Caine Thomas Henry - Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti

RECOLLECTIONS OF

DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI

By T. Hall Caine

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PREFACE.

One day towards the close of 1881 Rossetti, who was then very ill, said to me:

"How well I remember the beginning of our correspondence, and how little did I think it would lead to such relations between us as have ensued! I was at the time very solitary and depressed from various causes, and the letters of so young and ardent a well-wisher, though unknown to me personally, brought solace."

"Yours," I said, "were very valuable to me."

"Mine to you were among the largest bodies of literary letters I ever wrote, others being often letters of personal interest."

"And so admirable in themselves," I added, "and so free from the discussion of any but literary subjects that many of them would bear to be printed exactly as you penned them."

"That," he said, "will be for you some day to decide."

This was the first hint of any intention upon my part of publishing the letters he had written to me; indeed, this was the first moment at which I had conceived the idea of doing so. Nothing further on the subject was said down to the morning of the Thursday preceding the Sunday on which he died, when we talked together for the last time on subjects of general interest, - subsequent interviews being concerned wholly with solicitous inquiries upon my part, in common with other anxious friends, as to the nature of his sufferings, and the briefest answers from him.

"How long have we been friends?" he said.

I replied, between three and four years from my first corresponding with him.

"And how long did we correspond?"

"Three years, nearly."

"What numbers of my letters you must possess! They may perhaps even yet be useful to you."

From this moment I regarded the publication of his letters as in some sort a trust; and though I must have withheld them for some years if I had consulted my own wishes simply, I yielded to the necessity that they should be published at once, rather than run any risk of their not been published at all.

What I have just said will account for the circumstance that I, the youngest and latest of Rossetti's friends, should be the first to seem to stand towards him in the relation of a biographer. I say seem to stand, for this is not a biography. It was always known to be Rossetti's wish that if at any moment after his death it should appear that the story of his life required to be written, the one friend who during many of his later years knew him most intimately, and to whom he unlocked the most sacred secrets of his heart, Mr. Theodore Watts, should write it, unless indeed it were undertaken by his brother William. But though I know that whenever Mr. Watts sets pen to paper in pursuance of such purpose, and in fulfilment of such charge, he will afford us a recognisable portrait of the man, vivified by picturesque illustration, the like of which few other writers could compass, I also know from what Rossetti often told me of his friend's immersion in all kinds and varieties of life, that years (perhaps many years) may elapse before such a biography is given to the world. My own book is, I trust, exactly what it purports to be: a volume of Recollections, interwoven with letters and criticism, and preceded by such a summary of the leading facts in Rossetti's life as seems necessary for the elucidation of subsequent records. I have drawn Rossetti precisely as I found him in each stage of our friendship, exhibiting his many contradictions of character, extenuating nothing, and, I need hardly add, setting down naught in malice. Up to this moment I have never inquired of myself whether to those who have known little or nothing of Rossetti hitherto, mine will seem to be on the whole favourable or unfavourable portraiture; but I have trusted my admiration of the poet and affection for the friend to penetrate with kindly and appreciative feeling every comment I have had to offer. I was attracted to Rossetti in the first case by ardent love of his genius, and retained to him ultimately by love of the man. As I have said in the course of these Recollections, it was largely his unhappiness that held me, with others, as by a spell, and only too sadly in this particular did he in his last year realise his own picture of Dante at Verona:

Yet of the twofold life he led

In chainless thought and fettered will

Some glimpses reach us, - somewhat still

Of the steep stairs and bitter bread,

Of the soul's quest whose stern avow

For years had made him haggard now.

I am sensible of the difficulty and delicacy of the task I have undertaken, involving, as it does, many interests and issues; and in every reference to surviving relatives as well as to other persons now living, with whom Rossetti was in any way allied, I have exercised in all friendliness the best judgment at my command.

Clement's Inn, October 1882.

*** It has not been thought necessary to attach dates to the

letters printed in this volume, for not only would the

difficulty of doing so be great, owing to the fact that

Rossetti rarely dated his letters, but the utility of dates

in such a case would be doubtful, because the substance of

what is said is often quite impersonal, and, where

otherwise, is almost independent of the time of production.

It may be sufficient to say that the letters were written in

the years 1879,1880, and 1881.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I.

Gabriele Rossetti - Boyhood - The pre-Raphaelite Movement - Early

Manhood - The Blessed Damozel - Jenny - Sister Helen - The Translations - The

House of Life - The Germ - Oxford and Cambridge Magazine - Blackfriars

Bridge - Married Life

CHAPTER II.

Chelsea - Chloral - Dante's Dream - Recovery of the Poems - Poems - The

Contemporary Controversy - Mr. Theodore Watts - Rose Mary - The

White Ship - The King's Tragedy - Poetic Continuations - Cloud

Confines - Journalistic Slanders

CHAPTER III.

Early Intercourse - Poetic Impulses - Beginning of Correspondence - Early

Letters

CHAPTER IV.

Inedited Poems - Inedited Ballads - Additions to Sister Helen - Hand

and Soul - St. Agnes of Intercession - Catholic Opinion - Rossetti's

Catholicism - Cloud Confines - The Portrait

CHAPTER V.

Coleridge - Wordsworth - Lamb and Coleridge - Charles Wells - Keats - Leigh

Hunt and Keats - Keats's Sister

CHAPTER VI.

Chatterton - Oliver Madox Brown - Gilchrist's Blake - George Gilfillan - Old

Periodicals - A Rustic Poet - Art and Politics - Letters in Biography

CHAPTER VII.

Cheyne Walk - The House - First Meeting - Rossetti's Personality - His

Reading - The Painter's Craft - Mr. Ruskin - Rossetti's Sensitiveness - His

Garden - His Library

CHAPTER VIII.

English Sonnets - Sonnet Structure - Shakspeare's Sonnets - Wells's

Sonnet - Charles Whitehead - Ebenezer Jones - Mr. W. M. Rossetti - A New

Sonnet - Mr. W. Davies - Canon Dixon - Miss Christina Rossetti - The Bride's

Prelude - The Supernatural in Poetry

CHAPTER IX.

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

London - London - Birchington

CHAPTER I.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti was the eldest son of Gabriele Rossetti and Frances Polidori, daughter of Alfieri's secretary, and sister of the young physician who travelled with Lord Byron. Gabriele Rossetti was a native of Yasto, in the district of the Abruzzi, kingdom of Naples. He was a patriotic poet of very considerable distinction; and, as a politician, took a part in extorting from Ferdinand I. the Constitution of 1820. After the failure of the Neapolitan insurrection, owing to the treachery of the King (who asked leave of absence on a pretext of ill-health, and returned with an overwhelming Austrian army), the insurrectionists were compelled to fly. Some of them fell victims; others lay long in concealment. Rossetti was one of the latter; and, while he was in hiding, Sir Graham Moore, the English admiral, was lying with an English fleet in the bay. The wife of the admiral had long been a warm admirer of the patriotic hymns of Rossetti, and, when she learned his danger, she prevailed with her husband to make efforts to save him. Sir Graham thereupon set out with another English officer to the place of concealment, habited the poet in an English uniform, placed him between them in a carriage, and put him aboard a ship that sailed next day to Malta, where he obtained the friendship of the governor, John Hookham Frere, by whose agency valuable introductions were procured, and ultimately Rossetti established himself in England. Arrived in London about 1823, he lived a cheerful life as an exile, though deprived of the advantages of his Italian reputation. He married in 1826, and his eldest son was born May 12, 1828, in Charlotte Street, Portland Place, London. He was appointed Professor of Italian at King's College, and died in 1854. His house was for years the constant resort of Italian refugees; and the son used to say that it was from observation of these visitors of his father that he depicted the principal personage of his Last Confession. He did not live to see the returning glories of his country or the consummation we have witnessed of that great movement founded upon the principles for which he fought and suffered. His present position in Italy as a poet and patriot is a high one, a medal having been struck in his honour. An effort is even now afoot to erect a statue to him in his native place, and one of the last occasions upon which the son put pen to paper was when trying to make a reminiscent rough portrait for the use of the sculptor. Gabriele Rossetti spent his last years in the study of Dante, and his works on the subject are unique, exhibiting a peculiar view of Dante's conception of Beatrice, which he believed to be purely ideal, and employed solely for purposes of speculative and political disquisition. Something of this interpretation was fixed undoubtedly upon the personage by Dante himself in his later writings, but whether the change were the result of a maturer and more complicated state of thought, and whether the real and ideal characters of Beatrice may not be compatible, are questions which the poetic mind will not consider it possible to decide. Coleridge, no doubt, took a fair view of Rossetti's theory when he said: "Rossetti's view of Dante's meaning is in great part just, but he has pushed it beyond all bounds of common sense. How could a poet - and such a poet as Dante - have written the details of the allegory as conjectured by Rossetti? The boundaries between his allegory and his pure picturesque are plain enough, I think, at first reading." It was, doubtless, due to his devotion to studies of the Florentine that Gabriele Rossetti named after him his eldest son.