Probably the first impression one gets from reading the _Complete
Poetical Works_ of Christina Rossetti, now collected and edited by her
brother, Mr. W. M. Rossetti,[6] is that she wrote altogether too much,
and that it was a doubtful service to her memory to preserve so many
poems purely private in their nature. The editor, one thinks, might well
have shown himself more "reverent of her strange simplicity." For page
after page we are in the society of a spirit always refined and
exquisite in sentiment, but without any guiding and restraining artistic
impulse; she never drew to the shutters of her soul, but lay open to
every wandering breath of heaven. In comparison with the works of the
more creative poets her song is like the continuous lisping of an aeolian
harp beside the music elicited by cunning fingers. And then, suddenly,
out of this sweet monotony, moved by some stronger, clearer breeze of
inspiration, there sounds a strain of wonderful beauty and flawless
perfection, unmatched in its own kind in English letters. An anonymous
purveyor of anecdotes has recently told how one of these more exquisite
songs called forth the enthusiasm of Swinburne. It was just after the
publication of _Goblin Market and Other Poems_, and in a little company
of friends that erratic poet and critic started to read aloud from the
volume. Turning first to the devotional paraphrase which begins with
"Passing away, saith the World, passing away," he chanted the lines in
his own emphatic manner, then laid the book down with a vehement
gesture. Presently he took it up again, and a second time read the poem
through, even more impressively. "By God!" he exclaimed at the end,
"that's one of the finest things ever written!"
Passing away, saith the World, passing away:
Chances, beauty, and youth, sapped day by day,
Thy life never continueth in one stay.
Is the eye waxen dim, is the dark hair changing to grey,
That hath won neither laurel nor bay?
I shall clothe myself in Spring and bud in May:
Thou, root-stricken, shalt not rebuild thy decay
On my bosom for aye.
Then I answered: Yea.
Passing away, saith my Soul, passing away:
With its burden of fear and hope, of labour and play,
Hearken what the past doth witness and say:
Rust in thy gold, a moth is in thine array,
A canker is in thy bud, thy leaf must decay.
At midnight, at cockcrow, at morning, one certain day
Lo the Bridegroom shall come and shall not delay;
Watch thou and pray.
Then I answered: Yea.
Passing away, saith my God, passing away:
Winter passeth after the long delay:
New grapes on the vine, new figs on the tender spray,
Turtle calleth turtle in Heaven's May.
Though I tarry, wait for Me, trust Me, watch and pray:
Arise, come away, night is past and lo it is day:
My love, My sister, My spouse, thou shalt hear Me say.
Then I answered: Yea.
And Swinburne, somewhat contrary to his wont, was right. Purer
inspiration, less troubled by worldly motives, than these verses cannot
be found. Nor would it be difficult to discover in their brief compass
most of the qualities that lend distinction to Christina Rossetti's
work. Even her monotone, which after long continuation becomes monotony,
affects one here as a subtle device heightening the note of subdued
fervour and religious resignation; the repetition of the rhyming vowel
creates the feeling of a secret expectancy cherished through the
weariness of a frustrate life. If there is any excuse for publishing the
many poems that express the mere unlifted, unvaried prayer of her heart,
it is because their monotony may prepare the mind for the strange
artifice of this solemn chant. But such a preparation demands more
patience than a poet may justly claim from the ordinary reader. Better
would be a volume of selections from her works, including a number of
poems of this character. It would stand, in its own way, supreme in
English literature,--as pure and fine an expression of the feminine
genius as the world has yet heard.
It is, indeed, as the flower of strictly feminine genius that Christina
Rossetti should be read and judged. She is one of a group of women who
brought this new note into Victorian poetry,--Louisa Shore, Jean
Ingelow, rarely Mrs. Browning, and, I may add, Mrs. Meynell. She is like
them, but of a higher, finer strain than they ([Greek: kalai de te
pasai]), and I always think of her as of her brother's Blessed Damozel,
circled with a company of singers, yet holding herself aloof in chosen
loneliness of passion. She, too, has not quite ceased to yearn toward
earth:
And still she bowed herself and stooped
Out of the circling charm;
Until her bosom must have made
The bar she leaned on warm,
And the lilies lay as if asleep
Along her bended arm.
I have likened the artlessness of much of her writing to the sweet
monotony of an aeolian harp; the comparison returns as expressing also
the purely feminine spirit of her inspiration. There is in her a passive
surrender to the powers of life, a religious acquiescence, which wavers
between a plaintive pathos and a sublime exultation of faith. The great
world, with its harsh indifference for the weak, passes over her as a
ruinous gale rushes over a sequestered wood-flower; she bows her head,
humbled but not broken, nor ever forgetful of her gentle mission,--
And strong in patient weakness till the end.
She bends to the storm, yet no one, not the great mystics nor the
greater poets who cry out upon the sound and fury of life, is more
constantly impressed by the vanity and fleeting insignificance of the
blustering power, or more persistently looks for consolation and joy
from another source. But there is a difference. Read the masculine poets
who have heard this mystic call of the spirit, and you feel yourself in
the presence of a strong will that has grasped the world, and, finding
it insufficient, deliberately casts it away; and there is no room for
pathetic regret in their ruthless determination to renounce. But this
womanly poet does not properly renounce at all, she passively allows the
world to glide away from her. The strength of her genius is endurance:
She stands there like a beacon through the night,
A pale clear beacon where the storm-drift is--
She stands alone, a wonder deathly-white:
She stands there patient, nerved with inner might,
Indomitable in her feebleness,
Her face and will athirst against the light.
It is characteristic of her feminine disposition that the loss of the
world should have come to her first of all in the personal relation of
love. And here we must signalise the chief service of the editor toward
his sister. It was generally known in a vague way, indeed it was easy to
surmise as much from her published work, that Christina Rossetti bore
with her always the sadness of unfulfilled affection. In the
introductory Memoir her brother has now given a sufficiently detailed
account of this matter to remove all ambiguity. I am not one to wish
that the reserves and secret emotions of an author should be displayed
for the mere gratification of the curious; but in this case the
revelation would seem to be justified as a needed explanation of poems
which she herself was willing to publish. Twice, it appears, she gave
her love, and both times drew back in a kind of tremulous awe from the
last step. The first affair began in 1848, before she was eighteen, and
ran its course in about two years. The man was one James Collinson, an
artist of mediocre talent who had connected himself with the
Pre-raphaelite Brotherhood. He was originally a Protestant, but had
become a Roman Catholic. Then, as Christina refused to ally herself to
one of that faith, he compliantly abandoned Rome for the Church of
England. His conscience, however, which seems from all accounts to have
been of a flabby consistency, troubled him in the new faith, and he soon
reverted to Catholicism. Christina then drew back from him finally. It
is not so easy to understand why she refused the second suitor, with
whom she became intimately acquainted about 1860, and whom she loved in
her own retiring fashion until the day of her death. This was Charles
Bagot Cayley, a brother of the famous Cambridge mathematician, himself a
scholar and in a small way a poet. Some idea of the man may be obtained
from a notice of him written by Mr. W. M. Rossetti for the _Athenaeum_
after his death. "A more complete specimen than Mr. Charles Cayley,"
says Mr. Rossetti, "of the abstracted scholar in appearance and
manner--the scholar who constantly lives an inward and unmaterial life,
faintly perceptive of external facts and appearances--could hardly be
conceived. He united great sweetness to great simplicity of character,
and was not less polite than unworldly." One might suppose that such a
temperament was peculiarly fitted to join with that of the secluded
poetess, and so, to judge from her many love poems, it actually was. Of
her own heart or of his there seems to have been no doubt in her mind.
Even in her most rapturous visions of heaven, like the yearning cry of
the Blessed Damozel, the memory of that stilled passion often breaks
out:
How should I rest in Paradise,
Or sit on steps of heaven alone?
If Saints and Angels spoke of love,
Should I not answer from my throne,
Have pity upon me, ye my friends,
For I have heard the sound thereof?
She seems even not to have been unfamiliar with the hope of joy, and I
would persuade myself that her best-known lyric of gladness, "My heart
is like a singing-bird," was inspired by the early dawning of this
passion. But the hope and the joy soon passed away and left her only the
solemn refrain of acquiescence: "Then I answered: Yea." Her brother can
give no sufficient explanation of this refusal on her part to accept the
happiness almost within her hand, though he hints at lack of religious
sympathy between the two. Some inner necessity of sorrow and
resignation, one almost thinks, drew her back in both cases, some
perception that the real treasure of her heart lay not in this world:
A voice said, "Follow, follow": and I rose
And followed far into the dreamy night,
Turning my back upon the pleasant light.
It led me where the bluest water flows,
And would not let me drink: where the corn grows
I dared not pause, but went uncheered by sight
Or touch: until at length in evil plight
It left me, wearied out with many woes.
Some time I sat as one bereft of sense:
But soon another voice from very far
Called, "Follow, follow": and I rose again.
Now on my night has dawned a blessed star:
Kind steady hands my sinking steps sustain,
And will not leave me till I go from hence.
It might seem that here was a spirit of renunciation akin to that of the
more masculine mystics; indeed, a great many of her poems are,
unconsciously I presume, almost a paraphrase of that recurring theme of
the Imitation: "Nolle consolari ab aliqua creatura," and again: "Amore
igitur Creatoris, amorem hominis superavit; et pro humano solatio,
divinum beneplacitum magis elegit." She, too, was unwilling to find
consolation in any creature, and turned from the love of man to the love
of the Creator; yet a little reading of her exquisite hymns will show
that this renunciation has more the nature of surrender than of
deliberate choice:
He broke my will from day to day;
He read my yearnings unexprest,
And said them nay.
The world is withheld from her by a power above her will, and always
this power stands before her in that peculiarly personal form which it
is wont to assume in the feminine mind. Her faith is a mere transference
to heaven of a love that terrifies her in its ruthless earthly
manifestation; and the passion of her life is henceforth a yearning
expectation of the hour when the Bridegroom shall come and she shall
answer, Yea. Nor is the earthly source of this love forgotten; it abides
with her as a dream which often is not easily distinguished from its
celestial transmutation:
O dream how sweet, too sweet, too bitter sweet,
Whose wakening should have been in Paradise,
Where souls brimful of love abide and meet;
Where thirsting longing eyes
Watch the slow door
That opening, letting in, lets out no more.
Yet come to me in dreams, that I may live
My very life again though cold in death:
Come back to me in dreams, that I may give
Pulse for pulse, breath for breath:
Speak low, lean low,
As long ago, my love, how long ago.
It is this perfectly passive attitude toward the powers that command her
heart and her soul--a passivity which by its completeness assumes the
misguiding semblance of a deliberate determination of life--that makes
her to me the purest expression in English of the feminine genius. I
know that many would think this pre-eminence belongs to Mrs. Browning.
They would point out the narrowness of Christina Rossetti's range, and
the larger aspects of woman's nature, neglected by her, which inspire
some of her rival's best-known poems. To me, on the contrary, it is the
very scope attempted by Mrs. Browning that prevents her from holding the
place I would give to Christina Rossetti. So much of Mrs. Browning--her
political ideas, her passion for reform, her scholarship--simply carries
her into the sphere of the masculine poets, where she suffers by an
unfair comparison. She would be a better and less irritating writer
without these excursions into a field for which she was not entirely
fitted. The uncouthness that so often mars her language is partly due to
an unreconciled feud between her intellect and her heart. She had
neither a woman's wise passivity nor a man's controlling will. Even
within the range of strictly feminine powers her genius is not simple
and typical. And here I must take refuge in a paradox which is like
enough to carry but little conviction. Nevertheless, it is the truth. I
mean to say that probably most women will regard Mrs. Browning as the
better type of their sex, whereas to men the honour will seem to belong
to Miss Rossetti; and that the judgment of a man in this matter is more
conclusive than a woman's. This is a paradox, I admit, yet its solution
is simple. Women will judge a poetess by her inclusion of the larger
human nature, and will resent the limiting of her range to the qualities
that we look upon as peculiarly feminine. The passion of Mrs. Browning,
her attempt to control her inspiration to the demands of a shaping
intellect, her questioning and answering, her larger aims, in a word her
effort to create,--all these will be set down to her credit by women who
are as appreciative of such qualities as men, and who will not be
annoyed by the false tone running through them. Men, on the contrary,
are apt, in accepting a woman's work or in creating a female character,
to be interested more in the traits and limitations which distinguish
her from her masculine complement. They care more for the _idea_ of
woman, and less for woman as merely a human being. Thus, for example, I
should not hesitate to say that in this ideal aspect Thackeray's
heroines are more womanly than George Eliot's,--though I am aware of
the ridicule to which such an opinion lays me open; and for the same
reason I hold that Christina Rossetti is a more complete exemplar of
feminine genius, and, as being more perfect in her own sphere, a better
poet than Mrs. Browning. That disconcerting sneer of Edward
FitzGerald's, which so enraged Robert Browning, would never have
occurred to him, I think, in the case of Miss Rossetti.
There is a curious comment on this contrast in the introduction to
Christina Rossetti's _Monna Innominata_, a sonnet-sequence in which she
tells her own story in the supposed person of an early Italian lady.
"Had the great poetess of our own day and nation," she says, "only been
unhappy instead of happy, her circumstances would have invited her to
bequeath to us, in lieu of the _Portuguese Sonnets_, an inimitable
'donna innominata' drawn not from fancy, but from feeling, and worthy to
occupy, a niche beside Beatrice and Laura." Now this sonnet-sequence of
Miss Rossetti's is far from her best work, and holds a lower rank in
every way than that passionate self-revelation of Mrs. Browning's; yet
to read these confessions of the two poets together is a good way to get
at the division between their spirits. In Miss Rossetti's sonnets all
those feminine traits I have dwelt on are present to a marked, almost an
exaggerated, degree. They are harmonious within themselves, and filled
with a quiet ease; only the higher inspiration is lacking to them in
comparison with her _Passing Away_, and other great lyrics. In Mrs.
Browning, on the contrary, one cannot but feel a disturbing element. The
very tortuousness of her language, the straining to render her emotion
in terms of the intellect, introduces a quality which is out of harmony
with the ground theme of feminine surrender. More than that, this
submission to love, if looked at more closely, is itself in large part
such as might proceed from a man as well as from a woman, so that there
results an annoying confusion of masculine and feminine passion. Take,
for instance, the twenty-second of the _Portuguese Sonnets_, one of the
most perfect in the series:
When our two souls stand up erect and strong,
Face to face, drawing nigher and nigher,
Until the lengthening wings break into fire
At either curved point,--What bitter wrong
Can earth do to us, that we should not long
Be here contented? Think. In mounting higher,
The angels would press on us, and aspire
To drop some golden orb of perfect song
Into our deep, dear silence. Let us stay
Rather on earth, Beloved,--where the unfit
Contrarious moods of men recoil away
And isolate pure spirits, and permit
A place to stand and love in for a day,
With darkness and the death-hour rounding it.
That is noble verse, undoubtedly. The point is that it might just as
well have been written by a man to a woman as the contrary; it would,
for example, fit perfectly well into Dante Gabriel Rossetti's _House of
Life_. There is here no passivity of soul; the passion is not that of
acquiescence, but of determination to press to the quick of love. Only,
perhaps, a certain falsetto in the tone (if the meaning of that word may
be so extended) shows that, after all, it was written by a woman, who in
adopting the masculine pitch loses something of fineness and
exquisiteness.
A single phrase of the sonnet, that "deep, dear silence," links it in my
mind with one of Christina Rossetti's not found in the _Monna
Innominata_, but expressing the same spirit of resignation. It is
entitled simply _Rest_:
O Earth, lie heavily upon her eyes;
Seal her sweet eyes weary of watching, Earth;
Lie close around her; leave no room for mirth
With its harsh laughter, nor for sound of sighs.
She hath no questions, she hath no replies,
Hushed in and curtained with a blessed dearth
Of all that irked her from the hour of birth;
_With stillness that is almost Paradise.
Darkness more clear than noonday holdeth her,
Silence more musical than any song;_
Even her very heart has ceased to stir:
Until the morning of Eternity
Her rest shall not begin nor end, but be;
And when she wakes she will not think it long.
Am I misguided in thinking that in this stillness, this silence more
musical than any song, the feminine heart speaks with a simplicity and
consummate purity such as I quite fail to hear in the _Portuguese
Sonnets_, admired as those sonnets are? Nor could one, perhaps, find in
all Christina Rossetti's poems a single line that better expresses the
character of her genius than these magical words: "With stillness that
is almost Paradise." That is the mood which, with the passing away of
love, never leaves her; that is her religion; her acquiescent Yea, to
the world and the soul and to God. Into that region of rapt stillness it
seems almost a sacrilege to penetrate with inquisitive, critical mind;
it is like tearing away the veil of modesty. I will not attempt to bring
out the beauty of her mood by comparing it with that of the more
masculine quietists, who reach out and take the kingdom of Heaven by
storm, and whose prayer is, in the words of Tennyson:
Our wills are ours, we know not how;
Our wills are ours, to make them Thine.
It will be better to quote one other poem, perhaps her most perfect work
artistically, and to pass on: