Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti Part 11

I made some playful allusion, a.s.suredly not meant to involve Mr.

Swinburne, to Sheridan's epigram on easy writing and hard reading; and to the Abbe de Marolles, who exultingly told some poet that his verses cost no trouble: "They cost you what they are worth," replied the bard.

"One benefit I do derive," Rossetti added, "as a result of my method of composition; my work becomes condensed. Probably the man does not live who could write what I have written more briefly than I have done."

Emphasis and condensation, I remarked, were indubitably the characteristics of his muse. He then read me a great body of the new sonnets of _The House of Life_. Sitting in that studio listening to his reading and looking up meantime at the chalk-drawings that hung on the walls, I realised how truly he had said, in correspondence, that the feeling pervading his pictures was such as his poetry ought to suggest.

The affinity between the two seemed to me at that moment to be complete: the same half-sad, half-resigned view of life, the same glimpses of hope, the same foreshadowings of gloom.

"You doubtless think it odd," he said at one moment, "to hear an old fellow read such love-poetry as much of this is, but I may tell you that the larger part of it, though still unpublished, was written when I was as young as you are. When I print these sonnets, I shall probably affix a note saying, that though many of them are of recent production, not a few are obviously the work of earlier years."

I expressed admiration of the pathetic sonnet ent.i.tled _Without Her_.

"I cannot tell you," he said, "at what terrible moment it was wrung from me."

He had read it with tears of voice, subsiding at length into suppressed sobs and intervals of silence. As though to explain away this emotion he said:

"All poetry, that is really poetry, affects me deeply and often to tears. It does not need to be pathetic or yet tender to produce such a result. I have known in my life two men, and two only, who are similarly sensitive--Tennyson, and my old friend and neighbour William Bell Scott.

I once heard Tennyson read _Maud_, and whilst the fiery pa.s.sages were delivered with a voice and vehemence which he alone of living men can compa.s.s, the softer pa.s.sages and the songs made the tears course down his cheeks. Morris is a fine reader, and so, of his kind, though a little p.r.o.ne to sing-song, is Swinburne. Browning both reads and talks well--at least he did so when I knew him intimately as a young man."

Rossetti went on to say that he had been among Browning's earliest admirers. As a boy he had seen something signed by the then unknown name of the author of _Paracelsus_, and wrote to him. The result was an intimacy. He spoke with warmest admiration of _Child Roland_; and referred to Elizabeth Barrett Browning in terms of regard, and, I think I may say, of reverence.

I asked if he had ever heard Ruskin read. He replied:

"I must have done so, but remember nothing clearly. On one occasion, however, I heard him deliver a speech, and that was something never to forget. When we were young, we helped Frederick Denison Maurice by taking cla.s.ses at the Working Men's College, and there Charles Kingsley and others made speeches and delivered lectures. Ruskin was asked to do something of the kind and at length consented. He made no sort of preparation for the occasion: I know he did not; we were together at his father's house the whole of the day in question. At night we drove down to the College, and then he made the finest speech I ever heard. I doubted at the time if any written words of his were equal to it! such flaming diction! such emphasis! such appeal!--yet he had written his first and second volumes of _Modern Painters_ by that time." I have reproduced the substance of what Rossetti said on the occasion of my return visit, and, by help of letters written at the time to a friend, I have in many cases recalled his exact words. A certain incisiveness of speech which distinguished his conversation, I confess myself scarcely able to convey more than a suggestion of; as Mr. Watts has said in _The Athenaeum_, his talk showed an incisiveness so perfect that it had often the pleasurable surprise of wit. Rossetti had both wit and humour, but these, during the time that I knew him, were only occasionally present in his conversation, while the incisiveness was always conspicuous.

A certain quiet play of sportive fancy, developing at intervals into banter, was sometimes observable in his talk with the younger and more familiar of his acquaintances, but for the most part his conversation was serious, and, during the time I knew him, often sad. I speedily observed that he was not of the number of those who lead or sustain conversation. He required to be constantly interrogated, but as a negative talker, if I may so describe him, he was by much the best I had heard. Catching one's drift before one had revealed it, and antic.i.p.ating one's objections, he would go on from point to point, almost removing the necessity for more than occasional words. Nevertheless, as I say, he was not, in the conversations I have heard, a leading conversationalist; his talk was never more than talk, and in saying that it was uniformly sustained yet never declamatory, I think I convey an idea both of its merits and limitations.

I understood that Rossetti had never at any period of his life been an early riser, and at the time of the interview in question he was more than ever before p.r.o.ne to reverse the natural order of waking and sleeping hours. I am convinced that during the time I was with him only the necessity of securing a certain short interval of daylight, by which it was possible to paint, prevailed with him to rise before noon.

Alluding to this idiosyncrasy, he said: "I lie as long, or say as late, as Dr. Johnson used to do. You shall never know, until you discover it for yourself, at what hour I rise." He sat up until four A.M. on this night of my second visit,--no unaccustomed thing, as I afterwards learned. I must not omit the mention of one feature of the conversation, revealing to me a new side of his character, or, more properly, a new phase of his mind, which gave me subsequently an infinity of anxiety and distress. Branching off at a late hour from some entirely foreign topic, he begged me to tell him the facts of some unlucky debate in which I had long before been engaged on a public platform with some one who had attacked him. He had heard a report of what pa.s.sed at a time when my name was unknown to him, as also was that of his a.s.sailant. Being forewarned by William Rossetti of his brother's peculiar sensitiveness to critical attack, and having, moreover, observed something of the kind myself, I tried to avoid a circ.u.mstantial statement of what pa.s.sed. But Rossetti was, as has been said by one who knew him well, "of imagination all compact," and my obvious desire to shelve the subject suggested to his mind a thousand inferences infinitely more damaging than the fact.

To avoid such a result I told him all, and there was little in the way of attack to repeat beyond a few unwelcome strictures on his poem _Jenny_. He listened but too eagerly to what I was saying, and then in a voice slower, softer, and more charged, perhaps, with emotion than I had heard before, said it was the old story, which began ten years before, and would go on until he had been hunted and hounded to his grave.

Startled, and indeed, appalled by so grave a view of what to me had seemed no more than an error of critical judgment, coupled perhaps, with some intemperance of condemnation, I prayed of him to think no more of the matter, reproached myself with having yielded to his importunity, and begged him to remember that if one man held the opinions I had repeated, many men held contrary ones.

"It was right of you to tell me when I asked you," he said, "though my friends usually keep such facts from my knowledge. As to _Jenny_, it is a sermon, nothing less. As I say, it is a sermon, and on a great world, to most men unknown, though few consider themselves ignorant of it. But of this conspiracy to persecute me--what remains to say but that it is widespread and remorseless--one cannot but feel it."

I a.s.sured him there existed no conspiracy to persecute him: that he had ardent upholders everywhere, though it was true that few men had found crueller critics. He shook his head, and said I knew that what he had alleged was true, namely that an organised conspiracy existed, having for its object to annoy and injure him. Growing a little impatient of this delusion, so tenaciously held, against all show of reason, I told him that it was no more than the fever of an oppressed brain brought about by his reclusive habits of life, by shunning intercourse with all save some half dozen or more friends. "You tell me," I said, "that you have rarely been outside these walls for some years, and your brain has meanwhile been breeding a host of hallucinations, like cobwebs in a dark corner. You have only to go abroad, and the fresh air will blow these things away." But continuing for some moments longer in the same strain, he came to closer quarters and distressed me by naming as enemies three or four men who had throughout life been his friends, who have spoken of him since his death in words of admiration and even affection, and who had for a time fallen away from him or called on him but rarely, from contingencies due to any cause but alienated friends.h.i.+p.

At length the time had arrived when it was considered prudent to retire.

"You are to sleep in Watts's room to-night," he said: and then in reply to a look of inquiry he added, "He comes here at least twice a week, talking until four o'clock in the morning upon everything from poetry to the Pleiades, and driving away the bogies, and as he lives at Putney Hill, it is necessary to have a bed for him." Before going into my room he suggested that I should go and look, at his. It was entered from another and smaller room which he said that he used as a breakfast room. The outer room was made fairly bright and cheerful by a glittering chandelier (the property once, he told me, of David Garrick), and from the rustle of trees against the window-pane one perceived that it overlooked the garden; but the inner room was dark with heavy hangings around the walls as well as the bed, and thick velvet curtains before the windows, so that the candles in our hands seemed unable to light it, and our voices sounded thick and m.u.f.fled. An enormous black oak chimney-piece of curious design, having an ivory crucifix on the largest of its ledges, covered a part of one side and reached to the ceiling.

Cabinets, and the usual furniture of a bedroom, occupied places about the floor: and in the middle of it, and before a little couch, stood a small table on which was a wire lantern containing a candle which Rossetti lit from the open one in his hand--another candle meantime lying by its side. I remarked that he probably burned a light all night.

He said that was so. "My curse," he added, "is insomnia. Two or three hours hence I shall get up and lie on the couch, and, to pa.s.s away a weary hour, read this book"--a volume of Boswell's _Johnson_ which I noticed he took out of the bookcase as we left the studio. It did not escape me that on the table stood two small bottles sealed and labelled, together with a little measuring-gla.s.s. Without looking further at it, but with a terrible suspicion growing over me, I asked if that were his medicine.

"They say there is a skeleton in every cupboard," he said in a low voice, "and that's mine; it is chloral."

When I reached the room that I was to occupy during the night, I found it, like Rossetti's bedroom, heavy with hangings, and black with antique picture panels, with a ceiling (unlike that of the other rooms in the house), out of all reach or sight, and so dark from various causes, that the candle seemed only to glimmer in it--indeed to add to the darkness by making it felt. Mr. Watts, as Rossetti told me, was entirely indifferent to these eerie surroundings, even if his fine subjective intellect, more p.r.o.ne to meditate than to observe, was ever for an instant conscious of them; but on myself I fear they weighed heavily, and augmented the feeling of closeness and gloom which had been creeping upon me since I entered the house. Scattered about the room in most admired disorder were some outlandish and unheard-of books, and all kinds of antiquarian and Oriental oddities, which books and oddities I afterwards learnt had been picked up at various times by the occupant in his ramblings about Chelsea and elsewhere, and never yet taken away by him, but left there apparently to scare the chambermaid: such as old carved heads and gargoyles of the most grinning and ghastly expression, Burmese and Chinese Buddhas in soapstone of every degree of placid ugliness, together, I am bound by force of truth to admit, with one piece of carved Italian marble in bas-relief, of great interest and beauty. Such was my bed-chamber for the night, and little wonder if it threatened to murder the innocent sleep. But it was later than 4 A.M., and wearied nature must needs a.s.sert herself, and so I lay down amidst the odour of bygone ages.

Presently Rossetti came in, for no purpose that I can remember, except to say that he had enjoyed my visit I replied that I should never forget it. "If you decide to settle in London," he said, "I trust you 'll come and live with me, and then many such evenings must remove the memory of this one." I laughed, for I thought what he hinted at to be of the remotest likelihood. "I have just taken sixty grains of chloral," he said, as he was going out; "in four hours I take sixty more, and in four hours after that yet another sixty."

"Does not the dose increase with you?"

"It has not done so perceptibly in recent years. I judge I've taken more chloral than any man whatever: Marshall says if I were put into a Turkish bath I should sweat it at every pore."

There was something in his tone suggesting that he was even proud of the accomplishment. To me it was a frightful revelation, accounting entirely for what had puzzled and distressed me in his delusions already referred to. And now let me say that whilst it would have been on my part the most pitiful weakness (because the most foolish tearfulness of injuring a great man who was strong enough to suffer a good deal to be discounted from his strength), to attempt to conceal this painful side of Rossetti's mind, I shall not again allude to those delusions, unless it be to show that, coming to him with the drug which blighted half his life, they disappeared when it had been removed.

None may rightly say to what the use of that drug was due, or what was due to it; the sadder side of his life was ever under its shadow; his occasional distrust of friends: his fear of enemies: his broken health and shattered spirits, all came of his indulgence in the pernicious thing. When I remember this I am more than willing to put by all thought of the little annoyances, which to me, as to other immediate friends, were constantly occurring through that cause, which seemed at the moment so vexatious and often so insupportable, but which are now forgotten.

Next morning--(a clear autumn morning)--I strolled through the large garden at the back of the house, and of course I found it of a piece with what I had previously seen. A beautiful avenue of lime-trees opened into a gra.s.s plot of nearly an acre in extent. The trees were just as nature made them, and so was the gra.s.s, which in places was lying long, dry and withered under the sun, weeds creeping up in damp places, and the gravel of the pathway scattered upon the verges. This neglected condition of the garden was, I afterwards found, humorously charged upon Mr. Watts's "reluctance to interfere with nature in her clever scheme of the survival of the fittest," but I suspect it was due at least equally to the owner's personal indifference to everything of the kind.

Before leaving I glanced over the bookcase. Rossetti's library was by no means a large one. It consisted, perhaps, of 1000 volumes, scarcely more; and though this was not large as comprising the library of one whose reading must have been in two arts pursued as special studies, and each involving research and minute original inquiry, it cannot be considered noticeably small, and it must have been sufficient. Rossetti differed strangely as a reader from the man to whom in bias of genius he was most nearly related. Coleridge was an omnivorous general reader: Rossetti was eclectic rather than desultory. His library contained a number of valuable old works of more interest to him from their plates than letterpress. Of this kind were _Gerard's Herbal_ (1626), supposed to be the source of many a hint utilised by the Morris firm, of which Rossetti was a member; _Poliphili Hypnerotomachia_ (1467); Heywood's _History of Women_ (1624); _Songe de Poliphile_ (1561); Bonnard's _Costumes of 12th, 13th, and l4th Centuries; Habiti Antichi_ (of which the designs are said to be by t.i.tian)--printed Venice, (1664); _Cosmographia_, a history of the peoples of the world (1572); _Ciceronis Officia_ (1534), a blackletter folio, with woodcuts by Burgkmaier; _Jost Amman's Costumes_, with woodcuts coloured by hand; _Cento Novelle_ (Venice, 1598); Frances...o...b..rberino's _Doc.u.menti (d'Amore_ (Rome, 1640); _Decoda de t.i.tolivio_, a Spanish blackletter, without date, but probably belonging to the 16th century. Besides these were various vellum-bound works relating to Greek and Roman allegorical and mythological subjects, and a number of sc.r.a.p-books and portfolios containing photographs from nearly all the picture-galleries of Europe, but chiefly of the pictures of the early Florentine and Venetian schools, with an admixture of Spanish art. Of Michael Angelo's designs for the Sistine Chapel there was a fine set of photographs.

These did not make up a very complete ancient artistic library, but Rossetti's collection of the poets was more full and valuable. There was a pretty little early edition of Petrarch, which appeared to have been presented first by John Philip Kemble to Polidori (Rossetti's grandfather) in 1812; then in 1853 by Polidori to his daughter, Rossetti's mother, Frances Rossetti; and by her in 1870 to her son. A splendid edition (1552) of Boccaccio's _Decamerone_ contained a number of valuable marginal notes, chiefly by Rossetti, the first being as follows:

This volume contains 40 woodcuts besides many initial letters. The greater number, if not the whole, must certainly be by Holbein. I am in doubt as to the pictures heading the chapters, but think these most probably his, only following the usual style of such ill.u.s.trations to Boccaccio, and consequently more Italianised than the others. The initial letters present for the most part games of strength or skill.

There were various editions of Dante, including a very large folio edition of the _Commedia_, dated Florence, 1481, and the works of a number of Dante's contemporaries. Besides two or three editions of Shakspeare (the best being Dyce's, in 9 vols.), there were some of the Elizabethan dramatists. Coming to later poetry, I found a complete set of Gilfillan's _Poets_, in 45 vols. There was the curious little ma.n.u.script quarto (much like a s.h.i.+lling school-exercise book) labelled _Blake_, and this was, perhaps, by far the most valuable volume in the library. The contents and history of this book have already been given.

There were two editions of Gilchrist's _Blake_; complete (or almost complete) sets of the works of William Morris and A. C. Swinburne, inscribed in the authors' autographs--the copy of _Atalanta in Calydon_ being marked by the poet, "First copy; printed off before the dedication was in type." It may be remembered that Robert Brough translated Beranger's songs, and dedicated his volume in affectionate terms to Rossetti. The presentation copy of this book bore the following inscription:--"To D. G. Rossetti, meaning in my _heart_ what I have tried to say in print. Et. B. Brough. 1856." There were also several presentation copies from Robert Browning, Coventry Patmore, W. B. Scott, Sir Henry Taylor, Aubrey de Vere, Tom Taylor, Westland Marston, F.

Locker, A. O'Shaughnessy, Sir Theodore Martin; besides volumes bearing the names of nearly every well-known younger writer of prose or verse.

Five volumes of _Modern Painters_, together with _The Seven Lamps of Architecture_ and the tract on _Pre-Raphaelitism_, bore the author's name and Rossetti's in Mr. Ruskin's autograph. There was a fine copy in ten volumes of Violet-le-Duc's _Dictionnaire de l'Architecture_, and also of the _Biographie Generale_ in forty-six volumes, besides several dictionaries, concordances, and the like. There was also a copy of Fitzgerald's _Calderon_. Rossetti seemed to be a reader of Swedenborg, as White's book on the great mystic testified; also to have been at one time interested in the investigation of the phenomena of Spiritualism.

Of one writer of fiction he must have been an ardent reader, for there were at least 100 volumes by Alexandre Dumas. German writers were conspicuously absent, Goethe's _Faust_ and Carlyle's translation of _Wilhelm, Meister_, being about the only notable German works in the library. Rossetti did not appear to be a collector of first editions, nor did it seem that he attached much importance to the mere outsides of his books, but of the insides he was master indeed. The impression left upon the mind after a rapid survey of the poet-painter's library was that he was a careful, but slow and thorough reader (as was seen by the marginal annotations which nearly every volume contained), and that, though very far from affected by bibliomania, he was not without pride in the possession of rare and valuable books.

When I left the house at a late hour that morning Rossetti was not yet stirring, and so some months pa.s.sed before I saw him again. If I had tried to formulate the idea--or say sensation--that possessed me at the moment, I think I should have said, in a word or two, that outside the air breathed freely. Within, the gloom, the mediaeval furniture, the bra.s.s censers, sacramental cups, lamps; and crucifixes conspired, I thought, to make the atmosphere heavy and unwholesome. As for the man himself who was the central spirit amidst these anachronistic environments, he had, if possible, attached me yet closer to himself by contact. Before this I had been attracted to him in admiration of his gifts: but now I was drawn to him, in something very like pity, for his isolation and suffering. Not that at this time he consciously made demand of much compa.s.sion, and least of all from me. Health was apparently whole with him, his spirits were good, and his energies were at their best. He had not yet known the full bitterness of the shadowed valley: not yet learned what it was to hunger for any cheerful society that would relieve him of the burden of the flesh. All that came later.

Rossetti was one of the most magnetic of men, but it was not more his genius than his unhappiness that held certain of his friends by a spell.

CHAPTER VIII.

It was characteristic of Rossetti that he addressed me in the following terms probably before I had left his house: for the letter was, no doubt, written in that interval of sleeplessness which he had spoken of as his nightly visitant:

I forgot to say--Don't, please, spread details as to story of _Rose Mary_. I don't want it to be stale or to get forestalled in the travelling of report from mouth to mouth. I hope it won't be too long before you visit town again,--I will not for an instant question that you would then visit me also.

Six months or more intervened, however, before I was able to visit Rossetti again. In the meantime we corresponded as fully as before: the subject upon which we most frequently exchanged opinions being now the sonnet.

By-the-bye [he says], I cannot understand what you say of Milton's, Keats's, and Coleridge's sonnets. The last, it is true, was _always_ poor as a sonnetteer (I don't see much in the _Autumnal Moon_). My own only exception to this verdict (much as I adore Coleridge's genius) would be the ludicrous sonnet on _The House that Jack built_, which is a masterpiece in its way. I should not myself number the one you mention of Keats's among his best half-dozen (many of his are mere drafts, strange to say); and cannot at all enter into your verdict on those of Milton, which seem to me to be every one of exceptional excellence, though a few are even finer than the rest, notably, of course, the one you name. Pardon an egotistic sentence (in answer to what you say so generously of _Lost Days_), if I express an opinion that _Known in Vain_ and _Still-born Love_ may perhaps be said to head the series in value, though _Lost Days_ might be equally a favourite with me if I did not remember in what but too opportune juncture it was wrung out of me. I have a good number of sonnets for _The House of Life_ still in MS., which I have worked on with my best effort, and, I think, will fully sustain their place. These and other things I should like to show you whenever we meet again. The MS. vol.

I proposed to send is merely an old set of (chiefly) trifles, about which I should like an opinion as to whether any should be included in the future.

I had spoken of Keats's sonnet beginning

To one who has been long in city pent,

with its exquisite last lines--

E'en like the pa.s.sage of an angel's tear That falls through the clear ether silently,

reminding one of a less spiritual figure--

Kings like a golden jewel Down a golden stair.

After his bantering me, as of old he had done, on the use of long and crabbed words, I hinted that he was in honour bound to agree at least with my disparaging judgment upon _Tetrachordon_, if only because of the use of words that would "have made Quintillian stare."