At Birchington-on-Sea one of the most rarely gifted men of our time has just died [April 9th, 1882] after a lingering illness. During the time that his ‘Ballads and Sonnets’ was passing through the press last autumn his health began to give way, and he left London for Cumberland. A stay of a few weeks in the Vale of St. John, however, did nothing to improve his health, and he returned much shattered. After a time a numbness in the left arm excited fear of paralysis, and he became dangerously ill. It is probable, indeed, that nothing but the skill and unwearied attention of Mr. John Marshall saved his life then, as it had done upon several previous occasions. Such of his friends as were then in London—W. B. Scott, Burne Jones, Leyland, F. Shields, Mr. Dunn, and others—feeling the greatest alarm, showed him every affectionate attention, and spared no effort to preserve a life so precious and so beloved. Mr. Seddon having placed at his disposal West Cliff Bungalow, Birchington-on-Sea, he went thither, accompanied by his mother and sister and Mr. Hall Caine, about nine weeks since, but received no benefit from the change, and, gradually sinking from a complication of disorders, he died on Sunday last at 10 p.m.

Dante Gabriel Rosette. From a crayon-drawing by himself reproduced by the kind permission of Mrs. W. M. Rossetti

Were I even competent to enter upon the discussion of Rossetti’s gifts as a poet and as a painter, it would not be possible to do so here and at this moment. That the quality of romantic imagination informs with more vitality his work than it can be said to inform the work of any of his contemporaries was recognized at first by the few, and is now (judging from the great popularity of his last volume of poetry) being recognized by the many. And the same, I think, may be said of his painting. Those who had the privilege of a personal acquaintance with him knew how “of imagination all compact” he was. Imagination, indeed, was at once his blessing and his bane. To see too vividly—to love too intensely—to suffer and enjoy too acutely—is the doom, no doubt, of all those “lost wanderers from Arden” who, according to the Rosicrucian story, sing the world’s songs; and to Rossetti this applies more, perhaps, than to most poets. And when we consider that the one quality in all poetry which really gives it an endurance outlasting the generation of its birth is neither music nor colour, nor even intellectual substance, but the clearness of the seeing; the living breath of imagination—the very qualities, in short, for which such poems as ‘Sister Helen’ and ‘Rose Mary’ are so conspicuous—we are driven to the conclusion that Rossetti’s poetry has a long and enduring future before it.

A life more devoted to literature and art than his it is impossible to imagine. Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti was born at 38, Charlotte Street, Portland Place, London, on the 12th of May, 1828. He was the first son and second child of Gabriele Rossetti, the patriotic poet, who, born at Vasto in the Abruzzi, settled in Naples, and took an active part in extorting from the Neapolitan king Ferdinand I. the constitution granted in 1820, which constitution being traitorously cancelled by the king in 1821, Rossetti had to escape for his life to Malta with various other persecuted constitutionalists. From Malta Gabriele Rossetti went to England about 1823, where he married in 1826 Frances Polidori, daughter of Alfieri’s secretary and sister of Byron’s Dr. Polidori. He became Professor of Italian in King’s College, London, became also prominent as a commentator on Dante, and died in April, 1854. His children, four in number—Maria Francesca, Dante Gabriel, William Michael, and Christina Georgina—all turned to literature or to art, or to both, and all became famous. There can, indeed, be no doubt that the Rossetti family will hold a position quite unique in the literary and artistic annals of our time.

Young Rossetti was first sent to the private school of the Rev. Mr. Paul in Foley Street, Portland Place, where he remained, however, for only three quarters of a year, from the autumn of 1835 to the summer of 1836. He next went to King’s College School in the autumn of 1836, where he remained till the summer of 1843, having reached the fourth class, then conducted by the Rev. Mr. Framley.

Having from early childhood shown a strong propensity for drawing and painting, which had thus been always regarded as his future profession, he now left school for ever and received no more school learning. In Latin he was already fairly proficient for his age; French he knew well; he had spoken Italian from childhood, and had some German lessons about 1844–5. On leaving school he went at once to the Art Academy of Cary (previously called Sass’s) near Bedford Square, and thence obtained admission to the Royal Academy Antique School in 1844 or 1845. To the Royal Academy Life School he never went, and he was a somewhat negligent art student, but always regarded as one who had a future before him.

In 1849 Rossetti exhibited ‘The Girlhood of the Virgin’ in the so-called Free Exhibition or Portland Gallery. The artist who had perhaps the strongest influence upon Rossetti’s early tastes was Ford Madox Brown, who, however, refused from the first to join the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood on the ground that coteries had in modern art no proper function. Rossetti was deeply impressed with the power and designing faculty displayed by Madox Brown’s cartoons exhibited in Westminster Hall. When Rossetti began serious work as a painter he thought of Madox Brown as the one man from whom he would willingly receive practical guidance, and wrote to him at random. From this time Madox Brown became his intimate friend and artistic monitor.

In painting, however, Rossetti was during this time exercising only half his genius. From his childhood it became evident that he was a poet. At the age of five he wrote a sort of play called ‘The Slave,’ which, as may be imagined, showed no noteworthy characteristic save precocity. This was followed by the poem called ‘Sir Hugh Heron,’ which was written about 1844, and some translations of German poetry. ‘The Blessed Damozel’ and ‘Sister Helen’ were produced in their original form so early as 1846 or 1847. The latter of these has undergone more modifications than any other first-class poem of our time. To take even the new edition of the ‘Poems’ which appeared last year [1881], the stanzas introducing the wife of the luckless hero appealing to the sorceress for mercy are so important in the glamour they shed back over the stanzas that have gone before, that their introduction may almost be characterized as a rewriting of every previous line.

The translations from the early Italian poets also began as far back as 1845 or 1846, and may have been mainly completed by 1849. Rossetti’s gifts as a translator were, no doubt, of the highest. And this arose from his deep sympathy with literature as a medium of human expression: he could enter into the temperaments of other writers, and by sympathy criticize the literary form from the author’s own inner standpoint, supposing always that there was a certain racial kinship with the author. Many who write well themselves have less sympathy with the expressional forms adopted by other writers than is displayed by men who have neither the impulse nor the power to write themselves. But this sympathy betrayed him sometimes into a free rendering of locutions such as a translator should be chary of indulging in. Materials for a volume accumulated slowly, but all the important portions of the ‘Poems’ published in 1870 had been in existence some years before that date. The prose story of ‘Hand and Soul’ was also written as early as 1848 or 1849.

In the spring of 1860 he married Elizabeth Eleanor Siddall, who being very beautiful was constantly painted and drawn by him. She had one still-born child in 1861, and died in February, 1862. He felt her death very acutely, and for a time ceased to write or to take any interest in his own poetry. Like Prospero, indeed, he literally buried his wand, but for a time only. From this time to his death he continued to produce pictures, all of them showing, as far as technical skill goes, an unfaltering advance in his art.

Yet wonderful as was Rossetti as an artist and poet, he was still more wonderful, I think, as a man. The chief characteristic of his conversation was an incisiveness so perfect and clear as to have often the pleasurable surprise of wit. It is so well known that Rossetti has been for a long time the most retired man of genius of our day, and so many absurd causes for this retirement have been spoken of, that there is nothing indecorous in the true cause of it being made public by one who of late years has known more of him, perhaps, than has any other person. About 1868 the curse of the artistic and poetic temperament—insomnia—attacked him, and one of the most distressing effects of insomnia is a nervous shrinking from personal contact with any save a few intimate friends. This peculiar kind of nervousness may be aggravated by the use of sleeping draughts, and in his case was thus aggravated.

But, although Rossetti lived thus secluded, he did not lose the affectionate regard of the illustrious men with whom he started in his artistic life. Nor, assuredly, did he deserve to lose it, for no man ever lived, I think, who was so generous as he in sympathizing with other men’s work, save only when the cruel fumes of chloral turned him against everything. And his sympathy was as wide as generous. It was only necessary to mention the name of Leighton or Millais or Madox Brown or Burne Jones or G. F. Watts, or, indeed, of any contemporary painter, to get from him a glowing disquisition upon the merits of each—a disquisition full of the subtlest distinctions, and illuminated by the brilliant lights of his matchless fancy. And it was the same in poetry.

But those who loved Rossetti (that is to say, those who knew him) can realize how difficult it is for me, a friend, to pursue just now such reminiscences as these.

II.

In his preface Mr. W. M. Rossetti says:—

“I have not attempted to write a biographical account of my brother, nor to estimate the range or value of his powers and performances in fine art and in literature. I agree with those who think that a brother is not the proper person to undertake a work of this sort. An outsider can do it dispassionately, though with imperfect knowledge of the facts; a friend can do it with mastery, and without much undue bias; but a brother, however equitably he may address himself to the task, cannot perform it so as to secure the prompt and cordial assent of his readers.”

These words will serve as a good example of the dignified modesty which is a characteristic of Mr. W. M. Rossetti’s, and is one of the best features of this volume. [77] In these days of empty pretence it is always refreshing to come upon a page written in the spirit of scholarly self-suppression which informs every line this patient and admirable critic writes. And as to the interesting question glanced at in the passage above quoted, though the contents of this volume will, no doubt, form valuable material for the future biography of Rossetti, we wonder whether the time is even yet at hand when that biography, whether written by brother, by friend, or by outsider, is needed. That mysterious entity “the public,” would, no doubt, like to get one; but we have always shared Rossetti’s own opinion that a man of genius is no more the property of the “public” than is any private gentleman; and we have always felt with him that the prevalence in our time of the opposite opinion has fashioned so intolerable a yoke for the neck of any one who has had the misfortune to pass from the sweet paradise of obscurity into the vulgar purgatory of Fame, that it almost behoves a man of genius to avoid, if he can, passing into that purgatory at all.

Can any biography, by whomsoever written, be other than inchoate and illusory—nay, can it fail to be fraught with danger to the memory of the dead, with danger to the peace of the living, until years have fully calmed the air around the dead man’s grave? So long as the man to be portrayed cannot be separated from his surroundings, so long as his portrait cannot be fully and honestly limned without peril to the peace of those among whom he moved—in a word, so long as there remains any throb of vitality in those delicate filaments of social life by which he was enlinked to those with whom he played his part—that brother, or that friend, or that outsider who shall attempt the portraiture must feel what heavy responsibilities are his—must not forget that with him to trip is to sin against the head. And how shall he decide when the time has at last come for making the attempt? Before the incidents of a man’s life can be exploited without any risk of mischief, how much time should elapse? “A month,” say the publishers, each one of whom runs his own special “biographical series,” and keeps his own special bevy of recording angels writing against time and against each other. “Thirty years,” said one whose life-wisdom was so perfect as to be in a world like ours almost an adequate substitute for the morality he lacked—Talleyrand.

Of all forms of literary art biography demands from the artist not only the greatest courage, but also the happiest combination of the highest gifts. To succeed in painting the portrait of Achilles or of Priam, of Hamlet or of Othello, may be difficult, but is it as difficult as to succeed in painting the portrait of Browning or Rossetti? Surely not. In the one case an intense dramatic imagination is needed, and nothing more. If Homer’s Achaian and Trojan heroes were falsely limned, not they, but Homer’s art, would suffer the injury. If for the purposes of art the poet unduly exalted this one or unduly abased that—if he misread one incident in the mythical life of Achilles, and another in the mythical life of Hector—he did wrong to his art undoubtedly, but none to the memory of a dead man, and none to the peace of a living one. But with him who would paint the portrait of Browning or Rossetti how different is the case! Although he requires the poet’s vision before he can paint a living picture of his subject, the task he has set himself to do is something more than artistic: before everything else it is fiduciary.

A trustee whose trust fund is biographical truth, he has, after collecting and marshalling all the facts that come to his hand, to decide what is truth as indicated by those generalized facts. But having done this, he has to decide what is the proper time for giving the world the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth—what is the proper time? In the biographer’s relation to the dead man on the one-hand and to the public on the other should he be so unhappy as to forget that time is of the very “essence of the contract”—should he forget that so inwoven is human life that truth spoken at the wrong moment may be a greater mischief-worker than error—he may, if conscientious, have to remember that forgetfulness of his during the remainder of his days. He who thinks that truth may not be sometimes as mischievous as a pestilence knows but little of this mysterious and wonderful net of human life. But if this is so with regard to truth, how much more is it so with regard to mere matter of fact? Fact-worship, document-worship, is at once the crowning folly and the crowning vice of our time. To mistake a fact for a truth, and to give the world that; to throw facts about and documents about heedless of the mischief they may work—wronging the dead and wronging the living—this is actually paraded as a virtue in these days.

Here is a case in point. Down to the very last moment of his life Rossetti’s feeling towards his great contemporary Tennyson was that of the deepest admiration, and yet what says the documentary evidence as given to the world by Rossetti’s brother? It shows that Rossetti used an extremely unpleasant phrase concerning a letter from Tennyson acknowledging the receipt of Rossetti’s first volume of poems in 1870. Those who have heard Tennyson speak of Rossetti know that to use this phrase in relation to any letter of his dealing with Rossetti’s poetry was to misunderstand it. Yet here are the unpleasant words of a hasty mood, “rather shabby,” in print. And why? Because the public has become so demoralized that its feast of facts, its feast of documents it must have, come what will. But even supposing that the public had any rights whatsoever in regard to a man of genius, which we deny, what are letters as indications of a man’s character? Of all modes of expression is not the epistolary mode that in which man’s instinct for using language “to disguise his thought” is most likely to exercise itself? There is likely to be far more deep sincerity in a sonnet than in a letter. It is no exaggeration to say that the common courtesies of life demand a certain amount of what is called “blarney” in a letter—especially in an eminent man’s letter—which would ruin a sonnet. And this must be steadily borne in mind at a time like ours, when private letters are bought and sold like any other article of merchandise, not only immediately after a man’s death, but during his lifetime.

With regard to literary men, their letters in former times were simply artistic compositions; hence as indications of character they must be judged by the same canons as literary essays would be judged. In both cases the writer had full space and full time to qualify his statements of opinion; in both cases he was without excuse for throwing out anything heedlessly. Not only in Walpole’s case and Gray’s, but also in Charles Lamb’s, we apply the same rules of criticism to the letters as we apply to the published utterances that appeared in the writer’s lifetime. But now, when letters are just the hurried expression of the moment, when ill-considered things—often rash things—are said which either in literary compositions or in conversation would have been, if said at all, greatly qualified—the greatest injustice that can be done to a writer is to print his letters indiscriminately. Especially is this the case with Rossetti. All who knew him speak of him as being a superb critic, and a superb critic he was. But his printed letters show nothing of the kind. On literary subjects they are often full of over-statement and of biased judgment. Here is the explanation: in conversation he had a way of perpetrating a brilliant critical paradox for the very purpose of qualifying it, turning it about, colouring it by the lights of his wonderful fancy, until at last it became something quite different from the original paradox, and full of truth and wisdom. But when such a paradox went off in a letter, there it remained unqualified; and they who, not having known him, scoff at his friends who claim for him the honours of a great critic, seem to scoff with reason.

No one was more conscious of the treachery of letters than was Rossetti himself. Comparatively late in his life he realized what all eminent men would do well to realize, that owing to the degradation of public taste, which cries out for more personal gossip and still more every day, the time has fully come when every man of mark must consider the rights of his friends—when it behoves every man who has had the misfortune to pass into fame to burn all letters; and he began the holocaust that duty to friendship demanded of him. But the work of reading through such a correspondence as his in order to see what letters must be preserved from the burning took more time and more patience than he had contemplated, and the destruction did not progress further than to include the letters of the early sixties. Business letters it was, of course, necessary to preserve, and very properly it is from these that Mr. W. M. Rossetti has mainly quoted.

The volume is divided into two parts: first, documents relating to the production of certain of Rossetti’s pictures and poems; and second, a prose paraphrase of ‘The House of Life.’

The documents consist of abstracts of and extracts from such portions of Rossetti’s correspondence as have fallen into his brother’s hands as executor. Dealing as they necessarily do with those complications of prices and those involved commissions for which Rossetti’s artistic career was remarkable, there is a commercial air about the first portion of the book which some will think out of harmony with their conception of the painter, about whom there used to be such a mysterious interest until much writing about him had brought him into the light of common day. In future years a summary so accurate and so judicious as this will seem better worth making than it, perhaps, seems at the present moment; for Mr. W. M. Rossetti’s love of facts is accompanied by an equally strong love of making an honest statement of facts—a tabulated statement, if possible; and no one writing of Rossetti need hesitate about following his brother to the last letter and to the last figure.

To be precise and perspicuous is, he hints in his preface, better than to be graphic and entertaining; and we entirely agree with him, especially when the subject discussed is Rossetti, about whom so many fancies that are neither precise nor perspicuous are current. Still, to read about this picture being offered to one buyer and that to another, and rejected or accepted at a greatly reduced price after much chaffering, is not, we will confess, exhilarating reading to those to whom Rossetti’s pictures are also poems. It does not conduce to the happiness of his admirers to think of such works being produced under such prosaic conditions. One buyer—a most worthy man, to be sure, and a true friend of Rossetti’s, but full of that British superstition about the saving grace of clothes which is so wonderful a revelation to the pensive foreigner—had to be humoured in his craze against the nude. After having painted a beautiful partly-draped Gretchen (which, we may remark in passing, had no relation, as Mr. W. M. Rossetti supposes, to the Marguerite alluded to in a letter to Mr. Graham in 1870) from a new model whose characteristics were a superb bosom and arms, he, Rossetti, was obliged to consent to conceal the best portions of the picture under drapery.

That this was a matter of great and peculiar vexation to him may be supposed when it is remembered that unequalled as had been his good fortune in finding fine face-models (ladies of position and culture, and often of extraordinary beauty), he had in the matter of figure-models been most unlucky. And this, added to his slight knowledge of anatomy, made all his nude pictures undesirable save those few painted from the beautiful girl who stood for ‘The Spirit of the Rainbow’ and ‘Forced Music.’ What his work from the nude suffered from this is incalculable, as may be seen in the crayon called ‘Ligeia Siren,’ a naked siren playing on a kind of lute, which Rossetti described as “certainly one of his best things.” The beauty and value of a crayon which for weird poetry—especially in the eyes—must be among Rossetti’s masterpieces are ruined by the drawing of the breasts.

The most interesting feature of the book, however, is not that which deals with the prices Rossetti got for his pictures, but that which tells the reader the place where and the conditions under which they were painted; and no portion of the book is more interesting than that which relates to the work done at Kelmscott:—

“At the beginning of this year 1874 Rossetti was again occupied with the picture which he had commenced in the preceding spring, entitled, ‘The Bower Maiden’—a girl in a room with a pot of marigolds and a black cat. It was painted from ‘little Annie’ (a cottage-girl and house assistant at Kelmscott), and it ‘goes on’ (to quote the words of one of his letters) ‘like a house on fire. This is the only kind of picture one ought to do—just copying the materials, and no more: all others are too much trouble.’ It is not difficult to understand that the painter of a ‘Proserpine’ and a ‘Ghirlandata’ would occasionally feel the luxury of a mood intellectually lazy, and would be minded to give voice to it—as in this instance—in terms wilfully extreme; keeping his mental eye none the less steadily directed to a ‘Roman Widow’ or a ‘Blessed Damozel’ in the near future. As a matter of fact, my brother painted very few things, at any stage of his career, as mere representations of reality, unimbued by some inventive or ideal meaning: in the rare instances when he did so, he naturally felt an indolent comfort, and made no scruple of putting the feeling into words—highly suitable for being taken cum grano salis. Nothing was more alien from his nature or habit than ‘tall talk’ of any kind about his aims, aspirations, or performances. It was into his work—not into his utterances about his work—that he infused the higher and deeper elements of his spirit. ‘The Bower Maiden’ was finished early in February, and sold to Mr. Graham for 682l., after it had been offered to Mr. Leyland at a rather higher figure, and declined. It has also passed under the names of ‘Fleurs de Marie,’ ‘Marigolds,’ and ‘The Gardener’s Daughter.’ After ‘The Bower Maiden’ had been disposed of, other work was taken up—more especially ‘The Roman Widow,’ bearing the alternative title of ‘DÎs Manibus,’ which was in an advanced stage by the month of May, and was completed in June or July. It was finished with little or no glazing. The Roman widow is a lady still youthful, in a grey fawn-tinted drapery, with a musical instrument in each hand; she is in the sepulchral chamber of her husband, whose stone urn appears in the background. I possess the antique urn which my brother procured, and which he used for the painting. For graceful simplicity, and for depth of earnest but not strained sentiment, he never, I think, exceeded ‘The Roman Widow.’ The two instruments seem to repeat the two mottoes on the urn, ‘Ave Domine—Vale Domine.’ The head was painted from Miss Wilding, already mentioned; but it seems to me partly associated with the type of Mrs. Stillman’s face as well. There are many roses in this picture—both wild and garden roses; they kept the artist waiting a little after the work was otherwise finished. ‘I really think it looks well,’ he wrote on one occasion; ‘its fair luminous colour seems to melt into the gold frame (which has only just come) like a part of it.’ He feared that the picture might be ‘too severe and tragic’ for some tastes; but could add (not, perhaps, with undue confidence), ‘I don’t think GÉricault or RÉgnault would have quite scorned it.’”

The magnificent design here alluded to, ‘DÎs Manibus,’ entirely suggested by the urn, which had somewhat come into his possession (probably through Howell), and also ‘The Bower Maiden,’ suggested by his accidentally seeing a pretty cottage-child lifting some marigolds to a shelf, formed part of the superb work produced by Rossetti during his long retirement at Kelmscott Manor—that period never before recorded, which has at this very moment been brought into prominence by his friend Dr. Hake’s sonnet-sequence ‘The New Day,’ just published. As far as literary and artistic work goes, it was, perhaps, the richest period of his life; and that it was also one of the happiest is clear not only from his own words, but also from the following testimony of Dr. Hake, who saw much of him there:—

O, happy days with him who once so loved us!
We loved as brothers, with a single heart,
The man whose iris-woven pictures moved us
From nature to her blazoned shadow—Art.
How often did we trace the nestling Thames
From humblest waters on his course of might,
Down where the weir the bursting current stems—
There sat till evening grew to balmy night,
Veiling the weir whose roar recalled the Strand
Where we had listened to the wave-lipped sea,
That seemed to utter plaudits while we planned
Triumphal labours of the day to be.

It was at Kelmscott, in the famous tapestried room, that besides painting the ‘Proserpine,’ ‘The Roman Widow,’ &c., he wrote many of his later poems, including ‘Rose Mary.’

Considering how deep is Mr. W. M. Rossetti’s affection for his brother’s memory, and how great is his admiration for his brother’s work, it is remarkable how judicial is his mind when writing about him. This is what he says about the much discussed ‘Venus Astarte’:—

“Into the ‘Venus Astarte’ he had put his utmost intensity of thinking, feeling, and method—he had aimed to make it equally strong in abstract sentiment and in physical grandeur—an ideal of the mystery of beauty, offering a sort of combined quintessence of what he had endeavoured in earlier years to embody in the two several types of ‘Sibylla Palmifera’ and ‘Lilith,’ or (as he ultimately named them in the respective sonnets) ‘Soul’s Beauty’ and ‘Body’s Beauty.’ It may be well to remark that, by the time when he completed the ‘Venus Astarte,’ or ‘Astarte Syriaca,’ he had got into a more austere feeling than of old with regard to colour and chiaroscuro; and the charm of the picture has, I am aware, been less, to many critics and spectators of the work, than he would have deemed to be its due, as compared with some of his other performances of more obvious and ostensible attraction.”

Though Mr. W. M. Rossetti is right in saying that it was not till the beginning of 1877 that this remarkable picture was brought to a conclusion, the main portions were done during that long sojourn at Bognor in 1876–7, which those who have written about Rossetti have hitherto left unrecorded. Having fallen into ill health after his return to London from Kelmscott, he was advised to go to the seaside, and a large house at Bognor was finally selected. No doubt one reason why the preference was given to Bognor was the fact that Blake’s cottage at Felpham was close by, for businesslike and unbusiness-like qualities were strangely mingled in Rossetti’s temperament, and it was generally some sentiment or unpractical fancy of this kind that brought about Rossetti’s final decision upon anything. Blake’s name was with him still a word to charm with, and he was surprised to find, on the first pilgrimage of himself and his friends to the cottage, that scarcely a person in the neighbourhood knew what Blake it was that “the Londoners” were inquiring about.

To the secluded house at Bognor—a house so surrounded by trees and shrubs that the murmur of the waves mingling with the whispers of the leaves seemed at one moment the sea’s voice, and at another the voice of the earth—Rossetti took not only the cartoon of the ‘Astarte Syriaca,’ but also the most peculiar of all his pictures, ‘The Blessed Damozel,’ which had long lain in an incomplete state. But it was not much painting that he did at Bognor. From a cause he tried in vain to understand, and tried in vain to conquer, his thoughts ran upon poetry, and refused to fix themselves upon art. Partly this might have been owing to the fact that now, comparatively late in life, he to whom, as his brother well says, “such words as sea, ship, and boat were generic terms admitting of little specific and still less of any individual and detailed distinction,” awoke to the fascination that the sea sooner or later exercises upon all truly romantic souls. For deep as is the poetry of the inland woods, the Spirit of Romance, if there at all, is there in hiding. In order for that Spirit to come forth and take captive the soul something else is wanted; howsoever thick and green the trees—howsoever bright and winding the streams—a magical glimmer of sea-light far or near must shine through the branches as they wave.

That this should be a new experience to so fine a poet as Rossetti was no doubt strange, but so it chanced to be. He whose talk at Kelmscott had been of ‘Blessed Damozels’ and ‘Roman Widows’ and the like, talked now of the wanderings of Ulysses, of ‘The Ancient Mariner,’ of ‘Sir Patrick Spens,’ and even of ‘Arthur Gordon Pym’ and ‘Allan Gordon.’ And on hearing a friend recite some tentative verses on a great naval battle, he looked about for sea subjects too; and it was now, and not later, as is generally supposed, that he really thought of the subject of ‘The White Ship,’ a subject apparently so alien from his genius. Every evening he used to take walks on the beach for miles and miles, delighted with a beauty that before had had no charms for him. Still, the ‘Astarte Syriaca’ did progress, though slowly, and became the masterpiece that Mr. W. M. Rossetti sets so high among his brother’s work.

“From Bognor my brother returned to his house in Cheyne Walk; and in the summer he paid a visit to two of his kindest and most considerate friends, Lord and Lady Mount-Temple, at their seat of Broadlands in Hampshire. He executed there a portrait in chalks of Lady Mount-Temple. He went on also with the picture of ‘The Blessed Damozel.’ For the head of an infant angel which appears in the front of this picture he made drawings from two children—one being the baby of the Rev. H. C. Hawtrey, and the other a workhouse infant. The former sketch was presented to the parents of the child and the latter to Lady Mount-Temple; and the head with its wings, was painted on to the canvas at Broadlands.”

Mr. W. M. Rossetti omits to mention that the landscape which forms the predella to ‘The Blessed Damozel,’ a river winding in a peculiarly tortuous course through the cedars and other wide-spread trees of an English park, was taken from the scenery of Broadlands—that fairyland of soft beauty which lived in his memory as it must needs live in the memory of every one who has once known it. But the wonder is that such a mass of solid material has been compressed into so small a space.

Mr. W. M. Rossetti’s paraphrase of ‘The House of Life’—done with so much admiration of his brother’s genius and affection for his memory—touches upon a question relating to poetic art which has been raised before—raised in connexion with prose renderings of Homer, Sophocles, and Dante: Are poetry and prose so closely related in method that one can ever be adequately turned into the other? Schiller no doubt wrote his dramas in prose and then turned them into rhetorical verse; but then there are those who affirm that Schiller’s rhetorical verse is scarcely poetry. The importance of the question will be seen when we call to mind that if such a transmutation of form were possible, translations of poetry would be possible; for though, owing to the tyrannous demands of form, the verse of one language can never be translated into the verse of another, it can always be rendered in the prose of another, only it then ceases to be poetry.

That the intellectual, and even to some extent the emotional, substance of a poem can be seized and covered by a prose translation is seen in Prof. Jebb’s rendering of the ‘Œdipus Rex’; but, as we have before remarked, the fundamental difference between imaginative prose and poetry is that, while the one must be informed with intellectual life and emotional life, the other has to be informed with both these kinds of life, and with another life beyond these—rhythmic life. Now, if we wished to show that rhythmic life is in poetry the most important of all, our example would, we think, be Mr. W. M. Rossetti’s prose paraphrase of his brother’s sonnets. The obstacles against the adequate turning of poetry into prose can be best understood by considering the obstacles against the adequate turning of prose into poetry. Prose notes tracing out the course of the future poem may, no doubt, be made, and usefully made, by the poet (as Wordsworth said in an admirable letter to Gillies), unless, indeed, the notes form too elaborate an attempt at a full prose expression of the subject-matter, in which case, so soon as the poet tries to rise on his winged words, his wingless words are likely to act as a dead weight. For this reason, when Wordsworth said that the prose notes should be brief, he might almost as well have gone on to say that in expression they should be slovenly. This at least may be said, that the moment the language of the prose note is so “adequate” and rich that it seems to be what Wordsworth would call the natural “incarnation of the thought,” the poet’s imagination, if it escapes at all from the chains of the prose expression, escapes with great difficulty. An instance of this occurred in Rossetti’s own experience.

During one of those seaside rambles alluded to above, while he was watching with some friends the billows tumbling in beneath the wintry moon, some one, perhaps Rossetti himself, directed attention to the peculiar effect of the moon’s disc reflected in the white surf, and compared it to fire in snow. Rossetti, struck with the picturesqueness of the comparison, made there and then an elaborate prose note of it in one of the diminutive pocket-books that he was in the habit of carrying in the capacious pocket of his waistcoat. Years afterwards—shortly before his death, in fact—when he came to write ‘The King’s Tragedy,’ remembering this note, he thought he could find an excellent place for it in the scene where the king meets the Spae wife on the seashore and listens to her prophecies of doom. But he was at once confronted by this obstacle: so elaborately had the image of the moon reflected in the surf been rendered in the prose note—so entirely did the prose matter seem to be the inevitable and the final incarnation of the thought—that it appeared impossible to escape from it into the movement and the diction proper to poetry. It was only after much labour—a labour greater than he had given to all the previous stanzas combined—that he succeeded in freeing himself from the fetters of the prose, and in painting the picture in these words:—

That eve was clenched for a boding storm
’Neath a toilsome moon half seen;
The cloud stooped low and the surf rose high;
And where there was a line of sky,
Wild wings loomed dark between.

* * * *

’Twas then the moon sailed clear of the rack
On high on her hollow dome;
And still as aloft with hoary crest
Each clamorous wave rang home,
Like fire in snow the moonlight blazed
Amid the champing foam.

And the remark was then made to him with regard to Coleridge’s ‘Wanderings of Cain,’ that it is not unlikely the matchless fragment given in Coleridge’s poems might have passed nearer towards completion, or at least towards the completion of the first part, had it not been for those elaborate and beautiful prose notes which he has left behind.

And if the attempt to turn prose into poetry is hopeless, the attempt to turn poetry into prose is no less so, and for a like reason—that of the immense difficulty of passing from the movement natural to one mood into the movement natural to another. And this criticism applies especially to the poetry of Rossetti, which produces so many of its best effects by means not of logical statement, but of the music and suggestive richness of rhythmical language. That Rossetti did on some occasions, when told that his sonnets were unintelligible, talk about making such a paraphrase himself is indisputable, because Mr. Fairfax Murray say that he heard him say so. But indisputable also is many another saying of Rossetti’s, equally ill-considered and equally impracticable. That he ever seriously thought of doing so is most unlikely.

III.

In his memoir of his brother, Mr. William Michael Rossetti thus makes mention of a ballad left by the poet which still remains unpublished:—

“It [the ballad] is most fully worthy of publication, but has not been included in Rossetti’s ‘Collected Works,’ because he gave the MS. to his devoted friend Mr. Theodore Watts, with whom alone now rests the decision of presenting it or not to the public.”

And he afterwards mentions certain sonnets on the Sphinx, also in my possession.

With the most generous intentions my dear and loyal friend William Rossetti has here brought me into trouble.

Naturally such an announcement as the above has excited great curiosity among admirers of Rossetti, and I am frequently receiving letters—some of them cordial enough, but others far from cordial—asking, or rather demanding, to know the reason why important poems of Rossetti’s have for so long a period been withheld from the public. In order to explain the delay I must first give two extracts from Mr. Hall Caine’s picturesque ‘Recollections of Rossetti,’ published in 1882:—

“The end was drawing near, and we all knew the fact. Rossetti had actually taken to poetical composition afresh, and had written a facetious ballad (conceived years before), of the length of ‘The White Ship,’ called ‘Jan Van Hunks,’ embodying an eccentric story of a Dutchman’s wager to smoke against the devil. This was to appear in a miscellany of stories and poems by himself and Mr. Theodore Watts, a project which had been a favourite one of his for some years, and in which he now, in his last moments, took a revived interest, strange and strong.”

“On Wednesday morning, April 5th, I went into the bedroom to which he had for some days been confined, and wrote out to his dictation two sonnets which he had composed on a design of his called ‘The Sphinx,’ and which he wished to give, together with the drawing and the ballad before described, to Mr. Watts for publication in the volume just mentioned. On the Thursday morning I found his utterance thick, and his speech from that cause hardly intelligible.”

As the facts in connexion with this project exhibit, with a force that not all the words of all his detractors can withstand, the splendid generosity of the poet’s nature, I only wish that I had made them public years ago, Rossetti (whose power of taking interest in a friend’s work Mr. Joseph Knight has commented upon) had for years been urging me to publish certain writings of mine with which he was familiar, and for years I had declined to do so—declined for two simple reasons: first, though I liked writing for its own sake—indulged in it, indeed, as a delightful luxury—to enter formally the literary arena, and to go through that struggle which, as he himself used to say, “had never yet brought comfort to any poet, but only sorrow,” had never been an ambition of mine; and, secondly, I was only too conscious how biased must the judgment be of a man whose affections were so strong as his when brought to bear upon the work of a friend.

In order at last to achieve an end upon which he had set his heart, he proposed that he and I should jointly produce the volume to which Mr. Hall Caine refers, and that he should enrich it with reproductions of certain drawings of his, including the ‘Sphinx’ (now or lately in the possession of Mr. William Rossetti) and crayons and pencil drawings in my own possession illustrating poems of mine—those drawings, I mean, from that new model chosen by me whose head Leighton said must be the loveliest ever drawn, who sat for ‘The Spirit of the Rainbow,’ and that other design which William Sharp christened ‘Forced Music.’

In order to conquer my most natural reluctance to see a name so unknown as mine upon a title-page side by side with a name so illustrious as his, he (or else it was his generous sister Christina, I forget which) italianized the words Walter Theodore Watts into “Gualtiero Teodoro Gualtieri”—a name, I may add in passing, which appears as an inscription on one at least of the valuable Christmas presents he made me, a rare old Venetian Boccaccio. My portion of the book was already in existence, but that which was to have been the main feature of the volume, a ballad of Rossetti’s to be called ‘Michael Scott’s Wooing’ (which had no relation to early designs of his bearing that name), hung fire for this reason: the story upon which the ballad was to have been based was discovered to be not an old legend adapted and varied by the Romanies, as I had supposed when I gave it to him, but simply the Ettrick Shepherd’s novelette ‘Mary Burnet’; and the project then rested in abeyance until that last illness at Birchington painted so graphically and pathetically by Mr. Hall Caine.

For some reason quite inscrutable to the late John Marshall, who attended him, and to all of us, this old idea seized upon his brain; so much so, indeed, that Marshall hailed it as a good omen, and advised us to foster it, which we did with excellent results, as will be seen by referring to the very last entry in his mother’s touching diary as lately printed by Mr. W. M. Rossetti: “March 28, Tuesday. Mr. Watts came down. Gabriel rallied marvellously.”

Though the ballad, in Rossetti’s own writing, has ever since remained in my possession, as have also the two sonnets in the MS. of another friend who has since, I am delighted to know, achieved fame for himself, no one who enjoyed the intimate friendship of Rossetti need be told that his death took from me all heart to publish.

Time, however, is the suzerain before whom every king, even Sorrow himself, bows at last. The rights of Rossetti’s admirers can no longer be set at nought, and I am making arrangements to publish within the present year ‘Jan Van Hunks’ and the ‘Sphinx Sonnets,’ the former of which will show a new and, I think, unexpected side of Rossetti’s genius.

IV.

It is a sweet and comforting thought for every poet that, whether or not the public cares during his life to read his verses, it will after his death care very much to read his letters to his mistress, to his wife, to his relatives, to his friends, to his butcher, and to his baker. And some letters are by that same public held to be more precious than others. If, for instance, it has chanced that during the poet’s life he, like Rossetti, had to borrow thirty shillings from a friend, that is a circumstance of especial piquancy. The public likes—or rather it demands—to know all about that borrowed cash. Hence it behoves the properly equipped editor who understands his duty to see that not one allusion to it in the poet’s correspondence is omitted. If he can also show what caused the poet to borrow those thirty shillings—if he can by learned annotations show whether the friend in question lent the sum willingly or unwillingly, conveniently or inconveniently—if he can show whether the loan was ever repaid, and if repaid when—he will be a happy editor indeed. Then he will find a large and a grateful public to whom the mood in which the poet sat down to write ‘The Blessed Damosel’ is of far less interest than the mood in which he borrowed thirty shillings.

We do not charge the editor of this volume [104] with exhibiting unusual want of taste. On the whole, he is less irritating to the poetical student than those who have laboured in kindred “fields of literature.” Indeed, we do not so much blame the editors of such books as we blame the public, whose coarse and vulgar mouth is always agape for such pabulum. The writer of this review possesses an old circulating-library copy of a book containing some letters of Coleridge. One page, and one only, is greatly disfigured by thumb marks. It is the page on which appears, not some precious hint as to the conclusion of ‘Christabel,’ but a domestic missive of Coleridge’s ordering broad beans for dinner.

If, then, the name of those readers who take an interest in broad beans is legion compared with the name of those who take an interest in ‘Kubla Khan,’ is not the wise editor he who gives all due attention to the poet’s favourite vegetable? Those who will read with avidity Rossetti’s allusion to his wife’s confinement in the letter in which he tells Allingham that “the child had been dead for two or three weeks” will laugh to scorn the above remarks, and as they are in the majority the laugh is with them.

The editor of this volume laments that Allingham’s letters to Rossetti are beyond all editorial reach. But who has any right to ask for Allingham’s private letters? Rossetti, who was strongly against the printing of private letters, had the wholesome practice of burning all his correspondence. This he did at periodical holocausts—memorable occasions when the coruscations of the poet’s wit made the sparks from the burning paper seem pale and dull. He died away from home, or not a scrap of correspondence would have been left for the publishers. Although the “public” acknowledges no duties towards the man of literary or artistic genius, but would shrug up its shoulders or look with dismay at being asked to give five pounds in order to keep a poet from the workhouse, the moment a man of genius becomes famous the public becomes aware of certain rights in relation to him. Strangely enough, these rights are recognized more fully in the literary arena than anywhere else, and among them the chief appears to be that of reading an author’s private letters. One advantage—and surely it is a very great one—that the “writing man” has over the man of action is this: that, while the portrait of the man of action has to be painted, if painted at all, by 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.

But the reader will say, “Truth is great, and must prevail. The picture of Rossetti that now exists in the public mind is the true one. The former picture was a lie.” But here the reader will be much mistaken. The romantic picture which existed in the public mind during Rossetti’s life was the true one; the picture that now exists of him is false.

Does any one want to know what kind of a man was the painter of ‘Dante’s Dream’ and the poet of ‘The Blessed Damosel,’ let him wipe out of his mind most of what has been written about him, let him forget if he can most of the Rossetti letters that have been published, and let him read the poet’s poems and study the painter’s pictures, and he will know Rossetti—not, indeed, so thoroughly as we know Shakespeare and Æschylus and Sophocles, but as intimately as it is possible to know any man whose biography is written only in his works.

It must be admitted, however, that for those who had a personal knowledge of Rossetti some of the letters in this volume will have an interest, owing to the evidence they afford of that authorial generosity which was one of his most beautiful characteristics. His disinterested appreciation of the work of his contemporaries sets him apart from all the other poets of his time and perhaps of any other time. To wax eloquent in praise of this and that illustrious name, and thus to claim a kind of kinship with it, is a very different thing from Rossetti’s noble championship of a name, whether that of a friend or otherwise, which has never emerged from obscurity. It is perhaps inevitable and in the nature of things that most poets are too much absorbed in their own work to have time to interest themselves in the doings of their fellow-workers.

But, with regard to Rossetti, he could feel, and often did feel, as deep an interest in the work of another man as in his own. There was no trouble he would not take to aid a friend in gaining recognition. This it was more than anything else which endeared him to all his friends, and made them condone those faults of his which ever since his death have been so freely discussed. The editor of this volume quotes this sentence from Skelton’s ‘Table-Talk of Shirley’:—

“I have preserved a number of Rossetti’s letters, and there is barely one, I think, which is not mainly devoted to warm commendation of obscure poets and painters—obscure at the time of writing, but of whom more than one has since become famous.”

Nor was his interest in other men’s work confined to that of his personal friends. His discovery of Browning’s ‘Pauline,’ of Charles Wells, and of the poems of Ebenezer Jones may be cited as instances of this. Moreover, he was always looking out in magazines—some of them of the most obscure kind—for good work. And if he was rewarded, as he sometimes was, by coming upon precious things that might otherwise have been lost, his heart was rejoiced.

One day, having turned into a coffee-house in Chancery Lane to get a cup of coffee, he came upon a number of Reynolds’s Miscellany, and finding there a poem called ‘A Lover’s Pastime,’ he saw at once its extraordinary beauty, and enclosed it in a letter to Allingham. In this case, however, he unfortunately did not make his usual efforts to discover the authorship of a poem that pleased him; and a pity it is, for the poem is one of the loveliest lyrics that have been written in modern times. We hope it will find a place in the next anthology of lyrical poetry.

Though his criticisms were not always sure and impeccable, he was of all critics the most independent of authority. Had he chanced to find in the poets’ corner of The Eatanswill Gazette a lyric equal to the best of Shelley’s, he would have recognized its merits at once and proclaimed them; and had he come across a lyric of Shelley’s that had received unmerited applause, he would have recognized its demerits for himself, and proclaimed them with equal candour and fearlessness.

Again, certain passages in these letters will surprise the reader by throwing light upon a side of Rossetti’s life and character which was only known to his intimate friends. Recluse as Rossetti came to be, he knew more of “London life” in the true sense of the word than did many of those who were supposed to know it well—diners-out like Browning, for instance, and Richard Doyle. That the author of ‘The House of Life’ knew London on the side that Dickens knew it better than any other poet of his time will no doubt surprise many a reader. His visits to Jamrach’s mart for wild animals led him to explore the wonderful world, that so few people ever dream of, which lies around Ratcliffe Highway. He observed with the greatest zest the movements of the East-End swarm. Moreover, his passion for picking up “curios” and antique furniture made him familiar with quarters of London that he would otherwise have never known. And not Dickens himself had more of what may be called the “Haroun al Raschid passion” for wandering through a city’s streets at night. It was this that kept him in touch on one side with men so unlike him as Brough and Sala.

In this volume there is a charming anecdote of his generosity to Brough’s family, and Sala always spoke of him as “dear Dante Rossetti.” The transpontine theatre, even the penny gaff of the New Cut, was not quite unfamiliar with the face of the poet-painter. Hence no man was a better judge than he of the low-life pictures of a writer like F. W. Robinson, whose descriptions of the street arab in ‘Owen, a Waif,’ &c., he would read aloud with a dramatic power astonishing to those who associated him exclusively with Dante, Beatrice, and mystical passion.

Frequently in these letters an allusion will puzzle the reader who does not know of Rossetti’s love of nocturnal rambling, an allusion, however, which those who knew him will fully understand. Here is a sentence of the kind:—

“As I haven’t been outside my door for months in the daytime, I should not have had much opportunity of enjoying pastime and pleasaunces.”

The editor quotes some graphic and interesting words from Mr. W. M. Rossetti which explain this passage.

In summer, as in winter, he rose very late in the day and made a breakfast, as he used to say, which was to keep him in fuel for something under twelve hours. He would then begin to paint, and scarcely leave his work till the daylight waned. Then he would dine, and afterwards start off for a walk through the London streets, which to him, as he used to say, put on a magical robe with the lighting of the gas lamps. After walking for miles through the streets, either with a friend or alone, loitering at the windows of such shops as still were open, he would turn into an oyster shop or late restaurant for supper. Here his frankness of bearing was quite irresistible with strangers whenever it pleased him to approach them, as he sometimes did. The most singular and bizarre incidents of his life occurred to him on these occasions—incidents which he would relate with a dramatic power that set him at the head of the raconteurs of his time. One of these rencontres in the Haymarket was of a quite extraordinary character.

In the latter years of his life, when he lived at Cheyne Walk, he would often not begin his perambulations until an hour before midnight. It will be a pity if some one who accompanied him in his nocturnal rambles—the most remarkable man of our time—does not furnish the world with reminiscences of them.

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.