I am very glad you were welcomed by dear staunch S———, asI felt sure you would be. He holds the honourable positionof being almost the only living art-critic who has reallyhimself worked through the art-schools practically, andlearnt to draw and paint. He is one of my oldest and bestfriends, of whom few can be numbered at my age, from causesonly 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, andnot with all, as good S——— shews. I have not seen himsince his return. I wrote him a line to thank him for hisfriendly reception of you, and he wrote in return to thankme for your acquaintance, and spoke very pleasantly of you.Your youth seems to have surprised him. I sent a letter ofhis to your address. I hope you may see more of him. . . .You mention something he said to you of me and mysurroundings. They are certainlyquietenough as fax asretirement goes, and I have often thought I should enjoy thepresence of a congenial and intellectual housefellow andboardfellow in this big barn of mine, which is actuallygoing to rack and ruin for want of use. But where to findthe welcome, the willing, and the able combined in one? . . .I was truly concerned to hear of the attack of ill-healthyou have suffered from, though you do not tell me its exactnature. I hope it was not accompanied by any such symptomsas you mentioned before. . . . I myself have had similarsymptoms (though not so fully as you describe), and havespat blood at intervals for years, but now think nothing ofit—nor indeed ever did,—waiting for further alarm signalswhich never came.. . . By-the-bye, I have since remembered that Burne Jones,many years ago, had such an experience as you spoke ofbefore—quite as bad certainly. He was weak for some timeafter, and has frequently been reminded in minor ways of it,but seems now (at about forty-six or forty-seven) to be moresettled in health and stronger, perhaps, than everbefore.... Your letter holds out the welcome probability ofmeeting 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. Youwill recognise the hole-and-cornerest of all existences; butI’ll read you a ballad or two, and have Brown’s report toback my certainty of liking you.... I would propose that youshould dine with me at 8.30 on the Monday of your visit, andspend the evening.... Better come at 5.30 to 6 (if feasibleto 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 inmy studio, and in my painting coat. I judge this will reachyou in time for a note to reachme. Telegrams I hate. Inhope 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 ofverbatimreproduction, 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.
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, entitledHand and Soul. In posting the latter, he said:
I don’t know if you ever saw a sort of story of mine calledHand and Soul. I send you one with this, as printed to goin my poems (though afterwards omitted, being, nevertheless,more poem than story). I printed it since in theFortnightly—and, I believe, abolished one or two extrasentimentalities. You may have seen it there. In case it’sstale, I enclose with this a sonnet whichmustbe new, forI only wrote it the other day.I have already, in the proper place in this volume, said howthe story first struck me. Perhaps I had never beforereading it seen quite so clearly the complete mission aswell as enforced limitations of true art. All the manysubtle gradations in the development of purpose were therebeautifully pictured in a little creation that was charmingin the full sense of a word that has wellnigh lost itscharm. For all such as cried out against pursuitsoriginating in what Keats had christened “the infant chamberof sensation,” and for all such as demanded that everythingwe do should be done to “strengthen God among men,” thestory provided this answer: “When at any time hath He criedunto thee, saying, ‘My son, lend me thy shoulder, for Ifall’?”The sonnet sent, and spoken of as having just been written(the letter bears post-mark February 1880), was the sonneton the sonnet. It is throughout beautiful and in two of itslines (those depicting the dark wharf and the black Styx)truly magnificent. It appears most to be valued, however, asaffording a clue to the attitude of mind adopted towardsthis form of verse by the greatest master of it in modernpoetry. I think it is Mr. Pater who says that a fine poem inmanuscript carries an aroma with it, and a sensation ofmusic. I must have enjoyed the pleasure of such a presencesomewhat frequently about this period, for many of the poemsthat afterwards found places in the second volume of balladsand sonnets were sent to me from time to time.I should like to know what were the three or four vols. onItalian poetry which you mentioned in a former letter, andwhich my book somewhat recalled to your mind. I was notaware of any such extensiveEnglishwork on the subject.Or do you perhaps mean Trucchi’s ItalianDugento Poésieinédite?I am sincerely delighted at your rare interest inwhat I have sent you—both the translations, story, etc.—Ienclose three printed pieces meant for my volume butomitted:—the ballad, because it deals trivially with a baseamour (it was writtenveryearly) and is therefore reallyreprehensible to some extent; the Shakspeare sonnet, becauseof its incongruity with the rest of the poems, and alsobecause of the insult (however jocose) to the worshipfulbody of tailors; and the political sonnet for reasons whichare plain enough, though the date at which I wrote it (notwithout feeling) involves now a prophetic value. In a MS.vol. I have a sonnet (1871)After the German Subjugation ofFrance, which enforces the prophecy by its fulfilment. Inthis MS. vol. are a few pieces which were the only ones Icopied in doubt as to their admission when I printed thepoems, but none of which did I admit. One day I ‘ll send itfor you to look at. It contains a few sonnets bearing onpublic matters, but only a few. Tell me what you think onreading my things. All you said in your letter of thismorning was very grateful to me. I have a fair amount by mein the way of later MS. which I may shew you some day whenwe meet. Meanwhile I feel that your energies are already infull swing—work coming on the heels of work—and that yourtime cannot long be deferred as regards your place as awriter.
The ballad of which Rossetti here speaks as dealing trivially with a base amour is entitledDennis 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 asChevy ChaseandSir Patrick Spens. Mr. Symonds was right in his eloquent comments (Macmillan’s Magazine, February 1882), so far as they concern the absence fromRose Mary, The King’s Tragedy, and The White Shipof 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 asChristabelandThe 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 inThe Staff and Scrip and Stratton Water. Dennis Shandis 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 earlyAcademy, 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 deathShared 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 beneathRank also singly—the supreme unhung?Lo! Sheppard, Turpin, pleading with black tongueThis viler thief’s unsuffocated breath!We ‘U search thy glossary, Shakspeare! whence almost,And whence alone, some name shall be reveal’dFor this deaf drudge, to whom no length of earsSufficed to catch the music of the spheres;Whose soul is carrion now,—too mean to yieldSome tailor’s ninth allotment of a ghost.Stratford-on-Avon.
The other sonnets referred to, those, namely, on theFrench Liberation of Italy, and theGerman 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 ofSister 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 thebestedition (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 asThe 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 firstJenny, 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 calledThe 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., andin explanation of this signature Rossetti wrote on his owncopy the following characteristic note:—“The initials asabove 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 toSister 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 hisPoems, 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 ofSister 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. LikeThe Broken Heartof 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 withpleasurable care. At present I send you the Tauchnitzedition of my things. The bound copy is hideous, but moreconvenient—the other pretty. You will find a good manythings bettered (I believe) even on thelatestEnglishedition. I did not remember that the line you quote fromSister Helenappeared in the new form at all in an Englishissue. I am greatly pleased at your thinking it, as I do,quite a transfiguring change... The next point I have markedin your letter is that about the additions toSisterHelen. Of course I knew that your hair must arise from yourscalp in protest. But what should you say if Keith of Ewernwere a three days’ bridegroom—if the spell had begun on thewedding-morning—and if the bride herself became the lastpleader for mercy? I fancy you will see your way now. Theculminating, irresistible provocation helps, I think, tohumanize Helen, besides lifting the tragedy to a yet sternerheight.
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 abandonedbrideof 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 AmenStuck 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 inSister Helencould notwell (with all its fine suggestiveness) be likely to meetexactly a reality which had not been submitted to your eyein the verses themselves. It is thebride of Keithwho isthe last pleader—as vainly as the others, and with a yetmore exulting development of vengeance in the forsakenwitch. The only acknowledgment by her of a mutual misery isstill found in the line you spotted as so great a gainbefore, and in the last line she speaks. I ought to havesent the stanzas to explain them properly, but have somereluctance to ventilate them at present, much as I shouldlike the opportunity of reading them to you. They will meetyour eye in due course, and I am sure of your approval alsoas regards their value to the ballad.... Don’t let thechanges inHelenget wind overmuch. I want them to be newwhen published. Answer this when you can. I like gettingyour 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 contemplatedMichael 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 prefacedSister Helenwith 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 theadditions made thus late to the ballad ofS. H.My bestexcuse is that I believe some will wonder with myself thatsuch 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 wasprinted in a thing calledThe Düsseldorf Annualin (Ithink) 1853—published in Germany. {*}* In the same private copy of the Poems the followingexplanatory passage was written over the much-discussedsonnet, entitled, The Monochord:—“That sublimated mood ofthe soul in which a separate essence of itself seems as itwere to oversoar and survey it.” Neither the style nor thesubstance is characteristic of Rossetti, and though I do notat the moment remember to have met with the passageelsewhere, I doubt not it is a quotation. That quotationmarks are employed is not in itself evidence of much moment,for Rossetti had Coleridge’s enjoyment of a literarypractical joke, and on one occasion prefixed to a story inmanuscript a long passage on noses purporting to be fromTristram Shandy, but which is certainly not discoverable inSterne’s story.
The next letter I shall quote appears to explain itself:
There is a last point in your long letter which I have notnoticed, though it interested me much: viz., what you say ofyour lecture on my poetry; your idea of possibly returningto and enlarging it would, if carried out, be welcome to me.I suppose ere long I must get together such additional workas I have to show—probably a good deal added to the oldvol. (which has been for some time out of print) and onelonger poem by itself.The House of Life, when nextissued, will I trust be doubled in number of sonnets; it isnearly so already. Your writing that essay in one day, andthe information as to subsequent additions, I noted, andshould like to see the passage onJennywhich you have notyet used, if extant. The time taken in composition remindsme of the fact (so long ago!) that I wrote the tale ofHandand Soul(with the exception of an opening page or two) allin one night in December 1849, beginning I suppose about 2A.M. and ending about 7. In such a case a landscape and skyall unsurmised open gradually in the mind—a sort ofspiritualTurner, among whose hills one ranges and inwhose waters one strikes out at unknown liberty; but I havefound this only in nightlong work, which I have seldomattempted, for it leaves one entirely broken, and this statewas mine when I described the like of it at the close of thestory, ah! once again, how long ago! I have thought ofincluding this story in next issue of poems, but amuncertain. What think you?
It seemed certain thatHand and Soulought 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 ofTetrachordon, 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 Soulis 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 ofHand and Soul. It was to be entitledSt. 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 inHand 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 thanHand 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’shabits, he certainly never enjoyed any “rivers of morningair” at all, unless they were such as visited him in adarkened 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 myselfwas born on old May-Day (12th), in the year (1828) afterthat in which Blake died.... You were born, in fact, just asI was giving up poetry at about 25, on finding that itimpeded attention to what constituted another aim and alivelihood into the bargain,i.e.painting. From that dateup to the year when I published my poems, I wrote extremelylittle,—I might almost say nothing, except the renovatedJennyin 1858 or ‘59. To this again I added a passage ortwo 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 theNew 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 theCatholic Worldarticle 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 hisAveonly 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 inThe Catholic MagazineI 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 editorialwe, which at the fag-end of passages sometimes dropped intoI. [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 kinglyweis tripped up by the guiltyIin many places.] Rossetti wrote:
I am glad you liked theCatholic Worldarticle, 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 theDante and Circle, but don’t know if it was ever received or reviewed. As you have the vols, ofFortnightly, look up a little poem of mine called theCloud 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: