FEW poetical writers lived more consistently in the shadow of death than
Christina Rossetti. There was a certain taint of doom about her writings
from the first, and something of the hollow-eyed listlessness of low
vitality, that characterises the artistic work of the school to which
she primarily belonged, is never absent for very long together from her
writings. There is extant a portrait of her at about the age of
thirty-six, by her brother, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, which will be
familiar to many of my readers. After subtracting from it the languorous
mannerism of the artist, there remains in the wide, pathetic eyes, the
wistful uplifting of the eyebrows and the depressed curves of the
stately mouth something dreary and uncomforted about the whole aspect.
And a later photograph, which I have had the privilege of seeing, has
the same regretful patience. For many years she had been an invalid, and
lived a life of singular seclusion in Torrington Square, one of the
dreariest and least romantic of London thoroughfares. Latterly she had
been an acute sufferer from a wearing disease, borne with silent
fortitude. One after another, her mother, and the two aunts to whom she
devoted her tenderest care, were taken from her; and her brother William
Michael, the critic and editor of Shelley, was the only survivor of the
brilliant circle in which her life began. Her fervent religious faith,
inspired and matured by desolate experience, had nothing dreary or
undecided about it; it issued in a sedulous dutifulness and a patient
devotion that were the best proof of its sincerity.
Her artistic nature developed early, and before she was seventeen, a
little volume entitled _Verses by Christina Rossetti_, dedicated to her
mother, was printed by her maternal grandfather, Gaetano Polidori, at
his private printing-press in Regent's Park. This is now one of the
rarest of bibliographical treasures. Here her precise delineation of
natural objects, and a certain delicate antique charm, are distinctly
observable. But in 1850, under the _nom-de-plume_ of Ellen Alleyne, she
contributed verses to the _Germ_, that fertile organ of the
pre-Raphaelites, Holman Hunt, Thomas Woolner, Dante Gabriel Rossetti,
and others. Of these lyrics we shall presently have occasion to quote
one, "Dreamland," which shows how early her lyrical gift had matured.
And indeed it may be said that of the seven poems which she contributed
to the _Germ_, at least five are among her best lyrics.
In 1862 appeared _Goblin Market and other Poems_; and in this, as is so
often the case with the work of poets done before the thirty-fifth
year--the year that has so often been fatal to genius--she reached the
zenith of her poetical powers. Not that much of her later work was not
excellent, and would have sufficed for a definite reputation; but it may
be said that twenty or thirty of these earlier poems are those by which
she will be best remembered.
Some writers have the power of creating a species of aerial landscape in
the minds of their readers, often vague and shadowy, not obtruding
itself strongly upon the consciousness, but forming a quiet background,
like the scenery of portraits, in which the action of the lyric or the
sonnet seems to lie. I am not now speaking of pictorial writing, which
definitely aims at producing, with more or less vividness, a house, a
park, a valley, but lyrics and poems of pure thought and feeling, which
have none the less a haunting sense of locality in which the mood dreams
itself out.
Christina Rossetti's _mise-en-scene_ is a place of gardens, orchards,
wooded dingles, with a churchyard in the distance. The scene shifts a
little, but the spirit never wanders far afield; and it is certainly
singular that one who lived out almost the whole of her life in a city
so majestic, sober, and inspiriting as London, should never bring the
consciousness of streets and thoroughfares and populous murmur into her
writings. She, whose heart was so with birds and fruits, cornfields and
farmyard sounds, never even revolts against or despairs of the huge
desolation, the laborious monotony of a great town. She does not sing as
a caged bird, with exotic memories of freedom stirred by the flashing
water, the hanging groundsel of her wired prison, but with a wild voice,
with visions only limited by the rustic conventionalities of toil and
tillage. The dewy English woodland, the sharp silences of winter, the
gloom of low-hung clouds, and the sigh of weeping rain are her
backgrounds; and it is strange that one of Italian blood should write
with no alien longings for warm and sun-dried lands. Robert Browning,
who brings into sudden being by a word, the whole atmosphere of the
fiery Italian summer, the terraced vines, the gnarled olive, the bulging
plaster where the scorpion lies folded, still yearned for an English
spring morning. But Christina Rossetti, unlike even her brother, had no
leanings to the home of her race.
The critic of future ages, if he were confronted with the works of Mrs.
Browning and Miss Rossetti, and a history of their lives, would, it may
be said, acting on internal evidence only, assign such poems as _Aurora
Leigh_ and the _Casa-Guidi Windows_ to Miss Rossetti, and trace the
natural heart-beats which still thrilled her for the home of her origin,
and equally attribute the essentially English character of Miss
Rossetti's feeling to the English poetess. It is said that Miss Rossetti
never visited Italy, and had no wish to do so. It is a strange thing
that the two greatest of English poetesses should have, so to speak, so
passionately adopted each other's country as their own.
The only point in which Christina Rossetti's imagery may be held to be
tropical, is in the matters of fruit. In "Goblin Market," in the
"Pageant of the Months," even in such a poem as the "Apple Gathering,"
and in many other poems she seems to revel in descriptions of fruit
which the harsh apples and half-baked plums of English gardens can
hardly have suggested. Keats is the only other English poet who had the
same sensuous delight in the pulpy juiciness of summer fruit. It will be
found, I think, that in the majority of English poets fruit is quite as
often typical of immaturity and acidity as of cooling and delight. And
even Stevenson couples the onion and the nectarine as the noblest fruits
of God's creation. But the
Plump unpecked cherries.
Bloom down-cheeked peaches,
Wild free-born cranberries,
Pineapples, strawberries,
All ripe together
In summer weather.
are hardly the produce of the rushy glen where the leering goblin
merchants tramped and whisked up and down.
This leads me to speak of another region which Christina Rossetti trode
with an eager familiarity--the land of dreams and visions. With the
exception of Coleridge, who, in his three great poems, moved in that
difficult and turbid air with so proud a freedom, it may be said that no
English poet except Christina, her brother, and James Thomson, have ever
successfully attempted such work. Mr. Yeats, it is true, of younger
writers, has passed beyond the threshold of that eerie and unsubstantial
land; but with him it is the melancholy Celtic twilight, the home of old
earth-spirits, neither high nor hopeful, but with a bewildered sadness,
as of discrowned kings and discredited magicians. To a characteristically
English poet such as Wordsworth, such a region, as he betrays in the
memorable sonnet, "The world is too much with us," was a place of
desperate soulless horror. But Christina Rossetti, in "Goblin Market,"
and the "Ballad of Boding," as her brother in "Rose Mary," and "Sister
Helen," passed successfully along the narrow road of allegory. In
English hands such subjects are apt to pass with fatal swiftness into
the ludicrous and the grotesque. Witness the merry horned demons of
monkish MSS., and the cheerful oddities, so far aloof from fantastic
horror, of our English gurgoyles and stall-work, the straddling and
padding forms of Bunyan. What is needed is a sort of twilight of the
soul, a simple directness such as children value, a sense of grave
verisimilitude, hopelessly alien from the business-like Puritan mind.
Then, too, there is the singular creation of the modern ballad,
initiated by Coleridge, and carried to supreme perfection by D. G.
Rossetti, and in a less degree by his sister; that vague, dream-laden
writing which, using old forms of austere simplicity, charges them with
a whole world of modern sicknesses and degenerate dreams. It was this
that Matthew Arnold went so passionately in search of in a poem like the
"Scholar Gipsy," and yet could contrive no inner picture of the haunted
wanderer's thoughts, but only touch in the external aspects of the
phantom traveller, as seen unexpectedly by human toilers and
pleasure-seekers engaged in homely exercises.
But Miss Rossetti, in such poems as "Brandons Both," and in a supreme
degree in the exquisite ballad of "Noble Sisters," which we will quote
_in extenso_, laid a secure hand on the precise medium required:--