Old Familiar Faces Part 4

III.

In his memoir of his brother, Mr. William Michael Rossetti thus makes mention of a ballad left by the poet which still remains unpublished:-

"It [the ballad] is most fully worthy of publication, but has not been included in Rossetti's 'Collected Works,' because he gave the MS. to his devoted friend Mr. Theodore Watts, with whom alone now rests the decision of presenting it or not to the public."

And he afterwards mentions certain sonnets on the Sphinx, also in my possession.

With the most generous intentions my dear and loyal friend William Rossetti has here brought me into trouble.

Naturally such an announcement as the above has excited great curiosity among admirers of Rossetti, and I am frequently receiving letters-some of them cordial enough, but others far from cordial-asking, or rather demanding, to know the reason why important poems of Rossetti's have for so long a period been withheld from the public. In order to explain the delay I must first give two extracts from Mr. Hall Caine's picturesque 'Recollections of Rossetti,' published in 1882:-

"The end was drawing near, and we all knew the fact. Rossetti had actually taken to poetical composition afresh, and had written a facetious ballad (conceived years before), of the length of 'The White Ship,' called 'Jan Van Hunks,' embodying an eccentric story of a Dutchman's wager to smoke against the devil. This was to appear in a miscellany of stories and poems by himself and Mr. Theodore Watts, a project which had been a favourite one of his for some years, and in which he now, in his last moments, took a revived interest, strange and strong."

"On Wednesday morning, April 5th, I went into the bedroom to which he had for some days been confined, and wrote out to his dictation two sonnets which he had composed on a design of his called 'The Sphinx,'

and which he wished to give, together with the drawing and the ballad before described, to Mr. Watts for publication in the volume just mentioned. On the Thursday morning I found his utterance thick, and his speech from that cause hardly intelligible."

As the facts in connexion with this project exhibit, with a force that not all the words of all his detractors can withstand, the splendid generosity of the poet's nature, I only wish that I had made them public years ago, Rossetti (whose power of taking interest in a friend's work Mr. Joseph Knight has commented upon) had for years been urging me to publish certain writings of mine with which he was familiar, and for years I had declined to do so-declined for two simple reasons: first, though I liked writing for its own sake-indulged in it, indeed, as a delightful luxury-to enter formally the literary arena, and to go through that struggle which, as he himself used to say, "had never yet brought comfort to any poet, but only sorrow," had never been an ambition of mine; and, secondly, I was only too conscious how biased must the judgment be of a man whose affections were so strong as his when brought to bear upon the work of a friend.

In order at last to achieve an end upon which he had set his heart, he proposed that he and I should jointly produce the volume to which Mr.

Hall Caine refers, and that he should enrich it with reproductions of certain drawings of his, including the 'Sphinx' (now or lately in the possession of Mr. William Rossetti) and crayons and pencil drawings in my own possession ill.u.s.trating poems of mine-those drawings, I mean, from that new model chosen by me whose head Leighton said must be the loveliest ever drawn, who sat for 'The Spirit of the Rainbow,' and that other design which William Sharp christened 'Forced Music.'

In order to conquer my most natural reluctance to see a name so unknown as mine upon a t.i.tle-page side by side with a name so ill.u.s.trious as his, he (or else it was his generous sister Christina, I forget which) italianized the words Walter Theodore Watts into "Gualtiero Teodoro Gualtieri"-a name, I may add in pa.s.sing, which appears as an inscription on one at least of the valuable Christmas presents he made me, a rare old Venetian Boccaccio. My portion of the book was already in existence, but that which was to have been the main feature of the volume, a ballad of Rossetti's to be called 'Michael Scott's Wooing' (which had no relation to early designs of his bearing that name), hung fire for this reason: the story upon which the ballad was to have been based was discovered to be not an old legend adapted and varied by the Romanies, as I had supposed when I gave it to him, but simply the Ettrick Shepherd's novelette 'Mary Burnet'; and the project then rested in abeyance until that last illness at Birchington painted so graphically and pathetically by Mr. Hall Caine.

For some reason quite inscrutable to the late John Marshall, who attended him, and to all of us, this old idea seized upon his brain; so much so, indeed, that Marshall hailed it as a good omen, and advised us to foster it, which we did with excellent results, as will be seen by referring to the very last entry in his mother's touching diary as lately printed by Mr. W. M. Rossetti: "March 28, Tuesday. Mr. Watts came down. Gabriel rallied marvellously."

Though the ballad, in Rossetti's own writing, has ever since remained in my possession, as have also the two sonnets in the MS. of another friend who has since, I am delighted to know, achieved fame for himself, no one who enjoyed the intimate friendship of Rossetti need be told that his death took from me all heart to publish.

Time, however, is the suzerain before whom every king, even Sorrow himself, bows at last. The rights of Rossetti's admirers can no longer be set at nought, and I am making arrangements to publish within the present year 'Jan Van Hunks' and the 'Sphinx Sonnets,' the former of which will show a new and, I think, unexpected side of Rossetti's genius.

IV.

It is a sweet and comforting thought for every poet that, whether or not the public cares during his life to read his verses, it will after his death care very much to read his letters to his mistress, to his wife, to his relatives, to his friends, to his butcher, and to his baker. And some letters are by that same public held to be more precious than others. If, for instance, it has chanced that during the poet's life he, like Rossetti, had to borrow thirty shillings from a friend, that is a circ.u.mstance of especial piquancy. The public likes-or rather it demands-to know all about that borrowed cash. Hence it behoves the properly equipped editor who understands his duty to see that not one allusion to it in the poet's correspondence is omitted. If he can also show what caused the poet to borrow those thirty shillings-if he can by learned annotations show whether the friend in question lent the sum willingly or unwillingly, conveniently or inconveniently-if he can show whether the loan was ever repaid, and if repaid when-he will be a happy editor indeed. Then he will find a large and a grateful public to whom the mood in which the poet sat down to write 'The Blessed Damosel' is of far less interest than the mood in which he borrowed thirty shillings.

We do not charge the editor of this volume {104} with exhibiting unusual want of taste. On the whole, he is less irritating to the poetical student than those who have laboured in kindred "fields of literature."

Indeed, we do not so much blame the editors of such books as we blame the public, whose coa.r.s.e and vulgar mouth is always agape for such pabulum.

The writer of this review possesses an old circulating-library copy of a book containing some letters of Coleridge. One page, and one only, is greatly disfigured by thumb marks. It is the page on which appears, not some precious hint as to the conclusion of 'Christabel,' but a domestic missive of Coleridge's ordering broad beans for dinner.

If, then, the name of those readers who take an interest in broad beans is legion compared with the name of those who take an interest in 'Kubla Khan,' is not the wise editor he who gives all due attention to the poet's favourite vegetable? Those who will read with avidity Rossetti's allusion to his wife's confinement in the letter in which he tells Allingham that "the child had been dead for two or three weeks" will laugh to scorn the above remarks, and as they are in the majority the laugh is with them.

The editor of this volume laments that Allingham's letters to Rossetti are beyond all editorial reach. But who has any right to ask for Allingham's private letters? Rossetti, who was strongly against the printing of private letters, had the wholesome practice of burning all his correspondence. This he did at periodical holocausts-memorable occasions when the coruscations of the poet's wit made the sparks from the burning paper seem pale and dull. He died away from home, or not a sc.r.a.p of correspondence would have been left for the publishers.

Although the "public" acknowledges no duties towards the man of literary or artistic genius, but would shrug up its shoulders or look with dismay at being asked to give five pounds in order to keep a poet from the workhouse, the moment a man of genius becomes famous the public becomes aware of certain rights in relation to him. Strangely enough, these rights are recognized more fully in the literary arena than anywhere else, and among them the chief appears to be that of reading an author's private letters. One advantage-and surely it is a very great one-that the "writing man" has over the man of action is this: that, while the portrait of the man of action has to be painted, if painted at all, by the biographer, the writing man paints his own portrait for himself.

And as, in a deep sense, every biographer is an inventor like the novelist-as from the few facts that he is able to collect he infers a character-the man of action, after he is dead, is at the mercy of every man who writes his life. Is not Alexander the Great no less a figment of another man's brain than Achilles, or Macbeth, or Mr. Pickwick? But a poet, howsoever artistic, howsoever dramatic, the form of his work may be, is occupied during his entire life in painting his own portrait. And if it were not for the intervention of the biographer, the reminiscence writer, or the collector of letters for publication, our conception of every poet would be true and vital according to the intelligence with which we read his work.

This is why, of all English poets, Shakespeare is the only one whom we do thoroughly know-unless perhaps we should except his two great contemporaries Webster and Marlowe. Steevens did not exaggerate when he said that all we know of Shakespeare's outer life is that he was born at Stratford-on-Avon, married, went to London, wrote plays, returned to Stratford, and died. Owing to this circ.u.mstance (and a blessed one it is) we can commune with the greatest of our poets undisturbed. We know how Shakespeare confronted every circ.u.mstance of this mysterious life-we know how he confronted the universe, seen and unseen-we know to what degree and in what way he felt every human pa.s.sion. There is no careless letter of his, thank G.o.d! to give us a wrong impression of him. There is no record of his talk at the Mermaid, the Falcon, or the Apollo saloon to make readers doubtful whether his printed utterances truly represent him.

Would that the will had been destroyed! then there would have been no talk about the "second-best bed" and the like insane gabble. Suppose, by ill chance, a batch of his letters to Anna Hathaway had been preserved.

Is it not a moral certainty that they would have been as uninteresting as the letters of Coleridge, of Scott, of d.i.c.kens, of Rossetti, and of Rossetti's sister?

Why are the letters of literary men apt to be so much less interesting than those of other people? Is it not because, the desire to express oneself in written language being universal, this desire with people outside the literary cla.s.s has to be of necessity exercised in letter-writing? Is it not because, where there is no other means of written expression than that of letter-writing, the best efforts of the letter-writer are put into the composition, as the best writing of the essayist is put into his essays? However this might have been in Shakespeare's time, the half-conscious, graphic power of the non-literary letter-writer of to-day is often so great that if all the letters written in English by non-literary people, especially letters written from abroad to friends at home in the year 1897, {108} were collected, and the cream of them extracted and printed, the book would be the most precious literary production that the year has to show. If, on the other hand, the letters of contemporary English authors were collected in the same way, the poverty of the book would be amazing as compared with the published writings of the authors. With regard to d.i.c.kens's letters, indeed, the contrast between their commonplace, colourless style and the pregnancy of his printed utterances makes the writing in his books seem forced, artificial, unnatural.

The same may in some degree be said of such letters of Rossetti as have hitherto been published. The charming family letters printed by his brother come, of course, under a different category. With the exception of these, perhaps the letters in the volume before us are the most interesting Rossetti letters that have been printed. Yet it is astonishing how feeble they are in giving the reader an idea of Rossetti himself. And this gives birth to the question: Do we not live at a time when the unfairness of printing an author's letters is greater than it ever was before? To go no further back than the early years of the present century, the facilities of locomotion were then few, friends were necessarily separated from each other by long intervals of time, and letters were a very important part of intercommunication, consequently it might be expected that even among authors a good deal of a man's individuality would be expressed in his letters. But even at that period it was only a quite exceptional nature like that of Charles Lamb which adequately expressed itself in epistolary form. Keats's letters, no doubt, are full of good sense and good criticism, but taking them as a body, including the letters to f.a.n.n.y Brawne, we think it were better if they had been totally destroyed. As to Byron's letters, they, of course, are admirable in style and full of literary life, but their very excellence shows that his natural mode of expression was brilliant, slashing prose. But if it was unfair to publish the letters of Coleridge and Keats, what shall we say of the publication of letters written by the authors of our own day, when, owing to an entire change in the conditions of life, no one dreams of putting into his letters anything of literary interest?

When Rossetti died he was, as regards the public, owing to his exclusiveness, much in the same position as Shakespeare has always been.

The picture of Rossetti that lived in the public mind was that of a poet and painter of extraordinary imaginative intensity and magic, whose personality, as romantic as his work, influenced all who came in contact with him. He was, indeed, the only romantic figure in the imagination of the literary and art world of his time. It seemed as if in his very name there was an unaccountable music. The present writer well remembers being at a dinner-party many years ago when the late Lord Leighton was talking in his usual delightful way. His conversation was specially attended to only by his interlocutor, until the name of Rossetti fell from his lips. Then the general murmur of tongues ceased. Everybody wanted to hear what was being said about the mysterious poet-painter.

Thus matters stood when Rossetti died. Within forty-eight hours of his death the many-headed beast clamoured for its rights. Within forty-eight hours of his death there was a leading article in an important newspaper on the subject of his suspiciousness as the result of chloral-drinking.

And from that moment the romance has been rubbed off the picture as effectually by many of those who have written about him as the bloom is fingered off of a clumsily gathered peach.

But the reader will say, "Truth is great, and must prevail. The picture of Rossetti that now exists in the public mind is the true one. The former picture was a lie." But here the reader will be much mistaken.

The romantic picture which existed in the public mind during Rossetti's life was the true one; the picture that now exists of him is false.

Does any one want to know what kind of a man was the painter of 'Dante's Dream' and the poet of 'The Blessed Damosel,' let him wipe out of his mind most of what has been written about him, let him forget if he can most of the Rossetti letters that have been published, and let him read the poet's poems and study the painter's pictures, and he will know Rossetti-not, indeed, so thoroughly as we know Shakespeare and aeschylus and Sophocles, but as intimately as it is possible to know any man whose biography is written only in his works.

It must be admitted, however, that for those who had a personal knowledge of Rossetti some of the letters in this volume will have an interest, owing to the evidence they afford of that authorial generosity which was one of his most beautiful characteristics. His disinterested appreciation of the work of his contemporaries sets him apart from all the other poets of his time and perhaps of any other time. To wax eloquent in praise of this and that ill.u.s.trious name, and thus to claim a kind of kinship with it, is a very different thing from Rossetti's n.o.ble championship of a name, whether that of a friend or otherwise, which has never emerged from obscurity. It is perhaps inevitable and in the nature of things that most poets are too much absorbed in their own work to have time to interest themselves in the doings of their fellow-workers.

But, with regard to Rossetti, he could feel, and often did feel, as deep an interest in the work of another man as in his own. There was no trouble he would not take to aid a friend in gaining recognition. This it was more than anything else which endeared him to all his friends, and made them condone those faults of his which ever since his death have been so freely discussed. The editor of this volume quotes this sentence from Skelton's 'Table-Talk of Shirley':-

"I have preserved a number of Rossetti's letters, and there is barely one, I think, which is not mainly devoted to warm commendation of obscure poets and painters-obscure at the time of writing, but of whom more than one has since become famous."

Nor was his interest in other men's work confined to that of his personal friends. His discovery of Browning's 'Pauline,' of Charles Wells, and of the poems of Ebenezer Jones may be cited as instances of this. Moreover, he was always looking out in magazines-some of them of the most obscure kind-for good work. And if he was rewarded, as he sometimes was, by coming upon precious things that might otherwise have been lost, his heart was rejoiced.

One day, having turned into a coffee-house in Chancery Lane to get a cup of coffee, he came upon a number of _Reynolds's Miscellany_, and finding there a poem called 'A Lover's Pastime,' he saw at once its extraordinary beauty, and enclosed it in a letter to Allingham. In this case, however, he unfortunately did not make his usual efforts to discover the authorship of a poem that pleased him; and a pity it is, for the poem is one of the loveliest lyrics that have been written in modern times. We hope it will find a place in the next anthology of lyrical poetry.

Though his criticisms were not always sure and impeccable, he was of all critics the most independent of authority. Had he chanced to find in the poets' corner of _The Eatanswill Gazette_ a lyric equal to the best of Sh.e.l.ley's, he would have recognized its merits at once and proclaimed them; and had he come across a lyric of Sh.e.l.ley's that had received unmerited applause, he would have recognized its demerits for himself, and proclaimed them with equal candour and fearlessness.

Again, certain pa.s.sages in these letters will surprise the reader by throwing light upon a side of Rossetti's life and character which was only known to his intimate friends. Recluse as Rossetti came to be, he knew more of "London life" in the true sense of the word than did many of those who were supposed to know it well-diners-out like Browning, for instance, and Richard Doyle. That the author of 'The House of Life' knew London on the side that d.i.c.kens knew it better than any other poet of his time will no doubt surprise many a reader. His visits to Jamrach's mart for wild animals led him to explore the wonderful world, that so few people ever dream of, which lies around Ratcliffe Highway. He observed with the greatest zest the movements of the East-End swarm. Moreover, his pa.s.sion for picking up "curios" and antique furniture made him familiar with quarters of London that he would otherwise have never known. And not d.i.c.kens himself had more of what may be called the "Haroun al Raschid pa.s.sion" for wandering through a city's streets at night. It was this that kept him in touch on one side with men so unlike him as Brough and Sala.

In this volume there is a charming anecdote of his generosity to Brough's family, and Sala always spoke of him as "dear Dante Rossetti." The transpontine theatre, even the penny gaff of the New Cut, was not quite unfamiliar with the face of the poet-painter. Hence no man was a better judge than he of the low-life pictures of a writer like F. W. Robinson, whose descriptions of the street arab in 'Owen, a Waif,' &c., he would read aloud with a dramatic power astonishing to those who a.s.sociated him exclusively with Dante, Beatrice, and mystical pa.s.sion.

Frequently in these letters an allusion will puzzle the reader who does not know of Rossetti's love of nocturnal rambling, an allusion, however, which those who knew him will fully understand. Here is a sentence of the kind:-

"As I haven't been outside my door for months in the daytime, I should not have had much opportunity of enjoying pastime and pleasaunces."

The editor quotes some graphic and interesting words from Mr. W. M.

Rossetti which explain this pa.s.sage.

In summer, as in winter, he rose very late in the day and made a breakfast, as he used to say, which was to keep him in fuel for something under twelve hours. He would then begin to paint, and scarcely leave his work till the daylight waned. Then he would dine, and afterwards start off for a walk through the London streets, which to him, as he used to say, put on a magical robe with the lighting of the gas lamps. After walking for miles through the streets, either with a friend or alone, loitering at the windows of such shops as still were open, he would turn into an oyster shop or late restaurant for supper. Here his frankness of bearing was quite irresistible with strangers whenever it pleased him to approach them, as he sometimes did. The most singular and bizarre incidents of his life occurred to him on these occasions-incidents which he would relate with a dramatic power that set him at the head of the _raconteurs_ of his time. One of these _rencontres_ in the Haymarket was of a quite extraordinary character.

In the latter years of his life, when he lived at Cheyne Walk, he would often not begin his perambulations until an hour before midnight. It will be a pity if some one who accompanied him in his nocturnal rambles-the most remarkable man of our time-does not furnish the world with reminiscences of them.

Another point of interest upon which these letters will throw light is that connected with his method of work. He himself, like Tennyson, used to say that those who are the most curious as to the way in which a poem was written are precisely those who have the least appreciation of the beauties of the poem itself. If this is true, the time in which we live is not remarkable, perhaps, for its appreciation of poetry. These letters, at any rate, will be appreciated, for the light that some of them throw upon Rossetti at work is remarkable. When a subject for a poem struck him, it was his way to make a prose note of it, then to cartoon it, then to leave it for a time, then to take it up again and read it to his friends, and then to finish it. In a letter to Allingham, dated July 18th, 1854, enclosing the first form of the sonnet called 'Lost on Both Sides'-which sonnet did not appear in print till 1881-Rossetti says: "My sonnets are not generally finished till I see them again after forgetting them; and this is only two days old. When between the first form of a sonnet and the second an interval of twenty-seven years elapses, no student of poetry can fail to compare one form with the other.

And so with regard to that poem which is, on the whole, Rossetti's masterpiece-'Sister Helen'-sent as early as 1854 to Mrs. Howitt for the German publication the _Dusseldorf Annual_; the changes in it are extremely interesting. Never did it appear in print without suffering some important variation. Sometimes, indeed, the change of a word or two in a line would entirely transfigure the stanza. As to the new stanzas added to the ballad just before Rossetti's death, these turned the ballad from a fine poem into a great one.