Introduction

The purpose of this volume is to bring together essays very few of which have been republished in books before. Because Ford wrote critical essays all his writing life – well over five hundred periodical contributions have been discovered – it seemed to the present editors that it would make sense to allow the general reader access to the best of them, especially now that Ford enjoys a rather general recognition as a major twentieth-century author.

Perhaps these essays will send the reader to Ford’s many books of criticism, such as Thus to Revisit, Portraits from Life, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, The English Novel, and The March of Literature; and to the essays in collections such as Sondra Stang’s A Ford Madox Ford Reader, Frank MacShane’s Critical Writings of Ford Madox Ford, Brita Lindberg-Seyested’s Pound/Ford, Martin Stannard’s Norton Critical Edition of The Good Soldier. Work now in print was not included in the present volume since it seemed wasteful to use the limited space available to us reprinting material easily accessible.

The essays are arranged chronologically. They span nearly forty years, covering most of Ford’s publishing life, from his formative collaboration with Conrad to his last years. Three phases predominate, however, and they correspond to the three phases of his greatest creative intensity, when he was not only prolific, and at his best, as a critic, but was also writing his best fiction. From 1907 to 1910, when completing the Fifth Queen trilogy and writing A Call, Ford was producing weekly reviews for the Daily Mail and The Tribune, then writing for the magazine he founded and edited, The English Review.From 1913–14, while writing his best pre-war novel, The Good Soldier,and into 1915, he contributed weekly essays to The Outlook. Then in the mid-1920s, while working on his post-war masterpiece Parade’s End, he founded and wrote for a new magazine, the transatlantic review, as well as writing for other periodicals, and producing one of his best books of critical reminiscence, Joseph Conrad.

These essays, most of which give us Ford’s response as a reader to work just published, will perhaps help us to understand why Pound claimed in 1914 that Ford was ‘the best critic in England, one might say the only critic of any importance’, and Marianne Moore that Ford’s reviews ‘were of inestimable value to me, as method’.1 Few people today have heard of most of the books Ford reviewed in the pages of The Tribune, The Outlook, The Daily Mail and other newspapers and magazines. His portraits included writers we no longer read or whose names are only familiar to us from literary histories: Hall Caine, Mrs Mary E. Mann, Maurice Hewlett, Charles Doughty, Lord Dunsany, W.H. Mallock. Many of the books are clearly period pieces not likely to be exhumed. But because Ford asks the right questions when confronting a new work by a contemporary, these reviews of now forgotten books and the larger questions about writing they raise make them worth rescuing.

Interspersed with these are a large number of reviews of more significant figures: Shaw, Pound, Anatole France, Joyce, Wells, Bennett, Galsworthy, Conrad, Hardy, Schnitzler, Gorky, Dostoevsky, Yeats, Frost. In both categories, one reads Ford’s reviews for what he tells us about literature and its relation to a given time, and in doing that he communicates to us his distinctive note – genial and serious, civilized; if sometimes quirky, wrong-headed, and mildly outrageous. Clearly, it is immensely valuable to have the immediate response of an intelligent contemporary, especially one like Ford, who was at the same time reshaping the literary landscape.

Indeed, if all the literary portraits from The Daily Mail, The Tribune, and The Outlook were published as a group, it would provide a great source for understanding the literary situation of that time: the literary diary of one of the great minds of modern literature, showing how the modern movements (Impressionism, Imagism, Vorticism, Modernism) appeared in the cultural milieu of early twentieth-century London.

He was not necessarily interested in ‘judicious’ criticism. Rather, his instinct as a critic was bold and excessive – to follow wherever the friction between the work and his temperament might take him. Always deeply engaged, always vital, his writing tended to proceed by leaps, even overstatement, never to provide a final judgement on the work he was discussing, but to arouse a response in his reader, to provoke thought rather than foreclose it. His deliberately sweeping statements were not meant to be taken literally, but he did want to be taken seriously. Hence, he was never cautious and did not mind being shocking. As he said in The English Novel,

what I am about to write is highly controversial and [… the reader] must take none of it too much au pied de la lettre. I don’t mean to say that it will not be written with almost ferocious seriousness. But what follows are suggestions not dictates, for in perusing this sort of book the reader must be prepared to do a good deal of the work for himself – within his own mind.

On some of the sweeping statements of that book, he said the reader must object ‘as violently as possible: then, in reaction, thinking it over he will probably find there is something in what I say’.2

For Ford, the purpose of his criticism was to force the reader to be open to new impressions. The great enemy of art, as he saw it, was received opinion, stock responses, following conventions for conventions’ sake. To lose touch with reality – with the world outside of one’s self – would be to forestall the kind of reaction he had to reading for the first time the first Lawrence story he saw, ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’. In Portraits from Life he gives a marvellous vignette of that exemplary close-reading.3

His criticism is never systematic, theoretical, abstract, academic. He hated systems and the systematizing mind, the kind of mind he thought of as Prussian, resulting in the kind of work then emanating from German universities, as he hated language which loses touch with the spoken word, poetic diction, conventional language, academic jargon. (The parallels with Wordsworth’s famous preface to Lyrical Ballads are striking.) For him all writing had to be an individual rendering of what an individual really perceived. Even though he claimed to have hated Ruskin as one of the bearded Victorian greats who made his childhood miserable, Ruskin stated Ford’s credo as clearly as anyone:

… the greatest thing the human soul does in this world is to SEE something, and tell what it SAW in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion – all in one.4

Seeing clearly is what most of us do not do most of the time. It follows that when an artist sees clearly, and communicates to us his vision, something in our world has altered: our world has been transformed. According to Ford, in Provence, ‘the authentic note of the great poet is to modify for you the aspect of the world and of your relationship to the world’, and in his introduction to Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, he develops this idea:

a writer holds a reader by his temperament. That is his true ‘gift’ – what he receives from whoever sends him into the world. It arises from how you look at things. If you look at and render things so that they appear new to the reader you will hold his attention [….] You have had a moment of surprise and then your knowledge is added to. The word ‘author’ means ‘someone who adds to your consciousness’.5

Thus the artist must be an individual with an individual manner of seeing, an individual temperament, yet he is also part of a larger whole, which Ford liked to call ‘the Republic of letters’, which with the other arts is ‘the only real civilizing agency at work today’. After the First World War, which ushered in an increasingly bleak world marked by nationalism, militarism, mindless technology and ‘technocrats’, and totalitarianism, he wrote: ‘beautiful talents are the desperate need of these sad months and years when we tremble on the verge of a return to barbarism…’6 In the transatlantic review he explained why, in a passage reminiscent of Matthew Arnold’s definition of culture as the humanization of man in society:

the Arts […] make you understand your fellow human being: they may indeed make you understand your fellow brute beast. In either case in the train of comprehension come sympathy and tolerance and after subjecting yourself for some time to the influence of the arts you become less of a brute beast yourself.

This is the only humanising process that has no deleterious sides since all systems of morality tend to develop specific sides of a character at the expense of all other sides.7

Ford was clearly influenced by the aestheticism of the 1880s and 1890s. He writes of ‘that high, fine pleasure’ of poetry; and his great pleasure in reading comes across powerfully.8 Yet at the same time he always thought of art as communication. ‘An art is the highest form of communication between person and person’9 – again a Wordsworthian ideal, that of the poet as ‘a man speaking to men’. He is at his best as a reader of other writers – responding to their temperaments, their perceptions, their language, their art – rather than as a theorizer.

Sondra Stang, who sadly did not live to finish this project which she began, should have the last words. She wrote of Ford’s unusual preference for Christina Rossetti’s verse over that of her brother Dante Gabriel:

Her achievement was that, looking at life around her, she wrote in the ‘clear pure language of our own day’, unlike her brother Dante Gabriel, who had given the ‘numbing blow of a sandbag’ to the art of writing in English, ‘digging for obsolete words with which to express ideas forever dead and gone’.

Whether or not Ford was fair to either of the Rossettis, and whether or not Christina’s poetry was significant for the twentieth century, Ford’s preference should be understood as a moment in the gradual clarification of his own aesthetic. Readers looking for a judicious and disengaged point of view, that of an ideal literary historian, perpetually contemporary with them, have of course found Ford’s criticism disturbing, and his attack on the nineteenth-century English novel (or ‘nuvvle’, as he called it to distinguish it from what he considered was the genuine article, the Continental novel) has probably done its share in alienating readers. Ford’s judgements were highly personal, often overstated, and deliberately outrageous, but behind them was an unwillingness to corroborate an aesthetic that had already had its day. How he read other writers and how he theorized about his own writing all had to do with his forward-looking momentum: the writer must represent and interpret his own age and look toward the future.10

She also explained (in the notes she left for her selection, some of which have been incorporated into this introduction) how Ford’s criticism can give us a most refined – and at the same time realistic – sense of what art is, what it can do for human life:

Beyond their generosity and their grace, the pieces collected here contain the just pronouncements of a serious writer practising his craft and passing on to other [readers and] writers what he has clarified for himself, passing on to his readers what the work before them reveals to him. In these modest and often trenchant statements, Ford writes about the relation between language and literature, between temperament and writing; he defines for us what style is; and finally, he reminds us, if we are in any danger of forgetting, why we go to fiction, to poetry, to painting.

1 Pound, ‘Mr Hueffer and the Prose Tradition in Verse’, Poetry, 4 (June 1914), 111–20; The Complete Prose of Marianne Moore, Patricia C. Willis (London, 1987), p. 593.

2 The English Novel (London, 1930), pp. 24–5, 26–7.

3 Portraits from Life (Boston, 1937), pp. 70–74. Published in Britain as Mightier Than the Sword (London, 1938); see pp. 98–103.

4 Modern Painters, Vol. III, part 4, chapter 16.

5 Ford Madox Ford Reader, ed. Sondra J. Stang (Manchester, 1986), p. 252. Ford reiterates this idea in It Was the Nightingale (London, 1934), p. 69, when he defines the artist as ‘the man who added to the thought and emotions of mankind’.

6 Thus to Revisit (London, 1921), p. 15.

7 ‘Stocktaking. IV’, transatlantic review, 1:4 (April 1924), 169–70.

8 Thus to Revisit, p. 129.

9 The March of Literature (London, 1939), p. 4.

10 Sondra J. Stang, Ford Madox Ford (New York, 1977), pp. 20–1.

1 Pound, ‘Mr Hueffer and the Prose Tradition in Verse’, Poetry, 4 (June 1914), 111–20; The Complete Prose of Marianne Moore, Patricia C. Willis (London, 1987), p. 593.

2 The English Novel (London, 1930), pp. 24–5, 26–7.

3 Portraits from Life (Boston, 1937), pp. 70–74. Published in Britain as Mightier Than the Sword (London, 1938); see pp. 98–103.

4 Modern Painters, Vol. III, part 4, chapter 16.

5 Ford Madox Ford Reader, ed. Sondra J. Stang (Manchester, 1986), p. 252. Ford reiterates this idea in It Was the Nightingale (London, 1934), p. 69, when he defines the artist as ‘the man who added to the thought and emotions of mankind’.

6 Thus to Revisit (London, 1921), p. 15.

7 ‘Stocktaking. IV’, transatlantic review, 1:4 (April 1924), 169–70.

8 Thus to Revisit, p. 129.

9 The March of Literature (London, 1939), p. 4.

10 Sondra J. Stang, Ford Madox Ford (New York, 1977), pp. 20–1.

These essays, most of which give us Ford’s response as a reader to work just published, will perhaps help us to understand why Pound claimed in 1914 that Ford was ‘the best critic in England, one might say the only critic of any importance’, and Marianne Moore that Ford’s reviews ‘were of inestimable value to me, as method’.1 Few people today have heard of most of the books Ford reviewed in the pages of The Tribune, The Outlook, The Daily Mail and other newspapers and magazines. His portraits included writers we no longer read or whose names are only familiar to us from literary histories: Hall Caine, Mrs Mary E. Mann, Maurice Hewlett, Charles Doughty, Lord Dunsany, W.H. Mallock. Many of the books are clearly period pieces not likely to be exhumed. But because Ford asks the right questions when confronting a new work by a contemporary, these reviews of now forgotten books and the larger questions about writing they raise make them worth rescuing.

probably find there is something in what I say’.

For Ford, the purpose of his criticism was to force the reader to be open to new impressions. The great enemy of art, as he saw it, was received opinion, stock responses, following conventions for conventions’ sake. To lose touch with reality – with the world outside of one’s self – would be to forestall the kind of reaction he had to reading for the first time the first Lawrence story he saw, ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’. In Portraits from Life he gives a marvellous vignette of that exemplary close-reading.3

… the greatest thing the human soul does in this world is to SEE something, and tell what it SAW in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion – all in one.4

have had a moment of surprise and then your knowledge is added to. The word ‘author’ means ‘someone who adds to your consciousness’.

Thus the artist must be an individual with an individual manner of seeing, an individual temperament, yet he is also part of a larger whole, which Ford liked to call ‘the Republic of letters’, which with the other arts is ‘the only real civilizing agency at work today’. After the First World War, which ushered in an increasingly bleak world marked by nationalism, militarism, mindless technology and ‘technocrats’, and totalitarianism, he wrote: ‘beautiful talents are the desperate need of these sad months and years when we tremble on the verge of a return to barbarism…’6 In the transatlantic review he explained why, in a passage reminiscent of Matthew Arnold’s definition of culture as the humanization of man in society:

This is the only humanising process that has no deleterious sides since all systems of morality tend to develop specific sides of a character at the expense of all other sides.7

Ford was clearly influenced by the aestheticism of the 1880s and 1890s. He writes of ‘that high, fine pleasure’ of poetry; and his great pleasure in reading comes across powerfully.8 Yet at the same time he always thought of art as communication. ‘An art is the highest form of communication between person and person’9 – again a Wordsworthian ideal, that of the poet as ‘a man speaking to men’. He is at his best as a reader of other writers – responding to their temperaments, their perceptions, their language, their art – rather than as a theorizer.

Whether or not Ford was fair to either of the Rossettis, and whether or not Christina’s poetry was significant for the twentieth century, Ford’s preference should be understood as a moment in the gradual clarification of his own aesthetic. Readers looking for a judicious and disengaged point of view, that of an ideal literary historian, perpetually contemporary with them, have of course found Ford’s criticism disturbing, and his attack on the nineteenth-century English novel (or ‘nuvvle’, as he called it to distinguish it from what he considered was the genuine article, the Continental novel) has probably done its share in alienating readers. Ford’s judgements were highly personal, often overstated, and deliberately outrageous, but behind them was an unwillingness to corroborate an aesthetic that had already had its day. How he read other writers and how he theorized about his own writing all had to do with his forward-looking momentum: the writer must represent and interpret his own age and look toward the future.10

A Note on the Text

The essays in this volume come from a wide range of periodicals, all using different conventions of layout and punctuation. These have been converted to the Carcanet house style. Topical information (such as details of publishers and prices) have been removed. However, journalistic sub-headings have been retained. Typographical and other obvious errors have been silently corrected. Spelling and transliterations have been standardized. Ellipses of three or four dots represent Ford’s own. Editorial ellipses are indicated by three asterisks. Editorial footnotes are given in square brackets.

Acknowledgements

The editors would like to thank the following for their help in the preparation of this volume: the late Janice Biala; the Centre for Computing in the Humanities at King’s College London, and in particular Harold Short and Pam Jones; Susan Fox of New York City; the staff of the Washington University Library; Will Harris; Elena Lamberti; Leslie Verth; Hamish Whyte; Joseph Wiesenfarth; and Susan Hacker Stang. The greatest debt we owe is to Sondra Stang, who began this project and was working on it at the time of her death in 1990.

The Evolution of a Lyric

The baby was being put to bed in the room over the head of the writer of lyrics. He was pacing up and down the border of his carpet. He could hear the nurse crooning a lullaby that had hushed to sleep little negroes out in Louisiana.

‘Hang it all!’ he said; ‘the kiddy ought to have a lullaby of her own.’ One’s own baby is something precious to one; so are one’s own lyrics; and ‘Sweets to the sweet,’ they say; therefore, things precious to the precious. 1

He went to the window and looked out. It was falling dusk. Shadows were creeping up the hedgerows, the red rays of the sun fell aslant along the downs that closed round the farm. On the terrace above the stockyard the flowers were passively awaiting the oncoming of the night. The great white poppies were folding their petals together. High overhead the pigeons were circling round and round, the flush of the sunset irradiating their breasts and the inner sides of their wings. The writer of lyrics sat down at his desk, and began to scrawl upon a scrap of notepaper. The negro melody was running in his head.

‘Poppy heads are closing fast,’ he wrote, and then paused. What next? Ah! the pigeons – the child liked the pigeons, and the word began with a ‘p’. A little alliteration does no harm.

‘Pigeons wing their –’ No; that was no good. ‘Pigeons wing’ is wretched. Pigeons – pigeons – what do pigeons do? Ah! –

‘Pigeons circle home at last’ – the line wrote itself almost. So did the next three words, with the tune to help them:

‘Sleep, baby, sleep.’ Anything will do here – anything. But what is it to be? A bat cried outside. Yes – yes – the bats – ‘The bats are calling.’…

He looked out of the window again. The round beds on the terrace were bordered with hearts-ease – blue and yellow hearts-ease, and hearts-ease so dark that they were almost black—so black that the darkness could make very little difference to them.

‘Pansies’ he wrote – another ‘p’. He was rather doubtful about so much alliteration, but still ‘pansies’ is pretty, and then … ‘Never miss the light.’ The next line suggested itself, because, even if pansies can do without light, babies can’t. ‘But sweet babes must sleep at night.’ A glance out of the window had caught the settling down of the white shrouds of mist:–

‘sleep, baby, sleep, the dew is falling.’

That was a whole verse. But this only stood for the chorus of the tune. There was the body of the melody to be attended to. It was a terrible task, and cost a week’s wrestling. To begin with, the melody opened on the second note of a bar and ended on a slur that called for a ‘female rhyme’. At last he got as far as: ‘We’ve wandered all about the downs together’, but the rhymes to ‘together’ are all hopelessly hackneyed and necessitated for the third line: ‘But now, good-bye, good-bye, dear summer weather’, a line that might be good enough for a song translator. Besides, it was the beginning, not the end of summer. At last, for ‘downs together’ ‘upland fallows’ suggested itself, and, after that, the verse wrote itself. That made: one four-line verse and one sestet. There was as much again to do. Curiously enough, this time it was not the four-line, but the chorus verse, that gave the trouble. Before it was finished it looked like this:

‘You may slumber in your cot’ (scratched out).

‘Ducks’ heads underneath each wing’ (scratched out).

‘Warm beneath their mother’s breast’
‘Little chicks have gone to rest’} (vigorously erased)

‘Sleep, baby, sleep, the moon is rising, risen’ (erased).

‘Little mice have stolen out, on the sea the lights shine out’ (erased)

‘Hoping pussy’s not about’ (scratched out).

But at last – after fourteen days’ work – the thing was done. You will observe that each line cost nearly a whole day. On the morrow, a fellow-writer – a prose man – but one of the great ones of the earth, one of those who receive fifteen guineas per 1,000 words, looked in and picked up the fair copy.

‘Ah,’ he said, ‘if I could reel off little things like that and get half a guinea apiece – as you do – I’d soon be a millionaire.’ The writer of lyrics looked at his finished production. It ran:

We’ve wandered all about the upland fallows.

We’ve watched the rabbits at their play,

But now good-night, good-bye to soaring swallows,

Now, good-night, good-bye, dear day.

Poppy heads are closing fast, pigeons circle home at last;

Sleep, baby, sleep, the bats are calling;

Pansies never miss the light, but sweet babes must sleep at night:

Sleep, baby, sleep, the dew is falling.

Even the wind among the whisp’ring willows

Rests, and the waves are resting too.

See, soft white linen; cool, such cool white pillows

Wait in the darkling room for you.

All the little lambs are still, now the moon peeps down the hill;

Sleep, Liebchen, sleep, the owls are hooting;

Ships have hung their lanthorns out, little mice dare creep about:

Sleep, Liebchen, sleep, the stars are shooting.

He groaned: ‘“Ships have hung their lanthorns out” is the only line that doesn’t make me feel ill – all the rest is rubbish.’ And he sat down to rewrite the lyric from end to end.

Outlook, 3 (22 April 1899), 387–8.

1 [The lyric in question was later re-published as ‘Lullaby’ in From Inland (1907) and Collected Poems [1913], p. 99.]

‘Hang it all!’ he said; ‘the kiddy ought to have a lullaby of her own.’ One’s own baby is something precious to one; so are one’s own lyrics; and ‘Sweets to the sweet,’ they say; therefore, things precious to the precious. 1

Creative History and the Historic Sense

Mr A. F. Pollard has written a book on Henry VIII1 & Professor Goldwin Smith reviews it in the North American Review.2 Professor Smith’s article is mainly an attack on Henry & the late Mr Froude: immediately afterwards there appears in the Fortnightly Review Mr W.S. Lilly’s article on the last named historian.

Froude thought Henry was a marvellous instrument of Providence in the evolution of the Church of England, Professor Smith thinks that Henry was not a ‘high bred gentleman’, Mr Lilly thinks that the late Mr Froude was congenitally incapable of speaking the truth. (Mr Lilly is secretary to the Catholic Association of Great Britain.) Someone else says that ‘The proper place among the diseases of the mind for this wanton insolence may be found by anybody who has the patience & the spare time to read the works of Mr Lilly’.3 On such lines & in such tempers do we approach creative history & its heroes.

MM. Bouvard & Pécuchet, before they began their never finished Dictionary of Accepted Ideas, studied the works of Professors to find Truth. They attacked for instance the subject of literary style; they discovered Marmontel groaning over the licence that Homer allowed himself & Blair, an Englishman, lamenting the violence of Shakespeare. Bouvard found the disagreements of Professors so confusing & so distracting… ‘ces questions le travaillèrent tellement qu’il y gagnait une jaunisse’. After much reading the works of Professors & others on the question of the personality & the Times of Henry VIII it is difficult to escape the fate of Bouvard. It is at least refreshing to consider the point of view of one simple minded & aloof. A question was set in an examination paper: ‘Who was your favourite historical character & why?’ A schoolboy answered: ‘Henry VIII, because he was the only one that had more wives than children’.

This has a frivolous sound but actually that answer is a symptom serious enough: it represents the net value of History as it is taught today, in so far as it touches the time of Henry VIII.

That schoolboy, seriously considered, voiced practically the general view. The matter of the wives is a very insignificant detail of a whole reign, long, tortuous in its intrigues, extremely difficult to follow in its very broadest outlines: before ever one is able to descend to the king’s psychology & motives. Yet that matter has obsessed all our historians: it obsessed Mr Froude; no doubt it obsessed the first Defender of the Faith himself. It obsesses Professor Goldwin Smith to the point of hysteria; it ‘intrigues’ to this day the whole of Catholic Europe & as much of Protestant England as thinks of sixteenth-century history. It can not, apparently, be got away from.

Immediately after reading Professor Smith’s article I discussed the whole personality of Henry with three ex officio leaders of public opinion of today. Their joint, net, opinion was that he was a ‘lover’. Professor Smith however calls Henry a ‘human tiger’ who could not feel love. Yet Marillac the French Ambassador says (Letters & Papers, vol. xvi, 12) that Henry was ‘so amourous of the Queen, Katharine Howard, that he could not do enough for her’ & Chapuys, Charles V’s ambassador, says (Ibid, vol. xvii) that he thought Henry had his death at her execution he looked so ill after. Froude says that it was a pity Henry could not have lived in a world without women, to which Professor Smith gallantly but quite inconsequently retorts: ‘Would Mr Froude have found it a pleasant world?’ But Jerome Cardan, a professor with his eyes on the stars, accounts for the poor king’s matrimonial misfortunes which he had witnessed & lamented, thus: ‘Venus being in conjunction with Cauda, Lampas partook of the nature of Mars: Luna in occiduo cardine was among the dependencies of Mars & Mars himself was in the illstarred constellation Virgo & in the quadrant of Jupiter Infelix’. Mr Froude calls this ‘abominable nonsense’ whilst Henry himself remarked: ‘Happy those who never saw a King & whom a King never saw’.

Cardinal Pole in the revised version of De Unitate Ecclesiae accuses Henry of having debauched the sister of Anne Boleyn before divorcing Katharine of Aragon. Froude calls Cardinal Pole an arrogant, loquacious & ineffectual traitor. But Professor Smith says he was broadminded & exactly the reverse of everything that Froude called him. Pole says of himself that at the age of thirty-six he had long been conversant with old men & had long judged the oldest men too young for him to learn wisdom from. On the other hand he freely acknowledges that this remarkable wisdom was the gift of the king who had specially fostered his education. He wrote a book for the king’s private reading intended to turn the king back to the Old Faith & away from Anne. He swore to the king that no one had seen it after he had submitted it for the approval of the Vatican authorities. It contained such passages as: ‘Your flatterers have filled your heart with folly, you have made yourself abhorred amongst the rulers of Xtendom…. Rex est partus Naturae laborantis, populus enim regem procreat’. It astonished him that this failed to convert Henry & he travelled all Europe over seeking to raise a crusade against his king.

Froude accordingly calls Pole a fool, an evil genius, a narrow & odious fanatic, & a traitor to the Instrument of Providence. But Professor Smith excuses this treachery with: ‘surely without any religious fanaticism any man might well object to seeing the Church, the unity of which all Xtians prized, rent in twain in order to satisfy a tyrant’s lust’.

Henry however had been able to satisfy his lust with Anne, not to mention her sister, without rending the church in twain, for according to both Pole & Professor Smith Anne had been his mistress for years before the divorce. (Professor Smith speaks of Henry’s ‘brutal behaviour in openly installing his mistress as Queen designate at her side’.) The king had also, according to them both, ‘certainly’ enjoyed her sister. Mr Froude however thinks it unlikely that in that case Henry, his people & his Parliament could have been so ‘cynically heartless’ as to demand his separation from Katharine on the ground of incest. Professor Smith however considers the charge ‘certainly proved’: for, in the Act of Parliament, 28 Hen. VIII cap. 27, illegitimate unions are decreed to bring persons within the degree of consanguinity of marriage. Charles V’s view of the matter was (he was telling Wyatt, Henry’s ambassador, that he could not prevent Spanish preachers uttering these slanders against Henry): ‘Preachers will preach against myself whenever there is cause; that cannot be hindered; kings be not kings of tongues. And if men give cause to be spoken of they will be spoken of’. Thus Charles supported freedom of speech. On the other hand, the Queen of Navarre said to the Papal Nuncio at about the same time: ‘Say you that the King of England is a man lost & cast away? I would to God that your master the Pope, & the Emperor, & we here did live after so good & godly a sort as he & his doth.’

Thomas Cromwell’s portrait by Holbein, says Professor Smith, ‘is a softened version of the subject’! It is not ugly enough. His authority for this is Mr Merriman, who wrote in 1902. And: ‘For thorough paced villainy Cromwell had no peers. Who besides him has ever deliberately set down his criminal intentions in a memorandum book: “Item, The Abbot of Glaston to be tried at Glaston & also to be executed there with his accomplices. Item, to see that the evidence be well sorted & the indictment well drawn…. Item to send Gendon to the Tower to be racked. Item to appoint preachers to go through the realm to preach the gospel & the true word of God”.’ Yet Cardinal Pole, whom Professor Smith so much admires, was setting down in memoranda in books, & crying to all the princes in Europe, that his own king must be taken upon the field of battle & his entrails torn out & burnt before his face. And Pole too would have sent preachers with the true word of God throughout this realm.

The late Mr Froude found Cromwell a mighty minister & a consummate diplomatist, skilfully balancing the Powers one against another & crushing out seditions with a strong but necessary & beneficent hand… until Henry began to frown on him. Then immediately, Cromwell’s bringing about the diplomatic marriage with Anne of Cleves becomes ‘stooping to dabble in the muddy waters of intrigue’. When he was in the Tower Cromwell wrote: ‘Most Gracious Lord, I never spoke with the Chancellor of the Augmentation & Throgmorton at one time. But if I did I am sure I never spoke of any such matter & your Grace knows what matter of man Throgmorton is.’ But Froude says this denial ‘was faint, indirect, not like the broad, absolute repudiation of a man who was consciously clear of offience’. Cromwell was accused of having said before the Chancellor & Throgmorton that he would fight against the king sword in hand if the king reversed his policy. Cromwell of course had hanged many men on hearsay evidence of informers like Throgmorton, & Marillac puts the matter: ‘Words idly spoken he had aforetime twisted into treason: the measure which he had dealt out to others shall now be meted out to him.’ And this was practically the view of the Council that condemned him. Froude however says that Henry was forced to execute Cromwell because ‘the illegal acts of a minister who had been trusted with extraordinary powers were too patent to be denied’. Professor Smith accounts for it all by: ‘The king feared those under whose influence he had been & could not bear to let them live.’ The King of France & Cardinal ‘Du Bellay’ were of opinion that Cromwell fell because he wanted to marry the Princess Mary, no doubt with a view to the succession: ‘insomuch as at all times when any marriage was treated of for the Lady Mary he did always his best to break the same’. It should be remembered that the fondest desire of the Cardinal & Francis had been a French marriage for Mary.

Thus each man may see in the case of Henry VIII what he most desires to see, Professor Smith seeing that it is almost needless to add Cromwell was corrupt, & ‘accumulated wealth by foul means’. Yet in the nature of the case the only proof of this is the accusations of his enemies, for Cromwell was not even tried. The case against Anne Boleyn rests perhaps on no better evidence. She was at least tried & – Froude urges – found guilty by the greatest peers of the Realm, her own father being amongst them. Yet in her case, tho’ not in Cromwell’s, Professor Smith can see that nothing was proved against her… because he desires to prove that Henry was a human tiger.

I propose to sum up very briefly my views of Henry, to add one more to the small collection of bizarreries of judgements here adduced. (I had studied the matter for some years & had got together all the materials for a life of this king & I had written my first chapter when Mr Pollard forestalled me with his book, which for that reason I refrain from commenting upon.) Henry to me was a man very much of his age. He was of course a Tudor & a king: this made him unreasonable, ungovernable, with the horrible suspicions of a high solitude & a great craving for a companion he could trust. But it was in the nature of the policies of that day to be tortuous & in their very basis unscrupulous. Deceit was a recognized factor in public life & Henry employed all his trusted companions in endless intrigues that were based on sheer deceit. Taking this king & these things together it needs very little knowledge of psychology to see that his career must be one of passionate attachments reacting towards still more passionate suspicions. He employed these persons to deceive, he trusted them; sooner or later he must have the thought in his mind: These persons are deceiving me. And, that being the case in a Court circle, grounds for that belief could never be long wanting. Anne Boleyn & Katharine were as inevitably doomed to suspicion as Wolsey & Cromwell. He was a king & by every scheme of ethics of his contemporaries the fitting penalty for deceiving him was death. If we accept Professor Smith’s view of Henry as an insensate human tiger there were certainly no high-bred gentlemen in Europe of that day. It was a world of tigers.

It naturally was not, being only a world with other ideals from those of XXth century England & North America. ‘Tue la’ is still the hardly ethically or legally condemned remedy for matrimonial infidelity of the great Latin races & of by far the greater portion of the population of the globe. Very possibly Henry ‘lusted’ after other women as soon as he tired of one & very possibly too that helped him to desire the divorce of Katharine. But very possibly it did not. It must be remembered too that in those days what Schopenhauer called ‘Christo-Germanisch Dummheit’, the idea that women were to be more tenderly treated than men, had hardly been evolved & Henry was quite within his ethical scheme & the scheme of his contemporaries when he swept women as well as men out of his way by execution. The legal penalty for high treason was burning in the case of women & Henry was very essentially a child of his age. Populus enim regem procreat, as Pole said.

He was in fact not much more monstrous than his people but his people had given him more scope. And monstrous as we may account his treatment of Katharine of Aragon, judged by our own standards, it was as nothing to the treatment of that very unfortunate lady by Henry VII, the king whom so humanitarian a person as More eulogized.

But if it be Pharisaism to call Henry a human tiger it is blind Hero Worship to call him an instrument of providence or even a particularly great king. He was certainly a very hard worker but otherwise he was little more than a very obstinate opportunist. If he escaped ultimate disaster it was only on account of the utter incapacity & irresoluteness of his fellow rulers in Christendom. To a person with any imagination it is little less than maddening to follow the proceedings of Charles V during the great rising in the North when Henry was absolutely at his last gasp before the Catholic rebels. Of policy he had none & his mind was always fixed on the most meticulous details of his day’s chicanery. He detested Protestantism & he forced it upon the world, he held public debates with heretics & when he failed to convince them he had no better remedy than to let them be burnt for beliefs which, two years later, his opportunism forced him to tolerate. Upon the whole he increased the prestige of the Crown very materially but he did it in such a way that as soon as the personal power of the Tudors went from the Throne the Throne lost that power of packing juries & parliaments which was essentially the secret of his government.

Heavy, threatening, jealous & craving for that sympathy that is admiration, he made an immense splutter in Christendom. But he did not direct any tendencies: he merely changed them in a time when change was in the air.

If we regard him personally he seems, I think, a tragic figure as every suspicious man born to great power must be. Temperamental jealousy & suspicion are the greatest of all the plagues of the flesh, since jealous man is incapable of believing the most material proofs of innocence and perpetually torments himself very horribly for reasons that come out of his own being, & I am strongly inclined to believe that he must have been what today we call a neurotic subject, at any rate in his later years. The times were very complicated & the daily work that he had to get through was very great. Merely to read today & to keep in mind all the separate threads of events in the Calendars of Letters & State Papers, merely to follow them very much at one’s leisure is a sufficiently great undertaking. But to have been buried deep in the very belly of the events, to have trembled for one’s throne, for one’s dynasty, one’s land, one’s personal honour & very certainly for one’s soul, to have been certain of only one thing… that there was no man one could trust: all that must have meant a strain constant, increasing & maddening. I am not in the least inclined to doubt that Henry may really have believed his marriage with Katharine cursed by God. He was a superstitious man in a superstitious age & all her sons died at birth. It is possible even that he believed the adulteries of Anne & Katharine Howard were the successive revenges of Providence for his breaking up the Church & that this rivetted in his mind the belief in their adulteries. His precautions for keeping his son alive were those of a man in a panic & there is no doubt that, had he lived, he would have sought reconciliation with the Pope. A letter to Charles V asking for his intercession was actually drafted but never sent. You have only to look at his portrait to see that his life was not very merry.

The fact is that any study of Henry & his times must be a pathologic one. To approach them in any ex parte spirit… to approach any period of revolution, any revolutionary figure, or indeed to approach any figure or any period in a partisan spirit, is to do no more than to convince men who already agree with you or to give a picture of yourself to anyone who may happen to be disinterested. One or two foreign historians of distinction have assured me that the distinguishing defect of their English confrères is their insularity… their being exclusively preoccupied with the affairs of England. And when we look at the wideness of research of German professors the charge seems comparatively correct, though I suppose we may point to Robertson & Gibbon, not to mention the researches of Mr Martin Hume in the archives of Simancas or the delightful South American studies of Mr Cunninghame Graham. But the insular tendency is traceable to our inborn habit of regarding History as a branch of polemics. It is obvious that in that case our polemics will bear upon points that most nearly touch ourselves & that we shall find those points in our own history.

And the English public does not want impartial history. It asks for ethical points of view, ethical ‘leads’; just as it can not understand ‘the use’ of impersonal fiction. Consequently only the political tract ‘pays’ & we have phenomena like the histories of Hume, Macaulay & Froude; that amusing skit, Professor Smith’s article, & articles of similar, less exaggerated, but less amusing types.

The polemic is of course very stimulating & very exhilarating when it is well done: at its best it promotes thought, at its worst it provides a human document, casting light upon the workings of its writer’s mind. But it reduces History to a battlefield, rejoinder following rejoinder, so that the course of historic study remains perpetually in the same groove until it vanishes altogether in mere meticulousness or personal abuse.4

On the other hand the writing of impersonal history is a difficult matter, because the suppression of self is difficult. Yet in spite of the fact that the public does not want impartial writing & of the race habit of regarding History as polemics we have a powerful & industrious school of ‘scientific’ historians, a comparatively new growth in England. The State subsidizes great historical works & Lord Acton has left behind him as a memorial a gigantic enterprise of historical projection. Thus as far as research goes impersonal History is practicable in England. Unfortunately for the projection of these researches, meticulousness & the habit of rejoinder distinguish the Scientific Historian as well as the Polemical. And these things tend to destroy the sense of proportion which is really the Historic Sense. If one reads works of the type of Mr Round’s Commune of London one discovers that the greater part of them is given up to the battleaxing of opponents over matters that, relatively speaking, are not of much more importance than the authenticity of a disused postage stamp. It is almost nothing more than a manifestation of the collector’s habit.

This phrase is of course too violent & is hitting below the belt, for very obviously it is Mr Round’s business, as it is one of his supreme qualities, to strengthen the minutest links of his chains as he goes along. But to devote too much space to mere controversy & to leave selection entirely out of a work is to make one’s work comparatively useless as projection, though as research it may be supremely useful. Lord Acton on the other hand made little use of the controversial battleaxe, his habit of research was almost incredible, but he was so essentially rather the reader than the writer that he left practically nothing behind him except his tradition. It is in the spirit of this tradition that the committee of Scientific Historians to which I have referred is now engaged in putting pens to paper.

But as soon as they have begun to write – as soon as they have begun that projection of materials which is Creative History – they have, according to their own earlier ideals, slipped down hill and they confess that it is impossible to write without ‘points of view’. In the journal which to the public at large represents the Scientific Historian this reaction is marked enough. Thus today one may read in its columns the query whether Mazarin is not more vividly portrayed in Dumas’ Vingt Ans Après, than in what purports to be a serious historical work under review &, on the same page, in a review of Mr Roby’s Roman Private Law there appears: ‘Certainly an author who does not reverence the functions of imagination in history is not likely to make much of the origins of ancient institutions’. Thus we have the pendulum shewn in its swing back towards the Historical Novel. It is in fact quite possible to be impersonal in research; it is frankly impossible as soon as it comes to projection. Even in his prefaces to the Calendars of Letters & Papers (I remain for purposes of unity within the reign of Henry VIII) Dr Gairdner commits himself to such a sentence as: ‘Sane men it would seem, did not covet martyrdom.’ And later on he has a paragraph commencing in the old polemic way: ‘We have heard it said in times past & sometimes in our own day, that…’ & going on to combat what he had heard said. (Letters & Papers, Hen. VIII, vol. xvi).

I do not of course condemn Dr Gairdner as intemperate, but it seems to me that, if counsels of perfection prevailed at the Record Office, the Master of the Rolls should reprove Dr Gairdner… which would be absurd. Yet that reductio ad absurdum should add one more to the proofs that absolute detachment in historic writing is an impossibility. And it gives the pendulum one kick further back towards the Historical Novel of the type of Salammbô or the Education sentimentale. Or even, horrible to think, it may swing once more towards works like Vingt Ans Après, or Windsor Castle.

History conceived as an exact Science is an impossibility because even the minutest of financial accounts is made by human means, coloured by human views or liable to the slips of human pens, & as soon as your historian has gathered his materials together the devil of theorizing enters into him. One might say, a priori, that to get to know history one is safe in studying the accumulations at the various Record Offices of the world, yet Froude did this with fatal results. He went there with preconceived notions & preconceived notions are the death of the historic sense. Without that last the writing of history becomes as worthless as the writing of advertisements. For, in essence, such an article as Professor Smith’s is a form of self advertisement … not an odious one or in any way a reprehensible one, but still a form. When Professor Smith looks at the portraits of Henry’s queens he says at once that these ‘do not indicate that His Majesty’s sense of beauty was very keen’. This ‘advertises’ Prof. Smith’s taste at the expense of Henry’s, leaving quite out of account the fact that the aesthetic sense is a matter of associations & that ideals of beauty can never be fixed. It is in fact an attempt to force the writer’s personality & standards upon the world. The possession of the historic sense would make this impossible: it may drive the writer to want to know what type of beauty was then dominant, it might even drive him to ask why; it would at any rate cause him either to attempt to understand these matters or to leave them alone. But it would certainly prevent his ever trying to force his private preferences upon the world at the expense of his subject. It would do this in ethical matters as in aesthetic, in the domain of religious as of national feelings. For the possession of the historic sense makes first of all for comprehension. It implies an immense tolerance, an immense understanding, possibly an immense pity or possibly an immense contempt for one’s kind.

One of these last will be the writer’s ‘point of view’, essentially true or essentially false according to the standard of the reader. But it will be innocuous because it will be the product not of a doctrinaire spirit but of temperament. It will warp the presentations of character all one way or all another way, it will select no one type for praise & no other for blame. It will be honest.

In the domain of History there is no such thing as Time. She deals either with those who are dead or those who will soon be as dead as the men who fought before Troy. De mortuis nil nisi bonum5 is an idiotic & harmful motto, but it recurs with a pleasant ring when one is reading Froude’s blackening of Pole or Professor Smith on Thomas Cromwell. For these men, if one thinks of them at all, become alive once more, once 12 Critical Essays more strive, once more err, die & enlist one’s feelings in their opposing struggles, failures & inevitably tragic deaths.

The Scientific Historian is a private worker, he collects matter as another man collects mezzotints, he may annotate texts or refute errors. But the moment he emerges from these retreats it is his duty to be a creative artist, it is his business to evolve from his dry bones a picture of an era, of an individual, or of a type. And being thus a creator, he should be above his creations to the extent of checking both his preferences & his dislikes. Let him set his Henry on his feet & put into his mouth the words he really did utter; let him make Charles move once more & once more speak to Wyatt; the cry of the common people may sound through their voluminous protests to the Privy Council. Let the gossip of Marillac be set against the gossip of Chapuys: the most outrageous of Henry’s dialectical outpourings against the most outrageous of Luther, of Bucer, of Pole, of Latimer, of Shaxton, of Jerome & of the Anabaptists, let the Creative Historian set their most noble utterances & deeds against their most noble. Let his writing be ‘documented’ down to the bottom, colloquial of the vernacular, & above all let it be interesting. He may leave his readers to draw their own morals.

It may be objected that such a work of art would be in technique a work of fiction. One replies: ‘Why not?’ For in their really higher manifestations History & Fiction are one: they are documented, tolerant, vivid; their characters live & answer & react one upon another each after his own sort. Fiction indeed, so long as it is not written with a purpose, is Contemporary History & History is the same thing as the Historic Novel, as long as it is inspired with the Historic Sense… the Historic Novel with a wide outlook upon peoples & upon kings. What was Tacitus but a novelist (Mr Tarver would say a novelist with a purpose) or what is the following passage but incomparable History:

Il connut la faim, la soif, les fièvres et la vermine.

Il s’accoutuma au fracas des mêlées, à l’aspect des moribonds. Le vent tanna sa peau. Ses membres se durcirent par le contact des armures; et comme il était très fort, courageux, tempérant, avisé, il obtint sans peine le commandement d’une compagnie.

Au début des batailles, il enlevait ses soldats d’un grand geste de son épée. Avec une corde à noeuds, il grimpait aux murs des citadelles, la nuit, balancé par l’ouragan, pendant que les flammèches du feu grégeois se collaient à sa cuirasse, et que la résine bouillante et le plomb fondu ruisselaient des créneaux. Souvent le heurt d’une pierre fracassa son bouclier. Des ponts trop chargés d’hommes croulèrent sous lui. En tournant sa masse d’armes, il se débarassa de quatorze cavaliers. Il défit, en champs clos; tous ceux qui se proposèrent. Plus de vingt fois on le crut mort.6

[1903–4], ed. Sondra J. Stang and Richard Stang, Yale Review, 78:4 (Summer 1989), [511]–524.

1 Henry VIII by A.F. Pollard, London, Goupil & Co.

2 ‘A Gallery of Portraits,’ by Goldwin Smith, DCL.

3 Daily Chronicle, 1 June 1903.

4 Cf. Mr Lilly or Mr Froude.

5 [Speak nothing but good of the dead.]

6 ‘La Légende de Saint Julien l’Hospitalier’. [‘He knew hunger, thirst, fevers, and vermin. He became inured to the din of battle, to the sight of the dying. The wind tanned his skin. His limbs were hardened by their contact with armour; and hecause he was very strong, brave, temperate, shrewd, he easily obtained the command of a company.
When the battle started, he would spur his soldiers on by brandishing his sword. With the help of a knotted rope, he would climb over the walls of citadels at night, swinging in the gales, while sparks of Greek fire stuck to his armour, and boiling oil and molten lead poured from the battlements. Often the blow of a stone shattered his shield. Bridges, overloaded with men, crumbled under him. By swinging his mace he got rid of fourteen horsemen. In single combat he defeated all who challenged him. More than twenty times he was presumed dead.’]

1 Henry VIII by A.F. Pollard, London, Goupil & Co.

2 ‘A Gallery of Portraits,’ by Goldwin Smith, DCL.

3 Daily Chronicle, 1 June 1903.

4 Cf. Mr Lilly or Mr Froude.

5 [Speak nothing but good of the dead.]

6 ‘La Légende de Saint Julien l’Hospitalier’. [‘He knew hunger, thirst, fevers, and vermin. He became inured to the din of battle, to the sight of the dying. The wind tanned his skin. His limbs were hardened by their contact with armour; and hecause he was very strong, brave, temperate, shrewd, he easily obtained the command of a company.

When the battle started, he would spur his soldiers on by brandishing his sword. With the help of a knotted rope, he would climb over the walls of citadels at night, swinging in the gales, while sparks of Greek fire stuck to his armour, and boiling oil and molten lead poured from the battlements. Often the blow of a stone shattered his shield. Bridges, overloaded with men, crumbled under him. By swinging his mace he got rid of fourteen horsemen. In single combat he defeated all who challenged him. More than twenty times he was presumed dead.’]

Mr A. F. Pollard has written a book on Henry VIII1 & Professor Goldwin Smith reviews it in the North American Review.2 Professor Smith’s article is mainly an attack on Henry & the late Mr Froude: immediately afterwards there appears in the Fortnightly Review Mr W.S. Lilly’s article on the last named historian.

Froude thought Henry was a marvellous instrument of Providence in the evolution of the Church of England, Professor Smith thinks that Henry was not a ‘high bred gentleman’, Mr Lilly thinks that the late Mr Froude was congenitally incapable of speaking the truth. (Mr Lilly is secretary to the Catholic Association of Great Britain.) Someone else says that ‘The proper place among the diseases of the mind for this wanton insolence may be found by anybody who has the patience & the spare time to read the works of Mr Lilly’.3 On such lines & in such tempers do we approach creative history & its heroes.

The polemic is of course very stimulating & very exhilarating when it is well done: at its best it promotes thought, at its worst it provides a human document, casting light upon the workings of its writer’s mind. But it reduces History to a battlefield, rejoinder following rejoinder, so that the course of historic study remains perpetually in the same groove until it vanishes altogether in mere meticulousness or personal abuse.4

In the domain of History there is no such thing as Time. She deals either with those who are dead or those who will soon be as dead as the men who fought before Troy. De mortuis nil nisi bonum5 is an idiotic & harmful motto, but it recurs with a pleasant ring when one is reading Froude’s blackening of Pole or Professor Smith on Thomas Cromwell. For these men, if one thinks of them at all, become alive once more, once 12 Critical Essays more strive, once more err, die & enlist one’s feelings in their opposing struggles, failures & inevitably tragic deaths.

tournant sa masse d’armes, il se débarassa de quatorze cavaliers. Il défit, en champs clos; tous ceux qui se proposèrent. Plus de vingt fois on le crut mort.

The Collected Poems of Christina Rossetti

To appear in the familiar livery of the Standard Edition, if it isn’t a canonization for a poet, is as nearly as possible to be beatified.1 It is to be singled out and given, as it were, the chance to show what miracles may be worked by invoking him, what cures wrought in his name – how, long, in fact, his ‘bell’ will ring. It is a step upwards in the hagiology, but it is, also, to be put very decidedly on trial. It gives us, I mean, something to think of when the best work of a newly ‘collected’ poet is presented to us suddenly in a type, and on a page, where most plain men are accustomed to find The Tempest.

It is like seeing a wall-painting taken from the painter’s studio and set into its niche in a great hall. ‘Values’ readjust themselves, details drop into place or stick out, and you are set thinking: Will this last and be reverently taken care of, or will the dust finally settle on to a thing grown dull, until it flakes from the wall and is forgotten?

In the case of Christina Rossetti, the image is that of a mosaic rather than of a fresco, since hitherto the tendency has been to regard her as the poet of what some one has called small-gemmedness. Ever since the appearance of ‘Uphill’, in 1861, small fragments of her verse have been floating in the air, as it were. Almost every person at all lettered has carried about with him some little piece. You will find one man who retains with intimate pleasure some small phrase, like, ‘Beneath the moon’s most shadowy beam’; others have not forgotten a stanza or so of, ‘When I am dead, my dearest’; some have by heart nearly the whole of:

Does the road wind uphill all the way?

Yes, to the very end.

Will the day’s journey take the whole long day?

From morn to night, my friend.

And I know that a great many more, not literate at all, do constantly read favourite verses of her religious poems. At any rate, up and down the land there have been treasured for many years these small and gem-like fragments. Now, at last, the mosaic fits back to the wall, and the whole figure can be seen.

She lived her whole life behind a veil. She had not any literary contacts that counted very much. Upon the whole, in early days, she was a dark horse, not very much valued, if well loved, in a circle brilliant, buoyant, and, as youth will be, noisy in a fine way. She must have been often enough in the room with several great personages at one time. But it was natural that in such a roomful she should not make much noise. Her brothers and their distinguished companions troubled mostly about abstract ideas, they made movements, and such large things. In abstract matters she was not singularly intellectual: indeed, we may say that she was not intellectual at all. She had strong and settled faiths that simply could not be talked about, and she had above all a gift that was priceless; a faculty for picking up, like a tiny and dainty mouse, little precious crumbs of observation that were dropped unnoticed by people who, in argument, assailed each other with tremendous words. Mr Ruskin, for instance, considered that her verse was hardly worth publishing.

In those tremendous contests of young lungs of genius, whilst Ingres’ works were being called filthy slosh, Van Eyck’s tremendous, Michael Angelo’s Last Judgment simply comic, and Delacroix a perfect beast; whilst Academicians were being damned, and Primitives belauded; whilst, in fact, the P.R.B. was still, as is the way with romantic youth, hammering the Universe to its pattern, Christina’s voice simply did not carry. No doubt she learnt lessons, But you may imagine her sitting still, bright-eyed, smiling in the least, observing very much, and quite content to write one of her little poems next morning on the corner of her washstand.

The least considerable of the Pre-Raphaelites ruined the youth of her life. She was a person of rigid principle, and a wavering human being. (I imagine that the story is well enough known.) She was a convinced Anglican: Mr Collinson had been one. He had become a Roman Catholic when he fell in love with her. She refused him on account of his religion, and he shortly afterwards reverted to Anglicanism. She accepted him then, and after a time he once more became a Roman Catholic. It isn’t one’s business to reprehend Mr Collinson; he was obviously concerned for his soul. ‘He had none the less,’ says her brother, ‘struck a staggering blow at Christina Rossetti’s peace of mind on the very threshold of womanly life – a blow from which she did not recover for years. He died in 1881.’

And, indeed the tinge of sadness, of resignation, the attitude of hands folded in the lap is the suggestion of a great part of her verse. But there are other tones:–

My heart is like a singing bird,

Whose nest is in a watered shoot,

My heart is like an apple tree,

Whose boughs are bent with thickset fruit.

* * * * *

Raise me a daïs of silk and down,

Hang it with vair and purple dyes,

Carve it in doves and pomegranates,

And peacocks with a hundred eyes.

* * * * *

Because the birthday of my life

Is come, my love is come to me.

And this may be cited not as evidence of any historic event, not for instance as a paean for Mr Collinson, but simply to show that she had in her a strain of pagan feeling and a capacity for pure joy. And even if you put, as the other end of the scale:

The hope I dreamed of was a dream,

Was but a dream, and now I wake

Exceeding comfortless and worn and old,

For a dream’s sake.

it will stand as much for desire as for resignation.

Her union with her family was very close. For her mother she had a love which was an adoration. These two lived together with nothing to disturb their ties, with no events save deaths and bereavements, maintaining thus apart a life so tranquil that the rumour of events in the outer world penetrated through the mists and shadows of the regions round Bloomsbury into their warm home like sounds heard faintly and from a distance through closed doors – until her mother too died. She knew, later on, a period of tranquil and deep love for a very charming and unworldly scholar. Him, too, she could not marry because of his religious belief, or because of his latitude. Says Mr Rossetti: ‘She declined his suit without ceasing to see him, and to cherish him as a friend. Knowing the state of her heart at the time the offer was made, I urged her to marry, and offered that they should both, if money difficulties stood in the way, share my home. But she had made up her mind…. and she remained immovable. Years passed; she became an elderly and an old woman, and she loved the scholarly recluse to the last day of his life, December 5th, 1883, and to the last day of her own, his memory.’

And it is pleasant and instructive to transcribe this note to one of her poems: ‘“My Mouse”. This was not a mouse in the ordinary sense, but a “sea-mouse”. Mr Cayley had picked it up on the sea-shore, and presented it to my sister, preserved in spirits. The sea-mouse was with her to the end, and may remain with me to the end; its brilliant hues are still vivid.’ Towards the close of her life she became almost a recluse; her mind dwelt solely upon her religion, her verses became exclusively devotional, and her time was given up to acts of charity. She was then very brown in complexion, and somewhat startling in aspect, because a disease caused her eyes to protrude. She dressed in deep black, and spoke with precision, pausing for words with her head a little on one side. A half-humorous, half-introspective smile was never far from her lips. In an atmosphere of shadow, in a house over-shadowed by the tall trees of a London square, she was a figure not so much striking as penetrating, and, in face of her self-possession, her deliberate and rare movements, her clear and bell-like enunciation – it was difficult to realize that one had in front of one either a great poet or a woman suffering from more than one painful and lingering disease, from great bereavements, and, above all, from very terrible religious fears.

But if she were a recluse, she was not shut out from personal contacts; if she did not ‘go out’ much, she did not shut her doors. She had her reservations: in matters of her faith her mind was simply closed. She neither debated nor, as far as I know, did she ever attempt to convert any one who differed. But very decidedly she was not unable to be vigorous if she considered herself attacked. A young poet of an ingenuous and seraphic appearance once went to see her. He wanted to offer homage, and he had the top of a thin volume peeping out of his jacket pocket. He belonged to a school that in those days was called fin-de-siècle, his verse was rather aggressively decadent, and he was in a small way well known. I suppose she considered that his coming was in the nature of an aggression, and, almost before one had realized that conversation had begun, she was talking about modern verse – deploring its tendencies, deriding its powers of expression, and attacking it in a gentle voice with words keen, sharp, and precise, like a scalpel. It was an uncomfortable twenty minutes, and the young poet went away with his volume still in his pocket. So that, as a general rule, if she never obtruded her beliefs, she was, upon occasion, perfectly able to keep her own end rather more than ‘up’.

No other biographic details seem to tell anything about the main tendencies of her verses. Many of her poems may have been suggested by events, but they were inspired psychologically. They were renderings of emotions she had felt. She did not, I mean, sit down to ‘poetize’ on her vicissitudes.

It is convenient to call her verse lyric, but the term is not strictly correct, as I shall attempt to explain later. It is assuredly not Epic; it is never exactly Elegiac, nor is it ever really Narrative verse. Most particularly it is not philosophic, hortatory, or improving. Even her devotional poetry is seldom other than the expression of a mood. It is a prayer, an adoration of the Saviour, a fear of the Almighty, a craving for pardon and for rest. ‘Passing away, saith the World, Passing away’ is the presentation of a Christian mood; her devotional poem on the largest scale, the ‘Processional’, is a presentation of the whole of Creation defiling before God the Father, and uttering a Doxology. But her verse is never a sermon; it never preaches, and that, no doubt, is why it lives. In that matter she had the Latin temperament, the instinct that makes you see that if you want to convince you must interest, and if you want to interest you must draw concrete pictures, leaving your hearer to draw the morals. That too, as far as the presentation of her matter goes, is the ‘technique’ of her secular poetry; she had the gift of just, simple, and touching words, and with them she drew pictures that expressed her moods.

The expression of moods – that after all is the only business of the lyric poet. And when he has conveyed those moods to others he has succeeded. It is very decidedly not his business to look at things on the large scale, to ‘write poetic’, to be more impracticable, frenzied, or romantic than Nature has made him. He has to appeal rather than to overwhelm, to hang in the ear rather than to sweep you away with organ peals. It is for these reasons that Christina Rossetti deserves to live.

This new edition challenges a readjustment of our views of her. It emphasizes her other sides; it brings forward her larger flights. It groups together in a prominent place works in which, if the modelling is not broader, the outlines at least contain more canvas. This does not much affect one’s view of her technique; she remains still the poet of lines, of stanzas, of phrases, and of cadences that are intimately right. But, with the grouping together of her longer verse, there stands out a buoyancy of temperament, a profuseness, a life, and, as far as the metre of the verse is concerned, an infectious gaiety. There appears too, more strongly defined, her little humour, her delicate playfulness, her major key.

‘Goblin Market’, with which the volume opens, moves breathlessly. Its metre is short, its rhymes are concealed enough not to hinder you with a jingle of assonances, and accurate enough to keep the stanzas together.

At last the evil people,

Worn out by her resistance,

Flung back her penny, kicked their fruit,

Along whichever road they took,

Not leaving shoot or stone or root;

Some writhed into the ground,

Some dived into the brook,

With ring and ripple,

Some scudded on the gale without a sound,

Some vanished in the distance.

The whole poem goes in one breath. Yet it is treated with so much detail as to give the impression of profusion and of value. It is succeeded in the volume by three earlier poems of some length. ‘Repining’ and the ‘Three Nuns’ are juvenile efforts, rather dry in tone, and a little formal, but austerely worded. They show interestingly how, in the girl, the organ, the vehicle of expression, was already formed and waiting for the afflatus. Or, perhaps, it was only for the subject that she was waiting, since between the two poems she had already written: ‘When I am Dead, my Dearest’ (and, indeed, it is no small boast for a family to be able to make that one member should have written this poem when she was eighteen, and another, ‘The Blessed Damosel’, before he was twenty).

‘The Lowest Room’ and ‘From House to Home’ were both written before ‘Goblin Market’ and both after she had attained to maturity, the one in 1856, the other two years later. They indicate change of temperament, a hardening of point of view as well as of technical attainment. The first is a sort of commentary on the Homeric combatants, and, if at the end it strikes the note of resignation, and utters the words: These things are not for me, it certainly shows that the poet enjoyed describing the combats whilst they lasted. This note of life as a thing enjoyable and exciting is also the note of the opening of ‘From House to Home’, but the recoil from that idea is here not towards resignation. It announces definitely – and in more set terms than she employed anywhere else – that earthly joy is a snare and a lure:

The first was like a dream through summer heat,

* * * * *

It was a pleasure place within my soul,

* * * * *

That lured me from my goal.

She draws a picture of her royal estate: a castle, a pleasaunce, pastures, parks, and forests peopled with the quaint and sprightly beasts that she loved:

My heath lay further off where lizards lived,

In strange metallic mail, just spied and gone,

Like darted lightnings here and there perceived,

But nowhere dwelt upon.

And there she delighted harmlessly enough walking with a being like an angel:

And sometimes like a snowdrift he was fair,

And sometimes like a sunset glorious red,

And sometimes he had wings to scale the air,

An aureole round his head.

* * * * *

‘To-morrow’, once I said to him with smiles,

‘To-night’, he answered gravely and was dumb,

But pointed out the stones that numbered miles,

And miles and miles to come.

‘Not so,’ I said, ‘to-morrow shall be sweet.

To-night is not so sweet as coming days.’

Then first I saw that he had turned his feet,

Had turned from me his face.

The angel left her; her earth turned to winter, and the poem becomes one long apocalypse of pictures seen by a soul that is tortured by the remorse of having lived. It contains magnificent verses, but it falls off. It has poignant lines like this, from a description of souls before the throne: ‘Each face looked one way like a moon new lit’, but the impetus of the verse disappears. This may be because it is didactic, or derivative, or because the poet simply had not yet the strength to keep up – or because it was written with more emotion, and in consequence with more inflation.

But ‘Goblin Market’ was written next year, and from that time onward all her longer verse kept its level of inspiration. It has a profusion of imagination, a power of painting pictures; here and there it has dramatic places, and always a level austerity and restraint in the wording. The longer poems range from a ‘Royal Princess’, which is dramatic, vigorous, and bitter, to a charming ballad of three maidens with happy loves, and from that to the fine ‘Proccesional of Creation’.

The last of the longer poems here given is ‘Later Life, a double Sonnet of Sonnets’, and this suggests, after all, the clue to all her longer pieces. The throwing these thus together challenges, as I have said, a readjustment in our minds, a revision of our mental image of Christina Rossetti’s structural technique. It holds out, as it were, this rearrangement, the idea that here was a writer of ‘sustained’ verse, who had, at least potentially, epic as well as lyric gifts, But ‘Later Life’ is a sequence of sonnets and careful examination will reveal that the ‘Processional of Creation’ is a sequence of pictures, and so, too, the ‘Prince’s Progress’ and ‘Goblin Market’ are sequences – as you might say, strings of beads. They prove, if proof be needed, that, by very careful handling, the lyrical method may be applied to make long poems that are readable and entrancing. But there is not the sweep of pinions; the flight is that of the fieldfare that now and then crosses a sea.

That is, of course, a method like another, and it is no condemnation to say that a writer’s method is not the Epic; it is mostly a matter of temperament, the Epic’s being the temperament of action, the other’s that of observation. For if each of these longer poems is a chain of delicate and intimate ‘places’, beads of pure beauty, the links between are little quaintnesses, little pieces of observation so humanly rendered that they make you read on to the next ‘place’. And each whole poem has its key, its level of individuality. That is, so to speak, the string on which the beads, little and big, are strung. Here the method and temperament are generally lucky. Delicate humour, as a rule, counteracts that tendency to ‘write poetic’, which is the bane of so many poets; it does away with any danger that the writer will try to get the ‘poetic point of view’, it leaves her simple and natural. It lets her be human and interesting, when for the moment the theme is not grandiose, and it does not hinder soaring when the time comes.

‘Goblin Market’, for instance, is a poem concerned with human beings exposed to temptations. The human beings and their cravings are the subject, the tempters are subordinate. If, then, Christina Rossetti had made the tempters evil demi-gods, they must have been either well done, and too large for the frame, or ill done and not alive. Here they are:

Curious Laura chose to linger,

Wondering at each merchant man;

One had a cat’s face,

One whisked a tail,

One tramped at a rat’s pace,

One crawled like a snail,

One like a wombat, prowled obtuse and furry.

These, if you like, are unconventional and not dignified, but they are – and that is the main thing – in tone with the piece. And the passages in higher notes have not need to strain in order to rise from that level. This is a note of craving:

One day, remembering her kernel stone,

She set it by a wall that faced the south,

Dewed it with tears, hoped for a root;

But there came none.

It never saw the sun,

It never felt the trickling moisture run,

While with sunk eyes and faded mouth,

She pined for melons…

Most of the strong effects of the poem are no more forced than this – they are poignant and human rather than aloof and poetic. (This stanza, by the by, is a very good instance of what, for lack of a more precise word, I have called her Latin technique of presentation. The longing is not written about, but the actions of one longing are rendered and her picture drawn: ‘With sunk eyes and faded mouth, she dreamed of melons.’ It is not stated that she ‘craved very much’, or that ‘her sufferings were intense’.)

Christina Rossetti arrayed herself very little in the panoply of poetic phrases; she wrote as she spoke. And, indeed, when she was in the mood, she wrote nearly as easily as she spoke. Thus, on one day, she produced three of her best poems: ‘Uphill’, ‘At Home’, and ‘Today and Tomorrow’, on 29 June 1858. And it is the distinguishing characteristic of her best poems that they open always with a line that is just a remark, not the ‘strong first line’ of a song. She seems to utter a little sentence like, ‘I wonder if the sap is stirring yet’, and the spring is presented. For the most part she kept to that conversational key. Her vocabulary was not that of the first man you might meet, because she lived among exceptional people, and thought of exceptional things. Indeed, her choice of words was rather limited, and, along with it, her choice of images. She used words like ‘rest’ and ‘rain’ over and over again, without troubling to find synonyms. Verses as similar as:

Rest, rest, a perfect rest,

I shall not see the shadows,

Shed over brow and breast,

I shall not feel the rain,

Her face is towards the west,

A

I shall not hear the nightingale

The peaceful land.

n

Sing on as if in pain.

She cannot see the grain

d

But dreaming thro’ the twilight

Ripen on hill and plain,

That does not rise or set,

She cannot feel the rain

Haply I may remember,

Upon her hand.

And haply may forget,

are moderately common to each of her small volumes. This implies of course, limitations, both of vocabulary and of temperament. It means, too, that every word that she used was her own; it means, perhaps, an overscrupulousness.

Scrupulous she was to a degree beyond that of common humanity. She suppressed her work for fear of repeating herself, she suppressed still more of it for fear it was too pagan or too sensual. And how much of herself she suppressed in that fear we cannot do more than guess. But it is obvious that a person who could write:

Raise me a daïs of silk and down,

Hang it with vair and purple dyes –

that a person who had in her at once that pagan strain, and that other scourge of delights, the ascetic fear of eternal penalties, cannot in this world have done other than crave for rest between these warring components of her being. She was in the Christian Commonwealth the very antithesis of that other poetess, the nun Hroswitha, who, in the days of Otho the Great, wrote medieval Latin comedies to deride the carnal spirit. Hroswitha showed to her fellow nuns the Roman governor, intent on overcoming the virtue of Christian maids, and going, muddled, into a cellar in mistake for their room, to embrace pots and amphorae, and to be derided by the virgins. I am driven, indeed, to wonder whether Christina Rossetti were not better adapted for life in the other Communion. For her Southern nature the Northern cult was too stern, or was, perhaps, not adapted. Possibly in a convent with its petty detail of devotion, its spiritual direction which forbids too deep introspection, and enjoins a certain cheerfulness as a duty, she might have escaped many terrible moments, and have written verse with a wider range. It is possible that she would not, for the perils of the other system are great too – but the speculation is worth making. It is certain, at least, that a greater stability of mind, wherever she found it, would have been beneficial to her verse because she would have dealt less in suppressions. Suppressions, of course, are legitimate enough aesthetically, when they are made for aesthetic reasons. But it is a loss to both humanity and to art when they are made for reasons so personal – out of a fear for one’s soul, that if it is not purely pagan, is at least in essence a survival of devil worship and of the dark ages of the soul.

But if Christina Rossetti suppressed, as far as she was able, whatever was sensual and joyous in the matter and in the temperament of her poems, her faculty for pure delight and for aesthetic enjoyment was expressed all the more strongly in her metre. For her verse is neither musical nor lyrical, it has not the unconscious quality of ‘lilt’, or of the song that merely bubbles. It is rhythmical and even intricate; it is a faculty that, coming from very deep in the sources of enjoyment, moves us for deep and unexplained reasons just as the rhythms of music do. If it has not the quality of lilt it has not the defect; it is never mechanical with numbered syllables. A distinguished French critic has lately discovered that the distinguishing quality of English metre is its (musical rhythmical) rests, not its (metrical-stressed) accents. It is exciting as much on account of the accents it misses as of those it meets. If, for instance, you listen to a pulsing rhythm, which, in an orchestra, is emphasized by drum strokes, you will find that when the drum misses a beat or comes in on a half-beat, the rhythm is actually accentuated because your ear unconsciously supplies a sound. Christina Rossetti probably never knew of this fact, or of the theory that is founded upon it, but she wrote as if she knew them at a time when English verse, if it ever was governed, was governed by a hazy idea of Latin principles of prosody. A man, who as a child was brought up on Christina Rossetti’s ‘Sing Song’, tells me that the quality of the metre was one of the great delights of his ear. (And it should be remembered that children, like barbarians, and young peoples, take a most sensuous pleasure in rhythms of words. They are the real connoisseurs.)

Dead in the cold a song-singing thrush,

Dead at the foot of a snowberry bush,

Weave him a coffin of rush,

Dig him a grave where the soft breezes blow,

Raise him a tombstone of snow.

The sense of such a verse does not matter to a child. He will sing ‘London Bridge is broken down’ without thinking of the meaning. But that verse was to the child profoundly affecting and delightful. It is so still. But I imagine that had it run:

Dead in the cold (here’s a) song-singing thrush,

Dead at the foot of a snowberry bush.

Weave him a coffin of (straw and of) rush,

Dig him a grave where the soft breezes blow,

Raise him a tombstone of (soft-driven) snow,

had, in fact, the metre been regularized with dactyls into the expected decasyllabic lines, he would simply not have listened to it.

In Christina Rossetti’s verse it is this quality of the unexpected, the avoidance of the cliché in metre, the fact that here and there you must beat time in a rest of the melody, that gives it its fascination and its music. And it is that, after all, that is the supreme quality of English metricists – the quality that, when it is used in a masterly way, sets them apart, and differentiates them from poets in other tongues. (I am not, of course, talking of the sonnet line which isn’t an indigenous thing, or of the Alexandrine. But it applies to blank verse with its lines, when it is good, always linking together, and so overlapping that the ten or eleven-syllabled character is constantly eluded.)

She, as I have said, was unacquainted with these principles. Probably, too, she had never heard of Chromatics, or of Phonetic Syzygy. Yet when it was appropriate, her verse contrived to be quite sufficiently close in its assonances, its vowel effects, and its chromatic texture. Her skill in true rhymes was only equalled by her delicacy in using false ones – those delicious things that there are still miscreants hardhearted enough to reprehend.

She wrote, in fact, without any professional equipments – on the corners of washstands, as it were. Sometimes her verses came with ease – three masterpieces in a day; sometimes her difficulties with rhymes, metres, and ideas, were such that her little scraps of paper resembled palimpsests, lines in pencil and in pen crossing and recrossing as they used to do in old letters, as if she did not value her poems at the paper they cost. But practically her last and one of her best short poems, only shows four changes of ten words in all on the first pencilled draft.2 Her ‘manuscripts’ will be found on the backs of used envelopes; in the little notebooks which she made herself out of scraps of notepaper poems alternate with accounts, with the addresses of charitable ladies, and with the dates of favourite preachers. It might have been better had she valued her talent more highly, or perhaps that would only have led her into over-elaboration and ‘writing poetic’.

She wrote a great deal of verse that to one taste or another is comparatively poor, and many of Mr Rossetti’s inclusions she herself did not publish. But nearly all her poems are ‘authentic’ in tone; they yield generally a touch of her flavour here and there, even if the general quality be thin. The very quantity will probably help her fame to stand in the long run. For the saying of Goethe’s: ‘Who brings a lot of many kinds, brings something to many’ holds good in verse as in merchandise; A. liking one stanza which B. despises, and laughing at another which B. loves. In this edition there are 458 double-columned pages awaiting the selector and the anthologist. That, perhaps, is the function of collected editions. And there are Mr Rossetti’s helpful and restrained memoirs, a bibliography and notes which, with their occasional quaintness of phrase and observation, prove him to have the humorous seriousness that so distinguished his sister.

It is seldom safe to prophesy how an artist will stand with the Future, and it is always dangerous to attempt to place him in relation to his great contemporaries. As far as Posterity is concerned, I have tried to indicate those technical qualities in her verse which should – if technical qualities ever do make for delight – render Christina Rossetti’s poems a source of pleasure for several generations to come. My personal pleasure in her work is so great that I will not approach the ‘placing’. But she had one characteristic which should make her gain upon all her distinguished contemporaries – she held aloof from all the problems of her day. She was not greatly esteemed as a teacher in the nineteenth century, because she had not any lessons for that strenuous age. She did not evoke national enthusiasms, nor strive to redress the wrongs of martyred children; she was the poet neither of the Democracy nor of the County Family. She had not that boundless faith or love for her kind that makes writers become influences or social reformers; she did not help forward towards its unseen and mysterious goal the human destiny that follows blindly the calls of leaders, who cry from so many directions in the wilderness. This makes her less of a human figure, and less of a benefactress to her day and hour.

She was comparatively self-centred, but, inasmuch as the succeeding centuries will cease to be interested in the problems of yesterday, she escapes a danger if she missed some love. For the man, poet, or tailor, who identifies himself with the spirit of his time, is apt to take on the fashion of his age, and to become old-fashioned. This for either’s survival is disaster, for it renders him uninteresting.

Christina Rossetti, with her introspection, studied her soul; with her talent she rendered it until she became the poet of the suffering – and suffering is a thing of all the ages. It is the defect of this quality that it only consoles by saying to others in misfortune: ‘I, too, suffer, I am a comrade.’ It teaches no one how to find new heart, it is not obstinate towards optimism. (It is hardly necessary to say that to call this temperament morbid is to be unreflecting. Morbidness is a dwelling on suffering for wantonness’ sake; it is to find a joy in gloating on sorrows, and is a sensual pursuit like any other self-indulgence.) Christina Rossetti had great sorrows, and her work reflected her life. To have affected cheerfulness would have been harmful to the republic.

For the man who says: ‘There is no sorrow’ harms the young, the weak, and the inexperienced, making their disillusionment when experience brings it the more bitter. After all, there is demanded of each poet after his kind, only the true image of himself as he mirrors life, only his individual truth. And if it is good that there should be poets to teach the eternal child, which is man, to greet the unseen with a cheer, it is good also to leave him not too open to the miseries of defeat, to let him know that others, too, have fallen and found life bitter. That child is happy in his master who has been taught to say, along with Psalms of Life:

What are heavy? Sea sand and sorrow.

What are brief? Today and tomorrow.

What are frail? Spring blossoms and youth.

What are deep? The ocean and truth.

Fortnightly, 75 (March 1904), 393–405.

1 The Poetical Works of Christina Georgina Rossetti. Preface, Notes, &c. by William Michael Rossetti.

2 I reproduce here from the Academy a version in print of this poem which I used some years ago to illustrate an article on another subject. It would seem to show that her gift attended her to her deathbed, and that at times, at least, she found comfort in her faith:

Heaven overarches earth and sea,

Earth sadness and sea bitterness.

Heaven overarches you and me,

And all earth’s gardens and her graves

Look up with me {until we see

1 The Poetical Works of Christina Georgina Rossetti. Preface, Notes, &c. by William Michael Rossetti.

2 I reproduce here from the Academy a version in print of this poem which I used some years ago to illustrate an article on another subject. It would seem to show that her gift attended her to her deathbed, and that at times, at least, she found comfort in her faith:

To appear in the familiar livery of the Standard Edition, if it isn’t a canonization for a poet, is as nearly as possible to be beatified.1 It is to be singled out and given, as it were, the chance to show what miracles may be worked by invoking him, what cures wrought in his name – how, long, in fact, his ‘bell’ will ring. It is a step upwards in the hagiology, but it is, also, to be put very decidedly on trial. It gives us, I mean, something to think of when the best work of a newly ‘collected’ poet is presented to us suddenly in a type, and on a page, where most plain men are accustomed to find The Tempest.

She wrote, in fact, without any professional equipments – on the corners of washstands, as it were. Sometimes her verses came with ease – three masterpieces in a day; sometimes her difficulties with rhymes, metres, and ideas, were such that her little scraps of paper resembled palimpsests, lines in pencil and in pen crossing and recrossing as they used to do in old letters, as if she did not value her poems at the paper they cost. But practically her last and one of her best short poems, only shows four changes of ten words in all on the first pencilled draft.2 Her ‘manuscripts’ will be found on the backs of used envelopes; in the little notebooks which she made herself out of scraps of notepaper poems alternate with accounts, with the addresses of charitable ladies, and with the dates of favourite preachers. It might have been better had she valued her talent more highly, or perhaps that would only have led her into over-elaboration and ‘writing poetic’.

A Literary Causerie: On Some
Tendencies of Modern Verse

The state of the present world of poetry is curious and worthy of attention. On the one hand poets and publishers declare that there are no readers: poets and readers declare that there are no publishers: and publishers and readers declare that there are no poets. Here we have, reproduced, the celebrated triangular duel of Mr Midshipman Easy. That readers exist, even as they did in the days of Satan Montgomery or of Festus Bailey, may be doubted: that they exist in sufficient numbers to form a Public is, however, indubitable. What one is left to wonder at is: Why they are not ‘reached’. Is it lack of enterprise on the part of the publisher or lack of attractiveness in the poet? Is the answer to the riddle simply that the ‘Fifteen Hundred Market’ is overlooked or despised by the publisher whose eyes are fixed on the shining glories of the boomed novelist? Or is it simply that the verse that sees the light in the waste corners of the magazines is too good, in the sense of being too ‘literary’? Let an example be made of one of the more excellent of the body of poets.

There has been appearing lately, in a humble, almost periodical form – in ‘parts’ as it were – a series of shilling volumes of the poems of Mr T. Sturge Moore. That this enterprise has been completed may be taken as evidence that it has found a public to the extent of paying its way. That it has not overlapped the Fifteen Hundred connoisseurs we may take for granted. I first came across the work of Mr Sturge Moore at the house of a friend – a connoisseur of the connoisseurs – where, lying amongst a heap upon a table, I saw what appeared to be a pamphlet, called The Gazelles. One does not know what these things may not prove: a pamphlet called The Gazelles might be anything; most probably a tract of some society for the prevention of one form or other of vice or cruelty. But, opening it because I was too uninterested to lay it down, I read:

When the sheen on tall summer grass is pale,

Across blue skies white clouds float on

In shoals, or disperse and singly sail,

Till, the sun being set, they all are gone:

Yet, as long as they may shine bright in the sun,

They flock or stray through the daylight bland,

While their stealthy shadows like foxes run

Beneath where the grass is dry and tanned:

And the waste, in hills that swell and fall,

Goes heaving into yet dreamier haze;

And a wonder of silence is over all

Where the eye feeds long like a lover’s gaze:

Then, cleaving the grass, gazelles appear….

Now here is the opening of a rather long poem. And it is, essentially, the right opening – the wording not too close, the frame of the picture, the landscape, put in with simple words, the phrasing not intricate, the rhythm running easily. And, at the right moment, the heroes – the gazelles – appear. It reminds me, in fact, of the opening of the best of Maupassant’s long contes – ‘The Field of Olives’. And, in all these respects, the poem maintains its level to the end.

The other verses of the same fascicule were not so interesting to me. The wording of them was, precisely, too close: the rhythms intricate and rather crabbed: the ideas not very arresting to an unaroused mind. And it must be remembered that verse, suffering under those shackles of metre and form that later so greatly help it, must make an appeal sufficiently strong to arrest unaroused minds. I am glad therefore that I made the acquaintance of Mr Sturge Moore through his ‘Gazelles’ and not through, say: ‘Desire Sings’; ‘Desire Pleads’; and ‘Desire Muses’ – verses which are, as the titles indicate, derivative, allegorical, rather cold and rather crabbedly expressed.

Accidentally and desultorily I came across others of these little pamphlets – (I have them all now in a brown cardboard case) – and gradually there arose in my mind the figure of a poet who interested me – who came back to me at odd moments and set me wondering vaguely. They set me, in fact, wondering what he could be like – using the words in no personal sense – what could be his provenance, who his literary fathers and sponsors. I could not ‘place’ him anywhere. In a sense much of his verse was derivative, much of his vocabulary irritating because of a certain preciousness. Thus the prose introduction to Pan’s Prophecy is in a sort of Wardour Street English, and frequent use of alliteration such as ‘… she sits and works / As women work weaving in wall-cloths wide;’ renders whole passages uninteresting because of their artificiality. But one pardons – or rather one forgets – these things for the sake of a personality that interests one or because of a point of view novel and well worked out.

All the poems contained good things, if all tasted a little too strongly of the honeycomb. On the other hand, if most of the subjects were derivative – classical and not significant to a workaday world – the approach to the subject was new and individual. Thus the Rout of the Amazons is related by a Faun, appalled at the sight of so much beauty, feminine and shining, crushed by the hoofs of horses or emptied of its bright blood by men’s spears. That, too, was the root idea of the ‘Gazelles’.

I know now, because I have heard critics say so, that Mr Sturge Moore is by descent one of the Pre-Raphaelite poets; that he has worked at woodcutting; has made designs; is a thoughtful critic of the plastic arts – that in all probability he is, temperamentally or by accident, an aesthete. I am glad upon the whole that I did not know this until comparatively recently, since the ignorance had let me approach his work with a quite clear mind. But, of course, every man must have a parentage and a jumping-off place; and the question is how far Mr Moore will jump. It is for that that one examines his verse anxiously – for that and because he represents, typifies, and stands for most of the tendencies of the Modern Poet. One may, I mean, see in his verse at its least good pretty clearly, why Modern Poetry makes so little appeal to the modern world; and, in his verse at its really best, one may see some hope for an approaching renascence of appeal.

The Pre-Raphaelite poets – from whom nearly all the poets of today, including Mr William Watson and Mr Rudyard Kipling, in one way or another descend — put back the clock of British verse so woefully not because they sought their ‘subjects’ in the medieval world but because they tried to identify themselves with the medieval point of view. They could not, I mean, see that per se a sewing-machine is as romantic an object, or as poetic a symbol of human destinies, as an embroidery frame. But all the really great poems of the world have been expressed in terms of thought modern to them. It has never been the ‘documenting’ of a poem that has been the important matter. Paradise Lost made its appeal because of its reading of life in terms of the seventeenth century; because it voiced the thought of its time and not because it was a fine projection of the mental state of the Garden of Eden. But the verse of the present day is almost entirely derived from the thought of the present day. It goes searching, as it were, the hidden graves, ruined temples, or golden closets of forgotten worlds. In consequence it deals almost entirely in ‘pictures’; and, at the best, the appeal of the ‘picture-poem’ must be limited.

To a large extent it is a matter of the very bed-rock of all verse – of vocabulary. Imagine a modern poet lying on the beach at, say, Hastings. There is the hot shingle, a dove-coloured sea, a sky half silver half gold, and that most pathetic, suggestive and bewildering of all modern objects – the immense crowd. If we can imagine our modern poet being there at all and not hiding in an Italian cloister, what words will he have to describe the scene, what ‘tone’ will he get into his poem? How will he avoid making it wholly vulgar, or how will he avoid sudden contrasts of ‘poetic’ words with everyday objects? Yet assuredly such a ‘subject’, poetically viewed – the great crowds pouring out of the vast towns in search of some sort of Island of the Blest, in search of some sort of Ideal, Joy, Love, Health, New Youth, or whatever it be they seek – such a subject is worthy of treatment. Are there no classical Idylls that treat of lower middle-class people waiting to view the opening of temples? And are these Idylls not Poetry?

Such subjects are almost barred to the modern poet – by his ‘poetic’ dialect. He finds it, in fact, easier to ransack Chaucer or Spenser for archaic words that gain a certain glamour from their remoteness; he shirks the labour of selecting such modern words as should give his page aloofness from mere colloquialism, and instead of trying to form a modern language that shall be at once vivid and delicate as an instrument he goes further and further in the direction of evoking a literary dialect from dead languages. And the difficulty of understanding him, however slight, induces a weariness in his reader and a general distaste for attacking new verse, since the appreciation of each new poet means for the reader learning a new dialect in addition to getting into touch with a new personality. We wait, in fact, for the poet who, in limpid words, with clear enunciation and, without inverted phrases, shall give the mind of the time sincere frame and utterance.

It is not, let it be repeated, the choice of subject that is at fault. There is no reason why the poet should write solely of the Housing Question, the Sex Problem, or the new forms of locomotion, nor is there any reason why he should not set his story in Persia or in Verona before the Renaissance. There was no reason why Webster should not write of Amalfi or Shakespeare of Elsinore – a dim antiquity; the point is that the mind of the poet should be modern. The appeal of Webster’s Dance of Madmen1 was Cockney of the sixteenth century; and the soliloquy commencing ‘To be or not to be…’ was written by a man alive to the problems of his fellow men of the day. And, too, it is not necessary that the poet should regard himself as a teacher. But, whether he write lyric or epic, drama or contes in verse, it is necessary, if he is to appeal, that he should promote vital thought. He must rouse ideas in the minds of his fellow mortals; and, to that extent, he must voice his time.

It is for that reason that we see cause for hope in the works of Mr Sturge Moore and of some of his fellows. For the ‘problem’ – the query – of his ‘Gazelles’, as of The Rout of the Amazons, is simply: Why was so much beauty, of delicate beasts, of fair women, created to be so senselessly marred? Why are the gods so profuse of beautiful living organisms which are destined to be put to so little apparent use? And that is one of the ‘questions’ of today – one of the things that we are all asking, of our souls as of our neighbours, of our poets as of our preachers – a question that we may ask, lying on the beach at Hastings too. For why does the immense crowd exist? Merely to fill graveyards? It is, too, like the problem set in Hamlet’s soliloquy, one of the eternal questions – one that has been asked by Roman emperors, and one that will be asked, no doubt, by the commanders of the great Trusts of the dim future.

So that, given a vital and expressive vocabulary and a clear use of phrase, there is not much reason why Mr Sturge Moore or one of his fellows should not pass into history – into the history of human thought. But they must put aside – or at least they must digest – their derivations: they must forget that they are literary men. If, given the fact that they possess poetic personalities, they will give up the forcing of their own notes; if they will abandon the attempt to ‘write poetic’ and express themselves – not themselves in the mantles of the dead Elijahs that they variously affect, if they will forget that they are men of letters and discover that they are human beings they will come at last to that psychical suckling of fools, and metaphysical chronicling of small beer that, rightly understood, is the function of the poet. But of course they must first be poets.

Academy, 69 (23 September 1905), 982–4.

1 [Ford refers to Act IV, scene 2 of The Duchess of Malfi, which was written in the seventeenth century. Cf. p. 77.]

It is not, let it be repeated, the choice of subject that is at fault. There is no reason why the poet should write solely of the Housing Question, the Sex Problem, or the new forms of locomotion, nor is there any reason why he should not set his story in Persia or in Verona before the Renaissance. There was no reason why Webster should not write of Amalfi or Shakespeare of Elsinore – a dim antiquity; the point is that the mind of the poet should be modern. The appeal of Webster’s Dance of Madmen1 was Cockney of the sixteenth century; and the soliloquy commencing ‘To be or not to be…’ was written by a man alive to the problems of his fellow men of the day. And, too, it is not necessary that the poet should regard himself as a teacher. But, whether he write lyric or epic, drama or contes in verse, it is necessary, if he is to appeal, that he should promote vital thought. He must rouse ideas in the minds of his fellow mortals; and, to that extent, he must voice his time.

автордың кітабын онлайн тегін оқу Critical Essays
Ford Madox

Contents

Introduction

A Note on the Text

Acknowledgements

The Evolution of a Lyric

Creative History and the Historic Sense

The Collected Poems of Christina Rossetti

A Literary Causerie: On Some
Tendencies of Modern Verse

Ұқсас кітаптар

автордың кітабын онлайн тегін оқу Critical EssaysFord Madox

Contents

Introduction

A Note on the Text

Acknowledgements

The Evolution of a Lyric

Creative History and the Historic Sense

The Collected Poems of Christina Rossetti

A Literary Causerie: On Some Tendencies of Modern Verse

Ұқсас кітаптар

автордың кітабын онлайн тегін оқу Critical Essays
Ford Madox

A Literary Causerie: On Some
Tendencies of Modern Verse