Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti Part 6

"Oh! might I but hear her soul's blithe tune, Little brother!"

(O Mother, Mary Mother, Her woe's dumb cry, between h.e.l.l 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 h.e.l.l 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 pa.s.sages 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 pa.s.sing 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 Dusseldorf Annual_ in (I think) 1853--published in Germany. {*}

* In the same private copy of the Poems the following explanatory pa.s.sage was written over the much-discussed sonnet, ent.i.tled, 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 pa.s.sage 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 ma.n.u.script a long pa.s.sage 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 pa.s.sage 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 ant.i.thesis 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 ant.i.thesis) 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 d.a.m.ning 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 ent.i.tle it to a place as a sister art with poetry. Milton, however, although he wrote the n.o.blest 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 Sh.e.l.ley (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 ent.i.tled _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 finis.h.i.+ng 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 ma.n.u.script 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, superst.i.tion 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sage 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, impa.s.sioned, 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 const.i.tuted 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 pa.s.sage or two when publis.h.i.+ng 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 pa.s.sing 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 mediaeval Catholicism. Perhaps Catholicism is itself essentially mediaeval, and perhaps a man cannot possibly be, what the _Catholic World_ article called Rossetti, a "mediaeval 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 a.s.suredly 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 att.i.tude 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 f.a.g-end of pa.s.sages 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 p.r.o.noun 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 a.s.surance 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) ent.i.tled _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 pa.s.sage 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 princ.i.p.ally, 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 wors.h.i.+p 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 Sh.e.l.ley 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 Sh.e.l.ley." 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 G.o.d 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 att.i.tude 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 n.o.ble pa.s.sage in the _Ode to Duty_, which runs: