Chapter 16

to Part II. About these two last I have a theory of my own.

Did you ever see the excellent remarks on these sonnets in my brother’s _Lives of Famous Poets?_ I think a simple point he mentions (for first time) fixes Pembroke clearly as the male friend. I am glad you like his own two fine sonnets. I wish he would write more such. By the bye, you speak with great scorn of the closing couplet in sonnets. I do not certainly think that form the finest, but I do think this and every variety desirable in a series, and have often used it myself. I like your letters on sonnets; write on all points in question. The two last of Shakspeare’s sonnets seem to me to have a very probable (and rather elaborate) meaning never yet attributed to them. Some day, when I see you, we will talk it over. Did you ever see a curious book by one Brown (I don’t mean Armitage Brown) on Shakspeare’s sonnets? By the bye, he is not the source of my notion as above, but a matter of fact he names helps in it. I never saw Massey’s book on the subject, but fancy his views and Brown’s are somewhat allied. You should look at what my brother says, which is very concise and valuable. I hope I am not omitting to answer you in any essential point, but my writing-table is a chaos into which your last letters have, for the moment, sunk beyond recovery.

I consider the foregoing, perhaps, the most valuable of Rossetti’s letters to me. I cannot remember that we ever afterwards talked over the two last sonnets of Shakspeare; if we did so, the meaning attached to them by him did not fix itself very definitely upon my memory.

In explanation of my alleged dislike of the closing couplet, I may say that a rhymed couplet at the close of a sonnet has an effect upon my ear similar to that produced by the couplets at the ends of some of the acts of Shakspeare’s plays, which were in many instances interpolated by the actors to enable them to make emphatic exits.

I must now group together a number of short notes on sonnets:

I think Blanco White’s sonnet difficult to overrate in _thought_--probably in this respect unsurpassable, but easy to overrate as regards its workmanship. Of course there is the one fatally disenchanting line:

While fly and leaf and insect stood revealed.

The poverty of vision which could not see at a glance that fly and insect were one and the same, is, as you say, enough to account for its being the writer’s only sonnet (there is one more however which I don’t know).

I’ll copy you overpage a sonnet which I consider a very fine one, but which may be said to be quite unknown. It is by Charles Whitehead, who wrote the very admirable and exceptional novel of _Richard Savage_, published somewhere about 1840.

Even as yon lamp within my vacant room With arduous flame disputes the doubtful night, And can with its involuntary light But lifeless things that near it stand illume; Yet all the while it doth itself consume, And ere the sun hath reached his morning height With courier beams that greet the shepherd’s sight, There where its life arose must be its tomb:-- So wastes my life away, perforce confined To common things, a limit to its sphere, It gleams on worthless trifles undesign’d, With fainter ray each hour imprison’d here. Alas to know that the consuming mind Must leave its lamp cold ere the sun appear!

I am sure you will agree with me in admiring _that_. I quote from memory, and am not sure that I have given line 6 quite correctly....

I have just had Blanco White’s only other sonnet (_On being called an Old Man at 50_) copied out for you. I do certainly think it ought to go in, though no better than so-so, as you say. But it is just about as good as the former one, but for the leading and splendid thought in the latter. Both are but proseman’s diction.

There is a sonnet of Chas. Wells’s _On Chaucer_ which is not worthy of its writer, but still you should have it. It occurs among some prefatory tributes in _Chaucer Modernised_, edited by E. H. Home. I don’t know how you are to get a copy, but the book is in the British Museum Reading Room. The sonnet is signed C. W. only.

The sonnet by Wells seemed to me in every respect poor, and as it was no part of my purpose (as an admirer of Wells) to advertise what the poet could not do, I determined--against Rossetti’s judgment--not to print the sonnet.

You certainly, in my opinion, ought to print Wells’s sonnet. Certainly nothing so disjointed ever gave itself the name before, but it ought to be available for reference, and I do not agree with you in considering it weak in any sense except that of structure.

There is a sonnet by Ebenezer Jones, beginning “I never wholly feel that summer is high,” which, though very jagged, has decided merit to warrant its insertion.

As for Tennyson, he seems to have given leave for a sonnet to appear in Main’s book. Why not in yours? But I have long ceased to know him, nor is any friend of mine in communication with him.... My brother has written in his time a few sonnets. Two of them I think very fine-- especially the one called _Shelley’s Heart_, which he has lately worked upon again with immense advantage.... You do not tell me from whom you have received sonnets. The reason which prevents my coming forward, in such a difficulty, with a new sonnet of my own, is this:--which indeed you have probably surmised: I know nothing would gratify malevolence, after the controversy which ensued on your lecture, more than to be able to assert, however falsely, that we had been working in concert all along, that you were known to me from the first, and that your advocacy had no real spontaneity.... When you first entered on the subject, and wrote your lecture, you were a perfect stranger to me, and that fact greatly enhanced my pleasure in its enthusiastic tone. I hope sincerely that we may have further and close opportunities of intercourse, but should like whatever you may write of me to come from the old source of intellectual affinity only. That you should think the subject worthy of further labour is a pleasure to me, but I only trust it may not be a disadvantage to your book in unfriendly eyes, particularly if that view happened to be the proposed publisher’s, in which case I should much prefer that this section of your work were withdrawn for a more propitious occasion.... I am very glad Brown is furthering your sonnet- book--he knows so many bards. Of course if I were you, I should keep an eye on the mouths even of gift-horses; but were a creditable stud to be trotted out, of course I should be willing; as were I one among many, the objection I noted would not exist. I do not mean for a moment to say that many very fine sonnets might not be obtained from poets not yet known or not widely known; but known names would be the things to parry the difficulty.

Later he wrote:

As you know, I want to contribute to your volume if I can do so without fear of the consequences hinted at in a former letter as likely to ensue, so I now enclose a sonnet of my own. If you are out in March 1881, you may be before my new edition, but I am getting my stock together. Not a word of this however, as it mustn’t get into gossip paragraphs at present. _The House of Life_ is now a hundred sonnets--all lyrics being removed. Besides this series, I have forty-five sonnets extra. I think, as you are willing, I shall use the title I sent you--_A Sonnet Sequence_. I fancy the alternative title would be briefer and therefore better as

OUR SONNET-MUSE

PROM ELIZABETH TO VICTORIA

I could not be much concerned about the unwillingness to give me a new sonnet which Rossetti at first exhibited, for I knew full well that sooner or later the sonnet would come. Not that I recognised in him the faintest scintillation of the affectation so common among authors as to the publication of work. But the fear of any appearance of collusion between himself and his critics was, as he said, a bugbear that constantly haunted him. Owing to this, a stranger often stood a better chance of securing his ready and open co-operation than the most intimate of friends. I frequently yielded to his desire that in anything that I might write his name should not be mentioned--too frequently by far, to my infinite vexation at the time, and now to my deep and ineradicable regret. The sonnet-book out of which arose much of the correspondence printed in this chapter, contains in its preface and notes hardly an allusion to him, and yet he was, in my judgment, out of all reach and sight, the greatest sonnet-writer of his time. The sonnet first sent was _Pride of Youth_, but as this formed part of _The House of Life_ series, it was withdrawn, and _Raleigh’s Cell in the Tower_ was substituted The following hitherto unpublished sonnet was also contributed but withdrawn at the last moment, because of its being out of harmony with the sonnets selected to accompany it:

ON CERTAIN ELIZABETHAN REVIVALS.

O ruff-embastioned vast Elizabeth, Bush to these bushel-bellied casks of wine, Home-growth, ‘tis true, but rank as turpentine,-- What would we with such skittle-plays at death % Say, must we watch these brawlers’ brandished lathe, Or to their reeking wit our ears incline, Because all Castaly flowed crystalline In gentle Shakspeare’s modulated breath! What! must our drama with the rat-pit vie, Nor the scene close while one is left to kill! Shall this be poetry % And thou--thou--man Of blood, thou cannibalic Caliban, What shall be said to thee?--a poet?--Fie! “An honourable murderer, if you will”

I mentioned to you [he says] William Davies, author of _Songs of a Wayfarer_ (by the bye, another man has since adopted his title). He has many excellent sonnets, and is a valued friend of mine. I shall send you, on his behalf, a copy of the book for selection of what you may please.... It is very unequal, but the best truly excellent. The sonnets are numerous, and some good, though the best work in the book is not among them. There are two poems--_The Garden_, and another called, I think, _On a dried-up Spring_, which are worthy of the most fastidious collections. Many of the poems are unnamed, and the whole has too much of a Herrick air. . . .

It is quite refreshing to find you so pleased with my good friend Davies’s book, and I wish he were in London, as I would have shown him what you say, which I know would have given him pleasure. He is a man who suffers much from moods of depression, in spite of his philosophic nature. I have marked fifty pieces of different kinds throughout his book, and of these twenty-nine are sonnets. Had those fifty been alone printed, Davies would now be remembered and not forgotten: but all poets now-a-days are redundant except Tennyson. ...

I am this evening writing to Davies, who is in Rome, and could not resist enclosing what you say, with so much experimental appreciativeness of his book, and of his intention to fill it with moral sunshine. I am sure he ‘ll send a new sonnet if he has one, but I fancy his bardic day is over. I should think he was probably not subject to melancholy when he wrote the _Wayfarer_. However, he tells me that his spirits have improved in Italy. One other little book of Herrickian verse he has written, called _The Shepherd!s Garden_, but there are no sonnets in it. Besides this, he published a volume containing a record of travel of a very interesting kind, and called _The Pilgrimage of the Tiber_. This is well known. It is illustrated, many of the drawings being by himself, for he is quite as much painter as poet. He also wrote in _The Quarterly Review_ an article on the sonnet (I should think about 1870 or so), and, a little later, one which raised great wrath, on the English School of Painting. These I have not seen. He “lacks advancement,” however; having fertile powers and little opportunity, and being none the luckier (I think) for a small independence which keeps off _compulsion_ to work, though of willingness he has abundance in many directions.

There is an admirable but totally unknown living poet named Dixon. I will send you two small vols, of his which he gave me long ago, but please take good care of them, and return them as soon as done with. I value them highly. I forgot till to-day that he had written any sonnets, but I see there are three in one vol. and one in another. I have marked my two favourites. He should certainly be represented in your book. If I live, I mean to write something about him in some quarter when I can. His finest passages are as fine as any living man can do. He was a canon of Carlisle Cathedral, and at present has a living somewhere. If you wanted to ask him for an original sonnet, you might mention my name, and address him at Carlisle with _Please forward_. Of course he is a Rev.

You will be sorry to hear that Davies has abandoned the hope of producing a new sonnet to his own satisfaction. I have again, however, urged him to the onslaught, and told him how deserving you are of his efforts.

Swinburne, who is a vast admirer of my sister’s, thinks the _Advent_ perhaps the noblest of all her poems, and also specially loves the _Passing Away_. I do not know that I quite agree with your decided preference for the two sonnets of hers you signalise,--the _World_ is very fine, but the other, _Dead before Death_, a little sensational for her. I think _After Death_ one of her noblest, and the one _After Communion_. In my own view, the greatest of all her poems is that on France after the siege--_To-Day for Me_. A very splendid piece of feminine ascetic passion is _The Convent Threshold_.

I have run the sonnet you like, _St. Luke the Painter_, into a sequence with two more not yet printed, and given the three a general title of _Old and New Art_, as well as special titles to each. I shall annex them to _The House of Life_.

Have you ever read Vaughan? He resembles Donne a good deal as to quaintness, but with a more emotional personality.

I have altered the last line of octave in _Lost Days_. It now runs--

“The undying throats of Hell, athirst alway.”

I always had it in my mind to make a change here, as the _in_ standing in the line in its former reading clashed with _in_ occurring in the previous line. I have done what I think is a prime sonnet on the murdered Czar, which I enclose, but don’t show it to a soul.

Theodore Watts is going to print a very fine sonnet of his own in _The Athenæum_. It is the first verse he ever put in print, though he wrote much (when a very young man). Tell me how you like it. I think he is destined to shine in that class of poetry.

I knew you must like Watts’s sonnets. They are splendid affairs. I am not sure that I agree with you in liking the first the better of the two: the second (_Natura Maligna_) is perhaps the deeper and finer. I have asked Watts to give you a new sonnet, and I think perhaps he will do so, or at all events give you permission to use those he has printed. He has just come into the room, and says he would like to hear from you on the subject.

From one rather jocular sentence in your note I judge you may include some sonnets of your own. I see no possible reason why you should not. You are really now, at your highest, among our best sonnet-writers, and have written two or three sonnets that yield to few or none whatever. I am forced, however, to request that you will not put in the one referring to myself, from my constant bugbear of any appearance of collusion. That sonnet is a very fine one--my brother was showing it me again the other day. It is not my personal gratification alone, though that is deep, because I know you are sincere, which leads me to the conclusion that it is your best, and very fine indeed. I think your Cumberland sonnet admirable. The sonnet on Byron is extremely musical in flow and the symbolic scenery of exceptional excellence. The view taken is the question with me. Byron’s vehement directness, at its best, is a lasting lesson: and, dubious monument as _Don Juan_ may be, it towers over the century. Of course there is truth in what you say; but _ought_ it to be the case? and is it the case in any absolute sense? You deal frankly with your sonnets, and do not shrink from radical change. I think that on Oliver much better than when I saw it before. The opening phrases of both octave and sestette are very fine; but the second quatrain and the second terzina, though with a quality of beauty, both seem somewhat to lack distinctness. The word _rivers_ cannot be used with elision--the v is a hard pebble in the flow, and so are the closing consonants. You must put up with _streams_ if you keep the line.

You should have Bailey’s dedicatory sonnet in _Festus_.

I am enclosing a fine sonnet by William Bell Scott, which I wished him to let me send you for your book. It has not yet been printed. I think I heard of some little chaffy matter between him and you, but, doubtless, you have virtually forgotten all about it. I must say frankly that I think the day when you made the speech he told me of must have been rather a wool-gathering one with you.... I suppose you know that Scott has written a number of fine sonnets contained in his vol of _Poems_ published about 1875, I think.

I directed the attention of Mr. Waddington (whom, however, I don’t know personally) to a most noble sonnet by Fanny Kemble, beginning, “Art thou already weary of the way?” He has put it in, and several others of hers, but she is very unequal, and I don’t know if the others should be there, but you should take the one in question. It sadly wants new punctuation, being vilely printed just as I first saw it when a boy in some twopenny edition.

In a memoir of Gilchrist, appended now by his widow to the _Life of Blake_, there is a sonnet by G., perhaps interesting enough, as being exceptional, for you to ask for it; but I don’t advise you, if you don’t think it worth.

I have received from Mrs. Meynell, a sister of Eliz. Thompson, the painter, a most genuine little book of poems containing some sonnets of true spiritual beauty. I must send it you.

This book had just then been introduced to Rossetti with much warmth of praise by Mr. Watts, and he took to it vastly.

This closes Rossetti’s interesting letters on sonnet literature. In reprinting his first volume of _Poems_ he had determined to remove the sonnets of _The House of Life_ to the new volume of _Ballads and Sonnets_, and fill the space with the fragment of a poem written in youth, and now called _The Bride’s Prelude_. He sent me a proof. The reader will remember that as a narrative fragment it is less remarkable for striking incident (though never failing of interest and picturesqueness) than for a slow and psychical development which ultimately gained a great hold of the sympathies. The poem leaves behind it a sense as of a sultry day. Judging first of its merits as a song (using the word in its broad and simple sense), the poem flows on the tongue with unbroken sweetness and with a variety of cadence and light and shade of melody which might admit of its pursuing its meanderings through five times its less than 50 pages, and still keeping one’s senses awake to the constantly recurring advent of new and pleasing literary forms. The story is a striking one, with a great wealth of highly effective incident,--notably the episode of the card-playing, and of the father striking down the sword which Raoul turns against the breast of the bride. Almost equally memorable are the scenes in which the lover appears, and the occasional interludes of incident in which, between the pauses of the narrative, the bridegroom’s retinue are heard sporting in the courtyard without.

The whole atmosphere of the poem is saturated in a medievalism of spirit to which no lapse of modernism does violence, and the spell of romance which comes with that atmosphere of the middle ages is never broken, but preserved in the minutest most matter-of-fact details, such as the bowl of water that stood amidst flowers, and in which the sister Amelotte “slid a cup” and offered it to Aloyse to drink. But the one great charm of the poem lies in its subtle and most powerful psychical analysis, seen foreshadowed in the first mention of the bride sitting in the shade, but first felt strongly when she begs her sister to pray, and again when she tells how, at God’s hint, she had whispered something of the whole tale to her sister who slept

The dread introspection pictured after the sin is in the highest degree tragic, and affects one like remorse in its relentlessness, although less remorse than fear of discovery. The sickness of the following condition, with its yearnings, longings, dizziness, is very nobly done, and delicate as is the theme, and demanding a touch of unerring strength, yet lightness, the part of the poem concerned with it contains certain of the most beautiful and stirring things. The madness (for it is not less than such) in which at the sea-side, believing Urscelyn to be lost, the bride tells the whole tale, whilst her curse laughed within her to see the amazement and anger of her brothers and of her father, is doubtless true enough to the frenzied state of her mind; but my sympathies go out less to that part of the poem than to the subsequent part, in which the bride-mother is described as leaning along in thought after her child, till tears, not like a wedded girl’s, fall among her curls. Highly dramatic, too, is the passage in which she fears to curse the evil men whose evil hands have taken her child, lest from evil lips the curse should be a blessing.

The characterisation seemed to be highly powerful, and, so far as it went, finely contrasted. I could almost have wished that the love for which the bride suffers so much had been more dwelt upon, and Urscelyn had been made somehow more worthy of such love and sacrifice. The only point in which the poem struck me, after mature reflection, as less admirable than certain others of the author’s, lay in the circumstance that the narrative moves slowly, but, of course, it should be remembered that the poem is one of emotion, not incident. There are most magical flashes of imagery in the poem, notably in the passage beginning

Her thought, long stagnant, stirred by speech, Gave her a sick recoil; As, dip thy fingers through the green That masks a pool, where they have been, The naked depth is black between.

Rossetti wrote a valuable letter on his scheme for the completion of _The Bride’s Prelude_:

I was much pleased with your verdict on _The Bride’s Prelude_. I think the poem is saved by its picturesqueness, but that otherwise the story up to the point reached is too purely repellent. I have the sequel quite clear in my mind, and in it the mere passionate frailty of Aloyse’s first love would be followed by a true and noble love, rendered calamitous by Urscelyn, who then (having become a powerful soldier of fortune) solicits the hand of Aloyse. Thus the horror which she expresses against him to her sister on the bridal morning would be fully justified. Of course, Aloyse would confess her fault to her second lover whose love would, nevertheless, endure. The poem would gain so greatly by this sequel that I suppose I must set to and finish it one day, old as it is. I suppose it would be doubled, but hardly more. I hate long poems.

I quite think the card-playing passage the best thing--as a unit--in the poem: but your opinion encourages my own, that it fails nowhere of good material. It certainly moves slowly as you say, and this is quite against the rule I follow. But here was no life condensed in an episode; but a story which had necessarily to be told step by step, and a situation which had unavoidably to be anatomised. If it is not unworthy to appear with my best things, that is all I hope for it. You have pitched curiously upon some of my favourite touches, and very coincidently with Watts’s views.

Early in 1881, he wrote:

I am writing a ballad on the death of James I. of Scots. It is already twice the length of _The White Ship_, and has a good slice still to come. It is called _The King’s Tragedy_, and is a ripper I can tell you!

The other day I got from Italy a paper containing a really excellent and exceptional notice of my poems, written by the author of a volume also sent me containing, among other translations from the English, _Jenny, Last Confession_, etc.

I have been re-reading, after many years, Keats’s _Otho the Great_, and find it a much better thing than I remembered, though only a draft.

I am much exercised as to what you mention as to a _Michael Scott_ scheme of Coleridge’s. Where does he speak of it, and what is it? It is quite new to me; but curiously enough, I have a complete scheme drawn up for a ballad, to be called _Michael Scott’s Wooing_, not the one I proposed beginning now--and also have long designed a picture under the same title, but of quite different motif! Allan Cunningham wrote a romance called _Sir Michael Scott_, but I never saw it.

I have heard from Walter Severn about a subscription proposed to erect a gravestone to his father beside that of Keats. I should like you to copy for me your sonnet on Severn. I hear it is in _The Athenæum_, but have not seen it. I was asked to prepare an inscription, which I send you. Nothing would be so good as Severn’s own words.

I strongly urge you to go on with your book on the _Supernatural_. The closing chapter should, I think, be on the _weird_ element in its perfection, as shown by recent poets in the mess--i.e. those who take any lead. Tennyson has it certainly here and there in imagery, but there is no great success in the part it plays through his _Idylls_. The Old Romaunt beats him there. The strongest instance of this feeling in Tennyson that I remember is in a few lines of _The Palace of Art_:

And hollow breasts enclosing hearts of flame; And with dim-fretted foreheads all On corpses three months old at morn she came That stood against the wall.

I won’t answer for the precise age of the corpses--perhaps I have staled them somewhat.