Complete Poetical Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Page 64
your 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 contemplated Michael 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 prefaced Sister Helen with 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 the
additions made thus late to the ballad of S. H. My best
excuse is that I believe some will wonder with myself that
such 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 was
printed in a thing called The Düsseldorf Annual in (I
think) 1853 — published in Germany. {*}
* In the same private copy of the Poems the following
explanatory passage was written over the much-discussed
sonnet, entitled, The Monochord:— “That sublimated mood of
the soul in which a separate essence of itself seems as it
were to oversoar and survey it.” Neither the style nor the
substance is characteristic of Rossetti, and though I do not
at the moment remember to have met with the passage
elsewhere, I doubt not it is a quotation. That quotation
marks are employed is not in itself evidence of much moment,
for Rossetti had Coleridge’s enjoyment of a literary
practical joke, and on one occasion prefixed to a story in
manuscript a long passage on noses purporting to be from
Tristram Shandy, but which is certainly not discoverable in
Sterne’s story.
The next letter I shall quote appears to explain itself:
There is a last point in your long letter which I have not
noticed, though it interested me much: viz., what you say of
your lecture on my poetry; your idea of possibly returning
to and enlarging it would, if carried out, be welcome to me.
I suppose ere long I must get together such additional work
as I have to show — probably a good deal added to the old
vol. (which has been for some time out of print) and one
longer poem by itself. The House of Life, when next
issued, will I trust be doubled in number of sonnets; it is
nearly so already. Your writing that essay in one day, and
the information as to subsequent additions, I noted, and
should like to see the passage on Jenny which you have not
yet used, if extant. The time taken in composition reminds
me of the fact (so long ago!) that I wrote the tale of Hand
and Soul (with the exception of an opening page or two) all
in one night in December 1849, beginning I suppose about 2
A.M. and ending about 7. In such a case a landscape and sky
all unsurmised open gradually in the mind — a sort of
spiritual Turner, among whose hills one ranges and in
whose waters one strikes out at unknown liberty; but I have
found this only in nightlong work, which I have seldom
attempted, for it leaves one entirely broken, and this state
was mine when I described the like of it at the close of the
story, ah! once again, how long ago! I have thought of
including this story in next issue of poems, but am
uncertain. What think you?
It seemed certain that Hand and Soul ought 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 of Tetrachordon, 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 Soul is 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 of Hand and Soul. It was to be entitled St. 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 in Hand 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 than Hand 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’s
habits, he certainly never enjoyed any “rivers of morning
air” at all, unless they were such as visited him in a
darkened 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 myself
was born on old May-Day (12th), in the year (1828) after
that in which Blake died.... You were born, in fact, just as
I was giving up poetry at about 25, on finding that it
impeded attention to what constituted another aim and a
livelihood into the bargain, i.e. painting. From that date
up to the year when I published my poems, I wrote extremely
little, — I might almost say nothing, except the renovated
Jenny in 1858 or ‘59. To this again I added a passage or
two 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 the New 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 the Catholic World article 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 his Ave only 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 unreasonin
g 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 in The Catholic Magazine I 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 editorial we, which at the fag-end of passages sometimes dropped into I. [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 kingly we is tripped up by the guilty I in many places.] Rossetti wrote:
I am glad you liked the Catholic World article, 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 the Dante and Circle, but don’t know if it was ever received or reviewed. As you have the vols, of Fortnightly, look up a little poem of mine called the Cloud Confines, a few months later, I suppose, than the tale. It is one of my favourites, among my own doings.