Son of Allan!
“I may have been pale, and may be red—
But this night shall one lie white and dead.
(O Mother of God! whose eyes
Watch men lie dead ’neath midnight skies.)”
“Both story and verse I invented myself: and I think you will think it equal to anything I have done in power. It was a good lot to do at a sitting, wasn’t it? I will read it to you when you come home again.... I enjoyed my stay with Rossetti immensely. We did not breakfast till one o’clock on Tuesday—pretty late, wasn’t it? (I told you I had a holiday, didn’t I?) He told me again that he considered ‘Motherhood’ fit to take the foremost place in recent poetry. He has such a fine house, though much of it is shut up, and full of fine things: he showed me some of it that hardly any one ever sees. He has asked me to come to him again next Sunday. Isn’t it splendid?—and ar’n’t you glad for my sake? He told Philip that he thought I “had such a sweet genial happy nature.” Isn’t it nice to be told of that. My intense delight in little things seems also to be a great charm to him—whether in a stray line of verse, or some new author, or a cloudlet, or patch of blue sky, or chocolate-drops, etc., etc. Have you noticed this in me? I am half gratified and half amused to hear myself so delineated, as I did not know my nature was so palpable to comparative strangers. And now I am going to crown my horrid vanity by telling you that Mrs. Garnet met Philip a short time ago, and asked after the health of his friend, the “handsome young poet!” There now, amn’t I horridly conceited? (N. B.—I’m pleased all the same, you know!)
“I wrote a little lyric yesterday which is one of the most musical I have ever done. To-day, I was ‘took’ by a writing mood in the midst of business hours, and despite all the distracting and unpoetical surroundings, managed to hastily jot down the accompanying lyric. It is the general end of young unknowing love....
“I had a splendid evening last night, and Rossetti read a lot more of his latest work. Splendid as his published work is, it is surpassed by what has yet to be published. The more I look into and hear his poems the more I am struck with the incomparable power and depth of his genius—his almost magical perfection and mastery of language—his magnificent spiritual strength and subtlety. He read some things last night, lines in which almost took my breath away. No sonnet-writer in the past has equalled him, and it is almost inconceivable to imagine any one doing so in the future. His influence is already deep and strong, but I believe in time to come he will be looked back to as we now look to Shakespeare, to Milton, and in one sense to Keats. I can find no language to express my admiration of his supreme gifts, and it is with an almost painful ecstasy that I receive from time to time fresh revelations of his intellectual, spiritual, and artistic splendour. I fancy one needs to be an actual poet to feel this to the full, but every one, however dim and stagnant or coldly intellectual his or her soul, must feel more or less the marvellous beauty of this wedding of the spirit of emotional thought and the spirit of language, and the child thereof—divine, perfect expression. Our language in Rossetti’s hands is more solemn than Spanish, more majestic than Latin, deeper than German, sweeter than Italian, more divine than Greek. I know of nothing comparable to it. He told me to call him Rossetti and not ‘Mr. Rossetti,’ as disparity in age disappears in close friendship, wasn’t it nice of him? It makes me both very proud and humble to be so liked and praised by the greatest master in England—proud to have so far satisfied his fastidious critical taste and to have excited such strong belief in my powers, and humble in that I fall so far short of him as to make the gulf seem impassable.”
In Italy I was making a careful study of the old masters in painting, and found that my correspondent took but lukewarm interest in my enthusiasm. Until that date he had had little opportunity of studying Painting; and at no time did the cinquecento and earlier painters really attract him. I regretted his indifference, and asked him, banteringly, if his dislike extended equally to the early masters of the pen and to those of the brush.
He replied: “You ask me, if I dislike the Old Masters of Poetry as much as I do those of Painting? and I reply Certainly not, but at the same time the comparison is not fair. Most of the old poets are not only poets of their time but have special beauties at the present day, and can be read with as much or almost as much pleasure now as centuries ago. Their imagination, their scope, their detail is endless. On the other hand the Old Masters of Painting are (to me, of course, and speaking generally) utterly uninteresting in their subjects, in the way they treat them, and in the meaning that is conveyed. If it were not for the richness and beauty of their colour I would never go into another gallery from pleasure, but colour alone could not always satisfy me. But take the ‘Old Masters’ of Poetry! Homer of Greece, Virgil and Dante of Italy, Theocritus of Sicily, and in England Chaucer, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Webster, Ford, Massinger, Marlowe, Milton!