Part 14 (2/2)

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 s.p.a.ce 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 a.n.a.lysis, 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 G.o.d'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 n.o.bly 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 pa.s.sage 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 circ.u.mstance 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 pa.s.sage 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 pa.s.sionate frailty of Aloyse's first love would be followed by a true and n.o.ble 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 pa.s.sage 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 s.h.i.+p_, 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 t.i.tle, 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 Athenaeum_, 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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s 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.

CHAPTER IX.

It is in the nature of these Recollections that they should be personal, and it can hardly occur to any reader to complain of them for being that which above all else they purport to be. I have hitherto, however, been conscious of a desire (made manifest to my own mind by the character of my selections from the letters written to me) to impart to this volume an interest as broad and general as may be. But my primary purpose is now, and has been from the first, to afford the best view at my command of Rossetti as a man; and more helpful to such purpose than any number of critical opinions, however interesting, have often been those pa.s.sages in his letters where the writer has got closest to his correspondent in revealing most of himself. In the chapter I am now about to write I must perforce set aside all limitations of reserve if I am to convey such an idea of Rossetti's last days as fills my mind; I must be content to speak almost exclusively of my personal relations to him, to the enforced neglect of the more intimate relations of others.

About six months after my first visit, Rossetti invited me to spend a week with him at his house, and this I was glad to be able to do. I found him in many important particulars a changed man. His complexion was brighter than before, and this circ.u.mstance taken alone might have been understood to indicate improved bodily health, but in actual fact it rather denoted in his case a retrograde physical tendency, as being indicative chiefly of some recent excess in the use of his pernicious drug. He was distinctly less inclined to corpulence, his eyes were less bright, and had more frequently than formerly the appearance of gazing upon vacancy, and when he walked to and fro in the studio, as it was his habit to do at intervals of about an hour, he did so with a more laboured sidelong motion than I had previously noticed, as though the body unconsciously lost and then regained some necessary control and command at almost every step. Half sensible, no doubt, of a reduced condition, or guessing perhaps the nature of my reflections from a certain uneasiness which it baffled my efforts to conceal, he paused for an instant one evening in the midst of these melancholy perambulations and asked me how he struck me as to health. More frankly than judiciously I answered promptly, Less well than formerly. It was a luckless remark, for Rossetti's prevailing wish at that moment was to conceal even from himself his lowered state, and the time was still to come when he should crave the questionable sympathy of those who said he looked even more ill than he felt. Just before this, my second visit, he had completed his _King's Tragedy_, and I had heard from his own lips how prostrate the emotional strain involved in the production of the poem had first left him. Casting himself now on the couch in an att.i.tude indicative of unusual exhaustion, he said the ballad had taken much out of him. ”It was as though my life ebbed out with it,” he said, and in saying so much of the nervous tension occasioned by the work in question he did not overstate the truth as it presented itself to other eyes.

Time after time while the ballad was in course of production, he had made effort to read it aloud to the friend to whose judgment his poetry was always submitted, but had as frequently failed to do so from the physical impossibility of restraining the tears that at every stage welled up out of an overwrought nature, for the poet never existed perhaps who, while at work, lived so vividly in the imagined situation.

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