Though the ballad, in Rossetti’s own writing, has ever since remained in my possession, as have also the two sonnets in the MS. of another friend who has since, I am delighted to know,
achieved fame for himself, no one who enjoyed the intimate friendship of Rossetti need be told that his death took from me all heart to publish.
Time, however, is the suzerain before whom every king, even Sorrow himself, bows at last. The rights of Rossetti’s admirers can no longer be set at nought, and I am making arrangements to publish within the present year ‘Jan Van Hunks’ and the ‘Sphinx Sonnets,’ the former of which will show a new and, I think, unexpected side of Rossetti’s genius.
IV.
It is a sweet and comforting thought for every poet that, whether or not the public cares during his life to read his verses, it will after his death care very much to read his letters to his mistress, to his wife, to his relatives, to his friends, to his butcher, and to his baker. And some letters are by that same public held to be more precious than others. If, for instance, it has chanced that during the poet’s life he, like Rossetti, had to borrow thirty shillings from a friend, that is a circumstance of especial piquancy. The public likes—or rather it demands—to know all about that borrowed cash. Hence it behoves the properly equipped editor who understands his duty to see that not one allusion to it in the poet’s correspondence is omitted. If he can also show what caused the poet to borrow those thirty shillings—if he can by learned annotations show whether the friend in question lent the sum willingly or unwillingly, conveniently or inconveniently—if he can show whether the loan was ever repaid, and if repaid when—he will be a happy editor indeed. Then he will find a large and a grateful public to whom the mood in which the poet sat down to write
‘The Blessed Damosel’ is of far less interest than the mood in which he borrowed thirty shillings.
We do not charge the editor of this volume [104] with exhibiting unusual want of taste. On the whole, he is less irritating to the poetical student than those who have laboured in kindred “fields of literature.” Indeed, we do not so much blame the editors of such books as we blame the public, whose coarse and vulgar mouth is always agape for such pabulum. The writer of this review possesses an old circulating-library copy of a book containing some letters of Coleridge. One page, and one only, is greatly disfigured by thumb marks. It is the page on which appears, not some precious hint as to the conclusion of ‘Christabel,’ but a domestic missive of Coleridge’s ordering broad beans for dinner.
If, then, the name of those readers who take an interest in broad beans is legion compared with the name of those who take an interest in ‘Kubla Khan,’ is not the wise editor he who gives all due attention to the poet’s favourite vegetable? Those who will read with avidity Rossetti’s allusion to his wife’s confinement in the letter in which he tells Allingham that “the child had been dead for two or
three weeks” will laugh to scorn the above remarks, and as they are in the majority the laugh is with them.
The editor of this volume laments that Allingham’s letters to Rossetti are beyond all editorial reach. But who has any right to ask for Allingham’s private letters? Rossetti, who was strongly against the printing of private letters, had the wholesome practice of burning all his correspondence. This he did at periodical holocausts—memorable occasions when the coruscations of the poet’s wit made the sparks from the burning paper seem pale and dull. He died away from home, or not a scrap of correspondence would have been left for the publishers. Although the “public” acknowledges no duties towards the man of literary or artistic genius, but would shrug up its shoulders or look with dismay at being asked to give five pounds in order to keep a poet from the workhouse, the moment a man of genius becomes famous the public becomes aware of certain rights in relation to him. Strangely enough, these rights are recognized more fully in the literary arena than anywhere else, and among them the chief appears to be that of reading an author’s private letters. One advantage—and surely it is a very great one—that the “writing man” has over the man of action is this: that, while the portrait of the man of action has to be painted, if painted at all, by