“Madeline and other Poems” appeared not long after Rossetti’s volume. I kept myself clear of all models and other modes of thought—a fact recognized by every writer that reviewed my book. Rossetti was the first to say this, which he did in the Academy, the generosity of which proceeding cannot be too strongly put forward when one recollects that his own poems were in the hands of the critics at the same time. He read the poem before publication, and from what he wrote to me I learned that the metre itself in “Madeline” had a great charm for him.
I became known to Theodore Watts about the time “Madeline” came out. He was then comparatively young, and had formed for himself, in the country, certain poetic tenets which twenty years of experience have since greatly enlarged. He did not then think that “Madeline” had the elements of success within it. In intellect, in isolated quotable passages, according to his view, it abounded; for the rest it came strange to him.
Twenty years of experience and change of feeling affects us all; we become blasé for better or worse; authors in whom we revelled go stale; others, that we found it hard to bite at, seem to yield a light that was but a spark before. The change is in ourselves.
Not many months ago, after the publication of “The New Day,” Watts was with me, and said, “I have been reading ‘Madeline’ again; for sheer originality, both of conception and of treatment, I consider that it stands alone.”
I do not intend to submit this sentence to him for further consideration; it was once in his mouth, and thence it issued!
LVIII.
I may tell the origin of “Madeline” in a brief sentence. I had framed and delivered a lecture, scientifically treated, on “Sleep, Dreams, Sleep-walking, Sleep-talking and the Mesmeric State,” which last I explained by the facts of hypnotism. It was many years after this that I conceived the idea of conducting a character, in metre, through all these states of the human soul, and “Madeline” became that character.
Dr. Marston said, and I think truly, that the poem had too much machinery—a mistake which I have now corrected by erasure, in case an edition of the work should ever be required.
Watts is a man of many rich endowments; he has a fine poetic faculty, logical, yet warm; with an imagination not introspective only, but one that ranges over nature, and which might be called circumspective. His sonnets will bear the analysis to which I have submitted Shakespeare, Coleridge, and Wordsworth, in a previous page.