Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti

by Sir Hall Caine

To aid me in certain researches I was at the time engaged in making in the back-numbers of almost forgotten periodicals, Rossetti wrote:

The old Monthly Mag. was the precursor of the New
Monthly, which started about 1830, or thereabouts I think,
after which the old one ailed, but went on till fatal old
Heraud finished it off by editing it, and fairly massacred
that elderly innocent. You speak, in a former letter
(touching the continuation of Christabel), of “a certain
European magazine.” Are you aware that it was as old a thing
as The Gentleman’s, and went on ad infinitum? Other such
were the Universal Magazine, the Scots’ Magazine—all
endless in extent and beginning time out of mind,—to say
nothing of the Ladies’ Magazine and Wits’ Magazine. Then
there was the Annual Register. All these are quarters in
which you might prosecute researches, and might happen to
find something about Keats. The Monthly Magazine must have
commenced almost as early, I believe. I cannot help thinking
there was a similar Imperial Magazine.

The following letter possesses an interest independent of its subject, which to me, however, is interest enough. Mr. William Watson had sent Rossetti a copy of a volume of poems he had just published, and had received a letter in acknowledgment, wherein our friend, with characteristic appreciativeness, said many cordial words of it:

Your young friend Watson [he said in a subsequent letter]
wrote me in a very modest mood for one who can do as he can
at his age. I think I must have hurriedly mis-expressed
myself in writing to him, as he seems to think I wished to
dissuade him from following narrative poetry. Not in the
least—I only wished him to try his hand at clearer dramatic
life. The dreamy romantic really hardly needs more than one
vast Morris in a literature—at any rate in a century. Not
that I think him derivable from Morris—he goes straight
back to Keats with a little modification. The narrative,
whether condensed or developed, is at any rate a far better
impersonal form to work in than declamatory harangue,
whether calling on the stars or the Styx. I don’t know in
the least how Watson is faring with the critics. He must not
be discouraged, in any case, with his real and high gifts.

The young poet, in whom Rossetti saw so much to applaud, can scarcely be said to have fared at all at the hands of the critics.

Here is a pleasant piece of literary portraiture, as valuable from the peep it affords into Rossetti’s own character as from the description it gives of the rustic poet:

The other evening I had the pleasant experience of meeting
one to whom I have for about two years looked with interest
as a poet of the native rustic kind, but often of quite a
superior order. I don’t know if you noticed, somewhere about
the date referred to, in The Athenæum, a review of poems
by Joseph Skipsey. Skip-sey has exquisite—though, as in all
such cases (except of course Burns’s) not equal—powers in
several directions, but his pictures of humble life are the
best. He is a working miner, and describes rustic loves and
sports, and the perils and pathos of pit-life with great
charm, having a quiet humour too when needed. His more
ambitious pieces have solid merit of feeling, but are much
less artistic. The other night, as I say, he came here, and
I found him a stalwart son of toil, and every inch a
gentleman. In cast of face he recalls Tennyson somewhat,
though more bronzed and brawned. He is as sweet and gentle
as a woman in manner, and recited some beautiful things of
his own with a special freshness to which one is quite
unaccustomed.

Mr. Skipsey was a miner of North Shields, and in the review referred to much was made, in a delicate way, of his stern environments. His volume of lyrics is marked by the quiet humour. Rossetti speaks of, as well as by a rather exasperating inequality. Perhaps the best piece in it is a poem entitled Thistle and Nettle, treating with peculiar freshness of a country courtship. The coming together of two such entirely opposite natures was certainly curious, and only to be accounted for on the ground of Rossetti’s breadth of poetic sympathy. It would be interesting to hear what the impressions were of such a rude son of toil upon meeting with one whose life must have seemed the incarnation of artistic luxury and indulgence. Later on I received the following:

Poor Skipsey! He has lost the friend who brought him to
London only the other day (T. Dixon), and who was his only
hold on intellectual life in his district. Dixon died
immediately on his return to the North, of a violent attack
of asthma to which he was subject. He was a rarely pure and
simple soul, and is doubtless gone to higher uses, though
few could have reached, with his small opportunities, to
such usefulness as he compassed here. He was Ruskin’s
correspondent in a little book called (I think) Work by
Tyne and Wear. I got a very touching note from Skipsey on
the subject.

From Mr. Skipsey he received a letter only a little while before his death, and to him he addressed one of the last epistles he penned.