Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti

by Sir Hall Caine

About Coleridge (whom I only view as a poet, his other
aspects being to my apprehension mere bogies) I conceive the
leading point about his work is its human love, and the
leading point about his career, the sad fact of how little
of it was devoted to that work. These are the points made in
my sonnet, and the last is such as I (alas!) can sympathise
with, though what has excluded more poetry with me
(mountains of it I don’t want to heap) has chiefly been
livelihood necessity. I ‘ll copy the sonnet on opposite
page, only I ‘d rather you kept it to yourself. Five years
of good poetry is too long a tether to give his Muse, I
know.
His Soul fared forth (as from the deep home-grove
The father Songster plies the hour-long quest)
To feed his soul-brood hungering in the nest;
But his warm Heart, the mother-bird above
Their callow fledgling progeny still hove
With tented roof of wings and fostering breast
Till the Soul fed the soul-brood. Richly blest
From Heaven their growth, whose food was Human Love.
Tet ah! Like desert pools that shew the stars
Once in long leagues—even such the scarce-snatched hours
Which deepening pain left to his lordliest powers:—
Heaven lost through spider-trammelled prison-bars!
Five years, from seventy saved! yet kindling skies
Own them, a beacon to our centuries.

As a minor point I called Rossetti’s attention to the fact that Coleridge lived to be scarcely more than sixty, and that his poetic career really extended over six good years; and hence the thirteenth line was amended to

Six years from sixty saved.

I doubted if “deepening pain” could be charged with the whole burden of Coleridge’s constitutional procrastination, and to this objection Rossetti replied:

Line eleven in my first reading was “deepening sloth;” but
it seemed harsh—and—damn it all! much too like the spirit
of Banquo!

Before Coleridge, however, as to warmth of admiration, and before him also as to date of influence, Keats was Rossetti’s favourite among modern English poets. Our friend never tired of writing or talking about Keats, and never wearied of the society of any one who could generate a fresh thought concerning him. But his was a robust and masculine admiration, having nothing in common with the effeminate extra-affectionateness that has of late been so much ridiculed. His letters now to be quoted shall speak for themselves as to the qualities in Keats whereon Rossetti’s appreciation of him was founded: but I may say in general terms that it was not so much the wealth of expression in the author of Endymion which attracted the author of Rose Mary as the perfect hold of the supernatural which is seen in La Belle Dame Sans Merci and in the fragment of the Eve of St. Mark. At the time of our correspondence, I was engaged upon an essay on Keats, and à propos of this Rossetti wrote:

I shall take pleasure in reading your Keats article when
ready. He was, among all his contemporaries who established
their names, the one true heir of Shakspeare. Another
(unestablished then, but partly revived since) was Charles
Wells. Did you ever read his splendid dramatic poem Joseph
and his Brethren?

In this connexion, as a better opportunity may not arise, I take occasion to tell briefly the story of the revival of Wells. The facts to be related were communicated to me by Rossetti in conversation years after the date of the letter in which this first allusion to the subject was made. As a boy, Rossetti’s chief pleasure was to ransack old book-stalls, and the catalogues of the British Museum, for forgotten works in the bye-ways of English poetry. In this pursuit he became acquainted with nearly every curiosity of modern poetic literature, and many were the amusing stories he used to tell at that time, and in after life, of the titles and contents of the literary oddities he unearthed. If you chanced at any moment to alight upon any obscure book particularly curious from its pretentiousness and pomposity, from the audacity of its claim, or the obscurity and absurdity of its writing, you might be sure that Rossetti would prove familiar with it, and be able to recapitulate with infinite zest its salient features; but if you happened to drop upon ever so interesting an edition of a book (not of verse) which you supposed to be known to many a reader, the chances were at least equal that Rossetti would prove to know nothing of it but its name. In poring over the forgotten pages of the poetry of the beginning of the century, Rossetti, whilst still a boy, met with the scriptural drama of Joseph and his Brethren. He told me the title did not much attract him, but he resolved to glance at the contents, and with that swiftness of insight which throughout life distinguished him, he instantly perceived its great qualities. I think he said he then wrote a letter on the subject to one of the current literary journals, probably The Literary Gazette, and by this means came into correspondence with Charles Wells himself. Rather later a relative of Wells’s sought out the young enthusiast in London, intending to solicit his aid in an attempt to induce a publisher to undertake a reprint, but in any endeavours to this end he must have failed. For many years a copy of the poem, left by the author’s request at Rossetti’s lodgings, lay there untouched, and meantime the growing reputation of the young painter brought about certain removals from Blackfriars Bridge to other chambers, and afterwards to the house in Cheyne Walk. In the course of these changes the copy got hidden away, and it was not until numerous applications for it had been made that it was at length ferreted forth from the chaos of some similar volumes huddled together in a corner of the studio. Full of remorse for having so long abandoned a laudable project, Rossetti then took up afresh the cause of the neglected poem, and enlisted Mr. Swinburne’s interest so warmly as to prevail with him to use his influence to secure its publication. This failed however; but in The Athenæum of April 8, 1876, appeared Mr. Watts’s elaborate account of Wells and the poem and its vicissitudes, whereupon Messrs. Chatto and Windus offered to take the risk of publishing it, and the poem went forth with the noble commendatory essay of the young author of Atalanta, whose reputation was already almost at its height, though it lacked (doubtless from a touch of his constitutional procrastination) the appreciative comment of the discerning critic who first discovered it. To return to the Keats correspondence:

I am truly delighted to hear how young you are. In original
work, a man does some of his best things by your time of
life, though he only finds it out in a rage much later, at
some date when he expected to know no longer that he had
ever done them. Keats hardly died so much too early—not at
all if there had been any danger of his taking to the modern
habit eventually—treating material as product, and shooting
it all out as it comes. Of course, however, he wouldn’t; he
was getting always choicer and simpler, and my favourite
piece in his works is La Belle Dame Sans Merci—I suppose
about his last. As to Shelley, it is really a mercy that he
has not been hatching yearly universes till now. He might, I
suppose; for his friend Trelawny still walks the earth
without great-coat, stockings, or underclothing, this
Christmas (1879). In criticism, matters are different, as to
seasons of production.... I am writing hurriedly and
horribly in every sense. Write on the subject again and I’ll
try to answer better. All greetings to you.
P.S.—I think your reference to Keats new, and on a high
level It calls back to my mind an adaptation of his self-
chosen epitaph which I made in my very earliest days of
boyish rhyming, when I was rather proud to be as cockney as
Keats could be. Here it is,—
Through one, years since damned and forgot
Who stabbed backs by the Quarter,
Here lieth one who, while Time’s stream
Still runs, as God hath taught her,
Bearing man’s fame to men, hath writ
His name upon that water.
Well, the rhyme is not so bad as Keats’s
Ear
Of Goddess of Theræa!—
nor (tell it not in Gath!) as—-
I wove a crown before her
For her I love so dearly,
A garland for Lenora!
Is it possible the laurel crown should now hide a venerated
and impeccable ear which was once the ear of a cockney?

This letter was written in 1879, and the opening clauses of it were no doubt penned under the impression, then strong on Rossetti’s mind, that his first volume of poems would prove to be his only one; but when, within two years afterwards he completed Rose Mary, and wrote The King’s Tragedy and The White Ship, this accession of material dissipated the notion that a man does much his best work before twenty-five. It can hardly escape the reader that though Rossetti’s earlier volume displayed a surprising maturity, the subsequent one exhibited as a whole infinitely more power and feeling, range of sympathy, and knowledge of life. The poet’s dramatic instinct developed enormously in the interval between the periods of the two books, and, being conscious of this, Rossetti used to say in his later years that he would never again write poems as from his own person.