Read Ebook: Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti by Caine Hall Sir

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Gabriele Rossetti--Boyhood--The pre-Raphaelite Movement--Early Manhood--The Blessed Damozel--Jenny--Sister Helen--The Translations--The House of Life--The Germ--Oxford and Cambridge Magazine--Blackfriars Bridge--Married Life

Chelsea--Chloral--Dante's Dream--Recovery of the Poems--Poems--The Contemporary Controversy--Mr. Theodore Watts--Rose Mary--The White Ship--The King's Tragedy--Poetic Continuations--Cloud Confines--Journalistic Slanders

Early Intercourse--Poetic Impulses--Beginning of Correspondence--Early Letters

Inedited Poems--Inedited Ballads--Additions to Sister Helen--Hand and Soul--St. Agnes of Intercession--Catholic Opinion--Rossetti's Catholicism--Cloud Confines--The Portrait

Coleridge--Wordsworth--Lamb and Coleridge--Charles Wells--Keats--Leigh Hunt and Keats--Keats's Sister

Chatterton--Oliver Madox Brown--Gilchrist's Blake--George Gilfillan--Old Periodicals--A Rustic Poet--Art and Politics--Letters in Biography

Cheyne Walk--The House--First Meeting--Rossetti's Personality--His Reading--The Painter's Craft--Mr. Ruskin--Rossetti's Sensitiveness--His Garden--His Library

English Sonnets--Sonnet Structure--Shakspeare's Sonnets--Wells's Sonnet--Charles Whitehead--Ebenezer Jones--Mr. W. M. Rossetti--A New Sonnet--Mr. W. Davies--Canon Dixon--Miss Christina Rossetti--The Bride's Prelude--The Supernatural in Poetry

Last Days--Vale of St John--In the Lake Country--Return to London--London--Birchington

RECOLLECTIONS OF DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, whose full baptismal name was Gabriel Charles Dante, was educated principally at King's College School, London, and there attained to a moderate proficiency in the ordinary classical school-learning, besides a knowledge of French, which throughout life he spoke well. He learned at home some rudimentary German; Italian he had acquired at a very early age. There has always been some playful mention of certain tragedies and translations upon which he exercised himself from the ages of five to fifteen years; but it is hardly necessary to say that he himself never attached value to these efforts of his precocity; he even displayed, occasionally, a little irritation upon hearing them spoken of as remarkable youthful achievements.

One of these productions of his adolescence, Sir Hugh the Heron, has been so frequently alluded to, that it seems necessary to tell the story of it, as the author himself, in conversation, was accustomed to do. At about twelve years of age, the young poet wrote a scrap of a poem under this title, and then cast it aside. His grandfather, Polidori, had seen the fragment, however, and had conceived a much higher opinion of its merits than even the natural vanity of the young author himself permitted him to entertain. It had then become one of the grandfather's amusements to set up an amateur printing-press in his own house, and occupy his leisure in publishing little volumes of original verse for semi-public circulation. He urged his grandson to finish the poem in question, promising it, in a completed state, the dignity and distinction of type. Prompted by hope of this hitherto unexpected reward, Rossetti--then thirteen to fourteen years of age--finished the juvenile epic, and some bound copies of it got abroad. No more was thought of the matter, and in due time the little bard had forgotten that he had ever done it. But when a genuine distinction had been earned by poetry that was in no way immature, Rossetti discovered, by the gratuitous revelation of a friend, that a copy of the youthful production--privately printed and never published--was actually in the library of the British Museum. Amazed, and indeed appalled as he was by this disclosure, he was powerless to remedy the evil, which he foresaw would some day lead to the poem being unearthed to his injury, and printed as a part of his work. The utmost he could do to avert the threatened mischief he did, and this was to make an entry in a commonplace-book which he kept for such uses, explaining the origin and history of the poem, and expressing a conviction that it seemed to him to be remarkable only from its entire paucity of even ordinary poetic promise. But while this was indubitably a just estimate of these boyish efforts, it is no doubt true, as we shall presently see, that Rossetti's genius matured itself early in life.

Set you down this: And say, besides,--that in Aleppo once, Where a malignant and a turban'd Turk Beat a Venetian, and traduced the state, I took by the throat the circumcised dog, And smote him--thus!--

he snatched up an iron chisel, that lay somewhere at hand, and, to the consternation of his companions, smote himself with all his might on the chest, inflicting a wound from which he bled and fainted.

An angel-watered lily, that near God Grows and is quiet.

All this occurred between the years 1849-1856, but three years before the earlier of these dates Rossetti, as a painter, had come under an influence which he was never slow to acknowledge operated powerfully on his art. In 1846, Mr. Ford Madox Brown exhibited designs in the Westminster competition, and his cartoons deeply impressed Rossetti The young painter, then nineteen years of age, wrote to the elder one, his senior by no more than seven years, begging to be permitted to become a pupil. An intimacy sprang up between the two, and for a while Rossetti worked in Brown's studio; but though the friendship lasted throughout life the professional relationship soon terminated. The ardour of the younger man led him into the-brotherhood just referred to, but Brown never joined the pre-Raphaelites, mainly, it is said, from dislike of coterie tendencies.

His personal character in early manhood is described by friends as one of peculiar manliness, geniality, and unselfishness. It is said that, on one occasion, he put aside important work of his own in order to spend several days in the studio of a friend, whose gifts were quite inconsiderable compared with his, and whose prospects were all but hopeless,--helping forward certain pictures, which were backward, for forthcoming exhibition. Many similar acts of self-sacrifice are still remembered with gratitude by those who were the recipients of them. Rossetti was king of his circle, and it must be said, that in all that properly constituted kingship, he took care to rule. There was then a certain determination of purpose which occasionally had the look of arbitrariness, and sometimes, it is alleged, a disregard of opposing opinion which partook of tyranny: but where heart and not head were in question, he was assuredly the most urbane and amiable of monarchs. In matters of taste in art, or criticism in poetry, he would brook no opposition from any quarter; nor did he ever seem to be conscious of the unreasonableness of compelling his associates to swallow his opinions as being absolute and final. This disposition to govern his circle co-existed, however, with the most lavish appreciation of every good quality displayed by the members of it, and all the little uneasiness to which his absolutism may sometimes have given rise was much more than removed by constantly recurring acts of good-fellowship,--indeed it was forgotten in the presence of them.

A photograph which exists of Rossetti at twenty-seven conveys the idea of a nature rather austere and taciturn than genial and outspoken. The face is long and the cheeks sunken, the whole figure being attenuated and slightly stooping; the eyes have the inward look which belonged to them in later life, but the mouth, which is free from the concealment of moustache or beard, is severe. The impression conveyed is of a powerful intellect and ambitious nature at war with surroundings and not wholly satisfied with the results. It ought to be added that, at the period in question, health was uncertain with Rossetti: and this fact, added to the circumstance of his being at the time in the very throes of those difficulties with his art which he was soon to surmount, must be understood to account for the austerity of his early portrait. Rossetti was not in a distinct sense a humourist, but there came to him at intervals, in earlier manhood, those outbursts of volatility, which, to serious natures, act as safety-valves after prolonged tension of all the powers of the mind. At such moments of levity he is described as almost boyish in recklessness, plunging into any madcap escapade that might be afoot with heedlessness of all consequences. Stories of misadventures, quips and quiddities of every kind, were then his delight, and of these he possessed a fund which no man knew better how to use. He would tell a funny story with wonderful spirit and freshness of resource, always leading up to the point with watchful care of the finest shades of covert suggestion or innuendo, and, when the climax was reached, never denying himself a hearty share in the universal laughter. One of his choicest pleasures at a dinner or other such gathering was to improvise rhymes on his friends, and of these the fun usually lay in the improvisatore's audacious ascription of just those qualities which his subject did not possess. Though far from devoid of worldly wisdom, and indeed possessed of not a little shrewdness in his dealings with his buyers , he was sometimes amusingly deficient in what is known as common sense. In later life he used to tell with infinite zest a story of a blunder of earlier years which might easily have led to serious if not fatal results. He had been suffering from nervous exhaustion and had been ordered to take a preparation of nux vomica. The dose was to be taken three times daily: in the morning, at noon, and in the evening. One afternoon he was about to start out for the house of a friend with whom he had promised to lunch, when he remembered that he had not taken his first daily dose of medicine. He forthwith took it, and upon setting down the glass, reflected that the second dose was due, and so he took that also. Putting on his hat and preparing to sally forth he further reflected that before he could return the third dose ought in ordinary course to be taken, and so without more deliberation he poured himself a final portion and drank it off. He had thereupon scarcely turned himself about, when to his horror he discovered that his limbs were growing rigid and his jaw stiff. In the utmost agitation he tried to walk across the studio and found himself almost incapable of the effort. His eyes seemed to leap out of their sockets and his sight grew dim. Appalled and in agony, he at length sprang up from the couch upon which he had dropped down a moment before, and fled out of the house. The violent action speedily induced a copious perspiration, and this being by much the best thing that could have happened to him, carried off the poison and so saved his life. He could never afterwards be induced to return to the drug in question, and in the last year of his life was probably more fearfully aghast at seeing the present writer take a harmless dose of it than he would have been at learning that 50 grains of chloral had been taken.

He had, in early manhood, the keenest relish of a funny prank, and one such he used to act over again in after life with the greatest vivacity of manner. Every one remembers the story told by Jefferson Hogg how Shelley got rid of the old woman with the onion basket who took a place beside him in a stage coach in Sussex, by seating himself on the floor and fixing a tearful, woful face upon his companion, addressing her in thrilling accents thus--

For heaven's sake, let us sit upon the ground, And tell sad stories of the death of kings.

Rossetti's frolic was akin to this, though the results were amusingly different. It would appear that when in early years, Mr. William Morris and Mr. Burne Jones occupied a studio together, they had a young servant maid whose manners were perennially vivacious, whose good spirits no disaster could damp, and whose pertness nothing could banish or check. Rossetti conceived the idea of frightening the girl out of her complacency, and calling one day on his friends, he affected the direst madness, strutted ominously up to her and with the wildest glare of his wild eyes, the firmest and fiercest setting of his lower lip, and began in measured and resonant accents to recite the lines--

Shall the hide of a fierce lion Be stretched on a couch of wood, For a daughter's foot to lie on, Stained with a father's blood?

The poet's response is a soft "Ah, no!" but the girl, ignorant of course of this, and wholly undisturbed by the bloodthirsty tone of the question addressed to her, calmly fixed her eyes on the frenzied eyes before her, and answered with a swift light accent and rippling laugh, "It shall if you like, sir!" Rossetti's enjoyment of his discomfiture on this occasion seemed never to grow less.

We two will lie i' the shadow of That living mystic tree Within whose secret growth the Dove Is sometimes felt to be, While every leaf that His plumes touch Saith His Name audibly.

Here the love involved is so etherealised as scarcely to be called human, save only on the part of the mortal dreamer, in whose yearning ecstasy the ear thinks it recognises a more earthly note. The lover rejoins.--

It is said of the few existent examples of the art of Giorgione that, around some central realisation of human passion gathers always a landscape which is not merely harmonised to it, but a part of it, sharing the joy or the anguish, lying silent to the breathless adoration, or echoing the rapturous voice of the full pleasure of those who are beyond all height and depth more than it. Something of this passive sympathy of environing objects comes out in the poem:

Around her, lovers, newly met 'Mid deathless love's acclaims, Spoke evermore among themselves Their rapturous new names; And the souls mounting up to God Went by her like thin flames.

And still she bowed herself and stooped Out of the circling charm; Until her bosom must have made The bar she leaned on warm, And the lilies lay as if asleep Along her bended arm.

The sense induced by such imagery is akin to that which comes of rapt contemplation of the deep em-blazonings of a fine stained window when the sun's warm gules glides off before the dim twilight. And this sense as of a thing existent, yet passing stealthily out of all sight away, the metre of the poem helps to foster. Other metres of Rossetti's have a strenuous reality, and rejoice in their self-assertiveness, and seem, almost, in their resonant strength, to tell themselves they are very good; but this may almost be said to be a disembodied voice, that lives only on the air, and, like the song of a bird, is gone before its accents have been caught. Of the four-and-twenty stanzas of the poem, none is more calmly musical than this:

When round his head the aureole clings, And he is clothed in white, I 'll take his hand and go with him To the deep wells of light; We will step down as to a stream, And bathe there in God's sight.

Perhaps Rossetti never did anything more beautiful and spiritual than this little work of his twentieth year; and more than once in later life he painted the beautiful lady who is the subject of it, with the lilies lying along her arm.

Behold the lilies of the field, They toil not neither do they spin; Another rest and ease Along each summer-sated path From its new lord the garden hath, Than that whose spring in blessings ran Which praised the bounteous husbandman, Ere yet, in days of hankering breath, The lilies sickened unto death.

It was indeed a daring thing the author proposed to himself to do, and assuredly no man could have essayed it who had not consciously united to an unfailing and unshrinking insight, a relativeness of mind such as right-hearted people might approve. To take a fallen woman, a cipher of man's sum of lust, befouled with the shameful knowledge of the streets, yet young, delicate, "apparelled beyond parallel," unblessed, with a beauty which, if copied by a Da Vinci's hand, might stand whole ages long "for preachings of what God can do," and then to endow such a one with the sensitiveness of a poet's own mind, make her read afresh as though by lightning, and in a dream, that story of the old pure days--

Much older than any history That is written in any book,

and lastly, to gather about her an overwhelming sense of infinite solace for the wronged and lost, and of the retributive justice with which man's transgressions will be visited--this is, indeed, to hazard all things in the certainty of an upright purpose and true reward.

Shall no man hold his pride forewarn'd Till in the end, the Day of Days, At Judgment, one of his own race, As frail and lost as you, shall rise,-- His daughter with his mother's eyes!

This dramatic quality of sitting half-passively above their creations and of leaving their ethics to find their own channels , the poet and the romancer possess in common. If there is a point of difference between their attitudes of mind, it is where Rossetti seems to reserve his whole personal feeling for the impeachment of lust;--

Like a toad within a stone Seated while Time crumbles on; Which sits there since the earth was cursed For Man's transgression at the first; Which, living through all centuries, Not once has seen the sun arise; Whose life, to its cold circle charmed, The earth's whole summers have not warmed; Which always--whitherso the stone Be flung--sits there, deaf, blind, alone;-- Ay, and shall not be driven out Till that which shuts him round about Break at the very Master's stroke, And the dust thereof vanish as smoke, And the seed of Man vanish as dust:-- Even so within this world is Lust.

"Ah! what white thing at the door has cross'd, Sister Helen? Ah! what is this that sighs in the frost!" "A soul that's lost as mine is lost, Little brother!"

A Sonnet is a moment's monument,-- Memorial from the Soul's eternity To one dead deathless hour. Look that it be, Whether for lustral rite or dire portent, Of its own arduous fulness reverent: Carve it in ivory or in ebony, As Day or Night may rule; and let Time see Its flowering crest impearled and orient. A Sonnet is a coin; its face reveals The soul,--its converse, to what Power 'tis due:-- Whether for tribute to the august appeals Of Life, or dower in Love's high retinue, It serve; or 'mid the dark wharfs cavernous breath, In Charon's palm it pay the toll to Death.

Even as a child, of sorrow that we give dead, but little in his heart can find, Since without need of thought to his clear mind Their turn it is to die and his to live:-- Even so the winged New Love smiles to receive Along his eddying plumes the auroral wind, Nor, forward glorying, casts one look behind Where night-rack shrouds the Old Love fugitive.

There is a change in every hour's recall, And the last cowslip in the fields we see On the same day with the first corn-poppy. Alas for hourly change! Alas for all The loves that from his hand proud youth lets fall, Even as the beads of a told rosary!

Cisterned in Pride, verse is the feathery jet Of soulless air-flung fountains; nay, more dry Than the Dead Sea for throats that thirst and sigh, That song o'er which no singer's lids grew wet.

The Song-god--He the Sun-god--is no slave Of thine: thy Hunter he, who for thy soul Fledges his shaft: to the august control Of thy skilled hand his quivered store he gave: But if thy lips' loud cry leap to his smart, The inspired record shall pierce thy brother's heart.

This is not meant to convey the same idea as Shelley's "learn in suffering," etc., but merely that a poem must move the writer in its composition if it is to move the reader.

When vain desire at last and vain regret Go hand in hand to death, and all is vain, What shall assuage the unforgotten pain And teach the unforgetful to forget?

Shall Peace be still a sunk stream long unmet,-- Or may the soul at once in a green plain Stoop through the spray of some sweet life-fountain, And cull the dew-drenched flowering amulet?

Ah! when the wan soul in that golden air Between the scriptured petals softly blown Peers breathless for the gift of grace unknown,-- Ah! let none other alien spell soe'er But only the one Hope's one name be there,-- Not less nor more, but even that word alone.

I saw Rossetti for the first time in his lodgings over Blackfriars Bridge. It was impossible not to be impressed with the freedom and kindness of his manner, not less than by his personal appearance. His frank greeting, bold, but gentle glance, his whole presence, produced a feeling of confidence and pleasure. His voice had a great charm, both in tone, and from the peculiar cadences that belonged to it I think that the leading features of his character struck me more at first than the characteristics of his genius; or rather, that my notion of the character of the man was formed first, and was then applied to his works, and identified with them. The main features of his character were, in my apprehension, fearlessness, kindliness, a decision that sometimes made him seem somewhat arbitrary, and condensation or concentration. He was wonderfully self-reliant. These moral qualities, guiding an artistic temperament as exquisite as was ever bestowed on man, made him what he was, the greatest inventor of abstract beauty, both in form and colour, that this age, perhaps that the world, has seen. They would also account for some peculiarities that must be admitted in some of his works, want of nature, for instance. I heard him once remark that it was "astonishing how much the least bit of nature helped if one put it in;" which seemed like an acknowledgment that he might have gone more to nature. Hence, however, his works always seem abstract, always seem to embody some kind of typical aim, and acquire a sort of sacred character.

I saw a good deal of Rossetti in London, and afterwards in Oxford, during the painting of the Union debating-room. In later years our personal intercourse was broken off through distance; though I saw him occasionally almost to the time of his lamented death, and we had some correspondence. My recollection of him is that of greatness, as might be expected of one of the few who have been "illustrious in two arts," and who stands by himself and has earned an independent name in both. His work was great: the man was greater. His conversation had a wonderful ease, precision, and felicity of expression. He produced thoughts perfectly enunciated with a deliberate happiness that was indescribable, though it was always simple conversation, never haranguing or declamation. He was a natural leader because he was a natural teacher. When he chose to be interested in anything that was brought before him, no pains were too great for him to take. His advice was always given warmly and freely, and when he spoke of the works of others it was always in the most generous spirit of praise. It was in fact impossible to have been more free from captiousness, jealousy, envy, or any other form of pettiness than this truly noble man. The great painter who first took me to him said, "We shall see the greatest man in Europe." I have it on the same authority that Rossetti's aptitude for art was considered amongst painters to be no less extraordinary than his imagination. For example, that he could take hold of the extremity of the brush, and be as certain of his touch as if it had been held in the usual way; that he never painted a picture without doing something in colour that had never been done before; and, in particular, that he had a command of the features of the human face such as no other painter ever possessed. I also remember some observations by the same assuredly competent judge, to the effect that Rossetti might be set against the great painters of the fifteenth century, as equal to them, though unlike them: the difference being that while they represented the characters, whom they painted, in their ordinary and unmoved mood, he represented his characters under emotion, and yet gave them wholly. It may be added, perhaps, that he had a lofty standard of beauty of his own invention, and that he both elevated and subjected all to beauty. Such a man was not likely to be ignorant of the great root of power in art, and I once saw him very indignant on hearing that he had been accused of irreligion, or rather of not being a Christian. He asked with great earnestness, "Do not my works testify to my Christianity?" I wish that these imperfect recollections may be of any avail to those who cherish the memory of an extraordinary genius.

Towards the beginning of his artistic career Rossetti occupied a studio, with residential chambers, at Black-friars Bridge. The rooms overlooked the river, and the tide rose almost to the walls of the house, which, with nearly all its old surroundings, has long disappeared.

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