As we say, _Rose Mary_ was the first to be written of the leading poems

that found places in his final volume. This ballad (or ballad romance,

for ballad it can hardly be called) is akin to _Sister Helen_ in

_motif_. The superstition involved owes something in this case as in

the other to the invention and poetic bias of the poet. It has, however,

less of what has been called the Catholic element, and is more purely

Pagan. It is, therefore, as entirely undisturbed by animosity against

heresy, and is concerned only with an ultimate demoniacal justice

visiting the wrongdoer. The main point of divergency lies in the

circumstance that Rose Mary, unlike Helen, is the undesigning instrument

of evil powers, and that her blind deed is the means by which her

own and her lover’s sin and his treachery become revealed. A further

material point of divergency lies in the fact that unlike Helen, who

loses her soul (as the price of revenge, directed against her betrayer),

Rose Mary loses her life (as the price of vengeance directed against

the evil race), whilst her soul gains rest. The superstition is that

associated with the beryl stone, wherein the pure only may read the

future, and from which sinful eyes must chase the spirits of grace and

leave their realm to be usurped by the spirits of fire, who seal up the

truth or reveal it by contraries. Rose Mary, who has sinned with her

lover, is bidden to look in the beryl and learn where lurks the ambush

that waits to take his life as he rides at break of day. Hiding, but

remembering her transgression, she at first shrinks, but at length

submits, and the blessed spirits by whom the stone has been tenanted

give place to the fiery train. The stone is not sealed to her; and the

long spell being ministered, she is satisfied. But she has read the

stone by contraries, and her lover falls into the hand of his enemy.

By his death is their secret sin made known. And then a newer shame is

revealed, not to her eyes, but to her mother’s: even the treachery of

the murdered man. Ignorant of this to the end, Eose Mary seeks to work a

twofold ransoming by banishing from the beryl the evil powers. With the

sword of her father (by whom the accursed gift had been brought from

Palestine), she cleaves the heart of the stone, and with the broken

spell her own life breaks.

It will readily be seen that the scheme of the ballad does not afford

opportunity for a memorable incursion in the domain of character. Rose

Mary herself as a creation is not comparable with Helen. But the ballad

throughout is nevertheless a triumph of the higher imagination. Nowhere

else (to take the lowest ground) has Rossetti displayed so great a gift

of flashing images upon the mind at once by a single expression.

Closely locked, they clung without speech,

And the mirrored souls shook each to each,

As the cloud-moon and the water-moon

Shake face to face when the dim stars swoon

In stormy bowers of the night’s mid-noon.

Deep the flood and heavy the shock

When sea meets sea in the riven rock:

But calm is the pulse that shakes the sea

To the prisoned tide of doom set free

In the breaking heart of Rose Mary.

She knew she had waded bosom-deep

Along death’s bank in the sedge of sleep.

And now in Eose Mary’s lifted eye

‘Twas shadow alone that made reply

To the set face of the soul’s dark shy.

Nor has Rossetti anywhere displayed a more sustained picturesqueness.

One episode stands forth vividly even among so many that are

conspicuous. The mother has left her daughter in a swoon to seek help of

the priest who has knelt unweariedly by the dead body of her daughter’s

lover, now lying on the ingle-bench in the hall. When the priest has

gone and the castle folk have left her alone, the lady sinks to her

knees beside the corpse. Great wrong the dead man has done to her and

hers, and perhaps God has wrought this doom of his for a sign; but well

she knows, or thinks she knows, that if life had remained with him his

love would have been security for their honour. She stoops with a sob to

kiss the dead, but before her lips touch the cold brow she sees a packet

half-hidden in the dead man’s breast. It is a folded paper about which

the blood from a spear-thrust has grown clotted, and inside is a tress

of golden hair. Some pledge of her child’s she thinks it, and proceeds

to undo the paper’s folds, and then learns the treachery of the fallen

knight and suffers a bitterer pang than came of the knowledge of her

daughter’s dishonour. It is a love-missive from the sister of his foe

and murderer.

She rose upright with a long low moan,

And stared in the dead man’s face new-known.

Had it lived indeed? she scarce could tell:

‘Twas a cloud where fiends had come to dwell,--

A mask that hung on the gate of Hell.

She lifted the lock of gleaming hair,

And smote the lips and left it there.

“Here’s gold that Hell shall take for thy toll!

Full well hath thy treason found its goal,

O thou dead body and damned soul!”

Anything finer than this it would be hard to discover in English

narrative poetry. Every word goes to build up the story: every line is

quintessential: every flash of thought helps to heighten the emotion.

Indeed the closing lines rise entirely above the limits of ballad poetry

into the realm of dramatic diction. But perhaps the crowning glory and

epic grandeur of the poem comes at the close. Awakened from her swoon,

Rose Mary makes her way to the altar-cell and there she sees the

beryl-stone lying between the wings of some sculptured beast. Within the

fated glass she beholds Death, Sorrow, Sin and Shame marshalled past in

the glare of a writhing flame, and thereupon follows a scene scarcely

less terrible than Juliet’s vision of the tomb of the Capulets. But she

has been told within this hour that her weak hand shall send hence the

evil race by whom the stone is possessed, and with a stern purpose she

reaches her father’s dinted sword. Then when the beryl is cleft to the

core, and Rose Mary lies in her last gracious sleep--

With a cold brow like the snows ere May,

With a cold breast like the earth till spring,

With such a smile as the June days bring--

A clear voice pronounces her beatitude:

Already thy heart remembereth

No more his name thou sought’st in death:

For under all deeps, all heights above,--

So wide the gulf in the midst thereof,--

Are Hell of Treason and Heaven of Love.

Thee, true soul, shall thy truth prefer

To blessed Mary’s rose-bower:

Warmed and lit is thy place afar

With guerdon-fires of the sweet love-star,

Where hearts of steadfast lovers are.

The White Ship was written in 1880; _The King’s Tragedy_ in the spring

of 1881. These historical ballads we must briefly consider together. The

memorable events of which Rossetti has made poetic record are, in _The

White Ship_, those associated with the wreck of the ship in which the

son and daughter of Henry I. of England set sail from France, and in

_The King’s Tragedy_, with the death of James the First of Scots. The

story of the one is told by the sole survivor, Herold, the butcher of

Rouen; and of the other by Catherine Douglas, the maid of honour who

received popularly the name of Kate Barlass, in recognition of her

heroic act when she barred the door with her arm against the murderers

of the King. It is scarcely possible to conceive in either case a

diction more perfectly adapted to the person by whom it is employed.

If we compare the language of these ballads with that of the sonnets or

other poems spoken in the author’s own person, we find it is not first

of all gorgeous, condensed, emphatic. It is direct, simple, pure and

musical; heightened, it is true, by imagery acquired in its passage

through the medium of the poet’s mind, but in other respects essentially

the language of the historical personages who are made to speak. The

diction belongs in each case to the period of the ballad in which it

is employed, and yet there is no wanton use of archaisms, or any

disposition manifested to resort to meretricious artifices by which to

impart an appearance of probability to the story other than that which

comes legitimately of sheer narrative excellence. The characterisation

is that of history with the features softened that constituted the prose

of real life, and with the salient, moral, and intellectual lineaments

brought into relief. Herein the ballad may do that final justice which

history itself withholds. Thus the King Henry of _The White Ship_ is

governed by lust of dominion more than by parental affection; and the

Prince, his son, is a lawless, shameless youth; intolerant, tyrannical,

luxurious, voluptuous, yet capable of self-sacrifice even amidst peril

of death.

When he should be King, he oft would vow,

He ‘d yoke the peasant to his own plough.

O’er him the ships score their furrows now.

God only knows where his soul did wake,

But I saw him die for his sister’s sake.

The King James of _The King’s Tragedy_ is of a righteous and fearless

nature, strong yet sensitive, unbending before the pride and hate of

powerful men, resolute, and ready even where fate itself declares that

death lurks where his road must lie; his beautiful Queen Jane is sweet,

tender, loving, devoted--meet spouse for a poet and king. The incidents

too are those of history: the choice and final collocation of them, and

the closing scene in which the queen mourns her husband, being the sum

of the author’s contribution. And those incidents are in the highest

degree varied and picturesque. The author has not achieved a more vivid

pictorial presentment than is displayed in these latest ballads from his

pen. It would be hard to find in his earlier work anything bearing more

clearly the stamp of reality than the descriptions of the wreck in _The

White Ship_, of the two drowning men together on the mainyard, of the

morning dawning over the dim sea-sky--

At last the morning rose on the sea

Like an angel’s wing that beat towards me--

and of the little golden-haired boy in black whose foot patters down

the court of the king. Certainly Rossetti has never attained a higher

pictorial level than he reaches in the descriptions of the summoned

Parliament in _The King’s Tragedy_, of the journey to the Charterhouse

of Perth, of the woman on the rock of the black beach of the Scottish

sea, of the king singing to the queen the song he made while immured by

Bolingbroke at Windsor, of the knock of the woman at the outer gate,

of her voice at night beneath the window, of the death in _The Pit

of Fortune’s Wheel_. But all lesser excellencies must make way in our

regard before a distinguishing spiritualising element which exists

in these ballads only, or mainly amongst the author’s works. Natural

portents are here first employed as factors of poetic creation.

Presentiment, foreboding, omen become the essential tissue of works

that are lifted by them into the higher realm of imagination. These

supernatural constituents penetrate and pervade _The White Ship_; and

_The King’s Tragedy_ is saturated in the spirit of them. We do not speak

of the incidents associated with the wraith that haunts the isles, but

of the less palpable touches which convey the scarce explicable

sense of a change of voice when the king sings of the pit that is under

fortune’s wheel:

And under the wheel, beheld I there

An ugly Pit as deep as hell,

That to behold I quaked for fear:

And this I heard, that who therein fell

Came no more up, tidings to tell:

Whereat, astound of the fearful sight,

I wot not what to do for fright.

(The King’s Quair.)

It is the shadow of the supernatural that hangs over the king, and very

soon it must enshroud him. One of the most subtle and impressive of the

natural portents is that which presents itself to the eyes of Catherine

when the leaguers have first left the chamber, and the moon goes out and

leaves black the royal armorial shield on the painted window-pane:

And the rain had ceased, and the moonbeams lit

The window high in the wall,--

Bright beams that on the plank that I knew

Through the painted pane did fall

And gleamed with the splendour of Scotland’s crown

And shield armorial.

But then a great wind swept up the skies,

And the climbing moon fell back;

And the royal blazon fled from the floor,

And nought remained on its track;

And high in the darkened window-pane

The shield and the crown were black.

It has been said that _Sister Helen_ strikes the keynote of Rossetti’s

creative gift; it ought to be added that _The King’s Tragedy_ touches

his highest reach of imagination.

Having in the early part of 1881 brought together a sufficient quantity

of fresh poetry to fill a volume, Rossetti began negotiations for

publishing it. Anticipatory announcements were at that time constantly

appearing in many quarters, not rarely accompanied by an outspoken

disbelief in the poet’s ability to achieve a second success equal to his

first. In this way it often happens to an author, that, having achieved

a single conspicuous triumph, the public mind, which has spontaneously

offered him the tribute of a generous recognition, forthwith gravitates

towards a disposition to become silently but unmistakeably sceptical

of his power to repeat it. Subsequent effort in such a case is rarely

regarded with that confidence which might be looked for as the reward

of achievement, and which goes far to prepare the mind for the ready

acceptance of any genuine triumph. Indeed, a jealous attitude is often

unconsciously adopted, involving a demand for special qualities, for

which, perchance, the peculiar character of the past success has created

an appetite, or obedience to certain arbitrary tests, which, though

passively present in the recognised work, have grown mainly out of

critical analysis of it, and are neither radical nor essential. Where,

moreover, such conspicuous success has been followed by an interval

of years distinguished by no signal effort, the sceptical bias of the

public mind sometimes complacently settles into a conviction (grateful

alike to its pride and envy, whilst consciously hurtful to its more

generous impulses), that the man who made it lived once indeed upon the

mountains, but has at length come down to dwell finally upon the plain.

Literary biography furnishes abundant examples of this imperfection

of character, a foible, indeed, which in its multiform manifestations,

probably goes as far as anything else to interfere with the formation of

a just and final judgment of an author’s merit within his own lifetime.

When it goes the length of affirming that even a great writer’s creative

activity usually finds not merely central realisation, but absolute

exhaustion within the limits of some single work, to reason against it

is futile, and length of time affords it the only satisfying refutation.

One would think that it could scarcely require to be urged that creative

impulse, once existent within a mind, can never wholly depart from it,

but must remain to the end, dependent, perhaps, for its expression in

some measure on external promptings, variable with the variations of

physical environments, but always gathering innate strength for the

hour (silent perchance, or audible only within other spheres), when the

inventive faculty shall be harmonised, animated, and lubricated to

its utmost height. Nevertheless, Coleridge encountered the implied

doubtfulness of his contemporaries, that the gift remained with him

to carry to its completion the execution of that most subtle mid-day

witchery, which, as begun in _Christabel_, is probably the most

difficult and elusive thing ever attempted in the field of romance.

Goethe, too, found himself face to face with outspoken distrust of his

continuation of _Faust_; and even Cervantes had perforce to challenge

the popular judgment which long refused to allow that the second part

of _Don Quixote_, with all its added significance, was adequate to

his original simple conception. Indeed that author must be considered

fortunate who effects a reversal of the public judgment against

the completion of a fragment, and the repetition of a complete and

conspicuous success.

When Rossetti published his first volume of poems in 1870, he left only

his _House of Life_ incomplete; but amongst the readers who then offered

spontaneous tribute to that series of sonnets, and still treasured it

as a work of all but faultless symmetry, built up by aid of a blended

inspiration caught equally from Shakspeare and from Dante, with a

superadded psychical quality peculiar to its author, there were many,

even amongst the friendliest in sympathy, who heard of the completed

sequence with a sense of doubt. Such is the silent and unreasoning and

all but irrevocable edict of all popular criticism against continuations

of works which have in fragmentary form once made conquest of the

popular imagination. Moreover, Rossetti’s first volume achieved a

success so signal and unexpected as to subject this second and maturer

book to the preliminary ordeal of such a questioning attitude of mind

as we speak of, as the unfailing and ungracious reward of a conspicuous

triumph. In the interval of eleven years, Rossetti had essayed no

notable achievement, and his name had been found attached only to such

fugitive efforts as may have lived from time to time a brief life in the

pages of the _Athenæum_ and _Fortnightly_. Of the works in question

two only come now within our province to mention. The first and most

memorable was the poem _Cloud Confines_. Inadequate as the critical

attention necessarily was which this remarkable lyric obtained,

indications were not wanting that it had laid unconquerable siege to the

sympathies of that section of the public in whose enthusiasm the life of

every creative work is seen chiefly to abide. There was in it a lyrical

sweetness scarcely ever previously compassed by its author, a cadent

undertoned symphony that first gave testimony that the poet held the

power of conveying by words a sensible eflfect of great music, even

as former works of his had given testimony to his power of conveying a

sensible eflfect by great painting. But to these metrical excellencies

was added an element new to Rossetti’s poetry, or seen here for the

first time conspicuously. Insight and imagination of a high order,

together with a poetic instinct whose promptings were sure, had already

found expression in more than one creation moulded into an innate

chasteness of perfected parts and wedded to nature with an unerring

fidelity. But the range of nature was circumscribed, save only in the

one exception of a work throbbing with the sufferings and sorrows of

a shadowed side of modern life. To this lyric, however, there came

as basis a fundamental conception that made aim to grapple with the

pro-foundest problems compassed by the mysteries of life and death, and

a temper to yield only where human perception fails. Abstract indeed

in theme the lyric is, but few are the products of thought out of which

imagination has delved a more concrete and varied picturesqueness:

What of the heart of hate

That beats in thy breast, O Time?--

Bed strife from the furthest prime,

And anguish of fierce debate; that shatters her slain,

And peace that grinds them as grain,

And eyes fixed ever in vain

On the pitiless eyes of Fate.

The second of the fugitive efforts alluded to was a prose work entitled

_Hand and Soul_. More poem than story, this beautiful idyl may be

briefly described as mainly illustrative of the struggles of the

transition period through which, as through a slough, all true artists

must pass who have been led to reflect deeply upon the aims and ends of

their calling before they attain that goal of settled purpose in which

they see it to be best to work from their own heart simply, without

regard for the spectres that would draw them apart into quagmires of

moral aspiration. These two works and an occasional sonnet, such as that

on the greatly gifted and untimely lost Oliver Madox Brown, made the sum

of all {*} that was done, in the interval of eleven years between the

dates of the first volume and of that which was now to be published, to

keep before the public a name which rose at once into distinction, and

had since, without feverish periodical bolstering, grown not less

but more in the ardent upholding of sincere men who, in number and

influence, comprised a following as considerable perhaps as owned

allegiance to any contemporary.

* A ballad appeared in The Dark Blue.

Having brought these biographical and critical notes to the point at

which they overlap the personal recollections that form the body of this

volume, it only remains to say that during the years in which the poems

just reviewed were being written Rossetti was living at his house in

Chelsea a life of unbroken retirement. At this time, however (1877-81),

his seclusion was not so complete as it had been when he used to see

scarcely any one but Mr. Watts and his own family, with an occasional

visit from Lord and Lady Mount Temple, Mrs. Sumner, etc. Once weekly he

was now visited by his brother William, twice weekly by his attached

and gifted friend Frederick J. Shields, occasionally by his old friends

William Bell Scott and Ford Madox Brown. For the rest, he rarely if

ever left the precincts of his home. It was a placid and undisturbed

existence such as he loved. Health too (except for one serious attack

in 1877), was good with him, and his energies were, as we have seen, at

their best.

His personal amiability was, perhaps, never more conspicuous than

in these tranquil years; yet this was the very time when paragraphs

injurious to his character found their way into certain journals. Among

the numerous stories illustrative of his alleged barbarity of manners

was the one which has often been repeated both in conversation and in

print to the effect that H.E.H. the Princess Louise was rudely repulsed

from his door. Rossetti was certainly not easy to approach, but the

geniality of his personal bearing towards those who had commands upon

his esteem was always unfailing, and knowledge of this fact must

have been enough to give the lie to the injurious calumny just named.

Nevertheless, Rossetti, who was deeply moved by the imputation, thought

it necessary to contradict it emphatically, and as the letter in which

he did this is a thoroughly outspoken and manly one, and touches an

important point in his character, I reprint it in this place:

16 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, S.W., December 28, 1878.

My attention has been directed to the following paragraph

which has appeared in the newspapers:--“A very disagreeable

story is told about a neighbour of Mr. Whistler’s, whose

works are not exhibited to the vulgar herd; the Princess

Louise in her zeal, therefore, graciously sought them at the

artist’s studio, but was rebuffed by a ‘Not at home’ and an

intimation that he was not at the beck and call of

princesses. I trust it is not true,” continues the writer of

the paragraph, “that so medievally minded a gentleman is

really a stranger to that generous loyalty to rank and sex,

that dignified obedience,” etc.

The story is certainly “disagreeable” enough; but if I am

pointed at as the “near neighbour of Mr. Whistler’s” who

rebuffed, in this rude fashion, the Princess Louise, I can

only say that it is a _canard_ devoid of the smallest

nucleus of truth. Her Royal Highness has never called upon

me; and I know of only two occasions when she has expressed

a wish to do so. Some years ago Mr. Theodore Martin spoke to

me upon the subject; but I was at that time engaged upon an

important work, and the delays thence arising caused the

matter to slip through. And I heard no more upon the subject

till last summer, when Mr. Theodore Watts told me that the

Princess, in conversation, had mentioned my name to him, and

that he had then assured her that I should “feel honoured

and charmed to see her,” and suggested her making an

appointment. Her Royal Highness knew that Mr. Watts, as one

of my most intimate friends, would not have thus expressed

himself without feeling fully warranted in so doing; and had

she called she would not, I trust, have found me wanting in

that “generous loyalty” which is due not more to her exalted

position than to her well-known charm of character and

artistic gifts. It is true enough that I do not run after

great people on account of their mere social position, but I

am, I hope, never rude to them; and the man who could rebuff

the Princess Louise must be a curmudgeon indeed.

D. G. Rossetti.

At the very juncture in question Lord Lome was suddenly and unexpectedly

appointed Governor-General of Canada, and, leaving England, Her Royal

Highness did not return until Rossetti’s health had somewhat suddenly

broken down, and it was impossible for him to see any but his most

intimate friends.

CHAPTER III.

My intercourse with Rossetti, epistolary and personal, extended over a

period of between three and four years. During the first two of these

years I was, as this volume must show, his constant correspondent,

during the third year his attached friend, and during the portion of

the fourth year of our acquaintance terminating with his life, his daily

companion and housemate. It is a part of my purpose to help towards the

elucidation of Rossetti’s personal character by a simple, and I

trust, unaffected statement of my relations to him, and so I begin by

explaining that my knowledge of the man was the sequel to my admiration

of the poet. Not accident (the agency that usually operates in such

cases), but his genius and my love of it, began the friendship between

us. Of Rossetti’s pictorial art I knew little, until very recent years,

beyond what could be gathered from a few illustrations to books. My

acquaintance with his poetry must have been made at the time of the

publication of the first volume in 1870, but as I did not then possess a

copy of the book, and do not remember to have seen one, my knowledge of

the work must have been merely such as could be gleaned from the reading

of reviews. The unlucky controversy, that subsequently arose out of it,

directed afresh my attention, in common with that of others, to Rossetti

and his school of poetry, with the result of impressing my mind with

qualities of the work that were certainly quite outside the issues

involved in the discussion. Some two or three years after that

acrimonious controversy had subsided, an accident, sufficiently curious

to warrant my describing it, produced the effect of converting me from a

temperate believer in the charm of music and colour in Rossetti’s lyric

verse, to an ardent admirer of his imaginative genius as displayed in

the higher walks of his art.

I had set out with a knapsack to make one of my many periodical walking

tours of the beautiful lake country of Westmoreland and Cumberland.

Beginning the journey at Bowness--as tourists, if they will accept the

advice of one who knows perhaps the whole of the country, ought always

to do--I walked through Dungeon Ghyll, climbed the Stake Pass, descended

into Borrowdale, and traced the course of the winding Derwent to that

point at which it meets the estuary of the lake, and where stands the

Derwentwater Hotel. A rain and thunder storm was gathering over the

Black Sail and Great Gable as I reached the summit of the Pass, and

travelling slowly northwards it had overtaken me. Before I reached the

hotel, my resting-place for the night, I was certainly as thoroughly

saturated as any one in reasonable moments could wish to be. I remember

that as I passed into the shelter of the porch an elderly gentleman, who

was standing there, remarked upon the severity of the storm, inquired

what distance I had travelled, and expressed amazement that on such a

day, when mists were floating, any one could have ventured to cover so

much dangerous mountain-country,--which he estimated as nearly thirty

miles in extent. Beyond observing that my interlocutor was friendly

in manner and knew the country intimately, I do not remember to have

reflected either then or afterwards upon his personality except

perhaps that he might have answered to Wordsworth’s scarcely definite

description of his illustrious friend as “a noticeable man,” with

the further parallel, I think, of possessing “large grey eyes.” After

attending to the obvious necessity of dry garments in exchange for wet

ones, and otherwise comforting myself after a fatiguing day’s march, I

descended to the drawing-room of the hotel, where a company of persons

were trying, with that too formal cordiality peculiar to English people,

who are accidentally thrown together in the course of a holiday, to get

rid of the depression which results upon dishearteningly unpropitious

weather. Music, as usual, was the gracious angel employed to banish the

fiend of ennui, but among those who took no part either in the singing

or playing, other than that of an enforced auditor, was the elderly

gentleman, my quondam acquaintance of the porch, who stood apart in an

alcove looking through a window. I stepped up to him and renewed our

talk. The storm had rather increased than abated since my arrival; the

thunder which before had rumbled over the distant Langdale Pikes was

breaking in sharp peals over our heads, and flashes of sheeted lightning

lit up the gathering darkness that lay between us and Castle Crag.

A playful allusion to “poor Tom” and to King Lear’s undisputed sole

enjoyment of such a scene (except as viewed from the ambush of a

comfortable hotel) led to the discovery, very welcome to both at a

moment when we were at bay for an evening’s occupation, that besides

knowledge and love of the country round about us, we had in common

some knowledge and much love of the far wider realm of books. Thereupon

ensued a talk chiefly on authors and their works which lasted until long

after the music had ceased, until the elemental as well as instrumental

storm had passed, and the guests had slipped away one after one, and the

last remaining servant of the house had, by the introduction of a

couple of candles, given us a palpable hint that in the opinion of that

guardian of a country inn the hour was come and gone when well-regulated

persons should betake themselves to bed. To my delight my friend

knew nearly every prominent living author, could give me personal

descriptions of them, as well as scholarly and well-digested criticisms

of their works. He was certainly no ordinary man, but who he was I have

never learned with certainty, though I cherish the agreeable impression

that I could give a shrewd guess. At one moment the talk turned on

_Festus_, and then I heard the most lucid and philosophical account of

that work I have ever listened to or read. I was told that the author

of _Festus_ had never (in all the years that had elapsed since its

publication, when he was in his earliest manhood, though now he is

grown elderly) ceased to emend it, notwithstanding the protestations

of critics; and that an improved and enlarged edition of the poem might

probably appear after his death. Struck with the especial knowledge

displayed of the author in question, I asked if he happened to be

a friend. Then, with a scarcely perceptible smile playing about the

corners of the mouth (a circumstance without significance for me at the

time and only remembered afterwards), my new acquaintance answered:

“He is my oldest and dearest friend.” Next morning I saw my night-long

conversationalist in company with a clergyman get on to the Buttermere

coach and wave his hand to me as they vanished under the trees that

overhung the Buttermere road, but in answer to many inquiries the utmost

I could learn of my interesting acquaintance was that he was somehow

understood to be a great author, and a friend of Charles Kingsley, who,

I think they said, was or had been with him there or elsewhere that

year. Whether besides being the “oldest and dearest friend” of the

author of _Festus_, my delightful companion was Philip James Bailey

himself I have never learned to this day, and can only cherish a

pleasant trust; but what remains as really important in this connexion

is that whosoever he was he originated my first real love of Rossetti’s

poetry, and gave me my first realisable idea of the man. Taking up from

the table some popular _Garland, Casket, Treasury_, or other anthology

of English poetry, he pointed out a sonnet entitled _Lost Days_ (to

which, indeed, a friend at home had directed my attention), and dwelt

upon its marvellous strength of spiritual insight, and power of symbolic

phrase. Of course the sonnet was Rossetti’s. It is impossible for me

to describe the effect produced upon me by sonnet and exposition. I

resolved not to live many days longer without acquiring a knowledge

of the body of Rossetti’s work. Perceiving that the gentleman knew

something of the poet, I put questions to him which elicited the

fact that he had met him many years earlier at, I think he said, Mrs.

Gaskell’s, when Rossetti was a rather young man, known only as a painter

and the leader of an eccentric school in art. He described him as a

little dark man, with fine eyes under a broad brow, with a deep voice,

and Bohemian habits--“a little Italian, in short.” [Little, by the way,

Rossetti could not properly be said to be, but opinions as to physical

proportions being so liable to vary, I may at once mention that he was

exactly five feet eight inches in height, and except in early manhood,

when he was somewhat attenuated, well built in proportion.] He further

described Rossetti’s manners as those of a man in deliberate revolt

against society; delighting in an opportunity to startle well-ordered

persons out of their propriety, and to silence by sheer vehemence of

denunciation the seemly protests of very good and very gentle folk. The

portraiture seems to me now to bear the impress of truth, unlike as it

is in some particulars to the man as I knew him. When once, however,

years after the event recorded, I bantered Rossetti on the amiable

picture of him I had received from a stranger, he admitted that it

was in the main true to his character early in life, and recounted an

instance in which, from sheer perversity, or at best for amusement, he

had made the late Dean Stanley aghast with horror at the spectacle of a

young man, born in a Christian country, and in the nineteenth century,

defending (in sport) the vices of Neronian Home.

The outcome of this first serious and sufficient introduction to

Rossetti’s poetry was that I forthwith devoted time to reading and

meditating upon it. Ultimately I lectured twice or thrice on the subject

in Liverpool, first at the Royal Institution, and afterwards at the

Free Library. The text of that lecture I still preserve, and as in all

probability it did more than anything else to originate the friendship I

afterwards enjoyed with the poet, I shall try to convey very briefly an

idea of its purpose.

Against both friendly and unfriendly critics of Rossetti I held that to

place him among the “aesthetic” poets was an error of classification.

It seemed to me that, unlike the poets properly so described, he had

nothing in common with the Caliban of Mr. Browning, who worked “for

work’s sole sake;” and, unlike them yet further, the topmost thing

in him was indeed love of beauty, but the deepest thing was love of

uncomely right. The fusion of these elements in Rossetti softened the

mythological Italian Catholicism that I recognised as a leading thing in

him, and subjugated his sensuous passion. I thought it wrong to say that

Rossetti had part or lot with those false artists, or no artists, who

assert, without fear or shame, that the manner of doing a thing should

be abrogated or superseded by the moral purpose of its being done. On

the other hand, Rossetti appeared to make no conscious compromise with

the Puritan principle of doing good; and to demand first of his work the

lesson or message it had for us were wilfully to miss of pleasure while

we vainly strove for profit. He was too true an artist to follow art

into its byeways of moral significance, and thereby cripple its broader

arms; but at the same time all this absorption of the artist in his art

seemed to me to live and work together with the personal instincts of

the man. An artist’s nature cannot escape the colouring it gets from the

human side of his nature, because it is of the essence of art to appeal

to its own highest faculties largely through the channel of moral

instincts: that music is exquisite and colour splendid, first, because

they have an indescribable significance, and next because they respond

to mere sense. But it appeared to me to be one thing to work for “work’s

sole sake,” with an overruling moral instinct that gravitates, as Mr.

Arnold would say, towards conduct, and quite another thing to absorb art

in moral purposes. I thought that Rossetti’s poetry showed how possible

it is, without making conscious compromise with that puritan principle

of doing good of which Keats at one period became enamoured, to

be unconsciously making for moral ends. There was for me a passive

puritanism in _Jenny_ which lived and worked together with the poet’s

purely artistic passion for doing his work supremely well. Every thought

in _Dante at Verona_ and _The Last Confession_ seemed mixed with and

coloured by a personal moral instinct that was safe and right.

This was perhaps the only noticeable feature of my lecture, and knowing

Rossetti’s nature, as since the lecture I have learned to know it,

I feel no great surprise that such pleading for the moral impulses

animating his work should have been of all things the most likely to

engage his affections. Just as Coleridge always resented the imputation

that he had ever been concerned with Wordsworth and Southey in the

establishment of a school of poetry, and contended that, in common with

his colleagues, he had been inspired by no desire save that of imitating

the best examples of Greece and Home, so Rossetti (at least throughout

the period of my acquaintance with him) invariably shrank from

classification with the poetry of æstheticism, and aspired to the fame

of a poet who had been prompted primarily by the highest of spiritual

emotions, and to whom the sensations of the body were as naught, unless

they were sanctified by the concurrence of the soul. My lecture was

printed, but quite a year elapsed after its preparation before

it occurred to me that Rossetti himself might derive a moment’s

gratification from knowledge of the fact that he had one ardent upholder

and sincere well-wisher hitherto unknown to him. At length I sent him a

copy of the magazine containing my lecture on his poetry. A post or two

later brought me the following reply:

Dear Mr. Caine,--

I am much struck by the generous enthusiasm displayed in

your Lecture, and by the ability with which it is written.

Your estimate of the impulses influencing my poetry is such

as I should wish it to suggest, and this suggestion, I

believe, it will have always for a true-hearted nature. You

say that you are grateful to me: my response is, that I am

grateful to you: for you have spoken up heartily and

unfalteringly for the work you love.

I daresay you sometimes come to London. I should be very

glad to know you, and would ask you, if you thought of

calling, to give me a day’s notice when to expect you, as I

am not always able to see visitors without appointment. The

afternoon, about 5, might suit me, or else the evening about

9.30. With all best wishes, yours sincerely,

D. G. Rossetti.

This was the first of nearly two hundred letters in all received from

Rossetti in the course of our acquaintance. A day or two later the

following supplementary note reached me:

I return your article. In reading it, I feel it a

distinction that my minute plot in the poetic field should

have attracted the gaze of one who is able to traverse its

widest ranges with so much command. I shall be much pleased

if the plan of calling on me is carried out soon--at any

rate I trust it will be so eventually.... Have you got, or

do you know, my book of translations called _Dante and his

Circle?_ If not, I ‘ll send you one....

I have been reading again your article on _The Supernatural

in Poetry_. It is truly admirable--such work must soon make

you a place. The dramatic paper I thought suffered from some

immaturity.

It is hardly necessary to say that I was equally delighted with the

warmth of the reception accorded to my essay, and with the revelation

the letters appeared to contain of a sincere and unselfish nature. My

purpose, however, which was a modest one, had been served, and I made

no further attempt to continue the correspondence, least of all did I

expect or desire to originate anything of the nature of a friendship. In

my reply to his note, however, I had asked him to accept the dedication

of a little work of mine, and when, with abundant courtesy, he had

declined to do so on very sufficient grounds, I felt satisfied that

matters between us should rest where they were. It is a pleasing

recollection, nevertheless, that Rossetti himself had taken a different

view of the relation that had grown up between us, and by many generous

appeals induced me to put by all further thoughts of abandoning the

correspondence out of regard for him. There had ensued an interval in

which I did not write to him, whereupon he addressed to me a hurried

note, saying:

Let me have a line from you. I am haunted by the idea, that

in declining the dedication, I may have hurt you. I assure

you I should be proud to be associated in any way with your

work, but gave you my very reasons.

I shall be pleased if you do not think them sufficient, and

still carry out your original intention.... At least write

to me.

I replied to this letter (containing, as it did, the expression of so

much more than the necessary solicitude), by saying that I too had been

haunted, but it had been by the fear that I had been asking too much

of his attention. As to the dedication, so far from feeling hurt, by

Rossetti’s declining it, I had grown to see that such was the only

course that remained to him to take. The terms in which he had replied

to my offer of it (so far from being of a kind to annoy or hurt me),

had, to my thinking, been only generous, sympathetic, and beautiful.

Again he wrote:

My dear Caine,--

Let me assure you at once that correspondence with yourself

is one of my best pleasures, and that you cannot write too

much or too often for _me_; though after what you have told

me as to the apportioning of your time, I should be

unwilling to encroach unduly upon it. Neither should I on my

side prove very tardy in reply, as you are one to whom I

find there _is_ something to say when I sit down with a pen

and paper. I have a good deal of enforced evening leisure,

as it is seldom I can paint or draw by gaslight. It would

not be right in me to refrain from saying that to meet with

one so “leal and true” to myself as you are has been a

consolation amid much discouragement.... I perceive you have

had a complete poetic career which you have left behind to

strike out into wider waters.... The passage on Night, which

you say was written under the planet Shelley, seems to me

(and to my brother, to whom I read it) to savour more of the

“mortal moon”--that is, of a weird and sombre

Elizabethanism, of which Beddoes may be considered the

modern representative. But we both think it has an

unmistakeable force and value; and if you can write better

poetry than this, let your angel say unto you, _Write_.

I take it that it would be wholly unwise of me in selecting excerpts

from Rossetti’s letters entirely to withhold the passages that concern

exclusively (so far as their substance goes) my own early doings or

try-ings-to-do; for it ought to be a part of my purpose to lay bare the

beginnings of that friendship by virtue of which such letters exist.

I can only ask the readers of these pages to accept my assurance, that

whatever the number and extent of the passages which I publish that are

necessarily in themselves of more interest to myself personally than to

the public generally, they are altogether disproportionate to the number

and extent of those I withhold. I cannot, however, resist the conclusion

that such picture as they afford of a man beyond the period of middle

life capable of bending to a new and young friend, and of thinking with

and for him, is not without an exceptional literary interest as being so

contrary to every-day experience. Hence, I am not without hope that the

occasional references to myself which in the course of these extracts I

shall feel it necessary to introduce, may be understood to be employed

by me as much for their illustrative value (being indicative of

Rossetti’s character), as for any purpose less purely impersonal.

The passage of verse referred to was copied out for Rossetti in reply to

an inquiry as to whether I had written poetry. Prompted no doubt by the

encouragement derived in this instance, I submitted from time to time

other verses to Rossetti, as subsequent letters show, but it says

something for the value of his praise that whatever the measure of

it when his sympathies were fairly aroused, and whatever his natural

tendency to look for the characteristic merits rather than defects of

compositions referred to his judgment, his candour was always prominent

among his good qualities when censure alone required to be forthcoming.

Among many frank utterances of an opinion early formed, that whatever

my potentialities as a writer of prose, I had but small vocation as a

writer of poetry, I preserve one such utterance, which will, I trust, be

found not less interesting to other readers from affording a glimpse of

the writer’s attitude towards the old controversy touching the several

and distinguishing elements that contribute to make good prose on the

one hand and good verse on the other.

On one occasion he had sent me his fine sonnet on Keats, then just

written, and, in acknowledging the receipt of it with many expressions

of admiration, I remarked that for some days I had been struggling

desperately, in all senses, to incubate a sonnet on the same somewhat

hackneyed subject. I had not written a line or put pen to paper for the

purpose, but I could tell him, in general terms, what my unaccomplished

marvel of sonnet-craft was to be about.

Rossetti replied saying that the scheme for a sonnet was “extremely

beautiful,” and urging me to “do it at once.” Alas for my intrepidity,

“do it” I did, with the result of awakening my correspondent to the

certainty that, whatever embowerings I had in my mind, that shy bird the

sonnet would seek in vain for a nest to hide in there. It asked so much

special courage to send a first attempt at sonneteering to the greatest

living master of the sonnet that moral daring alone ought to have got me

off lightly, but here is Rossetti’s reply, valuable now, as well for the

view it affords of the poet’s attitude towards the sonnet as a medium of

expression, as for other reasons already assigned. The opening passage

alludes to a lyric of humble life.

You may be sure I do not mean essential discouragement when I say that,

full as _Nell_ is of reality and pathos, your swing of arm seems to me

firmer and freer in prose than in verse. I do think I see your field to

lie chiefly in the achievements of fervid and impassioned prose.... I am

sure that, when sending me your first sonnet, you wished me to say quite

frankly what I think of it. Well, I do not think it shows a special

vocation for this condensed and emphatic form. The prose version you

sent me seems to say much more distinctly what this says with some

want of force. The octave does not seem to me very clearly put, and the

sestet does not emphasize in a sufficiently striking way the idea which

the prose sketch conveyed to me,--that of Keats’s special privilege in

early death: viz., the lovely monumentalized image he bequeathed to us

of the young poet. Also I must say that more special originality and

even _newness_ (though this might be called a vulgarizing word), of

thought and picture in individual lines--more of this than I find

here--seems to me the very first qualification of a sonnet--otherwise it

puts forward no right to be so short, but might seem a severed passage

from a longer poem depending on development. I would almost counsel you

to try the same theme again--or else some other theme in sonnet-form.

I thought the passage on Night you sent showed an aptitude for choice

imagery. I should much like to see something which you view as your best

poetic effort hitherto. After all, there is no need that every gifted

writer should take the path of poetry--still less of sonneteering. I am

confident in your preference for frankness on my part.

I tried the theme again before I abandoned it, and was so fortunate as

to get him to admit a degree of improvement such as led to his

desiring to recall his conjectural judgment on my possibilities as a

sonnet-writer, but as the letters in which he characterises the

advance are neither so terse in criticism, nor so interesting from the

exposition of principles, as the one quoted, I pass them by. With

more confidence in my ultimate comparative success than I had ever

entertained, Rossetti was only anxious that I should engage in that work

to which I. could address myself with a sense of command; and I think it

will be agreed that, where temperate confidence in what the future may

legitimately hold for one is united to earnest and rightly directed

endeavour in the present, it is often a good thing for the man who

stands on the threshold of life (to whom, nevertheless, the path passed

seems ever to stretch out of sight backwards) to be told the extent

to which, little enough at the most, his clasp (to use a phrase of Mr.

Browning) may be equal to his grasp.

My residing, as I did, at a distance from London, was at once the

difficulty which for a time prevented our coming together and the

necessity for correspondence by virtue of which these letters exist.

As I failed, however, from hampering circumstance, to meet at once with

himself, Rossetti invariably displayed a good deal of friendly anxiety

to bring me into contact with his friends as frequently as occasion

rendered it feasible to do so. In this way I met with Mr. Madox

Brown, who was at the moment engaged on his admirable frescoes in the

Manchester Town Hall, and in this way also I met with other friends

of his resident in my neighbourhood. When I came to know him more

intimately I perceived that besides the kindliness of intention which

had prompted him to bring me into what he believed to be agreeable

associations, he had adopted this course from the other motive of

desiring to be reassured as to the comparative harmlessness of my

personality, for he usually followed the introduction to a friend by a

private letter of thanks for the reception accorded me, and a number of

dexterously manipulated allusions, which always, I found, produced the

desired result of eliciting the required information (to be gleaned

only from personal intercourse) as to my manner and habits. Later in our

acquaintance, I found that he, like all meditative men, had the greatest

conceivable dread of being taken unawares, and that there was no safer

way for any fresh acquaintance to insure his taking violently against

him, than to take the step of coming down upon him suddenly, and

without appointment, or before a sufficient time had elapsed between the

beginning of the friendship and the actual personal encounter, to admit

of his forming preconceived ideas of the manner of man to expect. The

agony he suffered upon the unexpected visit of even the most ardent of

well-wishers could scarcely be realised at the moment, from the apparent

ease, and assumed indifference of his outward bearing, and could only

be known to those who were with him after the trying ordeal had

been passed, or immediately before the threatened intrusion had been

consummated.

Early in our correspondence a friend of his, an art critic of

distinction, visited Liverpool with the purpose of lecturing on the

valuable examples of Byzantine art in the Eoyal Institution of that

city. The lecture was, I fear, almost too good and quite too technical

for some of the hearers, many of whom claim (and with reason) to be

lovers of art, and cover the walls of their houses with beautiful

representations of lovely landscape, but at the same time erect huge

furnaces which emit vast volumes of black smoke such as prevent the sky

of any Liverpool landscape being for an instant lovely. I doubt if the

lecture could have been treated more popularly, but there was manifestly

a lack of merited appreciation. The archaisms of some of the pictures

chosen for illustration (early Byzantine examples exclusively) appeared

to cause certain of the audience to smile at much of the lecturer’s

enthusiasm. Fortunately the man chiefly concerned seemed unconscious of

all this. And indeed, however he fared in public, in private he was only

too “dreadfully attended.” After the lecture a good many folks gave him

the benefit of their invaluable opinions on various art questions, and

some, as was natural, made pitiful slips. I observed with secret and

scarcely concealed satisfaction his courageous loyalty in defence of his

friends, and his hitting out in their defence when he believed them to

be assailed. One superlative intelligence, eager to do honour to the

guest, yet ignorant of his claim to such honour, gave him a wonderfully

facile and racy comment on the pre-Raphaelite painters, and, in

particular, made the ridiculous blunder of a deliberate attack upon

Rossetti, and then paused for breath and for the lecturer’s appreciative

response; of course, Rossetti’s friend was not to be drawn into such

disloyalty for an instant, even to avoid the risk of ruffling the

plumage of the mightiest of the corporate cacklers. Rossetti had

permitted me in his name to meet his friend, and in writing subsequently

I alluded to the affection with which he had been mentioned, also to

something that had been said of his immediate surroundings, and to that

frank championing of his claims which I have just described. Rossetti’s

reply to this is interesting as affording a pathetic view of his

isolation of life and of the natural affectionateness of his nature:

I am very glad you were welcomed by dear staunch S------, as

I felt sure you would be. He holds the honourable position

of being almost the only living art-critic who has really

himself worked through the art-schools practically, and

learnt to draw and paint. He is one of my oldest and best

friends, of whom few can be numbered at my age, from causes

only too varying.

Go from me, summer friends, and tarry not,--

I am no summer friend, but wintry cold, etc.

So be it, as needs must be,--not for all, let us hope, and

not with all, as good S------ shews. I have not seen him

since his return. I wrote him a line to thank him for his

friendly reception of you, and he wrote in return to thank

me for your acquaintance, and spoke very pleasantly of you.

Your youth seems to have surprised him. I sent a letter of

his to your address. I hope you may see more of him. . . .

You mention something he said to you of me and my

surroundings. They are certainly _quiet_ enough as fax as

retirement goes, and I have often thought I should enjoy the

presence of a congenial and intellectual housefellow and

boardfellow in this big barn of mine, which is actually

going to rack and ruin for want of use. But where to find

the welcome, the willing, and the able combined in one? . . .

I was truly concerned to hear of the attack of ill-health

you have suffered from, though you do not tell me its exact

nature. I hope it was not accompanied by any such symptoms

as you mentioned before. . . . I myself have had similar

symptoms (though not so fully as you describe), and have

spat blood at intervals for years, but now think nothing of

it--nor indeed ever did,--waiting for further alarm signals

which never came.

. . . By-the-bye, I have since remembered that Burne Jones,

many years ago, had such an experience as you spoke of

before--quite as bad certainly. He was weak for some time

after, and has frequently been reminded in minor ways of it,

but seems now (at about forty-six or forty-seven) to be more

settled in health and stronger, perhaps, than ever

before.... Your letter holds out the welcome probability of

meeting you here ere long.

This friendly solicitude regarding my health was excited by the

revelation of what seemed to me at the time a startling occurrence, but

has doubtless frequently happened to others, and has certainly

since happened to myself without provoking quite so much outcry. The

blood-spitting to which Rossetti here alleges he was liable was of

a comparatively innocent nature. In later years he was assuredly not

altogether a hero as to personal suffering, and I afterwards found that,

upon the periodical recurrence of the symptom, he never failed to become

convinced that he spat arterial blood, and that on each occasion he had

received his death-warrant. Proof enough was adduced that the blood came

from the minor vessels of the throat, and this was undoubtedly the case

in the majority of instances, but whether the same explanation applied

to one alarming occurrence which I shall now recount, seems to me

uncertain.

During the two or three weeks preceding our departure for Cumberland,

in the autumn of 1881, during the time of our residence there and during

the first few weeks after our return to London, Rossetti was afflicted

by a violent cough. I noticed that it troubled him almost exclusively in

the night-time, and after the taking of chloral; that it was sometimes

attended by vomiting; and that it invariably shook his whole system

so terribly as to leave him for a while entirely prostrate from sheer

physical exhaustion. The spectacle was a painful one, and I watched

closely its phenomena, with the result of convincing myself that

whatever radical mischief lay at the root of it, the damage done was

seriously augmented by a conscious giving way to it, induced, I thought,

by hope of the relief it sometimes afforded the stomach to get rid of

the nauseous drug at a moment of reduced digestive vitality. Then it

became my fear that in these violent and prolonged retchings internal

injury might be sustained, and so I begged him to try to restrain the

tendency to cough so much and often. He took the remonstrance with great

goodnature (observing that he perceived I thought he was putting it on),

but I was not conscious that at any moment he acted upon my suggestion.

At the time in question I was under the necessity of leaving him for

a day or two every week in order to fulfil, a course of lecturing

engagements at a distance; and upon my return in each instance I was

told much of all that had happened to him in the interval. On one

occasion, however, I was conscious that something had occurred of which

he desired to make a disclosure, for amongst the gifts that Rossetti

had not got was that of concealing from his intimate friends any event,

however trifling, or however important, which weighed upon his mind.

At length I begged him to say what had happened, whereupon, with great

reluctance and many protestations of his intention to observe silence,

and constant injunctions as to secrecy, he told me that during the night

of my absence, in the midst of one of his bouts of coughing, he had

discharged an enormous quantity of blood. “I know this is the final

signal,” he said, “and I shall die.” I did my utmost to compose him

by recounting afresh the personal incident hinted at, with many added

features of (I trust) justifiable exaggeration, but it is hardly

necessary to say that I did not hold the promise I gave him as to

secrecy sufficiently sacred, or so exclusive, as to forbid my revealing

the whole circumstance to his medical attendant. I may add that from

that moment the cough entirely disappeared.

To return from this reminiscence of a later period to the beginnings,

three years earlier, of our correspondence, I will bring the present

chapter to a close by quoting short passages from three letters written

on the eve of my first visit to Rossetti, in 1880:

I will be truly glad to meet you when you come to town. You

will recognise the hole-and-cornerest of all existences; but

I’ll read you a ballad or two, and have Brown’s report to

back my certainty of liking you.... I would propose that you

should dine with me at 8.30 on the Monday of your visit, and

spend the evening.... Better come at 5.30 to 6 (if feasible

to you), that I may try to show you a picture by daylight...

Of course, when I speak of your dining with me, I mean tête-

à-tête, and without ceremony of any kind. I usually dine in

my studio, and in my painting coat. I judge this will reach

you in time for a note to reach _me_. Telegrams I hate. In

hope of the pleasure of a meeting, yours ever.

How that “hole-and-cornerest of all existences” struck an ardent admirer

of the poet-painter’s genius, and a devoted lover of his personal

character, as then revealed to me, I hope to describe in a later section

of this book. Meantime I must proceed to cull from the epistolary

treasures I possess a number of interesting passages on literary

subjects, called forth in the course of an intercourse which, at that

stage, had few topics of a private nature to divert it from a channel

of impersonal discussion. It is a fact that the letters written to me by

Rossetti in the year 1880 deal so largely with literary affairs (chiefly

of the past) as to be almost capable of _verbatim_ reproduction, even

at the present short interval after his death. If they were to be

reproduced, they would be found to cover two hundred pages of the

present volume, and to be so easy, fluent, varied, and wholly felicitous

as to style, and full of research and reflection as to substance, as

probably to earn for the writer a foremost place for epistolary power.

Indeed, I am not without hope that this accession of a fresh reputation

may result even upon the excerpts I have decided to introduce.

CHAPTER IV.

It was very natural that our earliest correspondence should deal chiefly

with Rossetti’s own works, for those works gave rise to it. He sent me

a copy of his translations from early Italian poets (_Dante and his

Circle_), and a copy of his story, entitled _Hand and Soul_. In posting

the latter, he said:

I don’t know if you ever saw a sort of story of mine called

_Hand and Soul_. I send you one with this, as printed to go

in my poems (though afterwards omitted, being, nevertheless,

more poem than story). I printed it since in the

_Fortnightly_--and, I believe, abolished one or two extra

sentimentalities. You may have seen it there. In case it’s

stale, I enclose with this a sonnet which _must_ be new, for

I only wrote it the other day.

I have already, in the proper place in this volume, said how

the story first struck me. Perhaps I had never before

reading it seen quite so clearly the complete mission as

well as enforced limitations of true art. All the many

subtle gradations in the development of purpose were there

beautifully pictured in a little creation that was charming

in the full sense of a word that has wellnigh lost its

charm. For all such as cried out against pursuits

originating in what Keats had christened “the infant chamber

of sensation,” and for all such as demanded that everything

we do should be done to “strengthen God among men,” the

story provided this answer: “When at any time hath He cried

unto thee, saying, ‘My son, lend me thy shoulder, for I

fall’?”

The sonnet sent, and spoken of as having just been written

(the letter bears post-mark February 1880), was the sonnet

on the sonnet. It is throughout beautiful and in two of its

lines (those depicting the dark wharf and the black Styx)

truly magnificent. It appears most to be valued, however, as

affording a clue to the attitude of mind adopted towards

this form of verse by the greatest master of it in modern

poetry. I think it is Mr. Pater who says that a fine poem in

manuscript carries an aroma with it, and a sensation of

music. I must have enjoyed the pleasure of such a presence

somewhat frequently about this period, for many of the poems

that afterwards found places in the second volume of ballads

and sonnets were sent to me from time to time.

I should like to know what were the three or four vols. on

Italian poetry which you mentioned in a former letter, and

which my book somewhat recalled to your mind. I was not

aware of any such extensive _English_ work on the subject.

Or do you perhaps mean Trucchi’s Italian _Dugento Poésie

inédite?_ I am sincerely delighted at your rare interest in

what I have sent you--both the translations, story, etc.--I

enclose three printed pieces meant for my volume but

omitted:--the ballad, because it deals trivially with a base

amour (it was written _very_ early) and is therefore really

reprehensible to some extent; the Shakspeare sonnet, because

of its incongruity with the rest of the poems, and also

because of the insult (however jocose) to the worshipful

body of tailors; and the political sonnet for reasons which

are plain enough, though the date at which I wrote it (not

without feeling) involves now a prophetic value. In a MS.

vol. I have a sonnet (1871) _After the German Subjugation of

France_, which enforces the prophecy by its fulfilment. In

this MS. vol. are a few pieces which were the only ones I

copied in doubt as to their admission when I printed the

poems, but none of which did I admit. One day I ‘ll send it

for you to look at. It contains a few sonnets bearing on

public matters, but only a few. Tell me what you think on

reading my things. All you said in your letter of this

morning was very grateful to me. I have a fair amount by me

in the way of later MS. which I may shew you some day when

we meet. Meanwhile I feel that your energies are already in

full swing--work coming on the heels of work--and that your

time cannot long be deferred as regards your place as a

writer.

The ballad of which Rossetti here speaks as dealing trivially with a

base amour is entitled _Dennis Shand_. Though an early work, it affords

perhaps the best evidence extant of the poet’s grasp of the old ballad

style: it runs easiest of all his ballads, and is in some respects his

best. Mr. J. A. Symonds has, in my judgment, made the error of speaking

of Rossetti as incapable of reproducing the real note of such ballads

as _Chevy Chase_ and _Sir Patrick Spens_. Mr. Symonds was right in his

eloquent comments (_Macmillan’s Magazine_, February 1882), so far as

they concern the absence from _Rose Mary, The King’s Tragedy, and The

White Ship_ of the sinewy simplicity of the old singers. But in those

poems Rossetti attempted quite another thing. There is a development of

the English ballad that is entirely of modern product, being far more

complex than the primitive form, and getting rid to some extent of the

out-worn notion of the ballad being actually sung to set music, but

retaining enough of the sweep of a free rhythm to carry a sensible

effect as of being chanted when read. This is a sort of ballad-romance,

such as _Christabel_ and _The Lay of the Last Minstrel_; and this, and

this only, was what Rossetti aimed after, and entirely compassed in his

fine works just mentioned. But (as Rossetti himself remarked to me in

conversation when I repeated Mr. Symonds’s criticism, and urged my own

grounds of objection to it), that the poet was capable of the directness

and simplicity which characterise the early ballad-writers, he had

given proof in _The Staff and Scrip and Stratton Water. Dennis Shand_

is valuable as evidence going in the same direction, but the author’s

objection to it, on ethical grounds, must here prevail to withhold it

from publication.

The Shakspeare sonnet, spoken of in the letter as being withheld on

account of its incongruity with the rest of the poems, was published

in an early _Academy_, notwithstanding its jocose allusion to the

worshipful body of tailors. As it is little known, and really very

powerful in itself, and interesting as showing the author’s power over

words in a new direction, I print it in this place.

ON THE SITE OF A MULBERRY TREE.

Planted by Wm. Shakspeare; felled by the Rev. F. Gastrell.

This tree, here fall’n, no common birth or death

Shared with its kind. The world’s enfranchised son,

Who found the trees of Life and Knowledge one,

Here set it, frailer than his laurel-wreath.

Shall not the wretch whose hand it fell beneath

Rank also singly--the supreme unhung?

Lo! Sheppard, Turpin, pleading with black tongue

This viler thief’s unsuffocated breath!

We ‘U search thy glossary, Shakspeare! whence almost,

And whence alone, some name shall be reveal’d

For this deaf drudge, to whom no length of ears

Sufficed to catch the music of the spheres;

Whose soul is carrion now,--too mean to yield

Some tailor’s ninth allotment of a ghost.

Stratford-on-Avon.

The other sonnets referred to, those, namely, on the _French Liberation

of Italy_, and the _German Subjugation of France_, display all

Rossetti’s mastery of craftsmanship. In strength of vision, in fertility

of rhythmic resource, in pliant handling, these sonnets are, in my

judgment, among the best written by the author; and if I do not quote

them here, or altogether regret that they do not appear in the author’s

works, it is not because I have any sense of their possibly offending

against the delicate sensibilities of an age in which it seems necessary

to hide out of sight whatever appears to impinge upon the domain of what

is called our lower nature.

The circumstance has hardly obtained even so much as a passing mention

that Rossetti made certain very important additions to the ballad of

_Sister Helen_, just before passing the old volume through the press

afresh for publication, contemporaneously with the new book. The

letters I am now to quote show the origin of those additions, and are

interesting, as affording a view of the author’s estimate of the gain in

respect of completeness of conception, and sterner tragic spirit which

resulted upon their adoption.

I was very glad to have the three articles together, including the one

in which you have written on myself. Looking at this again, it seems to

me you must possess the _best_ edition (the Tauchnitz, which has my last

emendations). Otherwise I have been meaning all along to offer you a

copy of this edition, as I have some. Who was your informant as to dates

of the poems, etc.? They are not correct, yet show some inkling. _Jenny_

(in a first form) was written almost as early as _The Blessed Damozel_,

which I wrote (and have altered little since), when I was eighteen. It

was first printed when I was twenty-one. Of the first _Jenny_, perhaps

fifty lines survive here and there, but I felt it was quite beyond me

then (a world I was then happy enough to be a stranger to), and later

I re-wrote it completely. I will give you correct particulars at some

time. _Sister Helen_, I may mention, was written either in 1851 or

beginning of 1852, and was printed in something called _The Düsseldorf

Annual_ {*} (published in Germany) in 1853; though since much revised

in detail--not in the main. You will be horror-struck to hear that

the first main addition to this poem was made by me only a few days

ago!--eight stanzas (six together, and two scattered ones) involving

a new incident!! Your hair is on end, I know, but if you heard the

stanzas, they would smooth if not curl it. The gain is immense.

* In The Düsseldorf Annual the poem was signed H. H. H., and

in explanation of this signature Rossetti wrote on his own

copy the following characteristic note:--“The initials as

above were taken from the lead-pencil.”

In reply to this I told Rossetti that, as a “jealous honourer” of his,

I confessed to some uneasiness when I read that he had been making

important additions to _Sister Helen_. That I could not think of a stage

of the story that would bear so to be severed from what goes before or

comes after it as to admit of interpolation might not of itself go for

much; but the entire ballad was so rounded into unity, one incident so

naturally begetting the next, and the combined incidents so properly

building up a fabric of interest of which the meaning was all inwoven,

that I could not but fear that whatever the gain in certain directions,

the additions of any stanzas involving a new incident might, in

some measure, cripple the rest. Even though the new stanzas were as

beautiful, or yet more beautiful than the old ones, and the incident as

impressive as any that goes before it, or comes after it, the gain to

the poem as an individual creation was not, I thought, assured because

people used to say my style was hard.

Rossetti was mistaken in supposing that I possessed the latest and

best edition of his _Poems_, but I had seen the latest of all English

editions, and had noted in it several valuable emendations which, in

subsequent quotation, I had been careful to employ. One of these seemed

to me to involve an immeasurable gain. A stanza of _Sister Helen_, in

its first form, ran:

Oh, the wind is sad in the iron chill,

Sister Helen,

And weary sad they look by the hill;

But Keith of Ewern ‘s sadder still,

Little brother.--etc. etc.

In the later edition the fourth line of this stanza ran:

But he and I are sadder still.

The change adds enormously to one’s estimate of the characterisation.

All through the ballad one wants to feel that, despite the bitterness

of her speech, the heart of the relentless witch is breaking. Like _The

Broken Heart_ of Ford, the ballad with the amended line was a masterly

picture of suppressed emotion. I hoped the new incident touched the same

chord. Rossetti replied:

Thanks for your present letter, which I will answer with

pleasurable care. At present I send you the Tauchnitz

edition of my things. The bound copy is hideous, but more

convenient--the other pretty. You will find a good many

things bettered (I believe) even on the _latest_ English

edition. I did not remember that the line you quote from

_Sister Helen_ appeared in the new form at all in an English

issue. I am greatly pleased at your thinking it, as I do,

quite a transfiguring change... The next point I have marked

in your letter is that about the additions to _Sister

Helen_. Of course I knew that your hair must arise from your

scalp in protest. But what should you say if Keith of Ewern

were a three days’ bridegroom--if the spell had begun on the

wedding-morning--and if the bride herself became the last

pleader for mercy? I fancy you will see your way now. The

culminating, irresistible provocation helps, I think, to

humanize Helen, besides lifting the tragedy to a yet sterner

height.

If I had felt (as Rossetti predicted I should) an uneasy sensation

about the roots of the hair upon hearing that he was making important

additions to the ballad which seemed to me to be the finest of his

works, the sensation in that quarter was not less, but more, upon

learning the nature of those additions. But I mistook the character of

the new incidents. That Sister Helen should be herself the abandoned

_bride_ of Ewern (for so I understood the poet’s explanation), and, as

such, the last pleader for mercy, pointed, I thought, in the direction

of the humanizing emendation (“But he and I are sadder still “)

which had given me so much pleasure. That Keith of Ewern should be a

three-days’ bridegroom, and that the spell should begin on the wedding

morning, were incidents that seemed to intensify every line of the

poem. In this view of Rossetti’s account of the additions, there were

certainly difficulties out of which I could see no way, but I seemed

to realise that Helen’s hate, like Macbeth’s ambition, had overleaped

itself, and fallen on the other side, and that she would undo her work,

if to return were not harder than to go on; her initiate sensibility had

gained hard use, but even as hate recoils on love, so out of the ashes

of hate love had arisen. In this view of the characterisation of Helen,

the parallel with Macbeth struck me more and more as I thought of it.

When Macbeth kills Duncan, and hears the grooms of the chamber cry in

their sleep--“God bless us,” he cannot say “Amen,”

I had most need of blessing, and Amen

Stuck in my throat.

Helen pleading too late for mercy against the potency of the spell she

herself had raised, seemed to me an incident that raised her to the

utmost height of tragic creation. But Rossetti’s purpose was at once

less ambitious and more satisfying.

Your passage as to the changes in _Sister Helen_ could not

well (with all its fine suggestiveness) be likely to meet

exactly a reality which had not been submitted to your eye

in the verses themselves. It is the _bride of Keith_ who is

the last pleader--as vainly as the others, and with a yet

more exulting development of vengeance in the forsaken

witch. The only acknowledgment by her of a mutual misery is

still found in the line you spotted as so great a gain

before, and in the last line she speaks. I ought to have

sent the stanzas to explain them properly, but have some

reluctance to ventilate them at present, much as I should

like the opportunity of reading them to you. They will meet

your eye in due course, and I am sure of your approval also

as regards their value to the ballad.... Don’t let the

changes in _Helen_ get wind overmuch. I want them to be new

when published. Answer this when you can. I like getting

your epistles.

The fresh stanzas in question, which had already obtained the suffrages

of his brother, of Mr. Bell Scott, and other qualified critics, were

subsequently sent to me. They are as follows. After Keith of Keith,

the father of Sister Helen’s sometime lover, has pleaded for his son in

vain, the last suppliant to arrive is his son’s bride:

A lady here, by a dark steed brought,

Sister Helen,

So darkly clad I saw her not.

“See her now or never see aught,

Little brother!”

(_O Mother, Mary Mother_,

_Whit more to see, between Hell and Heaven?_)

“Her hood falls back, and the moon shines fair,

Sister Helen,

On the Lady of Ewern’s golden hair.”

“Blest hour of my power and her despair,

Little brother!”

(O Mother, Mary Mother,

Hour blest and bann’d, between Hell and Heaven!)

“Pale, pale her cheeks, that in pride did glow,

Sister Helen,

‘Neath the bridal-wreath three days ago.”

“One morn for pride and three days for woe,

Little brother!”

(O Mother, Mary Mother,

Three days, three nights, between Hell and Heaven!)

“Her clasp’d hands stretch from her bending head,

Sister Helen;

With the loud wind’s wail her sobs are wed.”

“What wedding-strains hath her bridal bed,

Little brother?”

(O Mother, Mary Mother,

What strain but death’s, between Hell and Heaven?)

“She may not speak, she sinks in a swoon,

Sister Helen,--

She lifts her lips and gasps on the moon.”

“Oh! might I but hear her soul’s blithe tune,

Little brother!”

(O Mother, Mary Mother,

Her woe’s dumb cry, between Hell and Heaven!)

“They’ve caught her to Westholm’s saddle-bow,

Sister Helen,

And her moonlit hair gleams white in its flow.”

“Let it turn whiter than winter snow,

Little brother!”

(O Mother, Mary Mother,

Woe-withered gold, between Hell and Heaven!)

Besides these there are two new stanzas, one going before, and the other

following after, the six stanzas quoted, but as the scattered passages

involve no farther incident, and are rather of interest as explaining

and perfecting the idea here expressed, than valuable in themselves, I

do not reprint them.

I think it must be allowed, by fit judges, that nothing more subtly

conceived than this incident can be met with in English poetry, though

something akin to it was projected by Coleridge in an episode of his

contemplated _Michael Scott_. It is--in the full sense of an abused

epithet--too weird to be called picturesque. But the crowning merit of

the poem still lies, as I have said, in the domain of character. Through

all the outbursts of her ignescent hate Sister Helen can never lose the

ineradicable relics of her human love:

But he and I are sadder still.

As Rossetti from time to time made changes in his poems, he transcribed

the amended verses in a copy of the Tauchnitz edition which he kept

constantly by him. Upon reference to this little volume some days after

his death, I discovered that he had prefaced _Sister Helen_ with a

note written in pencil, of which he had given me the substance in

conversation about the time of the publication of the altered version,

but which he abandoned while passing the book through the press. The

note (evidently designed to precede the ballad) runs:

It is not unlikely that some may be offended at seeing the

additions made thus late to the ballad of _S. H._ My best

excuse is that I believe some will wonder with myself that

such a climax did not enter into the first conception.

At the foot of the poem this further note is written:

I wrote this ballad either in 1851 or early in 1852. It was

printed in a thing called _The Düsseldorf Annual_ in (I

think) 1853--published in Germany. {*}

* In the same private copy of the Poems the following

explanatory passage was written over the much-discussed

sonnet, entitled, The Monochord:--“That sublimated mood of

the soul in which a separate essence of itself seems as it

were to oversoar and survey it.” Neither the style nor the

substance is characteristic of Rossetti, and though I do not

at the moment remember to have met with the passage

elsewhere, I doubt not it is a quotation. That quotation

marks are employed is not in itself evidence of much moment,

for Rossetti had Coleridge’s enjoyment of a literary

practical joke, and on one occasion prefixed to a story in

manuscript a long passage on noses purporting to be from

Tristram Shandy, but which is certainly not discoverable in

Sterne’s story.

The next letter I shall quote appears to explain itself:

There is a last point in your long letter which I have not

noticed, though it interested me much: viz., what you say of

your lecture on my poetry; your idea of possibly returning

to and enlarging it would, if carried out, be welcome to me.

I suppose ere long I must get together such additional work

as I have to show--probably a good deal added to the old

vol. (which has been for some time out of print) and one

longer poem by itself. _The House of Life_, when next

issued, will I trust be doubled in number of sonnets; it is

nearly so already. Your writing that essay in one day, and

the information as to subsequent additions, I noted, and

should like to see the passage on _Jenny_ which you have not

yet used, if extant. The time taken in composition reminds

me of the fact (so long ago!) that I wrote the tale of _Hand

and Soul_ (with the exception of an opening page or two) all

in one night in December 1849, beginning I suppose about 2

A.M. and ending about 7. In such a case a landscape and sky

all unsurmised open gradually in the mind--a sort of

spiritual _Turner_, among whose hills one ranges and in

whose waters one strikes out at unknown liberty; but I have

found this only in nightlong work, which I have seldom

attempted, for it leaves one entirely broken, and this state

was mine when I described the like of it at the close of the

story, ah! once again, how long ago! I have thought of

including this story in next issue of poems, but am

uncertain. What think you?

It seemed certain that _Hand and Soul_ ought not to continue to lie in

the back numbers, of a magazine. The story, being more poem than aught

else, might properly lay claim to a place in any fresh collection of

the author’s works. I could see no natural objection on the score of

its being written in prose. As Coleridge and Wordsworth both aptly said,

prose is not the antithesis of poetry; science and poetry may stand

over-against each other, as Keats implied by his famous toast:

“Confusion to the man who took the poetry out of the moon,” but prose

and poetry surely are or may be practically one. We know that in

rhythmic flow they sometimes come very close together, and nowhere

closer than in the heightened prose and the poetry of Rossetti. Poetic

prose may not be the best prose, just as (to use a false antithesis)

dull poetry is called prosaic; but there is no natural antagonism

between prose and verse as literary mediums, provided always that the

spirit that animates them be akin. Rossetti himself constantly urged

that in prose the first necessity was that it should be direct, and he

knew no reproach of poetry more damning than to say it was written in

proseman’s diction. This was the key to his depreciation of Wordsworth,

and doubtless it was this that ultimately operated with him to exclude

the story from his published works. I took another view, and did not

see that an accidental difference of outward form ought to prevent his

uniting within single book-covers productions that had so much of their

essential spirit in common. Unlike the Chinese, we do not read by sight

only, and there is in the story such richness, freshness, and variety

of cadence, as appeal to the ear also. Prose may be the lowest order

of rhythmic composition, but we know it is capable of such purity,

sweetness, strength, and elasticity, as entitle it to a place as a

sister art with poetry. Milton, however, although he wrote the noblest

of English prose, seemed more than half ashamed of it, as of a kind of

left-handed performance. Goethe and Wordsworth, on the other hand, not

to speak of Coleridge and Shelley (or yet of Keats, whose letters are

among the very best examples extant of the English epistolary style),

wrote prose of wonderful beauty and were not ashamed of it. In Milton’s

case the subjects, I imagine, were to blame for his indifference to his

achievements in prose, for not even the Westminster Convention, or

the divorce topics of _Tetrachordon_, or yet the liberty of the press,

albeit raised to a level of philosophic first principles, were quite up

to those fixed stars of sublimity about which it was Milton’s pleasure

to revolve. _Hand and Soul_ is in faultless harmony with Rossetti’s work

in verse, because distinguished by the same strength of imagination.

That it was written in a single night seems extraordinary when viewed

in relation to its sustained beauty; but it is done in a breath, and has

all the excellencies of fervour and force that result upon that method

of composition only.

A year or two later than the date of the correspondence with which I am

now dealing, Rossetti read aloud a fragment of a story written about

the period of _Hand and Soul_. It was to be entitled _St. Agnes of

Intercession_, and it dealt in a mystic way with the doctrine of the

transmigration of souls. He constantly expressed his intention of

finishing the story, and said that, although in its existing condition

it was fully as long as the companion story, it would require twice as

much more to complete it. During the time of our stay at Birchington, at

the beginning of 1882, he seemed anxious to get to work upon it, and had

the manuscript sent down from London for that purpose; but the packet

lay unopened until after his death, when I glanced at it again

to refresh my memory as to its contents. The fragment is much too

inconclusive as to design to admit of any satisfying account of its

plot, of which there is more, than in _Hand and Soul_. As far as it

goes, it is the story of a young English painter who becomes the victim

of a conviction that his soul has had a prior existence in this world.

The hallucination takes entire possession of him, and so unsettles

his life that he leaves England in search of relic or evidence of his

spiritual “double.” Finally, in a picture-gallery abroad, he comes face

to face with a portrait which’ he instantly recognises as the portrait

of himself, both as he is now and as he was in the time of his

antecedent existence. Upon inquiry, the portrait proves to be that of a

distinguished painter centuries dead, whose work had long been the young

Englishman’s guiding beacon in methods of art. Startled beyond measure

at the singular discovery of a coincidence which, superstition apart,

might well astonish the most unsentimental, he sickens to a fever. Here

the fragment ends. Late one evening, in August 1881, Rossetti gave me

a full account of the remaining incidents, but I find myself without

memoranda of what was said (it was never my habit to keep record of his

or of any man’s conversation), and my recollection of what passed is

too indefinite in some salient particulars to make it safe to attempt

to complete the outlines of the story. I consider the fragment in all

respects finer than _Hand and Soul_, and the passage descriptive of the

artist’s identification of his own personality in the portrait on

the walls of the gallery among the very finest pieces of picturesque,

impassioned, and dramatic writing that Rossetti ever achieved. On one

occasion I remarked incidentally upon something he had said of his

enjoyment of rivers of morning air {*} in the spring of the year, that

it would be an inquiry fraught with a curious interest to find out how

many of those who have the greatest love of the Spring were born in it.

* Within the period of my personal knowledge of Rossetti’s

habits, he certainly never enjoyed any “rivers of morning

air” at all, unless they were such as visited him in a

darkened bedchamber.

One felt that one could name a goodly number among the English poets

living and dead. It would be an inquiry, as Hamlet might say, such as

would become a woman. To this Rossetti answered that he was born on old

May-day (May 12), 1828; and thereupon he asked the date of my own birth.

The comparative dates of our births are curious.... I myself

was born on old May-Day (12th), in the year (1828) after

that in which Blake died.... You were born, in fact, just as

I was giving up poetry at about 25, on finding that it

impeded attention to what constituted another aim and a

livelihood into the bargain, _i.e._ painting. From that date

up to the year when I published my poems, I wrote extremely

little,--I might almost say nothing, except the renovated

_Jenny_ in 1858 or ‘59. To this again I added a passage or

two when publishing in 1870.

Often since Rossetti’s death I have reflected upon the fact that in that

lengthy correspondence between us which preceded personal intimacy,

he never made more than a single passing allusion to those adverse

criticisms which did so much at one period to sadden and alter his life.

Barely, indeed, in conversation did he touch upon that sore subject, but

it was obvious enough to the closer observer, as well from his silence

as from his speech, that though the wounds no longer rankled, they

did not wholly heal. I take it as evidence of his desire to put by

unpleasant reflections (at least whilst health was whole with him, for

he too often nourished melancholy retrospects when health was broken

or uncertain), that in his correspondence with me, as a young friend

who knew nothing at first hand of his gloomier side, he constantly dwelt

with radiant satisfaction and hopefulness on the friendly words that had

been said of him. And as frequently as he called my attention to such

favourable comment, he did so without a particle of vanity, and with

only such joy as he may feel who knows in his secret heart he has

depreciators, to find that he has ardent upholders too. In one letter he

says:

I should say that between the appearance of the poems and your lecture,

there was one article on the subject, of a very masterly kind indeed,

by some very scholarly hand (unknown to me), in the _New York Catholic

World_ (I think in 1874). I retain this article, and will some day send

it you to read.

He sent me the article, and I found it, as he had found it, among the

best things written on the subject. Naturally, the criticism was best

where the subject dealt with impinged most upon the spirit of mediæval

Catholicism. Perhaps Catholicism is itself essentially mediæval, and

perhaps a man cannot possibly be, what the _Catholic World_ article

called Rossetti, a “mediæval artist heart and soul,” without partaking

of a strong religious feeling that is primarily Catholic--so much were

the religion and art of the middle ages knit each to each. Yet, upon

reading the article, I doubted one of the writer’s inferences, namely,

that Rossetti had inherited a Catholic devotion to the Madonna. Not his

_Ave_ only seemed to me to live in an atmosphere of tender and sensitive

devotion, but I missed altogether in it, as in other poems of Rossetti,

that old, continual, and indispensable Catholic note of mystic Divine

love lost in love of humanity which, I suppose, Mr. Arnold would call

anthropomorphism. Years later, when I came to know Rossetti personally,

I perceived that the writer of the article in question had not made

a bad shot for the truth. True it was, that he had inherited a strong

religious spirit--such as could only be called Catholic--inherited

I say, for, though from his immediate parents, he assuredly did not

inherit any devotion to the Madonna, his own submission to religious

influences was too unreasoning and unquestioning to be anything but

intuitive. Despite some worldly-mindedness, and a certain shrewdness in

the management of the more important affairs of daily life, Rossetti’s

attitude towards spiritual things was exactly the reverse of what we

call Protestant. During the last months of his life, when the prospect

of leaving the world soon, and perhaps suddenly, impressed upon his

mind a deep sense of his religious position, he yielded himself up

unhesitatingly to the intuitive influences I speak of; and so far from

being touched by the interminable controversies which have for ages been

upsetting and uprearing creeds, he seemed both naturally incapable of

comprehending differences of belief, and unwilling to dwell upon them

for an instant. Indeed, he constantly impressed me during the last days

of his life with the conviction, that he was by religious bias of nature

a monk of the middle ages.

As to the article in _The Catholic Magazine_ I thought I perceived from

a curious habit of biblical quotation that it must have been written by

an Ecclesiastic. A remark in it to the effect that old age is usually

more indulgent than middle life to the work of first manhood, and that,

consequently, Rossetti would be a less censorious judge of his early

efforts at a later period of life, seemed to show that the writer

himself was no longer a young man. Further, I seemed to see that the

reviewer was not a professional critic, for his work displayed few of

the well-recognised trade-marks with which the articles of the literary

market are invariably branded. As a small matter one noticed the

somewhat slovenly use of the editorial _we_, which at the fag-end of

passages sometimes dropped into _I_. [Upon my remarking upon this to

Rossetti he remembered incidentally that a similar confounding of

the singular and plural number of the pronoun produces marvellously

suggestive effects in a very different work, _Macbeth_, where the kingly

_we_ is tripped up by the guilty _I_ in many places.] Rossetti wrote:

I am glad you liked the _Catholic World_ article, which I certainly view

as one of rare literary quality. I have not the least idea who is the

writer, but am sorry now I never wrote to him under cover of the editor

when I received it. I did send the _Dante and Circle_, but don’t know

if it was ever received or reviewed. As you have the vols, of

_Fortnightly_, look up a little poem of mine called the _Cloud

Confines_, a few months later, I suppose, than the tale. It is one of my

favourites, among my own doings.

I noticed at this early period, as well as later, that in Rossetti’s

eyes a favourable review was always enhanced in value if the writer

happened to be a stranger to him; and I constantly protested that a

friend’s knowledge of one’s work and sympathy with it ought not to be

less delightful, as such, than a stranger’s, however less surprising,

though at the same time the tribute that is true to one’s art without

auxiliary aids being brought to bear in its formation must be at once

the most satisfying assurance of the purity, strength, and completeness

of the art itself, and of the safe and enduring quality of the

appreciation. It is true that friends who are accustomed to our habit of

thought and manner of expression sometimes catch our meaning before we

have expressed it Not rarely, before our thought has reached that stage

at which it becomes intelligible to a stranger, a word, a look, or a

gesture will convey it perfectly and fully to a friend. And what goes on

between minds that exist in more or less intimate communion, goes on

to a greater degree within the individual mind where the metaphysical

equivalents to a word or a look answer to, and are answered by, the

half-realised conception. Hence it often happens that even where our

touch seems to ourselves delicate and precise, a mind not initiated

in our self-chosen method of abbreviation finds only impenetrable

obscurity. It is then in the tentative condition of mind just indicated

that the spirit of art comes in, and enables a man so to clothe his

thought in lucid words and fitting imagery that strangers may know, when

they see it, all that it is, and how he came by it. Although, therefore,

the praise of friends should not be less delightful, as praise, than

that tendered by strangers, there is an added element of surprise and

satisfaction in the latter which the former cannot bring. Rossetti

certainly never over-valued the applause of his own immediate circle,

but still no man was more sensible of the value of the good opinion of

one or two of his immediate friends. Returning to the correspondence, he

says:

In what I wrote as to critiques on my poems, I meant to

express _special_ gratification from those written by

strangers to myself and yet showing full knowledge of the

subject and full sympathy with it. Such were Formans at the

time, the American one since (and far from alone in America,

but this the best) and more lately your own. Other known and

unknown critics of course wrote on the book when it

appeared, some very favourably and others _quite_

sufficiently abusive.

As to _Cloud Confines_, I told Rossetti that I considered it in

philosophic grasp the most powerful of his productions, and interesting

as being (unlike the body of his works) more nearly akin to the spirit

of music than that of painting.

By the bye, you are right about _Cloud Confines_, which _is_

my very best thing--only, having been foolishly sent to a

magazine, no notice whatever resulted.

Rossetti was not always open to suggestions as to the need of clarifying

obscure phrases in his verses, but on one or two occasions, when I was

so bold as to hint at changes, I found him in highly tractable moods.

I called his attention to what I imagined might prove to be merely a

printer’s slip in his poem (a great favourite of mine) entitled _The

Portrait_. The second stanza ran:

Yet this, of all love’s perfect prize,

Remains; save what in mournful guise

Takes counsel with my soul alone,--

Save what is secret and unknown,

Below the earth, above the sky.

The words “yet” and “save” seemed to me (and to another friend) somewhat

puzzling, and I asked if “but” in the sense of _only_ had been meant. He

wrote:

That is a very just remark of yours about the passage in

_Portrait_ beginning _yet_. I meant to infer _yet only_, but

it certainly is truncated. I shall change the line to

Yet only this, of love’s whole prize,

Remains, etc.

But would again be dubious though explicable. Thanks for the

hint.... I shall be much obliged to you for any such hints

of a verbal nature.

CHAPTER V.

The letters printed in the foregoing chapter are valuable as settling

at first-hand all question of the chronology of the poems of Rossetti’s

volume of 1870. The poems of the volume of 1881 (Rose Mary and certain

of the sonnets excepted) grew under his hand during the period of my

acquaintance with him, and their origin I shall in due course record.

The two preceding chapters have been for the most part devoted to such

letters (and such explanatory matter as must needs accompany them) as

concern principally, perhaps, the poet and his correspondent; but I

have thrown into two further chapters a great body of highly interesting

letters on subjects of general literary interest (embracing the fullest

statement yet published of Rossetti’s critical opinions), and have

reserved for a more advanced section of the work a body of further

letters on sonnet literature which arose out of the discussion of an

anthology that I was at the time engaged in compiling.

It was very natural that Coleridge should prove to be one of the first

subjects discussed by Rossetti, who admired him greatly, and when it

transpired that Coleridge was, perhaps, my own chief idol, and that

whilst even yet a child I had perused and reperused not only his poetry

but even his mystical philosophy (impalpable or obscure even to his

maturer and more enlightened, if no more zealous, admirers), the

disposition to write upon him became great upon both sides. “You can

never say too much about Coleridge for me,” Rossetti would write, “for

I worship him on the right side of idolatry, and I perceive you know

him well.” Upon this one of my first remarks was that there was much in

Coleridge’s higher descriptive verse equivalent to the landscape art

of Turner. The critical parallel Rossetti warmly approved of, adding,

however, that Coleridge, at his best as a pictorial artist, was a

spiritualised Turner. He instanced his,

We listened and looked sideways up,

The moving moon went up the sky

And no where did abide,

Softly she was going up,

And a star or two beside--

The charmed water burnt alway

A still and awful red.

I remarked that Shelley possessed the same power of impregnating

landscape with spiritual feeling, and this Rossetti readily allowed;

but when I proceeded to say that Wordsworth sometimes, though rarely,

displayed a power akin to it, I found him less warmly responsive. “I

grudge Wordsworth every vote he gets,” {*} Rossetti frequently said to

me, both in writing, and afterwards in conversation. “The three

greatest English imaginations,” he would sometimes add, “are Shakspeare,

Coleridge, and Shelley.” I have heard him give a fourth name, Blake.

* There is a story frequently told of how, seeing two camels

walking together in the Zoological Gardens, keeping step in

a shambling way, and conversing with one another, Rossetti

exclaimed: “There’s Wordsworth and Ruskin virtuously taking

a walk!”

He thought Wordsworth was too much the High Priest of Nature to be

her lover: too much concerned to transfigure into poetry his

pantheo-Christian philosophy regarding Nature, to drop to his knees in

simple love of her to thank God that she was beautiful. It was hard to

side with Rossetti in his view of Wordsworth, partly because one feared

he did not practise the patience necessary to a full appreciation of

that poet, and was consequently apt to judge of him by fugitive lines

read at random. In the connection in question, I instanced the lines

(much admired by Coleridge) beginning

Suck, little babe, O suck again!

It cools my blood, it cools my brain,

and ending--

The breeze I see is in the tree,

It comes to cool my babe and me.

But Rossetti would not see that this last couplet denoted the point of

artistic vision at which the poet of nature identified himself with her,

in setting aside or superseding all proprieties of mere speech. To him

Wordsworth’s Idealism (which certainly had the German trick of keeping

close to the ground) only meant us to understand that the forsaken

woman through whose mouth the words are spoken (in _The Affliction of

Margaret_ ------ of ------) saw _the breeze shake the tree_ afar off.

And this attitude towards Wordsworth Rossetti maintained down to the

end. I remember that sometime in March of the year in which he died, Mr.

Theodore Watts, who was paying one of his many visits to see him in his

last illness at the sea-side, touched, in conversation, upon the power

of Wordsworth’s style in its higher vein, and instanced a noble passage

in the _Ode to Duty_, which runs:

Stern Lawgiver! yet thou dost wear

The Godhead’s most benignant grace;

Nor know we anything so fair

As is the smile upon thy face;

Flowers laugh before thee on their beds;

And fragrance in thy footing treads;

Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong;

And the most ancient heavens, through Thee, are

fresh and strong.

Mr. Watts spoke with enthusiasm of the strength and simplicity, the

sonorousness and stately march of these lines; and numbered them, I

think, among the noblest verses yet written, for every highest quality

of style.

But Rossetti was unyielding, and though he admitted the beauty of the

passage, and was ungrudging in his tribute to another passage which I

had instanced--

O joy that in our embers--

he would not allow that Wordsworth ever possessed a grasp of the

great style, or that (despite the Ode on Immortality and the sonnet on

_Toussaint L’Ouverture_, which he placed at the head of the poet’s work)

vital lyric impulse was ever fully developed in his muse. He said:

As to Wordsworth, no one regards the great Ode with more

special and unique homage than I do, as a thing absolutely

alone of its kind among all greatest things. I cannot say

that anything else of his with which I have ever been

familiar (and I suffer from long disuse of all familiarity

with him) seems at all on a level with this.

In all humility I regard his depreciatory opinion, not at all as a

valuable example of literary judgment, but as indicative of a clear

radical difference of poetic bias between the two poets, such as must

in the same way have made Wordsworth resist Rossetti if he had appeared

before him. I am the more confirmed in this view from the circumstance

that Rossetti, throughout the period of my acquaintance with him, seemed

to me always peculiarly and, if I may be permitted to say so without

offence, strangely liable to Mr. Watts’s influence in his critical

estimates, and that the case instanced was perhaps the only one in

which I knew him to resist Mr. Watts’s opinion upon a matter of poetical

criticism, which he considered to be almost final, as his letters to

me, printed in Chapter VIII. of this volume, will show. I had a striking

instance of this, and of the real modesty of the man whom I had heard

and still hear spoken of as the most arrogant man of genius of his

day, on one of the first occasions of my seeing him. He read out to me

an additional stanza to the beautiful poem _Cloud Confines_: As he

read it, I thought it very fine, and he evidently was very fond of it

himself. But he surprised me by saying that he should not print it. On

my asking him why, he said:

“Watts, though he admits its beauty, thinks the poem would be better

without it.”

“Well, but you like it yourself,” said I.

“Yes,” he replied; “but in a question of gain or loss to a poem, I feel

that Watts must be right.”

And the poem appeared in _Ballads and Sonnets_ without the stanza in

question. The same thing occurred with regard to the omission of the

sonnet _Nuptial Sleep_ from the new edition of the Poems in 1881. Mr.

Watts took the view (to Rossetti’s great vexation at first) that this

sonnet, howsoever perfect in structure and beautiful from the artistic

point of view, was “out of place and altogether incongruous in a group

of sonnets so entirely spiritual as _The House of Life_,” and Rossetti

gave way: but upon the subject of Wordsworth in his relations to

Coleridge, Keats, and Shelley, he was quite inflexible to the last.

In a letter treating of other matters, Rossetti asked me if I thought

“Christabel” really existed as a mediæval name, or existed at all

earlier than Coleridge. I replied that I had not met with it earlier

than the date of the poem. I thought Coleridge’s granddaughter must

have been the first person to bear the name. The other names in the poem

appear to belong to another family of names,--names with a different

origin and range of expression,--Leoline, Géraldine, Roland, and most

of all Bracy. It seemed to me very possible that Coleridge invented

the name, but it was highly probable that he brought it to England from

Germany, where, with Wordsworth, he visited Klopstock in 1798, about

the period of the first part of the poem. The Germans have names of a

kindred etymology and, even if my guess proved wide of the truth,

it might still be a fact that the name had German relations. Another

conjecture that seemed to me a reasonable one was that Coleridge evolved

the name out of the incidents of the opening passages of the poem.

The beautiful thing, not more from its beauty than its suggestiveness,

suited his purpose exactly. Rossetti replied:

Resuming the thread of my letter, I come to the question of

the name Christabel, viz.:--as to whether it is to be found

earlier than Coleridge. I have now realized afresh what I

knew long ago, viz.:--that in the grossly garbled ballad of

_Syr Cauline_, in Percy’s _Reliques_, there is a Ladye

Chrystabelle, but as every stanza in which her name appears

would seem certainly to be Percy’s own work, I suspect him

to be the inventor of the name, which is assuredly a much

better invention than any of the stanzas; and from this

wretched source Coleridge probably enriched the sphere of

symbolic nomenclature. However, a genuine source may turn

up, but the name does not sound to me like a real one. As to

a German origin, I do not know that language, but would not

the second syllable be there the one accented? This seems to

render the name shapeless and improbable.

I mentioned an idea that once possessed me despotically. It was that

where Coleridge says

Her silken robe and inner vest

Dropt to her feet, and full in view

Behold! her bosom and half her side--

A sight to dream of and not to tell,. . .

Shield the Lady Christabel!

he meant ultimately to show _eyes_ in the _bosom_ of the witch. I

fancied that if the poet had worked out this idea in the second part,

or in his never-compassed continuation, he must have electrified his

readers. The first part of the poem is of course immeasurably superior

in witchery to the second, despite two grand things in the latter--the

passage on the severance of early friendships, and the conclusion;

although the dexterity of hand (not to speak of the essential spirit of

enchantment) which is everywhere present in the first part, and nowhere

dominant in the second, exhibits itself not a little in the marvellous

passage in which Géraldine bewitches Christabel. Touching some jocose

allusion by Rossetti to the necessity which lay upon me to startle

the world with a continuation of the poem based upon the lines of my

conjectural scheme, I asked him if he knew that a continuation was

actually published in Coleridge’s own paper, _The Morning Post_. It

appeared about 1820, and was satirical of course--hitting off many

peculiarities of versification, if no more. With Coleridge’s playful

love of satirising himself anonymously, the continuation might even be

his own. Rossetti said:

I do not understand your early idea of _eyes_ in the bosom

of Géraldine. It is described as “that bosom old,” “that

bosom cold,” which seems to show that its withered character

as combined with Geraldine’s youth, was what shocked and

warned Christabel. The first edition says--

A sight to dream of, not to tell:--

And she is to sleep with Christabel!

I dare say Coleridge altered this, because an idea arose,

which I actually heard to have been reported as Coleridge’s

real intention by a member of contemporary circles (P. G.

Patmore, father of Coventry P. who conveyed the report to

me)--viz., that Géraldine was to turn out to be a man!! I

believe myself that the conclusion as given by Gillman from

Coleridge’s account to him is correct enough, only not

picturesquely worded. It does not seem a bad conclusion by

any means, though it would require fine treatment to make it

seem a really good one. Of course the first part is so

immeasurably beyond the second, that one feels Chas. Lamb’s

view was right, and it should have been abandoned at that

point. The passage on sundered friendship is one of the

masterpieces of the language, but no doubt was written quite

separately and then fitted into _Christabel_. The two lines

about Roland and Sir Leoline are simply an intrusion and an

outrage. I cannot say that I like the conclusion nearly so

well as this. It hints at infinite beauty, but somehow

remains a sort of cobweb. The conception, and partly the

execution, of the passage in which Christabel repeats by

fascination the serpent-glance of Géraldine, is magnificent;

but that is the only good narrative passage in part two. The

rest seems to have reached a fatal facility of jingling, at

the heels whereof followed Scott.