Another point of interest upon which these letters will throw light is that connected with his method of work. He himself, like Tennyson, used to say that those who are the most curious as to the way in which a poem was written are precisely those who have the least appreciation of the beauties of the poem itself. If this is true, the time in which we live is not remarkable, perhaps, for its appreciation of poetry. These letters, at any rate, will be appreciated, for the light that some of them throw upon Rossetti at work is remarkable. When a subject for a poem struck him, it was his way to make a prose note of it, then to cartoon it, then to leave it for a time, then to take it up again and read it to his friends, and then to finish it. In a letter to Allingham, dated July 18th, 1854, enclosing the first form of the sonnet called ‘Lost on Both Sides’—which sonnet did not appear in print till 1881—
Rossetti says: “My sonnets are not generally finished till I see them again after forgetting them; and this is only two days old. When between the first form of a sonnet and the second an interval of twenty-seven years elapses, no student of poetry can fail to compare one form with the other.
And so with regard to that poem which is, on the whole, Rossetti’s masterpiece—‘Sister Helen’—sent as early as 1854 to Mrs. Howitt for the German publication the Düsseldorf Annual; the changes in it are extremely interesting. Never did it appear in print without suffering some important variation. Sometimes, indeed, the change of a word or two in a line would entirely transfigure the stanza. As to the new stanzas added to the ballad just before Rossetti’s death, these turned the ballad from a fine poem into a great one.
Equally striking are the changes in ‘The Blessed Damosel.’ But the most notable example of the surety of his hand in revising is seen in regard to a poem several times mentioned in this volume, called originally ‘Bride’s Chamber Talk.’ It was begun as early as ‘Jenny,’ read by Allingham in 1860, but not printed till more than a quarter of a century later. The earliest form is still in existence in MS., and although some of the lines struck out are as poetry most lovely, the poem on the whole is better without them. It was a theory
of Rossetti’s, indeed, that the very riches of the English language made it necessary for the poet who would achieve excellence to revise and manipulate his lines. And in support of this he would contrast the amazing passion for revision disclosed by Dr. Garnett’s ‘Relics of Shelley,’ in which sometimes scarcely half a dozen of the original words are left on a page, with Scott’s metrical narratives, which were sent to the printer in cantos as they were written, like one of the contemporary novels thrown off for the serials. The fact seems to be, however, that the poet’s power of reaching, as Scott reached, his own ideal expression per saltum, or reaching it slowly and tentatively, is simply a matter of temperament. For whose verses are more loose-jointed than Byron’s? whose diction is more commonplace than his? And yet this is what the greatest of Byron specialists, Mr John Murray, says in his extremely interesting remarks upon Byron’s autograph:—
“If we except Byron’s dramatic pieces and ‘Don Juan,’ the first draft of Byron’s longer poems formed but a nucleus of the work as it was printed. For example, ‘English Bards and Scotch Reviewers’ grew out of the ‘British Bards,’ while ‘The Giaour,’ by constant additions to the manuscript, the proofs, and even to the work after publication, was expanded to nearly twice its original size. . . . When the inspiration was on him, the printer had to be kept at work the greater part of the night, and fresh ‘copy’ and fresh revises were crossing one another hour by hour.”
The conclusion is that poets cannot be classified according to their methods of work, but only in relation to the result of those methods, and that our two great elaborators, Byron and Rossetti, may still be more unlike each other in essentials than are any other two nineteenth-century poets.
On the whole, we cannot help closing this book with kindly feelings towards the editor, inasmuch as it aids in the good work of restoring the true portrait of the man who has suffered more than any other from the mischievous malignity of foes and the more mischievous indiscretion of certain of his friends.