante
Gabriel Rossetti, by thirty-seven years, dying at the age of
eighty-nine. Not really a man of letters, in the essential sense, his
verse, as Gabriel said, "Always going back on the old track," he had a
certain talent of his own; for he edited an excellent edition of Blake's
Poems, and a creditable edition of Shelley, the first critical edition
of his poems.
He was the first Englishman who ever dared to print a Selection from
Whitman's _Leaves of Grass_,--in 1868; and, in spite of having to
exclude such passages as he considered indecent, the whole book was a
valuable contribution to our literature.
There is no question that Michael was not invaluable to Gabriel; indeed,
during the whole of the tragic and wonderful life of that man of supreme
genius; not only because he dedicated his _Poems_ of 1870 to one "who
had given them the first brotherly hearing;" not only because, had not
Michael been with him at the British Museum on the ever-memorable and
unforgettable date of April 30, 1847, he had never bought the
imperishable _MS. Book of Blake_, borrowing for this purchase ten
shillings from his brother; but also because when Rossetti, after his
wife's death, had his manuscript volume of poems exhumed in October,
1869, he did the right thing, both in his impetuous act in burying them
beside his dead wife and in his silence with his brother--who was really
aware of the event--so that his own tortured nerves might have some
respite.
Still, I have never forgotten how passionately Eleanore Duse said to me,
in 1900:
Rossetti's eyes desire some feverish thing, but the mouth and chin
hesitate in pursuit. All Rossetti is in that story of his _MS._ buried
in his wife's coffin. He could do it, he could repent of it; but he
should have gone and taken it back himself: he sent his friends.
In one of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's invaluable notes on Poetry, he tells
us that to him "the leading point about Coleridge's work is its human
love." That Rossetti, whose face indicated voluptuousness brooding
thoughtfully over destiny, was intensely sensitive, is true; and this
made him a sort of medium to forces seen and unseen. Yet, I think, he
wanted in life more than most men of such genius as he had wanted. For,
as Watts-Dunton said: "He was the slave of his imagination--an
imagination of a power and dominance such as I have never seen equalled.
Of his vividness, no artistic expression of his can give any notion. He
had not the smallest command over it." That is one of the reasons why,
with all his affection for his brother Michael, the chasm between them
was immense--a chasm no dragon-created bridge could ever span; Gabriel
had in him, perhaps, too much of "chasm-fire": his genius was too
flame-fledged for earth's eternity, to have ever had one wing of it
broken by an enemy's shaft.
No modern poet ever had anything like the same grasp upon whatever is
essential in poetry that Rossetti had; for all that he wrote or said
about Art has in it an absolute rightness of judgment; and, with these,
as absolutely, an intellectual sanity. Here is one principle of artistic
creation stated with instantaneous certainty: "Conception, _fundamental
brain work_, that is what makes the difference in all art. Work your
metal as much as you like, but first take care that the gold was worth
working." But it is, strangely enough, that at the beginning of a review
of Hake's _Parables and Tales_ he says the final, the inevitable words
on creation and on what lies in the artist's mind before the act of
creation:
The first and highest is that where the work has been all mentally
"cartooned," as it were, beforehand by a process intensely conscious,
but patient and silent--an occult evolution of life: then follows the
glory of wielding words, and we see the hand of Dante, as the hand of
Michelangelo--or almost as that quickening hand which Michelangelo has
dared to embody--sweep from left to right, fiery and final.
In 1862, Rossetti took possession of his famous house, 10 Cheyne Walk,
Chelsea, where he lived to the end of his life, and whose joint
occupants were, for a certain length of time, George Meredith, Swinburne
and William Michael Rossetti, who left the house in 1874, the year in
which he married Lucy Madox Brown.
That four men of individualities so utterly different, and, in some
senses, aggressive, or at least assertive, should have been able to live
together in closeness of continuous intimacy, from which there was
hardly an escape, was barely conceivable. Yet it was in this house that
Swinburne wrote many of his _Poems Ballads_, part of his book on Blake
and his masterpiece, _Atalanta in Calydon._ There Meredith finished his
masterpiece in the matter of tragic and passionate verse, _Modern Love._
There is nothing like it in the whole of English poetry, nor did he ever
achieve so magnificent a vivisection of the heart in verse as in these
pages--in which he created a wonderful style, acid, stinging,
bitter-sweet, poignant--where these self-torturing and cruel lovers
weave the amazing web of their disillusions as they struggle, open-eyed,
against the blindness of passion.
The poem laughs while it cries.
Swinburne, who was, I think, on the whole, less susceptible in regard to
abusive attacks on his books than Meredith or Rossetti, vindicates
himself, and superbly, in the pamphlet I have before me: _Notes on Poems
and Reviews_ (1866). He has been accused of indecency and immorality and
perversity; and is amazed to find that _Anactoria_ "has excited, among
the chaste and candid critics of the day, or hour, or minute, a more
vehement reputation, a more virtuous horror, a more passionate appeal,
than any other of my writing. I am evidently not virtuous enough to
understand them. I thank Heaven that I am not. _Ma corruption rougirait
de leur pudeur._"
In regard to _Laus Veneris_, I turn for a moment to W. M. Rossetti's
_Swinburne's Poems and Ballads: A criticism_ (1866) which, on the whole,
is uncommonly well written, to one of those passages where he betrays a
kind of Puritanism in his Italian blood; saying that the opening lines
were, apart from any question of sentiment, much overdone. "That is a
situation (and there are many such in Swinburne's writings) which we
would much rather see touched off with the reticence of a Tennyson: he
would probably have given one epithet, or, at the utmost, one line, to
it, and it would at least equally have haunted the memory." I turn from
this to Swinburne on Tennyson, as for instance: "At times, of course,
his song was then as sweet as ever it has sounded since; but he could
never make sure of singing right for more than a few minutes or
stanzas." And--what is certainly true--that Vivien's impurity is
eclipsed by her incredible and incomparable vulgarity. "She is such a
sordid creature as plucks men passing by the sleeve."
Now the actual origin of _Laus Veneris_ came about when Swinburne, with
Rossetti, bought the first edition of Fitzgerald's wonderful version of
_Omar Khayyam._ "We invested," Swinburne writes, "in hardly less than
six-penny-worth apiece, and on returning to the stall next day, for
more, found that we had sent up the market to the sinfully extravagant
price of two-pence, an imposition which evoked from Rossetti a fervent
and impressive remonstrance." Swinburne went down to stay with Meredith
in the country with the priceless book; and, before lunch, they read,
alternately, stanza after stanza. The result was that, after lunch,
Swinburne went to his room and came down to Meredith's study with his
invariable blue paper and wrote there and then thirteen stanzas of
_Veneris_, that end with the lines:
Till when the spool is finished, lo I see
His web, reeled off, curls and goes out like steam.
His only invention was the certainly cunning one of inserting a rhyme
after the second line of each stanza, which is not in the version.
Swinburne's re-creation of the immortal legend of Venus and her Knight,
certainly--though certainly unknown to W. M. Rossetti--owes also much of
its origin from Swinburne's inordinate admiration of _Les Fleurs du
Mal_, by Baudelaire. Its origin, in a certain sense only; that is of the
influence of one poet on the other. For, as he says:
It was not till my poem was completed that I received from the hands of
its author the admirable pamphlet of Charles Baudelaire on Wagner's
_Tannhauser._ If anyone desires to see, expressed in better words than I
can command, the conception of the mediæval Venus which it was my aim
to put into verse, let him turn to the magnificent passage in which
Baudelaire describes the fallen goddess, grown diabolic among eyes that
would not accept her as divine.
I need not reiterate the extraordinary influence that Baudelaire always
had on Swinburne; seen most of all in _Poems and Ballads_ and recurring
at intervals in later volumes of his verse. Both had in their genius, a
certain abnormality, a certain perversity, a certain love of depravity
in the highest sense of the word.
Swinburne, who had a fashion of overpraising many writers, such as Hugo,
so that his prose is often extravagant and the criticism as unbalanced
as the praise, dedicated his finest book, "_William Blake_," to W. M.
Rossetti, in words whose almost strained sense of humility--a way really
in which he often showed the intensity of his pride--makes one wonder
how he could have said: "I can but bring you brass for the gold you send
me; but between equals and friends there can be no question of barter.
Like Diomed, I take what I am given and offer what I have." What
Swinburne had--his genius--he never gave away lavishly; here he is much
too lavish. "There is a joy in praising" might have been written for
him, and he communicates to us, as few writers do, his own sense of joy
in beauty. It is quite possible to be annoyed by many of the things he
has said, not only about literature, but also about religion, and morals
and politics. But he has never said anything on any of these subjects
which is not generous, and high-minded, and, at least for the moment,
passionately and absolutely sincere.
It is almost cruel to have to test one sentence of the man of talent
with one sentence of the man of genius. I chose these from the _Notes on
the Royal Academy Exhibition_ they wrote together in 1868, which I have
before me, in the form of a printed pamphlet. "If everybody tells me
that the picture of A, of which this pamphlet says nothing, merits
criticism, or that the picture of B, praised for color, claims praise on
the score of drawing also, I shall have no difficulty in admitting the
probable correctness of these remarks; but, if he adds that I am
blamable for the omissions, I shall feel entitled to reply that A's
picture and B's draughtsmanship were not and indeed never were in the
bond."
How honestly that is written and how prosaically, "Pale as from poison,
with the blood drawn back from her very lips, agonized in face and limbs
with the labor and the fierce contention of old love with new, of a
daughter's love with a bride's, the fatal figure of Medea pauses a
little on the funereal verge of the wood of death, in act to pour a
blood-like liquid into the soft opal-coloured hollow of a shell." How
princely that praise of Sandys rings in one's ears, lyrical prose that
quickens the blood! But the greater marvel to me is that Swinburne in
his _Miscellanies_, of 1866, should have quoted two sentences of
Rossetti on Shakespeare's Sonnets and ended by saying: "These words
themselves deserve to put on immortality: there are none truer or
nobler, wiser or more memorable in the whole historic range of highest
criticism." I can only imagine it as that of an arrow in flight: only,
it loses the mark.
It was when Christina Rossetti was living at 30 Torrington Square that I
spent several entrancing hours with her. She had still traces of her
Italian beauty; but all the loveliness had gone out of her, so subtly
and so delicately painted by Gabriel when she was young. The moment she
entered, dressed simply and severely, she bowed, almost curtsied, with
that old-fashioned charm that since her time has gone mostly out of the
world. Her face lit up when she spoke of Gabriel: for between them was
always love and admiration. His genius, to her, both as a poet and a
painter, invariably received her elaborate and unstinted praise.
She told me that Gabriel had said to her: "_The Convent Threshold_ is a
very splendid piece of feminine ascetic passion; and, to me, one of your
greatest poems is that on France after the Siege--_To-Day for me._" And
that Swinburne specially loved _Passing away, saith the world, passing
away._ It always seems to me that as she had read Leopardi and
Baudelaire, the thought of death had for her the same fascination; only
it is not the fascination of attraction, as with the one, nor repulsion,
as with the other, but of interest, sad but scarcely unquiet interest in
what the dead are doing underground, in their memories, if memory they
have, of the world they have left.
Yet this fact is of curious interest, knowing the purity of her
imagination, that when Swinburne sent her his _Atalanta in Calydon_ she
crossed out in ink one line:
"_The supreme evil, God._"
Swinburne himself told me of his amazement and amusement when he
happened to turn to this page while he was looking through the copy he
had sent her.
It was one of Gabriel Rossetti's glories to paint luxurious women,
surrounded by every form of luxury. And some of them are set to pose in
Eastern garments, with caskets in their hands and flames about them,
looking out with unsearchable eyes. His colors, before they began to
have, like his forms, an exaggeration, a blurred vision which gave him
the need of repainting, of depriving his figures of life, were as if
charmed into their own places; they took on at times some strange and
stealthy and startling ardors of paint, with a subtle fury.
By his fiery imagination, his restless energy, he created a world:
curious, astonishing, at first sight; strange, morbid, and subtly
beautiful. Everything he made was chiefly for his own pleasure; he had a
contempt for the outside world, and his life was so given up to beauty,
in search for it and in finding of it, that one can but say not only
that his life was passion consumed by passion, as his nerves became more
and more his tyrants (tyrants, indeed, these were, more formidable and
more alluring and more tempting than even the nerves confess), but also
that, to put it in the words of Walter Pater: "To him life is a crisis
at every moment."
There was in him, as in many artists, the lust of the eyes. And as
others feasted their lust on elemental things, as in Turner's _Rain,
Steam and Speed_, as in Whistler's _Valparaiso_, as in the _Olympia_ of
Manet, as in a _Décors de Ballet_ of Degas, so did Rossetti upon other
regions than theirs. He had neither the evasive and instinctive genius
of Whistler, nor Turner's tremendous sweep of vision, nor the creative
and fiercely imaginative genius of Manet. But he had his own way of
feasting on forms and visions more sensuous, more nervously passionate,
more occult, perhaps, than theirs.
Yet, as his intentions overpower him, as he becomes the slave and no
longer the master of his dreams, his pictures become no longer symbolic.
They become idols. Venus, growing more and more Asiatic as the moon's
crescent begins to glitter above her head, and her name changes from
Aphrodite into Astarte, loses all the freshness of the waves from which
she was born, and her own sorcery hardens into a wooden image painted to
be the object of savage worship.
Dreams are no longer content to be turned into waking realities, taking
the color of the daylight, that they may be visible to our eyes, but
they remain lunar, spectral, a dark and unintelligible menace.