Complete Poetical Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti

by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

  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:

  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) entitled 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 passage 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 principally, 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 worship 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 Shelley 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 Shelley.” 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 God 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 attitude 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 noble passage in the Ode to Duty, which runs:

  Stern Lawgiver! yet thou dost wear

  The Godhead’s most benignant grace;

  Nor know we anything so fair

  As is the smile upon thy face;

  Flowers laugh before thee on their beds;

  And fragrance in thy footing treads;

  Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong;

  And the most ancient heavens, through Thee, are

  fresh and strong.

  Mr. Watts spoke with enthusiasm of the strength and simplicity, the sonorousness and stately march of these lines; and numbered them, I think, among the noblest verses yet written, for every highest quality of style.

  But Rossetti was unyielding, and though he admitted the beauty of the passage, and was ungrudging in his tribute to another passage which I had instanced —

  O joy that in our embers —

  he would not allow that Wordsworth ever possessed a grasp of the great style, or that (despite the Ode on Immortality and the sonnet on Toussaint L’Ouverture, which he placed at the head of the poet’s work) vital lyric impulse was ever fully developed in his muse. He said:

  As to Wordsworth, no one regards the great Ode with more

  special and unique homage than I do, as a thing absolutely

  alone of its kind among all greatest things. I cannot say

  that anything else of his with which I have ever been

  familiar (and I suffer from long disuse of all familiarity

  with him) seems at all on a level with this.

  In all humility I regard his depreciatory opinion, not at all as a valuable example of literary judgment, but as indicative of a clear radical difference of poetic bias between the two poets, such as must in the same way have made Wordsworth resist Rossetti if he had appeared before him. I am the more confirmed in this view from the circumstance that Rossetti, throughout the period of my acquaintance with him, seemed to me always peculiarly and, if I may be permitted to say so without offence, strangely liable to Mr. Watts’s influence in his critical estimates, and that the case instanced was perhaps the only one in which I knew him to resist Mr. Watts’s opinion upon a matter of poetical criticism, which he considered to be almost final, as his letters to me, printed in Chapter VIII. of this volume, will show. I had a striking instance of this, and of the real modesty of the man whom I had heard and still hear spoken of as the most arrogant man of genius of his day, on one of the first occasions of my seeing him. He read out to me an additional stanza to the beautiful poem Cloud Confines: As he read it, I thought it very fine, and he evidently was very fond of it himself. But he surprised me by saying that he should not print it. On my asking him why, he said:

  “Watts, though he admits its beauty, thinks the poem would be better without it.”

  “Well, but you like it yourself,” said I.

  “Yes,” he replied; “but in a question of gain or loss to a poem, I feel that Watts must be right.”

  And the poem appeared in Ballads and Sonnets without the stanza in question. The same thing occurred with regard to the omission of the sonnet Nuptial Sleep from the new edition of the Poems in 1881. Mr. Watts took the view (to Rossetti’s great vexation at first) that this sonnet, howsoever perfect in structure and beautiful from the artistic point of view, was “out of place and altogether incongruous in a group of sonnets so entirely spiritual as The House of Life,” and Rossetti gave way: but upon the subject of Wordsworth in his relations to Coleridge, Keats, and Shelley, he was quite inflexible to the last.

  In a letter treating of other matters, Rossetti asked me if I thought “Christabel” really existed as a mediæval name, or existed at all earlier than Coleridge. I replied that I had not met with it earlier than the date of the poem. I thought Coleridge’s granddaughter must have been the first person to bear the name. The other names in the poem appear to belong to another family of names, — names with a different origin and range of expression, — Leoline, Géraldine, Roland, and most of all Bracy. It seemed to me very possible that Coleridge invented the name, but it was highly probable that he brought it to England from Germany, where, with Wordsworth, he visited Klopstock in 1798, about the period of the first part of the poem. The Germans have names of a kindred etymology and, even if my guess proved wide of the truth, it might still be a fact that the name had German relations. Another conjecture that seemed to me a reasonable one was that Coleridge evolved the name out of the incidents of the opening passages of the poem. The beautiful thing, not more from its beauty than its suggestiveness, suited his purpose exactly. Rossetti replied:

  Resuming the thread of my letter, I come to the question of

  the name Christabel, viz.: — as to whether it is to be found

  earlier than Coleridge. I have now realized afresh what I

  knew long ago, viz.: — that in the grossly garbled ballad of

  Syr Cauline, in Percy’s Reliques, there is a Ladye

  Chrystabelle, but as every stanza in which her name appears

  would seem certainly to be Percy’s own work, I suspect him

  to be the inventor of the name, which is assuredly a much

  better invention than any of the stanzas; and from this

  wretched source Coleridge probably enriched the sphere of

  symbolic nomenclature. However, a genuine source may turn

  up, but the name does not sound to me like a real one. As to

  a German origin, I do not know that language, but would not

  the second syllable be there the one accented? This seems to

  render the name shapeless and improbable.

  I mentioned an idea that once possessed me despotically. It was that where Coleridge says

  Her silken robe and inner vest

  Dropt to her feet, and full in view

  Behold! her bosom and half her side —

  A sight to dream of and not to tell,. . .

  Shield the Lady Christabel!

  he meant ultimately to show eyes in the bosom of the witch. I fancied that if the poet had worked out this idea in the second part, or in his never-compassed continuation, he must have electrified his readers. The first part of the poem is of course immeasurably superior in witchery to the second, despite two grand things in the latter — the passage on the severance of early friendships, and the conclusion; although the dexterity of hand (not to speak of the essential spirit of enchantment) which is everywhere present in the first part, and nowhere dominant in the second, exhibits itself not a little in the marvellous passage in which Géraldine bewitches Christabel. Touching some jocose allusion by Rossetti to the necessity which lay upon me to startle the world with a continuation of the poem based upon the lines of my conjectural scheme, I asked him if he knew that a continuation was actually published in Coleridge’s own paper, The Morning Post. It appeared about 1820, and was satirical of course — hitting off many peculiarities of versification, if no more. With Coleridge’s playful love of satirising himself anonymously, the continuation might even be his own. Rossetti said:

  I do not understand your early idea of eyes in the bosom

  of Géraldine. It is described as “that bosom old,” “that

  bosom cold,” which seems to show that its withered character

  as combined with Geraldine’s youth, was what shocked and

  warned Christabel. The first edition says —

  A sight to dream of, not to tell: —

  And she is to sleep with
Christabel!

  I dare say Coleridge altered this, because an idea arose,

  which I actually heard to have been reported as Coleridge’s

  real intention by a member of contemporary circles (P. G.

  Patmore, father of Coventry P. who conveyed the report to

  me) — viz., that Géraldine was to turn out to be a man!! I

  believe myself that the conclusion as given by Gillman from

  Coleridge’s account to him is correct enough, only not

  picturesquely worded. It does not seem a bad conclusion by

  any means, though it would require fine treatment to make it

  seem a really good one. Of course the first part is so

  immeasurably beyond the second, that one feels Chas. Lamb’s

  view was right, and it should have been abandoned at that

  point. The passage on sundered friendship is one of the

  masterpieces of the language, but no doubt was written quite

  separately and then fitted into Christabel. The two lines

  about Roland and Sir Leoline are simply an intrusion and an

  outrage. I cannot say that I like the conclusion nearly so

  well as this. It hints at infinite beauty, but somehow

  remains a sort of cobweb. The conception, and partly the

  execution, of the passage in which Christabel repeats by

  fascination the serpent-glance of Géraldine, is magnificent;

  but that is the only good narrative passage in part two. The

  rest seems to have reached a fatal facility of jingling, at

  the heels whereof followed Scott.

  There are, I believe, many continuations of Christabel. Tupper did one! I myself saw a continuation in childhood, long before I saw the original, and was all agog to see it for years. Our household was all of Italian, not English environment, and it was only when I went to school later that I began to ransack bookstalls. The continuation in question was by one Eliza Stewart, and appeared in a shortlived monthly thing called Smallwood’s Magazine, to which my father contributed some Italian poetry, and so it came into the house. I thought the continuation spirited then, and perhaps it may have been so. This must have been before 1840 I think.