WHEN HER NEW volume appeared, a year after the visit to Italy, Christina was in Scotland, staying with Miss Boyd and the Scotts at Penkill.
This was her first opportunity to really get to know and like Alice. The Scotts had moved to London in spring 1864, following the illness in which Scott had lost his hair and his subsequent retirement from the School of Design. For the time being Miss Boyd remained in Newcastle with her brother, but the long-term plan was to live à trois, and Scott’s letters to Alice, filled with intimacies and endearments, demonstrate how close they had become. Both however were anxious to preserve her reputation from scandalous suspicions, so the house-share was openly arranged, on the basis that Alice would spend the winters living with the Scotts in London and the summers with her brother and ‘WB’ at Penkill. Had the Rossetti women imagined for a moment anything improper was afoot, they would neither have visited nor invited either Alice or Scott; instead, they welcomed Alice as a new and valued friend and must therefore have received assurances from Letitia that the arrangement had her blessing. Christina, as usual, was stiff and formal at first, having always liked Letitia better than Scott, but in time she numbered Alice among her dearest acquaintance, and in 1866 was happy to be asked to accompany Letitia for an early holiday at Penkill – an anticipated pleasure for one who had never yet visited Scotland. Spencer Boyd’s untimely death meant that other visitors were now necessary to render WB’s presence at Penkill respectable; as he told Alice, it was otherwise difficult for him to stay ‘so long as we (you and I) have hoped’. Alice herself left for Ayrshire at the beginning of May, followed a couple of weeks later by Scott, he indeed being so anxious lest Christina think it improper that he contemplated delaying his own departure until she and Letitia were ready to travel.
This concern with proprieties looks suspicious, but was not unnecessary, as has been thought, ‘given the common knowledge of the Scotts’ household arrangements’. As yet there was hardly a ménage à trois – Alice had spent almost the whole of 1865 alone in Scotland – and though Christina was of course relatively innocent in the ways of the world, there is no reason for a more cynical age to doubt the basis of her trust, for Alice was an honourable and upright woman. She and Scott were in love, and therefore needed to preserve the proprieties – not in order to disguise immorality but because gossip, without misbehaviour, would effectively finish their friendship.
Fortuitously, the invitation obliged Christina to decline two others, one from Anne Gilchrist, and another – more flattering but also alarming – from Julia Cameron, who had recently descended on Albany Street bearing a portfolio of photographs of Gabriel’s paintings, five of which she graciously presented. Christina and Maria returned the call, to Little Holland House in Kensington, home of Mrs Cameron’s sister, where as well as getting a brief glimpse of Browning they met the resident genius G. F. Watts and also Mrs Dalrymple, a third sister whose husband owned the neighbouring castle to Penkill. Mrs Cameron invited Christina to her home on the Isle of Wight, holding out the promise of a meeting with Tennyson. Christina confessed herself too shy to contemplate this prospect ‘with anything like unmixed pleasure’ but was perhaps more sorry than she admitted when the clash of dates made it impossible, for like all other poets at mid-century she stood in awe of the Laureate, and measured herself against him. What with her shyness and Tennyson’s dislike of being lionised, however, a visit to Freshwater could well have been mutually awkward.
She therefore travelled north with Letitia, breaking the rail journey at Carlisle and proceeding along the coast to Girvan, where they were met by the Penkill carriage for the short drive to the Castle, an ancient peel tower hidden in the narrow Penwhapple glen. As castles go, it was small, hardly more than a double keep built perpendicular to the hillside. Spencer Boyd had renovated the original structure, rebuilt a circular staircase tower, and furnished the rooms with armour and ancient woodwork. Alice, inspired by embroidered wall-hangings at the Morrises’ Red House, had covered the rough interior walls in dark blue serge stitched with red and white flowers, and Scott had begun an ambitious mural of the medieval Scottish poem The Kingis Quhair on the curving walls of the wide stairway. On arrival, Christina was recruited to sit for the figure of Lady Jane Beaufort. Somewhat ambiguously, the poem, written by James I of Scotland, is a celebration of married love.
‘I hope you are amongst still finer surroundings, but you are not badly off if you are only in a country as fine as this,’ Christina wrote to William, who had finally made the journey to Naples. ‘As to room,’ she continued:
I expect I exceed you, inhabiting as I do an apartment like the best bedroom at Tudor House on a large scale …
Ailsa Craig is a wonderfully poetic object continually in sight. Of small fry, jackdaws perch near the windows, and rabbits parade in full view of the house. The glen is lovely. And, to crown all, we are having a pleasant mild summer.
She had been at Penkill for just three days, and they had already been out for two drives and a visit to church.
Christina’s bedroom, according to tradition, was at the top of the original peel tower, whose westward view from a turret-window towards the sea and the great rock of Ailsa Craig prompted a little Song, neatly filling the last page of the current notebook on 11 June:
Oh what comes over the sea,
Shoals and quicksands past;
And what comes home to me,
Sailing slow, sailing fast?
A wind comes over the sea
With a moan in its blast;
But nothing comes home to me,
Sailing slow, sailing fast.
Let me be, let me be,
For my lot is cast:
Land or sea all’s one to me
And sail it slow or fast.
Here, early one morning, she replied to the sound of repeated taps, thinking herself called, only to find that the noise came from the jackdaws lodged in the loopholes. Scott, also sometimes thus wakened, described the silent early hours of summer, when everything was still and bright:
the sky was white, the sun unspeakably white, making the shadows of the trees faintly chequer the smooth green terrace. On the point of one of the leaves of a great aloe below perched a thrush, silent and motionless; two wild rabbits were sitting on the green terrace still as if they were carved in stone …
On the floor of her room, Christina found a many-legged insect, whom she decided to eject. As she gathered it up, a swarm of baby millipedes was born into her hand. ‘Surprised, but resolute, I hurried on, and carried out my scheme successfully,’ she recalled, ‘observing the juniors retire into the cracks outside the window as adroitly as if they had been centenarians.’
Short walks, in the grounds that Alice aimed to make into a pleasant garden, with alleys, arbours, fishponds and croquet lawn, or into the precipitous glen below the keep, were varied with local excursions to the coast or inland. The most spectacular sights were the evenings over the western sea; as she told Anne: ‘when beyond the immediate greenness, a gorgeous sunset glorifies the sea distance, one scarcely need desire aught more exquisite in this world’. Together with Alice and Letitia, she attended the local episcopal church at New Dailly, and though Penkill was sufficiently remote to receive few visitors – the Dalrymples of Bargany were not in residence this June – Christina was responsible for one awkward encounter with the rector of Girvan. Before travelling north, she had anxiously written to inquire about services, in a manner that apparently led him to think, as she told Alice, that she was some kind of ‘grandee residing awhile at your Castle’. He therefore called, to Alice’s great annoyance – perhaps occasioned by greater anxiety regarding gossip.
The third week of Christina’s stay was saddened by the death of Alice’s little dog, which prevented her from joining the others for a two-day visit to the picturesque village of Barr. At the end of the month Christina and Letitia left, to wind up their holiday with ‘a highly satisfactory week in Edinburgh’ staying with Letitia’s aunt. Scott had been rather prickly – not for nothing had Pauline Trevelyan nicknamed him Mr Porcupine – for, as he grumbled privately to William, living with three women with ‘religion and ailments forming a large part of daily life and talk’ was not exhilarating. Moreover, ‘as for Christina and I, we fight like cats, as is our nature … especially at croquet.’ This is the only record of antagonism between Christina and Scott and although partly self-mocking had a serious basis; he thought her narrow-minded and nervously over-cautious, with a sort of moral watching brief over her brothers. Though in later years she returned his teasing affection, her true feelings are harder to discern; it is likely that she still found Scott somewhat satanic, as well as grumpy. On this occasion much of his discontent clearly came from being outnumbered, and unable to spend his time alone with Alice. As an aspiring poet as well as painter, he may also have been a touch envious of Christina’s renown, as manifested in her new book.
Gabriel’s delays had again cost Christina the chance of pre-Christmas publication. It was March before he had sent the woodcuts for engraving and May before production could proceed, twelve months after the text was set. For her part, Christina had been alarmed to find some lingering proof errors, and was only pacified when Macmillan promised to have them corrected by hand. When bound copies of her ‘laggard book’ arrived however, at the beginning of June, she wailed that the book was still blemished ‘by perhaps the worst misprint of all left uncorrected’. This was in fact merely an intrusive period in Songs in a Cornfield and as it turned out, the handwritten corrections appeared in all other copies, having escaped only the author’s complimentary volumes, so her dismay proved unfounded.
Christina trusted her Scottish holiday made her ‘all the braver to undergo the lash’ of reviewing, but she probably expected better treatment than she received. As could have been foreseen, it was not a propitious time to bring out a new book, for Britain was in the midst of a financial crisis triggered by the spectacular collapse of a major banking and broking firm on 11 May – ‘Black Friday’ – that caused panic in the commercial world and decimated many individuals’ savings. Moreover, June publication meant noticeably less publicity. By the time the book appeared, reviewers and readers were already beginning to disperse for the summer, and by the time they returned, new titles and topics commanded attention. The reviews that trickled in over July, August and September were therefore fewer, and lukewarm.
As could also have been predicted, whatever its quality her second book was bound to arouse less applause than the first. For one thing, there was no ‘discovery’ to announce, no ‘new voice’ to welcome. For another, even friendly reviewers offered a more serious critique, as befitted an established author. Thus the Saturday Review on 23 June:
Neither the Prince’s Progress nor the shorter poems that follow can be said to open up veins of thought and feeling that are new …
A good many tame and rather slovenly verses have been left which ought either to have been cut out or polished into something more shapely. It is all very well to resist the temptation to substitute mere artificial emphasis instead of an idea, but a dull pointless cadence, such as now and again occurs in these verses, is almost as bad …
Thus the Athenaeum, on the same day:
We do not see the conflict of the heart, but the sequel of that conflict … Her saints and heroes have not the stir and dust of life about them; but they smile to us in a repose almost mournful, like effigies …
We cannot but lament that the tone of Miss Rossetti’s poetry – always, be it remembered, religiously submissive – should be that of the dirge rather than the anthem.
If she was cast down, Christina did not show it. Writing to Anne, she claimed to have received no ‘severe handling’ from critics. Perhaps she recognised the judiciousness of their judgements; as she knew, the Prince lacked the Goblins’ ‘special felicity’, and the volume as a whole undoubtedly contained too many pieces chosen for the sake of ‘bulk’. It had its own hits, including Jessie Cameron, Twice, Queen of Hearts, Bird’s Eye View, Memory, LEL, Somewhere or Other and Despised and Rejected – but also too many poems that quite frankly fail, together with a meagre devotional section largely filled with straining martyrdom.
After she returned home, feeling well and plump and more than willing to take her share of housekeeping while Mamma and Maria went to Eastbourne, Christina stopped copying out her compositions, as she had done for over twenty years now, and even left the last notebook unindexed. This change in practice probably came about more by default than design – having been accustomed to ‘wait’ for poems, she found the critics of Prince’s Progress had implicitly endorsed this method by their negative response to those very pieces written to bulk out the volume. She then reverted to previous practice, only to find herself waiting rather a long time. This had often happened in the past, and was not necessarily worrying, but when poems again began to appear, there perhaps seemed no compelling reason to purchase a new notebook – which was after all rather a juvenile procedure, and might in any case tempt fate, and scare her muse away again.
There was however another reason which may have inhibited her creativity more than she or anyone else realised – the outcry that greeted Swinburne’s new book.
Over the past year, Swinburne had effectively displaced Christina as the new voice in verse. She returned from Scotland to find his Poems and Ballads the centre of literary attention and abuse, excoriated for its ‘libidinous song’, excited by ‘shameless abominations’ expressed with ‘feverish carnality’. With copious quotations John Morley, in the Saturday Review, rather overdid the outrage in five columns.
No language is too strong to condemn the mixed vileness and childishness of depicting the spurious passion of a putrescent imagination, the unnamed lusts of sated wantons, as if they were the crown of character and … the great glory of human life …
Is there really nothing in women worth singing about except ‘quivering flanks’ and ‘splendid supple thighs’, ‘hot sweet throats’ and ‘hotter hands than fire’? …
… The bottomless pit encompasses us on one side, and stews and bagnios on the other.
The Athenaeum charged Swinburne with insincere immorality posing as decadence, and also implied that he was a ringleted, amorous-lidded pederast. The London Review castigated his blasphemy and gross depravity, the Pall Mall Gazette declared he was ‘maudlin drunk on lewd ideas’. Personal and poetic judgements were intertwined, for Swinburne’s dissolute behaviour was well known in literary London, but this hardly mitigated the hostility.
This need not have affected Christina, but for the fact that her brothers were closely associated with Swinburne, who, when his publisher took fright and withdrew the volume, began drumming up support among his friends. Gabriel entered the lists cautiously, telling Tennyson, for instance, that while he hailed Swinburne’s genius, he also ‘strenuously combated its wayward exercise’ and advised against publishing certain poems. Scott took a similar line, urging Swinburne not to compound the volume’s notoriety by transferring to a less reputable publisher. But William went to the barricades, calling Swinburne ‘the most glorious perhaps of living English poets’ bar the Laureate, and composing a long defence, to be published alongside the reissued volume. Oddly, William seems to have had no personal liking for Baudelairean fleurs du mal or lust, and frankly warned Swinburne that his alcoholic behaviour was unacceptable. But he energetically supported poetic and pagan sensuality against parson and pedagogue and prude. And in doing so he drew into the argument other poets – including his sister, in what from anyone else would have been construed as a hostile paragraph. Christina Rossetti, he declared, was a ‘natural’ singer of the same order as Swinburne:
There is no poet with a more marked instinct for fusing the thought into the image, and the image into the thought: the fact is always to her emotional, not merely positive, and the emotion clothed in sensible shape, not merely abstract. No treatment can be more artistically womanly in general scope than this, which appears to us the most essential distinction of Miss Rossetti’s writings. It might be futile to seek for any points of direct analogy or of memorable divergence between Mr Swinburne and Miss Rossetti. The prevalent cadence of the poem ‘Rococo’, and the lyrical structure of ‘Madonna Mia’ may, however, suggest that the poet is a not unsympathetic reader of the poetess’s compositions; nor is the ‘Garden of Proserpine’ much unlike some of these so far merely as lyrical tone is concerned.
Despite his qualifications, in plain terms (William’s expression was often ponderous) this amounted to a claim that Swinburne had learnt his tones and cadences from Christina’s instinctively sensuous and emotional verse.
This was partly true. Swinburne had undeniably echoed An End in the final lines of his most unreligious Madonna Mia, and had sung of world-weariness in the Garden of Proserpine in falling rhythms that matched hers. That motive and message were quite different did not make it less of a disastrous comparison, for though William’s intention was of course to exonerate Swinburne, the indirect result was to infect Christina. If their work was similar, would not the public regard her in some sort as soul-sister to this notorious new-hatched poet, despite her reputation for devoutness and his for debauchery? Indeed, the critic of the Examiner tried to prove that Swinburne’s sensuality was actually moral, in terms that might well remind readers of the goblin merchandise peddled by Miss Rossetti:
He sings of Lust as Sin, its portion Pain and its end Death. He paints its fruit as Sodom apples, very fair without, ashes and dust within. In dwelling on their outward beauty, he is sensual. Men see that and say that he is a licentious writer. But again and again when he has dwelt as proper folk object to dwell on the desire of the flesh, the beauty drops away and shows the grinning skeleton beneath the fires of hell below.
A fortnight later, the same reviewer made this even plainer in a long notice of her work by ‘identifying the gist of Dolores with that of Goblin Market!’ as William told Swinburne. This was hardly mitigated by the reviewer’s simultaneous comparison of Christina’s work with that of George Herbert, or his attempt to crown her ‘Queen of the living Shepherdesses in our British Arcadia’.
It was a doubly ambiguous linking, for Swinburne was regarded not only as depraved but also as perverted. As Scott opined, when proof copies of Poems and Ballads were prematurely circulated, his provocative depravity was partly a pose and partly the result of his ‘unmanly’ nature, a word which many suspected was ‘physically correct’. As all agreed, and William had emphasised, Christina was the most feminine of writers. But for a ‘womanly’ poetess to be linked with an ‘unmanly’ poet was to imply that perverted femininity was somehow the cause of his corruption, as if she had leaked into his verse. And in the context of the attack on Swinburne’s morality and versification, when everyone gave an opinion whether or not they had read the book, any comparison was at least unfortunate, and at worst contaminating. What, for instance, might readers think of the rippling feminine rhymes favoured by both poets? What of their shared interest in virgin martyrs like St Dorothea? What of Swinburne’s notorious rendering of Sappho’s distress on seeing her beloved in a male embrace – a specifically lesbian reading of the ode traditionally translated heterosexually? What, most unfortunately, of Christina’s latest poem, which Gabriel had kept out of her book but which she had just published in Macmillan’s, in which the Jewish captive laments in wholly Swinburnian phrases:
Strangers press the olives that are mine,
Reap all the corners of my harvest-field,
And make their fat hearts wanton with my wine;
To them my trees, to them my gardens yield
Their sweets and spices and their tender green …
‘I have read (did I say it before?) your sister’s poem in M’millan with great admiration,’ Algernon wrote on 13 October. In the circumstances, it was admiration she could well do without.
There is no evidence that Christina was openly or even consciously upset by her brother’s remarks or the general linkage of her work with Swinburne’s. Her subsequent relationship with the younger poet was friendly in tone, as he was always warmly respectful towards her. The following year, he made his admiration public, by inserting into a long article on Matthew Arnold in the Fortnightly a sudden paean of praise, listing her among ‘immortal women’ of artistic and religious eminence – ‘St Theresa, St Catherine, Vittoria Colonna, Mrs Browning, Miss Christina Rossetti’ – and hailing her poem Passing Away as ‘so much the noblest of sacred poems in our language that there is none which come near it enough to stand second; a hymn touched as with the fire and bathed as in the light of sunbeams, tuned as to chords and cadences of refluent sea-music beyond reach of harp and organ, large echoes of the serene and sonorous tides of heaven.’ This, one might feel, was sufficiently extravagant and foolish to do Miss Rossetti no good at all, but seems to have been welcomed. ‘The praise is really too great, as you know she would be the first to say and feel,’ wrote William to Swinburne, adding that it was ‘not the less acceptable on all grounds’.
Alerted by the controversy, Christina probably did not read far into Poems and Ballads, though it is worth noting that she was not as extremely prudish as later generations have believed. She read and reread Plato with absorption, and after her visit to Penkill lent her copy to Alice, warmly commending ‘the glorious Apology, Crito and Phaedo’, and only warning her that the Phaedrus could not be read aloud in mixed company, and might be better avoided altogether. She herself had evidently not been so timorous, and though William later claimed that she pasted strips of paper over offensive passages in Swinburne’s verse, this was on grounds of its ‘irreligious taint’. For his part, William probably made no effort to persuade her otherwise, knowing that like others of his acquaintance, she was ‘puritan enough to believe that good art cannot exist without good morals’, as his friend Charles Norton in Boston put it, having read only the reviews.
One thing she could not escape however was the fact that Swinburne engrossed all critical attention. As Fraser’s admitted in November, all available space had been occupied with this cause célèbre, so that amongst others, ‘Miss Rossetti’s quaint and characteristic volume … must remain unnoticed till a more convenient season’. Such a time never came.
With the benefit of hindsight, it can be seen that both poets were aesthetic companions, so to speak, in the vanguard of the transition from the mid-to the dominant late-Victorian poetic mode, with its intense but dreamlike imaginative world. Ironically, just as Christina’s Lost Titian anticipated Pater and Wilde, so in terms of form and style her verse led the way to an art for art’s sake, whose amorality was wholly abhorrent to her sensibility.
1 difficult to stay: WBS to AB 12 May 1866, Pictor Ignotus 95
2 common knowledge: Pictor Ignotus 95
3 too shy: CGR to WMR 4 Jun 1866
4 I hope: ibid
5 sky was white: Scott ii, 292
6 surprised but resolute: TF 62
7 spectacular sights: CGR to ABG Jul 1866
8 grandee: CGR to AB 1879, see TLS, 26 Jun 1958, 389
9 fight like cats: WBS to WMR Jul 1866, Pictor Ignotus 98
10 only pacified: CGR to AM 5/16 Dec 1865
11 laggard book: CGR to ABG Jul 1866
12 worst misprint: CGR to WMR 4 Jun 1866
13 handwritten corrections: see Crump i, 274
14 all the braver: CGR to ABG Jul 1866. AB’s diary shows CGR and LMS at Penkill 1–27 Jun 1866.
15 Saturday Review: 23 Jun 1866, 761–2
16 Atheneaum: 23 Jun 1866, 824–5
17 no language: Saturday Review, 4 Aug 1866, 145–7
18 maudlin drunk: see Swinburne: the Critical Heritage, ed. C. K. Hyder, London 1970
19 strenuously combated: DGR to Alfred Tennyson 6 Oct 1866
20 the most glorious: WMR, ‘Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads’, 1866, reprinted Swinburne: the Critical Heritage, 79–80
21 sings of Lust: Examiner, 22 Sep 1866, 597
22 gist of Dolores: WMR to ACS 7 Oct 1866, and Examiner, 6 Oct 1866, 629–31.
23 I have read: ACS to WMR 13 Oct 1866, Lang i, 201
24 immortal women: ACS, ‘Mr Arnold’s New Poems’, Fortnightly, 1 Oct 1867, 441
25 praise too great: WMR to ACS 10 Oct 1867
26 Phaedrus: CGR to AB 30 Jul 1866
27 puritan enough: Charles Eliot Norton to WMR 12 Sep 1866, Peattie 154, n.1
28 irreligious taint: CGR to Miss Hayward 17 Jan 1867
29 Eraser’s: Nov 1866, 648