Part 7 (1/2)
Stern Lawgiver! yet thou dost wear The G.o.dhead's most benignant grace; Nor know we anything so fair As is the smile upon thy face; Flowers laugh before thee on their beds; And fragrance in thy footing treads; Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong; And the most ancient heavens, through Thee, are fresh and strong.
Mr. Watts spoke with enthusiasm of the strength and simplicity, the sonorousness and stately march of these lines; and numbered them, I think, among the n.o.blest verses yet written, for every highest quality of style.
But Rossetti was unyielding, and though he admitted the beauty of the pa.s.sage, and was ungrudging in his tribute to another pa.s.sage which I had instanced--
O joy that in our embers--
he would not allow that Wordsworth ever possessed a grasp of the great style, or that (despite the Ode on Immortality and the sonnet on _Toussaint L'Ouverture_, which he placed at the head of the poet's work) vital lyric impulse was ever fully developed in his muse. He said:
As to Wordsworth, no one regards the great Ode with more special and unique homage than I do, as a thing absolutely alone of its kind among all greatest things. I cannot say that anything else of his with which I have ever been familiar (and I suffer from long disuse of all familiarity with him) seems at all on a level with this.
In all humility I regard his depreciatory opinion, not at all as a valuable example of literary judgment, but as indicative of a clear radical difference of poetic bias between the two poets, such as must in the same way have made Wordsworth resist Rossetti if he had appeared before him. I am the more confirmed in this view from the circ.u.mstance that Rossetti, throughout the period of my acquaintance with him, seemed to me always peculiarly and, if I may be permitted to say so without offence, strangely liable to Mr. Watts's influence in his critical estimates, and that the case instanced was perhaps the only one in which I knew him to resist Mr. Watts's opinion upon a matter of poetical criticism, which he considered to be almost final, as his letters to me, printed in Chapter VIII. of this volume, will show. I had a striking instance of this, and of the real modesty of the man whom I had heard and still hear spoken of as the most arrogant man of genius of his day, on one of the first occasions of my seeing him. He read out to me an additional stanza to the beautiful poem _Cloud Confines_: As he read it, I thought it very fine, and he evidently was very fond of it himself. But he surprised me by saying that he should not print it. On my asking him why, he said:
”Watts, though he admits its beauty, thinks the poem would be better without it.”
”Well, but you like it yourself,” said I.
”Yes,” he replied; ”but in a question of gain or loss to a poem, I feel that Watts must be right.”
And the poem appeared in _Ballads and Sonnets_ without the stanza in question. The same thing occurred with regard to the omission of the sonnet _Nuptial Sleep_ from the new edition of the Poems in 1881. Mr.
Watts took the view (to Rossetti's great vexation at first) that this sonnet, howsoever perfect in structure and beautiful from the artistic point of view, was ”out of place and altogether incongruous in a group of sonnets so entirely spiritual as _The House of Life_,” and Rossetti gave way: but upon the subject of Wordsworth in his relations to Coleridge, Keats, and Sh.e.l.ley, he was quite inflexible to the last.
In a letter treating of other matters, Rossetti asked me if I thought ”Christabel” really existed as a mediaeval name, or existed at all earlier than Coleridge. I replied that I had not met with it earlier than the date of the poem. I thought Coleridge's granddaughter must have been the first person to bear the name. The other names in the poem appear to belong to another family of names,--names with a different origin and range of expression,--Leoline, Geraldine, Roland, and most of all Bracy. It seemed to me very possible that Coleridge invented the name, but it was highly probable that he brought it to England from Germany, where, with Wordsworth, he visited Klopstock in 1798, about the period of the first part of the poem. The Germans have names of a kindred etymology and, even if my guess proved wide of the truth, it might still be a fact that the name had German relations. Another conjecture that seemed to me a reasonable one was that Coleridge evolved the name out of the incidents of the opening pa.s.sages of the poem.
The beautiful thing, not more from its beauty than its suggestiveness, suited his purpose exactly. Rossetti replied:
Resuming the thread of my letter, I come to the question of the name Christabel, viz.:--as to whether it is to be found earlier than Coleridge. I have now realized afresh what I knew long ago, viz.:--that in the grossly garbled ballad of _Syr Cauline_, in Percy's _Reliques_, there is a Ladye Chrystabelle, but as every stanza in which her name appears would seem certainly to be Percy's own work, I suspect him to be the inventor of the name, which is a.s.suredly a much better invention than any of the stanzas; and from this wretched source Coleridge probably enriched the sphere of symbolic nomenclature. However, a genuine source may turn up, but the name does not sound to me like a real one. As to a German origin, I do not know that language, but would not the second syllable be there the one accented? This seems to render the name shapeless and improbable.
I mentioned an idea that once possessed me despotically. It was that where Coleridge says
Her silken robe and inner vest Dropt to her feet, and full in view Behold! her bosom and half her side-- A sight to dream of and not to tell,. . .
s.h.i.+eld the Lady Christabel!
he meant ultimately to show _eyes_ in the _bosom_ of the witch. I fancied that if the poet had worked out this idea in the second part, or in his never-compa.s.sed continuation, he must have electrified his readers. The first part of the poem is of course immeasurably superior in witchery to the second, despite two grand things in the latter--the pa.s.sage on the severance of early friends.h.i.+ps, and the conclusion; although the dexterity of hand (not to speak of the essential spirit of enchantment) which is everywhere present in the first part, and nowhere dominant in the second, exhibits itself not a little in the marvellous pa.s.sage in which Geraldine bewitches Christabel. Touching some jocose allusion by Rossetti to the necessity which lay upon me to startle the world with a continuation of the poem based upon the lines of my conjectural scheme, I asked him if he knew that a continuation was actually published in Coleridge's own paper, _The Morning Post_. It appeared about 1820, and was satirical of course--hitting off many peculiarities of versification, if no more. With Coleridge's playful love of satirising himself anonymously, the continuation might even be his own. Rossetti said:
I do not understand your early idea of _eyes_ in the bosom of Geraldine. It is described as ”that bosom old,” ”that bosom cold,” which seems to show that its withered character as combined with Geraldine's youth, was what shocked and warned Christabel. The first edition says--
A sight to dream of, not to tell:-- And she is to sleep with Christabel!
I dare say Coleridge altered this, because an idea arose, which I actually heard to have been reported as Coleridge's real intention by a member of contemporary circles (P. G.
Patmore, father of Coventry P. who conveyed the report to me)--viz., that Geraldine was to turn out to be a man!! I believe myself that the conclusion as given by Gillman from Coleridge's account to him is correct enough, only not picturesquely worded. It does not seem a bad conclusion by any means, though it would require fine treatment to make it seem a really good one. Of course the first part is so immeasurably beyond the second, that one feels Chas. Lamb's view was right, and it should have been abandoned at that point. The pa.s.sage on sundered friends.h.i.+p is one of the masterpieces of the language, but no doubt was written quite separately and then fitted into _Christabel_. The two lines about Roland and Sir Leoline are simply an intrusion and an outrage. I cannot say that I like the conclusion nearly so well as this. It hints at infinite beauty, but somehow remains a sort of cobweb. The conception, and partly the execution, of the pa.s.sage in which Christabel repeats by fascination the serpent-glance of Geraldine, is magnificent; but that is the only good narrative pa.s.sage in part two. The rest seems to have reached a fatal facility of jingling, at the heels whereof followed Scott.
There are, I believe, many continuations of _Christabel_. Tupper did one! I myself saw a continuation in childhood, long before I saw the original, and was all agog to see it for years. Our household was all of Italian, not English environment, and it was only when I went to school later that I began to ransack bookstalls. The continuation in question was by one Eliza Stewart, and appeared in a shortlived monthly thing called _Smallwood's Magazine_, to which my father contributed some Italian poetry, and so it came into the house. I thought the continuation spirited then, and perhaps it may have been so. This must have been before 1840 I think.
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 s.h.i.+llings,--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.