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Hake, whose name was absolutely unknown, had made his way into Rossetti’s affections—as, indeed, he made his way into the affections of all who knew him—and this was quite enough to induce Rossetti to ask Dr. Appleton for leave to review ‘Madeline’ in ’71 in The Academy—a request which Appleton, of course, was delighted to grant. And again, when in 1873 ‘Parables and Tales’ appeared, Mr.
Though the ballad, in Rossetti’s own writing, has ever since remained in my possession, as have also the two sonnets in the MS. of another friend who has since, I am delighted to know, achieved fame for himself, no one who enjoyed the intimate friendship of Rossetti need be told that his death took from me all heart to publish.
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.
Frequently in these letters an allusion will puzzle the reader who does not know of Rossetti’s love of nocturnal rambling, an allusion, however, which those who knew him will fully understand. Here is a sentence of the kind:— “As I haven’t been outside my door for months in the daytime, I should not have had much opportunity of enjoying pastime and pleasaunces.”
Is it not a moral certainty that they would have been as uninteresting as the letters of Coleridge, of Scott, of Dickens, of Rossetti, and of Rossetti’s sister? Why are the letters of literary men apt to be so much less interesting than those of other people?
Those who will read with avidity Rossetti’s allusion to his wife’s confinement in the letter in which he tells Allingham that “the child had been dead for two or three weeks” will laugh to scorn the above remarks, and as they are in the majority the laugh is with them. The editor of this volume laments that Allingham’s letters to Rossetti are beyond all editorial reach.
The earliest form is still in existence in MS., and although some of the lines struck out are as poetry most lovely, the poem on the whole is better without them. It was a theory of Rossetti’s, indeed, that the very riches of the English language made it necessary for the poet who would achieve excellence to revise and manipulate his lines.
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.
And when we consider that the one quality in all poetry which really gives it an endurance outlasting the generation of its birth is neither music nor colour, nor even intellectual substance, but the clearness of the seeing; the living breath of imagination—the very qualities, in short, for which such poems as ‘Sister Helen’ and ‘Rose Mary’ are so conspicuous—we are driven to the conclusion that Rossetti’s poetry has a long and enduring future before it.
The question here is, What were Christina Rossetti’s 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.
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