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 friendswhen 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 Rossettis 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 Rossettis correspondence as have fallen into his brothers hands as executor. Dealing as they necessarily do with those complications of prices and those involved commissions for which Rossettis 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. Rossettis love of facts is accompanied by an equally strong love of making an honest statement of factsa 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 Rossettis 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 buyera most worthy man, to be sure, and a true friend of Rossettis, but full of that British superstition about the saving grace of clothes which is so wonderful a revelation to the pensive foreignerhad 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 poetryespecially in the eyesmust be among Rossettis 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 Maidena 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 dojust 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 itas in this instancein 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 wordshighly 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 worknot into his utterances about his workthat 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 Gardeners Daughter. After The Bower Maiden had been disposed of, other work was taken upmore 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 DomineVale Domine. The head was painted from Miss Wilding, already mentioned; but it seems to me partly associated with the type of Mrs. Stillmans face as well. There are many roses in this pictureboth 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 dont 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 Manorthat period never before recorded, which has at this very moment been brought into prominence by his friend Dr. Hakes 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 shadowArt. 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. Rossettis affection for his brothers memory, and how great is his admiration for his brothers 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 methodhe had aimed to make it equally strong in abstract sentiment and in physical grandeuran 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) Souls Beauty and Bodys 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 18767, 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 Blakes cottage at Felpham was close by, for businesslike and unbusiness-like qualities were strangely mingled in Rossettis temperament, and it was generally some sentiment or unpractical fancy of this kind that brought about Rossettis final decision upon anything. Blakes 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 Bognora 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 seas voice, and at another the voice of the earthRossetti 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 treeshowsoever bright and winding the streamsa 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 brothers 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 childrenone 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 Broadlandsthat 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. Rossettis paraphrase of The House of Lifedone with so much admiration of his brothers genius and affection for his memorytouches upon a question relating to poetic art which has been raised beforeraised 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 Schillers 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. Jebbs rendering of the dipus 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 theserhythmic 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. Rossettis prose paraphrase of his brothers 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 poets imagination, if it escapes at all from the chains of the prose expression, escapes with great difficulty. An instance of this occurred in Rossettis 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 moons 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 afterwardsshortly before his death, in factwhen he came to write The Kings 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 noteso entirely did the prose matter seem to be the inevitable and the final incarnation of the thoughtthat it appeared impossible to escape from it into the movement and the diction proper to poetry. It was only after much laboura labour greater than he had given to all the previous stanzas combinedthat 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 Coleridges Wanderings of Cain, that it is not unlikely the matchless fragment given in Coleridges 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 reasonthat 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 Rossettis, 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 Rossettis 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 letterssome of them cordial enough, but others far from cordialasking, or rather demanding, to know the reason why important poems of Rossettis 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 Caines 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 Dutchmans 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 poets nature, I only wish that I had made them public years ago, Rossetti (whose power of taking interest in a friends 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 sodeclined for two simple reasons: first, though I liked writing for its own sakeindulged in it, indeed, as a delightful luxuryto 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 minethose 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 Gualtieria 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 Rossettis to be called Michael Scotts 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 Shepherds 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 mothers touching diary as lately printed by Mr. W. M. Rossetti: March 28, Tuesday. Mr. Watts came down. Gabriel rallied marvellously.

Though the ballad, in Rossettis 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 Rossettis 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 Rossettis 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 poets life he, like Rossetti, had to borrow thirty shillings from a friend, that is a circumstance of especial piquancy. The public likesor rather it demandsto 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 poets correspondence is omitted. If he can also show what caused the poet to borrow those thirty shillingsif he can by learned annotations show whether the friend in question lent the sum willingly or unwillingly, conveniently or inconvenientlyif he can show whether the loan was ever repaid, and if repaid whenhe 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 Coleridges 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 poets favourite vegetable? Those who will read with avidity Rossettis allusion to his wifes 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 Allinghams letters to Rossetti are beyond all editorial reach. But who has any right to ask for Allinghams 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 holocaustsmemorable occasions when the coruscations of the poets 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 authors private letters. One advantageand surely it is a very great onethat 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 novelistas from the few facts that he is able to collect he infers a characterthe 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 mans 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 knowunless perhaps we should except his two great contemporaries Webster and Marlowe. Steevens did not exaggerate when he said that all we know of Shakespeares 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 lifewe know how he confronted the universe, seen and unseenwe 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 Rossettis 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 Shakespeares 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 Dickenss 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 authors 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 mans 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. Keatss 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 Byrons 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 Rossettis 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 Dantes 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 poets poems and study the painters pictures, and he will know Rossettinot, 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 Rossettis 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 Skeltons Table-Talk of Shirley:

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

Nor was his interest in other mens work confined to that of his personal friends. His discovery of Brownings 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 magazinessome of them of the most obscure kindfor 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 Reynoldss Miscellany, and finding there a poem called A Lovers 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 Shelleys, he would have recognized its merits at once and proclaimed them; and had he come across a lyric of Shelleys 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 Rossettis 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 welldiners-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 Jamrachs 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 citys 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 Broughs 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 Rossettis love of nocturnal rambling, an allusion, however, which those who knew him will fully understand. Here is a sentence of the kind:

As I havent 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 occasionsincidents 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 ramblesthe most remarkable man of our timedoes 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 Sideswhich sonnet did not appear in print till 1881Rossetti 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, Rossettis masterpieceSister Helensent 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 Rossettis 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 Brides 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 Rossettis, 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. Garnetts Relics of Shelley, in which sometimes scarcely half a dozen of the original words are left on a page, with Scotts 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 poets 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 Byrons? 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 Byrons autograph:

If we except Byrons dramatic pieces and Don Juan, the first draft of Byrons 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.



III. ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON. 18091892.

I.

Charles Lamb was so paralyzed, it is said, by Coleridges death, that for weeks after that event, he was heard murmuring often to himself, Coleridge is dead, Coleridge is dead. In such a mental condition at this moment is an entire country, I think. Tennyson is dead! Tennyson is dead! It will be some time before Englands loss can really be expressed by any words so powerful in pathos and in sorrow as these. And if this is so with regard to English people generally, what of those few who knew the man, and knowing him, must needs love himmust needs love him above all others?those, I mean, who, when speaking of him, used to talk not so much about the poetry as about the man who wrote itthose who now are saying, with a tremor of the voice, and a moistening of the eye:

There was none like himnone.

[Picture: Alfred, Lord Tennyson, æt. 80. From a photography reproduced by the kind permission of Lord Tennyson]

To say wherein lies the secret of the charm of anything that lives is mostly difficult. Especially is it so with regard to a man of poetic genius. All are agreed, for instance, that D. G. Rossetti possessed an immense charm. So he did, indeed. But who has been able to define that charm? I, too, knew Rossetti well, and loved him well. Sometimes, indeed, the egotism of a sorrowing memory makes me think that outside his own most affectionate and noble-tempered family, including that old friend in art at whose feet he sat as a boy, no man loved Rossetti so deeply and so lastingly as I did; unless, perhaps, it was the poor blind poet, Philip Marston, who, being so deeply stricken, needed to love and to be loved more sorely than I, to whom Fate has been kind. And yet I should find it difficult to say wherein lay the charm of Rossettis chameleon-like personality. So with other men and women I could name. This is not so in regard to the great man now lying dead at Aldworth. Nothing is easier than to define the charm of Tennyson.

It lay in a great veracity of soulin a simple-mindedness so childlike that, unless you had known him to be the undoubted author of his exquisitely artistic poems, you would have supposed that even the subtleties of poetic art must be foreign to a nature so devoid of all subtlety as his. Homer, you would have said, might have been such a man as this, for Homer worked in a language which is Poetrys very voice. But Tennyson works in a language which has to be moulded into harmony by a myriad subtleties of art. How can this great inspired child, who yet has the simple wisdom of Bragi, the poetry-smith of the Northern Olympus, be the delicate-fingered artist of The Princess, The Palace of Art, The Day-Dream, and The Dream of Fair Women?

As deeply as some men feel that language was given to men to disguise their thoughts did Tennyson feel that language was given to him to declare his thoughts without disguise. He knew of but one justification for the thing he said, viz., that it was the thing he thought. Arrière pensée was with him impossible. But, it may be asked, when a man carries out-speaking to such a pass as this, is he not apt to become a somewhat troublesome and discordant thread in the complex web of modern society? No doubt any other man than Tennyson would have been so. But the honest ring in the voicewhich, by-the-by, was strengthened and deepened by the old-fashioned Lincolnshire accentsoftened and, to a great degree, neutralized the effect of the bluntness. Moreover, behind this uncompromising directness was apparent a noble and a splendid courtesy; for, above all things, Tennyson was a great and forthright English gentleman. As he stood at the porch at Aldworth, meeting a guest or bidding him good-byeas he stood there, tall, far beyond the height of average men, his naturally fair skin showing dark and tanned by the sun and windas he stood there no one could mistake him for anything but a great gentleman, who was also much more. Up to the last a man of extraordinary presence, he showed, I think, the beauty of old age to a degree rarely seen.

A friend of his who, visiting him on his birthday, discovered him thus standing at the door to welcome him, has described his unique appearance in words which are literally accurate at least:

A poet should be limned in youth, they say, Or else in prime, with eyes and forehead beaming Of manhoods noonthe very body seeming To lend the spirit wings to win the bay; But here stands he whose noontide blooms for aye, Whose eyes, where past and future both are gleaming With lore beyond all youthful poets dreaming, Seem lit from shores of some far-glittering day.

Our masters prime is nowis ever now; Our star that wastes not in the wastes of night Holds Natures dower undimmed in Times despite; Those eyes seem Wisdoms own beneath that brow, Where every furrow Time hath dared to plough Shines a new bar of still diviner light.

This, then, was the secret of Tennysons personal charm. And if the reader is sceptical as to its magnetic effect upon his friends, let me remind him of the amazing rarity of these great and guileless natures; let me remind him also that this world is comprised of two classes of peoplethe bores, whose name is legion, and the interesting people, whose name is not legionthe former being those whose natural instinct of self-protective mimicry impels them to move about among their fellows hiding their features behind a mask of convention, the latter being those who move about with uncovered faces just as Nature fashioned them. If guilelessness lends interest to a dullard, it is still more so with the really luminous souls. So infinite is the creative power of nature that she makes no two individuals alike. If we only had the power of inquiring into the matter, we should find not only that each individual creature that once inhabited one of the minute shells that go to the building of Englands fortress walls of chalk was absolutely unlike all the others, but that even the poor microbe himself, who in these days is so maligned, is also very intensely an individual.

Some time ago the old discussion was revived in The Athenæum as to whether the nightingales song was joyful or melancholy. And, perhaps, if the poems of the late James Thomson and the poems of Mr. Austin Dobson were recited by their authors to a congregation of nightingales, the question would at once be debated amongst them, Is the note of the human songster joyful or melancholy? The truth is that the humidity or the dryness of the atmosphere in the various habitats of the nightingale modifies so greatly the timbre of the voice that, while a nightingale chorus at Fiesole may seem joyous, a nightingale chorus in the moist thickets along the banks of the Ouse may seem melancholy. Nay, more, as I once told Tennyson at Aldworth, I, when a truant boy wandering along the banks of the Ouse (where six nightingales nests have been found in the hedge of a single meadow), got so used to these matters that I had my own favourite individuals, and could easily distinguish one from another. That rich climacteric swell which is reached just before the jug, jug, jug, varies amazingly, if the listener will only give the matter attention. And if this infinite variety of individualism is thus seen in the lower animals, what must it be in man?

There is, however, in the entire human race, a fatal instinct for marring itself. To break down the exterior signs of this variety of individualism in the race by mutual imitation, by all sorts of affectations, is the object not only of the civilization of the Western world, but of the very negroes on the Gaboon River. No wonder, then, that whensoever we meet, as at rarest interval we do meet, an individual who is able to preserve his personality as Nature meant it to live, we feel an attraction towards him such as is irresistible. Now I would challenge those who knew him to say whether they ever knew any other man so free from this great human infirmity as Tennyson. The way in which his simplicity of nature would manifest itself was, in some instances, most remarkable. Though, of course, he had his share of that egoism of the artist without which imaginative genius may become sterile, it seemed impossible for him to realize what a transcendent position he took among contemporary writers all over the world. Poets, he once said to me, have not had the advantage of being born to the purple. Up to the last he felt himself to be a poet at struggle more or less with the Wilsons and the Crokers who, in his youth, assailed him. I, and a very dear friend of his, a family connexion, tried in vain to make him see that when a poet had reached a position such as he had won, no criticism could injure him or benefit him one jot.

What has been called his exclusiveness is entirely mythical. He was the most hospitable of men. It was very rare, indeed, for him to part from a friend at his hall door, or at the railway station without urging him to return as soon as possible, and generally with the words, Come whenever you like. The fact is, however, that for many years the strangest notions seem to have got abroad as to the claims of the public upon men of genius. There seems now to be scarcely any one who does not look upon every man who has passed into the purgatory of fame as his or her common property. The unlucky victim is to be pestered by letters upon every sort of foolish subject, and to be hunted down in his walks and insulted by senseless adulation. Tennyson resented this, and so did Rossetti, and so ought every man who has reached eminence and respects his own genius. Neither fame nor life itself is worth having on such terms as these.

One day, Tennyson when walking round his garden at Farringford, saw perched up in the trees that surrounded it, two men who had been refused admittance at the gatetwo men dressed like gentlemen. He very wisely gave the public to understand that his fame was not to be taken as an abrogation of his rights as a private English gentleman. For my part, whenever I hear any one railing against a man of eminence with whom he cannot possibly have been brought into contact, I know at once what it means: the railer has been writing an idle letter to the eminent one and received no reply.

Tennysons knowledge of naturenature in every aspectwas very great. His passion for star-gazing has often been commented upon by readers of his poetry. Since Dante no poet in any land has so loved the stars. He had an equal delight in watching the lightning; and I remember being at Aldworth once during a thunderstorm, when I was alarmed at the temerity with which he persisted, in spite of all remonstrances, in gazing at the blinding lightning. For moonlight effects he had a passion equally strong, and it is especially pathetic to those who know this to remember that he passed away in the light he so lovedin a room where there was no artificial lightnothing to quicken the darkness but the light of the full moon (which somehow seems to shine more brightly at Aldworth than anywhere else in England); and that on the face of the poet, as he passed away, fell that radiance in which he so loved to bathe it when alive.

If it is as easy to describe the personal attraction of Tennyson as it is difficult to describe that of any one of his great contemporaries, we do not find the same relations existing between him and them as regards his place in the firmament of English poetry. In a country with a composite language such as ours, it may be affirmed with special emphasis, that there are two kinds of poetry; one appealing to the uncultivated masses, whose vocabulary is of the narrowest; the other appealing to the few who, partly by temperament, and partly by education, are sensitive to the true beauties of poetic art. While in the one case the appeal is made through a free and popular use of words, partly commonplace and partly steeped in that literary sentimentalism which in certain stages of an artificial society takes the place of the simple utterances of simple passion of earlier and simpler times; in the other case the appeal is made very largely through what Dante calls the use of the sieve for noble words.

Of the one perhaps Byron is the type, the exemplars being such poets as those of the Mrs. Hemans school in England, and of the Longfellow school in America. Of the other class of poets, the class typified by Milton, the most notable exemplars are Keats, Shelley, and Coleridge. Wordsworth partakes of the qualities of both classes. The methods of the first of these two groups are so cheapthey are so based on the wide severance between the popular taste and the poetic temper (which, though in earlier times it inspired the people, is now confined to the few)that one may say of the first group that their success in finding and holding an audience is almost damnatory to them as poets. As compared with the poets of Greece, however, both groups may be said to have secured only a partial success in poetry; for not only Æschylus and Sophocles, but Homer too, are as satisfying in the matter of noble words as though they had never tried to win that popular success which was their goal. In this respectas being, I mean, the compeer of the great poets of GreeceShakespeare takes his peculiar place in English poetry. Of all poets he is the most popular, and yet in his use of the sieve for noble words his skill transcends that of even Milton, Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats. His felicities of diction in the great passages seem little short of miraculous, and they are so many that it is easy to understand why he is so often spoken of as being a kind of inspired improvisatore. That he was not an improvisatore, however, any one can see who will take the trouble to compare the first edition of Romeo and Juliet with the received text, the first sketch of The Merry Wives of Windsor with the play as we now have it, and the Hamlet of 1603 with the Hamlet of 1604, and with the still further varied version of the play given by Heminge and Condell in the Folio of 1623. If we take into account, moreover, that it is only by the lucky chapter of accidents that we now possess the earlier forms of the three plays mentioned above, and that most likely the other plays were once in a like condition, we shall come to the conclusion that there was no more vigilant worker with Dantes sieve than Shakespeare. Next to Shakespeare in this great power of combining the forces of the two great classes of English poets, appealing both to the commonplace sense of a commonplace public and to the artistic sense of the few, stands, perhaps, Chaucer; but since Shakespeares time no one has met with anything like Tennysons success in effecting a reconciliation between popular and artistic sympathy with poetry in England.

The biography of such a poet, one who has had such an immense influence upon the literary history of the entire Victorian epochindeed, upon the nineteenth century, for his work covers two-thirds of the centurywill be a work of incalculable importance. There is but one man who is fully equipped for such an undertaking, and fortunately that is his own sona man of great ability, of admirable critical acumen, and of quite exceptional accomplishments. His sons filial affection was so precious to Tennyson that, although the poets powers remained undimmed to the last day of his life, I do not believe that we should have had all the splendid work of the last ten years without his affectionate and unwearied aid.



II.

All emotionthat of communities as well as that of individualsis largely governed by the laws of ebb and flow. It is immediately after a national mourning for the loss of a great man that a wave of reaction generally sets in. But the eagerness with which these volumes {132} have been awaited shows that Tennysons hold upon the British public is as strong at this moment as it was on the day of his death. This very popularity of his, however, has sometimes been spoken of by critics as though it were an impeachment of him as a poet. The English public is commonplace, they say, and hence the commonplace in poetry suits it. And no doubt this is true as a general saying, otherwise what would become of certain English poetasters who are such a joy to the many and such a source of laughter to the few? But a hardy critic would he be who should characterize Tennysons poetry as commonplacethat very poetry which, before it became popular, was decried because it was merely poetry for poets. Still that poetry so rich and so rare as his should find its way to the heart of a people like the English, who have not sufficient poetic instinct in them to give birth to vernacular poetry, is undoubtedly a striking fact. With regard to the mass of his work, he belonged to those poets whose appeal is as much through their mastery over the more subtle beauties of poetic art as through the heat of the poetic fire; and such as these must expect to share the fate of Coleridge, Keats, and Shelley. Every true poet must have an individual accent of his ownan accent which is, however, recognizable as another variation of that large utterance of the early gods common to all true poets in all tongues. Is it not, then, in the nature of things that, in England at least, the fit though few comprise the audience of such a poet until the voice of recognized Authority proclaims him? But Authority moves slowly in these matters; years have to pass before the music of the new voice can wind its way through the convolutions of the general earso many years, indeed, that unless the poet is blessed with the sublime self-esteem of Wordsworth he generally has to die in the belief that his is another name written in water. And was it always so? Yes, always.

England having, as we have said, no vernacular song, her poetry is entirely artistic, even such poetry as The May Queen, The Northern Farmer, and the idyls of William Barnes. And it would be strange indeed if, until Authority spoke out, the beauties of artistic poetry were ever apparent to the many. Is it supposable, for instance, that even the voice of Chauceris it supposable that even the voice of Shakspearewould have succeeded in winning the contemporary ear had it not been for that great mass of legendary and romantic material which each of these found ready to his hand, waiting to be moulded into poetic form? The fate, however, of Moores poetical narratives (perhaps we might say of Byrons too) shows that if any poetry is to last beyond the generation that produced it, there is needed not only the romantic material, but also the accent, new and true, of the old poetic voice. And these volumes show why in these late days, when the poets inheritance of romantic material seemed to have been exhausted, there appeared one poet to whom the English public gave an acceptance as wide almost as if he had written in the vernacular like Burns or Béranger.

It is long since any book has been so eagerly looked forward to as this. The main facts of Tennysons life have been matter of familiar knowledge for so many years that we do not propose to run over them here once more. Nor shall we fill the space at our command with the biographers interesting personal anecdotes. So fierce a light had been beating upon Aldworth and Farringford that the relations of the present Lord Tennyson to his father were pretty generally known. In the story of English poetry these relations held a place that was quite unique. What the biographer says about the poets sagacity, judgment, and good senseespecially what he says about his insight into the characters of those with whom he was brought into contactwill be challenged by no one who knew him. Still, the fact remains that Tennysons temperament was poetic entirely. And the more attention the poet pays to his art, the more unfitted does he become to pay attention to anything else. For in these days the mechanism of social life moves on grating wheels that need no little oiling if the poet is to bring out the very best that is within him. Not that all poets are equally vexed by the special infirmity of the poetic temperament. Poets like Wordsworth, for instance, are supported against the world by love of Nature and by that divine arrogance which is sometimes a characteristic of genius. Tennysons case shows that not even love of Nature and intimate communings with her are of use in giving a man peace when he has not Wordsworths temperament. No adverse criticism could disturb Wordsworths sublime self-complacency.

Your father, writes Jowett, with his usual wisdom, to Lord Tennyson, was very sensitive, and had an honest hatred of being gossiped about. He called the malignant critics and chatterers mosquitos. He never felt any pleasure at praise (except from his friends), but he felt a great pain at the injustice of censure. It never occurred to him that a new poet in the days of his youth was sure to provoke dangerous hostilities in the genus irritabile vatum and in the old-fashioned public.

It might almost be said, indeed, that had it not been for the ministrations, first of his beloved wife, and then of his sons, Tennysons life would have been one long warfare between the attitude of his splendid intellect towards the universe and the response of his nervous system to human criticism. From his very childhood he seems to have had that instinct for confronting the universe as a whole which, except in the case of Shakespeare, is not often seen among poets. Star-gazing and speculation as to the meaning of the stars and what was going on in them seem to have begun in his childhood. In his first Cambridge letter to his aunt, Mrs. Russell, written from No. 12, Rose Crescent, he says, I am sitting owl-like and solitary in my room, nothing between me and the stars but a stratum of tiles. And his son tells us of a story current in the family that Frederick, when an Eton schoolboy, was shy of going to a neighbouring dinner-party to which he had been invited. Fred, said his younger brother, think of Herschels great star-patches, and you will soon get over all that. He had Wordsworths passion, too, for communing with Nature alone. He was one of Natures elect who knew that even the company of a dear and intimate friend, howsoever close, is a disturbance of the delight that intercourse with her can afford to the true devotee. In a letter to his future wife, written from Mablethorpe in 1839, he says:

I am not so able as in old years to commune alone with Nature . . . Dim mystic sympathies with tree and hill reaching far back into childhood, a known landskip is to me an old friend, that continually talks to me of my own youth and half-forgotten things, and indeed does more for me than many an old friend that I know. An old park is my delight, and I could tumble about it for ever.

Moreover, he was always speculating upon the mystery and the wonder of the human story. The far future, he says in a letter to Miss Sellwood, written from High Beech in Epping Forest, has been my world always. And yet so powerless is reason in that dire wrestle with temperament which most poets know, that with all these causes for despising criticism of his work, Tennyson was as sensitive to critical strictures as Wordsworth was indifferent. He fancied, says his biographer, that England was an unsympathetic atmosphere, and half resolved to live abroad in Jersey, in the South of France, or in Italy. He was so far persuaded that the English people would never care for his poetry, that, had it not been for the intervention of his friends, he declared it not unlikely that after the death of Hallam he would not have continued to write. And again, in reference to the completion of The Sleeping Beauty, his son says, He warmed to his work because there had been a favourable review of him lately published in far-off Calcutta.

We dwell upon this weakness of Tennysonsa weakness which, in view of his immense powers, was certainly a source of wonder to his friendsin order to show, once for all, that without the tender care of his son he could never in his later years have done the work he did. This it was which caused the relations between Tennyson and the writer of this admirable memoir to be those of brother with brother rather than of father with son. And those who have been eagerly looking forward to these volumes will not be disappointed. In writing the life of any man there are scores and scores of facts and documents, great and small, which only some person closely acquainted with him, either as relative or as friend, can bring into their true light; and this it is which makes documents so deceptive. Here is an instance of what we mean. In writing to Thompson, Spedding says of Tennyson on a certain occasion: I could not get Alfred to Rydal Mount. He would and would not (sulky one!), although Wordsworth was hospitably minded towards him. This remark would inevitably have been construed into another instance of that churlishness which is so often said (though quite erroneously) to have been one of Tennysons infirmities. But when we read the following foot-note by the biographer, He said he did not wish to intrude himself on the great man at Rydal, we accept the incident as another proof of that humility which the son alludes to in his preface as being one of his fathers characteristics. And of such evidence that had not the poets son written his biography the loss to literature would have been incalculable the book is full. Evidence of a fine intellect, a fine culture, and a sure judgment is afforded by every pageafforded as much by what is left unsaid as by what is said.

The biographer has invited a few of the poets friends to furnish their impressions of him. These could not fail to be interesting; it is pleasant to know what impression Tennyson made upon men of such diverse characters as the Duke of Argyll, Jowett, Tyndall, Froude, and others. But so far as a vital portrait of the man is concerned they were not needed, so vigorously does the man live in the portrait painted by him who knew the poet best of all.

For my own part, says the biographer, I feel strongly that no biographer could so truly give him as he gives himself in his own works; but this may be because, having lived my life with him, I see him in every word which he has written; and it is difficult for me so far to detach myself from the home circle as to pourtray him for others. There is also the impossibility of fathoming a great mans mind; his deeper thoughts are hardly ever revealed. He himself disliked the notion of a long, formal biography, for

None can truly write his single day, And none can write it for him upon earth.

However, he wished that, if I deemed it better, the incidents of his life should be given as shortly as might be without comment, but that my notes should be final and full enough to preclude the chance of further and unauthentic biographies.

For those who cared to know about his literary history he wrote Merlin and the Gleam. From his boyhood he had felt the magic of Merlinthat spirit of poetrywhich bade him know his power and follow throughout his work a pure and high ideal, with a simple and single devotedness and a desire to ennoble the life of the world, and which helped him through doubts and difficulties to endure as seeing Him who is invisible.

Great the Master, And sweet the Magic, When over the valley, In early summers, Over the mountain, On human faces, And all around me, Moving to melody, Floated the Gleam.

In his youth he sang of the brook flowing through his upland valley, of the ridged wolds that rose above his home, of the mountain-glen and snowy summits of his early dreams, and of the beings, heroes and fairies, with which his imaginary world was peopled. Then was heard the croak of the raven, the harsh voice of those who were unsympathetic

The light retreated, The Landskip darkend, The melody deadend, The Master whisperd, Follow the Gleam.

Still the inward voice told him not to be faint-hearted but to follow his ideal. And by the delight in his own romantic fancy, and by the harmonies of nature, the warble of water, and cataract music of falling torrents, the inspiration of the poet was renewed. His Eclogues and English Idyls followed, when he sang the songs of country life and the joys and griefs of country folk, which he knew through and through,

Innocent maidens, Garrulous children, Homestead and harvest, Reaper and gleaner, And rough-ruddy faces Of lowly labour.

By degrees, having learnt somewhat of the real philosophy of life and of humanity from his own experience, he rose to a melody stronger and statelier. He celebrated the glory of human love and of human heroism and of human thought, and began what he had already devised, his epic of King Arthur, typifying above all things the life of man, wherein he had intended to represent some of the great religions of the world. He had purposed that this was to be the chief work of his manhood. Yet the death of his friend, Arthur Hallam, and the consequent darkening of the whole world for him made him almost fail in this purpose; nor any longer for a while did he rejoice in the splendour of his spiritual visions, nor in the Gleam that had waned to a wintry glimmer.

Clouds and darkness Closed upon Camelot; Arthur had vanishd I knew not whither, The King who loved me, And cannot die.

Here my father united the two Arthurs, the Arthur of the Idylls and the Arthur the man he held as half divine. He himself had fought with death, and had come out victorious to find a stronger faith his own, and a hope for himself, for all those in sorrow and for universal human kind, that never forsook him through the future years.

And broader and brighter The Gleam flying onward, Wed to the melody, Sang thro the world.

* * *

I saw, wherever In passing it glanced upon Hamlet or city, That under the Crosses The dead mans garden, The mortal hillock, Would break into blossom; And so to the lands Last limit I came.

Up to the end he faced death with the same earnest and unfailing courage that he had always shown, but with an added sense of the awe and the mystery of the Infinite.

I can no longer, But die rejoicing, For thro the Magic Of Him the Mighty, Who taught me in childhood, There on the border Of boundless Ocean, And all but in Heaven Hovers the Gleam.

That is the reading of the poets riddle as he gave it to me. He thought that Merlin and the Gleam would probably be enough of biography for those friends who urged him to write about himself. However, this has not been their verdict, and I have tried to do what he said that I might do.

There are many specialists in Tennysonian bibliography who take a pride (and a worthy pride) in their knowledge of the masters poems. But the knowledge of all of these specialists put together is not equal to that of him who writes this book. Not only is every line at his fingers ends, but he knows, either from his own memory or from what his father has told him, where and when and why every line was written. He, however, shares, it is evident that dislikerather let us say that passionate hatredwhich his father, like so many other poets, had of that well-intentioned but vexing being whom Rossetti anathematized as the literary resurrection man. Rossetti used to say that of all signs that a man was devoid of poetic instinct and poetic feeling the impulse of the literary resurrectionist was the surest. Without going so far as this we may at least affirm that all poets writing in a language requiring, as English does, much manipulation before it can be moulded into perfect form must needs revise in the brain before the line is set down, or in manuscript, as Shelley did, or partly in manuscript and partly in type, as Coleridge did. But the rakers-up of the chips of the workshop, to use Tennysons own phrase, seem to have been specially irritating to him, because he belonged to those poets who cannot really revise and complete their work till they see it in type. Poetry, he said, looks better, more convincing in print.

From the volume of 1832, says his son, he omitted several stanzas of The Palace of Art because he thought that the poem was too full. The artist is known by his self-limitation was a favourite adage of his. He allowed me, however, to print some of them in my notes, otherwise I should have hesitated to quote without his leave lines that he had excised. He gave the people of his best, and he usually wished that his best should remain without variorum readings, the chips of the workshop, as he called them. The love of bibliomaniacs for first editions filled him with horror, for the first editions are obviously in many cases the worst editions, and once he said to me: Why do they treasure the rubbish I shot from my full-finishd cantos?

.

For himself many passages in Wordsworth and other poets have been entirely spoilt by the modern habit of giving every various reading along with the text. Besides, in his case, very often what is published as the latest edition has been the original version in his first manuscript, so that there is no possibility of really tracing the history of what may seem to be a new word or a new passage. For instance, he said, in Maud a line in the first edition was I will bury myself in my books, and the Devil may pipe to his own, which was afterwards altered to I will bury myself in myself, &c.: this was highly commended by the critics as an improvement on the original readingbut it was actually in the first MS. draft of the poem.

Again, it is important to get a statement by one entitled to speak with authority as to what Tennyson did and what he did not believe upon religious matters. He had in In Memoriam and other poems touched with a hand so strong and sometimes so daring upon the teaching of modern science, and yet he had spoken always so reverently of what modern civilization reverences, that the most opposite lessons were read from his utterances. To one thinker it would seem that Tennyson had thrown himself boldly upon the very foremost wave of scientific thought. To another it would seem that Wordsworth (although, living and writing when he did, before the birth of the new cosmogony, he believed himself to be still in trammels of the old) was by temperament far more in touch with the new cosmogony than was Tennyson, who studied evolution more ardently than any poet since Lucretius. While Wordsworth, notwithstanding a conventional phrase here and there, had an apprehension of Nature without the ever-present idea of the Power behind her, Spinosa himself was not so God-intoxicated a man as Tennyson. His son sets the question at rest in the following pregnant words:

Assuredly Religion was no nebulous abstraction for him. He consistently emphasized his own belief in what he called the Eternal Truths; in an Omnipotent, Omnipresent, and All-loving God, Who has revealed Himself through the human attribute of the highest self-sacrificing love; in the freedom of the human will; and in the immortality of the soul. But he asserted that Nothing worthy proving can be proven, and that even as to the great laws which are the basis of Science, We have but faith, we cannot know. He dreaded the dogmatism of sects and rash definitions of God. I dare hardly name His Name, he would say, and accordingly he named Him in The Ancient Sage the Nameless. But take away belief in the self-conscious personality of God, he said, and you take away the backbone of the world. On God and God-like men we build our trust. A week before his death I was sitting by him, and he talked long of the Personality and of the Love of God, That God, Whose eyes consider the poor, Who catereth, even for the sparrow. I should, he said, infinitely rather feel myself the most miserable wretch on the face of the earth with a God above, than the highest type of man standing alone. He would allow that God is unknowable in his whole world-self, and all-in-all, and that, therefore, there was some force in the objection made by some people to the word Personality as being anthropomorphic, and that, perhaps Self-consciousness or Mind might be clearer to them: but at the same time he insisted that, although man is like a thing of nought in the boundless plan, our highest view of God must be more or less anthropomorphic: and that Personality, as far as our intelligence goes, is the widest definition and includes Mind, Self-consciousness, Will, Love, and other attributes of the Real, the Supreme, the High and Lofty One that inhabiteth Eternity, Whose name is Holy.

And then Lord Tennyson quotes a manuscript note of Jowetts in which he says:

Alfred Tennyson thinks it ridiculous to believe in a God and deny his consciousness, and was amused at some one who said of him that he had versified Hegelianism.

He notes also an anecdote of Edward Fitzgeralds which speaks of a week with Tennyson, when the poet, picking up a daisy, and looking closely at its crimson-tipped leaves, said, Does not this look like a thinking Artificer, one who wishes to ornament?

Here is a paragraph which will be read with the deepest interest, not only by every lover of poetry, but by every man whose heart has been rung by the most terrible of all bereavementsthe loss of a beloved friend. Close as the tie of blood relationship undoubtedly is, it is based upon convention as much as upon nature. It may exist and flourish vigorously when there is little or no community of taste or of thought:

It may be as well to say here that all the letters from my father to Arthur Hallam were destroyed by his father after Arthurs death: a great loss, as these particular letters probably revealed his inner self more truly than anything outside his poems.

We confess to belonging to those who always read with a twinge of remorse the private letters of a man in print. But if there is a case where one must needs long to see the letters between two intimate friends, it is that of Tennyson and Arthur Hallam. They would have been only second in interest to Shakespeares letters to that mysterious Mr. W. H. whose identity now can never be traced. For, notwithstanding all that has recently been said, and ably said, to the contrary, the man to whom many of the sonnets were addressed was he whom T. T. addresses as Mr. W. H.

But for an intimacy to be so strong as that which existed between Tennyson and Arthur H. Hallam there must be a kinship of soul so close and so rare that the tie of blood relationship seems weak beside it. It is then that friendship may sometimes pass from a sentiment into a passion. It did so in the case of Shakespeare and his mysterious friend, as the sonnets in question make manifest; but we are not aware that there is in English literature any other instance of friendship as a passion until we get to In Memoriam. So profound was the effect of Hallams death upon Tennyson that it was the origin, his son tells us, of The Two Voices; or, Thoughts of a Suicide. What was the secret of Hallams influence over Tennyson can never be guessed from anything that he has left behind either in prose or verse. But besides the creative genius of the artist there is that genius of personality which is irresistible. With a very large gift of this kind of genius Arthur Hallam seems to have been endowed.

In the letters from Arthur Hallams friends, says Lord Tennyson, there was a rare unanimity of opinion about his worth. Milnes, writing to his father, says that he had a very deep respect for Hallam, and that Thirlwall, in after years the great bishop, for whom Hallam and my father had a profound affection, was actually captivated by him. When at Cambridge with Hallam he had written: He is the only man here of my own standing before whom I bow in conscious inferiority in everything. Alford writes: Hallam was a man of wonderful mind and knowledge on all subjects, hardly credible at his age. . . . I long ago set him down for the most wonderful person I ever knew. He was of the most tender, affectionate disposition.

Lord Tennysons remarks upon the Idylls of the King, and upon the enormous success of the book have a special interest, and serve to illustrate our opening remarks upon the popularity of his fathers works. Popular as Tennyson had become through The Gardeners Daughter, The Millers Daughter, The May Queen, The Lord of Burleigh, and scores of other poemsendeared to every sorrowing heart as he had become through In Memoriamit was the Idylls of the King that secured for him his unique place. Many explanations of the phenomenon of a true poet securing the popular suffrages have been offered, one of them being his acceptance of the Laureateship. But Wordsworth, a great poet, also accepted it; and he never was and never will be popular. The wisdom of what Goethe says about the enormous importance of subject in poetic art is illustrated by the story of Tennyson and the Idylls of the King.

For what was there in the Idylls of the King that brought all England to Tennysons feetmade English people re-read with a new seeing in their eyes the poems which they once thought merely beautiful, but now thought half divine? Beautiful these Idylls are indeed, but they are not more beautiful than work of his that went before. The rich Klondyke of Malory and Geoffrey of Monmouth had not escaped the eyes of previous prospectors. All his life Milton had dreamed of the mines lying concealed in the misty mid-region of King Arthur and the Round Table, but, luckily for Tennyson, was led away from it into other paths. With Miltons immense power of sensuous expressiona power that impelled him, even when dealing with the spirit world, to flash upon our senses pictures of the very limbs of angels and fiends at fightwe may imagine what an epic of King Arthur he would have produced. Dryden also contemplated working in this mine, but never did; and until Scott came with his Lyulphs Tale in The Bridal of Triermain, no one had taken up the subject but writers like Blackmore. Then came Bulwers burlesque. Now no prospector on the banks of the Yukon has a keener eye for nuggets than Tennyson had for poetic ore, and besides The Lady of Shalott and Launcelot and Guinevere, he had already printed the grandest of all his poemsthe Morte dArthur. It needed only the Idylls of the King, where episode after episode of the Arthurian cycle was rendered in poems which could be understood by allit needed only this for all England to be set reading and re-reading all his poems, some of them more precious than any of these Idyllspoems whose familiar beauties shone out now with a new light.