Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 896
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 toward Christina Rossetti. It was the same fine superiority as made the police magistrate embrace St. Catharine of Siena, 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, among 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 had 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 books 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 colors 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-colored 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 seashore, 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 deathbed 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 insured, 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 mediæval 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 coordination 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 among 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 among snowflakes 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 mackintosh 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.
But with its glamour, its swooning, its ecstasies, and its all-embracing justification, the Pre-Raphaelite view of mediæval love was a very different thing from real mediævalism. That was a state of things much more like our own. Mediæval people took their own individual cases on their own individual merits, and guilty love exacted some kind of retribution very frequently painful, as often as not grotesque. Or sometimes there was not any retribution at all — a successful intrigue “came off,” and became material for a joyous conte. It was a matter of individual idiosyncrasies then as it is to-day. You got roasted in hell, or an injured husband stuck a dagger into you, or you were soundly cudgelled, drenched with water, or thrown onto noxious dung-heaps, just as nowadays you get horsewhipped, escape or do not escape the divorce courts, and do or do not get requested to resign from your club. There was not then, as there is not now, any protective glamour about it. The things happened, hard, direct, and without the chance of ignoring them. Dante’s lovers in hell felt bitter cold, stinging flame, shame, horror, despair, and possibly even all the eternity of woe that was before them. And all the hard, direct, ferocious, and unrelenting spirit of the poet went into the picture, as into all his other pictures of mediæval after-life. So it was with the Rossetti who dwelt for so long in the same house as Dante Gabriel, writing her poems on the corner of the washhand-stand in her bedroom, and making no mark at all in the household, while all the other great figures spouted and generalized about love and the musical glasses in every other room of the gloomy and surely glamourous houses that in Bloomsbury the Rossettis successively inhabited. They talked and generalized about life and love, and they pursued their romantic images along the lines of least resistance. They got into scrapes or they did not, they squabbled or they made it up; but they always worked out a moral theory good enough to justify themselves and to impress the rest of the world.
And that in essence was the note of the Victorian great. It did not matter what they did, whether it was George Eliot living in what we should call today “open sin,” or Schopenhauer trying to have all noises suppressed by law because they interrupted his cogitations. No matter what their personal eccentricities or peccadilloes might be, they were always along the lines of the higher morality. I am not saying that such figures are not to be found to-day. If you will read the works of Mr. — you will find the attitude of the Victorian Great Man exactly reproduced. For whatever this gentleman may desire to do in a moment of impulse or of irritation, or in the search for copy or in the quest for health, at once he will write a great big book to prove that this, his eccentricity, ought, according to the higher morals, to be the rule of life for the British middle-classes. And there are ten or twenty of such gentlemen nowadays occupied in so directing our lives, and waxing moderately fat upon the profits of their spiritual dictatorships, but they have not anything like the ascendancy of their predecessors. We have not any longer our Ruskins, Carlyles, George Eliots, and the rest. We have in consequence very much more to work out our special cases for ourselves, and we are probably a great deal more honest in consequence. We either do our duties and have very bad times, with good consciences, or we do not do our duties and enjoy ourselves with occasional pauses for unpleasant reflections. But we look, upon the whole, in our little unimportantly individual ways; honestly at our special cases. The influence of Jean Jacques Rousseau, in fact, is on the wane, and the gentleman to-day who left his illegitimate children on the steps of a foundling hospital would think himself rather a dirty dog, and try to forget the incident.
And this, as much as her closed bedroom door, separated Christina Rossetti from the other artists and poets and critics and social reformers that frequented her father’s house. She was not influenced by Rousseauism at all. She took her life and her love unflinchingly in hand, and how very painfully she proceeded along the straight path of duty!
“Does the road wind up-hill all the way?
Yea, to the very end.
Will the day’s journey last the whole long day?
From dawn to night, my friend.”
So writing in her early youth she forecasted her life. The record is an insensate one; still, from the point 6f view of the man who said that to make a good job of a given task is the highest thing in life, then surely Christina Rossetti achieved the very highest of high things. There is no anchorite who so denied himself and no Simeon upon his pillar. Of course, if we speak about the uselessness of sacrifice....
In the beginning, even from that point of view, the poetess was somewhat badly used. She bestowed her affections and became engaged to a poor specimen of humanity, one of the seven Pre-Raphaelite brethren, and, like herself, a member of the Church of England. Shortly after the engagement this gentleman’s spiritual vicissitudes forced him to become a Roman Catholic. Christina put up with the change, though it grieved her. She consented to remain engaged to him, for was not her father at least nominally Catholic and her mother Protestant? But no sooner had she adjusted herself to the changed conditions than her lover once more reverted to Anglicanism. I am not certain how many religions he essayed. But certainly there came a point when the poetess, whose religion was the main point of her life, cried that it was enough. The breaking off of her engagement was a very severe blow and tinged her life and work with melancholy. Later she became engaged to a very charming man of a mild humor, great gifts, a touching absence of mind, and much gentleness of spirit. This was Cayley, the translator of Homer, and the brother of the great mathematician. But Cayley himself offered one very serious obstacle. He was an agnostic, and, in spite of Christina’s arguments and remonstrances, he remained an agnostic. She found it therefore to be her duty not to marry him, and they remained apart to the end of their lives. And I think that the correspondence of this essentially good and gentle man and this nunlike and saintly woman is one of the most touching products that we have of human love and abstention. As love-letters theirs are all the more touching in that no note at all of passion is sounded. The lover presents the poetess with the sea-mouse, a spiny creature like an iridescent slug, and the poetess writes a poem to her mouse and chronicles its fate and fortunes, and they write about the weather and their households and all such things — little, quaint, humorous, and not at all pathetic letters such as might have passed between Abelard and Héloïse if those earlier Christians had been gifted with senses of humor, decency, and renunciation. So that the figure of Christina Rossetti remains mediæval or modern, but always nun-like. And, since she suffered nearly always from intense physical pain and much isolation, there was little wonder that her poems were almost altogether introspective — just, indeed, as all modern poetry is almost altogether introspective. I remember being intensely shocked at reading in the Dictionary of National Biography that Doctor Garnett, himself one of the quaintest, most picturesque, and most lovable of the later figures of English literary life — that Doctor Garnett considered Christina Rossetti’s poetry to be uniformly morbid. I was so distressed by this discovery that — though I suppose it was no affair of mine — I hurried to the principal librarian’s book-hidden study in the British Museum, and I remonstrated even with some agitation against the epithet he had selected. Doctor Garnett, however, was exceedingly impenitent. With his amiable and obstinate smile and his odd, caressing gestures of the hand, he insisted that the word “morbid” as applied to literature signified that which was written by a person suffering from disease. I insisted that it meant such writing as was calculated to disease the mind of the reader, but we got no further than the statement of our respective opinions several times repeated. Doctor Garnett, surely the most erudite man as far as books were concerned in the world of his day, was also a gentleman of strong and unshakable opinions, apparently of the Tory and High Church, but at any rate of the official type. I remember being present at an impressive argument between this scholar and another member of the Rossetti family. It concerned the retention by Great Britain of Egypt, and it ran like this:
