Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (657 page)

They took themselves with such extreme seriousness — these Pre-Raphaelite poets — and nevertheless I have always fancied that they are responsible for the death of English poetry. My father once wrote of Rossetti that he put down the thoughts of Dante in the language of Shakespeare, and the words seem to me to be extremely true and extremely damning. For what is wanted of a poet is that he should express his own thoughts in the language of his own time. This, with perhaps the solitary exception of Christina Rossetti, the Pre-Raphaelite poets never thought of.

I remember once hearing Stephen Crane — the author of
The Red Badge of Courage
and of
The Open Boat
, which is the finest volume of true short stories in the English language, — I remember hearing him, with his wonderful eyes flashing and his extreme vigour and intonation, comment upon a sentence of Robert Louis Stevenson that he was reading. The sentence was: “With interjected finger he delayed the motion of the timepiece.”

“By God, poor dear!” Crane exclaimed. “That man put back the clock of English fiction fifty years.” I do not know that this is exactly what Stevenson did do. I should say myself that the art of writing in English received the numbing blow of a sandbag when Rossetti wrote, at the age of eighteen,
The Blessed Damozel.
From that time forward and until to-day — and for how many years to come! — the idea has been inherent in the mind of the English writer that writing was a matter of digging for obsolete words with which to express ideas for ever dead and gone. Stevenson did this, of course, as carefully as any Pre-Raphaelite, though instead of going to mediaeval books he ransacked the seventeenth century. But this tendency is unfortunately not limited to authors misusing our very excellent tongue. The other day I was listening to an excellent Italian
conférencier
who assured an impressed audience that Signor D’Annuncio is the greatest Italian stylist there has ever been, since in his last book he has used over 2,017 obsolete words which cannot be understood by a modern Italian without the help of a mediaeval glossary.

CHAPTER I
V

CHRISTINA ROSSETTI AND PRE-RAPHAELITE LOVE

It always appears to me that whereas D. G. Rossetti belongs to a comparatively early period of nineteenth-century literature Christina’s was a much more modern figure. Dates, perhaps, do not bear me out in this. Rossetti was born in the ‘twenties, printed his first poem when he was perhaps ten, and wrote
The Blessed Damozel
when he was eighteen. On the other hand his first published volume of original poetry did not appear until the late ‘seventies. Yet he died in the ‘eighties. Christina Rossetti’s
Goblin Market
volume was published in the late ‘sixties, but she lived well on into the ‘nineties; and she wrote poems until practically the day of her death. I am perhaps eccentric when I say that I consider Christina Rossetti to be the greatest master of words — at least of English words — that the nineteenth century gave us. Her verse at its best is as clean in texture and as perfect in the choice of epithet as any of Maupassant’s short stories. And although the range of her subjects was limited — although it was limited very strictly within the bounds of her personal emotions, yet within those limits she expressed herself consummately. And it was in this rather more than by her dates of publication that she proved herself a poet more modern than her brother who in his day bulked so much more largely in the public eye. It was perhaps for this reason, too, that Mr. Ruskin — and in this alone he would have earned for himself my lasting dislike — that Mr. Ruskin pooh-poohed and discouraged Christina Rossetti’s efforts at poetry. For there is extant at least one letter from the voluminous critic in which he declares that the
Goblin Market
volume was too slight and too frivolous a fascicule to publish, and to the end of his days Mr. Ruskin considered that Christina damaged her brother. It was not good for Gabriel’s fame or market, he considered, that there should be another Rossetti in the field. And I must confess that when I consider these utterances and this attitude I am filled with as hot and as uncontrollable an anger as I am when faced by some more than usually imbecile argument against the cause of women’s franchise. Yesterday I was arguing upon this latter subject with a distinguished ornament of the London stipendiai y bench. Said the police magistrate: No woman ever administered financial interests, ever reigned or ever fought. I mentioned with a quite feigned humility and with apologies for the antiquated nature of my illustrations the prioresses and mothers superior who with never-questioned financial abilities had administered, and do administer, the innumerable convents, schools, almshouses, hospitals and penitentiaries of Catholic Christendom. His Worship mentioned with a snigger Sœur C — of Paris who obtained fraudulent credit from jewellers in order to support almshouses. Thus with one sneer and the mention of a lady who was not a nun at all, Mr. — considered himself to have demolished the claims to consideration of all Catholic womanhood. I said that his argument reminded me of a Park orator who claimed to demolish the whole historical and social record of the Church of England by citing the name of one Herring, a sham clergyman, who had extorted contributions from the charitable in favour of a fraudulent almshouse, and I mentioned Joan of Arc. The legal luminary remarked that he never
had
liked her, and when I produced Queen Elizabeth and Queen Victoria as arguments in favour of the fact that a country might enormously extend its bounds, and enormously flourish, whilst a queen reigned, my superior interlocutor remarked that Victoria was a horrid old woman and that Elizabeth ought to have been a man.

I do not say that my friend’s methods of argument made me angry, since they gave me the chance of roasting him alive before an able and distinguished assembly, but I could not help being reminded by him of Mr. Ruskin’s attitude towards Christina Rossetti. It was the same fine superiority as made the police magistrate embrace St. Catharine of Sienna, Joan of Arc and Queen Elizabeth in one common sneer. But after all, Queen Elizabeth and the other two could look after themselves. Did not one St. Catharine confute forty thousand doctors, amongst whom were nine hundred and sixty police magistrates? And did she not in Heaven decide the ticklish case as to whether penguins, when they had been baptized, must be considered to possess souls?

But Christina Rossetti’s was a figure so tragic, so sympathetic and, let me emphasize it, so modern, that I could wish for any one who put obstacles in her way — and there were several — that fate which was adjudged the most terrible of all, that a millstone should be set about his neck and that he should be cast into the deep sea. And, indeed, it would seem that Mr. Ruskin has fallen into a deep, a very deep, a bottomless sea of oblivion with, around his neck, all his heavy volumes for a millstone. (I am at this moment corrected in this exaggerated statement, for I am informed that you will always find
Sesame and Lilies
in every library catalogue!) And indeed, I am no doubt unduly hard upon Mr. Ruskin, little though his eloquent ghost may mind it. For the fact is that Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites whom he heralded so splendidly and so picturesquely survived — that these men marked the close of an era. Ruskin was engaged in setting the seal on a pot. Christina Rossetti was, if not a genie in the form of a cloud of smoke, at least a subtle essence that was bound not only to escape his embalming but to survive him.

Ruskin pooh-poohed her because she was not important. And I fancy he disliked her intuitively because importance was the last thing in this world that she would have desired. I remember informing her shortly after the death of Lord Tennyson that there was a very strong movement, or at any rate a very strong feeling abroad, that the laureateship should be conferred upon her. She shuddered. And I think that she gave evidence then to as strong an emotion as I ever knew in her. The idea of such a position of eminence filled her with real horror. She wanted to be obscure and to be an obscure handmaiden of the Lord as fervently as she desired to be exactly correct in her language. Exaggerations really pained her. I remember that when I told her that I had met hundreds of people who thought the appointment would be most appropriate she pinned me down until she had extracted from me the confession that not more than nine persons had spoken to me on the subject. And a letter of hers which I possess, acknowledging the receipt of my first book begins: “My dear young relation (if you will permit me to style you so, though I am aware that I should write more justly ‘connection.’ Yet you are now too old for me to call you ‘Fordie’)....”

And there we have one symptom of the gulf that separated Christina Rossetti as a Modernist from Ruskin and the old Pre-Raphaelite Circle. The very last thing that these, the last of the Romanticists, desired was precision. On one page of one of Mr. Ruskin’s book I have counted the epithet “golden” six times. There are “golden days,”

“goldenmouthed,”

“distant golden spire,”

“golden peaks” and “golden sunset,” all of them describing one picture by Turner in which the nearest approach to gold discernible by a precise eye is a mixture of orange red and madder brown. His was another method; it was the last kick of Romanticism — of that romanticism that is now so very dead.

Pre-Raphaelism in itself was born of Realism. Ruskin gave it one white wing of moral purpose. The Æstheticists presented it with another, dyed all the colours of the rainbow, from the hues of mediæval tapestries to that of romantic love. Thus it flew rather unevenly and came to the ground. The first Pre-Raphaelites said that you must paint your model exactly as you see it, hair for hair or leaf-spore for leaf-spore. Mr. Ruskin gave them the added canon that the subject they painted must be one of moral distinction. You must, in fact, paint life as you see it and yet in such a way as to prove that life is an ennobling thing. How one was to do this one got no particular directions. Perhaps one might have obtained it by living only in the drawing-room of Brantwood House, Coniston, when Mr. Ruskin was in residence.

I do not know that in her drawing-room in the gloomy London square Christina Rossetti found life in any way ennobling or inspiring. She must have found it, if not exceedingly tragic, at least so full of pain as to be almost beyond supporting. Her poetry is very full of a desire, of a passionate yearning for the country, yet there in box-like rooms she lived, her windows brushed by the leaves, her rooms rendered dark by the shade of those black-trunked London trees that are like a’ grim mockery of their green-boled sisters of the open country. I do not know why she should have resided in a London square. There were no material circumstances that forced it on her, but rather the psychological cravings of her inner life. And again her poetry is very full of a love, of a desire, of a passionate yearning for love. Yet there in her cloistral seclusion she lived alone in pain, practising acts of charity and piety, and seeking almost as remorselessly as did Flaubert himself, and just as solitarily, for correct expression — for that, that is to say, which was her duty in life. As I have pointed out elsewhere, this black-robed figure with eyes rendered large by one of the most painful of diseases, and suffering always from the knife-stabs of yet two other most painful diseases — this black-robed figure with the clear-cut and olive-coloured features, the dark hair, the restrained and formal gestures, the hands always folded in the lap, the head always judicially a little on one side and with the precise enunciation, this tranquil Religious was undergoing within herself always a fierce struggle between the pagan desire for life, the light of the sun and love, and an asceticism that, in its almost more than Calvinistic restraint, reached also to a point of frenzy. She put love from her with both hands and yearned for it unceasingly, she let life pass by and wrote of glowing tapestries, of wine and pomegranates; she was thinking always of heaths, the wide sands of the sea-shore, of south walls on which the apricots glow, and she lived always of her own free will in the gloom of a London square. So that if Christianity have its saints and martyrs I am not certain that she was not one of the most distinguished of them. For there have been ascetics, but there can have been few who could have better enjoyed a higher life of the senses. She was at the very opposite end of the hagæological scale from St. Louis Gonzaga of whom it is recorded that he was so chaste that he had never raised his eyes to look upon a woman, not even upon his mother. Her last harrowing thoughts upon her racked death-bed were that she had not sufficiently denied herself, that she had not worked sufficiently in the olive-garden of the Saviour, that she had merited, and without the right of complaint she had ensued, an eternal damnation. It was a terrible thought to go down to Death with, and it has always seemed to me to be a condemnation of Christianity that it should have let such a fate harass such a woman, just as perhaps it is one of the greatest testimonies to the powers of discipline of Christianity, that it should have trained up such a woman to such a life of abnegation, of splendid literary expression, and of meticulous attention to duty. The trouble was, of course, that whereas by blood and by nature Christina Rossetti was a Catholic, by upbringing and by all the influences that were around her she was forced into the Protestant Communion. Under the influence of a wise confessor the morbidities of her self-abnegation would have been checked, her doubts would have been stilled with an authoritative “yes” or “no”; and though such sins as she may have sinned might have led her to consider that she had earned a more or less long period of torture in Purgatory, she would have felt the comfort of the thought that all the thousands whom by her work she had sustained in religion and comforted in the night — that the prayers and conversions of all those thousands would have earned for her a remission of her penalties and great bliss and comfort in an ultimate Heaven. There are, of course, Protestant natures as there are Catholic, just as there are those by nature agnostic and those by nature believing in every fibre; and Heaven is, without doubt, wide enough for us all. But Christina Rossetti’s nature was mediaeval in the sense that it cared for little things and for arbitrary arrangements. In the same sense it was so very modern. For the life of to-day is more and more becoming a life of little things. We are losing more and more the sense of a whole, the feeling of a grand design, of the co-ordination of all Nature in one great architectonic scheme. We have no longer any time to look out for the ultimate design. We have to face such an infinite number of little things that we cannot stay to arrange them in our minds, or to consider them as anything but as accidents, happenings, the mere events of the day. And if in outside things we can perceive no design but only the fortuitous materialism of a bewildering world, we are thrown more and more in upon ourselves for comprehension of that which is not understandable and for analysis of things of the spirit. In this way we seem again to be returning to the empiricism of the middle ages and in that way, too, Christina herself, although she resembled the figure of a mediæval nun, seems also a figure very modern amongst all the romantic generalizers who surrounded her, who overwhelmed her, who despised and outshouted her.

For in the nineteenth century men still generalized. Empirical religion appeared to be dead and all the functions of life could be treated as manifestations of a Whole, ordered according to one school of thought or another. Thus, love, according to the Pre-Raphaelite canon, was a great but rather sloppy passion. Its manifestations would be Paolo and Francesca, or Launcelot and Guinevere. It was a thing that you swooned about on broad, general lines, your eyes closed, your arms outstretched. It excused all sins, it sanctified all purposes and, if you went to hell over it, you still drifted about amongst snow-flakes of fire with your eyes closed and in the arms of the object of your passion. For it is impossible to suppose that when Rossetti painted his picture of Paolo and Francesca in hell, he, or any of his admirers, thought that these two lovers were really suffering. They were not. They were suffering perhaps with the malaise of love which is always an uneasiness, but an uneasiness how sweet! And the flakes of flames were descending all over the rest of the picture, but they did not fall upon Paolo and Francesca. No, the lovers were protected by a generalized, swooning passion that formed, as it were, a moral and very efficient macintosh all over them. And no doubt what D. G. Rossetti and his school thought was that, although guilty lovers have to go to hell for the sake of the story, they will find hell pleasant enough because the aroma of their passion, the wings of the great god of love and the swooning intensity of it all will render them insensible to the inconveniences of their lodgings. As much as to say that you do not mind the bad cooking of the Brighton hotel if you are having otherwise a good time of it.