Old Familiar Faces

by Theodore Watts-Dunton

the biographer, the writing man paints his own portrait for himself.

And as, in a deep sense, every biographer is an inventor like the novelist—as from the few facts that he is able to collect he infers a character—the man of action, after he is dead, is at the mercy of every man who writes his life. Is not Alexander the Great no less a figment of another man’s brain than Achilles, or Macbeth, or Mr. Pickwick? But a poet, howsoever artistic, howsoever dramatic, the form of his work may be, is occupied during his entire life in painting his own portrait. And if it were not for the intervention of the biographer, the reminiscence writer, or the collector of letters for publication, our conception of every poet would be true and vital according to the intelligence with which we read his work.

This is why, of all English poets, Shakespeare is the only one whom we do thoroughly know—unless perhaps we should except his two great contemporaries Webster and Marlowe. Steevens did not exaggerate when he said that all we know of Shakespeare’s outer life is that he was born at Stratford-on-Avon, married, went to London, wrote plays, returned to Stratford, and died. Owing to this circumstance (and a blessed one it is) we can commune with the greatest of our poets undisturbed. We know how Shakespeare confronted every circumstance of this mysterious life—we know how he confronted

the universe, seen and unseen—we know to what degree and in what way he felt every human passion. There is no careless letter of his, thank God! to give us a wrong impression of him. There is no record of his talk at the Mermaid, the Falcon, or the Apollo saloon to make readers doubtful whether his printed utterances truly represent him. Would that the will had been destroyed! then there would have been no talk about the “second-best bed” and the like insane gabble. Suppose, by ill chance, a batch of his letters to Anna Hathaway had been preserved. Is it not a moral certainty that they would have been as uninteresting as the letters of Coleridge, of Scott, of Dickens, of Rossetti, and of Rossetti’s sister?

Why are the letters of literary men apt to be so much less interesting than those of other people? Is it not because, the desire to express oneself in written language being universal, this desire with people outside the literary class has to be of necessity exercised in letter-writing? Is it not because, where there is no other means of written expression than that of letter-writing, the best efforts of the letter-writer are put into the composition, as the best writing of the essayist is put into his essays? However this might have been in Shakespeare’s time, the half-conscious, graphic power of the non-literary letter-writer of to-day is often so

great that if all the letters written in English by non-literary people, especially letters written from abroad to friends at home in the year 1897, [108] were collected, and the cream of them extracted and printed, the book would be the most precious literary production that the year has to show. If, on the other hand, the letters of contemporary English authors were collected in the same way, the poverty of the book would be amazing as compared with the published writings of the authors. With regard to Dickens’s letters, indeed, the contrast between their commonplace, colourless style and the pregnancy of his printed utterances makes the writing in his books seem forced, artificial, unnatural.

The same may in some degree be said of such letters of Rossetti as have hitherto been published. The charming family letters printed by his brother come, of course, under a different category. With the exception of these, perhaps the letters in the volume before us are the most interesting Rossetti letters that have been printed. Yet it is astonishing how feeble they are in giving the reader an idea of Rossetti himself. And this gives birth to the question: Do we not live at a time when the unfairness of printing an author’s letters is greater than it ever was before? To go no further back than the early years of the present century, the

facilities of locomotion were then few, friends were necessarily separated from each other by long intervals of time, and letters were a very important part of intercommunication, consequently it might be expected that even among authors a good deal of a man’s individuality would be expressed in his letters. But even at that period it was only a quite exceptional nature like that of Charles Lamb which adequately expressed itself in epistolary form. Keats’s letters, no doubt, are full of good sense and good criticism, but taking them as a body, including the letters to Fanny Brawne, we think it were better if they had been totally destroyed. As to Byron’s letters, they, of course, are admirable in style and full of literary life, but their very excellence shows that his natural mode of expression was brilliant, slashing prose. But if it was unfair to publish the letters of Coleridge and Keats, what shall we say of the publication of letters written by the authors of our own day, when, owing to an entire change in the conditions of life, no one dreams of putting into his letters anything of literary interest?

When Rossetti died he was, as regards the public, owing to his exclusiveness, much in the same position as Shakespeare has always been. The picture of Rossetti that lived in the public mind was that of a poet and painter of extraordinary imaginative intensity and magic, whose

personality, as romantic as his work, influenced all who came in contact with him. He was, indeed, the only romantic figure in the imagination of the literary and art world of his time. It seemed as if in his very name there was an unaccountable music. The present writer well remembers being at a dinner-party many years ago when the late Lord Leighton was talking in his usual delightful way. His conversation was specially attended to only by his interlocutor, until the name of Rossetti fell from his lips. Then the general murmur of tongues ceased. Everybody wanted to hear what was being said about the mysterious poet-painter. Thus matters stood when Rossetti died. Within forty-eight hours of his death the many-headed beast clamoured for its rights. Within forty-eight hours of his death there was a leading article in an important newspaper on the subject of his suspiciousness as the result of chloral-drinking. And from that moment the romance has been rubbed off the picture as effectually by many of those who have written about him as the bloom is fingered off of a clumsily gathered peach.