Part 6 (2/2)

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.

I noticed at this early period, as well as later, that in Rossetti's eyes a favourable review was always enhanced in value if the writer happened to be a stranger to him; and I constantly protested that a friend's knowledge of one's work and sympathy with it ought not to be less delightful, as such, than a stranger's, however less surprising, though at the same time the tribute that is true to one's art without auxiliary aids being brought to bear in its formation must be at once the most satisfying a.s.surance of the purity, strength, and completeness of the art itself, and of the safe and enduring quality of the appreciation. It is true that friends who are accustomed to our habit of thought and manner of expression sometimes catch our meaning before we have expressed it Not rarely, before our thought has reached that stage at which it becomes intelligible to a stranger, a word, a look, or a gesture will convey it perfectly and fully to a friend. And what goes on between minds that exist in more or less intimate communion, goes on to a greater degree within the individual mind where the metaphysical equivalents to a word or a look answer to, and are answered by, the half-realised conception. Hence it often happens that even where our touch seems to ourselves delicate and precise, a mind not initiated in our self-chosen method of abbreviation finds only impenetrable obscurity. It is then in the tentative condition of mind just indicated that the spirit of art comes in, and enables a man so to clothe his thought in lucid words and fitting imagery that strangers may know, when they see it, all that it is, and how he came by it. Although, therefore, the praise of friends should not be less delightful, as praise, than that tendered by strangers, there is an added element of surprise and satisfaction in the latter which the former cannot bring. Rossetti certainly never over-valued the applause of his own immediate circle, but still no man was more sensible of the value of the good opinion of one or two of his immediate friends. Returning to the correspondence, he says:

In what I wrote as to critiques on my poems, I meant to express _special_ gratification from those written by strangers to myself and yet showing full knowledge of the subject and full sympathy with it. Such were Formans at the time, the American one since (and far from alone in America, but this the best) and more lately your own. Other known and unknown critics of course wrote on the book when it appeared, some very favourably and others _quite_ sufficiently abusive.

As to _Cloud Confines_, I told Rossetti that I considered it in philosophic grasp the most powerful of his productions, and interesting as being (unlike the body of his works) more nearly akin to the spirit of music than that of painting.

By the bye, you are right about _Cloud Confines_, which _is_ my very best thing--only, having been foolishly sent to a magazine, no notice whatever resulted.

Rossetti was not always open to suggestions as to the need of clarifying obscure phrases in his verses, but on one or two occasions, when I was so bold as to hint at changes, I found him in highly tractable moods.

I called his attention to what I imagined might prove to be merely a printer's slip in his poem (a great favourite of mine) ent.i.tled _The Portrait_. The second stanza ran:

Yet this, of all love's perfect prize, Remains; save what in mournful guise Takes counsel with my soul alone,-- Save what is secret and unknown, Below the earth, above the sky.

The words ”yet” and ”save” seemed to me (and to another friend) somewhat puzzling, and I asked if ”but” in the sense of _only_ had been meant. He wrote:

That is a very just remark of yours about the pa.s.sage in _Portrait_ beginning _yet_. I meant to infer _yet only_, but it certainly is truncated. I shall change the line to

Yet only this, of love's whole prize, Remains, etc.

But would again be dubious though explicable. Thanks for the hint.... I shall be much obliged to you for any such hints of a verbal nature.

CHAPTER V.

The letters printed in the foregoing chapter are valuable as settling at first-hand all question of the chronology of the poems of Rossetti's volume of 1870. The poems of the volume of 1881 (Rose Mary and certain of the sonnets excepted) grew under his hand during the period of my acquaintance with him, and their origin I shall in due course record.

The two preceding chapters have been for the most part devoted to such letters (and such explanatory matter as must needs accompany them) as concern princ.i.p.ally, perhaps, the poet and his correspondent; but I have thrown into two further chapters a great body of highly interesting letters on subjects of general literary interest (embracing the fullest statement yet published of Rossetti's critical opinions), and have reserved for a more advanced section of the work a body of further letters on sonnet literature which arose out of the discussion of an anthology that I was at the time engaged in compiling.

It was very natural that Coleridge should prove to be one of the first subjects discussed by Rossetti, who admired him greatly, and when it transpired that Coleridge was, perhaps, my own chief idol, and that whilst even yet a child I had perused and reperused not only his poetry but even his mystical philosophy (impalpable or obscure even to his maturer and more enlightened, if no more zealous, admirers), the disposition to write upon him became great upon both sides. ”You can never say too much about Coleridge for me,” Rossetti would write, ”for I wors.h.i.+p him on the right side of idolatry, and I perceive you know him well.” Upon this one of my first remarks was that there was much in Coleridge's higher descriptive verse equivalent to the landscape art of Turner. The critical parallel Rossetti warmly approved of, adding, however, that Coleridge, at his best as a pictorial artist, was a spiritualised Turner. He instanced his,

We listened and looked sideways up, The moving moon went up the sky And no where did abide, Softly she was going up, And a star or two beside-- The charmed water burnt alway A still and awful red.

I remarked that Sh.e.l.ley possessed the same power of impregnating landscape with spiritual feeling, and this Rossetti readily allowed; but when I proceeded to say that Wordsworth sometimes, though rarely, displayed a power akin to it, I found him less warmly responsive. ”I grudge Wordsworth every vote he gets,” {*} Rossetti frequently said to me, both in writing, and afterwards in conversation. ”The three greatest English imaginations,” he would sometimes add, ”are Shakspeare, Coleridge, and Sh.e.l.ley.” I have heard him give a fourth name, Blake.

* There is a story frequently told of how, seeing two camels walking together in the Zoological Gardens, keeping step in a shambling way, and conversing with one another, Rossetti exclaimed: ”There's Wordsworth and Ruskin virtuously taking a walk!”

He thought Wordsworth was too much the High Priest of Nature to be her lover: too much concerned to transfigure into poetry his pantheo-Christian philosophy regarding Nature, to drop to his knees in simple love of her to thank G.o.d that she was beautiful. It was hard to side with Rossetti in his view of Wordsworth, partly because one feared he did not practise the patience necessary to a full appreciation of that poet, and was consequently apt to judge of him by fugitive lines read at random. In the connection in question, I instanced the lines (much admired by Coleridge) beginning

Suck, little babe, O suck again!

It cools my blood, it cools my brain,

and ending--

The breeze I see is in the tree, It comes to cool my babe and me.

But Rossetti would not see that this last couplet denoted the point of artistic vision at which the poet of nature identified himself with her, in setting aside or superseding all proprieties of mere speech. To him Wordsworth's Idealism (which certainly had the German trick of keeping close to the ground) only meant us to understand that the forsaken woman through whose mouth the words are spoken (in _The Affliction of Margaret_ ------ of ------) saw _the breeze shake the tree_ afar off.

And this att.i.tude towards Wordsworth Rossetti maintained down to the end. I remember that sometime in March of the year in which he died, Mr.

Theodore Watts, who was paying one of his many visits to see him in his last illness at the sea-side, touched, in conversation, upon the power of Wordsworth's style in its higher vein, and instanced a n.o.ble pa.s.sage in the _Ode to Duty_, which runs:

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