CHAPTER IX.

Last Days--Vale of St John--In the Lake Country--Return to

London--London--Birchington

RECOLLECTIONS OF DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI

CHAPTER I.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti was the eldest son of Gabriele Rossetti and

Frances Polidori, daughter of Alfieri’s secretary, and sister of the

young physician who travelled with Lord Byron. Gabriele Rossetti was a

native of Yasto, in the district of the Abruzzi, kingdom of Naples.

He was a patriotic poet of very considerable distinction; and, as a

politician, took a part in extorting from Ferdinand I. the Constitution

of 1820. After the failure of the Neapolitan insurrection, owing to

the treachery of the King (who asked leave of absence on a pretext

of ill-health, and returned with an overwhelming Austrian army), the

insurrectionists were compelled to fly. Some of them fell victims;

others lay long in concealment. Rossetti was one of the latter; and,

while he was in hiding, Sir Graham Moore, the English admiral, was lying

with an English fleet in the bay. The wife of the admiral had long been

a warm admirer of the patriotic hymns of Rossetti, and, when she learned

his danger, she prevailed with her husband to make efforts to save him.

Sir Graham thereupon set out with another English officer to the place

of concealment, habited the poet in an English uniform, placed him

between them in a carriage, and put him aboard a ship that sailed next

day to Malta, where he obtained the friendship of the governor, John

Hookham Frere, by whose agency valuable introductions were procured, and

ultimately Rossetti established himself in England. Arrived in London

about 1823, he lived a cheerful life as an exile, though deprived of the

advantages of his Italian reputation. He married in 1826, and his eldest

son was born May 12, 1828, in Charlotte Street, Portland Place, London.

He was appointed Professor of Italian at King’s College, and died in

1854. His house was for years the constant resort of Italian refugees;

and the son used to say that it was from observation of these visitors

of his father that he depicted the principal personage of his _Last

Confession_. He did not live to see the returning glories of his country

or the consummation we have witnessed of that great movement founded

upon the principles for which he fought and suffered. His present

position in Italy as a poet and patriot is a high one, a medal having

been struck in his honour. An effort is even now afoot to erect a statue

to him in his native place, and one of the last occasions upon which

the son put pen to paper was when trying to make a reminiscent rough

portrait for the use of the sculptor. Gabriele Rossetti spent his last

years in the study of Dante, and his works on the subject are unique,

exhibiting a peculiar view of Dante’s conception of Beatrice, which

he believed to be purely ideal, and employed solely for purposes of

speculative and political disquisition. Something of this interpretation

was fixed undoubtedly upon the personage by Dante himself in his later

writings, but whether the change were the result of a maturer and more

complicated state of thought, and whether the real and ideal characters

of Beatrice may not be compatible, are questions which the poetic mind

will not consider it possible to decide. Coleridge, no doubt, took a

fair view of Rossetti’s theory when he said: “Rossetti’s view of Dante’s

meaning is in great part just, but he has pushed it beyond all bounds of

common sense. How could a poet--and such a poet as Dante--have written

the details of the allegory as conjectured by Rossetti? The boundaries

between his allegory and his pure picturesque are plain enough, I think,

at first reading.” It was, doubtless, due to his devotion to studies of

the Florentine that Gabriele Rossetti named after him his eldest son.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, whose full baptismal name was Gabriel Charles

Dante, was educated principally at King’s College School, London, and

there attained to a moderate proficiency in the ordinary classical

school-learning, besides a knowledge of French, which throughout life he

spoke well. He learned at home some rudimentary German; Italian he had

acquired at a very early age. There has always been some playful mention

of certain tragedies and translations upon which he exercised himself

from the ages of five to fifteen years; but it is hardly necessary

to say that he himself never attached value to these efforts of his

precocity; he even displayed, occasionally, a little irritation upon

hearing them spoken of as remarkable youthful achievements.

One of these productions of his adolescence, Sir Hugh the Heron, has

been so frequently alluded to, that it seems necessary to tell the story

of it, as the author himself, in conversation, was accustomed to do. At

about twelve years of age, the young poet wrote a scrap of a poem under

this title, and then cast it aside. His grandfather, Polidori, had seen

the fragment, however, and had conceived a much higher opinion of

its merits than even the natural vanity of the young author himself

permitted him to entertain. It had then become one of the grandfather’s

amusements to set up an amateur printing-press in his own house, and

occupy his leisure in publishing little volumes of original verse for

semi-public circulation. He urged his grandson to finish the poem

in question, promising it, in a completed state, the dignity and

distinction of type. Prompted by hope of this hitherto unexpected

reward, Rossetti--then thirteen to fourteen years of age--finished

the juvenile epic, and some bound copies of it got abroad. No more was

thought of the matter, and in due time the little bard had forgotten

that he had ever done it. But when a genuine distinction had been earned

by poetry that was in no way immature, Rossetti discovered, by

the gratuitous revelation of a friend, that a copy of the youthful

production--privately printed and never published--was actually in the

library of the British Museum. Amazed, and indeed appalled as he was by

this disclosure, he was powerless to remedy the evil, which he foresaw

would some day lead to the poem being unearthed to his injury, and

printed as a part of his work. The utmost he could do to avert

the threatened mischief he did, and this was to make an entry in a

commonplace-book which he kept for such uses, explaining the origin and

history of the poem, and expressing a conviction that it seemed to him

to be remarkable only from its entire paucity of even ordinary poetic

promise. But while this was indubitably a just estimate of these boyish

efforts, it is no doubt true, as we shall presently see, that Rossetti’s

genius matured itself early in life.

Whilst still a child, his love of literature exhibited itself, and a

story is told of a disaster occurring to him, when rather less than nine

years of age, which affords amusing proof of the ardour of his poetic

nature. Upon going with his brother and sisters to the house of his

grandfather, where as children they occupied themselves with sports

appropriate to their years, he proposed to improvise a part of a scene

from _Othello_, and cast himself for the principal _rôle_. The scene

selected was the closing one of the play, and began with the speech

delivered to Lodovico, Montano, and Gratiano, when they are about to

take Othello prisoner. Rossetti used to say that he delivered the lines

in a frenzy of boyish excitement, and coming to the words--

Set you down this:

And say, besides,--that in Aleppo once,

Where a malignant and a turban’d Turk

Beat a Venetian, and traduced the state,

I took by the throat the circumcised dog,

And smote him--thus!--

he snatched up an iron chisel, that lay somewhere at hand, and, to the

consternation of his companions, smote himself with all his might on the

chest, inflicting a wound from which he bled and fainted.

He is described by those who remember him, at this period, as a boy of

a gentle and affectionate nature, albeit prone to outbursts of

masterfulness. The earliest existent portraits represent a comely youth,

having redundant auburn hair curling all round the head, and eyes and

forehead of extraordinary beauty. It is said that he was brave and

manly of temperament, courageous as to personal suffering, eminently

solicitous of the welfare of others, and kind and considerate to*such

as he had claims upon. This is no doubt true portraiture, but it must

be stated (however open to explanation, on grounds of laudable

self-depreciation), that it is not the picture which he himself used

to paint of his character as a boy. He often described himself as being

destitute of personal courage when at school, as shrinking from the

amusements of schoolfellows, and fearful of their quarrels; not wholly

without generous impulses, but, in the main, selfish of nature and

reclusive in habit of life. He was certainly free from the meaningless

affectation--for such it too frequently is--of representing his

school-days as the happiest of his life. If, after so much undervaluing

of himself, it were possible to trust his estimate of his youthful

character, he would have had you believe that school was to him a place

of semi-purgatorial probation,--which nothing but love of his mother,

and desire to meet her wishes, prevented him, as an irreclaimable

antischoliast, from obstinately renouncing at a time when he had learned

little Latin, and less Greek.

Having from childhood shown a propensity towards painting, the strong

inclination was fostered by his parents, and art was looked upon as his

future profession. Upon leaving school about 1843, he studied first at

an art academy near Bedford Square, and afterwards at the Eoyal Academy

Antique School, never, however, going to the Eoyal Academy Life School.

He appears to have been an assiduous student. In after life when his

habit of late rising had become a stock subject of banter among his

intimate friends, he would tell with unwonted pride how in earlier years

he used to rise at six A.M. once a week in order to attend a life-class

held before breakfast. On such occasions he was accustomed, he would

say, to purchase a buttered roll and cup of coffee at some stall at a

street corner, so as not to dislocate domestic arrangements by requiring

the servants to get up in the middle of the night. He left the Academy

about 1848 or 1849, and in the latter year exhibited his picture

entitled the _Girlhood of Mary Virgin_. This painting is an admirable

example of his early art, before the Gothicism of the early Italian

painters became his quest. Better known to the public than the picture

is the sonnet written upon it, containing the beautiful lines--

An angel-watered lily, that near God

Grows and is quiet.

While Rossetti was still under age he associated with J. E. Millais,

Holman Hunt, Thomas Woolner, James Collinson, F. G. Stephens, and his

brother, W. M. Rossetti, in the movement called pre-Raphaelite. At the

beginning of his career he recognised, in common with his associates,

that the contemporary classicism had run to seed, and that, beyond an

effort after perfection of _technique_, the art of the period was all

but devoid of purpose, of thought, imagination, or spirituality. At such

a moment it was matter for little surprise that ardent young intellects

should go back for inspiration to the Gothicism of Giotto and the early

painters. There, at least, lay feeling, aim, aspiration, such as did

not concern itself primarily with any question of whether a subject were

painted well or ill, if only it were first of all a subject at all--a

subject involving manipulative excellence, perhaps, but feeling and

invention certainly. This, then, stated briefly, was the meaning of

pre-Raphaelitism. The name (as shall hereafter appear) was subsequently

given to the movement more than half in jest. It has sometimes been

stated that Mr. Ruskin was an initiator, but this is not strictly the

case. The company of young painters and writers are said to have been

ignorant of Mr. Ruskin’s writings when they began their revolt against

the current classicism. It is a fact however, that, after perhaps a

couple of years, Mr. Ruskin came to the rescue of the little brotherhood

(then much maligned) by writing in their defence a letter in the

_Times_. It is easy to make too much of these early endeavours of

a company of young men, exceptionally gifted though the reformers

undoubtedly were, and inspired by an ennobling enthusiasm. In later

years Rossetti was not the most prominent of those who kept these

beginnings of a movement constantly in view; indeed, it is hardly rash

to say that there were moments when he seemed almost to resent the

intrusion of them upon the maturity of aim and handling which, in common

with his brother artists, he ultimately compassed. But it would be folly

not to recognise the essential germs of a right aspiration which grew

out of that interchange of feeling and opinion which, in its concrete

shape, came to be termed pre-Raphaelitism. Rossetti is acknowledged to

have taken the most prominent part in the movement, supplying, it is

alleged, much of the poetic impulse as well as knowledge of mediaeval

art. He occupied himself in these and following years mainly in the

making of designs for pictures--the most important of them being

_Dante’s Dream, Hamlet and Ophelia, Cassandra, Lucretia Borgia, Giotto

painting Dante’s Portrait, The First Anniversary of the Death of

Beatrice Mary Magdalene at the Door of Simon the Pharisee, The Death

of Lady Macbeth, Desdemona’s Death-song_ and a great subject entitled

_Found_, designed and begun at twenty-five, but left incomplete at

death.

All this occurred between the years 1849-1856, but three years before

the earlier of these dates Rossetti, as a painter, had come under an

influence which he was never slow to acknowledge operated powerfully

on his art. In 1846, Mr. Ford Madox Brown exhibited designs in the

Westminster competition, and his cartoons deeply impressed Rossetti The

young painter, then nineteen years of age, wrote to the elder one, his

senior by no more than seven years, begging to be permitted to become a

pupil. An intimacy sprang up between the two, and for a while Rossetti

worked in Brown’s studio; but though the friendship lasted throughout

life the professional relationship soon terminated. The ardour of the

younger man led him into the-brotherhood just referred to, but Brown

never joined the pre-Raphaelites, mainly, it is said, from dislike of

coterie tendencies.

About 1856, Rossetti, with two or three other young painters,

gratuitously undertook to paint designs on the walls of the Union

Debating Hall at Oxford, and about the time he was engaged upon this

task he made the acquaintance of Mr. William Morris, Mr. Burne Jones,

and Mr. Swinburne, who were undergraduates at the University. Mr.

Burne Jones was intended for a clerical career, but due to Rossett’s

intercession Holy Orders were abandoned, to the great gain of English

art. He has more than once generously allowed that he owed much to

Rossetti at the beginning of his career, find regarded him to the last

as leader of the movement with which his own name is now so eminently

and distinctively associated. Together, and with the co-operation of Mr.

William Morris and Canon Dixon, they started and carried on for about a

year a monthly periodical called _The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine_,

of which Canon Dixon, as one of the projectors, shall presently tell the

history. At a subsequent period Mr. Burne Jones and Rossetti, together

with Mr. Madox Brown and some three others, associated with Mr. Morris

in establishing, from the smallest of all possible beginnings, the

trading firm now so well known as Morris and Co., and they remained

partners in this enterprise down to the year 1874, when a dissolution

took place, leaving the business in the hands of the gentleman

whose name it bore, and whose energy had from the first been mainly

instrumental in securing its success.

It may be said that almost from the outset Rossetti viewed the public

exhibition of pictures as a distracting practice. Except the _Girlhood

of Mary Virgin_, the _Annunciation_ was almost the only picture he

exhibited in London, though three or four water-colour drawings were

at an early period exhibited in Liverpool, and of these, by a curious

coincidence, one was the first study for the _Dante’s Dream_, which

was purchased by the corporation of the city within a few months of

the painter’s death. To sum up all that remains at this stage to say

of Rossetti as a pictorial artist down to his thirtieth year, we may

describe him (as he liked best to hear himself described) simply as

a poetic painter. If he had a special method, it might be called

a distinct poetic abstraction, together with a choice of mediaeval

subject, and an effort after no less vivid rendering of nature than was

found in other painters. With his early designs (the outcome of such a

quest as has been indicated) there came, perchance, artistic crudities

enough, but assuredly there came a great spirituality also. By and by

Rossetti perceived that he must make narrower the stream of his effort

if he would have it flow deeper; and then, throughout many years, he

perfected his technical methods by abandoning complex subject-designs,

and confining himself to simple three-quarter-length pictures. More

shall be said on this point in due course. Already, although unknown

through the medium of the public picture-gallery, he was recognised as

the leader of a school of rising young artists whose eccentricities were

frequently a theme of discussion. He never invited publicity, yet he was

rapidly attaining to a prominent position among painters.

His personal character in early manhood is described by friends as one

of peculiar manliness, geniality, and unselfishness. It is said that, on

one occasion, he put aside important work of his own in order to

spend several days in the studio of a friend, whose gifts were quite

inconsiderable compared with his, and whose prospects were all but

hopeless,--helping forward certain pictures, which were backward, for

forthcoming exhibition. Many similar acts of self-sacrifice are still

remembered with gratitude by those who were the recipients of them.

Rossetti was king of his circle, and it must be said, that in all that

properly constituted kingship, he took care to rule. There was then

a certain determination of purpose which occasionally had the look of

arbitrariness, and sometimes, it is alleged, a disregard of opposing

opinion which partook of tyranny: but where heart and not head were in

question, he was assuredly the most urbane and amiable of monarchs.

In matters of taste in art, or criticism in poetry, he would brook no

opposition from any quarter; nor did he ever seem to be conscious of the

unreasonableness of compelling his associates to swallow his opinions

as being absolute and final. This disposition to govern his circle

co-existed, however, with the most lavish appreciation of every good

quality displayed by the members of it, and all the little uneasiness

to which his absolutism may sometimes have given rise was much more than

removed by constantly recurring acts of good-fellowship,--indeed it was

forgotten in the presence of them.

A photograph which exists of Rossetti at twenty-seven conveys the idea

of a nature rather austere and taciturn than genial and outspoken. The

face is long and the cheeks sunken, the whole figure being attenuated

and slightly stooping; the eyes have the inward look which belonged to

them in later life, but the mouth, which is free from the concealment of

moustache or beard, is severe. The impression conveyed is of a powerful

intellect and ambitious nature at war with surroundings and not wholly

satisfied with the results. It ought to be added that, at the period in

question, health was uncertain with Rossetti: and this fact, added to

the circumstance of his being at the time in the very throes of those

difficulties with his art which he was soon to surmount, must be

understood to account for the austerity of his early portrait. Rossetti

was not in a distinct sense a humourist, but there came to him at

intervals, in earlier manhood, those outbursts of volatility, which, to

serious natures, act as safety-valves after prolonged tension of all the

powers of the mind. At such moments of levity he is described as almost

boyish in recklessness, plunging into any madcap escapade that might be

afoot with heedlessness of all consequences. Stories of misadventures,

quips and quiddities of every kind, were then his delight, and of these

he possessed a fund which no man knew better how to use. He would tell

a funny story with wonderful spirit and freshness of resource, always

leading up to the point with watchful care of the finest shades of

covert suggestion or innuendo, and, when the climax was reached, never

denying himself a hearty share in the universal laughter. One of his

choicest pleasures at a dinner or other such gathering was to improvise

rhymes on his friends, and of these the fun usually lay in the

improvisatore’s audacious ascription of just those qualities which his

subject did not possess. Though far from devoid of worldly wisdom, and

indeed possessed of not a little shrewdness in his dealings with his

buyers (often exhibiting that rarest quality of the successful trader,

the art of linking one transaction with another), he was sometimes

amusingly deficient in what is known as common sense. In later life he

used to tell with infinite zest a story of a blunder of earlier years

which might easily have led to serious if not fatal results. He had

been suffering from nervous exhaustion and had been ordered to take a

preparation of nux vomica. The dose was to be taken three times daily:

in the morning, at noon, and in the evening. One afternoon he was about

to start out for the house of a friend with whom he had promised to

lunch, when he remembered that he had not taken his first daily dose

of medicine. He forthwith took it, and upon setting down the glass,

reflected that the second dose was due, and so he took that also.

Putting on his hat and preparing to sally forth he further reflected

that before he could return the third dose ought in ordinary course to

be taken, and so without more deliberation he poured himself a final

portion and drank it off. He had thereupon scarcely turned himself

about, when to his horror he discovered that his limbs were growing

rigid and his jaw stiff. In the utmost agitation he tried to walk across

the studio and found himself almost incapable of the effort. His eyes

seemed to leap out of their sockets and his sight grew dim. Appalled

and in agony, he at length sprang up from the couch upon which he had

dropped down a moment before, and fled out of the house. The violent

action speedily induced a copious perspiration, and this being by much

the best thing that could have happened to him, carried off the poison

and so saved his life. He could never afterwards be induced to return to

the drug in question, and in the last year of his life was probably more

fearfully aghast at seeing the present writer take a harmless dose of it

than he would have been at learning that 50 grains of chloral had been

taken.

He had, in early manhood, the keenest relish of a funny prank, and one

such he used to act over again in after life with the greatest vivacity

of manner. Every one remembers the story told by Jefferson Hogg how

Shelley got rid of the old woman with the onion basket who took a place

beside him in a stage coach in Sussex, by seating himself on the floor

and fixing a tearful, woful face upon his companion, addressing her in

thrilling accents thus--

For heaven’s sake, let us sit upon the ground,

And tell sad stories of the death of kings.

Rossetti’s frolic was akin to this, though the results were amusingly

different. It would appear that when in early years, Mr. William Morris

and Mr. Burne Jones occupied a studio together, they had a young servant

maid whose manners were perennially vivacious, whose good spirits no

disaster could damp, and whose pertness nothing could banish or

check. Rossetti conceived the idea of frightening the girl out of her

complacency, and calling one day on his friends, he affected the direst

madness, strutted ominously up to her and with the wildest glare of his

wild eyes, the firmest and fiercest setting of his lower lip, and began

in measured and resonant accents to recite the lines--

Shall the hide of a fierce lion

Be stretched on a couch of wood,

For a daughter’s foot to lie on,

Stained with a father’s blood?

The poet’s response is a soft “Ah, no!” but the girl, ignorant of course

of this, and wholly undisturbed by the bloodthirsty tone of the question

addressed to her, calmly fixed her eyes on the frenzied eyes before her,

and answered with a swift light accent and rippling laugh, “It shall

if you like, sir!” Rossetti’s enjoyment of his discomfiture on this

occasion seemed never to grow less.

His life was twofold in intellectual effort, and of the directions in

which his energy went out the artistic alone has thus far been dealt

with. It has been said that he early displayed talent for writing as

well as painting, and, in truth, the poems that he wrote in early youth

are even more remarkable than the pictures that he painted. His poetic

genius developed rapidly after sixteen, and sprang at once to a singular

and perfect maturity. It is difficult to say whether it will add to the

marvel of mature achievement or deduct from the sense of reality of

personal experience, to make public the fact that _The Blessed Damozel_

was written when the poet was no more than nineteen. That poem is a

creation so pure and simple in the higher imagination, as to support the

contention that the author was electively related to Fra Angelico.

Described briefly, it may be said to embody the meditations of a

beautiful girl in Paradise, whose lover is in the same hour dreaming of

her on earth. How the poet lighted upon the conception shall be told by

himself in that portion of this book devoted to the writer’s personal

recollections.

_The Blessed Damozel_ is a conception dilated to such spiritual

loveliness that it seems not to exist within things substantially

beautiful, or yet by aid of images that coalesce out of the evolving

memory of them, but outside of everything actual It is not merely that

the dream itself is one of ideal purity; the wave of impulse is pure,

and flows without taint of media that seem almost to know it not. The

lady says:--

We two will lie i’ the shadow of

That living mystic tree

Within whose secret growth the Dove

Is sometimes felt to be,

While every leaf that His plumes touch

Saith His Name audibly.

Here the love involved is so etherealised as scarcely to be called

human, save only on the part of the mortal dreamer, in whose yearning

ecstasy the ear thinks it recognises a more earthly note. The lover

rejoins.--

(Alas! We two, we two, thou say’st!

Yea, one wast thou with me

That once of old. But shall God lift

To endless unity

The soul whose likeness with thy soul

Was but its love for thee?)

It is said of the few existent examples of the art of Giorgione that,

around some central realisation of human passion gathers always a

landscape which is not merely harmonised to it, but a part of it,

sharing the joy or the anguish, lying silent to the breathless

adoration, or echoing the rapturous voice of the full pleasure of those

who are beyond all height and depth more than it. Something of this

passive sympathy of environing objects comes out in the poem:

Around her, lovers, newly met

‘Mid deathless love’s acclaims,

Spoke evermore among themselves

Their rapturous new names;

And the souls mounting up to God

Went by her like thin flames.

And still she bowed herself and stooped

Out of the circling charm;

Until her bosom must have made

The bar she leaned on warm,

And the lilies lay as if asleep

Along her bended arm.

The sense induced by such imagery is akin to that which comes of rapt

contemplation of the deep em-blazonings of a fine stained window when

the sun’s warm gules glides off before the dim twilight. And this sense

as of a thing existent, yet passing stealthily out of all sight away,

the metre of the poem helps to foster. Other metres of Rossetti’s have

a strenuous reality, and rejoice in their self-assertiveness, and seem,

almost, in their resonant strength, to tell themselves they are very

good; but this may almost be said to be a disembodied voice, that

lives only on the air, and, like the song of a bird, is gone before its

accents have been caught. Of the four-and-twenty stanzas of the poem,

none is more calmly musical than this:

When round his head the aureole clings,

And he is clothed in white,

I ‘ll take his hand and go with him

To the deep wells of light;

We will step down as to a stream,

And bathe there in God’s sight.

Perhaps Rossetti never did anything more beautiful and spiritual than

this little work of his twentieth year; and more than once in later life

he painted the beautiful lady who is the subject of it, with the lilies

lying along her arm.

A first draft of _Jenny_ was struck off when the poet was scarcely more

than a boy, and taken up again years afterwards, and almost entirely

re-written--the only notable passage of the early poem that now remains

being the passage on lust. It is best described in the simplest phrase,

as a man’s meditations on the life of a courtesan whom he has met at a

dancing-garden and accompanied home. While he sits on a couch, she lies

at his feet with her head on his knee and sleeps. When the morning dawns

he rises, places cushions beneath her head, puts some gold among

her hair, and leaves her. It is wisest to hazard at the outset all

unfavourable comment by the frankest statement of the story of the

poem. But the _motif_ of it is a much higher thing. _Jenny_ embodies

an entirely distinct phase of feeling, yet the poet’s root impulse

is therein the same as in the case of _The Blessed Damozel_. No two

creations could stand more widely apart as to outward features than

the dream of the sainted maiden and the reality of the frail and fallen

girl; yet the primary prompting and the ultimate outcome are the same.

The ardent longing after ideal purity in womanhood, which in the one

gave birth to a conception whereof the very sorrow is but excess of

joy found expression in the other through a vivid presentment of the

nameless misery of unwomanly dishonour:--

Behold the lilies of the field,

They toil not neither do they spin;

(So doth the ancient text begin,--

Not of such rest as one of these Can share.)

Another rest and ease

Along each summer-sated path

From its new lord the garden hath,

Than that whose spring in blessings ran

Which praised the bounteous husbandman,

Ere yet, in days of hankering breath,

The lilies sickened unto death.

It was indeed a daring thing the author proposed to himself to do, and

assuredly no man could have essayed it who had not consciously united

to an unfailing and unshrinking insight, a relativeness of mind such as

right-hearted people might approve. To take a fallen woman, a cipher of

man’s sum of lust, befouled with the shameful knowledge of the streets,

yet young, delicate, “apparelled beyond parallel,” unblessed, with a

beauty which, if copied by a Da Vinci’s hand, might stand whole ages

long “for preachings of what God can do,” and then to endow such a one

with the sensitiveness of a poet’s own mind, make her read afresh as

though by lightning, and in a dream, that story of the old pure days--

Much older than any history

That is written in any book,

and lastly, to gather about her an overwhelming sense of infinite solace

for the wronged and lost, and of the retributive justice with which

man’s transgressions will be visited--this is, indeed, to hazard all

things in the certainty of an upright purpose and true reward.

Shall no man hold his pride forewarn’d

Till in the end, the Day of Days,

At Judgment, one of his own race,

As frail and lost as you, shall rise,--

His daughter with his mother’s eyes!

Yet Rossetti made no treaty with puritanism, and in this respect his

_Jenny_ has something in common with Hawthorne’s _Scarlet Letter_--than

which nothing, perhaps, that is so pure, without being puritanical,

has reached us even from the land that gave _Evangeline_ to the English

tongue. The guilty love of Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale is never

for an instant condoned, but, on the other hand, the rigorous severity

of the old puritan community is not dwelt upon with favour. Relentless

remorse must spend itself upon the man before the whole measure of his

misery is full, and on the woman the brand of a public shame must be

borne meekly to the end. But though no rancour is shown towards the

austere and blind morality which puts to open discharge the guilty

mother whilst unconsciously nourishing the yet more guilty father, we

see the tenderness of a love that palliates the baseness of the amour,

and the bitter depths of a penitence that cannot be complete until it

can no longer be concealed. And so with Jenny. She may have transient

flashes of remorseful consciousness, such as reveal to her the trackless

leagues that separate what she was from what she is, but no effort is

made to hide the plain truth that she is a courtesan, skilled only

in the lures and artifices peculiar to her shameful function. No

reformatory promptings fit her for a place at the footstool of the

puritan. Nothing tells of winter yet; on the other hand, no virulent

diatribes are cast forth against the society that shuts this woman out,

as the puritan settlement turned its back on Hester Prynne. But we

see her and know her for what she is, a woman like unto other women:

desecrated but akin.

This dramatic quality of sitting half-passively above their creations

and of leaving their ethics to find their own channels (once assured

that their impulses are pure), the poet and the romancer possess in

common. If there is a point of difference between their attitudes of

mind, it is where Rossetti seems to reserve his whole personal feeling

for the impeachment of lust;--

Like a toad within a stone

Seated while Time crumbles on;

Which sits there since the earth was cursed

For Man’s transgression at the first;

Which, living through all centuries,

Not once has seen the sun arise;

Whose life, to its cold circle charmed,

The earth’s whole summers have not warmed;

Which always--whitherso the stone

Be flung--sits there, deaf, blind, alone;--

Ay, and shall not be driven out

Till that which shuts him round about

Break at the very Master’s stroke,

And the dust thereof vanish as smoke,

And the seed of Man vanish as dust:--

Even so within this world is Lust.

_Sister Helen_ was written somewhat later than _The Blessed Damozel_

and the first draft of _Jenny_, and probably belonged to the poet’s

twenty-fourth or twenty-fifth year. The ballad involves a story of

witchcraft A girl has been first betrayed and then deserted by her

lover; so, to revenge herself upon him and his newly-married bride, she

burns his waxen image three days over a fire, and during that time he

dies in torment In _Sister Helen_ we touch the key-note of Rossetti’s

creative gift. Even the superstition which forms the basis of the ballad

owes something of its individual character to the invention and poetic

bias of the poet. The popular superstitions of the Middle Ages were

usually of two kinds only. First, there were those that arose out of a

jealous Catholicism, always glancing towards heresy; and next there were

those that laid their account neither with orthodoxy nor unbelief, and

were purely pagan. The former were the offspring of fanaticism; the

latter of an appeal to appetite or passion, or fancy, or perhaps

intuitive reason directed blindly or unconsciously towards natural

phenomena. The superstition involved in _Sister Helen_ partakes wholly

of neither character, but partly of both, with an added element of

demonology. The groundwork is essentially catholic, the burden of the

ballad showing that the tragic event lies between Hell and Heaven:--

(O Mother, Mary Mother,

Three days to-day, between Hell and Heaven!)

But the superstructural overgrowth is totally undisturbed by any

animosity against heresy, and is concerned only with a certain ultimate

demoniacal justice visiting the wrongdoer. Thus far the elemental tissue

of the superstition has something in common with that of the German

secret tribunal of the steel and cord; with this difference, however,

that whereas the latter punishes in secret, even _as the deity_, the

former makes conscious compact with the powers of evil, that whatever

justice shall be administered upon the wicked shall first be purchased

by sacrifice of the good. Sister Helen may burn, alive, the body and

soul of her betrayer, but the dying knell that tells of the false soul’s

untimely flight, tolls the loss of her own soul also:--

“Ah! what white thing at the door has cross’d,

Sister Helen?

Ah! what is this that sighs in the frost!”

“A soul that’s lost as mine is lost,

Little brother!”

(O Mother, Mary Mother,

Lost, lost, all lost, between Hell and Heaven!)

Here lies the divergence between the lines of this and other compacts

with evil powers; this is the point of Rossetti’s departure from the

scheme that forms the underplot of Goethe’s _Faust_, and of Marlowe’s

_Faustus_, and was intended to constitute the plan of Coleridge’s

_Michael Scott_. It has been well said that the theme of the Faust is

the consequence of a misology, or hatred of knowledge, resulting upon

an original thirst for knowledge baffled. Faust never does from the

beginning love knowledge for itself, but he loves it for the means it

affords for the acquisition of power. This base purpose defeats itself;

and when Faust finds that learning fails to yield him the domination he

craves, he hates and contemns it. Away, henceforth, with all pretence to

knowledge! Then follows the compact, the articles to which are absolute

servility of the Devil on the one part, and complete possession of the

soul of Faust on the other. Faust is little better than a wizard from

the first, for if knowledge had given him what he: sought, he had never

had recourse to witchcraft! Helen, however, partakes in some sort

of the triumphant nobility of an avenging deity who has cozened hell

itself, and not in vain. In the whole majesty of her great wrong, she

loses the originally vulgar character of the witch. It is not as the

consequence of a poison-speck in her own heart that she has recourse to

sorcery. She does not love witchery for its own sake; she loves it only

as the retributive channel for the requital of a terrible offence. It

is throughout the last hour of her three-days’ conflict, merely, that we

see her, but we know her then not more for the revengeful woman she is

than for the trustful maiden she has been. When she becomes conscious of

the treason wrought against her, we feel that she suffers change. In

the eyes of others we can see her, and in our vision of her she is

beautiful; but hers is the beauty of fair cheeks, from which the canker

frets the soft tenderness of colour, the loveliness of golden hair that

has lost its radiance, the sweetness of eyes once dripping with the

dews of the spirit, now pale, and cold, and lustreless. Very soon the

wrongdoer shall reap the harvest of a twofold injury: this day another

bride shall stand by his side. Is there, then, no way to wreak the just

revenge of a broken heart? _That_ suggests sorcery. Yes, the body and

soul of the false lover may melt as before a flame; but the price of

vengeance is horrible. Yet why? Has not love become devilish? Is not

life a curse? Then wherefore shrink? The resolute wronged woman must

go through with it. And when the last hour comes, nature itself is

portentous of the virulent ill. In the wind’s wake, the moon flies

through a rack of night clouds. One after one the suppliants crave

pardon for the distant dying lover, and last of these comes the

three-days’ bride.

In addition to the three great poems just traversed, Rossetti had

written, before the completion of his twenty-sixth year, _The Staff

and Scrip, The Burden of Nineveh, Troy Town, Eden Bower_ and _The Last

Confession_, as well as a fragment of _The Bride’s Prelude_, to which

it will be necessary to return. But, with a single exception, the

poems just named may be said to exist beside the three that have been

analysed, without being radically distinct from them, or touching

higher or other levels, and hence it is not considered needful to dwell

upon them at length. _The Last Confession_ covers another range of

feeling, it is true, whereof it may be said that the nobler part is

akin to that which finds expression in the pure and shattered love of

Othello; but it is a range of feeling less characteristical, perhaps

less indigenous and appreciable.

In the years 1845-49 inclusive, Rossetti made the larger part of his

translations (published in 1861) from the early Italian poets, and

though he afterwards spoke of them as having been the work of the

leisure moments of many years, of their subsequent revision alone,

perhaps, could this be altogether true. The _Vita Nuova_, together with

the many among Dante’s _Lyrics_ and those of his contemporaries which

elucidate their personal intercourse; were translated, as well as a

great body of the sonnets of poets later than Dante. {*} This early and

indirect apprenticeship to the sonnet, as a form of composition, led

to his becoming, in the end, perhaps the most perfect of English

sonnet-writers. In youth, it was one of his pleasures to engage in

exercises of sonnet-skill with his brother William and his sister

Christina, and, even then, he attained to such proficiency, in the mere

mechanism of sonnet structure, that he could sometimes dash off a sonnet

in ten minutes--rivalling, in this particular, the impromptu productions

of Hartley Coleridge. It is hardly necessary to say that the poems

produced, under such conditions of time and other tests, were rarely,

if ever, adjudged worthy of publication, by the side of work to which he

gave adequate deliberation. But several of the sonnets on pictures--as,

for example, the fine one on a Venetian pastoral by Giorgione--and the

political sonnet, Miltonic in spirit, _On the Refusal of Aid between

Nations_, were written contemporaneously with the experimental sonnets

in question.

* Rossetti often remarked that he had intended to translate

the sonnets of Michael Angelo, until he saw Mr. Symonds’s

translation, when he was so much impressed by its excellence

that he forthwith abandoned the purpose.

As _The House of Life_ was composed in great part at the period with

which we are now dealing (though published in the complete sequence

nearly twenty-five years later), it may be best to traverse it at this

stage. Though called a full series of sonnets, there is no intimation

that it is not fragmentary as to design; the title is an astronomical,

not an architectural figure. The work is at once Shakspearean and

Dantesque. Whilst electively akin to the _Vita Nuova_, it is broader

in range, the life involved being life idealised in all phases. What

Rossetti’s idea was of the mission of the sonnet, as associated with

life, and exhibiting a similitude of it, may best be learned from his

prefatory sonnet:--

A Sonnet is a moment’s monument,--

Memorial from the Soul’s eternity

To one dead deathless hour. Look that it be,

Whether for lustral rite or dire portent,

Of its own arduous fulness reverent:

Carve it in ivory or in ebony,

As Day or Night may rule; and let Time see

Its flowering crest impearled and orient.

A Sonnet is a coin; its face reveals

The soul,--its converse, to what Power ‘tis due:--

Whether for tribute to the august appeals

Of Life, or dower in Love’s high retinue,

It serve; or ‘mid the dark wharfs cavernous breath,

In Charon’s palm it pay the toll to Death.

Rossetti’s sonnets are of varied metrical structure; but their

intellectual structure is uniform, comprising in each case a flow and

ebb of thought within the limits of a single conception. In this latter

respect they have a character almost peculiar to themselves among

English sonnets. Rossetti was not the first English writer who

deliberatively separated octave and sestet, but he was the first who

obeyed throughout a series of sonnets the canon of the contemporary

structure requiring that a sonnet shall present the twofold facet of a

single thought or emotion. This form of the sonnet Rossetti was at least

the first among English writers entirely to achieve and perfectly to

render. _The House of Life_ does not contain a sonnet which is not to

some degree informed by such an intellectual and musical wave; but the

following is an example more than usually emphatic:

Even as a child, of sorrow that we give

dead, but little in his heart can find,

Since without need of thought to his clear mind

Their turn it is to die and his to live:--

Even so the winged New Love smiles to receive

Along his eddying plumes the auroral wind,

Nor, forward glorying, casts one look behind

Where night-rack shrouds the Old Love fugitive.

There is a change in every hour’s recall,

And the last cowslip in the fields we see

On the same day with the first corn-poppy.

Alas for hourly change! Alas for all

The loves that from his hand proud youth lets fall,

Even as the beads of a told rosary!

The distinguishing excellence of craftsmanship in Rossetti’s sonnets

was early recognised; but the fertility of thought, and range of emotion

compassed by this part of his work constitute an excellence far higher

than any that belongs to perfection of form, rhythm, or metre. Mr.

Palgrave has well said that a poet’s story differs from a narrative in

being in itself a creation; that it brings its own facts; that what

we have to ask is not the true life of Laura, but how far Petrarch has

truly drawn the life of love. So with Rossetti’s sonnets. They may or

may not be “occasional.” Many readers who enter with sympathy into the

series of feelings they present will doubtless insist upon regarding

them as autobiographical. Others, who think they see the stamp of

reality upon them, will perhaps accept them (as Hallam accepted the

Sonnets of Shakspeare) as witnesses of excessive affection, redeemed

sometimes by touches of nobler sentiments--if affection, however

excessive, needs to be redeemed. Others again will receive them as

artistic embodiments of ideal love upon which is placed the imprint of a

passion as mythical as they believe to be attached to the autobiography

of Dante’s early days. But the genesis and history of these sonnets

(whether the emotion with which they are pervaded be actual or imagined)

must be looked for within. Do they realise vividly Life representative

in its many phases of love, joy, sorrow, and death? It must be conceded

that _he House of Life_ touches many passions and depicts life in

most of its changeful aspects. It would afford an adequate test of its

comprehensiveness to note how rarely a mind in general sympathy with the

author could come to its perusal without alighting upon something that

would be in harmony with its mood. To traverse the work through its

aspiration and foreboding, joy, grief, remorse, despair, and final

resignation, would involve a task too long and difficult to be attempted

here. Two sonnets only need be quoted as at once indicative of the range

of thought and feeling covered, and of the sequent relation these poems

bear each to each.

By thine own tears thy song must tears beget,

Singer! Magic mirror thou hast none

Except thy manifest heart; and save thine own

Anguish or ardour, else no amulet.

Cisterned in Pride, verse is the feathery jet

Of soulless air-flung fountains; nay, more dry

Than the Dead Sea for throats that thirst and sigh,

That song o’er which no singer’s lids grew wet.

The Song-god--He the Sun-god--is no slave

Of thine: thy Hunter he, who for thy soul

Fledges his shaft: to the august control

Of thy skilled hand his quivered store he gave:

But if thy lips’ loud cry leap to his smart,

The inspired record shall pierce thy brother’s heart.

This is not meant to convey the same idea as Shelley’s “learn in

suffering,” etc., but merely that a poem must move the writer in its

composition if it is to move the reader.

With the following _The House of Life_ is made to close:

When vain desire at last and vain regret

Go hand in hand to death, and all is vain,

What shall assuage the unforgotten pain

And teach the unforgetful to forget?

Shall Peace be still a sunk stream long unmet,--

Or may the soul at once in a green plain

Stoop through the spray of some sweet life-fountain,

And cull the dew-drenched flowering amulet?

Ah! when the wan soul in that golden air

Between the scriptured petals softly blown

Peers breathless for the gift of grace unknown,--

Ah! let none other alien spell soe’er

But only the one Hope’s one name be there,--

Not less nor more, but even that word alone.

A writer must needs be loath to part from this section of Rossett’s work

without naming some few sonnets that seem to be in all respects on a

level with those to which attention has been drawn. Of such, perhaps,

the most conspicuous are:--_A Day of Love; Mid-Rapture; Her Gifts; The

Dark Glass; True Woman; Without Her; Known in Vain; The Heart of

the Night; The Landmark; Stillborn Love; Lost Days_. But it would be

difficult to formulate a critical opinion in support of the superiority

of almost any of these’ sonnets over the others,--so balanced is their

merit, so equal their appeal to the imagination and heart. Indeed, it

were scarcely rash to say that in the language (outside Shakspeare)

there exists no single body of sonnets characterised by such sustained

excellence of vision and presentment. It must have been strange enough

if the all but unexampled ardour and constancy with which Rossetti

pursued the art of the sonnet-writer had not resulted in absolute

mastery.

In 1850 _The Germ_ was started under the editorship of Mr. William

Michael Rossetti, and to the four issues, which were all that were

published of this monthly magazine (designed to advocate the views of

the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood), Rossetti contributed certain of

his early poems--_The Blessed Damozel_ among the number. In 1856 he

contributed many of the same poems, together with others, to _The Oxford

and Cambridge Magazine_, of which Canon Dixon has kindly undertaken to

tell the history. He says:

My knowledge of Dante Gabriel Rossetti was begun in connection with _The

Oxford and Cambridge Magazine_, a monthly periodical, which was started

in January 1856, and lasted a year. The projectors of this periodical

were Mr. William Morris, Mr. Ed. Burne Jones, and myself. The editor was

Mr. (now the Rev.) William Fulford. Among the original contributors were

the late Mr. Wilfred Heeley of Cambridge, Mr. Faulkner, now Fellow

of University College, Oxford, and Mr. Cormel Price. We were all

undergraduates. The publishers of the magazine were the late firm of

Bell and Daldy. We gradually associated with ourselves several other

contributors: above all, D. G. Rossetti.

Of this undertaking the central notion was, I think, to advocate moral

earnestness and purpose in literature, art, and society. It was founded

much on Mr. Ruskin’s teaching: it sprang out of youthful impatience, and

exhibited many signs of immaturity and ignorance: but perhaps it was

not without value as a protest against some things. The pre-Raphaelite

movement was then in vigour: and this Magazine came to be considered as

the organ of those who accepted the ideas which were brought into art

at that time; and, as in a manner, the successor of _The Germ_, a small

periodical which had been published previously by the first beginners

of the movement. Rossetti, in many respects the most memorable of the

pre-Raphaelites, became connected with our Magazine when it had been

in existence about six months: and he contributed to it several of the

finest of the poems that were afterwards collected in the former of

his two volumes of poems: namely, _The Burden of Nineveh, The Blessed

Damozel, and The Staff and Scrip_. I think that one of them, _The

Blessed Damozel_, had appeared previously in _The Germ_. All these

poems, as they now stand in the author’s volume, have been greatly

altered from what they were in the Magazine: and, in being altered, not

always improved, at least in the verbal changes. The first of them, a

sublime meditation of peculiar metrical power, has been much altered,

and in general happily, as to the arrangement of stanzas: but not always

so happily as to the words. It is, however, pleasing to notice that in

the alterations some touches of bitterness have been effaced. The second

of these pieces has been brought with great skill into regular form by

transposition: but again one repines to find several touches gone that

once were there. The last of them, _The Staff and Scrip_, is, in my

judgment, the finest of all Rossetti’s poems, and one of the most

glorious writings in the language. It exhibits in flawless perfection

the gift that he had above all other writers, absolute beauty and pure

action. Here again it is not possible to see without regret some of the

verbal alterations that have been made in the poem as it now stands,

although the chief emendation, the omission of one stanza and the

insertion of another, adds clearness, and was all that was wanted to

make the poem perfect in structure.

I saw Rossetti for the first time in his lodgings over Blackfriars

Bridge. It was impossible not to be impressed with the freedom and

kindness of his manner, not less than by his personal appearance. His

frank greeting, bold, but gentle glance, his whole presence, produced a

feeling of confidence and pleasure. His voice had a great charm, both

in tone, and from the peculiar cadences that belonged to it I think that

the leading features of his character struck me more at first than

the characteristics of his genius; or rather, that my notion of the

character of the man was formed first, and was then applied to his

works, and identified with them. The main features of his character

were, in my apprehension, fearlessness, kindliness, a decision that

sometimes made him seem somewhat arbitrary, and condensation or

concentration. He was wonderfully self-reliant. These moral qualities,

guiding an artistic temperament as exquisite as was ever bestowed on

man, made him what he was, the greatest inventor of abstract beauty,

both in form and colour, that this age, perhaps that the world, has

seen. They would also account for some peculiarities that must be

admitted in some of his works, want of nature, for instance. I heard him

once remark that it was “astonishing how much the least bit of nature

helped if one put it in;” which seemed like an acknowledgment that he

might have gone more to nature. Hence, however, his works always seem

abstract, always seem to embody some kind of typical aim, and acquire a

sort of sacred character.

I saw a good deal of Rossetti in London, and afterwards in Oxford,

during the painting of the Union debating-room. In later years our

personal intercourse was broken off through distance; though I saw him

occasionally almost to the time of his lamented death, and we had some

correspondence. My recollection of him is that of greatness, as might be

expected of one of the few who have been “illustrious in two arts,” and

who stands by himself and has earned an independent name in both. His

work was great: the man was greater. His conversation had a wonderful

ease, precision, and felicity of expression. He produced thoughts

perfectly enunciated with a deliberate happiness that was indescribable,

though it was always simple conversation, never haranguing or

declamation. He was a natural leader because he was a natural teacher.

When he chose to be interested in anything that was brought before him,

no pains were too great for him to take. His advice was always given

warmly and freely, and when he spoke of the works of others it was

always in the most generous spirit of praise. It was in fact impossible

to have been more free from captiousness, jealousy, envy, or any other

form of pettiness than this truly noble man. The great painter who first

took me to him said, “We shall see the greatest man in Europe.” I have

it on the same authority that Rossetti’s aptitude for art was considered

amongst painters to be no less extraordinary than his imagination. For

example, that he could take hold of the extremity of the brush, and be

as certain of his touch as if it had been held in the usual way; that he

never painted a picture without doing something in colour that had

never been done before; and, in particular, that he had a command of the

features of the human face such as no other painter ever possessed. I

also remember some observations by the same assuredly competent judge,

to the effect that Rossetti might be set against the great painters

of the fifteenth century, as equal to them, though unlike them: the

difference being that while they represented the characters, whom

they painted, in their ordinary and unmoved mood, he represented his

characters under emotion, and yet gave them wholly. It may be added,

perhaps, that he had a lofty standard of beauty of his own invention,

and that he both elevated and subjected all to beauty. Such a man was

not likely to be ignorant of the great root of power in art, and I

once saw him very indignant on hearing that he had been accused of

irreligion, or rather of not being a Christian. He asked with great

earnestness, “Do not my works testify to my Christianity?” I wish that

these imperfect recollections may be of any avail to those who cherish

the memory of an extraordinary genius.

Besides his contributions to _The Germ_, and to _The Oxford and

Cambridge Magazine_, Rossetti contributed _Sister Helen_, in 1853, to a

German Annual. Beyond this he made little attempt to publish his poetry.

He had written it for the love of writing, or in obedience to the

inherent impulse compelling him to do so, but of actual hope of

achieving by virtue of it a place among English poets he seems to

have had none, or next to none. In later life he used to say that Mr.

Browning’s greatness and the splendour of Mr. Tennyson’s merited renown

seemed to him in those early years to render all attempt on his part

to secure rank by their side as hopeless as presumptuous. This, he

asserted, was the cause that operated to restrain him from publication

between 1853 and 1862, and after that (as will presently be seen),

another and more serious obstacle than self-depreciation intervened. But

in putting aside all hope of the reward of poetic achievement, he did

not wholly banish the memory of the work he had done. He made two or

more copies of the most noticeable of the poems he had written, and sent

them to friends eminent in letters. To Leigh Hunt he sent _The Blessed

Damozel_, and received in acknowledgment a letter full of appreciative

comment, and foretelling a brilliant future. His literary friends at

this time were Mr. Ruskin, Mr. and Mrs. Browning; he used to see Mr.

Tennyson and Carlyle at intervals, and was in constant intercourse with

the younger writers, Mr. Swinburne and Mr. Morris, whose reputations had

then to be made; Mr. Arnold, Sir Henry Taylor, Mr. Aubrey de Vere, Mr.

E. Brough, Mr. J. Hannay, and Mr. Monckton Milnes (Lord Houghton),

he met occasionally; Dobell he knew only by correspondence. Though

unpublished, his poems were not unknown, for besides the semi-publicity

they obtained by circulation “among his private friends,” he was nothing

loath to read or recite them at request, and by such means a few of

them secured a celebrity akin in kind and almost equal in extent to that

enjoyed by Coleridge’s _Christabel_ during the many years preceding

1816 in which it lay in manuscript. Like Coleridge’s poem in another

important particular, certain of Rossetti’s ballads, whilst still

unknown to the public, so far influenced contemporary poetry that when

they did at length appear they had all the appearance to the uninitiated

of work imitated from contemporary models, instead of being, as in fact

they were, the primary source of inspiration for writers whose names

were earlier established.

Towards the beginning of his artistic career Rossetti occupied a studio,

with residential chambers, at Black-friars Bridge. The rooms overlooked

the river, and the tide rose almost to the walls of the house, which,

with nearly all its old surroundings, has long disappeared.

A story is told of Rossetti amidst these environments which aptly

illustrates almost every trait of his character: his impetuosity,

and superstition especially. It was his daily habit to ransack

old book-stalls, and carry off to his studio whatever treasures he

unearthed, but when, upon further investigation, he found he had been

deceived as to the value of a book that at first looked promising, he

usually revenged himself by throwing the volume through a window into

the river running below--a habit which he discovered (to his amusement,

and occasionally to his distress), that his friends, Mr. Swinburne

especially, imitated from him and practised at his rooms on his behalf.

On one occasion he discovered in some odd nook a volume long sought

for, and having inscribed it with his name and address, he bore it off

joyfully to his chambers; but finding a few days later that in some

respects it disappointed his expectations, he flung it through the

window, and banished all further thought of it. The tide had been at the

flood when the book disappeared, and when it ebbed, the offending volume

was found by a little mud-lark imbedded in the refuse of the river. The

boy washed it and took it back to the address it contained, expecting to

find it eagerly reclaimed; but, impatient and angry at sight of what he

thought he had destroyed, Rossetti snatched the book out of the muddy

hand that proffered it and flung it again into the Thames, with rather

less than the courtesy which might have been looked for as the reward of

an act that was meant so well. But the haunting volume was not even

yet done with. Next morning, an old man of the riverside labourer class

knocked at the door, bearing in his hands a small parcel rudely made

up in a piece of newspaper that was greasy enough to have previously

contained his morning’s breakfast. He had come from where he was working

below London Bridge: he had found something that might have been lost

by Mr. Rossetti. It was the tormenting volume: the indestructible,

unrelenting phantom that would not be laid! Rossetti now perceived that

higher agencies were at work: it was _not meant_ that he should get rid

of the book: why should he contend against the inevitable? Reverently

and with both hands he took the besoiled parcel from the brown palm

of the labourer, placed half-a-crown there instead, and restored the

fearful book to its place on his shelf.

And now we come to incidents in Rossetti’s career of which it is

necessary to treat as briefly as tenderly. Among the models who sat to

him was Miss Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal, a young lady of great personal

beauty, in whom he discovered a natural genius for painting and a

noticeable love of the higher poetic literature. He felt impelled

to give her lessons, and she became as much his pupil as model. Her

water-colour drawings done under his tuition gave proof of a wonderful

eye for colour, and displayed a marked tendency to style. The subjects,

too, were admirably composed and often exhibited unusual poetic feeling.

It was very natural that such a connection between persons of kindred

aspirations should lead to friendship and finally to love.

Rossetti and Miss Siddal were married in 1860. They visited France and

Belgium; and this journey, together with a similar one undertaken in the

company of Mr. Holman Hunt in 1849, and again another in 1863, when his

brother was his companion, and a short residence on the Continent when

a boy, may be said to constitute almost the whole sum of Rossetti’s

travelling. Very soon the lady’s health began to fail, and she became

the victim of neuralgia. To meet this dread enemy she resorted to

laudanum, taking it at first in small quantities, but eventually in

excess. Her spirits drooped, her art was laid aside, and much of the

cheerfulness of home was lost to her. There was a child, but it was

stillborn, and not long after this disaster, it was found that Mrs.

Rossetti had taken an overdose of her accustomed sleeping potion and

was lying dead in her bed. This was in 1862, and after two years only of

married life. The blow was a terrible one to Rossetti, who was the first

to discover what fate had reserved for him. It was some days before he

seemed fully to realise the loss that had befallen him, and then his

grief knew no bounds. The poems he had written, so far as they were

poems of love, were chiefly inspired by and addressed to her. At her

request he had copied them into a little book presented to him for the

purpose, and on the day of the funeral he walked into the room where

the body lay, and, unmindful of the presence of friends, he spoke to

his dead wife as though she heard, saying, as he held the book, that the

words it contained were written to her and for her, and she must take

them with her for they could not remain when she had gone. Then he put

the volume into the coffin between her cheek and beautiful hair, and it

was that day buried with her in Highgate Cemetery.

CHAPTER II.

It was long before Rossetti recovered from the shock of his wife’s

sudden death. The loss sustained appeared to change the whole course

of his life. Previously he had been of a cheerful temperament, and

accustomed to go abroad at frequent intervals to visit friends; but

after this event he seemed to become for a time morose, and by nature

reclusive. Not a great while afterwards he removed from Blackfriars

Bridge, and after a temporary residence in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, he took

up his abode in the house he occupied during the twenty remaining years

of his life, at 16 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea. This home of Rossetti’s shall

be fully described in subsequent personal recollections. It was called

Tudor House when he became its tenant, from the tradition that Elizabeth

Tudor had lived in it, and it is understood to be the same that

Thackeray describes in _Esmond_ as the home of the old Countess of

Chelsey. A large garden, which recently has been cut off for building

purposes, lay at the back, and, doubtless, it was as much due to

the attractions of this piece of pleasant ground, dotted over with

lime-trees, and enclosed by a high wall, that Rossetti went so far

afield, for at that period Chelsea was not the rallying ground of

artists and men of letters. He wished to live a life of retirement, and

thought the possession of a garden in which he could take sufficient

daily exercise would enable him to do so. In leaving Blackfriars

he destroyed many things associated with his residence there, and

calculated to remind him of his life’s great loss. He burnt a great body

of letters, and among them were many valuable ones from almost all

the men and women then eminent in literature and art. His great grief

notwithstanding, upon settling at Chelsea he began almost insensibly to

interest himself in furnishing the house in a beautiful and novel style.

Old oak then became for a time his passion, and in hunting it up he

rummaged the brokers’ shops round London for miles, buying for trifles

what would eventually (when the fashion he started grew to be general)

have fetched large sums. Cabinets of all conceivable superannuated

designs--so old in material or pattern that no one else would look at

them--were unearthed in obscure corners, bolstered up by a joiner,

and consigned to their places in the new residence. Following old oak,

Japanese furniture became Rossetti’s quest, and following this came blue

china ware (of which he had perhaps the first fine collection made),

and then ecclesiastical and other brasses, incense-burners, sacramental

cups, crucifixes, Indian spice boxes, mediaeval lamps, antique bronzes,

and the like. In a few years he had filled his house with so much

curious and beautiful furniture that there grew up a widespread desire

to imitate his methods; and very soon artists, authors, and men of

fortune having no other occupation, were found rummaging, as he had

rummaged, for the neglected articles of the centuries gone by. What he

did was done, as he used to say, less from love of the things hunted

for, than from love of the pursuit, which, from its difficulty, gave

rise to a pleasurable excitement. Thus did he grieve down his loss, and

little did they think who afterwards followed the fashion he set them,

and carried his passion for antique furniture to an excess at which he

must have laughed, that his’ primary impulse was so far from a desire to

“live up to his blue ware,” that it was more like an effort to live down

to it.

It was during the earlier years of his residence at Chelsea that

Rossetti formed a habit of life which clung to him almost to the last,

and did more than aught else to blight his happiness. What his intimate

friend has lately characterised in _The Daily News_ as that great curse

of the literary and artistic temperament, insomnia, had been hanging

about him since the death of his wife, and was becoming each year more

and more alarming. He had tried opiates, but in sparing quantities, for

had he not the most serious cause to eschew them? Towards 1868 he heard

of the then newly found drug chloral, which was accredited with all the

virtues and none of the vices of other known narcotics. Here then was

the thing he wanted; this was the blessed discovery that was to save

him from days of weariness and nights of misery and tears. Eagerly he

procured it, took it nightly in single small doses of ten grains each,

and from it he received pleasant and refreshing sleep. He made no

concealment of his habit; like Coleridge under similar conditions, he

preferred to talk of it. Not yet had he learned the sad truth, too soon

to force itself upon him, that the fumes of this dreadful drug would

one day wither up his hopes and joys in life: deluding him with a

short-lived surcease of pain only to impose a terrible legacy of

suffering from which there was to be no respite. Had Rossetti been

master of the drug and not mastered by it, perhaps he might have

turned it to account at a critical juncture, and laid it aside when the

necessity to employ it had gradually been removed. But, alas! he gave

way little by little to the encroachments of an evil power with which,

when once it had gained the ascendant, he fought down to his dying day a

single-handed and losing fight.

It was not, however, for some years after he began the use of it that

chloral produced any sensible effects of an injurious kind, and meantime

he pursued as usual his avocation as a painter. Mention has been made

of the fact that Rossetti abandoned at an early age subject designs for

three-quarter-length figures. Of the latter, in the period of which we

are now treating, he painted great numbers: among them, produced at this

time and later, were _Sibylla Palmifera and The Beloved_ (the property

of Mr. George Rae), _La Pia and The Salutation of Beatrice_ (Mr. F. E.

Leyland), _The Dying Beatrice_ (Lord Mount Temple), _Venus Astarte_

(Mr. Fry), _Fiammetta_ (Mr. Turner), _Proserpina_ (Mr. Graham). Of these

works, solidity may be said to be the prominent characteristic. The

drapery of Rossetti’s pictures is wonderfully powerful and solid; his

colour may be said to be at times almost matchable with that of certain

of the Venetian painters, though different in kind. He hated beyond most

things the “varnishy” look of some modern work; and his own oil pictures

had so much of the manner of frescoes in their lustreless depth, that

they were sometimes mistaken for water-colours, while, on the other

hand, his water-colours had often so much depth and brilliancy as

sometimes to be mistaken for oil. It is alleged in certain quarters

that Rossetti was deficient in some qualities of drawing, and this is

no doubt a just allegation; but it is beyond question that no English

painter has ever been a greater master of the human face, which in his

works (especially those painted in later years) acquires a splendid

solemnity and spiritual beauty and significance all but peculiar to

himself. It seems proper to say in such a connexion, that his success

in this direction was always attributed by him to the fact that the most

memorable of his faces were painted from a well-known friend.

Only one of his early designs, the _Dante’s Dream_, was ever painted by

Rossetti on a scale commensurate with its importance, and the solemnity

and massive grandeur of that work leave only a feeling of regret that,

whether from personal indisposition on the part of the painter or lack

of adequate recognition on that of the public, the three or four other

finest designs made in youth were never carried out. As the picture in

question stands alone among Rossetti’s pictorial works as a completed

conception, it may be well to devote a few pages to a description of it.

It is essential to an appreciation of _Dante’s Dream_, that we should

not only fully understand the nature of the particular incident depicted

in the picture, but also possess a general knowledge of the lives and

relations of the two principal personages concerned in it. What we know,

to most purpose, of the early life and love of Dante, we learn from the

autobiography which he entitled _La Vita Nuova_. Boccaccio, however,

writing fifty years after the death of the great Florentine, affords

a more detailed statement than is furnished by Dante himself of the

circumstances of the poets first meeting with the lady he called

Beatrice. He says that it was the custom of citizens in Florence, when

the time of spring came round, to form social gatherings in their own

quarters for purposes of merry-making; that in this way Folco Portinari,

a citizen of mark, had collected his neighbours at his house upon the

first of May, 1274, for pastime and rejoicing: that amongst those who

came to him was Alighiero Alighieri, father of Dante Alighieri, who

lived within fifty yards; that it was common for children to accompany

their parents at such merrymakings, and that Dante, then scarce nine

years old, was in the house on the day in question engaged in sports,

appropriate to his years, with other children, amongst whom was a little

daughter of Folco Portinari, eight years old. The child is described as

being, even at this period, in aspect extremely beautiful, and winning

and graceful in her ways. Not to dwell upon these passages of childhood,

it may be sufficient to say that the boy, young as he was, is said

to have then conceived so deep a passion for the child that maturer

attachments proved powerless to efface it. Such was the origin of a love

that grew from childlike tenderness to manly ardour, and, surviving all

the buffetings of an untoward fate, is known to us now and for all

time in a record of so much reality and purity, as seems to every

right-hearted nature to be equally the story of his personal attachment

as the history of a passion that in Florence, six centuries ago, for its

mortal put on immortality.

The Portinari and Alighieri were immediate neighbours, yet it does not

appear that the young Dante encountered the lady in any marked way until

nine years later, and then, in the first bloom of a gracious womanhood,

she is described as affording him in the street a salutation of such

unspeakable courtesy that he left the place where for the instant he had

stood sorely abashed, as one intoxicated with a love that now at first

knew itself for what it was. The incidents of the attachment are few in

facts; numerous only in emotions, and therein too uncertain and liable

to change to be counted. In order not to disclose a passion, which other

reasons than those given by the poet may have tempted him to conceal,

Dante affects an attachment to another lady of the city, and the

rumour of this brings about an estrangement with the real object of his

desires, which reduces the poet to such an abject condition of mind, as

finally results in his laying aside all counterfeiting. Portinari, the

father, now dies, and witnessing the tenderness with which the beautiful

Beatrice mourns him, Dante becomes affected with a painful infirmity,

wherein his mind broods over his enfeebled body, and, perceiving how

frail a thing life is, even though health keep with it, his brain begins

to travail in many imaginings, and he says within himself, “Certainly

it must some time come to pass that the very gentle Beatrice will die.”

Feeling bewildered, he closes his eyes, and, in a trance, he conceives

that a friend comes to him, and says, “Hast thou not heard? She that

was thine excellent lady has been taken out of life.” Then as he looks

towards Heaven in imagination, he beholds a multitude of angels who are

returning upwards, having before them an exceedingly white cloud; and

these angels are singing, and the words of their song are, “Osanna in

excelsis.” So strong is his imagining, that it seems to him that he goes

to look upon the body where it has its abiding-place.

The sun ceased, and the stars began to gather,

And each wept at the other;

And birds dropp’d at midflight out of the sky;

And earth shook suddenly;

And I was ‘ware of one, hoarse and tired out,

Who ask’d of me: ‘Hast thou not heard it said--

Thy lady, she that was so fair, is dead?

Then lifting up mine eyes, as the tears came,

I saw the angels, like a rain of manna

In a long flight flying back Heavenward,

Having a little cloud in front of them,

After the which they went, and said ‘Hosanna;’

And if they had said more, you should have heard.

Then Love said, ‘Now shall all things be made clear:

Come, and behold our lady where she lies

These ‘wildering phantasies

Then carried me to see my lady dead.

Even as I there was led,

Her ladies with a veil were covering her;

And with her was such very humbleness

That she appeared to say, ‘I am at peace.’

(Dante and his Circle.)

The trance proves to be a premonition of the event, for, shortly after

writing the poem in which his imaginings find record, Dante says, “The

Lord God of Justice called my most gracious lady unto Himself.”

It is with the incidents of the dream that Rossetti has dealt. The

principal personage in the picture is, of course, Dante himself. Of the

poet’s face, two old and accredited witnesses remain to us--the portrait

of Giotto and the mask supposed to be copied from a similar one

taken after death. Giotto’s portrait represents Dante at the age of

twenty-seven. The face has a feminine delicacy of outline, yet is

full of manly beauty; strength and tenderness are seen blended in its

lineaments. It might be that of a poet, a scholar, a courtier, or yet a

soldier; and in Dante it is all combined.

Such, as seen in Giotto, was the great Florentine when Beatrice beheld

him. The familiar mask represents that youthful beauty as somewhat

saddened by years of exile, by the accidents of an unequal fortune, and

by the long brooding memory of his life’s one, deep, irreparable loss.

We see in it the warrior who served in the great battle of Campaldino:

the mourner who sought refuge from grief in the action and danger of the

war waged by Florence upon Pisa: the magistrate whose justice proved his

ruin: the exile who ate bitter bread when Florence banished the greatest

of her sons. The mask is as full as the portrait of intellect and

feeling, of strength and character, but it lacks something of the early

sweetness and sensibility. Rossetti’s portraiture retains the salient

qualities of both portrait and mask. It represents Dante in his

twenty-seventh year; the face gives hint of both poet and soldier, for

behind clear-cut features capable of strengthening into resolve and

rigour lie whole depths of tenderest sympathy. The abstracted air,

the self-centred look, the eyes that seem to see only what the

mind conceives and casts forward from itself; the slow, uncertain,

half-reluctant gait,--these are profoundly true to the man and the

dream.

Of Beatrice, no such description is given either in the _Vita Nuova_ or

the _Commedia_ as could afford an artist a definite suggestion. Dante’s

love was an idealised passion; it concerned itself with spiritual

beauty, whereof the emotions excited absorbed every merely physical

consideration. The beauty of Beatrice in the _Vita Nuova_ is like a

ray of sunshine flooding a landscape--we see it only in the effect it

produces. All we know with certainty is that her hair was light, that

her face was pale, and that her smile was one of thoughtful sweetness.

These hints of a beautiful person Rossetti has wrought into a creation

of such purity that, lovely as she is in death, as in life, we think

less of her loveliness than of her loveableness.

The personage of Love, who plays throughout the _Vita Nuova_ a mystical

part is not the Pagan Love, but a youth and Christian Master, as Dante

terms him, sometimes of severe and terrible aspect. He is represented in

the picture as clad in a flame-coloured garment (for it is in a mist

of the colour of fire that he appears to the lover), and he wears the

pilgrim’s scallop-shell on his shoulder as emblem of that pilgrimage on

earth which Love is.

The chamber wherein the body of Beatrice has its abiding-place is, to

Dante’s imaginings, a chamber of dreams. Visionary as the mind of the

dreamer, it discloses at once all that goes forward within its own

narrow compass, together with the desolate streets of the city of

Florence, which, to his fancy, sits silent for his loss, and the long

flight of angels above that bear away the little cloud, to which is

given a vague semblance of the beatified Beatrice. As if just fallen

back in sleep, the beautiful lady lies in death, her hands folded across

her breast, and a glory of golden hair flowing over her shoulders. With

measured tread Dante approaches the couch led by the winged and scarlet

Love, but, as though fearful of so near and unaccustomed an approach,

draws slowly backward on his half-raised foot, while the mystical emblem

of his earthly passion stands droopingly between him the living, and his

lady the dead, and takes the kiss that he himself might never have. In

life they must needs be apart, but thus in death they are united, for

the hand of the pilgrim, who is the embodiment of his love, holds his

hand even as the master’s lips touch her lips. Two ladies of the chamber

are covering her with a pall, and on the dreamer they fix sympathetic

eyes. The floor is strewn with poppies--emblems equally of the sleep in

which the lover walks, and of the sleep that is the sleep of death.

The may-bloom in the pall, the apple-blossom in the hand of Love, the

violets and roses in the frieze of the alcove, symbolise purity and

virginity, the life that is cut off in its spring, the love that is

consummated in death before the coming of fruit. Suspended from the roof

is a scroll, bearing the first words of the wail from the Lamentations

of Jeremiah, quoted by Dante himself:--“How doth the city sit solitary,

that was full of people! How is she become as a widow, she that was

great among the nations!” In the ascending and descending staircase on

either iand fly doves of the same glowing colour as Love, and these are

emblems of his presence in the house. Over all flickers the last beam of

a lamp which has burnt through the long night, and which the dawn of a

new day sees die away--fit symbol of the life that has now taken flight

with the heavenly host, leaving behind it only the burnt-out socket

where the live flame lived.

Full of symbol as this picture is, it is furthermore permeated by

a significance that is not occult. It bears witness to the possible

strength of a passion that is so spiritual as to be without taint of

sense; and to a confident belief in an immortality wherein the utmost

limits of a blessedness not of this world may be compassed. Such are

in this picture the simpler, yet deeper, symbols, that all who look may

read. Sir Noel Paton has written of this work:

I was so dumbfounded by the beauty of that great picture of Rosetti’s,

called _Dante’s Dream_, that I was usable to give any expression to the

emotions it excited--emotions such as I do not think any other picture,

except the _Madonna di San Sisto_ at Dresden, ever stirred within me.

The memory of such a picture is like the memory of sublime and perfect

music; it makes any one who _fully_ feels it--_silent_. Fifty years

hence it will be named among the half-dozen supreme pictures of the

world.

Rossetti had buried the only complete copy of his poems with his wife at

Highgate, and for a time he had been able to put by the thought of them;

but as one by one his friends, Mr. Morris, Mr. Swinburne, and others,

attained to distinction as poets, he began to hanker after poetic

reputation, and to reflect with pain and regret upon the hidden

fruits of his best effort. Rossetti--in all love of his memory be

it spoken--was after all a frail mortal; of unstable character: of

variable purpose: a creature of impulse and whim, and with a plentiful

lack of the backbone of volition. With less affection he would not have

buried his book; with more strength of will he had not done so; or,

having done so, he had never wished to undo what he had done; or having

undone it, he would never have tormented himself with the memory of it

as of a deed of sacrilege. But Rossetti had both affection enough to

do it and weakness enough to have it undone. After an infinity of

self-communions he determined to have the grave opened, and the book

extracted. Endless were the preparations necessary before such a work

could be begun. Mr. Home Secretary Bruce had to be consulted. At length

preliminaries were complete, and one night, seven and a half years after

the burial, a fire was built by the side of the grave, and then the

coffin was raised and opened. The body is described as perfect upon

coming to light.

Whilst this painful work was being done the unhappy author of it was

sitting alone and anxious, and full of self-reproaches at the house of

the friend who had charge of it. He was relieved and thankful when told

that all was over. The volume was not much the worse for the years it

had lain in the grave. Deficiencies were filled in from memory, the

manuscript was put in the press, and in 1870 the reclaimed work was

issued under the simple title of _Poems_.

The success of the book was almost without precedent; seven editions

were called for in rapid succession. It was reviewed with enthusiasm in

many quarters. Yet that was a period in which fresh poetry and new poets

arose, even as they now arise, with all the abundance and timeliness

of poppies in autumn. It is probable enough that of the circumstances

attending the unexampled early success of this first volume only

the remarkable fact is still remembered that, from a bookseller’s

standpoint, it ran a neck-and-neck race with Disraeli’s _Lothair_ at

a time when political romance was found universally appetising, and

poetry, as of old, a drug. But it will not be forgotten that certain

subsidiary circumstances were thought to have contributed to the former

success. Of these the most material was the reputation Rossetti had

already achieved as a painter by methods which awakened curiosity

as much as they aroused enthusiasm. The public mind became sensibly

affected by the idea that the poems of the new poet were not to be

regarded as the emanations of a single individual, but as the result of

a movement in which Rossetti had played one of the most prominent parts.

Mr. F. Hueffer, in prefacing the Tauchnitz edition of the poems with

a pleasant memoir, has comprehensively denominated that movement

the _renaissance of mediæval feeling_, but at the outset it

acquired popularly, for good or ill, the more rememberable name of

pre-Raphaelitism. What the shibboleth was of the originators of the

school that grew out of it concerned men but little to ascertain; and

this was a condition of indifference as to the logic of the movement

which was occasioned partly by the known fact that the most popular of

its leaders, Mr. Millais, had long been shifting ground. It was

enough that the new sect had comprised dissenters from the creed once

established, that the catholic spirit of art which lived with the

lives of Elmore, Goodall, and Stone was long dead, and that none of the

coteries for love of which the old faith, exemplified in the works of

men such as these, had been put aside, possessed such an appeal for

the imagination as this, now that twenty years of fairly consistent

endeavour had cleared away the cloud of obloquy that gathered about it

when it began. And so it came to be thought that the poems of Rossetti

were to exhibit a new phase of this movement, involving kindred issues,

and opening up afresh in the poetic domain the controversies which had

been waged and won in the pictorial. Much to this purpose was said at

the time to account for the success of a book whose popular qualities

were I manifestly inconsiderable; and much to similar purpose

will doubtless long be said by those who affect to believe that a

concatenation of circumstances did for Rossetti’s earlier work a service

which could not attend his subsequent one. But the explanation was

inadequate, and had for its immediate outcome a charge of narrowed range

of poetic sympathy with which Rossetti’s admirers had not laid their

account.

A renaissance of mediæval feeling the movement in art assuredly

involved, but the essential part of it was another thing, of which

mediævalism was palpably independent. How it came to be considered the

fundamental element is not difficult to show. In an eminent degree

the originators of the new school in painting were colourists, having,

perhaps, in their effects, a certain affinity to the early Florentine

masters, and this accident of native gift had probably more to do in

determining the precise direction of the _intellectual_ sympathy than

any external agency. The art feeling which formed the foundation of the

movement existed apart from it, or bore no closer relation to it than

kinship of powers induced. When Rossetti’s poetry came it was seen to

be animated by a choice of subject-matter akin to that which gave

individual character to his painting, but this was because coeval

efforts in two totally distinct arts must needs bear the family

resemblance, each to each, which belong to all the offspring of a

thoroughly harmonised mind. The poems and the pictures, however, had not

more in common than can be found in the early poems and early dramas of

Shakspeare. Nay, not so much; for whereas in his poems Shakspeare was

constantly evolving certain shades of feeling and begetting certain

movements of thought which were soon to find concrete and final

collocation in the dramatic creations, in his pictures Rossetti was

first of all a dissenter from all prescribed canons of taste, whilst in

his poems he was in harmony with the catholic spirit which was as old

as Shakspeare himself, and found revival, after temporary eclipse, in

Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, and Tennyson. Choice of mediaeval theme would

not in itself have been enough to secure a reversal of popular feeling

against work that contained no germs of the sensational; and hence we

must conclude that Mr. Swinburne accounted more satisfactorily for the

instant popularity of Rossetti’s poetry when he claimed for it those

innate utmost qualities of beauty and strength which are always

the first and last constituents of poetry that abides. Indeed those

qualities and none other, wholly independent of auxiliary aids, must now

as then go farthest to determine Rossetti’s final place among poets.

Such as is here described was the first reception given to Rossetti’s

volume of poetry; but at the close of 1871, there arose out of it a

long and acrimonious controversy. It seems necessary to allude to this

painful matter, because it involved serious issues; but an effort alike

after brevity and impartiality of comment shall be observed in what is

said of it. In October of the year mentioned, an article entitled _The

Fleshly School of Poetry_, and signed “Thomas Maitland,” appeared

in _The Contemporary Review_. {*} It consisted in the main of an

impeachment of Rossetti’s poetry on the ground of sensuality, though it

embraced a broad denunciation of the sensual tendencies of the age in

art, music, poetry, the drama, and social life generally. Sensuality was

regarded as the phenomenon of the age. “It lies,” said the writer, “on

the drawing-room table, shamelessly naked and dangerously fair. It is

part of the pretty poem which the belle of the season reads, and it

breathes away the pureness of her soul like the poisoned breath of

the girl in Hawthorne’s tale. It covers the shelves of the great

Oxford-Street librarian, lurking in the covers of three-volume novels.

It is on the French booksellers’ counters, authenticated by the

signature of the author of the _Visite de Noces_. It is here, there,

and everywhere, in art, literature, life, just as surely as it is in

the _Fleurs de Mal_, the Marquis de Sade’s _Justine_, or the _Monk_ of

Lewis. It appeals to all tastes, to all dispositions, to all ages. If

the querulous man of letters has his Baudelaire, the pimpled clerk has

his _Day’s Doings_, and the dissipated artisan his _Day and Night._”

When the writer set himself to inquire into the source of this social

cancer, he refused to believe that English society was honeycombed and

rotten. He accounted for the portentous symptoms that appalled him by

attributing the evil to a fringe of real English society, chiefly, if

not altogether, resident in London: “a sort of demi-monde, not composed,

like that other in France, of simple courtesans, but of men and women of

indolent habits and aesthetic tastes, artists, literary persons, novel

writers, actors, men of genius and men of talent, butterflies and

gadflies of the human kind, leading a lazy existence from hand to

mouth.” It was to this Bohemian fringe of society that the writer

attributed the “gross and vulgar conceptions of life which are

formulated into certain products of art, literature, and criticism.”

Dealing with only one form of the social phenomenon, with sensualism so

far as it appeared to affect contemporary poetry, the writer proceeded

with a literary retrospect intended to show that the fair dawn of

our English poetry in Chaucer and the Elizabethan dramatists had been

overclouded by a portentous darkness, a darkness “vaporous,” “miasmic,”

coming from a “fever-cloud generated first in Italy and then blown

westward,” sucking up on its way “all that was most unwholesome from the

soil of France.”

* In this summary, the pamphlet reprint has been followed in

preference to the original article as it appeared in the

Review.

Just previously to and contemporaneously with the rise of Dante, there

had flourished a legion of poets of greater or less ability, but all

more or less characterised by affectation, foolishness, and moral

blindness: singers of the falsetto school, with ballads to their

mistress’s eyebrow, sonnets to their lady’s lute, and general songs of a

fiddlestick; peevish men for the most part, as is the way of all fleshly

and affected beings; men so ignorant of human subjects and materials

as to be driven in their sheer bankruptcy of mind to raise Hope, Love,

Fear, Rage (everything but Charity) into human entities, and to

treat the body and upholstery of a dollish woman as if, in itself, it

constituted a whole universe.

After tracing the effect of the “moral poison” here seen in its

inception through English poetry from Surrey and Wyat to Cowley, the

writer recognised a “tranquil gleam of honest English light” in Cowper,

who “spread the seeds of new life” soon to re-appear in Wordsworth,

Coleridge, Southey, Lamb, and Scott. In his opinion the “Italian disease

would now have died out altogether,” but for a “fresh importation of the

obnoxious matter from France.”

At this stage came a denunciation of the representation of “abnormal

types of diseased lust and lustful disease” as seen in Charles

Baudelaire’s _Fleurs de Mal_, with the conclusion that out of “the

hideousness of _Femmes Damnées_” came certain English poems. “This,”

said the writer, “is our double misfortune--to have a nuisance, and to

have it at second-hand. We might have been more tolerant to an unclean

thing if it had been in some sense a product of the soil” All that is

here summarised, however, was but preparatory to the real object of the

article, which was to assail Rossetti’s new volume.

The poems were traversed in detail, with but little (and that the most

grudging) admission of their power and beauty, and the very sharpest

accentuation of their less spiritual qualities. Since the publication

of the article in question, events have taken such a turn that it is no

longer either necessary or wise to quote the strictures contained in it,

however they might be fenced by juster views. The gravamen of the charge

against Rossetti, Mr. Swinburne, and Mr. Morris alike--setting aside

all particular accusations, however serious--was that they had “bound

themselves into a solemn league and covenant to extol fleshliness as

the distinct and supreme end of poetic and pictorial art; to aver that

poetic expression is greater than poetic thought, and by inference that

the body is greater than the soul, and sound superior to sense.”

Such, then, is a synopsis of the hostile article of which the nucleus

appeared in _The Contemporary Review_, and it were little less than

childish to say that events so important as the publication of the

article and subsequent pamphlet, and the controversy that arose out

of them, should, from their unpleasantness and futility, from the bad

passions provoked by them, or yet from the regret that followed after

them, be passed over in sorrow and silence. For good or ill, what was

written on both sides will remain. It has stood and will stand. Sooner

or later the story of this literary quarrel will be told in detail and

in cold blood, and perhaps with less than sufficient knowledge of either

of the parties concerned in it, or sympathy with their aims. No better

fate, one might think, could befall it than to be dealt with, however

briefly, by a writer whose affections were warmly engaged on one side,

while his convictions and bias of nature forced him to recognise the

justice of the other--stripped, of course, of the cruelties with which

literary error but too obviously enshrouded it.

Whatever the effect produced upon the public mind by the article

in question (and there seems little reason to think it was at all

material), the effect upon two of the writers attacked was certainly

more than commensurate with the assault. Mr. Morris wisely attempted

no reply to the few words of adverse criticism in which his name was

specifically involved; but Mr. Swinburne retorted upon his adversary

with the torrents of invective of which he has a measureless command.

Rossetti’s course was different. Greatly concerned at the bitterness,

as well as startled by the unexpectedness of the attack, he wrote in the

first moments of indignation a full and point-for-point rejoinder, and

this he printed in the form of a pamphlet, and had a great number struck

off; but with constitutional irresolution (wisely restraining him in

this case), he destroyed every copy, and contented himself with writing

a temperate letter on the subject to _The Athenæum_, December 16, 1871.

He said:

A sonnet, entitled _Nuptial Sleep_, is quoted and abused at page 338

of the Review, and is there dwelt upon as a “whole poem,” describing

“merely animal sensations.” It is no more a whole poem in reality than

is any single stanza of any poem throughout the book. The poem, written

chiefly in sonnets, and of which this is one sonnet-stanza, is entitled

_The House of Life_; and even in my first published instalment of the

whole work (as contained in the volume under notice), ample evidence

is included that no such passing phase of description as the one headed

_Nuptial Sleep_ could possibly be put forward by the author of _The

House of Life_ as his own representative view of the subject of love.

In proof of this I will direct attention (among the love-sonnets of this

poem), to Nos. 2, 8, 11, 17, 28, and more especially 13. [Here _Love

Sweetness_ is printed.] Any reader may bring any artistic charge he

pleases against the above sonnet; but one charge it would be impossible

to maintain against the writer of the series in which it occurs, and

that is, the wish on his part to assert that the body is greater than

the soul. For here all the passionate and just delights of the body are

declared--somewhat figuratively, it is true, but unmistakeably--to be

as naught if not ennobled by the concurrence of the soul at all times.

Moreover, nearly one half of this series of sonnets has nothing to do

with love, but treats of quite other life-influences. I would defy any

one to couple with fair quotation of sonnets 29, 30, 31, 39, 40, 43, or

others, the slander that their author was not impressed, like all other

thinking men, with the responsibilities and higher mysteries of life;

while sonnets 35, 36, and 37, entitled _The Choice_, sum up the general

view taken in a manner only to be evaded by conscious insincerity. Thus

much for _The House of Life_, of which the sonnet _Nuptial Sleep_ is one

stanza, embodying, for its small constituent share, a beauty of natural

universal function, only to be reprobated in art if dwelt on (as I have

shown that it is not here), to the exclusion of those other highest

things of which it is the harmonious concomitant.

It had become known that the article in the _Review_ was not the work

of the unknown Thomas Maitland, whose name it bore, and on this head

Rossetti wrote:

Here a critical organ, professedly adopting the principle of open

signature, would seem, in reality, to assert (by silent practice,

however, not by annunciation) that if the anonymous in criticism

was--as itself originally indicated--but an early caterpillar stage,

the nominate too is found to be no better than a homely transitional

chrysalis, and that the ultimate butterfly form for a critic who

likes to sport in sunlight, and yet elude the grasp, is after all the

pseudonymous.

It transpired, in subsequent correspondence (of which there was more

than enough), that the actual writer was Mr. Robert Buchanan, then

a young author who had risen into distinction as a poet, and who was

consequently suspected, by the writers and disciples of the Rossetti

school, of being actuated much more by feelings of rivalry than

by desire for the public good. Mr. Buchanan’s reply to the serious

accusation of having assailed a brother-poet pseudonymously was that the

false signature was affixed to the article without his knowledge,

“in order that the criticism might rest upon its own merits, and gain

nothing from the name of the real writer.”

It was an unpleasant controversy, and what remains as an impartial

synopsis of it appears to be this: that there was actually manifest

in the poetry of certain writers a tendency to deviate from wholesome

reticence, and that this dangerous tendency came to us from France,

where deep-seated unhealthy passion so gave shape to the glorification

of gross forms of animalism as to excite alarm that what had begun with

the hideousness of _Femmes Damnées_ would not even end there; finally,

that the unpleasant truth demanded to be spoken--by whomsoever had

courage enough to utter it--that to deify mere lust was an offence and

an outrage. So much for the justice on Mr. Buchanan’s side; with the

mistaken criticism linking the writers of Dante’s time with French

writers of the time of Baudelaire it is hardly necessary to deal. On the

other hand, it must be said that the sum-total of all the English

poetry written in imitation of the worst forms of this French excess was

probably less than one hundred lines; that what was really reprehensible

in the English imitation of the poetry of the French School was,

therefore, too inconsiderable to justify a wholesale charge against it

of an endeavour to raise the banner of a black ambition whose only aim

was to ruin society; that Rossetti, who was made to bear the brunt

of attack, was a man who never by direct avowal, or yet by inference,

displayed the faintest conceivable sympathy with the French excesses in

question, and who never wrote a line inspired by unwholesome passion.

As the pith of Mr. Buchanan’s accusation of 1871 lay here, and as Mr.

Buchanan has, since then, very manfully withdrawn it, {*} we need hardly

go further; but, as more recent articles in prominent places,

_The Edinburgh Review, The British Quarterly Review, and again The

Contemporary Review_, have repeated what was first said by him on the

alleged unwholesomeness of Rossetti’s poetic impulses, it may be as well

to admit frankly, and at once (for the subject will arise in the future

as frequently as this poetry is under discussion) that love of bodily

beauty did underlie much of the poet’s work. But has not the same

passion made the back-bone of nine-tenths of the noblest English poetry

since Chaucer? If it is objected that Rossetti’s love of physical

beauty took new forms, the rejoinder is that it would have been equally

childish and futile to attempt to prescribe limits for it. All this

we grant to those unfriendly critics who refuse to see that spiritual

beauty and not sensuality was Rossetti’s actual goal.

* Writing to me on this subject since Rossetti’s death, Mr.

Buchanan says:--“In perfect frankness, let me say a few

words concerning our old quarrel. While admitting freely

that my article in the C. R. was unjust to Rossetti’s claims

as a poet, I have ever held, and still hold, that it

contained nothing to warrant the manner in which it was

received by the poet and his circle. At the time it was

written, the newspapers were full of panegyric; mine was a

mere drop of gall in an ocean of _eau sucrée_. That it could

have had on any man the effect you describe, I can scarcely

believe; indeed, I think that no living man had so little to

complain of as Rossetti, on the score of criticism. Well, my

protest was received in a way which turned irritation into

wrath, wrath into violence; and then ensued the paper war

which lasted for years. If you compare what I have written

of Rossetti with what his admirers have written of myself, I

think you will admit that there has been some cause for me

to complain, to shun society, to feel bitter against the

world; but happily, I have a thick epidermis, and the

courage of an approving conscience. I was unjust, as I have

said; most unjust when I impugned the purity and

misconceived the passion of writings too hurriedly read and

reviewed currente calamo; but I was at least honest and

fearless, and wrote with no personal malignity. Save for the

action of the literary defence, if I may so term it, my

article would have been as ephemeral as the mood which

induced its composition. I make full admission of Rossetti’s

claims to the purest kind of literary renown, and if I were

to criticise his poems now, I should write very differently.

But nothing will shake my conviction that the cruelty, the

unfairness, the pusillanimity has been on the other side,

not on mine. The amende of my Dedication in God and the Man

was a sacred thing; between his spirit and mine; not between

my character and the cowards who have attacked it. I thought

he would understand,--which would have been, and indeed is,

sufficient. I cried, and cry, no truce with the horde of

slanderers who hid themselves within his shadow. That is

all. But when all is said, there still remains the pity that

our quarrel should ever have been. Our little lives are too

short for such animosities. Your friend is at peace with

God,--that God who will justify and cherish him, who has

dried his tears, and who will turn the shadow of his sad

life-dream into full sunshine. My only regret now is that we

did not meet,--that I did not take him by the hand; but I am

old-fashioned enough to believe that this world is only a

prelude, and that our meeting may take place--even yet.”

To Rossetti, the poet, the accusation of extolling fleshliness as

the distinct and supreme end of art was, after all, only an error of

critical judgment; but to Rossetti, the man, the charge was something

far more serious. It was a cruel and irremediable wound inflicted upon a

fine spirit, sensitive to attack beyond all sensitiveness hitherto known

among poets. He who had withheld his pictures from exhibition from dread

of the distracting influences of popular opinion, he who for fifteen

years had withheld his poems from print in obedience first to an

extreme modesty of personal estimate and afterwards to the commands of

a mastering affection was likely enough at forty-two years of age (after

being loaded by the disciples that idolised him with only too much of

the “frankincense of praise and myrrh of flattery”) to feel deeply the

slander that he had unpacked his bosom of unhealthy passions. But to say

that Rossetti felt the slander does not express his sense of it. He had

replied to his reviewer and had acted unwisely in so doing; but when

one after one--in the _Quarterly Review, the North American Review_,

and elsewhere, in articles more or less ignorant, uncritical, and

stupid--the accusations he had rebutted were repeated with increased

bitterness, he lost all hope of stemming the torrent of hostile

criticism. He had, as we have seen, for years lived in partial

retirement, enjoying at intervals a garden party behind the house, or

going about occasionally to visit relatives and acquaintances, but now

he became entirely reclusive, refusing to see any friends except the

three or four intimate ones who were constantly with him. Nor did the

mischief end there. We have spoken of his habitual use of chloral,

which was taken at first in small doses as a remedy for insomnia and

afterwards indulged in to excess at moments of physical prostration or

nervous excitement. To that false friend he came at this time with only

too great assiduity, and the chloral, added to the seclusive habit of

life, induced a series of terrible though intermittent illnesses and a

morbid condition of mind in which for a little while he was the victim

of many painful delusions. It was at this time that the soothing

friendship of Dr. Gordon Hake, and his son Mr. George Hake, was of such

inestimable service to Rossetti. Having appeared myself on the scene

much later I never had the privilege of knowing either of these two

gentlemen, for Mr. George Hake was already gone away to Cyprus and Dr.

Hake had retired very much into the bosom of his own family where, as is

rumoured, he has been engaged upon a literary work which will establish

his fame. But I have often heard Mr. Theodore Watts speak with deep

emotion and eloquent enthusiasm of the tender kindness and loyal zeal

shown to Rossetti during this crisis by Mr. Bell Scott, and by Dr. Hake

and his son. As to Mr. Theodore Watts, whose brotherly devotion to him,

and beneficial influence over him from that time forward are so well

known, this must be considered by those who witnessed it to be almost

without precedent or parallel even in the beautiful story of literary

friendships, and it does as much honour to the one as to the other. No

light matter it must have been to lay aside one’s own long-cherished

life-work and literary ambitions to be Rossetti’s closest friend and

brother, at a moment like the present, when he imagined the world to be

conspiring against him; but through these evil days, and long after them

down to his death, the friend that clung closer than a brother was with

him, as he himself said, to protect, to soothe, to comfort, to divert,

to interest, and inspire him--asking, meantime, no better reward than

the knowledge that a noble mind and nature was by such sacrifice lifted

out of sorrow. Among the world’s great men the greatest are sometimes

those whose names are least on our lips, and this is because selfish

aims have been so subordinate in their lives to the welfare of others

as to leave no time for the personal achievements that win personal

distinction; but when the world comes to the knowledge of the price

that has been paid for the devotion that enables others to enjoy their

renown, shall it not reward with a double meed of gratitude the fine

spirits to whom ambition has been as nothing against fidelity of

friendship? Among the latest words I heard from Rossetti was this:

“Watts is a hero of friendship;” and indeed he has displayed his

capacity for participation in the noblest part of comradeship, that

part, namely, which is far above the mere traffic that too often goes by

the name, and wherein self-love always counts upon being the gainer. If

in the end it should appear that he has in his own person done less than

might have been hoped for from one possessed of his splendid gifts,

let it not be overlooked that he has influenced in a quite incalculable

degree, and influenced for good, several of the foremost among those who

in their turn have influenced the age. As Rossetti’s faithful friend,

and gifted medical adviser, Mr. John Marshall has often declared, there

were periods when Rossetti’s very life may be said to have hung upon Mr.

Watts’s power to cheer and soothe.

Efforts were afoot about the year 1872 to induce Rossetti to visit

Italy--a journey which, strangely enough, he had never made--but this

he could not be prevailed upon to do. In the hope of diverting his mind

from the unwholesome matters that too largely engaged it, his brother

and friends, prominent among whom at this time were Mr. Bell Scott, Mr.

Ford Madox Brown, Mr. W. Graham, and Dr. Gordon Hake, as well as his

assistant and friend, Mr. H. T. Dunn, and Mr. George Hake, induced him

to seek a change in Scotland, and there he speedily recovered tone.

Immediately upon the publication of his first volume, and incited

thereto by the early success of it, he had written the poem _Rose Mary_,

as well as two lyrics published at the time in _The Fortnightly Review_;

but he suffered so seriously from the subsequent assaults of criticism,

that he seemed definitely to lay aside all hope of producing further

poetry, and, indeed, to become possessed of the delusion that he had for

ever lost all power of doing so. It is an interesting fact, well known

in his own literary circle, that his taking up poetry afresh was

the result of a fortuitous occurrence. After one of his most serious

illnesses, and in the hope of drawing off his attention from himself,

and from the gloomy forebodings which in an invalid’s mind usually

gather about his own too absorbing personality, a friend prevailed upon

him, with infinite solicitation, to try his hand afresh at a sonnet. The

outcome was an effort so feeble as to be all but unrecognisable as the

work of the author of the sonnets of _The House of Life_, but with

more shrewdness and friendliness (on this occasion) than frankness,

the critic lavished measureless praise upon it, and urged the poet to

renewed exertion. One by one, at longer or shorter intervals, sonnets

were written, and this exercise did more towards his recovery than

any other medicine, with the result besides that Rossetti eventually

regained all his old dexterity and mastery of hand. The artifice had

succeeded beyond every expectation formed of it, serving, indeed, the

twofold end of improving the invalid’s health by preventing his brooding

over unhealthy matters, and increasing the number of his accomplished

works. Encouraged by such results, the friend went on to induce Rossetti

to write a ballad, and this purpose he finally achieved by challenging

the poet’s ability to compose in the simple, direct, and emphatic style,

which is the style of the ballad proper, as distinguished from the

elaborate, ornate, and condensed diction which he had hitherto worked

in. Put upon his mettle, the outcome of this second artifice practised

upon him, was that he wrote _The White Ship_, and afterwards _The King’s

Tragedy_.

Thus was Rossetti already immersed in this revived occupation of poetic

composition, and had recovered a healthy* tone of body, before he became

conscious of what was being done with him. It is a further amusing fact

that one day he requested to be shown the first sonnet which, in view of

the praise lavished upon it by the friend on whose judgment he reposed,

had encouraged him to renewed effort. The sonnet was bad: the critic

knew it was bad, and had from the first hour of its production kept it

carefully out of sight, and was now more than ever unwilling to show it.

Eventually, however, by reason of ceaseless importunity, he returned it

to its author, who, upon reading it, cried: “You fraud! you said this

sonnet was good, and it’s the worst I _ever_ wrote.” “The worst ever

written would perhaps be a truer criticism,” was the reply, as the

studio resounded with a hearty laugh, and the poem was committed to the

flames. It would appear that to this occurrence we probably owe a large

portion of the contents of the volume of 1881.