Complete Poetical Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Page 67
I am truly delighted to hear how young you are. In original
work, a man does some of his best things by your time of
life, though he only finds it out in a rage much later, at
some date when he expected to know no longer that he had
ever done them. Keats hardly died so much too early — not at
all if there had been any danger of his taking to the modern
habit eventually — treating material as product, and shooting
it all out as it comes. Of course, however, he wouldn’t; he
was getting always choicer and simpler, and my favourite
piece in his works is La Belle Dame Sans Merci — I suppose
about his last. As to Shelley, it is really a mercy that he
has not been hatching yearly universes till now. He might, I
suppose; for his friend Trelawny still walks the earth
without great-coat, stockings, or underclothing, this
Christmas (1879). In criticism, matters are different, as to
seasons of production.... I am writing hurriedly and
horribly in every sense. Write on the subject again and I’ll
try to answer better. All greetings to you.
P.S. — I think your reference to Keats new, and on a high
level It calls back to my mind an adaptation of his self-
chosen epitaph which I made in my very earliest days of
boyish rhyming, when I was rather proud to be as cockney as
Keats could be. Here it is, —
Through one, years since damned and forgot
Who stabbed backs by the Quarter,
Here lieth one who, while Time’s stream
Still runs, as God hath taught her,
Bearing man’s fame to men, hath writ
His name upon that water.
Well, the rhyme is not so bad as Keats’s
Ear
Of Goddess of Theræa! —
nor (tell it not in Gath!) as —
I wove a crown before her
For her I love so dearly,
A garland for Lenora!
Is it possible the laurel crown should now hide a venerated
and impeccable ear which was once the ear of a cockney?
This letter was written in 1879, and the opening clauses of it were no doubt penned under the impression, then strong on Rossetti’s mind, that his first volume of poems would prove to be his only one; but when, within two years afterwards he completed Rose Mary, and wrote The King’s Tragedy and The White Ship, this accession of material dissipated the notion that a man does much his best work before twenty-five. It can hardly escape the reader that though Rossetti’s earlier volume displayed a surprising maturity, the subsequent one exhibited as a whole infinitely more power and feeling, range of sympathy, and knowledge of life. The poet’s dramatic instinct developed enormously in the interval between the periods of the two books, and, being conscious of this, Rossetti used to say in his later years that he would never again write poems as from his own person.
You say an excellent thing [he writes] when you ask, “Where
can we look for more poetry per page than Keats furnishes?”
It is strange that there is not yet one complete edition of
him. {*} No doubt the desideratum (so far as care and
exhaustiveness go), will be supplied when
Forman’s edition appears. He is a good appreciator too, as I
have reason to say. You will think it strange that I have
not seen the Keats love-letters, but I mean to do so.
However, I am told they add nothing to one’s idea of his
epistolary powers.... I hear sometimes from Buxton Forman,
and was sending him the other day an extract (from a book
called The Unseen World) which doubtless bears on the
superstition which Keats intended to develope in his lovely
Eve of St. Mark — a fragment which seems to me to rank with
La Belle Dame Sans Merci, as a clear advance in direct
simplicity.... You ought to have my recent Keats sonnet, so
I send it. Your own plan, for one on the same subject, seems
to me most beautiful. Do it at once. You will see that mine
is again concerned with the epitaph, and perhaps my reviving
the latter in writing you was the cause of the sonnet.
* Rossetti afterwards admitted in conversation that the
Aldine Edition seemed complete, though I think he did not
approve of the chronological arrangement therein adopted; at
least he thought that arrangement had many serious
disadvantages.
Rossetti formed a very different opinion of Keats’s love-letters, when, a year later, he came to read them. At first he shared the general view that letters so intimes should never have been made public. Afterwards the book had irresistible charms for him, from the first page whereon his old friend, Mr. Bell Scott, has vigorously etched Severn’s drawing of the once redundant locks of rich hair, dank and matted over the forehead cold with the death-dew, down to the last line of the letterpress. He thought Mr. Forman’s work admirably done, and as for the letters themselves, he believed they placed Keats indisputably among the highest masters of English epistolary style. He considered that all Keats’s letters proved him to be no weakling, and that whatever walk he had chosen he must have been a master. He seemed particularly struck with the apparently intuitive perception of Shakspeare’s subtlest meanings, which certain of the letters display. In a note he said:
Forman gave me a copy of Keats’s letters to Fanny Brawne.
The silhouette given of the lady is sadly disenchanting, and
may be the strongest proof existing of how much a man may
know about abstract Beauty without having an artist’s eye
for the outside of it.
The Keats sonnet, as first shown to me, ran as follows:
The weltering London ways where children weep, —
Where girls whom none call maidens laugh, where gain,
Hurrying men’s steps, is yet by loss o’erta’en: —
The bright Castalian brink and Latinos’ steep: —
Such were his paths, till deeper and more deep,
He trod the sands of Lethe; and long pain,
Weary with labour spurned and love found vain,
In dead Rome’s sheltering shadow wrapped his sleep.
O pang-dowered Poet, whose reverberant lips
And heart-strung lyre awoke the moon’s eclipse, —
Thou whom the daisies glory in growing o’er, —
Their fragrance clings around thy name, not writ,
But rumour’d in water, while the fame of it
Along Time’s flood goes echoing evermore.
I need hardly say that this sonnet seemed to me extremely noble in sentiment, and in music a glorious volume of sound. I felt, however, that it would be urged against it that it did not strike the keynote of the genius of Keats; that it would be said that in all the particulars in which Rossetti had truthfully and pathetically described London, Keats was in rather than of it; and that it would be affirmed that Keats lived in a fairy world of his own inventing, caring little for the storm and stress of London life. On the other hand, I knew it could be replied that Keats was not indifferent to the misery of city life; that it bore heavily upon him; that it came out powerfully and very sadly in his Ode to the Nightingale, and that it may have been from sheer torture in the contemplation of it that he fled away to a poetic world of his own creating. Moreover, Rossetti’s sonnet touched the life, rather than the genius, of Keats, and of this it struck the keynote in the opening lines. I ventured to think that the second and third lines wanted a little clarifying in the relation in which they stood. They seemed to be a sudden focussing of the laughter and weeping previously mentioned, rather than, what they were meant to be, a natural
and necessary equipoise showing the inner life of Keats as contrasted with his outer life. To such an objection as this, Rossetti said:
I am rather aghast for my own lucidity when I read what you
say as to the first quatrain of my Keats sonnet. However, I
always take these misconceptions as warnings to the Muse,
and may probably alter the opening as below:
The weltering London ways where children weep
And girls whom none call maidens laugh, — strange road,
Miring his outward steps who inly trode
The bright Castalian brink and Latinos’ steep: —
Even such his life’s cross-paths: till deathly deep
He toiled through sands of Lethe, etc.
I ‘ll say more anent Keats anon.
About the period of this portion of the correspondence (1880) I was engaged reading up old periodicals dating from 1816 to 1822. My purpose was to get at first-hand all available data relative to the life of Keats. I thought I met with a good deal of fresh material, and as the result of my reading I believed myself able to correct a few errors as to facts into which previous writers on the subject had fallen. Two things at least I realised — first, that Keats’s poetic gift developed very rapidly, more rapidly perhaps than that of Shelley; and, next, that Keats received vastly more attention and appreciation in his day than is commonly supposed. I found it was quite a blunder to say that the first volume of miscellaneous poems fell flat. Lord Houghton says in error that the book did not so much as seem to signal the advent of a new Cockney poet! It is a fact, however, that this very book, in conjunction with one of Shelley’s and one of Hunt’s, all published 1816-17, gave rise to the name “The Cockney School of Poets,” which was invented by the writer signing “Z.” in Blackwood in the early part of 1818. Nor had Keats to wait for the publication of the volume before attaining to some poetic distinction. At the close of 1816, an article, under the head of “Young Poets,” appeared in The Examiner, and in this both Shelley and Keats were dealt with. Then The Quarterly contained allusions to him, though not by name, in reviews of Leigh Hunt’s work, and Blackwood mentioned him very frequently in all sorts of places as “Johnny Keats” — all this (or much of it) before he published anything except occasional sonnets and other fugitive poems in The Examiner and elsewhere. And then when Endymion appeared it was abundantly reviewed. The Edinburgh reviewers had nothing on it (the book cannot have been sent to them, for in 1820 they say they have only just met with it), and I could not find anything in the way of original criticism in The Examiner; but many provincial papers (in Manchester, Exeter, and elsewhere) and some metropolitan papers retorted on The Quarterly. All this, however, does not disturb the impression which (Lord Houghton and Mr. W. M. Rossetti notwithstanding) I have been from the first compelled to entertain, namely, that “labour spurned” did more than all else to kill Keats in 1821.
Most men who rightly know the workings of their own minds will agree that an adverse criticism rankles longer than a flattering notice soothes; and though it be shown that Keats in 1820 was comparatively indifferent to the praise of The Edinburgh, it cannot follow that in 1818 he must have been superior to the blame of The Quarterly. It is difficult to see why a man may not be keenly sensitive to what the world says about him, and yet retain all proper manliness as a part of his literary character. Surely it was from the mistaken impression that this could not be, and that an admission of extreme sensitiveness to criticism exposed Keats to a charge of effeminacy that Lord Houghton attempted to prove, against the evidence of all immediate friends, against the publisher’s note to Hyperion, against the | poet’s self-chosen epitaph, and against all but one or two of the most self-contained of his letters, that the soul of Keats was so far from being “snuffed out by an article,” that it was more than ordinarily impervious to hostile comment, even when it came in the shape of rancorous abuse. In all discussion of the effects produced upon Keats by the reviews in Blackwood and The Quarterly, let it be remembered, first, that having wellnigh exhausted his small patrimony, Keats was to be dependent upon literature for his future subsistence; next, that Leigh Hunt attempted no defence of Keats when the bread was being taken out of his mouth, and that Keats felt this neglect and remarked upon it in a letter in which he further cast some doubt upon the purity of Hunt’s friendship. Hunt, after Keats’s death, said in reference to this: “Had he but given me the hint!” The hint, forsooth! Moreover, I can find no sort of allusion in The Examiner for 1821, to the death of Keats. I told Rossetti that by the reading of the periodicals of the time, I formed a poor opinion of Hunt. Previously I was willing to believe in his unswerving loyalty to the much greater men who were his friends, but even that poor confidence in him must perforce be shaken when one finds him silent at a moment when Keats most needs his voice, and abusive when Coleridge is a common subject of ridicule. It was all very well for Hunt to glorify himself in the borrowed splendour of Keats’s established fame when the poet was twenty years dead, and to make much of his intimacy with Coleridge after the homage of two generations had been offered him, but I know of no instance (unless in the case of Shelley) in which Hunt stood by his friends in the winter of their lives, and gave them that journalistic support which was, poor man, the only thing he ever had to give, whatever he might take. I have, however, heard Mr. H. A. Bright (one of Hawthorne’s intimate friends in England) say that no man here impressed the American romancer so much as Hunt for good qualities, both of heart and head. But what I have stated above, I believe to be facts; and I have gathered them at first-hand, and by the light of them I do not hesitate to say that there is no reason to believe that it was Keats’s illness alone that caused him to regard Hunt’s friendship with suspicion. It is true, however, that when one reads Hunt’s letter to Severn at Borne, one feels that he must be forgiven. On this pregnant subject Rossetti wrote:
Thanks for yours received to-day, and for all you say with
so much more kind solicitousness than the matter deserved,
about the opening of the Keats sonnet. I have now realized
that the new form is a gain in every way; and am therefore
glad that, though arising in accident, I was led to make the
change.... All you say of Keats shows that you have been
reading up the subject with good results. I fancy it would
hardly be desirable to add the sonnets you speak of (as
being worthless) at this date, though they might be valuable
for quotation as to the course of his mental and physical
state. I do not myself think that any poems now included
should be removed, but the reckless and tasteless plan of
the gatherings hitherto (in which the Nightingale and other
such masterpieces are jostled indiscriminately, with such
wretched juvenile trash as Lines to some Ladies on
receiving a Shelly etc), should of course be amended, and
the rubbish (of which there is a fair quantity), removed to
a “Juvenile” or other such section. It is a curious fact
that among a poet’s early writings, some will really be