I have, as I say, a further batch of letters to introduce, but as these were, for the most part, written after an event which forms a land-mark in our acquaintance (I mean the occasion of our first meeting), I judge it is best to reserve them for a later section of this book. There are two forms, and, so far as I know, two only, in which a body of letters can be published with justice to the writer. Of these the first and most obvious form is to offer them chronologically in extenso or with only such eliminations as seem inevitable, and the second is to tabulate them according to subject-matter, and print them in the order not of date but substance. There are advantages attending each method, and corresponding disadvantages also. The temptation to adopt the first of these was, in this case of Rossetti’s letters, almost insurmountable, for nothing can be more charming in epistolary style than the easy grace with which the writer passes from point to point, evolving one idea out of another, interlinking subject with subject, and building up a fabric of which the meaning is everywhere inwoven. In this respect Rossetti’s letters are almost as perfect as anything that ever left his hand; and, in freedom of phrase, in power of throwing off parenthetical reflections always faultlessly enunciated, in play of humour, often in eloquence (never becoming declamatory, and calling on “Styx or Stars”), sometimes in pathos, Rossetti’s letters are, in a word, admirable. They are comparable in these respects with the best things yet done in English,—as pleasing and graceful as Cowper’s letters, broader in range of subject than the letters of Keats, easier and more colloquial than those of Coleridge, and with less appearance of being intended for the public eye than is the case with the letters of Byron and of Shelley. Rossetti’s letters have, moreover, a value quite apart from the merits of their epistolary style, in so far as they contain almost the only expression extant of his opinions on literary questions. And this is the circumstance that has chiefly weighed with me to offer them in fragmentary form interspersed with elucidatory comment bearing principally upon the occasions that called them forth.
Such then as I have described was the nature of my intercourse with Rossetti during the first year and a half of our correspondence, and now the time had come when I was to meet my friend for the first time face to face. The elasticity of sympathy by which a man of genius, surrounded by constant friends, could yet bend to a new-comer who was a stranger and twenty-five years his junior, and think and feel with him; the generous appreciativeness by which he could bring himself to consider the first efforts of one quite unknown; and then the unselfishness that seemed always to prefer the claims of others to his own great claims, could command only the return of unqualified allegiance. Such were the feelings with which I went forth to my first meeting with Rossetti, and if at any later date, the ardour of my regard for him in any measure suffered modification, be sure when the time comes to touch upon it I shall make no more concealment of the causes that led to such a change than I have made of those circumstances, however personal in primary interest, that generated a friendship so unusual and to me so serious and important.
CHAPTER VII.
It was in the autumn of 1880 that I saw Rossetti for the first time. Being then rather reduced in health I contemplated a visit to the sea-side and wrote saying that in passing through London I should avail myself of his oft-repeated invitation to visit him. I gave him this warning of my intention, remembering his declared dread of being taken unawares, but I came to know at a subsequent period that for one who was within the inner circle of his friends the necessity to advise him of a visit was by no means binding. His reception of my intimation of an intention to call upon him was received with an amount of epistolary ceremony which I recognise now by the light of further acquaintance as eminently characteristic of the man, although curiously contradictory of his unceremonious habits of daily life. The fact is that Rossetti was of an excessively nervous temperament, and rarely if ever underwent an ordeal more trying than a first meeting with any one to whom for some time previously he had looked forward with interest. Hence by return of the post that bore him my missive came two letters, the one obviously written and posted within an hour or two of the other. In the first of these he expressed courteously his pleasure at the prospect of seeing me, and appointed 8.30 p.m. the following evening as his dinner hour at his house in Cheyne Walk. The second letter begged me to come at 5.30 or 6 p.m., so that we might have a long evening. “You will, I repeat,” he says, “recognise the hole-and-cornerest of all existences in this big barn of mine; but come early and I shall read you some ballads, and we can talk of many things.” An hour later than the arrival of these letters came a third epistle, which ran: “Of course when I speak of your dining with me, I mean tête-à-tête and without ceremony of any kind. I usually dine in my studio and in my painting coat!” I had before me a five hours’ journey to London, so that in order to reach Chelsea at 6 P.M., I must needs set out at mid-day, but oblivious of this necessity, Rossetti had actually posted a fourth letter on the morning of the day on which we were to meet begging me not on any account to talk, in the course of our interview, of a certain personal matter upon which we had corresponded. This fourth and final message came to hand the morning after the meeting, when I had the satisfaction to reflect that (owing more perhaps to the plethora of other subjects of interest than to any suspicion of its being tabooed) I had luckily eschewed the proscribed topic.
Cheyne Walk was unknown to me at the time in question, except as the locality in and near which many men and women eminent in literature resided. It seems hard to realise that this was the case as recently as two years ago, now that so short an interval has associated it in one’s mind with memories which seem to cover a large part of one’s life. The Walk is not now exactly as picturesque as it appears in certain familiar old engravings; the new embankment and the gardens that separate it from the main thoroughfare have taken something from its beauty, but it still possesses many attractions, and among them a look of age which contrasts agreeably with the spic-and-span newness of neighbouring places. I found Rossetti’s house, No. 16, answering in external appearances to the frank description he gave of it. It stands about mid-way between the Chelsea pier and the new redbrick mansions erected on the Chelsea embankment. It seems to be the oldest house in the Walk, and the exceptional proportions of its gate-piers, and the weight and mass of its gate and railings, suggests that probably at some period it stood alone, and commanded as grounds a large part of the space now occupied by the adjoining residences. Behind the house, during eighteen years of Rossetti’s occupancy, there was a garden of almost an acre in extent, covering by much the larger part of the space enclosed by a block of four streets forming a square. At No. 4 Maclise had lived and died; at the same house George Eliot, after her marriage with Mr. Cross, had come to live; at No. 5, in the second street to the westward, Thomas Carlyle was still living, and a little beyond Cheyne Row stood the modest cottage wherein Turner died. Rossetti’s house had to me the appearance of a plain Queen Anne erection, much mutilated by the introduction of unsightly bay-windows; the brickwork seemed to be falling into decay; the paint to be in serious need of renewal; the windows to be dull with the accumulation of the dust of years; the sills to bear the suspicion of cobwebs; the angles of the steps and the untrodden flags of the courtyard to be here and there overgrown with moss and weeds; and round the walls and up the reveals of doors and windows were creeping the tangled branches of the wildest ivy that ever grew untouched by shears. Such was the exterior of the home of the poet-painter when I walked up to it on the autumn evening of my first visit, and the interior of the house was at once like and unlike the exterior. The hall had a puzzling look of equal nobility and shabbiness. The floor was paved with beautiful white marble, which however, was partly covered with a strip of worn cocoa-nut matting; the ceiling was in one of its sections gracefully groined, and in each of the walls, which were lofty, there was an arched recess containing a piece of sculpture; an old inlaid rosewood clock filled a bulkhead on one side facing the door, and on the corresponding side stood a massive gas branch. A mezzotint lithograph by Legros was the only pictorial decoration of the walls, which were plain, and seemed not to have been distempered for many years. Three doors led out of the hall, one at each side, and one in front, and two corridors opened into it, but there was no sign of staircase, nor had it any light except such as was borrowed from the fanlight that looked into the porch. These facts I noted in the few minutes I stood waiting in the hall, but during the many months in which subsequently that house was my own home as well as Rossetti’s, I came to see that the changes which the building must have undergone since the period of its erection, had so filled it with crooks and corners as to bewilder the most ingenious observer to account for its peculiarities.
Very soon Rossetti came to me through the doorway in front, which proved to be the entrance to his studio. Holding forth both hands and crying ‘Hulloa,’ he gave me that cheery, hearty greeting which I came to recognise as his alone, perhaps, in warmth and unfailing geniality among all the men of our circle. It was Italian in its spontaneity, and yet it was English in its manly reserve, and I remember with much tenderness of feeling that never to the last (not even when sickness saddened him, or after an absence of a few days or even hours) did it fail him when meeting with those friends to whom to the last he was really attached. Leading the way into the studio, he introduced me to his brother, who was there upon one of the evening visits, which at intervals of a week he was at that time making, with unfailing regularity. I should have described Rossetti, at this time, as a man who looked quite ten years older than his actual age, which was fifty-two, of full middle height and inclining to corpulence, with a round face that ought, one thought, to be ruddy but was pale, large grey eyes with a steady introspecting look, surmounted by broad protrusive brows and a clearly-pencilled ridge over the nose, which was well cut and had large breathing nostrils. The mouth and chin were hidden beneath a heavy moustache and abundant beard, which grew up to the ears, and had been of a mixed black-brown and auburn, and were now streaked with grey. The forehead was large, round, without protuberances, and very gently receding to where thin black curls, that had once been redundant, began to tumble down to the ears. The entire configuration of the head and face seemed to me singularly noble, and from the eyes upwards, full of beauty. He wore a pair of spectacles, and, in reading, a second pair over the first: but these took little from the sense of power conveyed by those steady eyes, and that “bar of Michael Angelo.” His dress was not conspicuous, being however rather negligent than otherwise, and noticeable, if at all, only for a straight sack-coat buttoned at the throat, descending at least to the knees, and having large pockets cut into it perpendicularly at the sides. This garment was, I afterwards found, one of the articles of various kinds made to the author’s own design. When he spoke, even in exchanging the preliminary courtesies of an opening conversation, I thought his voice the richest I had ever known any one to possess. It was a full deep barytone, capable of easy modulation, and with undertones of infinite softness and sweetness, yet, as I afterwards found, with almost illimitable compass, and with every gradation of tone at command, for the recitation or reading of poetry. The studio was a large room probably measuring thirty feet by twenty, and structurally as puzzling as the other parts of the house. A series of columns and arches on one side suggested that the room had almost certainly been at some period the site of an important staircase with a wide well, and on the other side a broad mullioned window reaching to the ceiling, seemed certainly to bear record of the occupant’s own contribution to the peculiarities of the edifice. The fireplace was at an end of the room, and over and at each side of it were hung a number of fine drawings in chalk, chiefly studies of heads, with here and there a water-colour figure piece, all from Rossetti’s hand. At the opposite end of the room hung some symbolic designs in chalk, Pandora and Proserpina being among the number, and easels of various sizes, some very large, bearing pictures in differing stages of completion, occupied positions on all sides of the floor, leaving room only for a sofa, with a bookcase behind, two old cabinets, two large low easy chairs, and a writing desk and chair at a window at the side, which was heavily darkened by the thick foliage of the trees that grew in the garden beyond.
Dropping down on the sofa with his head laid low and his feet thrown up in a favourite attitude on the back, which must, I imagine, have been at least as easy as it was elegant, he began the conversation by bantering me upon what he called my “robustious” appearance compared with what he had been led to expect from gloomy reports of uncertain health. After a series of playful touches (all done in the easiest conceivable way, and conveying any impression on earth save the right one, that a first meeting with any man, however young and harmless, was little less than a tragic event to Rossetti) he glanced one by one at certain of the topics that had arisen in the course of our correspondence. I perceived that he was a ready, fluent, and graceful talker, with a remarkable incisiveness of speech, and a trick of dignifying ordinary topics in words which, without rising above conversation, were so exactly, though freely enunciated, as would have admitted of their being reported exactly as they fell from his lips. In some of these respects I found his brother William resemble him, though, if I may describe the talk of a dead friend by contrasting it with that of a living one bearing a natural affinity to it, I will say that Gabriel’s conversation was perhaps more spontaneous, and had more variety of tone with less range of subject, together with the same precision and perspicuity. Very soon the talk became general, and then Rossetti spoke without appearance of reserve of his two or three intimate friends, telling me, among other things, of Theodore Watts, that he “had a head exactly like that of Napoleon I., whom Watts,” he said with a chuckle, “detests more than any character in history; depend upon it,” he added, “such a head was not given to him for nothing;” that Frederick Shields was as emotional as Shelley, and Ford Madox Brown, whom I had met, as sententious as Dr. Johnson. I kept no sort of record of what passed upon the occasion in question, but I remember that Rossetti seemed to be playfully battering his friends in their absence in the assured consciousness that he was doing so in the presence of a well-wisher; and it was amusing to observe that, after any particularly lively sally, he would pause to say something in a sobered tone that was meant to convey the idea that he was really very jealous of his friends’ reputation, and was merely for the sake of amusement giving rein to a sportive fancy. During dinner (and contrary to his declared habit, we did not dine in the studio) he talked a good deal about Oliver Madox Brown, for whom I had conceived a warm admiration, and to whom I had about that time addressed a sonnet.
“You had a sincere admiration of the boy’s gifts?” I asked.
“Assuredly. I have always said that twenty years after his death his name will be a familiar one. The Black Swan is a powerful story, although I must honestly say that it displays in its central incident a certain torpidity that to me is painful. Undoubtedly Oliver had genius, and must have done great things had he lived. His death was a grievous blow to his father. I’m glad you’ve written that sonnet; I wanted you to toss up your cap for Nolly.” He spoke of Oliver’s father as indisputably one of the greatest of living colourists, inquired earnestly into the progress of his frescoes at Manchester, for one of the figures in which I had sat, and showed me a little water-colour drawing made by Oliver himself when very young. Dinner being now over, I asked Rossetti to redeem his promise to read one of his new ballads; and as his brother, who had often heard it before, expressed his readiness to hear it again, he responded readily, and, taking a small manuscript volume out of a section of the bookcase that had been locked, read us The White Ship. I have spoken of the ballad as a poem at an earlier stage, but it remains to me, in this place, to describe the effect produced upon me by the author’s reading. It seemed to me that I never heard anything at all matchable with Rossetti’s elocution; his rich deep voice lent an added music to the music of the verse: it rose and fell in the passages descriptive of the wreck with something of the surge and sibilation of the sea itself; in the tenderer passages it was soft as a woman’s, and in the pathetic stanzas with which the ballad closes it was profoundly moving. Effective as the reading sounded in that studio, I remember at the moment to have doubted if it would prove quite so effective from a public platform. Perhaps there seemed to be so much insistence on the rhythm, and so prolonged a tension of the rhyme sounds, as would run the risk of a charge of monotony if falling on ears less concerned with points of metrical beauty than with fundamental substance. Personally, however, I found the reading in the very highest degree enjoyable and inspiring.