Old Familiar Faces

by Theodore Watts-Dunton

That the instinct we are speaking of is really one of the primal instincts is the very first fact that archæology vouches for. Of many lost races, such as the Aztecs and Toltecs, for instance, we have no historical traces save those which are furnished by testimonials of their reverence for the dead. But that this fine instinct is now dying out in the Western world—that it will soon be eliminated from the human constitution of races that are generally considered to be the most advanced—is made

manifest by the present attitude of England and America towards their illustrious dead. In the literary arena of both countries, indeed, so entire is the abrogation of this most beautiful of all feelings—so recklessly and so shamefully are not only raw manuscripts, but private letters, put up to auction for publication—that at last the great writers of our time, confronted by this new terror, are wisely beginning to take care of themselves and their friends by a holocaust of every scrap of paper lying in their desks.

So demoralized has the literary world become by the present craze for notoriety and for personal details of prominent men that an executor who in regard to the disposal of his testator’s money would act with the most rigid scrupulousness will, in regard to the MSS. he finds in his testator’s desk, commit, “for the benefit of the public,” an outrage that would have made the men of a less vulgar period shudder. The “benefit of the public,” indeed! Who is this “public,” and what are its rights as against the rights of the dead poet, whose heartstrings are woven into “copy” by the disloyal friend he trusted? The inherent callousness of man’s nature is never so painfully seen as in the relation of this ogre, “the public,” to dead genius. Without the smallest real reverence for genius—without the smallest capacity of distinguishing the poetaster it

always adores from the true poet it always ignores—the public can still fall down before the pedestal upon which genius has been placed by the select few—fall down with its long ears wide open for gossip about genius, or anything else that is talked about.

It was with such thoughts as these that we opened the present somewhat bulky volume [195]—not, however, with many misgivings; for Christina Rossetti, before she made her brother executor, knew what were his views as to the rights of the public as against the rights of genius. And if he has printed here every poem he could lay hands upon, he may fairly be assumed to have done so with the consent of a sister whom he loved so dearly and by whom he was so dearly loved. Fortunately there are not many of these relics that are devoid of a deep interest, some from the biographical point of view, some from the poetical.

Again, what is to be said about such part of a dead author’s writing as, having appeared in print, has afterwards passed through the author’s crucible of artistic revision? What about the executor’s duty here, where the case between the author and the public stands on a different footing? At the present time, when newspapers and novels alone are read, it is not the poet’s verses which most people read, but

paragraphs about what the author and his wife and children “eat and drink and avoid”: a time when, if the poet’s verses are read at all, it is the accidents rather than the essentials of the work that seem primarily to concern the public. At such a time an editor is not entirely master of his actions. Doubtless, there is much reason in the wrath of Tennyson and other great poets against the “literary resurrection man,” who, though incapable of understanding the beauties of a beautiful work, can take a very great interest in poring over the various stages through which that work has passed on its way to perfection. These poets, however, are apt to forget that, after a poem or line has once passed into print, its final suppression is impossible. And perhaps there are other reasons why, in this matter, an editor should be allowed some indulgence.

Here, for instance, is a puzzling case to be tried in foro conscientiæ. In the first edition of ‘Goblin Market,’ published in 1862, appeared three poems of more breadth of treatment than any of the others: ‘Cousin Kate,’ a ballad, ‘Sister Maude,’ a ballad, and ‘A Triad,’ a sonnet. In subsequent issues of the book these were all omitted. Mr. W. M. Rossetti, speaking of ‘Sister Maude,’ says: “I presume that my sister, with overstrained scrupulosity, considered its moral tone to be somewhat open to exception. In such a view I by no means

agree, and I therefore reproduce it.” If Christina’s objection was valid when she raised it, it is, of course, valid now, when the beloved poet is in the “country beyond Orion,” and knows what sanctions are of man’s imagining, and what sanctions are more eternal than the movements of the stars.

The question here is, What were Christina Rossetti’s wishes? not whether her brother “agrees” with them. Hence, if it were not certain that some one would soon have restored them, would Mr. W. M. Rossetti have hesitated before doing so? For they are among the most powerful things Christina Rossetti ever wrote, and it was a subject of deep regret to her friends that she suppressed them. Yet she withdrew them from conscientious motives. In ‘Sister Maude’ she showed how great was her power in the most difficult of all forms of poetic art—the romantic ballad. Splendid as are Gabriel Rossetti’s ‘Sister Helen’ and ‘Rose Mary,’ the literary aura surrounding them prevents them from seeming—as the best of the Border ballads seem—Nature’s very voice muttering in her dreams of the pathos and the mystery of the human story. It was not, perhaps, given even to Rossetti to get very near to that supreme old poet (not forgotten, because never known) who wrote “May Margaret’s” appeal to the ghost of her lover Clerk Saunders:—