Complete Poetical Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti

by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

  The other day I saw in a bookseller’s catalogue — Christabess, by S. T. Colebritche, translated from the Doggrel by Sir Vinegar Sponge (1816). This seems a parody, not a continuation, in the very year of the poem’s first appearance! I did not think it worth two shillings, — which was the price.... Have you seen the continuation of Christabel in European Magazine? of course it might have been Coleridge’s, so far as the date of the composition of the original was concerned; but of course it was not his.

  I imagine the “Sir Vinegar Sponge” who translated “Christabess from the Doggerel” must belong to the family of Sponges described by Coleridge himself, who give out the liquid they take in much dirtier than they imbibe it. I thought it very possible that Coleridge’s epigram to this effect might have been provoked by the lampoon referred to, and Rossetti also thought this probable. Immediately after meeting with the continuation of Christabel already referred to, I came across great numbers of such continuations, as well as satires, parodies, reviews, etc., in old issues of Blackwood, The Quarterly, and The Examiner. They seemed to me, for the most part, poor in quality — the highest reach of comicality to which they attained being concerned with side slaps at Kubla Khan:

  Better poetry I make

  When asleep than when awake.

  Am I sure, or am I guessing?

  Are my eyes like those of Lessing?

  This latter elegant couplet was expected to serve as a scorching satire on a letter in the Biographia Literaria in which Coleridge says he saw a portrait of Lessing at Klopstock’s, in which the eyes seemed singularly like his own. The time has gone by when that flight of egotism on Coleridge’s part seemed an unpardonable offence, and to our more modern judgment it scarcely seems necessary that the author of Christabel should be charged with a desire to look radiant in the glory reflected by an accidental personal resemblance to the author of Laokoon. Curiously enough I found evidence of the Patmore version of Coleridge’s intentions as to the ultimate disclosure of the sex of Géraldine in a review in the Examiner. The author was perhaps Hazlitt, but more probably the editor himself, but whether Hazlitt or Hunt, he must have been within the circle that found its rallying point at Highgate, and consequently acquainted with the earliest forms of the poem. The review is an unfavourable one, and Coleridge is told in it that he is the dog-in-the-manger of literature, and that his poem is proof of the fact that he can write better nonsense poetry than any man in England. The writer is particularly wroth with what he considers the wilful indefiniteness of the author, and in proof of a charge of a desire not to let the public into the secret of the poem, and of a conscious endeavour to mystify the reader, he deliberately accuses Coleridge of omitting one line of the poem as it was written, which, if printed, would have proved conclusively that Géraldine had seduced Christabel after getting drunk with her, — for such sequel is implied if not openly stated. I told Rossetti of this brutality of criticism, and he replied:

  As for the passage in Christabel, I am not sure we quite

  understand each other. What I heard through the Patmores (a

  complete mistake I am sure), was that Coleridge meant

  Géraldine to prove to be a man bent on the seduction of

  Christabel, and presumably effecting it. What I inferred (if

  so) was that Coleridge had intended the line as in first

  ed.: “And she is to sleep with Christabel!” as leading up

  too nearly to what he meant to keep back for the present.

  But the whole thing was a figment.

  What is assuredly not a figment is, that an idea, such as the elder Patmore referred to, really did exist in the minds of Coleridge’s so-called friends, who after praising the poem beyond measure whilst it was in manuscript, abused it beyond reason or decency when it was printed. My settled conviction is that the Examiner criticism, and not the sudden advent of the idea after the first part was written, was the cause of Coleridge’s adopting the correction which Rossetti mentions.

  Rossetti called my attention to a letter by Lamb, about which he gathered a good deal of interesting conjecture:

  There is (given in Cottle) an inconceivably sarcastic,

  galling, and admirable letter from Lamb to Coleridge,

  regarding which I never could learn how the deuce their

  friendship recovered from it. Cottle says the only reason he

  could ever trace for its being written lay in the three

  parodied sonnets (one being The House that Jack Built)

  which Coleridge published as a skit on the joint volume

  brought out by himself, Lamb, and Lloyd. The whole thing was

  always a mystery to me. But I have thought that the passage

  on division between friends was not improbably written by

  Coleridge on this occasion. Curiously enough (if so) Lamb,

  who is said to have objected greatly to the idea of a second

  part of Christabel, thought (on seeing it) that the

  mistake was redeemed by this very passage. He may have

  traced its meaning, though, of course, its beauty alone was

  enough to make him say so.

  The three satirical sonnets which Rossetti refers to appear not only in Cottle but in a note to the Biographia Literaria They were published first under a fictitious name in he Monthly Magazine They must be understood as almost wholly satirical of three distinct facets of Coleridge’s own manner, for even the sonnet in which occur the words

  Eve saddens into night, {*}

  has its counterpart in The Songs of the Pixies —

  Hence! thou lingerer, light!

  Eve saddens into night,

  and nearly all the phrases satirised are borrowed from Coleridge’s own poetry, not from that of Lamb or Lloyd. Nevertheless, Cottle was doubtless right as to the fact that Lamb took offence at Coleridge’s conduct on this account, and Rossetti almost certainly made a good shot at the truth when he attributed to the rupture thereupon ensuing the passage on severed friendship. The sonnet on The House that Jack Built is the finest of the three as a satire.

  * So in the Biographia Literaria; in Cottle, “Eve darkens

  into night.”

  Indeed, the figure used therein as an equipoise to “the hindward charms” satirises perfectly the style of writing characterised by inflated thought and imagery. It may be doubted if there exists anything more comical; but each of the companion sonnets is good in its way. The egotism, which was a constant reproach urged by The Edinburgh critics and by the “Cockney Poets” against the poets of the Lake School, is splendidly hit off in the first sonnet; the low and creeping meanness, or say, simpleness, as contrasted with simplicity, of thought and expression, which was stealing into Wordsworth’s work at that period, is equally cleverly ridiculed in the second sonnet. In reproducing the sonnets, Coleridge claims only to have satirised types. As to Lamb’s letter, it is, indeed, hard to realise the fact that the “gentle-hearted Charles,” as Coleridge himself named him, could write a galling letter to the “inspired charity-boy,” for whom at an early period, and again at the end, he had so profound a reverence. Every word is an outrage, and every syllable must have hit Coleridge terribly. I called Rossetti’s attention to the surprising circumstance that in a letter written immediately after the date of the one in question, Loyd tells Cottle that he has never known Lamb (who is at the moment staying with him) so happy before as just then! There can hardly be a doubt, however, that Rossetti’s conjecture is a just one as to the origin of the great passage in the second part of Christabel. Touching that passage I called his attention to an imperfection that I must have perceived, or thought I perceived long before, — an imperfection of craftsmanship that had taken away something of my absolute enjoyment of its many beauties. The passage ends —

  They parted, ne’er to meet again!

  But never either found another

  To free the hollow heart from paining —

  They stood aloof, the scars remain
ing,

  Like cliffs which had been rent asunder;

  A dreary sea now flows between,

  But neither heat, nor frost, nor thunder,

  Shall wholly do away, I ween,

  The marks of that which once hath been.

  This is, it is needless to say, in almost every respect, finely felt, but the words italicised appeared to display some insufficiency of poetic vision. First, nothing but an earthquake would (speaking within limits of human experience) unite the two sides of a ravine; and though frost might bring them together temporarily, heat and thunder must be powerless to make or to unmake the marks that showed the cliffs to have once been one, and to have been violently torn apart. Next, heat (supposing frost to be the root-conception) was obviously used merely as a balancing phrase, and thunder simply as the inevitable rhyme to asunder. I have not seen this matter alluded to, though it may have been mentioned, and it is certainly not important enough to make any serious deduction from the pleasure afforded by a passage that is in other respects so rich in beauty as to be able to endure such modest discounting. Rossetti replied:

  Your geological strictures on Coleridge’s “friendship”

  passage are but too just, and I believe quite new. But I

  would fain think that this is “to consider too nicely.” I am

  certainly willing to bear the obloquy of never having been

  struck by what is nevertheless obvious enough. {*}... Lamb’s

  letter is a teazer. The three sonnets in The Monthly

  Magazine were signed “Nehemiah Higginbotham,” and were

  meant to banter good-humouredly the joint vol. issued by

  Coleridge, Lamb, and Lloyd, — C. himself being, of course,

  the most obviously ridiculed. I fancy you have really hit

  the mark as regards Coleridge’s epigram and Sir Vinegar

  Sponge. He might have been worth two shillings after all....

  I also remember noting Lloyd’s assertion of Lamb’s

  exceptional happiness just after that letter. It is a

  puzzling affair. However C. and Lamb got over it (for I

  certainly believe they were friends later in life) no one

  seems to have recorded. The second vol. of Cottle, after the

  raciness of the first, is very disappointing.

  * In a note on this passage, Canon Dixon writes: What is

  meant is that in cliffs, actual cliffs, the action of these

  agents, heat, cold, thunder even, might have an obliterating

  power; but in the severance of friendship, there is nothing

  (heat of nature, frost of time, thunder of accident or

  surprise) that can wholly have the like effect.

  On one occasion Rossetti wrote, saying he had written a sonnet on Coleridge, and I was curious to learn what note he struck in dealing with so complex a subject. The keynote of a man’s genius or character should be struck in a poetic address to him, just as the expressional individuality of a man’s features (freed of the modifying or emphasising effects of passing fashions of dress), should be reproduced in his portrait; but Coleridge’s mind had so many sides to it, and his character had such varied aspects — from keen and beautiful sensibility to every form of suffering, to almost utter disregard of the calls of domestic duty — that it seemed difficult to think what kind of idea, consistent with the unity of the sonnet and its simplicity of scheme, would call up a picture of the entire man. It goes against the grain to hint, adoring the man as we must, that Coleridge’s personal character was anything less than one of untarnished purity, and certainly the persons chiefly concerned in the alleged neglect, Southey and his own family, have never joined in the strictures commonly levelled against him: but whatever Coleridge’s personal ego may have been, his creative ego was assuredly not single in kind or aim. He did some noble things late in life (instance the passage on “Youth and Age,” and that on “Work without Hope”), but his poetic genius seemed to desert him when Kant took possession of him as a gigantic windmill to do battle with, and it is now hard to say which was the deeper thing in him: the poetry to which he devoted the sunniest years of his young life, or the philosophy which he firmly believed it to be the main business of his later life to expound. In any discussion of the relative claims of these two to the gratitude of the ages that follow, I found Rossetti frankly took one side, and constantly said that the few unequal poems Coleridge had left us, were a legacy more stimulating, solacing, and enduring, than his philosophy could have been, even if he had perfected that attempt of his to reconcile all learning and revelation, and if, when perfected, the whole effort had not proved to be a work of supererogation. I doubt if Rossetti quite knew what was meant by Coleridge’s “system,” as it was so frequently called, and I know that he could not be induced by any eulogiums to do so much as look at the Biographia Literaria, though once he listened whilst I read a chapter from it. He had certainly little love of the German elements in Coleridge’s later intellectual life, and hence it is small matter for surprise that in his sonnet he chose for treatment the more poetic side of Coleridge’s genius. Nevertheless, I think it remains an open question whether the philosophy of the author of The Ancient Mariner was more influenced by his poetry, or his poetry by his philosophy; for the philosophy is always tinged by the mysticism of his poetry, and his poetry is always adumbrated by the disposition, which afterwards become paramount, to dig beneath the surface for problems of life and character, and for “suggestions of the final mystery of existence.” I have heard Rossetti say that what came most of all uppermost in Coleridge, was his wonderful intuitive knowledge and love of the sea, whose billowy roll, and break, and sibilation, seemed echoed in the very mechanism of his verse. Sleep, too, Rossetti thought, had given up to Coleridge her utmost secrets; and perhaps it was partly due to his own sad experience of the dread curse of insomnia, as well as to keen susceptibility to poetic beauty, that tears so frequently filled his eyes, and sobs rose to his throat when he recited the lines beginning

  O sleep! it is a gentle thing —

  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-snatched 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 h
ence 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 constitutional procrastination, and to this objection Rossetti replied:

  Line eleven in my first reading was “deepening sloth;” but

  it seemed harsh — and — damn 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 à 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 titles 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 title 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 Athenæum 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 publishing it, and the poem went forth with the noble 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 constitutional procrastination) the appreciative comment of the discerning critic who first discovered it. To return to the Keats correspondence: