Chapter 7
Again, certain passages 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 Dickens 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 passion for picking up “curios” and antique furniture made him familiar with quarters of London that he would otherwise have never known. And not Dickens himself had more of what may be called the “Haroun al Raschid passion” 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 associated him exclusively with Dante, Beatrice, and mystical passion.
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 passage.
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 _Düsseldorf 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.
Equally striking are the changes in ‘The Blessed Damosel.’ But the most notable example of the surety of his hand in revising is seen in regard to a poem several times mentioned in this volume, called originally ‘Bride’s Chamber Talk.’ It was begun as early as ‘Jenny,’ read by Allingham in 1860, but not printed till more than a quarter of a century later. The earliest form is still in existence in MS., and although some of the lines struck out are as poetry most lovely, the poem on the whole is better without them. It was a theory of Rossetti’s, indeed, that the very riches of the English language made it necessary for the poet who would achieve excellence to revise and manipulate his lines. And in support of this he would contrast the amazing passion for revision disclosed by Dr. Garnett’s ‘Relics of Shelley,’ in which sometimes scarcely half a dozen of the original words are left on a page, with Scott’s metrical narratives, which were sent to the printer in cantos as they were written, like one of the contemporary novels thrown off for the serials. The fact seems to be, however, that the poet’s power of reaching, as Scott reached, his own ideal expression _per saltum_, or reaching it slowly and tentatively, is simply a matter of temperament. For whose verses are more loose-jointed than Byron’s? whose diction is more commonplace than his? And yet this is what the greatest of Byron specialists, Mr John Murray, says in his extremely interesting remarks upon Byron’s autograph:—
“If we except Byron’s dramatic pieces and ‘Don Juan,’ the first draft of Byron’s longer poems formed but a nucleus of the work as it was printed. For example, ‘English Bards and Scotch Reviewers’ grew out of the ‘British Bards,’ while ‘The Giaour,’ by constant additions to the manuscript, the proofs, and even to the work after publication, was expanded to nearly twice its original size. . . . When the inspiration was on him, the printer had to be kept at work the greater part of the night, and fresh ‘copy’ and fresh revises were crossing one another hour by hour.”
The conclusion is that poets cannot be classified according to their methods of work, but only in relation to the result of those methods, and that our two great elaborators, Byron and Rossetti, may still be more unlike each other in essentials than are any other two nineteenth-century poets.
On the whole, we cannot help closing this book with kindly feelings towards the editor, inasmuch as it aids in the good work of restoring the true portrait of the man who has suffered more than any other from the mischievous malignity of foes and the more mischievous indiscretion of certain of his friends.
III. ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON. 1809–1892.
I.
Charles Lamb was so paralyzed, it is said, by Coleridge’s death, that for weeks after that event, he was heard murmuring often to himself, “Coleridge is dead, Coleridge is dead.” In such a mental condition at this moment is an entire country, I think. “Tennyson is dead! Tennyson is dead!” It will be some time before England’s loss can really be expressed by any words so powerful in pathos and in sorrow as these. And if this is so with regard to English people generally, what of those few who knew the man, and knowing him, must needs love him—must needs love him above all others?—those, I mean, who, when speaking of him, used to talk not so much about the poetry as about the man who wrote it—those who now are saying, with a tremor of the voice, and a moistening of the eye:—
There was none like him—none.
[Picture: Alfred, Lord Tennyson, æt. 80. From a photography reproduced by the kind permission of Lord Tennyson]
To say wherein lies the secret of the charm of anything that lives is mostly difficult. Especially is it so with regard to a man of poetic genius. All are agreed, for instance, that D. G. Rossetti possessed an immense charm. So he did, indeed. But who has been able to define that charm? I, too, knew Rossetti well, and loved him well. Sometimes, indeed, the egotism of a sorrowing memory makes me think that outside his own most affectionate and noble-tempered family, including that old friend in art at whose feet he sat as a boy, no man loved Rossetti so deeply and so lastingly as I did; unless, perhaps, it was the poor blind poet, Philip Marston, who, being so deeply stricken, needed to love and to be loved more sorely than I, to whom Fate has been kind. And yet I should find it difficult to say wherein lay the charm of Rossetti’s chameleon-like personality. So with other men and women I could name. This is not so in regard to the great man now lying dead at Aldworth. Nothing is easier than to define the charm of Tennyson.
It lay in a great veracity of soul—in a simple-mindedness so childlike that, unless you had known him to be the undoubted author of his exquisitely artistic poems, you would have supposed that even the subtleties of poetic art must be foreign to a nature so devoid of all subtlety as his. “Homer,” you would have said, “might have been such a man as this, for Homer worked in a language which is Poetry’s very voice. But Tennyson works in a language which has to be moulded into harmony by a myriad subtleties of art. How can this great inspired child, who yet has the simple wisdom of Bragi, the poetry-smith of the Northern Olympus, be the delicate-fingered artist of ‘The Princess,’ ‘The Palace of Art,’ ‘The Day-Dream,’ and ‘The Dream of Fair Women’?”
As deeply as some men feel that language was given to men to disguise their thoughts did Tennyson feel that language was given to _him_ to declare his thoughts without disguise. He knew of but one justification for the thing he said, viz., that it was the thing he thought. _Arrière pensée_ was with him impossible. But, it may be asked, when a man carries out-speaking to such a pass as this, is he not apt to become a somewhat troublesome and discordant thread in the complex web of modern society? No doubt any other man than Tennyson would have been so. But the honest ring in the voice—which, by-the-by, was strengthened and deepened by the old-fashioned Lincolnshire accent—softened and, to a great degree, neutralized the effect of the bluntness. Moreover, behind this uncompromising directness was apparent a noble and a splendid courtesy; for, above all things, Tennyson was a great and forthright English gentleman. As he stood at the porch at Aldworth, meeting a guest or bidding him good-bye—as he stood there, tall, far beyond the height of average men, his naturally fair skin showing dark and tanned by the sun and wind—as he stood there no one could mistake him for anything but a great gentleman, who was also much more. Up to the last a man of extraordinary presence, he showed, I think, the beauty of old age to a degree rarely seen.
A friend of his who, visiting him on his birthday, discovered him thus standing at the door to welcome him, has described his unique appearance in words which are literally accurate at least:—
A poet should be limned in youth, they say, Or else in prime, with eyes and forehead beaming Of manhood’s noon—the very body seeming To lend the spirit wings to win the bay; But here stands he whose noontide blooms for aye, Whose eyes, where past and future both are gleaming With lore beyond all youthful poets’ dreaming, Seem lit from shores of some far-glittering day.
Our master’s prime is now—is ever now; Our star that wastes not in the wastes of night Holds Nature’s dower undimmed in Time’s despite; Those eyes seem Wisdom’s own beneath that brow, Where every furrow Time hath dared to plough Shines a new bar of still diviner light.
This, then, was the secret of Tennyson’s personal charm. And if the reader is sceptical as to its magnetic effect upon his friends, let me remind him of the amazing rarity of these great and guileless natures; let me remind him also that this world is comprised of two classes of people—the bores, whose name is legion, and the interesting people, whose name is _not_ legion—the former being those whose natural instinct of self-protective mimicry impels them to move about among their fellows hiding their features behind a mask of convention, the latter being those who move about with uncovered faces just as Nature fashioned them. If guilelessness lends interest to a dullard, it is still more so with the really luminous souls. So infinite is the creative power of nature that she makes no two individuals alike. If we only had the power of inquiring into the matter, we should find not only that each individual creature that once inhabited one of the minute shells that go to the building of England’s fortress walls of chalk was absolutely unlike all the others, but that even the poor microbe himself, who in these days is so maligned, is also very intensely an individual.
Some time ago the old discussion was revived in _The Athenæum_ as to whether the nightingale’s song was joyful or melancholy. And, perhaps, if the poems of the late James Thomson and the poems of Mr. Austin Dobson were recited by their authors to a congregation of nightingales, the question would at once be debated amongst them, “Is the note of the human songster joyful or melancholy?” The truth is that the humidity or the dryness of the atmosphere in the various habitats of the nightingale modifies so greatly the _timbre_ of the voice that, while a nightingale chorus at Fiesole may seem joyous, a nightingale chorus in the moist thickets along the banks of the Ouse may seem melancholy. Nay, more, as I once told Tennyson at Aldworth, I, when a truant boy wandering along the banks of the Ouse (where six nightingales’ nests have been found in the hedge of a single meadow), got so used to these matters that I had my own favourite individuals, and could easily distinguish one from another. That rich climacteric swell which is reached just before the “jug, jug, jug,” varies amazingly, if the listener will only give the matter attention. And if this infinite variety of individualism is thus seen in the lower animals, what must it be in man?
There is, however, in the entire human race, a fatal instinct for marring itself. To break down the exterior signs of this variety of individualism in the race by mutual imitation, by all sorts of affectations, is the object not only of the civilization of the Western world, but of the very negroes on the Gaboon River. No wonder, then, that whensoever we meet, as at rarest interval we do meet, an individual who is able to preserve his personality as Nature meant it to live, we feel an attraction towards him such as is irresistible. Now I would challenge those who knew him to say whether they ever knew any other man so free from this great human infirmity as Tennyson. The way in which his simplicity of nature would manifest itself was, in some instances, most remarkable. Though, of course, he had his share of that egoism of the artist without which imaginative genius may become sterile, it seemed impossible for him to realize what a transcendent position he took among contemporary writers all over the world. “Poets,” he once said to me, “have not had the advantage of being _born_ to the purple.” Up to the last he felt himself to be a poet at struggle more or less with the Wilsons and the Crokers who, in his youth, assailed him. I, and a very dear friend of his, a family connexion, tried in vain to make him see that when a poet had reached a position such as he had won, no criticism could injure him or benefit him one jot.
What has been called his exclusiveness is entirely mythical. He was the most hospitable of men. It was very rare, indeed, for him to part from a friend at his hall door, or at the railway station without urging him to return as soon as possible, and generally with the words, “Come whenever you like.” The fact is, however, that for many years the strangest notions seem to have got abroad as to the claims of the public upon men of genius. There seems now to be scarcely any one who does not look upon every man who has passed into the purgatory of fame as his or her common property. The unlucky victim is to be pestered by letters upon every sort of foolish subject, and to be hunted down in his walks and insulted by senseless adulation. Tennyson resented this, and so did Rossetti, and so ought every man who has reached eminence and respects his own genius. Neither fame nor life itself is worth having on such terms as these.
One day, Tennyson when walking round his garden at Farringford, saw perched up in the trees that surrounded it, two men who had been refused admittance at the gate—two men dressed like gentlemen. He very wisely gave the public to understand that his fame was not to be taken as an abrogation of his rights as a private English gentleman. For my part, whenever I hear any one railing against a man of eminence with whom he cannot possibly have been brought into contact, I know at once what it means: the railer has been writing an idle letter to the eminent one and received no reply.
Tennyson’s knowledge of nature—nature in every aspect—was very great. His passion for “star-gazing” has often been commented upon by readers of his poetry. Since Dante no poet in any land has so loved the stars. He had an equal delight in watching the lightning; and I remember being at Aldworth once during a thunderstorm, when I was alarmed at the temerity with which he persisted, in spite of all remonstrances, in gazing at the blinding lightning. For moonlight effects he had a passion equally strong, and it is especially pathetic to those who know this to remember that he passed away in the light he so loved—in a room where there was no artificial light—nothing to quicken the darkness but the light of the full moon (which somehow seems to shine more brightly at Aldworth than anywhere else in England); and that on the face of the poet, as he passed away, fell that radiance in which he so loved to bathe it when alive.
If it is as easy to describe the personal attraction of Tennyson as it is difficult to describe that of any one of his great contemporaries, we do not find the same relations existing between him and them as regards his place in the firmament of English poetry. In a country with a composite language such as ours, it may be affirmed with special emphasis, that there are two kinds of poetry; one appealing to the uncultivated masses, whose vocabulary is of the narrowest; the other appealing to the few who, partly by temperament, and partly by education, are sensitive to the true beauties of poetic art. While in the one case the appeal is made through a free and popular use of words, partly commonplace and partly steeped in that literary sentimentalism which in certain stages of an artificial society takes the place of the simple utterances of simple passion of earlier and simpler times; in the other case the appeal is made very largely through what Dante calls the “use of the sieve for noble words.”
Of the one perhaps Byron is the type, the exemplars being such poets as those of the Mrs. Hemans school in England, and of the Longfellow school in America. Of the other class of poets, the class typified by Milton, the most notable exemplars are Keats, Shelley, and Coleridge. Wordsworth partakes of the qualities of both classes. The methods of the first of these two groups are so cheap—they are so based on the wide severance between the popular taste and the poetic temper (which, though in earlier times it inspired the people, is now confined to the few)—that one may say of the first group that their success in finding and holding an audience is almost damnatory to them as poets. As compared with the poets of Greece, however, both groups may be said to have secured only a partial success in poetry; for not only Æschylus and Sophocles, but Homer too, are as satisfying in the matter of noble words as though they had never tried to win that popular success which was their goal. In this respect—as being, I mean, the compeer of the great poets of Greece—Shakespeare takes his peculiar place in English poetry. Of all poets he is the most popular, and yet in his use of the “sieve for noble words” his skill transcends that of even Milton, Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats. His felicities of diction in the great passages seem little short of miraculous, and they are so many that it is easy to understand why he is so often spoken of as being a kind of inspired improvisatore. That he was _not_ an improvisatore, however, any one can see who will take the trouble to compare the first edition of ‘Romeo and Juliet’ with the received text, the first sketch of ‘The Merry Wives of Windsor’ with the play as we now have it, and the ‘Hamlet’ of 1603 with the ‘Hamlet’ of 1604, and with the still further varied version of the play given by Heminge and Condell in the Folio of 1623. If we take into account, moreover, that it is only by the lucky chapter of accidents that we now possess the earlier forms of the three plays mentioned above, and that most likely the other plays were once in a like condition, we shall come to the conclusion that there was no more vigilant worker with Dante’s sieve than Shakespeare. Next to Shakespeare in this great power of combining the forces of the two great classes of English poets, appealing both to the commonplace sense of a commonplace public and to the artistic sense of the few, stands, perhaps, Chaucer; but since Shakespeare’s time no one has met with anything like Tennyson’s success in effecting a reconciliation between popular and artistic sympathy with poetry in England.
The biography of such a poet, one who has had such an immense influence upon the literary history of the entire Victorian epoch—indeed, upon the nineteenth century, for his work covers two-thirds of the century—will be a work of incalculable importance. There is but one man who is fully equipped for such an undertaking, and fortunately that is his own son—a man of great ability, of admirable critical acumen, and of quite exceptional accomplishments. His son’s filial affection was so precious to Tennyson that, although the poet’s powers remained undimmed to the last day of his life, I do not believe that we should have had all the splendid work of the last ten years without his affectionate and unwearied aid.
II.