In most things, however, Christina Rossetti seemed to stand midway between Gabriel and the other two members of her family, and it was the same in physical matters. She had Gabriel’s eyes, in which hazel and blue-grey were marvellously blent, one hue shifting into the other, answering to the movements of the thoughts—eyes like the mother’s. And her brown hair, though less warm in colour than his during his boyhood, was still like it. When a young girl, at the time that she sat for the Virgin in the picture now in the National Gallery, she was, as both her mother and Gabriel have told me, really lovely, with an extraordinary expression of pensive sweetness. She used to have in the little back parlour a portrait of herself at eighteen by Gabriel, which gives all these qualities. Even then, however, the fullness in the eyes was somewhat excessive. Afterwards her ill health took a peculiar form, the effect of which was that the eyes were, in a manner of speaking, pushed
forward, and although this protuberance was never disagreeable, it certainly took a good deal of beauty from her face.
Dominant, however, as was the father’s personality among his friends, the mother’s influence upon the children was stronger than his; and no wonder, for I think there was no beautiful charm of woman that Mrs. Rossetti lacked. She did not seem at all aware that she was a woman of exceptional gifts, yet her intellectual penetration and the curious exactitude of her knowledge were so remarkable that Gabriel accepted her dicta as oracles not to be challenged. One of her specialities was the pronunciation of English words, in which she was an authority. I cannot resist giving one little instance, as it illustrates a sweet feature of Gabriel’s character. It occurred on a lovely summer’s day in the old Kelmscott manor house in 1873, when Mrs. Rossetti, Christina, and myself were watching Gabriel at work upon ‘Proserpine.’ I had pronounced the word aspirant with the accent upon the middle syllable. “Pardon me, my dear fellow,” said he, without looking from his work, “that word should be pronounced with the accent on the first syllable, as a purist like you ought to know.” On my challenging this, he said, in a tone which was meant to show that he was saying the last word upon the subject, “My mother always says áspirant, and she is always right upon
matters of pronunciation.” “Then I shall always say áspirant,” I replied. And I may add that I now do say áspirant, and, right or wrong, intend to say áspirant so long as this breath of mine enables me to say áspirant at all. Afterwards Christina, as we were strolling by the weir, watching Gabriel and George Hake pounding across the meadows at the rate of five miles an hour, said to me, “I think you were right about aspírant.” “No,” I said, “it is a dear, old-fashioned way. Your mother says áspirant; I now remember that my own mother said áspirant. I shall stick to áspirant till the end of the chapter.” And Christina said, “Then so will I.”
Among Mrs. Rossetti’s accomplishments was reading aloud, mainly from imaginative writers, and I cannot recall without a thrill of mingled emotions a delightful stay of mine at Kelmscott in the summer of ’73, when she, whose age then was seventy-three, used to read out to us all sorts of things. And writing these words makes me hear those readings again—makes me hear, through the open casement of the quaint old house, the blackbirds from the home field trying in vain to rival the music of that half-Italian, half-English voice. To have been admitted into such a charmed circle I look upon as one of the greatest privileges of my life. It is something for a man to have lived within touch of Christina Rossetti and her mother.
From her father, however, Christina took, either by the operation of some law of heredity or from early association with the author of ‘Il Mistero dell’ Amor Platonico del Medio Evo’ and ‘La Beatrice di Dante,’ that passion for symbolism which is one of the chief features of her poetry. There is, perhaps, no more striking instance of the inscrutable lines in which ancestral characteristics descend than the way in which the passion for symbolism was inherited by Christina and Gabriel Rossetti from their father.
While Christina’s poetical work may be described as being all symbolical, she was not much given, like her brother, to read symbols into the every-day incidents of life. Gabriel, on the contrary, though using symbolism in his poetry in only a moderate degree, allowed his instinct for symbolizing his own life to pass into positive superstition. When a party of us—including Mrs. Rossetti, Christina, the two aunts, Dr. Hake, with four of his sons, and myself—were staying for Christmas with Gabriel near Bognor, a tree fell in the garden during a storm. While Gabriel seemed inclined to take it as a sign of future disaster, Christina, whose poetry is so full of symbolism, would smile at such a notion. Yet Gabriel could speak of his father’s symbolizing (as in ‘La Beatrice di Dante’) as being absolutely and hopelessly eccentric and worthless. This is
remarkable, for one would have thought that it was impossible to read those extraordinary works of the elder Rossetti’s without being impressed by the rare intellectual subtlety of the Italian scholar.
Of course the opportunities of brother and sister of studying Nature were identical. Both were born in London, and during childhood saw Nature only as a holiday scene. Christina would talk with delight of her grandfather’s cottage retreat about thirty miles from London, to which she used to go for a holiday in a stage coach, and of the beauty of the country around. But these expeditions were not numerous, and came to an end when she was a child of seven or eight, and it was very little that she saw outside London before girlhood was past. I have myself heard her speak of what she has somewhere written about—the rapture of the sight of some primroses growing in a railway cutting. It is, of course, a great disadvantage to any poet not to have been born in the country; learned in Nature the city-born poet can never be, as we see in the case of Milton, who loved Nature without knowing her. It is here that Jean Ingelow has such an advantage over Christina Rossetti. Her love of flowers, and birds, and trees, and all that makes the earth so beautiful, is not one whit stronger than Christina’s own, but it is a love born of an exhaustive detailed knowledge of Nature’s life.
On a certain occasion when walking with a friend at Hunter’s Forestall, near Herne Bay, where she and her mother were nursing Gabriel through one of his illnesses, the talk ran upon Shelley’s ‘Skylark,’ a poem which she adored. She was literally bewildered because the friend showed that he was able to tell, from a certain change of sound in the note of a skylark that had risen over the lane, the moment when the bird had made up its mind to cease singing and return to the earth. It seemed to her an almost supernatural gift, and yet an ignorant ploughman will often be able to do the same thing. This kind of intimacy with Nature she coveted. With the lower animals, nevertheless, she had a strange kind of sympathy of her own. Young creatures especially understood the playful humour of her approach. A delightful fantastic whim was the bond between her and puppies and kittens and birds. Her intimacy with Nature—of a different kind altogether from that of Wordsworth and Tennyson—was of the kind that I have described on a previous occasion as Sufeyistic: she loved the beauty of this world, but not entirely for itself; she loved it on account of its symbols of another world beyond. And yet she was no slave to the ascetic side of Christianity. No doubt there was mixed with her spiritualism, or perhaps underlying it, a rich sensuousness that under other circumstances