Part 4 (2/2)

I have been reading again your article on _The Supernatural in Poetry_. It is truly admirable--such work must soon make you a place. The dramatic paper I thought suffered from some immaturity.

It is hardly necessary to say that I was equally delighted with the warmth of the reception accorded to my essay, and with the revelation the letters appeared to contain of a sincere and unselfish nature. My purpose, however, which was a modest one, had been served, and I made no further attempt to continue the correspondence, least of all did I expect or desire to originate anything of the nature of a friends.h.i.+p. In my reply to his note, however, I had asked him to accept the dedication of a little work of mine, and when, with abundant courtesy, he had declined to do so on very sufficient grounds, I felt satisfied that matters between us should rest where they were. It is a pleasing recollection, nevertheless, that Rossetti himself had taken a different view of the relation that had grown up between us, and by many generous appeals induced me to put by all further thoughts of abandoning the correspondence out of regard for him. There had ensued an interval in which I did not write to him, whereupon he addressed to me a hurried note, saying:

Let me have a line from you. I am haunted by the idea, that in declining the dedication, I may have hurt you. I a.s.sure you I should be proud to be a.s.sociated in any way with your work, but gave you my very reasons.

I shall be pleased if you do not think them sufficient, and still carry out your original intention.... At least write to me.

I replied to this letter (containing, as it did, the expression of so much more than the necessary solicitude), by saying that I too had been haunted, but it had been by the fear that I had been asking too much of his attention. As to the dedication, so far from feeling hurt, by Rossetti's declining it, I had grown to see that such was the only course that remained to him to take. The terms in which he had replied to my offer of it (so far from being of a kind to annoy or hurt me), had, to my thinking, been only generous, sympathetic, and beautiful.

Again he wrote:

My dear Caine,--

Let me a.s.sure you at once that correspondence with yourself is one of my best pleasures, and that you cannot write too much or too often for _me_; though after what you have told me as to the apportioning of your time, I should be unwilling to encroach unduly upon it. Neither should I on my side prove very tardy in reply, as you are one to whom I find there _is_ something to say when I sit down with a pen and paper. I have a good deal of enforced evening leisure, as it is seldom I can paint or draw by gaslight. It would not be right in me to refrain from saying that to meet with one so ”leal and true” to myself as you are has been a consolation amid much discouragement.... I perceive you have had a complete poetic career which you have left behind to strike out into wider waters.... The pa.s.sage on Night, which you say was written under the planet Sh.e.l.ley, seems to me (and to my brother, to whom I read it) to savour more of the ”mortal moon”--that is, of a weird and sombre Elizabethanism, of which Beddoes may be considered the modern representative. But we both think it has an unmistakeable force and value; and if you can write better poetry than this, let your angel say unto you, _Write_.

I take it that it would be wholly unwise of me in selecting excerpts from Rossetti's letters entirely to withhold the pa.s.sages that concern exclusively (so far as their substance goes) my own early doings or try-ings-to-do; for it ought to be a part of my purpose to lay bare the beginnings of that friends.h.i.+p by virtue of which such letters exist.

I can only ask the readers of these pages to accept my a.s.surance, that whatever the number and extent of the pa.s.sages which I publish that are necessarily in themselves of more interest to myself personally than to the public generally, they are altogether disproportionate to the number and extent of those I withhold. I cannot, however, resist the conclusion that such picture as they afford of a man beyond the period of middle life capable of bending to a new and young friend, and of thinking with and for him, is not without an exceptional literary interest as being so contrary to every-day experience. Hence, I am not without hope that the occasional references to myself which in the course of these extracts I shall feel it necessary to introduce, may be understood to be employed by me as much for their ill.u.s.trative value (being indicative of Rossetti's character), as for any purpose less purely impersonal.

The pa.s.sage of verse referred to was copied out for Rossetti in reply to an inquiry as to whether I had written poetry. Prompted no doubt by the encouragement derived in this instance, I submitted from time to time other verses to Rossetti, as subsequent letters show, but it says something for the value of his praise that whatever the measure of it when his sympathies were fairly aroused, and whatever his natural tendency to look for the characteristic merits rather than defects of compositions referred to his judgment, his candour was always prominent among his good qualities when censure alone required to be forthcoming.

Among many frank utterances of an opinion early formed, that whatever my potentialities as a writer of prose, I had but small vocation as a writer of poetry, I preserve one such utterance, which will, I trust, be found not less interesting to other readers from affording a glimpse of the writer's att.i.tude towards the old controversy touching the several and distinguis.h.i.+ng elements that contribute to make good prose on the one hand and good verse on the other.

On one occasion he had sent me his fine sonnet on Keats, then just written, and, in acknowledging the receipt of it with many expressions of admiration, I remarked that for some days I had been struggling desperately, in all senses, to incubate a sonnet on the same somewhat hackneyed subject. I had not written a line or put pen to paper for the purpose, but I could tell him, in general terms, what my unaccomplished marvel of sonnet-craft was to be about.

Rossetti replied saying that the scheme for a sonnet was ”extremely beautiful,” and urging me to ”do it at once.” Alas for my intrepidity, ”do it” I did, with the result of awakening my correspondent to the certainty that, whatever embowerings I had in my mind, that shy bird the sonnet would seek in vain for a nest to hide in there. It asked so much special courage to send a first attempt at sonneteering to the greatest living master of the sonnet that moral daring alone ought to have got me off lightly, but here is Rossetti's reply, valuable now, as well for the view it affords of the poet's att.i.tude towards the sonnet as a medium of expression, as for other reasons already a.s.signed. The opening pa.s.sage alludes to a lyric of humble life.

You may be sure I do not mean essential discouragement when I say that, full as _Nell_ is of reality and pathos, your swing of arm seems to me firmer and freer in prose than in verse. I do think I see your field to lie chiefly in the achievements of fervid and impa.s.sioned prose.... I am sure that, when sending me your first sonnet, you wished me to say quite frankly what I think of it. Well, I do not think it shows a special vocation for this condensed and emphatic form. The prose version you sent me seems to say much more distinctly what this says with some want of force. The octave does not seem to me very clearly put, and the sestet does not emphasize in a sufficiently striking way the idea which the prose sketch conveyed to me,--that of Keats's special privilege in early death: viz., the lovely monumentalized image he bequeathed to us of the young poet. Also I must say that more special originality and even _newness_ (though this might be called a vulgarizing word), of thought and picture in individual lines--more of this than I find here--seems to me the very first qualification of a sonnet--otherwise it puts forward no right to be so short, but might seem a severed pa.s.sage from a longer poem depending on development. I would almost counsel you to try the same theme again--or else some other theme in sonnet-form.

I thought the pa.s.sage on Night you sent showed an apt.i.tude for choice imagery. I should much like to see something which you view as your best poetic effort hitherto. After all, there is no need that every gifted writer should take the path of poetry--still less of sonneteering. I am confident in your preference for frankness on my part.

I tried the theme again before I abandoned it, and was so fortunate as to get him to admit a degree of improvement such as led to his desiring to recall his conjectural judgment on my possibilities as a sonnet-writer, but as the letters in which he characterises the advance are neither so terse in criticism, nor so interesting from the exposition of principles, as the one quoted, I pa.s.s them by. With more confidence in my ultimate comparative success than I had ever entertained, Rossetti was only anxious that I should engage in that work to which I. could address myself with a sense of command; and I think it will be agreed that, where temperate confidence in what the future may legitimately hold for one is united to earnest and rightly directed endeavour in the present, it is often a good thing for the man who stands on the threshold of life (to whom, nevertheless, the path pa.s.sed seems ever to stretch out of sight backwards) to be told the extent to which, little enough at the most, his clasp (to use a phrase of Mr.

Browning) may be equal to his grasp.

My residing, as I did, at a distance from London, was at once the difficulty which for a time prevented our coming together and the necessity for correspondence by virtue of which these letters exist.

As I failed, however, from hampering circ.u.mstance, to meet at once with himself, Rossetti invariably displayed a good deal of friendly anxiety to bring me into contact with his friends as frequently as occasion rendered it feasible to do so. In this way I met with Mr. Madox Brown, who was at the moment engaged on his admirable frescoes in the Manchester Town Hall, and in this way also I met with other friends of his resident in my neighbourhood. When I came to know him more intimately I perceived that besides the kindliness of intention which had prompted him to bring me into what he believed to be agreeable a.s.sociations, he had adopted this course from the other motive of desiring to be rea.s.sured as to the comparative harmlessness of my personality, for he usually followed the introduction to a friend by a private letter of thanks for the reception accorded me, and a number of dexterously manipulated allusions, which always, I found, produced the desired result of eliciting the required information (to be gleaned only from personal intercourse) as to my manner and habits. Later in our acquaintance, I found that he, like all meditative men, had the greatest conceivable dread of being taken unawares, and that there was no safer way for any fresh acquaintance to insure his taking violently against him, than to take the step of coming down upon him suddenly, and without appointment, or before a sufficient time had elapsed between the beginning of the friends.h.i.+p and the actual personal encounter, to admit of his forming preconceived ideas of the manner of man to expect. The agony he suffered upon the unexpected visit of even the most ardent of well-wishers could scarcely be realised at the moment, from the apparent ease, and a.s.sumed indifference of his outward bearing, and could only be known to those who were with him after the trying ordeal had been pa.s.sed, or immediately before the threatened intrusion had been consummated.

Early in our correspondence a friend of his, an art critic of distinction, visited Liverpool with the purpose of lecturing on the valuable examples of Byzantine art in the Eoyal Inst.i.tution of that city. The lecture was, I fear, almost too good and quite too technical for some of the hearers, many of whom claim (and with reason) to be lovers of art, and cover the walls of their houses with beautiful representations of lovely landscape, but at the same time erect huge furnaces which emit vast volumes of black smoke such as prevent the sky of any Liverpool landscape being for an instant lovely. I doubt if the lecture could have been treated more popularly, but there was manifestly a lack of merited appreciation. The archaisms of some of the pictures chosen for ill.u.s.tration (early Byzantine examples exclusively) appeared to cause certain of the audience to smile at much of the lecturer's enthusiasm. Fortunately the man chiefly concerned seemed unconscious of all this. And indeed, however he fared in public, in private he was only too ”dreadfully attended.” After the lecture a good many folks gave him the benefit of their invaluable opinions on various art questions, and some, as was natural, made pitiful slips. I observed with secret and scarcely concealed satisfaction his courageous loyalty in defence of his friends, and his. .h.i.tting out in their defence when he believed them to be a.s.sailed. One superlative intelligence, eager to do honour to the guest, yet ignorant of his claim to such honour, gave him a wonderfully facile and racy comment on the pre-Raphaelite painters, and, in particular, made the ridiculous blunder of a deliberate attack upon Rossetti, and then paused for breath and for the lecturer's appreciative response; of course, Rossetti's friend was not to be drawn into such disloyalty for an instant, even to avoid the risk of ruffling the plumage of the mightiest of the corporate cacklers. Rossetti had permitted me in his name to meet his friend, and in writing subsequently I alluded to the affection with which he had been mentioned, also to something that had been said of his immediate surroundings, and to that frank championing of his claims which I have just described. Rossetti's reply to this is interesting as affording a pathetic view of his isolation of life and of the natural affectionateness of his nature:

I am very glad you were welcomed by dear staunch S------, as I felt sure you would be. He holds the honourable position of being almost the only living art-critic who has really himself worked through the art-schools practically, and learnt to draw and paint. He is one of my oldest and best friends, of whom few can be numbered at my age, from causes only too varying.

Go from me, summer friends, and tarry not,-- I am no summer friend, but wintry cold, etc.

So be it, as needs must be,--not for all, let us hope, and not with all, as good S------ shews. I have not seen him since his return. I wrote him a line to thank him for his friendly reception of you, and he wrote in return to thank me for your acquaintance, and spoke very pleasantly of you.

Your youth seems to have surprised him. I sent a letter of his to your address. I hope you may see more of him. . . .

You mention something he said to you of me and my surroundings. They are certainly _quiet_ enough as fax as retirement goes, and I have often thought I should enjoy the presence of a congenial and intellectual housefellow and boardfellow in this big barn of mine, which is actually going to rack and ruin for want of use. But where to find the welcome, the willing, and the able combined in one? . . .

I was truly concerned to hear of the attack of ill-health you have suffered from, though you do not tell me its exact nature. I hope it was not accompanied by any such symptoms as you mentioned before. . . . I myself have had similar symptoms (though not so fully as you describe), and have spat blood at intervals for years, but now think nothing of it--nor indeed ever did,--waiting for further alarm signals which never came.

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