Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti Part 8

affirming, meantime, that nothing so simple and touching had ever been written on the subject. As to the sonnet, he wrote:

About Coleridge (whom I only view as a poet, his other aspects being to my apprehension mere bogies) I conceive the leading point about his work is its human love, and the leading point about his career, the sad fact of how little of it was devoted to that work. These are the points made in my sonnet, and the last is such as I (alas!) can sympathise with, though what has excluded more poetry with me (_mountains_ of it I don't want to heap) has chiefly been livelihood necessity. I 'll copy the sonnet on opposite page, only I 'd rather you kept it to yourself. _Five_ years of _good_ poetry is too long a tether to give his Muse, I know.

His Soul fared forth (as from the deep home-grove The father Songster plies the hour-long quest) To feed his soul-brood hungering in the nest; But his warm Heart, the mother-bird above Their callow fledgling progeny still hove With tented roof of wings and fostering breast Till the Soul fed the soul-brood. Richly blest From Heaven their growth, whose food was Human Love.

Tet ah! Like desert pools that shew the stars Once in long leagues--even such the scarce-s.n.a.t.c.hed hours Which deepening pain left to his lordliest powers:-- Heaven lost through spider-trammelled prison-bars!

Five years, from seventy saved! yet kindling skies Own them, a beacon to our centuries.

As a minor point I called Rossetti's attention to the fact that Coleridge lived to be scarcely more than sixty, and that his poetic career really extended over six good years; and hence the thirteenth line was amended to

Six years from sixty saved.

I doubted if "deepening pain" could be charged with the whole burden of Coleridge's const.i.tutional procrastination, and to this objection Rossetti replied:

Line eleven in my first reading was "deepening _sloth_;" but it seemed harsh--and--d.a.m.n it all! much too like the spirit of Banquo!

Before Coleridge, however, as to warmth of admiration, and before him also as to date of influence, Keats was Rossetti's favourite among modern English poets. Our friend never tired of writing or talking about Keats, and never wearied of the society of any one who could generate a fresh thought concerning him. But his was a robust and masculine admiration, having nothing in common with the effeminate extra-affectionateness that has of late been so much ridiculed. His letters now to be quoted shall speak for themselves as to the qualities in Keats whereon Rossetti's appreciation of him was founded: but I may say in general terms that it was not so much the wealth of expression in the author of _Endymion_ which attracted the author of _Rose Mary_ as the perfect hold of the supernatural which is seen in _La Belle Dame Sans Merci_ and in the fragment of the _Eve of St. Mark_. At the time of our correspondence, I was engaged upon an essay on Keats, and _a propos_ of this Rossetti wrote:

I shall take pleasure in reading your Keats article when ready. He was, among all his contemporaries who established their names, the one true heir of Shakspeare. Another (unestablished then, but partly revived since) was Charles Wells. Did you ever read his splendid dramatic poem _Joseph and his Brethren?_

In this connexion, as a better opportunity may not arise, I take occasion to tell briefly the story of the revival of Wells. The facts to be related were communicated to me by Rossetti in conversation years after the date of the letter in which this first allusion to the subject was made. As a boy, Rossetti's chief pleasure was to ransack old book-stalls, and the catalogues of the British Museum, for forgotten works in the bye-ways of English poetry. In this pursuit he became acquainted with nearly every curiosity of modern poetic literature, and many were the amusing stories he used to tell at that time, and in after life, of the t.i.tles and contents of the literary oddities he unearthed. If you chanced at any moment to alight upon any obscure book particularly curious from its pretentiousness and pomposity, from the audacity of its claim, or the obscurity and absurdity of its writing, you might be sure that Rossetti would prove familiar with it, and be able to recapitulate with infinite zest its salient features; but if you happened to drop upon ever so interesting an edition of a book (not of verse) which you supposed to be known to many a reader, the chances were at least equal that Rossetti would prove to know nothing of it but its name. In poring over the forgotten pages of the poetry of the beginning of the century, Rossetti, whilst still a boy, met with the scriptural drama of _Joseph and his Brethren_. He told me the t.i.tle did not much attract him, but he resolved to glance at the contents, and with that swiftness of insight which throughout life distinguished him, he instantly perceived its great qualities. I think he said he then wrote a letter on the subject to one of the current literary journals, probably _The Literary Gazette_, and by this means came into correspondence with Charles Wells himself. Rather later a relative of Wells's sought out the young enthusiast in London, intending to solicit his aid in an attempt to induce a publisher to undertake a reprint, but in any endeavours to this end he must have failed. For many years a copy of the poem, left by the author's request at Rossetti's lodgings, lay there untouched, and meantime the growing reputation of the young painter brought about certain removals from Blackfriars Bridge to other chambers, and afterwards to the house in Cheyne Walk. In the course of these changes the copy got hidden away, and it was not until numerous applications for it had been made that it was at length ferreted forth from the chaos of some similar volumes huddled together in a corner of the studio. Full of remorse for having so long abandoned a laudable project, Rossetti then took up afresh the cause of the neglected poem, and enlisted Mr. Swinburne's interest so warmly as to prevail with him to use his influence to secure its publication. This failed however; but in _The Athenaeum_ of April 8, 1876, appeared Mr. Watts's elaborate account of Wells and the poem and its vicissitudes, whereupon Messrs. Chatto and Windus offered to take the risk of publis.h.i.+ng it, and the poem went forth with the n.o.ble commendatory essay of the young author of _Atalanta_, whose reputation was already almost at its height, though it lacked (doubtless from a touch of his const.i.tutional procrastination) the appreciative comment of the discerning critic who first discovered it. To return to the Keats correspondence:

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 Sh.e.l.ley, 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 c.o.c.kney as Keats _could_ be. Here it is,--

Through one, years since d.a.m.ned and forgot Who stabbed backs by the Quarter, Here lieth one who, while Time's stream Still runs, as G.o.d 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 G.o.ddess of Theraea!--

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 c.o.c.kney?

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 s.h.i.+p_, 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 superst.i.tion 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 f.a.n.n.y 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 n.o.ble 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 Sh.e.l.ley; 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 c.o.c.kney poet! It is a fact, however, that this very book, in conjunction with one of Sh.e.l.ley's and one of Hunt's, all published 1816-17, gave rise to the name "The c.o.c.kney 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 Sh.e.l.ley 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 friends.h.i.+p. 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 Sh.e.l.ley) 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 friends.h.i.+p 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. .h.i.therto (in which the _Nightingale_ and other such masterpieces are jostled indiscriminately, with such wretched juvenile trash as _Lines to some Ladies on receiving a Sh.e.l.ly etc_), should of course be amended, and the rubbish (of which there is a fair quant.i.ty), removed to a "Juvenile" or other such section. It is a curious fact that among a poet's early writings, some will really be juvenile in this sense, while others, written at the same time, will perhaps take rank at last with his best efforts.

This, however, was not substantially the case with Keats.

As to Leigh Hunt's friends.h.i.+p for Keats, I think the points you mention look equivocal; but Hunt was a many-laboured and much belaboured man, and as much allowance as may be made on this score is perhaps due to him--no more than that much.

His own powers stand high in various ways--poetically higher perhaps than is I at present admitted, despite his detestable flutter and airiness for the most part. But a.s.suredly by no means could he have stood so high in the long-run, as by a loud and earnest defence of Keats. Perhaps the best excuse for him is the remaining possibility of an idea on his part, that any defence coming from one who had himself so many powerful enemies might seem to Keats rather to! damage than improve his position.

I have this minute (at last) read the first instalment of your Keats paper, and return it.... One of the most marked points in the early recognition of Keats's claims, as compared with the recognition given to other poets, is the fact that he was the only one who secured almost at once a _great_ poet as a close and obvious imitator--viz., Hood, whose first volume is more identical with Keats's work than could be said of any other similar parallel. You quote some of Keats's sayings. One of the most characteristic I think is in a letter to Haydon:--

"I value more the privilege of seeing great things in loneliness, than the fame of a prophet." I had not in mind the quotations you give from Keats as bearing on the poetic (or prophetic) mission of "doing good." I must say that I should not have thought a longer career thrown away upon him (as you intimate) if he had continued to the age of anything only to give joy. Nor would he ever have done any "good" at all. Sh.e.l.ley did good, and perhaps some harm with it.

Keats's joy was after all a flawless gift.

Keats wrote to Sh.e.l.ley:--"You, I am sure, will forgive me for sincerely remarking that you might curb your magnanimity and be more of an artist, and load every rift of your subject with ore." Cheeky!--but not so much amiss. Poetry, and no prophecy however, must come of that mood,--and no pulpit would have held Keats's wings,--the body and mind together were not heavy enough for a counterweight.... Did you ever meet with

It has very finely engraved plates of the late Flemish type.