It must have been in 1871 that I made the acquaintance of Rossetti. This
was some time after Lady Ripon’s death, on which I visited my married
daughter in Germany, but finally returned to Roehampton. It was then that
I called on the poet-painter, as described. After dining with me, he was
so good as to send me a note, in which he said he should like to ask some
of his friends to meet me at dinner. In reply, I said that it would be
a pleasure to me to dine with him, but begged him not to inconvenience
himself on my account, as it would suit me at any time to visit him.
On the day finally fixed there were many at dinner, and as many later.
Many of these, at the time, had good positions as editors, writers, and
painters. W. B. Scott was at the table, also Mr. Sidney Colvin, Mr.
Joseph Knight, Dr. Hüffer, Mr. William Rossetti, and so on; and in the
evening, Dr. Westland Marston, Mr. O’Shaugnessy, Philip Marston, Madox
Brown, Dr. Appleton, a wife or two, and not a few besides.
Some of these have increased in fame since then, some are dead, some
are forgotten. Madox Brown, a painter with a fine historic imagination,
flourishes still.
Rossetti’s topic was still “Old Souls;” Scott was his echo. They said it
was a subject that could never be written on again.
At this date Rossetti’s poems were passing through the press, and I had a
bundle of verse myself ready for it.
I was very much moved by the contents of Rossetti’s volume. I still
admire it much, but with a severer criticism than then.
I could say much of Rossetti’s later life, but am compelled to omit all
such details, for they are intimately mixed up with illness, which to
a physician the witness of it, is sacred ground. Then again, friends
are bad biographers, because they know too much and cannot shape the
character to that ideal which those personally unknown to a great poet
might expect.
Rossetti’s intellectual force was not of a striking order, but it was
adequate; his charm lay in the artistic colouring of his mind, arrayed as
it was in the fascinations of a Provençal attire. This is very different
to the charm in which Nature invests her lovers; and yet it is so
bewitching as to claim a rivalry, and to almost appear the subject of her
inspirations in some enchanted guise.
I had heard that paintings were leaving Cheyne Walk, such as in
colouring had not been seen since Titian lived; and, with a claim on his
acquaintance, I was induced to visit him.
What Reynolds’s faded works once were we no longer know, but when I saw
Rossetti’s paintings I was reminded of what was said of one—the Infant
Hercules, sent to Russia—that it looked as if it had been boiled in
brandy.
It is a pleasure to me to think that I was once a comfort to Rossetti
in his trying illness. I went to him on his summoning me to Scotland. I
passed six weeks with him there; first at Stobbs Hall, afterwards outside
Crieff, to which place, among others, I travelled to find him a suitable
abode. I walked with him by day, I sat at his bedside by night, relating
to him the history of almost every one I had ever known, and by diverting
his mind from itself, I left him comparatively restored.
If he forgot all this, it was no fault of his own making; his illness
never fully subsided. But I was among the favoured still who had known
him in his best days, and was appointed to serve him in his most trying
hour.
I can further say that when I saw Rossetti in his prime, a healthy man,
he was the noblest of men, and had a heart so good that I have never
known a better, seldom its equal.
Illness changed him, but then he was no longer himself.
Taking Rossetti’s pictures and his verse together as one, he was a great
poet; his poetics and paintings help each other, as did Blake’s in a
vastly inferior degree, but their separation shows faults in each with
distinctness. When one reads his poems, one thinks of his paintings; when
one looks at his paintings, one thinks of his poems; whence the charm
that surrounds all his work.
The celebrity that awaited Rossetti’s poems among critics was latent in
his paintings, which were already famous for their emotional colouring
and fine portraiture of women; and, being in intimate social relation
with many leading members of the press, his poetical pretensions were
accepted by acclamation. Then he had a powerful _clientèle_ among buyers.
Those who possessed his pictures were very ready to receive and admire
the poems of their favourite artist, and to push them about in the
fashionable and the wealthy world, as the works of the poet-painter, a
title rarely obtained, so many gifts does it imply.
It was this that at once secured him his deserved success. He had
published the “Blessed Damozel,” one of the poems on which his reputation
rests, when a young man unknown to art, and it attracted no attention in
the world at large; for justice is not done to merit of any kind unless
it can pay its way.
The “Blessed Damozel” may be characterized as a drawing with tender
descriptions of convent life, with the Virgin Mary as lady abbess; the
whole lifted into remotest space, where lies the boundary-line of Heaven;
the damozel being a sort of nun living among the holy, while all her
reflections are human; the burden of them from first to last on love for
an absent one, without whose presence she can find no happiness in her
purgatorial heaven. It reads like the suggestion of a picture done in
mediæval times—as old as the court cards in the pack used by players—at a
period when the glory of saints and of christs was symbolized by a sort
of curtain-ring round the head, or by circular fireworks which emitted
sparks in perpetual corruscation.
I do not feel that the antique moulding of this poem is a fair excuse
for its being illogical in places. The sun was so far off that it was
scarcely visible—say two billion miles or so, like Uranus or Neptune; but
that it looked like a bridge, is a simile that cannot be made suggestive
of any round body save the moon. That she can see the earth spin like a
fretful midge, does not please the logical understanding, when that body
is at least as far off as the scarce-visible sun. We are comparatively
close to our neighbouring orbs, Venus and Mars, which do not exhibit the
slightest motion to our eyes—how then should a world as remote from the
damozel as Uranus is from us be seen in motion?
We are made to realize that the “Blessed Damozel” is of flesh and blood;
she stoops and bends forward until her bosom makes the bar she leans on
warm. But the souls mounting up to God were spirits; they passed by her
like thin flame. This does not show the logical consistency which poetry
demands even more rigidly than prose.
The poem is strictly sentimental. The one feeling of love-longings runs
through every stanza.
The subject was painted for Lord Mount Temple. I have not seen the work,
but doubtless it is composed of the three first verses of the poem,
which must have been painted on the author’s mind long before it reached
the canvas. The poem, which is not very musical or imaginative beyond
the _motif_ it carries out, has a great charm for many. It is simple in
diction and emotional, and a merit not often found in Rossetti’s love
poetry is its spiritual character, the lover not being near to incite the
girl to passion of the naked kind which pervades his sonnets.
The author cannot be said to exhibit himself personally in this poem, nor
in the other with which his fame is equally bound up, namely, “Sister
Helen.” Both appear to tell their own story, which is the perfection of
narrative, a truth which critics cannot too forcibly insist on. It is no
easy matter for a writer himself to appear beautiful in the midst of his
beautiful verses, unless his subject and its treatment is of the most
elevated kind, as in Coleridge’s “Love,” which is so deliciously pure,
and in the first verse or two of Wordsworth’s “Intimations.”