Ever since then Tennysons hold upon the British public seemed to grow stronger and stronger up to the day of his death, when Great Britain, and, indeed, the entire English-speaking race, went into mourning for him; nor, as we have said, has any weakening of that hold been perceptible during the five years that have elapsed since.

The volumes are so crammed with interesting and important matter that to discuss them in one article is impossible. But before concluding these remarks we must say that the good fortune which attended Tennyson during his life did not end with his death. Fortunate, indeed, is the famous man who escapes the catchpenny biographer. No man so illustrious as Tennyson ever before passed away without his death giving rise to a flood of books professing to tell the story of his life. Yet it chanced that for a long time before his death a monograph on Tennyson by Mr. Arthur Waughwhich, though of course it is sometimes at fault, was carefully prepared and well consideredhad been in preparation, as had also a second edition of another sketch of the poets life by Mr. Henry Jennings, written with equal reticence and judgment. These two books, coming out, as far as we remember, in the very week of Tennysons funeral, did the good service of filling up the gap of five years until the appearance of this authorized biography by his son. Otherwise there is no knowing what pseudo-biographies stuffed with what errors and nonsense might have flooded the market and vexed the souls of Tennysonian students. For the future such pseudo-biographies will be impossible.



III.

Notwithstanding the apparently fortunate circumstances by which Tennyson was surrounded, the record of his early life produces in the readers mind a sense of unhappiness. Happiness is an affair of temperament, not of outward circumstances. Happy, in the sense of enjoying the present as Wordsworth enjoyed it, Tennyson could never be. Once, no doubt, Natures sweetest gift to all living thingsthe power of enjoying the presentwas mans inheritance too. Some of the human family have not lost it even yet; but poets are rarely of these. Give Wordsworth any pittance, enough to satisfy the simplest physical wantsenough to procure him plain living and leisure for high thinkingand he would be happier than Tennyson would have been, cracking the finest walnuts and sipping the richest wine amidst a circle of admiring and powerful friends. As to opinion, as to criticism of his workwhat was that to Wordsworth? Had he not from the first the good opinion of her of whom he was the high priest elect. Natura Benigna herself? Nay, had he not from the first the good opinions of Wordsworth himself and Dorothy? Without this faculty of enjoying the present, how can a bard be happy? For the present alone exists. The past is a dream; the future is a dream; the present is the narrow plank thrown for an instant from the dream of the past to the dream of the future. And yet it is the poet (who of all men should enjoy the raree show hurrying and scrambling along the plank)it is he who refuses to enjoy himself on his own trembling little plank in order to stare round from side to side.

Spedding, speaking in a letter to Thompson in 1835 of Tennysons visit to the Lake country, lets fall a few words that describe the poet in the period before his marriage more fully than could have been done by a volume of subtle analysis:

I think he took in more pleasure and inspiration than any one would have supposed who did not know his own almost personal dislike of the present, whatever it might be.

This is what makes us say that by far the most important thing in Tennysons life was his marriage. He began to enjoy the present: The peace of God came into my life before the altar when I wedded her. No more beautiful words than these were ever uttered by any man concerning any woman. And to say that the words were Tennysons is to say that they expressed the simple truth, for his definition of human speech as God meant it to be would have been the breath that utters truth. It would have been wonderful, indeed, if he, whose capacity of loving a friend was so great had been without an equal capacity of loving a woman.

Although as a son, says the biographer, I cannot allow myself full utterance about her whom I loved as perfect mother and very woman of very womansuch a wife and true helpmate she proved herself. It was she who became my fathers adviser in literary matters; I am proud of her intellect, he wrote. With her he always discussed what he was working at; she transcribed his poems: to her and to no one else he referred for a final criticism before publishing. She, with her tender, spiritual nature, {156} and instinctive nobility of thought, was always by his side, a ready, cheerful, courageous, wise, and sympathetic counsellor. It was she who shielded his sensitive spirit from the annoyances and trials of life, answering (for example) the innumerable letters addressed to him from all parts of the world. By her quiet sense of humour, by her selfless devotion, by her faith as clear as the heights of the June-blue heaven, she helped him also to the utmost in the hours of his depression and of his sorrow.

There are some few people whose natures are so noble or so sweet that how rich soever may be their endowment of intellect, or even of genius, we seem to remember them mainly by what St. Gregory Nazianzen calls the rhetoric of their lives. And surely the knowledge that this is so is encouraging to him who would fain believe in the high destiny of mansurely it is encouraging to know that, in spite of the inhuman dearth of noble natures, mankind can still so dearly love moral beauty as to hold it more precious than any other human force. And certainly one of those whose intellectual endowments are outdazzled by the beauty of their qualities of heart and soul was the sweet lady whose death I am recording.

Among those who had the privilege of knowing Lady Tennyson (and they were many, and these many were of the best), some are at this moment eloquent in talk about the perfect helpmate she was to the great poet, and the perfect mother she was to his children, and they quote those lovely lines of Tennyson which every one knows by heart:

Dear, near and trueno truer Time himself Can prove you, tho he make you evermore Dearer and nearer, as the rapid of life Shoots to the falltake this and pray that he Who wrote it, honouring your sweet faith to him, May trust himself;and after praise and scorn, As one who feels the immeasurable world, Attain the wise indifference of the wise; And after autumn pastif left to pass His autumn into seeming leafless days Draw toward the long frost and longest night, Wearing his wisdom lightly, like the fruit Which in our winter woodland looks a flower.

Others dwell on the unique way in which those wistful blue eyes of hers and that beautiful face expressed the tender spiritual nature described by the poetexpressed it, indeed, more and more eloquently with the passage of years, and the bereavements the years had brought. The present writer saw her within a few days of her death. She did not seem to him then more fragile than ordinary. For many years she whose fragile frame seemed to be kept alive by the love and sweet movements of the soul within had seemed as she lay upon her couch the same as she seemed when death was so nearintensely pale, save when a flush as slight as the pink on a wild rose told her watchful son that the subject of conversation was interesting her more than was well for her. As a matter of fact, however, Lady Tennyson was no less remarkable as an intelligence than as the central heart of love and light that illumined one of the most beautiful households of our time.

Though her special gift was no doubt music, she had, as Tennyson would say with affectionate pride, a real insight into poetical effects; and those who knew her best shared his opinion in this matter. Whether, had her life not been devoted so entirely to others, she would have been a noticeable artistic producer it is hard to guess. But there is no doubt that she was born to hold a high place as a conversationalist, brilliant and stimulating. Notwithstanding the jealous watchfulness of her family lest the dinner talk should draw too heavily upon her small stock of physical power, the fascination of her conversation, both as to subject-matter and manner, was so irresistible that her friends were apt to forget how fragile she really was until warned by a sign from her son or, daughter-in-law, who adored her, that the conversation should be brought to a close.

Her diary, upon which her son has drawn for certain biographical portions of his book shows how keen and how persistent was her interest in the poetry of her husband; it also shows how thorough was her insight into its principles. As a rule, diaries, professing as they do to give portraitures of eminent men, are mostly very much worse than worthless. The points seized upon by the diarist are almost never physiognomic, and even if the diarist does give some glimpse of the character he professes to limn, the picture can only be partially true, inasmuch as it can never be toned down by other aspects of the character unseen by the diarist and unknown to him.

Very different, however, is the record kept by Lady Tennyson. As an instance of her power of selecting really luminous points for preservation in her diary, let me instance this. Many a student of the Idylls of the King has been struck by a certain difference in the style between The Coming of Arthur and The Passing of Arthur and the other idylls. Indeed, more than once this difference has been cited as showing Tennysons inability to fuse the different portions of a long poem. This fact had not escaped the eye of the loving wife and critic, and two days before her death she said to her son, He said The Coming of Arthur and The Passing of Arthur are purposely simpler in style than the other idylls as dealing with the awfulness of birth and death, and wished this remark of the poets to be put on record in the book.

It is needless to comment on the value of these few words and the light they shed upon Tennysons method.

Those who saw Lady Tennyson in middle life and in advanced age, and were struck by that spiritual beauty of hers which no painter could ever render, will not find it difficult to imagine what she was at seventeen, when Tennyson suddenly came upon her in the Fairy Wood, and exclaimed, Are you an Oread or a Dryad wandering here? And yet her beauty was only a small part of a charm that was indescribable. An important event for English literature was that meeting in the Fairy Wood. For, from the moment of his engagement, the current of his mind was no longer and constantly in the channel of mournful memories and melancholy forebodings, says his son. And speaking of the year, 1838, the son tells us that, on the whole, he was happy in his life. When I wrote The Two Voices, he used to say, I was so utterly miserable, a burden to myself and my family, that I said, Is life worth anything? and now that I am old, I fear that I shall only live a year or two, for I have work still to do.

The hostile manner in which Maud was received vexed him, and would, before his marriage, have deeply disturbed him. A right view of this fine poem seems to have been taken by George Brimley, an admirable critic, who in the Cambridge Essays, had already pointed out with great acumen many of the more subtle beauties of Tennyson.

There are few more pleasant pages in this book than those which record Tennysons relations with another poet who was blessed in his wifeBrowning. Although the two poets had previously met (notably in Paris in 1851), the intimacy between them would seem to have been cemented, if not begun, during one of Tennysons visits to his and Brownings friends, Mr. and Mrs. Knowles at the Hollies, Clapham Common. Here Tennyson read to Browning the Grail (which the latter pronounced to be Tennysons best and highest); and here Browning came and read his own new poem The Ring and the Book, when Tennysons verdict on it was, Full of strange vigour and remarkable in many ways, doubtful if it will ever be popular.

The record of his long intimacy with Coventry Patmore and Aubrey de Vere takes an important place in the biography, and the reminiscences of Tennyson by the latter poet form an interesting feature of the volumes. In George Merediths first little book Tennyson was delighted by the Love in a Valley, and he had a full appreciation of the great novelist all round. With the three leading poets of a younger generation, Rossetti, William Morris, and Swinburne, he had slight acquaintance. Here, however, is an interesting memorandum by Tennyson recording his first meeting with Swinburne:

I may tell you, however, that young Swinburne called here the other day with a college friend of his, and we asked him to dinner, and I thought him a very modest and intelligent young fellow. Moreover I read him what you vindicated [Maud], but what I particularly admired in him was that he did not press upon me any verses of his own.

Of contemporary novels he seems to have been a voracious and indiscriminate reader. In the long list here given of novelists whose books he readgood, bad, and indifferentit is curious not to find the name of Mrs. Humphry Ward. With Thackeray he was intimate; and he was in cordial relations with Dickens, Douglas Jerrold, and George Eliot. Among the poets, besides Edward Fitzgerald and Coventry Patmore, he saw much of William Allingham. Though he admired parts of Festus greatly, we do not gather from these volumes that he met the author. Dobell he saw much of at Malvern in 1846. The letter-diary from Tennyson during his stay in Cornwall with Holman Hunt, Val. Prinsep, Woolner, and Palgrave, shows how exhilarated he could be by wind and sea. The death of Lionel was a sad blow to him. Demeter, and other Poems, was dedicated to Lord Dufferin, as a tribute, says his son, of affection and of gratitude; for words would fail me to tell the unremitting kindness shown by himself and Lady Dufferin to my brother Lionel during his fatal illness.

Tennysons critical insight could not fail to be good when exercised upon poetry. Here are one or two of his sayings about Burns, which show in what spirit he would have read Henleys recent utterances about that poet:

Burns did for the old songs of Scotland almost what Shakespeare had done for the English drama that preceded him.

Read the exquisite songs of Burns. In shape each of them has the perfection of the berry, in light the radiance of the dew-drop: you forget for its sake those stupid things his serious poems.

Among the reminiscences and impressions of the poet which Lord Tennyson has appended to his second volume, it is only fair to specialize the admirable paper by F. T. Palgrave, which, long as it is, is not by one word too long. That Jowett would write wisely and well was in the nature of things. The only contribution, however, we can quote here is Froudes, for it is as brief as it is emphatic:

I owe to your father the first serious reflexions upon life and the nature of it which have followed me for more than fifty years. The same voice speaks to me now as I come near my own end, from beyond the bar. Of the early poems, Love and Death had the deepest effect upon me. The same thought is in the last lines of the last poems which we shall ever have from him.

Your father in my estimate, stands, and will stand far away by the side of Shakespeare above all other English Poets, with this relative superiority even to Shakespeare, that he speaks the thoughts and speaks to the perplexities and misgivings of his own age.

He was born at the fit time, before the world had grown inflated with the vanity of Progress, and there was still an atmosphere in which such a soul could grow. There will be no such others for many a long age.

Yours gratefully, J. A. FROUDE.

This letter is striking evidence of the influence Tennyson had upon his contemporaries. Comparisons, however, between Shakespeare and other poets can hardly be satisfactory. A kinship between him and any other poet can only be discovered in relation to one of the many sides of the myriad-minded man. Where lies Tennysons kinship? Is it on the dramatic side? In a certain sense Tennyson possessed dramatic power undoubtedly; for he had a fine imagination of extraordinary vividness, and could, as in Rizpah, make a character live in an imagined situation. But to write a vital play requires more than this: it requires a knowledgepartly instinctive and partly acquiredof men as well as of man, and especially of the way in which one individual acts and reacts upon another in the complex web of human life. To depict the workings of the soul of man in a given situation is one thingto depict the impact of ego upon ego is another. When we consider that the more poetical a poet is the more oblivious we expect him to be of the machinery of social life, it is no wonder that poetical dramatists are so rare. In drama, even poetic drama, the poet must leave the golden clime in which he was born, must leave those golden stars above in order to learn this machinery, and not only learn it, but take a pleasure in learning it.

In honest admiration of Tennysons dramatic work, where it is admirable, we yield to none, at the time when The Foresters was somewhat coldly accepted by the press on account of its lack of virility, we considered that in the class to which it belonged, the scenic pastoral plays, it held a very worthy place. That Tennysons admiration for Shakespeare was unbounded is evident enough.

There was no one, says Jowett in his recollections of Tennyson, to whom he was so absolutely devoted, no poet of whom he had a more intimate knowledge than Shakespeare. He said to me, and probably to many others, that there was one intellectual process in the world of which he could not even entertain an apprehensionthat was the plays of Shakespeare. He thought that he could instinctively distinguish between the genuine and the spurious in them, e.g., between those parts of King Henry VIII., which are generally admitted to be spurious, and those that are genuine. The same thought was partly working in his mind on another occasion, when he spoke of two things, which he conceived to be beyond the intelligence of man, and it was certainly not repeated by him from any irreverence; the one, the intellectual genius of Shakespearethe other, the religious genius of Jesus Christ.

And in the pathetic account of Tennysons last moments we find it recorded that on the Tuesday before the Wednesday on which he died, he called out, Where is my Shakespeare? I must have my Shakespeare; and again on the day of his death, when the breath was passing out of his body, he asked for his Shakespeare. All this, however, makes it the more remarkable that of poets Shakespeare had the least influence upon Tennysons art. There was a fundamental unlikeness between the genius of the two men. The only point in common between them is that each in his own way captivated the suffrages both of the many and of the fit though few, notwithstanding the fact that their methods of dramatic approach in their plays are absolutely and fundamentally different. Even their very methods of writing verse are entirely different. Tennysons blank verse seems at its best to combine the beauties of the Miltonic and the Wordsworthian line; while nothing is so rare in his work as a Shakespearean line. Now and then such a line as

Authority forgets a dying king

turns up, but very rarely. We agree with all Professor Jebb says in praise of Tennysons blank verse.

He has known, says he, how to modulate it to every theme, and to elicit a music appropriate to each; attuning it in turn to a tender and homely grace, as in The Gardeners Daughter ; to the severe and ideal majesty of the antique, as in Tithonus; to meditative thought, as in The Ancient Sage, or Akbars Dream; to pathetic or tragic tales of contemporary life, as in Aylmers Field, or Enoch Arden; or to sustained romance narrative, as in the Idylls. No English poet has used blank verse with such flexible variety, or drawn from it so large a compass of tones; nor has any maintained it so equably on a high level of excellence.

But we fail to see where he touched Shakespeare on the dramatic side of Shakespeares immense genius.

Tennyson had the yearning common to all English poets to write Shakespearean plays, and the filial piety with which his son tries to uphold his fathers claims as a dramatist is beautiful; indeed, it is pathetic. But the greatest injustice that can be done to a great poet is to claim for him honours that do not belong to him. In his own line Tennyson is supreme, and this book makes it necessary to ask once more what that line is. Shakespeares stupendous fame has for centuries been the candle into which all the various coloured wings of later days have flown with more or less of disaster. Though much was said in praise of Harold by one of the most accomplished critics and scholars of our time, Dr. Jebb, {168} the play could not keep the stage, nor does it live as a drama as any one of Tennysons lyrics can be said to live. Becket, to be sure, was a success on the stage. A letter to Tennyson in 1884 from so competent a student of Shakespeare as Sir Henry Irving declares that Becket is a finer play than King John. Still, the Morte dArthur, The Lotos-Eaters, The Gardeners Daughter, outweigh the five-act tragedy in the world of literary art. Of acted drama Tennyson knew nothing at all. To him, evidently, the word act in a printed play meant chapter; the word scene meant section. In his early days he had gone occasionally to see a play, and in 1875 he went to see Irving in Hamlet and liked him better than Macready, whom he had seen in the part. Still later he went to see Lady Archibald Campbell act when Becket was given among the glades of oak and fern in the Canizzaro Wood at Wimbledon. But handicapped as he was by ignorance of drama as a stage product how could he write Shakespearean plays?

But let us for a moment consider the difference between the two men as poets. It is hard to imagine the master-dramatist of the worldit is hard to imagine the poet who, by setting his foot upon allegory, saved our poetry from drying up after the invasion of gongorism, euphuism, and allegoryit is, we say, hard to imagine Shakespeare, if he had conceived and written such lovely episodes as those of the Idylls of the King, so full of concrete pictures, setting about to turn his flesh-and-blood characters into symbolic abstractions. There is in these volumes a curious document, a memorandum of Tennysons presented to Mr. Knowles at Aldworth in 1869, in which an elaborate scheme for turning into abstract ideas the characters of the Arthurian story is sketched:

K.A. Religious Faith.

King Arthurs three Guineveres.

The Lady of the Lake.

Two Guineveres, ye first prim Christianity. 2d Roman Catholicism: ye first is put away and dwells apart, 2d Guinevere flies. Arthur takes to the first again, but finds her changed by lapse of Time.

Modred, the sceptical understanding. He pulls Guinevere, Arthurs latest wife, from the throne.

Merlin Emrys, the Enchanter. Science. Marries his daughter to Modred.

Excalibur, War.

The Sea, the people / The Saxons, the people } the S. are a sea-people and it is theirs and a type of them.

The Round Table: liberal institutions.

Battle of Camlan.

2d Guinevere with the enchanted book and cup.

And Mr. Knowles in a letter to the biographer says:

He encouraged me to write a short paper, in the form of a letter to The Spectator, on the inner meaning of the whole poem, which I did, simply upon the lines he himself indicated. He often said, however, that an allegory should never be pressed too far. Are all the lovely passages of human passion and human pathos in these Idylls allegoricalthat is to saymake-believe? The reason why allegorical poetry is always second-rate, even at its best, is that it flatters the readers intellect at the expense of his heart. Fancy the allegorical intent behind the parting of Hector and Andromache, and behind the death of Desdemona! Thank Heaven, however, Tennysons allegorical intent was a destructive afterthought. For, says the biographer, the allegorical drift here marked out was fundamentally changed in the later schemes in the Idylls. According to that delicate critic, Canon Ainger, there is a symbolical intent underlying The Lady of Shalott:

The new-born love for something, for some one in the wide world from whom she has been so long secluded, takes her out of the region of shadows into that of realities.

But what concerns us here is the fact that when Shakespeare wrote, although he yielded too much now and then to the passion for gongorism and euphuism which had spread all over Europe, it was against the nature of his genius to be influenced by the contemporary passion for allegory. That he had a natural dislike of allegorical treatment of a subject is evident, not only in his plays, but in his sonnets. At a time when the sonnet was treated as the special vehicle for allegory, Shakespeares sonnets were the direct outcome of emotion of the most intimate and personal kinda fact which at once destroys the ignorant drivel about the Baconian authorship of Shakespeares plays, for what Bacon had was fancy, not imagination, and Fancy is the mother of Allegory, Imagination is the mother of Drama. The moment that Bacon essayed imaginative work, he passed into allegory, as we see in the New Atlantis.

It might, perhaps, be said that there are three kinds of poetical temperament which have never yet been found equally combined in any one poetnot even in Shakespeare himself. There is the lyric temperament, as exemplified in writers like Sappho, Shelley, and others; there is the meditative temperamentsometimes speculative, but not always accompanied by metaphysical dreamingas exemplified in Lucretius, Wordsworth, and others; and there is the dramatic temperament, as exemplified in Homer, Æschylus, Sophocles, and Shakespeare. In a certain sense the Iliad is the most dramatic poem in the world, for the dramatic picture lives undisturbed by lyrism or meditation. In Æschylus and Sophocles we find, besides the dramatic temperament, a large amount of the lyrical temperament, and a large amount of the meditative, but unaccompanied by metaphysical speculation. In Shakespeare we find, besides the dramatic temperament, a large amount of the meditative accompanied by an irresistible impulse towards metaphysical speculation, but, on the whole, a moderate endowment of the lyrical temperament, judging by the few occasions on which he exercised it. For fine as are such lyrics as Hark, hark, the lark, Where the bee sucks, &c., other poets have written lyrics as fine.

In a certain sense no man can be a pure and perfect dramatist. Every ego is a central sun found which the universe revolves, and it must needs assert itself. This is why on a previous occasion, when speaking of the way in which thoughts are interjected into drama by the Greek dramatists, we said that really and truly no man can paint another, but only himself, and what we call character-painting is at the best but a poor mixing of painter and painteda third something between these two, just as what we call colour and sound are born of the play of undulation upon organism. Very likely this is putting the case too strongly. But be this as it may, it is impossible to open a play of Shakespeares without being struck with the way in which the meditative side of Shakespeares mind strove with and sometimes nearly strangled the dramatic. If this were confined to Hamlet, where the play seems meant to revolve on a philosophical pivot, it would not be so remarkable. But so hindered with thoughts, reflections, meditations, and metaphysical speculations was Shakespeare that he tossed them indiscriminately into other plays, tragedies, comedies, and histories, regardless sometimes of the character who uttered them. With regard to metaphysical speculation, indeed, even when he was at work on the busiest scenes of his dramas, it would seemas was said on the occasion before alluded tothat Shakespeares instinct for actualizing and embodying in concrete form the dreams of the metaphysician often arose and baffled him. It would seem that when writing a comedy he could not help putting into the mouth of a man like Claudio those words which seem as if they ought to have been spoken by a metaphysician of the Hamlet type, beginning,

Ay, but to die and go we know not where.

It would seem that he could not help putting into the mouth of Macbeth those words which also seem as if they ought to have been spoken on the platform at Elsinore, beginning,

To-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow.

And if it be said that Macbeth was a philosopher as well as a murderer, and might have thought these thoughts in the terrible strait in which he then was, surely nothing but this marvellous peculiarity of Shakespeares temperament will explain his making Macbeth stop at Duncans bedroom door, dagger in hand, to say,

Now oer the one half world Nature seems dead, &c.

And again, though Prospero was very likely a philosopher too, even he steals from Hamlets mouth such words of the metaphysician as these:

We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep.

That this is one of Shakespeares most striking characteristics will not be denied by any competent student of his works. Nor will any such student deny that, exquisite as his lyrics are, they are too few and too unimportant in subject-matter to set beside his supreme wealth of dramatic picture, and his wide vision as a thinker and a metaphysical dreamer.

Now on which of these sides of Shakespeare does Tennyson touch? Is it on the lyrical side? Shakespeares fine lyrics are so few that they would be lost if set beside the marvellous wealth of Tennysons lyrical work. On one side only of Shakespeares genius Tennyson touches, perhaps, more closely than any subsequent poet. As a metaphysician none comes so near Shakespeare as he who wrote these lines:

And more, my son! for more than once when I Sat all alone, revolving in myself The word that is the symbol of myself, The mortal limit of the Self was loosed, And passed into the Nameless, as a cloud Melts into Heaven. I touchd my limbs, the limbs Were strange not mineand yet no shade of doubt, But utter clearness, and thro loss of Self. The gain of such large life as matchd with ours Were Sun to sparkunshadowable in words, Themselves but shadows of a shadow-world.

Here, then, seems to be the truth of the matter: while Shakespeare had immense dramatic power, and immense meditative power with moderate lyric power, Tennyson had the lyric gift and the meditative gift without the dramatic. His poems are more full of reflections, meditations, and generalizations upon human life than any poets since Shakespeare. But then the moment that Shakespeare descended from those heights whether his metaphysical imagination had borne him, he became, not a lyrist, as Tennyson became, but a dramatist. And this divides Shakespeare as far from Tennyson as it divides him from any other first-class writer. We admirers of Tennyson must content ourselves with this thought, that, wonderful as it is for Shakespeare to have combined great metaphysical power with supreme power as a dramatist, it is scarcely less wonderful for Tennyson to have combined great metaphysical power with the power of a supreme lyrist. Nay, is it not in a certain sense more wonderful for a lyrical impulse such as Tennysons to be found combined with a power of philosophical and metaphysical abstraction such as he shows in some of his poems?



IV. CHRISTINA GEORGINA ROSSETTI. 18301894.

I.

Although the noble poet and high-souled woman we have just lost had been ill and suffering from grievous pain for a long time, Death came at last with a soft hand which could but make him welcome. Since early in August, when she took to her bed, she was so extremely weak and otherwise ill that one scarcely expected her (at any time) to live more than a month or so, and for the last six weeks or thereaboutssay from the 15th of Novemberone expected her to die almost from day to day. My dear friend William Rossetti, who used to go to Torrington Square every afternoon, saw her on the afternoon of December 28th [1894]. He did not, he told me, much expect to find her alive in the afternoon of the 29th, and intended, therefore, to make his next call earlier. She died at half-past seven in the morning of the 29th, in the presence only of her faithful nurse Mrs. Read. It was through her sudden collapse that she missed at her side, when she passed away, that brother whose whole life has been one of devotion to his family, and whose tireless affection for the last of them was one of the few links that bound Christinas sympathy to the earth.

[Picture: Christina Rossetti. From a crayon-drawing by D. G. Rossetti reproduced by the kind permission of Mr. W. M. Rossetti]

Her illness was of a most complicated kind: two years and a half ago she was operated on for cancer: functional malady of the heart, accompanied by dropsy in the left arm and hand, followed. Although on Friday the serious symptoms of her case became, as I have said, accentuated, she was throughout the day and night entirely conscious; and so peaceful and apparently so free from pain was she that neither the medical man nor the nurse supposed the end to be quite so near as it was. During all this time, up to the moment of actual dissolution, her lips seemed to be moving in prayer, but, of course, this with her was no uncommon sign: duty and prayer ordered her life. Her sufferings, I say, had been great, but they had been encountered by a fortitude that was greater still. Throughout all her life, indeed, she was the most notable example that our time has produced of the masterful power of mans spiritual nature when at its highest to conquer in its warfare with earthly conditions, as her brother Gabriels life was the most notable example of the struggle of the spiritual nature with the bodily when the two are equally equipped. It is the conviction of one whose high privilege it was to know her in many a passage of sorrow and trial that of all the poets who have lived and died within our time, Christina Rossetti must have had the noblest soul.

A certain irritability of temper, which was, perhaps, natural to her, had, when I first became acquainted with her family (about 1872), been overcome, or at least greatly chastened, by religion (which with her was a passion) and by a large acquaintance with grief, resulting in a long meditation over the mystery of pain. In wordly matters her generosity may be described as boundless; but perhaps it is not difficult for a poet to be generous in a worldly senseto be free in parting with that which can be precious only to commonplace souls. What, however, is not so easy is for one holding such strong religious convictions as Christina Rossetti held to cherish such generous thoughts and feelings as were hers about those to whom her shibboleths meant nothing. This was what made her life so beautiful and such a blessing to all. The indurating effects of a selfish religiosity never withered her soul nor narrowed it. With her, indeed, religion was very love

A largess universal like the sun.

It is always futile to make guesses as to what might have been the development of a poets genius and character had the education of circumstances been different from what it was, and perhaps it is specially futile to guess what would have been the development under other circumstances of her, the poet of whom her friends used to speak with affection and reverence as Christina.

On the death of her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti (or as his friends used to call him Gabriel) in 1882, I gave that sketch of the family story which has formed the basis of most of the biographical notices of him and his family; it would, therefore, be superfluous to reiterate what I said and what is now matter of familiar knowledge. It may, however, be as well to remind the reader that, owing to the peculiar position in London of the father Gabriele Rossetti, the family were during childhood and partly during youth as much isolated from the outer English world as were the family between whom and themselves there were many points of resemblancethe Brontës. The two among them who were not in youth of a retiring disposition were he who afterwards became the most retiring of all, Gabriel, and Maria, the latter of whom was in one sense retiring, and in another expansive. In her dark brown, or, as some called them, black eyes, there would suddenly come up and shine an enthusiasm, a capacity of poetic and romantic fire, to the quelling of which there must have gone an immensity of religious force. As to Gabriel, during a large portion of his splendid youth he exhibited a genial breadth of front that affined him to Shakespeare and Walter Scott. The English strain in the family found expression in him, and in him alone. There was a something in the hearty ring of his voice that drew Englishmen to him as by a magnet.

While it was but little that the others drew from the rich soil of merry England, he drew from it half at least of his radiant personalityhalf at least of his incomparable genius. Though he was in every way part and parcel of that marvellous little family circle of children of genius in Charlotte Street, he had also the power of looking at it from the outside. It would be strange, indeed, if this or any other power should be found lacking in him. I have often heard Rossettiby the red flicker of the studio fire, when the gas was turned down to save his eyesightgive the most graphic and fascinating descriptions of the little group and the way in which they grew up to be what they were under the tuition of a father whose career can only be called romantic, and a mother whose intellectual gifts were so remarkable that, had they not been in some great degree stifled by the exercise of an entire self-abnegation on behalf of her family, she, too, must have become an important figure in literature.

[Picture: Mrs. Rossetti. From a crayon-drawing by D. G. Rossetti reproduced by the kind permission of Mr. W. M. Rossetti]

The father died in 1854, many years before I knew the family; but Gabriels description of him; his conversations with his brother-refugees and others who visited the houseconversations in which the dreamy and the matter-of-fact were oddly blent; his striking skill as an improvisatore of Italian poetry, and also as a master of pen-and-ink drawing; his great musical gifta gift which none of his family seemed to have inherited; his fine tenor voice; his unflinching courage and independence of character (qualities which made him refuse, in a Protestant country, to make open abjuration of the creed in which the Rossettis had been reared, though he detested the Pope and all his works, and was, if not an actual freethinker, thoroughly latitudinarian)Gabriels pictures of this poet and father of poets were so vividso amazingly and incredibly vividthat I find it difficult to think I never met the father in the flesh: not unfrequently I find myself talking of him as if I had known him. What higher tribute than this can be made to a narrators dramatic power? Those who have seen the elder Rossettis pen-and-ink drawings (the work of a child) will agree with me that Gabriel did not over-estimate them in the least degree. All the Rossettis inherited from their father voices so musical that they could be recognized among other voices in any gathering, and no doubt that clear-cut method of syllabification which was so marked a characteristic of Christinas conversation, but which gave it a sort of foreign tone, was inherited from the father. Her affinity to the other two members of the family was seen in that intense sense of duty of which Gabriel, with all his generosity, had but little. There was no martyrdom she would not have undertaken if she thought that duty called upon her to undertake it, and this may be said of the other two.

In most things, however, Christina Rossetti seemed to stand midway between Gabriel and the other two members of her family, and it was the same in physical matters. She had Gabriels eyes, in which hazel and blue-grey were marvellously blent, one hue shifting into the other, answering to the movements of the thoughtseyes like the mothers. And her brown hair, though less warm in colour than his during his boyhood, was still like it. When a young girl, at the time that she sat for the Virgin in the picture now in the National Gallery, she was, as both her mother and Gabriel have told me, really lovely, with an extraordinary expression of pensive sweetness. She used to have in the little back parlour a portrait of herself at eighteen by Gabriel, which gives all these qualities. Even then, however, the fullness in the eyes was somewhat excessive. Afterwards her ill health took a peculiar form, the effect of which was that the eyes were, in a manner of speaking, pushed forward, and although this protuberance was never disagreeable, it certainly took a good deal of beauty from her face.

Dominant, however, as was the fathers personality among his friends, the mothers influence upon the children was stronger than his; and no wonder, for I think there was no beautiful charm of woman that Mrs. Rossetti lacked. She did not seem at all aware that she was a woman of exceptional gifts, yet her intellectual penetration and the curious exactitude of her knowledge were so remarkable that Gabriel accepted her dicta as oracles not to be challenged. One of her specialities was the pronunciation of English words, in which she was an authority. I cannot resist giving one little instance, as it illustrates a sweet feature of Gabriels character. It occurred on a lovely summers day in the old Kelmscott manor house in 1873, when Mrs. Rossetti, Christina, and myself were watching Gabriel at work upon Proserpine. I had pronounced the word aspirant with the accent upon the middle syllable. Pardon me, my dear fellow, said he, without looking from his work, that word should be pronounced with the accent on the first syllable, as a purist like you ought to know. On my challenging this, he said, in a tone which was meant to show that he was saying the last word upon the subject, My mother always says áspirant, and she is always right upon matters of pronunciation. Then I shall always say áspirant, I replied. And I may add that I now do say áspirant, and, right or wrong, intend to say áspirant so long as this breath of mine enables me to say áspirant at all. Afterwards Christina, as we were strolling by the weir, watching Gabriel and George Hake pounding across the meadows at the rate of five miles an hour, said to me, I think you were right about aspírant. No, I said, it is a dear, old-fashioned way. Your mother says áspirant; I now remember that my own mother said áspirant. I shall stick to áspirant till the end of the chapter. And Christina said, Then so will I.

Among Mrs. Rossettis accomplishments was reading aloud, mainly from imaginative writers, and I cannot recall without a thrill of mingled emotions a delightful stay of mine at Kelmscott in the summer of 73, when she, whose age then was seventy-three, used to read out to us all sorts of things. And writing these words makes me hear those readings againmakes me hear, through the open casement of the quaint old house, the blackbirds from the home field trying in vain to rival the music of that half-Italian, half-English voice. To have been admitted into such a charmed circle I look upon as one of the greatest privileges of my life. It is something for a man to have lived within touch of Christina Rossetti and her mother. From her father, however, Christina took, either by the operation of some law of heredity or from early association with the author of Il Mistero dell Amor Platonico del Medio Evo and La Beatrice di Dante, that passion for symbolism which is one of the chief features of her poetry. There is, perhaps, no more striking instance of the inscrutable lines in which ancestral characteristics descend than the way in which the passion for symbolism was inherited by Christina and Gabriel Rossetti from their father.

While Christinas poetical work may be described as being all symbolical, she was not much given, like her brother, to read symbols into the every-day incidents of life. Gabriel, on the contrary, though using symbolism in his poetry in only a moderate degree, allowed his instinct for symbolizing his own life to pass into positive superstition. When a party of usincluding Mrs. Rossetti, Christina, the two aunts, Dr. Hake, with four of his sons, and myselfwere staying for Christmas with Gabriel near Bognor, a tree fell in the garden during a storm. While Gabriel seemed inclined to take it as a sign of future disaster, Christina, whose poetry is so full of symbolism, would smile at such a notion. Yet Gabriel could speak of his fathers symbolizing (as in La Beatrice di Dante) as being absolutely and hopelessly eccentric and worthless. This is remarkable, for one would have thought that it was impossible to read those extraordinary works of the elder Rossettis without being impressed by the rare intellectual subtlety of the Italian scholar.

Of course the opportunities of brother and sister of studying Nature were identical. Both were born in London, and during childhood saw Nature only as a holiday scene. Christina would talk with delight of her grandfathers cottage retreat about thirty miles from London, to which she used to go for a holiday in a stage coach, and of the beauty of the country around. But these expeditions were not numerous, and came to an end when she was a child of seven or eight, and it was very little that she saw outside London before girlhood was past. I have myself heard her speak of what she has somewhere written aboutthe rapture of the sight of some primroses growing in a railway cutting. It is, of course, a great disadvantage to any poet not to have been born in the country; learned in Nature the city-born poet can never be, as we see in the case of Milton, who loved Nature without knowing her. It is here that Jean Ingelow has such an advantage over Christina Rossetti. Her love of flowers, and birds, and trees, and all that makes the earth so beautiful, is not one whit stronger than Christinas own, but it is a love born of an exhaustive detailed knowledge of Natures life.

On a certain occasion when walking with a friend at Hunters Forestall, near Herne Bay, where she and her mother were nursing Gabriel through one of his illnesses, the talk ran upon Shelleys Skylark, a poem which she adored. She was literally bewildered because the friend showed that he was able to tell, from a certain change of sound in the note of a skylark that had risen over the lane, the moment when the bird had made up its mind to cease singing and return to the earth. It seemed to her an almost supernatural gift, and yet an ignorant ploughman will often be able to do the same thing. This kind of intimacy with Nature she coveted. With the lower animals, nevertheless, she had a strange kind of sympathy of her own. Young creatures especially understood the playful humour of her approach. A delightful fantastic whim was the bond between her and puppies and kittens and birds. Her intimacy with Natureof a different kind altogether from that of Wordsworth and Tennysonwas of the kind that I have described on a previous occasion as Sufeyistic: she loved the beauty of this world, but not entirely for itself; she loved it on account of its symbols of another world beyond. And yet she was no slave to the ascetic side of Christianity. No doubt there was mixed with her spiritualism, or perhaps underlying it, a rich sensuousness that under other circumstances of life would have made itself manifest, and also a rare potentiality of deep passion. It is this, indeed, which makes the study of her great and noble nature so absorbing.

Perhaps for strength both of subject and of treatment, Christina Rossettis masterpiece is Amor Mundi. Here we get a lesson of human life expressed, not didactically, but in a concrete form of unsurpassable strength, harmony, and concision. Indeed, it may be said of her work generally that her strength as an artist is seen not so much in mastery over the rhythm, or even over the verbal texture of poetry, as in the skill with which she expresses an allegorical intent by subtle suggestion instead of direct preachment. Herein An Apple Gathering is quite perfect. It is, however, if I may venture to say so, a mistake to speak of Christina Rossetti as being a great poetic artist. Exquisite as her best things are, no one had a more uncertain hand than she when at work. Here, as in so many things, she was like Blake, whose influence upon her was very great.

Of self-criticism she had almost nothing. On one occasion, many years ago now, she expressed a wish to have some of her verses printed in The Athenæum, and I suggested her sending them to 16, Cheyne Walk, her brothers house, where I then used to spend much time in a study that I occupied there. I said that her brother and I would read them together and submit them to the editor. She sent several poems (I think about six), not one of which was in the least degree worthy of her. This naturally embarrassed me, but Gabriel, who entirely shared my opinion of the poems, wrote at once to her and told her that the verses sent were, both in his own judgment and mine, unworthy of her, and that she had better buckle to at once and write another poem. She did so, and the result was an exquisite lyric which appeared in The Athenæum. Here is where she was wonderfully unlike Gabriel, whose power of self-criticism in poetry was almost as great as Tennysons own. But in the matter of inspiration she was, I must think, above Gabrielabove almost everybody.

If English rhymed metres had been as easy to work in as Italian rhymed metres, her imagination was so vivid, her poetic impulse was so strong, and, indeed, her poetic wealth so inexhaustible, that she would have stood in the front rank of English poets. But the writer of English rhymed measures is in a very different position as regards improvisatorial efforts from the Italian who writes in rhymed measures. He has to grapple with the metrical structureto seize the form by the throat, as it were, and force it to take in the enormous wealth at the English poets command. Fine as is the Princes Progress, for instance (and it would be hard to find its superior in regard to poetic material in the whole compass of Victorian poetry), the number of rugged lines the reader has to encounter weighs upon and distresses him until, indeed, the conclusion is reached: then the passion and the pathos of the subject cause the poem to rise upon billows of true rhythm. On the other hand, however, it may be said that a special quality of her verse is a curiosa felicitas which makes a metrical blemish tell as a kind of suggestive grace. But I must stop; I must bear in mind that he who has walked and talked with Christina Rossetti, burdened with a wealth of remembered beauty from earth and heaven, runs the risk of becoming garrulous.



II.

In regard to unpublished manuscripts which a writer has left behind him, the responsibilities of his legal representatives are far more grave than seems to be generally supposed. In deciding what posthumous writings an executor is justified in giving to the public it is important, of course, to take into account the character, the idiosyncrasy of the writer in regard to all his relations towards what may be called the mechanism of every-day life. Some poets are so methodical that the mere fact of anything having been left by them in manuscript unaccompanied by directions as to its disposal is primâ facie evidence that it was intended to be withheld from the public, either temporarily for revision or finally and absolutely. And, of course, the representative, especially if he is also a relative or a friend, has to consider primarily the intentions of the dead. If loyalty to living friends is a duty, what shall be said of loyalty to friends who are dead? This, indeed, has a sanction of the deepest religious kind.

No doubt, in the philosophical sense, the aspiration of the dead artist for perfect work and the honour it brings is a delusion, a sweet mockery of the fancy. But then so is every other aspiration which soars above the warm circle of the human affections, and if this delusion of the dead artist was held worthy of respect during the artists life, it is worthy of respectnay, it is worthy of reverenceafter he is dead. Now every true artist when at work has before him an ideal which he would fain reach, or at least approach, and if he does not himself know whether in any given exercise he has reached that ideal or neared it, we may be pretty sure that no one else does. Hence, whenever there is apparent in the circumstances under which the MS. has been found the slightest indication that the writer did not wish it to be given to the public, the representative who ignores this indication sins against that reverence for the dead which in all forms of civilization declares itself to be one of the deepest instincts of man.

That the instinct we are speaking of is really one of the primal instincts is the very first fact that archæology vouches for. Of many lost races, such as the Aztecs and Toltecs, for instance, we have no historical traces save those which are furnished by testimonials of their reverence for the dead. But that this fine instinct is now dying out in the Western worldthat it will soon be eliminated from the human constitution of races that are generally considered to be the most advancedis made manifest by the present attitude of England and America towards their illustrious dead. In the literary arena of both countries, indeed, so entire is the abrogation of this most beautiful of all feelingsso recklessly and so shamefully are not only raw manuscripts, but private letters, put up to auction for publicationthat at last the great writers of our time, confronted by this new terror, are wisely beginning to take care of themselves and their friends by a holocaust of every scrap of paper lying in their desks.

So demoralized has the literary world become by the present craze for notoriety and for personal details of prominent men that an executor who in regard to the disposal of his testators money would act with the most rigid scrupulousness will, in regard to the MSS. he finds in his testators desk, commit, for the benefit of the public, an outrage that would have made the men of a less vulgar period shudder. The benefit of the public, indeed! Who is this public, and what are its rights as against the rights of the dead poet, whose heartstrings are woven into copy by the disloyal friend he trusted? The inherent callousness of mans nature is never so painfully seen as in the relation of this ogre, the public, to dead genius. Without the smallest real reverence for geniuswithout the smallest capacity of distinguishing the poetaster it always adores from the true poet it always ignoresthe public can still fall down before the pedestal upon which genius has been placed by the select fewfall down with its long ears wide open for gossip about genius, or anything else that is talked about.

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

Again, what is to be said about such part of a dead authors writing as, having appeared in print, has afterwards passed through the authors crucible of artistic revision? What about the executors duty here, where the case between the author and the public stands on a different footing? At the present time, when newspapers and novels alone are read, it is not the poets verses which most people read, but paragraphs about what the author and his wife and children eat and drink and avoid: a time when, if the poets verses are read at all, it is the accidents rather than the essentials of the work that seem primarily to concern the public. At such a time an editor is not entirely master of his actions. Doubtless, there is much reason in the wrath of Tennyson and other great poets against the literary resurrection man, who, though incapable of understanding the beauties of a beautiful work, can take a very great interest in poring over the various stages through which that work has passed on its way to perfection. These poets, however, are apt to forget that, after a poem or line has once passed into print, its final suppression is impossible. And perhaps there are other reasons why, in this matter, an editor should be allowed some indulgence.

Here, for instance, is a puzzling case to be tried in foro conscientiæ. In the first edition of Goblin Market, published in 1862, appeared three poems of more breadth of treatment than any of the others: Cousin Kate, a ballad, Sister Maude, a ballad, and A Triad, a sonnet. In subsequent issues of the book these were all omitted. Mr. W. M. Rossetti, speaking of Sister Maude, says: I presume that my sister, with overstrained scrupulosity, considered its moral tone to be somewhat open to exception. In such a view I by no means agree, and I therefore reproduce it. If Christinas objection was valid when she raised it, it is, of course, valid now, when the beloved poet is in the country beyond Orion, and knows what sanctions are of mans imagining, and what sanctions are more eternal than the movements of the stars.

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

Is there ony room at your head, Saunders? Is there ony room at your feet? Is there ony room at your side, Saunders, Where fain, fain I wad sleep?

where the very imperfections of the rhymes seem somehow to add to the pathos and the mystery of the chant. But if, indeed, it has been given to any modern poet to get into this atmosphere, it has been given to Christina Rossetti. And so with the ballad of simple human passion no modern writer has quite done what Christina Rossetti has done in one of the poems here restored:

SISTER MAUDE.

Who told my mother of my shame, Who told my father of my dear? Oh who but Maude, my sister Maude, Who lurked to spy and peer.

Cold he lies, as cold as stone, With his clotted curls about his face: The comeliest corpse in all the world, And worthy of a queens embrace.

You might have spared his soul, sister, Have spared my soul, your own soul too: Though I had not been born at all, Hed never have looked at you.

My father may sleep in Paradise, My mother at Heaven-gate: But sister Maude shall get no sleep Either early or late.

My father may wear a golden gown, My mother a crown may win; If my dear and I knocked at Heaven-gate Perhaps theyd let us in: But sister Maude, O sister Maude, Bide you with death and sin.

But it is for the personal poems that this volume will be prized most dearly by certain readers.

Mr. W. M. Rossetti speaks of the very wide and exceedingly strong outburst of eulogy of his sister which appeared in the public press after her death. Yet that outburst was far from giving adequate expression to what was felt by some of her readersthose between whom and herself there was a bond of sympathy so sacred and so deep as to be something like a religion. It is not merely that she was the acknowledged queen in that world (outside the arena called the literary world) where poetry is its own exceeding great reward, but to other readers of a different kind altogetherreaders who, drawing the deepest delight from such poetry as specially appeals to them, never read any other, and have but small knowledge of poetry as a fine arther verse was, perhaps, more precious still. They feel that at every page of her writing the beautiful poetry is only the outcome of a life whose almost unexampled beauty fascinates them.

Although Christina Rossetti had more of what is called the unconsciousness of poetic inspiration than any other poet of her time, the writing of poetry was not by any means the chief business of her life. She was too thorough a poet for that. No one felt so deeply as she that poetic art is only at the best the imperfect body in which dwells the poetic soul. No one felt so deeply as she that as the notes of the nightingale are but the involuntary expression of the birds emotion, and, again, as the perfume of the violet is but the flowers natural breath, so it is and must be with the song of the very poet, and that, therefore, to write beautifully is in a deep and true sense to live beautifully. In the volume before us, as in all her previously published writings, we see at its best what Christianity is as the motive power of poetry. The Christian idea is essentially feminine, and of this feminine quality Christina Rossettis poetry is full.

In motive power the difference between classic and Christian poetry must needs be very great. But whatever may be said in favour of one as against the other, this at least cannot be controverted, that the history of literature shows no human development so beautiful as the ideal Christian woman of our own day. She is unique, indeed. Men of science tell us that among all the fossilized plants we find none of the lovely family of the rose, and in the same way we should search in vain through the entire human record for anything so beautiful as that kind of Christian lady to whom self-abnegation is not only the first of duties, but the first of joys. Yet, no doubt, the Christian idea must needs be more or less flavoured by each personality through which it is expressed. With regard to Christina Rossetti, while upon herself Christian dogma imposed infinite obligationsobligations which could never be evaded by her without the risk of all the penalties fulminated by all believersthere was in the order of things a sort of ether of universal charity for all others. She would lament, of course, the lapses of every soul, but for these there was a forgiveness which her own lapses could never claim. There was, to be sure, a sweet egotism in this. It was very fascinating, however. This feeling explains what seems somewhat to puzzle the editor, especially in the poem called The End of the First Part, written April 18th, 1849, of which he says, Tears for guilt is in reference to Christina a very exaggerated phrase:

THE END OF THE FIRST PART.

My happy dream is finished with, My dream in which alone I lived so long. My heart sleptwoe is me, it wakeneth; Was weakI thought it strong.

Oh, weary wakening from a life-true dream! Oh pleasant dream from which I wake in pain! I rested all my trust on things that seem, And all my trust is vain.

I must pull down my palace that I built, Dig up the pleasure-gardens of my soul; Must change my laughter to sad tears for guilt, My freedom to control.

Now all the cherished secrets of my heart, Now all my hidden hopes, are turned to sin. Part of my life is dead, part sick, and part Is all on fire within.

The fruitless thought of what I might have been, Haunting me ever, will not let me rest. A cold North wind has withered all my green, My sun is in the West.

But, where my palace stood, with the same stone I will uprear a shady hermitage; And there my spirit shall keep house alone, Accomplishing its age.

There other garden beds shall lie around, Full of sweet-briar and incense-bearing thyme: There I will sit, and listen for the sound Of the last lingering chime.

It was the beauty of her life that made her personal influence so great, and upon no one was that influence exercised with more strength than upon her illustrious brother Gabriel, who in many ways was so much unlike her. In spite of his deep religious instinct and his intense sympathy with mysticism, Gabriel remained what is called a free thinker in the true meaning of that much-abused phrase. In religion as in politics he thought for himself, and yet when Mr. W. M. Rossetti affirms that the poet was never drawn towards free thinking women, he says what is perfectly true. And this arose from the extraordinary influence, scarcely recognized by himself, that the beauty of Christinas life and her religious system had upon him.

This, of course, is not the place in which to say much about him; nor need much at any time and in any place be said, for has he not written his own biographydepicted himself more faithfully than Lockhart could depict Walter Scott, more faithfully than Boswell could depict Dr. Johnson? Has he not done this in the immortal sonnet-sequence called The House of Life? What poet of the nineteenth century do we know so intimately as we know the author of The House of Life?

Christina Rossettis peculiar form of the Christian sentiment she inherited from her mother, the sweetness of whose nature was never disturbed by that exercise of the egoism of the artist in which Christina indulged and without whose influence it is difficult to imagine what the Rossetti family would have been. The father was a poet and a mystic of the cryptographic kind, and it is by no means unlikely that had he studied Shakespeare as he studied Dante he would in these days have been a disciple of the Baconians, and, of course, his influence on the family in the matter of literary activity and of mysticism must have been very great. And yet all that is noblest in Christinas poetry, an ever-present sense of the beauty and power of goodness, must surely have come from the mother, from whom also came that other charm of Christinas, to which Gabriel was peculiarly sensitive, her youthfulness of temperament.

Among the many differences which exist between the sexes this might, perhaps, be mentioned, that while it is beautiful for a man to grow oldgrow old with the passage of yearsa woman to retain her charm must always remain young. In a deep sense woman may be said to have but one paramount charm, youth, and when this is gone all is gone. The youthfulness of the body, of course, soon vanishes, but with any woman who can really win and retain the love of man this is not nearly so important as at first it seems. It is the youthfulness of the soul that, in the truly adorable woman, is invulnerable. It is one of the deep misfortunes of the very poor of cities that as a rule the terrible struggle with the wolf at the door is apt to sour the nature of women and turn them into crones at the age when in the more fortunate classes the true beauty of woman often begins; and even where the environment is not that of poverty, but of straitened means, it is as a rule impossible for a woman to retain this youthfulness.

In the case of the Rossettis, in the early period they were in a position of straitened means. Nor was this all: the children, Gabriel alone excepted, felt themselves to be by nationality aliens. Christina, though she made only one visit to Italy, felt herself to be an Italian, and would smile when any one talked to her of the John Bullism of her brother Gabriel, and yet, with these powerful causes working against their natural elasticity of temperament, both mother and daughter retained that juvenility which Gabriel Rossetti felt to be so refreshing. So strong was it in the mother that it had a strange effect upon the mere physique, and at eighty the expression in the eyes, and, indeed, on the face throughout, retained so much of the winsomeness of youth that she was more beautiful than most young women:

1882.

My blessed mother dozing in her chair On Christmas Day seemed an embodied Love, A comfortable Love with soft brown hair Softened and silvered to a tint of dove; A better sort of Venus with an air Angelical from thoughts that dwell above; A wiser Pallas in whose body fair Enshrined a blessed soul looks out thereof. Winter brought holly then, now Spring has brought Paler and frailer snowdrops shivering; And I have brought a simple humble thought I her devoted duteous Valentine A lifelong thought which thrills this song I sing, A lifelong love to this dear saint of mine.

Although this was not so with Christina, upon whose face ill-health worked its ravages, her temperament, as we say, remained as young as ever. The lovely relationssometimes staid and sometimes playfulbetween mother and daughter, are seen throughout the book before us. But especially are they seen in one little group of poemsThe Valentines to her Motherin regard to which Christina left the following pencilled note:

These Valentines had their origin from my dearest mothers remarking that she had never received one. I, her C. G. R., ever after supplied one on the day; and (so far as I recollect) it was a surprise every time, she having forgotten all about it in the interim.

Mrs. Rossettis first valentine was received when she was nearly seventy-six years of age, and she continued every year to receive a valentine until 1886, when she died. Surely there is not in the history of English poetry anything more fascinating than these valentines.

It is pleasing to see the book open with the following dedication by Mr. W. M. Rossetti:

To Algernon Charles Swinburne, a generous eulogist of Christina Rossetti, who hailed his genius and prized himself the greatest of living British poets, my old and constant friend, I dedicate this book.



V. DR. GORDON HAKE. 18091895.

I little thought when I recently quoted from Dr. Hakes account of that Christmas gathering of the Rossettis at Bognor in 1875a gathering which he has made historicthat to-day I should be writing an obituary notice of the parable-poet himself. It is true that, having fractured a leg in a lamentable accident which befell him, he had for the last few years been imprisoned in one room and compelled during most of the time to lie in a horizontal position. But notwithstanding this, and notwithstanding his great age, his mental faculties remained so unimpaired that it was hard to believe his death could be so near.

[Picture: Dr. Gordon Hake. From a crayon-drawing by D. G. Rossetti reproduced by the kind permission of Mr. Thomas Hake]

Although, owing to his intimacy with George Borrow, Hake was associated in the public mind with the Eastern Counties, he was not an East Anglian. It was at Leeds (in 1809) that he first saw the light. His mother was a Gordon of the Huntly stock, and came of the Park branch of that house. The famous General Gordon was his first cousin, and it was owing to this fact that Hakes son, Mr. Egmont Hake, was entrusted with the material for writing his authoritative books upon the heroic Christian soldier. Between Hakes eldest son, Mr. T. St. E. Hake, a rising novelist, and the General the likeness was curiously strong. Nominated by one of his uncles to Christs Hospital, Hake entered that famous school. He gives in his Memoirs of Eighty Years a very vivid picture of it and also a really vital portrait of himself. From his very childhood he was haunted by a literary ambition which can only be called an insatiable passion. It lasted till the very hour of his death. When eleven years of age he became acquainted with that one poet whose immensity of fame has for more than three centuries been the flame into which the myriad Shakespeare moths of English literature have been flying. The Shakespearean of eleven summers did not, like so many Shakespeare enthusiasts from Davenant down to those latest Shakespeares, Homers, and Miltons of our contemporary paragraphists, get himself up to look like the Stratford bust. The only man who ever really looked like that bust was the late Dion Boucicault, who did so without trying. But Shakespeares wonderful work acted on the imagination of the child of eleven in an equally humorous way. Shakespeares perfection, he says in his memoirs, not only made me envious of the greatest of writers, but it depressed me in turn with the feeling that I could never equal it howsoever long I might live.

Yet although this passion never passed away, but waxed with his years, it must not be supposed that Hake suffered from what in the new criticism is sweetly and appropriately called modernityin other words, that vulgar greed for notoriety that in these days, when literature to be listened to must be puffed like quack medicine and patent soap, has made the atmosphere of the literary arena somewhat stifling in the nostrils of those who turn from modernity to poetic art. Nor was Hakes feeling akin to that fine despair

Before the foreheads of the gods of song

which true poets, great or small, knowthat fine despair which, while it will sometimes stop the breath of one of the true sons of Apollo, as it actually did strike mute Charles Wells, and as at one time it threatened to stop the breath of Rossetti, will lead others to write, and write, and write. It is, however, lifes illusions that in most cases make life tolerable. When in old age calamity came upon Hake, and he was shut out from life as by a prison wall, his one solace, the one thing that really bound him to life, was this ambitious dream which came upon the Bluecoat boy of eleven.

His mother was in easy circumstances, and when a youth Hake travelled a good deal on the Continent, where his success in the great world of that time was swift and complete. If this success was owing as much to his exceptionally striking personal appearance and natural endowment of style as to his intellectual equipmentshigh as these werethat is not surprising to those who knew him. Of course he was well advanced in years before I was old enough to call him my friend; but even then he was so extremely handsome a man that I can well believe the stories I have got from his family connexions (such as his wifes sisters) of his appearance in youth. With the single exception of Tennyson, he was the most poetical-looking poet I have ever seen. And circumstances put to the best uses his natural gift of style; for it was in the plastic period of his life that he met the best people on the Continent and in England. I suspect, indeed, that after the plastic period in a mans life is passed it is not of much use for him to come into contact with what used to be called the great world. To be, or to seem to be, unconscious of ones own bearing towards the world, and unconscious of the worlds bearing towards oneself, is, I fancy, impossible to a maneven though he have the genius and intellectual endowment of a Browningwho is for the first time brought into touch with society after the plastic period is passed.

I have told elsewhere the whimsical story of Hake and Rossetti, of Rossettis delightful account of his reading as a boy, in a coffee-house in Chancery Lane, Hakes remarkable romance Vates, afterwards called Valdarno, in a magazine; his writing a letter about it to the unknown author, and getting no reply until many years had passed. Hakes relations towards Rossetti were of the deepest and most sacred kind. Rossetti had the highest opinion of Hakes poetical genius, and also felt towards him the greatest love and gratitude for services of an inestimable kind rendered to him in the direst crisis of his life. To enter upon these matters, however, is obviously impossible in a brief and hurried obituary notice; and equally impossible is it for me to enter into the poetic principles of a writer whose very originality has been a barrier to his winning a wide recognition.

Hakes best work is that, I think, contained in the volume called New Symbols, in which there is disclosed an extraordinary variety of poetic power. In execution, too, he is at his best in that volume. Christina Rossetti has often told me that Ecce Homo impressed her more profoundly than did any other poem of her own time. Also its daring startled her. It was, however, the previous volume, Madeline, and other Poems, which brought him into contact with Rossettithe great event of his literary life.

If the man ever lived who could take as much interest in another mans work as his own, Dr. Hake in finding Rossetti found that man. Although at that time Tennyson, Browning, Matthew Arnold, William Morris, and Swinburne were running abreast of each other, there was no poet in England who would not have felt honoured by having his work reviewed by Rossetti. But Dr. Hake, whose name was absolutely unknown, had made his way into Rossettis affectionsas, indeed, he made his way into the affections of all who knew himand this was quite enough to induce Rossetti to ask Dr. Appleton for leave to review Madeline in 71 in The Academya request which Appleton, of course, was delighted to grant. And again, when in 1873 Parables and Tales appeared, Mr. John Morley, we may be sure, was something more than willing to let Rossetti review the book in The Fortnightly Review; and, again, when New Symbols appeared, there was some talk about Rossettis reviewing it in The Fortnightly Review; but this, for certain reasons which Rossetti explained to mereasons which have been misunderstood, but which were entirely adequatewas abandoned. Down to the period when Dr. Hake went to live in Germany he and his son Mr. Gordon Hake were among the most intimate friends of the great poet-painter. Mr. Gordon Hake, indeed, a man of admirable culture and abilities, lived with Rossetti, who certainly benefited much by contact with his bright and lively companion. The portrait of Dr. Hake prefixed to Mrs. Meynells selections from his works is one of Rossettis finest crayons. It is, however, too heavy in expression for Hake.

Full of fine qualities as is his best poetry, full of intellectual subtlety, imagination, and a rare combination of subjective with objective power, there is apparently in it a certain je ne sais quoi which has prevented him at present from winning his true meed of fame. His hand, no doubt, is uncertain; but so is the hand of many a successful poetthat of Christina Rossetti, for instance. For sheer originality of conception and of treatment what recent poems surpass or even equal Old Souls and the Serpent Charmer? Then take the remarkable mastery over colour exhibited by Ortruds Vision. His volume of pantheistic sonnets in the Shakespearean form, The New Day, written in his eighty-first year, is on the whole, however, his most remarkable work. The kind of Sufeyistic nature ecstasy displayed therein by a man of so advanced an age is nothing less than wonderful. And as to knowledge of nature, not even Wordsworth or Tennyson knew nature so completely as did Hake, for he had a thorough training as a naturalist. In looking at a flower he could enjoy not only its beauty, but also the delight of picturing to himself the flowers inherited beauty and the ancestors from which the flower got its inheritance. And as regards the lyrical flow imported into so monumental a form as the sonnet, every student of this form must needs study the book with the greatest interest. His very latest work, however, is in prose. I find it extremely difficult to write about Memoirs of Eighty Years. It is full of remarkable qualities: wit, humour, an ebullience of animal spirits that is Rabelaisian. What it lacks (and in some portions of it greatly lacks) is delicacy, refinement of tone. And surely this is remarkable when we realize the kind of man he was who wrote it.

It has been my privilege to go about with him not only in London, but also in Rome, in Paris, in Venice, in Florence, Pisa, &c.; and no matter what might be the quality of the society with which he was brought into contact, it always seemed to me that he was distinguished by his very lack of that accentuated movement which the littérateur generally displays. I merely dwell upon this to show how inscrutable are the mental processes in the crowning puzzle of the great humourist Nature, the writing man. Just as the most angular and gauche man in a literary gathering may possibly turn out to be the poet whose lyrics have been compared to Shelley, or the prose writer whose mellifluous periods have been compared to those of Plato, so the most dignified man in the room may turn out to be the writer of a book whose defect is a noticeable lack of dignified style. It was hard, indeed, for those who knew Hake in the flesh to believe that the Memoirs of Eighty Years was written by him. I suppose I shall be expected to say a word about the famous intimacy between Hake and Borrow. After Hake went to live in Germany, Borrow told me a good deal about this intimacy and also about his own early life; for reticent as he naturally was, he and I got to be confidential and intimate. His friendship with Hake began when Hake was practising as a physician in Norfolk. It lasted during the greater part of Borrows later life. When Borrow was living in London, his great delight was to walk over on Sundays from Hereford Square to Coombe End, call upon Hake, and take a stroll with him over Richmond Park. They both had a passion for herons and for deer. At that time Hake was a very intimate friend of my own, and having had the good fortune to be introduced by him to Borrow, I used to join the two in their walks. Afterwards, when Hake went to live in Germany, I used to take these walks with Borrow alone. Two more interesting men it would be impossible to meet. The remarkable thing was that there was between them no sort of intellectual sympathy. In style, in education, in experience, whatever Hake was Borrow was not. Borrow knew almost nothing of Hakes writings, either in prose or in verse. His ideal poet was Pope, and when he read, or rather looked into, Hakes Worlds Epitaph, he thought he did Hake the greatest honour by saying, There are lines here and there that are nigh as good as Popes. On the other hand, Hakes acquaintance with Borrows works was far behind that of some Borrovians who did not know Lavengro in the flesh, such as Mr. Saintsbury and Mr. Birrell.

Borrow was shy, eccentric, angular, rustic in accent and in locution, but with a charm for me, at least, that was irresistible. Hake was polished, easy, and urbane in everything, and, although not without prejudice and bias, ready to shine gracefully in any society. As far as Hake was concerned, the sole link between them was that of reminiscence of earlier days and adventures in Borrows beloved East Anglia. Among many proofs that I could adduce of this, I will give one. I am the possessor of the manuscript of Borrows Gypsies in Spain, written partly in a Spanish note-book as he moved about Spain in his colporteur days. It was my wish that Hake would leave behind him some memorial of Borrow more worthy of himself and his friend than those brief reminiscences contained in Memoirs of Eighty Years. I took to Hake this precious relic of one of the most wonderful men of the nineteenth century in order to discuss with him differences between the MS. and the printed text. Hake was sitting in his invalid chair, writing verses. What does it all matter? he said. I do not think you understand Lavengro, said I. Hake replied, And yet Lavengro had an advantage over me, for he understood nobody. Every individuality with which he was brought into contact had, as no one knows better than you, to be tinged with colours of his own before he could see it at all.

This, of course, was true enough; and Hakes asperities when speaking of Borrow in Memoirs of Eighty Yearsasperities which have vexed a good many Borrovianssimply arose from the fact that it was impossible for two such men to understand each other. When I told him of Andrew Langs angry onslaught upon Borrow, in his notes to the Waverley Novels, on account of his attacks upon Scott, he said, Well, and does he not deserve it? When I told him of Miss Cobbes description of Borrow as a poseur, he said to me, I told you the same scores of times. But I saw that Borrow had bewitched you during that first walk under the rainbow in Richmond Park. It was that rainbow, I think, that befooled you. Borrows affection for Hake, however, was both strong and deep, as I saw after Hake had gone to Germany and in a way dropped out of Borrows ken. Yet Hake was as good a man as ever Borrow was, and for certain others with whom he was brought in contact as full of a genuine affection as Borrow was himself.



JOHN LEICESTER WARREN, LORD DE TABLEY. 18351895.

I.

In the death of Lord de Tabley, the English world of letters has lost a true poet and a scholar of very varied accomplishments. His friends have lost much more. Since his last attack of influenza, those who knew him and loved him had been much concerned about him. The pallor of his complexion had greatly increased; so had his feebleness. As long ago as May last, when I called upon him at the Athenæum Club in order to join him at a luncheon he was giving at the Café Royal, I found that he had engaged a four-wheeled cab to take us over those few yards. The expression in his kind and wistful blue-grey eyes showed that he had noted the start of surprise I gave on seeing the cab waiting for us. You know my love of a growler, he said; this is just to save us the bother of getting across the Piccadilly cataracts. I thought to myself, I wish it were only the bother of crossing the cataracts which accounts for the growler.

Another sign that the physical part of him was in the grip of the demon of decay was that, instead of coming to the Pines to luncheon, as had been his wont, he preferred of late to come to afternoon tea, and return to Elm Park before dinner. And on the occasion when he last came in this way it seemed to us here that he had aged still more; yet his intellectual forces had lost nothing of their power. And as a companion he was as winsome as ever. That fine quality with which he was so richly endowed, the quality which used to be called urbanity, was as fresh when I saw him last as when I first knew him. That sweet sagacity, mellowed and softened by a peculiarly quiet humour, shone from his face at intervals as he talked of the pleasant old days when he was my colleague on The Athenæum, and when I used to call upon him so frequently on my way to Rossetti in Cheyne Walk to chat over the walnuts and the wine about poetry.

My own friendship with him began at my first meeting him, and this was long ago. Being at that time a less-known man of letters than I am now, supposing that to be possible, I was astonished one day when my friend Edmund Gosse told me that his friend Leicester Warren had expressed a wish to meet me on account of certain things of mine which he had read in The Examiner and The Athenæum. I accepted with alacrity Mr. Gosses invitation to one of those charming salons of his on the banks of Westbournias Grand Canal which have become historic. I was surprised to find Warren, who was then scarcely above forty, looking so old, not to say so old-fashioned. At that time he did not wear the moustache and beard which afterwards lent a picturesqueness to his face. There was a kind of rural appearance about him which had for me a charm of its own; it suited so well with his gentle ways, I thought. This being the impression he made upon me, it may be imagined how delighted I was shortly afterwards to see him come to the door of Ivy Lodge, Putney, where I was then living alone. Nor was I less surprised than delighted to see him. On realizing at Gosses salon that my new acquaintance was a botanist, I had fraternized with him on this point, and had described to him an extremely rare and lovely little tree growing in the centre of my garden, which some unknown lover of trees had imported. I had given Warren a kind of general invitation to come some day and see it. So early a call as this I had not hoped to get. Perhaps I thought so reclusive a man as he even then appeared would never come at all.

After having duly admired the tree he turned to the Rossetti crayons on the walls of the rooms; but although he talked much about The Spirit of the Rainbow and the design from the same beautiful model which William Sharp has christened Forced Music, the loveliness of which attracted him not a little, I perceived that he had something else that he wanted to talk about, and allowed him to lead the conversation up to it. To my surprise I found that, so far from having perceived how much he had interested me, he had imagined that my attitude towards him was constrained, and had explained it to his own discomfort after the following fashion: Watts has an intimate friend of whose poetry I am a deep admirerso deep indeed that some people, and not without reason, have said that my own poetry is unduly influenced by it. But an article by me in The Fortnightly goes out of its way to dub as a minor poet the very writer to whose influence I have succumbed. It is the incongruity between my dubbing my idol a minor poet and my real and most obvious admiration of his work that makes Watts, in spite of an external civility, feel unfriendly towards me. Yet there is no real incongruity, for it was the editor, G. H. Lewes, who, after my proof had been returned for press, interpolated the objectionable words about the minor poet.

This was how he had been reasoning. When I laughed and told him to recast his syllogismtold him that I had never seen the article in question, and doubted whether my friend hadmatters became very bright between us. He stayed to luncheon; we walked on the Common; I showed him our Wimbledon sun-dews; in a word, I felt that I had discovered a richer gold mine than the richest in the world, a new friend. Had I then known him as well as I afterwards did, I should have been aware that he had a strong dash of the sensitive, not to say the morbid, in his nature. He had a habit of submitting almost every incident of his life to such an analysis as that I have been describing.

On another occasion, when years later he had a difference with a friend, I reminded him of the incident recorded above, and made him laugh by saying, My dear Warren, you are so afraid of treading on peoples corns that you tread upon them.

On first visiting him, as on many a subsequent occasion, I was struck by the variety of his intellectual interests, and the thoroughness with which he pursued them all. I have lately said in print what I fully believethat he was the most learned of English poets, if learning means something more than mere scholarship. He was a skilled numismatist, and in 1862 published, through the Numismatic Society, An Essay on Greek Federal Coinage, and an essay On Some Coins of Lycia under Rhodian Domination and of the Lycian League. He even took an interest in book-plates, and actually, in 1880, published A Guide to the Study of Book-Plates. I should not have been at all surprised to learn that he was also writing a guide for the collectors of postage stamps.

At this time he had published a good deal of verse; for instance, Eclogues and Monodramas in 1865; Studies in Verse in 1866; Orestes in 1867; a collection of poems called Rehearsals in 1873; another collection, called The Searching Net, in 1876. From this time, during many years, I saw him frequently, although, for a reason which it is not necessary to discuss here, he became seized with a deep dislike of the literary world and its doings, and I am not aware that he saw any literary man save myself and the late W. B. Scott, the bond between whom and himself was book-plates! Then he took to residing in the country. As a poet he seemed to be quite forgotten, save by students of poetry, until his name was revived by means of Mr. Miless colossal anthology The Poets and the Poetry of the Nineteenth Century, Mr. Miles, it seems, was a great admirer of Lord de Tableys poetry, and managed to reach the hermit in his cell. In the sixth volume of his work Mr. Miles gave a judicious selection from Lord de Tableys poems and an admirable essay upon them. The selection attracted a good deal of attention.

On finding that the public would listen to him, I urged him to bring out a volume of selected pieces from all his works, an idea which for some time he contested with his usual pessimistic vigour. Having, however, set my heart upon it, I spoke upon the subject to Mr. John Lane, who at once saw his way to bring out such a volume at his own risk. To the poets astonishment the book was a success, and it at once passed into a second edition. In the spring of this year he was emboldened to bring out another volume of new poems, and his name became firmly re-established as a poet. It was after the success of the first book that he consulted me upon a question which was then upon his mind: Should he devote his future energies to literature or to making himself a position as a speaker in the Lords? He had lately had occasion to speak both in the country and in the Lords upon some local matter of importance, and his success had in some slight degree revived an old aspiration to plunge into the world of politics. He was a Liberal, and in 1868 he had contestedbut unsuccessfullyMid-Cheshire. This was on the first election for that division after the Reform Act of 1867. His support in a county so Conservative as Cheshire had really been very strong, but he never made another effort to get into Parliament. You know my way, he used to say. I can make one springperhaps a pretty good springbut not more than one.

On the whole, he leaned towards the idea of going into politics. The way in which he put the case to me was thoroughly characteristic of him: Even if my verse were strong and vital, which I fear it is not, there is almost no chance for men of my generation receiving more than a slight attention at the present day. Things have altogether changed since the sixties and seventies, when I published my most important workat a time when the prominent names were Tennyson, Browning, Matthew Arnold, Rossetti, Morris, and Swinburne. The old critical oracles are now dumb; the reviewers are all young men whose knowledge of poetry does not go back so far as the sixties. Those who reviewed the selection from my work in Miless book showed themselves to be entirely unconscious of the name of Leicester Warren, and treated the poems there selected as being the work of a new writer; and even when the poems published by Lane came out, no one seemed to be aware that they were by a writer who was very much to the fore a quarter of a century ago. That book has had a flutter of success, but in how large a degree was the success owing to the curiosity excited by the book of a man of my generation being brought out now, and by the publisher of the men of this? With all my sympathy with the work of the younger men and my admiration of some of it, things, I say, have changed since those days.

I did not share these pessimistic views. Moreover, knowing as I did how extremely sensitive he was, I knew that his figuring in Parliament would result in the greatest pain to him, and if I gave a somewhat exaggerated expression with regard to my hopes of him in the literary world, it was a kindly feeling towards himself that impelled me to do so. He took my advice and proceeded to gather material for another volume.