Old Familiar Faces Part 3

Having from early childhood shown a strong propensity for drawing and painting, which had thus been always regarded as his future profession, he now left school for ever and received no more school learning. In Latin he was already fairly proficient for his age; French he knew well; he had spoken Italian from childhood, and had some German lessons about 18445. On leaving school he went at once to the Art Academy of Cary (previously called Sa.s.s's) near Bedford Square, and thence obtained admission to the Royal Academy Antique School in 1844 or 1845. To the Royal Academy Life School he never went, and he was a somewhat negligent art student, but always regarded as one who had a future before him.

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

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

The translations from the early Italian poets also began as far back as 1845 or 1846, and may have been mainly completed by 1849. Rossetti's gifts as a translator were, no doubt, of the highest. And this arose from his deep sympathy with literature as a medium of human expression: he could enter into the temperaments of other writers, and by sympathy criticize the literary form from the author's own inner standpoint, supposing always that there was a certain racial kins.h.i.+p with the author.

Many who write well themselves have less sympathy with the expressional forms adopted by other writers than is displayed by men who have neither the impulse nor the power to write themselves. But this sympathy betrayed him sometimes into a free rendering of locutions such as a translator should be chary of indulging in. Materials for a volume acc.u.mulated slowly, but all the important portions of the 'Poems'

published in 1870 had been in existence some years before that date. The prose story of 'Hand and Soul' was also written as early as 1848 or 1849.

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

Yet wonderful as was Rossetti as an artist and poet, he was still more wonderful, I think, as a man. The chief characteristic of his conversation was an incisiveness so perfect and clear as to have often the pleasurable surprise of wit. It is so well known that Rossetti has been for a long time the most retired man of genius of our day, and so many absurd causes for this retirement have been spoken of, that there is nothing indecorous in the true cause of it being made public by one who of late years has known more of him, perhaps, than has any other person.

About 1868 the curse of the artistic and poetic temperament-insomnia-attacked him, and one of the most distressing effects of insomnia is a nervous shrinking from personal contact with any save a few intimate friends. This peculiar kind of nervousness may be aggravated by the use of sleeping draughts, and in his case was thus aggravated.

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

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

II.

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

"I have not attempted to write a biographical account of my brother, nor to estimate the range or value of his powers and performances in fine art and in literature. I agree with those who think that a brother is not the proper person to undertake a work of this sort.

An outsider can do it dispa.s.sionately, though with imperfect knowledge of the facts; a friend can do it with mastery, and without much undue bias; but a brother, however equitably he may address himself to the task, cannot perform it so as to secure the prompt and cordial a.s.sent of his readers."

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

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

Of all forms of literary art biography demands from the artist not only the greatest courage, but also the happiest combination of the highest gifts. To succeed in painting the portrait of Achilles or of Priam, of Hamlet or of Oth.e.l.lo, may be difficult, but is it as difficult as to succeed in painting the portrait of Browning or Rossetti? Surely not.

In the one case an intense dramatic imagination is needed, and nothing more. If Homer's Achaian and Trojan heroes were falsely limned, not they, but Homer's art, would suffer the injury. If for the purposes of art the poet unduly exalted this one or unduly abased that-if he misread one incident in the mythical life of Achilles, and another in the mythical life of Hector-he did wrong to his art undoubtedly, but none to the memory of a dead man, and none to the peace of a living one. But with him who would paint the portrait of Browning or Rossetti how different is the case! Although he requires the poet's vision before he can paint a living picture of his subject, the task he has set himself to do is something more than artistic: before everything else it is fiduciary.

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

Here is a case in point. Down to the very last moment of his life Rossetti's feeling towards his great contemporary Tennyson was that of the deepest admiration, and yet what says the doc.u.mentary evidence as given to the world by Rossetti's brother? It shows that Rossetti used an extremely unpleasant phrase concerning a letter from Tennyson acknowledging the receipt of Rossetti's first volume of poems in 1870.

Those who have heard Tennyson speak of Rossetti know that to use this phrase in relation to any letter of his dealing with Rossetti's poetry was to misunderstand it. Yet here are the unpleasant words of a hasty mood, "rather shabby," in print. And why? Because the public has become so demoralized that its feast of facts, its feast of doc.u.ments it must have, come what will. But even supposing that the public had any rights whatsoever in regard to a man of genius, which we deny, what are letters as indications of a man's character? Of all modes of expression is not the epistolary mode that in which man's instinct for using language "to disguise his thought" is most likely to exercise itself? There is likely to be far more deep sincerity in a sonnet than in a letter. It is no exaggeration to say that the common courtesies of life demand a certain amount of what is called "blarney" in a letter-especially in an eminent man's letter-which would ruin a sonnet. And this must be steadily borne in mind at a time like ours, when private letters are bought and sold like any other article of merchandise, not only immediately after a man's death, but during his lifetime.

With regard to literary men, their letters in former times were simply artistic compositions; hence as indications of character they must be judged by the same canons as literary essays would be judged. In both cases the writer had full s.p.a.ce and full time to qualify his statements of opinion; in both cases he was without excuse for throwing out anything heedlessly. Not only in Walpole's case and Gray's, but also in Charles Lamb's, we apply the same rules of criticism to the letters as we apply to the published utterances that appeared in the writer's lifetime. But now, when letters are just the hurried expression of the moment, when ill-considered things-often rash things-are said which either in literary compositions or in conversation would have been, if said at all, greatly qualified-the greatest injustice that can be done to a writer is to print his letters indiscriminately. Especially is this the case with Rossetti.

All who knew him speak of him as being a superb critic, and a superb critic he was. But his printed letters show nothing of the kind. On literary subjects they are often full of over-statement and of biased judgment. Here is the explanation: in conversation he had a way of perpetrating a brilliant critical paradox for the very purpose of qualifying it, turning it about, colouring it by the lights of his wonderful fancy, until at last it became something quite different from the original paradox, and full of truth and wisdom. But when such a paradox went off in a letter, there it remained unqualified; and they who, not having known him, scoff at his friends who claim for him the honours of a great critic, seem to scoff with reason.

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

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

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

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

That this was a matter of great and peculiar vexation to him may be supposed when it is remembered that unequalled as had been his good fortune in finding fine face-models (ladies of position and culture, and often of extraordinary beauty), he had in the matter of figure-models been most unlucky. And this, added to his slight knowledge of anatomy, made all his nude pictures undesirable save those few painted from the beautiful girl who stood for 'The Spirit of the Rainbow' and 'Forced Music.' What his work from the nude suffered from this is incalculable, as may be seen in the crayon called 'Ligeia Siren,' a naked siren playing on a kind of lute, which Rossetti described as "certainly one of his best things." The beauty and value of a crayon which for weird poetry-especially in the eyes-must be among Rossetti's masterpieces are ruined by the drawing of the b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

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

"At the beginning of this year 1874 Rossetti was again occupied with the picture which he had commenced in the preceding spring, ent.i.tled, 'The Bower Maiden'-a girl in a room with a pot of marigolds and a black cat. It was painted from 'little Annie' (a cottage-girl and house a.s.sistant at Kelmscott), and it 'goes on' (to quote the words of one of his letters) 'like a house on fire. This is the only kind of picture one ought to do-just copying the materials, and no more: all others are too much trouble.' It is not difficult to understand that the painter of a 'Proserpine' and a 'Ghirlandata' would occasionally feel the luxury of a mood intellectually lazy, and would be minded to give voice to it-as in this instance-in terms wilfully extreme; keeping his mental eye none the less steadily directed to a 'Roman Widow' or a 'Blessed Damozel' in the near future. As a matter of fact, my brother painted very few things, at any stage of his career, as mere representations of reality, unimbued by some inventive or ideal meaning: in the rare instances when he did so, he naturally felt an indolent comfort, and made no scruple of putting the feeling into words-highly suitable for being taken _c.u.m grano salis_. Nothing was more alien from his nature or habit than 'tall talk' of any kind about his aims, aspirations, or performances. It was into his work-not into his utterances about his work-that he infused the higher and deeper elements of his spirit. 'The Bower Maiden' was finished early in February, and sold to Mr. Graham for 682_l._, after it had been offered to Mr. Leyland at a rather higher figure, and declined. It has also pa.s.sed under the names of 'Fleurs de Marie,' 'Marigolds,' and 'The Gardener's Daughter.' After 'The Bower Maiden' had been disposed of, other work was taken up-more especially 'The Roman Widow,' bearing the alternative t.i.tle of 'Dis Manibus,' which was in an advanced stage by the month of May, and was completed in June or July. It was finished with little or no glazing. The Roman widow is a lady still youthful, in a grey fawn-tinted drapery, with a musical instrument in each hand; she is in the sepulchral chamber of her husband, whose stone urn appears in the background. I possess the antique urn which my brother procured, and which he used for the painting. For graceful simplicity, and for depth of earnest but not strained sentiment, he never, I think, exceeded 'The Roman Widow.' The two instruments seem to repeat the two mottoes on the urn, 'Ave Domine-Vale Domine.' The head was painted from Miss Wilding, already mentioned; but it seems to me partly a.s.sociated with the type of Mrs. Stillman's face as well.

There are many roses in this picture-both wild and garden roses; they kept the artist waiting a little after the work was otherwise finished. 'I really think it looks well,' he wrote on one occasion; 'its fair luminous colour seems to melt into the gold frame (which has only just come) like a part of it.' He feared that the picture might be 'too severe and tragic' for some tastes; but could add (not, perhaps, with undue confidence), 'I don't think Gericault or Regnault would have quite scorned it.'"

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

O, happy days with him who once so loved us!

We loved as brothers, with a single heart, The man whose iris-woven pictures moved us From nature to her blazoned shadow-Art.

How often did we trace the nestling Thames From humblest waters on his course of might, Down where the weir the bursting current stems- There sat till evening grew to balmy night, Veiling the weir whose roar recalled the Strand Where we had listened to the wave-lipped sea, That seemed to utter plaudits while we planned Triumphal labours of the day to be.

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

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

"Into the 'Venus Astarte' he had put his utmost intensity of thinking, feeling, and method-he had aimed to make it equally strong in abstract sentiment and in physical grandeur-an ideal of the mystery of beauty, offering a sort of combined quintessence of what he had endeavoured in earlier years to embody in the two several types of 'Sibylla Palmifera' and 'Lilith,' or (as he ultimately named them in the respective sonnets) 'Soul's Beauty' and 'Body's Beauty.'

It may be well to remark that, by the time when he completed the 'Venus Astarte,' or 'Astarte Syriaca,' he had got into a more austere feeling than of old with regard to colour and chiaroscuro; and the charm of the picture has, I am aware, been less, to many critics and spectators of the work, than he would have deemed to be its due, as compared with some of his other performances of more obvious and ostensible attraction."

Though Mr. W. M. Rossetti is right in saying that it was not till the beginning of 1877 that this remarkable picture was brought to a conclusion, the main portions were done during that long sojourn at Bognor in 18767, which those who have written about Rossetti have hitherto left unrecorded. Having fallen into ill health after his return to London from Kelmscott, he was advised to go to the seaside, and a large house at Bognor was finally selected. No doubt one reason why the preference was given to Bognor was the fact that Blake's cottage at Felpham was close by, for businesslike and unbusiness-like qualities were strangely mingled in Rossetti's temperament, and it was generally some sentiment or unpractical fancy of this kind that brought about Rossetti's final decision upon anything. Blake's name was with him still a word to charm with, and he was surprised to find, on the first pilgrimage of himself and his friends to the cottage, that scarcely a person in the neighbourhood knew what Blake it was that "the Londoners" were inquiring about.

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

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

W. M. Rossetti sets so high among his brother's work.

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

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

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

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

During one of those seaside rambles alluded to above, while he was watching with some friends the billows tumbling in beneath the wintry moon, some one, perhaps Rossetti himself, directed attention to the peculiar effect of the moon's disc reflected in the white surf, and compared it to fire in snow. Rossetti, struck with the picturesqueness of the comparison, made there and then an elaborate prose note of it in one of the diminutive pocket-books that he was in the habit of carrying in the capacious pocket of his waistcoat. Years afterwards-shortly before his death, in fact-when he came to write 'The King's Tragedy,'

remembering this note, he thought he could find an excellent place for it in the scene where the king meets the Spae wife on the seash.o.r.e and listens to her prophecies of doom. But he was at once confronted by this obstacle: so elaborately had the image of the moon reflected in the surf been rendered in the prose note-so entirely did the prose matter seem to be the inevitable and the final incarnation of the thought-that it appeared impossible to escape from it into the movement and the diction proper to poetry. It was only after much labour-a labour greater than he had given to all the previous stanzas combined-that he succeeded in freeing himself from the fetters of the prose, and in painting the picture in these words:-

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

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

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

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