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 passages 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 circumstance 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 attitude 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. And the weight of that work was still upon him when we met again. His voice seemed to have lost much in quality, and in compass too to have diminished: or if the volume of sound remained the same, it appeared to have retired (so to express it) inwards, and to convey, when he spoke, the idea of a man speaking as much to himself as to others. More than ever now the scene of his life lacked for me some necessary vitality: it breathed an atmosphere of sorrow: it was like the dream of a distempered imagination out of which there came no welcome awakening, to say it was not true. On the side of his intellectual life Rossetti was obviously under less constraint with me than ever before. Previously he had seemed to make a conscious effort to speak generously of all contemporaries, and cordially of every friend with whom he was brought into active relations; and if, by force of some stray impulse, he was ever led to say a disparaging word of any one, he forthwith made a palpable, and sometimes amusing, effort so to obliterate the injurious impression as to convey the idea that he wished it to appear that he had not said anything at all. But now this restraint was thrown aside.
I perceived that the drug by which he was enslaved caused what I may best characterise as intermittent waves of morbid suspiciousness as to the good faith of every individual, including his best, oldest, and truest friends, as to whom the most inexplicable delusions would suddenly come, and as suddenly go. He would talk in the gravest and most earnest way of the wrongs he had suffered at the hands of a dear friend, and then the moment his eloquence had drawn from me an exclamation of sympathy for him, he would turn round and heap upon the same individual an extravagance of praise for his fidelity and good faith. And now, he so classed his contemporaries as to leave no doubt that he was duly sensible of his own place amongst them, preserving, meantime, a dignified reticence as to the extent of his personal claims.
His life was an anachronism. Such a man should have had no dealings with the nineteenth century: he belonged to the sixteenth, or perhaps the thirteenth, and in Italy not in England. It would, nevertheless, be wrong to say that he was wholly indifferent to important political issues, of which he took often a very judicial view. In dismissing further mention of this second and prolonged meeting with Rossetti, it only remains to me to say (as a necessary, if strictly personal, explanation of much that will follow), that on the evening preceding my departure, he asked me, in the event of my deciding to come to live in London, to take up my quarters at his house. To this proposal I made no reply: and neither his speech nor my silence needs any comment, and I shall offer none.
A month or two later my own health gave way, and then, a change of residence being inevitable, Rossetti repeated his invitation; but a London campaign, under such conditions as were necessarily entailed by pitching one’s tent with him, got further and further away, until I seemed to see it through the inverse end of a telescope whereof the slides were being drawn out, out, every day further and further. I determined to spend half a year among’ the mountains of Cumberland, and went up to the Vale of St. John. Scarcely had I settled there when Rossetti wrote that he must himself soon leave London: that he was wearied out absolutely, and unable to sleep at night, that if he could only reach that secluded vale he would breathe a purer air mentally as well as physically. The mood induced by contemplation of the tranquillity of my retreat over-against the turmoil and distractions of the city in which, though not of which, he was, added to the deepening exhaustion which had already begun when I left him, had prevailed with him, he said, to ask me to come down to London, and travel back with him. “Supposing,” he wrote, “I were to ask you to come to town in a fortnight’s time from now—I returning with you for a while into the country—would that be feasible to you?”
Once unsettled in the environments within which for years he had moved contentedly, a thousand reasons were found for the contemplated step, and simultaneously a thousand obstacles arose to impede the execution of it. “They have at length taken my garden,” he said, “as they have long threatened to do, and now they are really setting about building upon it. I do not in the least know what my plans may be.” And again: “It seems certain that I must leave this house and seek another. Is there any house in the neighbourhood of the Vale of St. John with a largish room one could paint in (to N. or NE.)?” The idea of his taking up his permanent abode so far out of the market circle was, I well knew, just one of those impracticable notions which, with Rossetti, were abandoned as soon as conceived, so I was not surprised to hear from him as follows, by the succeeding post: “In what I wrote yesterday I said something as to a possibility of leaving town, but I now perceive this is not practicable at present; therefore need not trouble you to take note of neighbouring houses.” Presently he wrote again: “Bedevilments thicken: the garden is ploughed up, and I ‘ve not stirred out of the house for a week: I must leave this place at once if I am to leave it alive.” {*}
* It is but just to say that, although Rossetti wrote thus
peevishly of what was quite inevitable,—the yielding up of
his fine garden,—he would at other times speak of the great
courtesy and good-nature of Messrs. Pemberton, in allowing
him the use of the garden after it had been severed from the
property he hired.
“My present purpose is to take another house in London. Could you not come down and beat up agents for me? I know you will not deny me your help. I hear of a house at Brixton, with a garden of two acres, and only £130 a year.” In a day or two even this last hope had proved delusive: “I find the house at Brixton will not do, and I hear of nothing else.... I am anxious as to having become perfectly deaf on the right side of my head. Partial approaches to this have sometimes occurred to me and passed away, so I will not be too much troubled at it.” A little later he wrote: “Now my housekeeper is leaving me, her mother being very ill. Can you not come to my assistance? Come at once and we will set sail in one boat.” I appear to have replied to this last appeal in a tone of some little scepticism as to his remaining long in the same mind relative to our mutual housemating, for subsequently he says: “At this writing I can see no likelihood of my not remaining in the mind that, in case of your coming to London, your quarters should be taken up here. The house is big enough for two, even if they meant to be strangers to each other. You would have your own rooms and we should meet just when we pleased. You have got a sufficient inkling of my exceptional habits not to be scared by them. It is true, at times my health and spirits are variable, but I am sure we should not be squabbling. However, it seems you have no intention of a quite immediate move, and we can speak farther of it.” I readily consented to do whatever seemed feasible to help him out of his difficulties, which existed, however, as I perceived, much more in his own mind than in actual fact. I thought a brief holiday in the solitude within which I was then located would probably be helpful in restoring a tranquil condition of mind, and as his brother, Mr. Scott, Mr. Watts, Mr. Shields, and other friends in London, were of a similar opinion, efforts were made to induce him to undertake the journey which he had been the first to think of. His oldest friend, Mr. Madox Brown (whose presence would have been as valuable now as it had proved to be on former occasions), was away at Manchester, and remained there throughout the time of his last illness. His moods at this time were too variable to be relied upon three days together, and so I find him writing: