Part 11 (1/2)
I made some playful allusion, a.s.suredly not meant to involve Mr.
Swinburne, to Sheridan's epigram on easy writing and hard reading; and to the Abbe de Marolles, who exultingly told some poet that his verses cost no trouble: ”They cost you what they are worth,” replied the bard.
”One benefit I do derive,” Rossetti added, ”as a result of my method of composition; my work becomes condensed. Probably the man does not live who could write what I have written more briefly than I have done.”
Emphasis and condensation, I remarked, were indubitably the characteristics of his muse. He then read me a great body of the new sonnets of _The House of Life_. Sitting in that studio listening to his reading and looking up meantime at the chalk-drawings that hung on the walls, I realised how truly he had said, in correspondence, that the feeling pervading his pictures was such as his poetry ought to suggest.
The affinity between the two seemed to me at that moment to be complete: the same half-sad, half-resigned view of life, the same glimpses of hope, the same foreshadowings of gloom.
”You doubtless think it odd,” he said at one moment, ”to hear an old fellow read such love-poetry as much of this is, but I may tell you that the larger part of it, though still unpublished, was written when I was as young as you are. When I print these sonnets, I shall probably affix a note saying, that though many of them are of recent production, not a few are obviously the work of earlier years.”
I expressed admiration of the pathetic sonnet ent.i.tled _Without Her_.
”I cannot tell you,” he said, ”at what terrible moment it was wrung from me.”
He had read it with tears of voice, subsiding at length into suppressed sobs and intervals of silence. As though to explain away this emotion he said:
”All poetry, that is really poetry, affects me deeply and often to tears. It does not need to be pathetic or yet tender to produce such a result. I have known in my life two men, and two only, who are similarly sensitive--Tennyson, and my old friend and neighbour William Bell Scott.
I once heard Tennyson read _Maud_, and whilst the fiery pa.s.sages were delivered with a voice and vehemence which he alone of living men can compa.s.s, the softer pa.s.sages and the songs made the tears course down his cheeks. Morris is a fine reader, and so, of his kind, though a little p.r.o.ne to sing-song, is Swinburne. Browning both reads and talks well--at least he did so when I knew him intimately as a young man.”
Rossetti went on to say that he had been among Browning's earliest admirers. As a boy he had seen something signed by the then unknown name of the author of _Paracelsus_, and wrote to him. The result was an intimacy. He spoke with warmest admiration of _Child Roland_; and referred to Elizabeth Barrett Browning in terms of regard, and, I think I may say, of reverence.
I asked if he had ever heard Ruskin read. He replied:
”I must have done so, but remember nothing clearly. On one occasion, however, I heard him deliver a speech, and that was something never to forget. When we were young, we helped Frederick Denison Maurice by taking cla.s.ses at the Working Men's College, and there Charles Kingsley and others made speeches and delivered lectures. Ruskin was asked to do something of the kind and at length consented. He made no sort of preparation for the occasion: I know he did not; we were together at his father's house the whole of the day in question. At night we drove down to the College, and then he made the finest speech I ever heard. I doubted at the time if any written words of his were equal to it! such flaming diction! such emphasis! such appeal!--yet he had written his first and second volumes of _Modern Painters_ by that time.” I have reproduced the substance of what Rossetti said on the occasion of my return visit, and, by help of letters written at the time to a friend, I have in many cases recalled his exact words. A certain incisiveness of speech which distinguished his conversation, I confess myself scarcely able to convey more than a suggestion of; as Mr. Watts has said in _The Athenaeum_, his talk showed an incisiveness so perfect that it had often the pleasurable surprise of wit. Rossetti had both wit and humour, but these, during the time that I knew him, were only occasionally present in his conversation, while the incisiveness was always conspicuous.
A certain quiet play of sportive fancy, developing at intervals into banter, was sometimes observable in his talk with the younger and more familiar of his acquaintances, but for the most part his conversation was serious, and, during the time I knew him, often sad. I speedily observed that he was not of the number of those who lead or sustain conversation. He required to be constantly interrogated, but as a negative talker, if I may so describe him, he was by much the best I had heard. Catching one's drift before one had revealed it, and antic.i.p.ating one's objections, he would go on from point to point, almost removing the necessity for more than occasional words. Nevertheless, as I say, he was not, in the conversations I have heard, a leading conversationalist; his talk was never more than talk, and in saying that it was uniformly sustained yet never declamatory, I think I convey an idea both of its merits and limitations.
I understood that Rossetti had never at any period of his life been an early riser, and at the time of the interview in question he was more than ever before p.r.o.ne to reverse the natural order of waking and sleeping hours. I am convinced that during the time I was with him only the necessity of securing a certain short interval of daylight, by which it was possible to paint, prevailed with him to rise before noon.
Alluding to this idiosyncrasy, he said: ”I lie as long, or say as late, as Dr. Johnson used to do. You shall never know, until you discover it for yourself, at what hour I rise.” He sat up until four A.M. on this night of my second visit,--no unaccustomed thing, as I afterwards learned. I must not omit the mention of one feature of the conversation, revealing to me a new side of his character, or, more properly, a new phase of his mind, which gave me subsequently an infinity of anxiety and distress. Branching off at a late hour from some entirely foreign topic, he begged me to tell him the facts of some unlucky debate in which I had long before been engaged on a public platform with some one who had attacked him. He had heard a report of what pa.s.sed at a time when my name was unknown to him, as also was that of his a.s.sailant. Being forewarned by William Rossetti of his brother's peculiar sensitiveness to critical attack, and having, moreover, observed something of the kind myself, I tried to avoid a circ.u.mstantial statement of what pa.s.sed. But Rossetti was, as has been said by one who knew him well, ”of imagination all compact,” and my obvious desire to shelve the subject suggested to his mind a thousand inferences infinitely more damaging than the fact.
To avoid such a result I told him all, and there was little in the way of attack to repeat beyond a few unwelcome strictures on his poem _Jenny_. He listened but too eagerly to what I was saying, and then in a voice slower, softer, and more charged, perhaps, with emotion than I had heard before, said it was the old story, which began ten years before, and would go on until he had been hunted and hounded to his grave.
Startled, and indeed, appalled by so grave a view of what to me had seemed no more than an error of critical judgment, coupled perhaps, with some intemperance of condemnation, I prayed of him to think no more of the matter, reproached myself with having yielded to his importunity, and begged him to remember that if one man held the opinions I had repeated, many men held contrary ones.
”It was right of you to tell me when I asked you,” he said, ”though my friends usually keep such facts from my knowledge. As to _Jenny_, it is a sermon, nothing less. As I say, it is a sermon, and on a great world, to most men unknown, though few consider themselves ignorant of it. But of this conspiracy to persecute me--what remains to say but that it is widespread and remorseless--one cannot but feel it.”
I a.s.sured him there existed no conspiracy to persecute him: that he had ardent upholders everywhere, though it was true that few men had found crueller critics. He shook his head, and said I knew that what he had alleged was true, namely that an organised conspiracy existed, having for its object to annoy and injure him. Growing a little impatient of this delusion, so tenaciously held, against all show of reason, I told him that it was no more than the fever of an oppressed brain brought about by his reclusive habits of life, by shunning intercourse with all save some half dozen or more friends. ”You tell me,” I said, ”that you have rarely been outside these walls for some years, and your brain has meanwhile been breeding a host of hallucinations, like cobwebs in a dark corner. You have only to go abroad, and the fresh air will blow these things away.” But continuing for some moments longer in the same strain, he came to closer quarters and distressed me by naming as enemies three or four men who had throughout life been his friends, who have spoken of him since his death in words of admiration and even affection, and who had for a time fallen away from him or called on him but rarely, from contingencies due to any cause but alienated friends.h.i.+p.
At length the time had arrived when it was considered prudent to retire.
”You are to sleep in Watts's room to-night,” he said: and then in reply to a look of inquiry he added, ”He comes here at least twice a week, talking until four o'clock in the morning upon everything from poetry to the Pleiades, and driving away the bogies, and as he lives at Putney Hill, it is necessary to have a bed for him.” Before going into my room he suggested that I should go and look, at his. It was entered from another and smaller room which he said that he used as a breakfast room. The outer room was made fairly bright and cheerful by a glittering chandelier (the property once, he told me, of David Garrick), and from the rustle of trees against the window-pane one perceived that it overlooked the garden; but the inner room was dark with heavy hangings around the walls as well as the bed, and thick velvet curtains before the windows, so that the candles in our hands seemed unable to light it, and our voices sounded thick and m.u.f.fled. An enormous black oak chimney-piece of curious design, having an ivory crucifix on the largest of its ledges, covered a part of one side and reached to the ceiling.
Cabinets, and the usual furniture of a bedroom, occupied places about the floor: and in the middle of it, and before a little couch, stood a small table on which was a wire lantern containing a candle which Rossetti lit from the open one in his hand--another candle meantime lying by its side. I remarked that he probably burned a light all night.
He said that was so. ”My curse,” he added, ”is insomnia. Two or three hours hence I shall get up and lie on the couch, and, to pa.s.s away a weary hour, read this book”--a volume of Boswell's _Johnson_ which I noticed he took out of the bookcase as we left the studio. It did not escape me that on the table stood two small bottles sealed and labelled, together with a little measuring-gla.s.s. Without looking further at it, but with a terrible suspicion growing over me, I asked if that were his medicine.
”They say there is a skeleton in every cupboard,” he said in a low voice, ”and that's mine; it is chloral.”
When I reached the room that I was to occupy during the night, I found it, like Rossetti's bedroom, heavy with hangings, and black with antique picture panels, with a ceiling (unlike that of the other rooms in the house), out of all reach or sight, and so dark from various causes, that the candle seemed only to glimmer in it--indeed to add to the darkness by making it felt. Mr. Watts, as Rossetti told me, was entirely indifferent to these eerie surroundings, even if his fine subjective intellect, more p.r.o.ne to meditate than to observe, was ever for an instant conscious of them; but on myself I fear they weighed heavily, and augmented the feeling of closeness and gloom which had been creeping upon me since I entered the house. Scattered about the room in most admired disorder were some outlandish and unheard-of books, and all kinds of antiquarian and Oriental oddities, which books and oddities I afterwards learnt had been picked up at various times by the occupant in his ramblings about Chelsea and elsewhere, and never yet taken away by him, but left there apparently to scare the chambermaid: such as old carved heads and gargoyles of the most grinning and ghastly expression, Burmese and Chinese Buddhas in soapstone of every degree of placid ugliness, together, I am bound by force of truth to admit, with one piece of carved Italian marble in bas-relief, of great interest and beauty. Such was my bed-chamber for the night, and little wonder if it threatened to murder the innocent sleep. But it was later than 4 A.M., and wearied nature must needs a.s.sert herself, and so I lay down amidst the odour of bygone ages.
Presently Rossetti came in, for no purpose that I can remember, except to say that he had enjoyed my visit I replied that I should never forget it. ”If you decide to settle in London,” he said, ”I trust you 'll come and live with me, and then many such evenings must remove the memory of this one.” I laughed, for I thought what he hinted at to be of the remotest likelihood. ”I have just taken sixty grains of chloral,” he said, as he was going out; ”in four hours I take sixty more, and in four hours after that yet another sixty.”
”Does not the dose increase with you?”