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:–

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:

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.

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:

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:

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

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:

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:

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:

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.)

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:

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:

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, Heaven overarches you and me,
  And all earth’s gardens and her graves Look up with me {until we see