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From DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI: HIS FAMILY-LETTERS by William Michael Rossetti
(London: Ellis and Elvey, 1895.) pp. 293-310 XXXIII. THE FLESHLY SCHOOL OF POETRY. IN the Contemporary Review for October 1871 an article appeared entitled The Fleshly School of Poetry—Mr. D. G. 294 Rossetti—and signed Thomas Maitland. For the purpose of this article Thomas Maitland was non-existent, and the real author was the verse-writer—or let us say the poet—Robert Buchanan. Some skirmishing in the press rapidly ensued, not free from confusion and self-conflicting. Its main upshot was this—that Mr. Buchanan had intended to write an anonymous attack upon Rossetti, and the publisher of the Contemporary Review turned it into a pseudonymous attack. One poet who assails another anonymously, in a magazine where anonymity is in no degree the rule, does not occupy a very graceful position; and the publisher who pseudonymizes his anonymous and aggressive contributor occupies, I apprehend, an ungraceful position. I have very positive grounds for affirming (and I will produce them if wanted) that Mr. Buchanan was from the first strongly urged, and this by a person who had every right to intervene, not to be anonymous, and à fortiori not pseudonymous. I shall not repeat—what was said in some papers at the time—that there was plain mendacity in some of the explanations offered. But it seems to behove me to say a little about the antecedents of The Fleshly School of Poetry—Mr. D. G. Rossetti, and to take to myself any blame which may properly or plausibly belong to me; for I have more than once been told by friends that the animus against my brother, apparent in the article of Mr. Robert-Thomas Buchanan-Maitland, should be regarded as a vicarious expression of resentment at something which I myself had written. Thus then.
Mr. Swinburne’s volume of Poems and Ballads having excited a fluster in 1866, a burlesque poem appeared in the Spectator for 15 September 1866, named The Session of the Poets. It was anonymous; but rumour—since then confirmed by himself—ascribed it to Mr. Buchanan. It contained the following lines:—
“Up jumped, with his neck stretching out like a gander,
Master Swinburne, and squealed, glaring out through his hair,
‘All Virtue is bosh! Hallelujah for Landor!
I disbelieve wholly in everything! There!’ 295 “With language so awful he dared then to treat ’em,
Miss Ingelow fainted in Tennyson’s arms;
Poor Arnold rushed out, crying “Sæcl’ inficetum!’
And great bards and small bards were full of alarms:
Till Tennyson, flaming and red as a gypsy,
Struck his fist on the table and uttered a shout:
‘To the door with the boy! Call a cab! He is tipsy!’
And they carried the naughty young gentleman out. * * * * * * “Then ‘Ah!’ cried the Chairman, ‘this teaches me knowledge:
The future shall find me more wise, by the Powers!
This comes of assigning to younkers from college
Too early a place in such meetings as ours.’”
About the same time I was writing for an American quarterly a review of Mr. Swinburne’s poems. It was eventually published, not in America, but as a brochure in England, under the name of Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads, a Criticism, by William Michael Rossetti, 1866. Bearing in mind Mr. Buchanan’s—as I thought it—gratuitous and insolent attack upon a poet already so illustrious as Mr. Swinburne, and entertaining the opinion that much more than commensurate laudation had been bestowed by reviews upon the volume (or volumes) of verse which Mr. Buchanan had up to that time published, I opened my Criticism with the following sentence:— “The advent of a new great poet is sure to cause a commotion of one kind or another; and it would be hard were this otherwise in times like ours, when the advent of even so poor and pretentious a poetaster as a Robert Buchanan stirs storms in teapots.” When my first edition of Shelley appeared in 1870 it was severely condemned in the Athenæum, in a criticism which I was informed was written by Mr. Buchanan. Whether this is correct I cannot affirm. At any rate, Mr. Buchanan considered that to be “the worst edition of Shelley which has ever seen the light,” for so he has told us in The Fleshly School of Poetry, adding one or two other partially relevant “digs” at me. Somewhat later in 1870 than the Athenæum article 296 my brother’s volume of Poems came out. It remained uncriticized by Mr. Buchanan (so far as I am aware) until October 1871, when the article in the Contemporary Review appeared.
This article was (to use no other expression) severe against Rossetti. It was afterwards considerably enlarged, and its severity, direct and implied, was increased, and it was reissued as a pamphlet-volume of about 100 pages—The Fleshly School of Poetry, and other Phenomena of the Day, by Robert Buchanan (Strahan & Co., 1872). I will give some extracts, showing what opinion Mr. Buchanan entertained of Rossetti’s performances. These extracts come direct from the pamphlet, and are (practically speaking) verbatim; but it should be understood that the “Thomas Maitland” article was in full general conformity with them.
The Poems (we are told) exhibit morbid deviation from healthy forms of life. Nothing is virile, nothing tender, nothing completely sane. There is thorough nastiness in many pieces. A sickening desire is evinced to reproduce the sensual mood. Rossetti has not given us one rounded and noteworthy piece of art. He is fleshly all over, from the roots of his hair to the tips of his toes. There is bad blood in all the poems, and breadth of poetic interest in none. Bad rhymes become the rule, and not the exception. The burden of Sister Helen is repeated with little or no alteration through thirty-four verses (as a fact, it is repeated with invariable and essential alteration, and Mr. Buchanan misquotes its close “between Hell and Heaven,” changing this into “between Heaven and Hell,” and so spoiling the cadence). Sister Helen and Eden Bower are affected rubbish. The House of Life is a very hotbed of nasty phrases. Sonnets 11 to 20 are one profuse sweat of animalism. Sonnets 29, 30, and 31, are very, very silly. 1 The Last Confession positively reeks of morbid _____ 1 The thirteen Sonnets thus characterized are the following: The Birth-Bond (Have you not noted in some family); A Day of Love (Those envied places which do know her well); Love Sweetness (Sweet dimness of her loosened hair’s downfall); Love’s Baubles (I stood where Love in brimming armfuls bore); Winged Hours (Each hour until we meet is as a bird); Life in Love (Not in thy body is thy life at all); The Love-Moon (When that dead face bowered in the furthest years); The Morrow’s Message (Thou Ghost, I said, and is thy name To-day?); Sleepless Dreams (Girt in dark growths yet glimmering with one star); Secret Parting (Because our talk was of the cloud-control); Inclusiveness (The changing guests each in a different mood); Known in Vain (As two whose love, first foolish, widening scope); The Landmark (Was that the landmark? what, the foolish well).
_____ 297 lust. In Rossetti’s poetry there is a veritably stupendous preponderance of sensuality and sickly animalism. He and Mr. Swinburne merely echo what is vile. I see in Rossetti no gleam of Nature, not a sign of humanity. [On a passage from The Portrait] Was ever writing so formally slovenly and laboriously limp? [The, in general] Treatment, down to the tiniest detail, frivolous, absurd, and reckless. As shapeless and undigested as chaos itself.
On such abuse as this, wholesale and retail, I will not express any view of my own, nor solicit the verdict of the reader. About twenty-four years have elapsed since Mr. Buchanan wrote. If public opinion in that interval has ratified, or gone near to ratifying, his dicta, I remain under a mistake. If public opinion at the present date should avouch that the man who could thus express himself must have had in view some object extraneous to the fair and moderate expression of a candid conviction, I should be far from astonished.
According to my recollection of the facts—of which I had adequate personal knowledge at the time—my brother was but little troubled, and not downcast at all, by the article such as it appeared in the Contemporary Review. He had all along expected that some one or other would make a point of assailing him. He knew himself to be above such an assault as was now delivered, and felt moreover that the fact of the pseudonym, and the ambiguities which had accompanied it, gave him a considerable advantage as a defendant. Mr. Scott—with an inaccuracy as to date which is very habitual to him—relates how, “as midsummer 1872 was drawing on,” he gave a dinner-party which Rossetti attended; and how 298 the latter shouted out the name of Robert Buchanan, whom “he had discovered to be the writer of the article,” and how “from this time he occupied himself in composing a long reply.” It is certain (as one of the Family-letters shows) that my brother had been informed about Mr. Buchanan towards the middle of October 1871, and that soon after that time he undertook a reply for publication. Mr. Scott’s date is therefore quite erroneous. To his other statements I raise no demur, but he seems to think the whole incident more noteworthy than I can. My brother was impulsive and outspoken; and, being (it is to be supposed) among friends well known to him, and known to be on his side of any such controversy, he may very likely—and very harmlessly—have been a trifle more vociferous than those drawing-room and dining-room manners for which Dickens gave the formula of “prunes and prisms” would indicate.
It is certainly true that he set-to at writing a reply to Mr. Buchanan—a fact which is in no wise inconsistent with what I have just been saying about his comparative coolness under the Contemporary attack. He was vehemently, not to say virulently, assailed; and this more on the ground of imputed moral obliquity than of poetic or literary shortcomings. To be ridiculed was what he did not like; to be vilified as writing from impure motives and as an incentive to public impurity was what he disliked extremely. It would have been much better—and I told him so at the time—to take no part in the controversy, and to allow the anonymo-pseudonymous attack to die out of itself, leaving perhaps little general memory of its unsavoury existence, and little warning to any one except the parties directly concerned; who would probably have found out that a “poet” who abuses another poet under the shield of anonymity had better not be loaded, by himself or another, with the thicker shield of pseudonymity. However, my brother did not adopt my well-meant advice. He wrote a pamphlet, and sent the more serious parts of it to the Athenæum, where these were printed with his name appended, and under his own title, 299 The Stealthy School of Criticism.1 To me The Stealthy School of Criticism appears a very sound and telling piece of self-vindication. It rectifies some positive mis-statements contained in Mr. Buchanan’s article, and sets the whole question in a much more correct light than the latter had succeeded in casting upon it, or perhaps had been minded to supply. The pamphlet itself, including this extracted portion, was put into print, with a view to its being published by Mr. Ellis; but on consideration it was held to be such as might lay the author or the publisher open to an action at law—possibly on the ground, “the greater the truth, the greater the libel”—and it was withheld, and ultimately destroyed. I heard it at the time; but long ago I had quite forgotten its treatment and details—which were assuredly not scurrilous, but I dare say sarcastic and stinging enough, for my brother was the reverse of a bad hand at that sort of thing when he chose to take it up. He was displeased, indignant, and perhaps incensed, and disposed to “give as good as he got”; but still, as I have said, not seriously wounded nor deeply mortified, so far as the Contemporary article went. I can even remember that he was frankly amused at some remarks by Mr. Buchanan upon certain rhymes in his volume—such as “wet” rhyming with “Haymarket”; and he thought that Mr. Buchanan had made a very neat travestie of them as follows:—
“When winds do roar and rains do pour,
Hard is the life of the sailor:
He scarcely, as he reels, can tell
The side-lights from the binnacle:
He looketh on the wild water,” etc.
And at a later date, hearing that the anonymously published poem, St. Abe and his Seven Wives, was the work of Mr. Buchanan, he told me that he had found it to be a production of considerable force and spirit. He was indeed (and Dr. Hake has told us so), though sufficiently downright in denouncing works which he disrelished, whether in literature or in fine _____ 1 Naturally, it is included in Rossetti’s Collected Works. _____ 300 art, always inclined to say a good word for such points in them as he thought deserving of this.
Mr. Buchanan, having made one envenomed attack upon Rossetti, was not to be appeased until he had made another much more envenomed; and in the spring of 1872 he issued (as I have said) his pamphlet-volume, being a greatly extended, more systematic, and more denunciatory version of the original review. He here more definitely identified Rossetti, as well as some other poets, with a supposed movement for the propagation of whatsoever is most foul in vice, and most disgusting in vicious display. Possibly this production, like its predecessor, is only very partially remembered by the living generation of readers. The sooner it is totally forgotten, the better for all concerned, and more especially for Mr. Buchanan himself.
I can say this without any unfair bias towards my brother’s side. It must likewise be the opinion of Mr. Buchanan, for whose feelings in the matter it is not my business to entertain or express any especial concern. At the same time I willingly acknowledge that, when at last he did retract, he retracted straightforwardly, and in a spirit to which my brother might perhaps have openly responded, had he then been less near his grave. Mr. Buchanan, in 1881, dedicated to Rossetti, as to “An Old Enemy,” his romance entitled God and the Man; and, besides some other retractation (especially a phrase in The Academy, 1 July 1882, “Mr. Rossetti, I freely admit now, never was a Fleshly Poet at all”), he addressed to Mr. Hall Caine, soon after Rossetti’s death, a letter containing the following phrases. I only extract some expressions relating to Rossetti; others which show persistent rancour against other people are best left in oblivion:— “While admitting freely that my article in the Contemporary Review was unjust to Rossetti’s claims as a poet, I have ever held, and still hold, that it contained nothing to warrant the manner in which it was received by the poet and his circle [the poet’s only overt act, it will be remembered, was to write that very moderate self-vindication called The Stealthy School of Criticism]. Well, my 301 protest was received in a way which turned irritation into wrath, wrath into violence. I was unjust, as I have said; most unjust when I impugned the purity, and misconceived the passion, of writings too hurriedly read, and reviewed currente calamo [ but several months had elapsed between the publication of the review-article and that of the pamphlet]. I make full admission of Rossetti’s claims to the purest kind of literary renown; and, if I were to criticize his poems now, I would write very differently.” There is another phrase which seems to go near to admitting that Mr. Buchanan—in 1871, and also in 1871—abused Rossetti just because other critics had praised him:— “At the time it [the review-article] was written, the news papers were full of panegyric. Mine was a mere drop of gall in an ocean of eau sucrée.” But even this is not quite apposite to the facts. The “newspapers” had had their say about Rossetti’s Poems towards April and May 1870, whereas Mr. Buchanan’s pseudonymous article appeared in October 1871.
Let me sum up briefly the chief stages in this miserable, and in some aspects disgraceful, affair. 1. Mr. Buchanan, whether anonymously or pseudonymously—being a poet, veritable or reputed—attacked another poet, a year and a half after the works of the latter had been received with general and high applause. 2. He attacked him on grounds partly literary, but more prominently moral. 3. After he had had every opportunity for reflection, he repeated the attack in a greatly aggravated form. 4. At a later date he knew that the author in question was not a bad poet, nor a poet with an immoral purpose. The question naturally arises—If he knew this in or before 1881, why did he know or suppose the exact contrary in 1871 and 1872? Here is a question to which no answer (within my cognizance) has ever been given by Mr. Buchanan, and it is one to which some readers may risk their own reply. That is their affair. If Mr. Robert Buchanan concludes that Mr. Thomas Maitland told an untruth, it is not for me to say him nay.
302 Not long after Rossetti’s death an article named The Art of Rossetti was written by Mr. Harry Quilter, and it was published in that same Contemporary Review which had reviled the man during his lifetime. It is laudatory, but very far from being exclusively so. Some of the observations in this article appear to me to be among the best and most acute which have been spoken on that question of “fleshliness,” and I will give them here. I will only premise that, while I regard it as a gross calumny to say that Rossetti was in any marked sense an adherent of any “Fleshly School of Poetry” (if such there was), I do not contest that there are some things in his writings to which a puritan or a purist may, from his own point of view, legitimately take exception. The real question is not whether Rossetti, as a man or as a poet, was “fleshly,” but whether certain subjects, and certain modes of treatment and forms of expression, are to be admitted into poetry as a wide domain, or excluded from it as a narrow domain. To this question perhaps the simplest and the most sufficient answer is that all or nearly all the greatest poets, in all countries and ages of the world, have admitted them; and I will go a step further, and (without presuming to rank Dante Rossetti with those greatest poets) will say that very few of them have admitted so little as he did of those subjects, modes of treatment, and forms of expression. I now cite from Mr. Quilter:— “It was said once, by a writer anxious to make out a case against the Præraphaelite school of modern poetry, that one of the chief characteristics of Rossetti’s verse was its sensuality, and certain quotations were given to prove this. Time has effectually disposed of that charge, and the misrepresentations on which it was founded have been adequately confuted; but it has hardly been sufficiently noticed that the real ground of the accusation is due to the fact of the poet-painter being unable to dissever his pictorial from his poetic faculty. He habitually thought (if such an expression is allowable) in terms of painting. He could not dissever his most purely intellectual ideas from colour and form; and it is the intrusion of these physical facts into his poetry, in places where they are 303 unexpected and unnecessary, that gives, to hasty readers and superficial critics, such a wrong impression. And, in the same way as he charges a poem with more colour and form than it can well bear with reference to its special subject, so does he charge his pictures with a weight of idea which their form and colour scarcely realize; and in both he calls upon the spectator to be at once the witness and the interpreter of his work. From this there results in his poetry the following effect —that he is at his finest when he has to tell some plain story, or exemplify some comparatively simple thought, the insertion into which of physical facts will heighten the meaning rather than jar upon it; or in verses which treat intellectual ideas from a purely sensuous basis, such for instance as in those sonnets which are concerned with the passion of love. When however he seeks to treat either a purely intellectual or a purely spiritual subject, he fails almost inevitably, and that apparently in painting as well as in poetry. Like Antæus, if he is held off the earth too long his strength fails him. It is this painter-like quality which makes his verse so puzzling; for in idea it is, almost without exception, of a singularly pure and intellectual character. Turn from his verse to his painting, and the same curious contradiction is forced upon our attention. We find continually, in his pictures where the painter’s individuality is most manifest, that the reproduction of the sensuous part of his subject is, so to speak, interfered with by the strange, half-refining, half-abstract quality of his intellect. . . . All the other physical peculiarities to be traced in his works are all due to the passionately sensuous but equally passionately intellectual nature of Rossetti. They are the record of a man whose sense of beauty was always being disturbed by his sense of feeling.” XXXIV. HYPOCHONDRIA AND ILLNESS. WE have now reached what may be called “the parting of the waters” in Dante Rossetti’s life. In earlier years he had had his tribulations: difficulties in his professional career, the ill-health of his loved Lizzie, with ensuing harasses in relation to their engagement, and to their matrimonial life; her early and shocking death, with troublous memories 304 attending it, and anxieties and self-conflicts ensuing; partial failure of eyesight; insomnia, only combated by perilous palliatives. Still, on the whole, as he stood at the middle of 1871, and even on to the spring of 1872, he was a moderately healthy man, and in many respects a thriving if not exactly a happy one. For happiness some fair measure of contentment is essential; and Rossetti, a man of restless imagination and vehement desires, better satisfied with his surroundings than with himself and his performances, was never contented, and therefore never, in a right sense, happy. His aspirations, though to some extent assuaged, were by no means soothed into serenity; but this I need not say, for no aspirations, properly to be thus called, will be so in the little life which is rounded with a sleep. Nature had endowed him with an ample stock of high-heartedness and high spirits. These served to while the time for his external self and for his friends, while moody distaste, and something like a surging mist of gloom, were often active within. He was a successful man: successful and admired as a painter—necessarily in a small circle, as he would not exhibit; still more successful and acclaimed as a poet, and by a much wider public. Achievement in art and in poetry he had always longed for, for these he had passionately worked; to general recognition he was not indifferent. Fortune had thrown in a more than wonted share of her capricious favours. Loving and beloved by his family, warmly cherished by his friends, acknowledged by his intellectual compeers, sought out by strangers as a man of renown, he seemed to have attained a singularly enviable position. It was indeed one of those positions which Destiny begrudges to men, and determines to reverse.
This was Dante Rossetti viewed from the outside in 1871. “But I have that within which passeth show.” Mental trouble and a too active and unappeased imagination had long ago brought on insomnia; insomnia had brought on chloral; chloral had brought on depression, agitation, and a turmoil of fantasies. I think it clear, judging from results, 305 that my brother being—“put out,” though not gravely perturbed, by the Contemporary article, and by the announcement that it would soon be enlarged and re-published separately—must have got even worse sleep than usual, and must have exceeded more than usual in his chloral-dosing and its concomitant of alcohol. Certain it is that, when the pamphlet-edition appeared (which was towards the middle of May 1872), with its greatly enhanced virus of imputation and suggestion, he received it in a spirit very different from that with which he had encountered the review-article, and had confuted it in The Stealthy School of Criticism. His fancies now ran away with him, and he thought that the pamphlet was a first symptom in a widespread conspiracy for crushing his fair fame as an artist and a man, and for hounding him out of honest society. Most of his friends, myself included, combated these ideas. I question whether his closest confidant, Madox Brown, did so with adequate energy, for he himself, though reasonable and clear-headed, was of a very suspicious temper in professional matters, and held himself and his immediate circle to be not a little ill-used. My brother’s notions were, as I have said, fancies, and fancies bred, not of a temperate consideration of facts, but of the constitutional and mental upset caused by a noxious drug. Still, it is manifest, upon the face of his booklet, that the charges brought forward and reinforced by Mr. Buchanan were by no manner of means light ones. They were sufficient—if believed, which I suppose they very scantily were—to exclude Rossetti from the companionship of virtuous and even of decent people; and it was no fault of this “accuser of sins” (to use Blake’s expression) if such a result did not ensue.
I do not remember, and do not wish to remember, all the details about Mr. Buchanan’s performances, and their reception by the press. He had of course his supporters—not perhaps extremely numerous. I don’t suppose that a single poet of renown was among them. Tennyson (as I have reason to know positively) was one of the first to object to the attack 306 that it was by no means a fair appraisement of Rossetti, much of whose work he rated extremely high, the sonnets especially. In January 1872, midway between the Contemporary article and the pamphlet, there was a critique in the Quarterly Review (I have heard it ascribed to Mr. Courthope) which was unfavourable to Rossetti, and more especially to Mr. Morris, less so to Mr. Swinburne. Mr. Hall Caine has spoken of other adverse articles in the Edinburgh Review and the British Quarterly. Their dates and other details, if ever known to me, have slipped my recollection. I can dimly recall a leading article in the Echo, one word in which, “coward” or “cowards,” disturbed my brother unduly. This article—possibly without the least reason—has been ascribed to Mr. Buchanan himself. So overstrained was the balance of his mind at the time that my brother seriously consulted me as to whether it might not be his duty to challenge the writer or the editor to a duel. I need hardly record my reply—that duels in this common-sensible country are equally illegal and risible. Mr. Buchanan’s own preface to his pamphlet makes use of the same offensive word. After referring to “Mr. Rossetti’s defence, and the opinion of Mr. Rossetti’s friends,” he is pleased to say (and to this also my brother greatly objected)—“I have only one word to use concerning the attacks upon myself. They are the inventions of cowards, too spoilt with flattery to bear criticism, and too querulous and humoursome to perceive the real issues of the case.” It does not seem to have occurred to Mr. Buchanan to ponder whether the term “coward” applies more properly to a verse-writer who anonymously (not to say pseudonymously) assails another verse-writer, intermingling questions of morals with those of poetry—or rather to the man who, being thus assailed, defends himself under his own name, or to friends (or it may be outsiders) who, with or without their names, retort on the assailant.
I am sorry to dwell at so much length upon this really contemptible, and by its very author discarded, affair of The 307 Fleshly School of Poetry; but, as a biographer, I could not from this point onward tell a word of truth unless I gave it prominence. In my brother’s life it was deplorably prominent, though in itself of hardly more importance than some one’s bad breath passing across a looking-glass and slurring it for a moment. The whole matter grieved me exceedingly at the time, and will always continue to grieve me in reminiscence or record. It is a simple fact that, from the time when the pamphlet had begun to work into the inner tissue of his feelings, Dante Rossetti was a changed man, and so continued till the close of his life. Difficult though it may be to believe this of a person so self-reliant in essentials as Rossetti—one who had all his life been doing so many things just as he chose, and because he so chose, and whether other people liked them or not—it is nevertheless the truth, as I know but too well.
On 2 June 1872 I was with my brother all day at No. 16 Cheyne Walk. It was one of the most miserable days of my life, not to speak of his. From his wild way of talking—about conspiracies and what not—I was astounded to perceive that he was, past question, not entirely sane. I went round for Mr. Scott, then living at No. 92 Cheyne Walk; and he (so I noted in my Diary), “as usual, acted in a spirit of the truest and kindest friendship.” This seems to be the occasion of which Mr. Scott speaks in his Autobiographical Notes. He says that “Mr. Marshall and Dr. Hake were there,” but my own impression is that that was on a slightly later day. It is a rather curious coincidence that, on this same 2 June, my brother completed the sale of the picture of which he had painted the background as far back as 1850 at Sevenoaks, and which he had recently completed under the name of The Bower-meadow. Messrs. Pilgeram and Lefèvre bought it for the large price of £735. When Mr. Lefèvre entered, Rossetti was in a state of nervous agitation, possessed with the delusion that all sorts of people were set against him, and trying to undervalue him; and I can recollect the stare of surprise 308 with which the picture-dealer received Rossetti’s suggestion that, if the picture were not considered good value for its price, the agreement might be cancelled. Indeed such a suggestion was not less strange as coming from Rossetti, the paragon of artists at making a bargain, than as addressed to a picture-dealer (Gambart’s successor) who was no novice at taking care of himself.
Another most unfortunate circumstance happened about the same time—I think a day or two later. Browning had just published his singular poem Fifine at the Fair, and he sent (as in previous instances) a presentation-copy to my brother. The latter looked into the book; and, to the astonishment of bystanders, he at once fastened upon some lines at its close as being intended as an attack upon him, or as a spiteful reference to something which had occurred, or might be alleged to have occurred, at his house. In a moment he relented, with an effusion of tenderness to this old, attached, and illustrious friend; but in another moment the scarcely credible delusion returned. Browning was regarded as a leading member of the “conspiracy”; and, from first to last, I was never able to discern that this miserable bugbear had ever been expelled from the purlieus of my brother’s mind. He saw no more of Browning, and communicated with him no more; and on one or two occasions when the great poet, the object of Rossetti’s early and unbounded homage, kindly enquired of me concerning him, and expressed a wish to look him up, I was compelled to fence with the suggestion, lest worse should ensue—no doubt putting myself in a very absurd and unaccountable position. Whether Browning ever knew that Dante Rossetti had conceived a real dislike of him, or supposed himself to have motive of definite complaint, I am unable to say. He was certainly far too keen to miss seeing that there was something amiss, and something which was kept studiously unexplained. Another extravagant fantasy took hold of my brother’s mind at this or some other time—namely, that the wildly grotesque verses of Mr. Dodgson (whom he knew fairly well) 309 called The Hunting of the Snark were in fact intended as a pasquinade against himself. So Mr. Dodgson was another member of the conspiracy.
Thus then on 2 June I was dismayed to find my brother an actual monomaniac. I, who had known him from infancy, had never before seen or surmised the faintest seed of insanity in him. Wilful indeed he always was, but, so far from being mad, his strong idiosyncrasy had never trenched even upon what can be called the eccentric. He was eminently natural, as very many Italians are; and in this quality he followed, to my thinking, rather the Italian model than the English, which latter derives more from sturdy straightforwardness than from direct temperament. He was easy, abrupt when he liked, and transparently intelligible—except in so far as a high and subtle mind baffles one of a dull or conventional order. On that fatal 2 June, and for many days and months ensuing, I was compelled to regard my brother as partially insane, in the ordinary sense of that term. It was only after an interval of time, and as I had opportunity to compare and consider the opinions expressed by medical men and others well qualified to judge, that I came to the conclusion that he never had been and never became thus insane at all, but was on the contrary the victim of chloral, acting upon strained nerves, mental disquiet, and a highly excitable imagination—all these coupled with a grievous and fully justified sense of wrong. For many years past my conviction has been that hypochondria, consequent upon the over-dosing with chloral and alcohol—this, and not anything dependent upon constitutional unsoundness of mind—was the real secret of my brother’s frenzied collapse. Mr. Caine, speaking according to his observation, which began in 1880, has expressed a like opinion.
From this point onward I shall assume in good faith (and my reader can part company with me if he chooses) that my brother’s fantasies were those of a hypochondriac, not a madman; and that the hypochondria was directly due to 310 the chloral, but without leaving out of account those other incentives of which I have just spoken. Meanwhile, whatever the cause, his mind was truly not a sound one. He not only supposed things contrary to reason, but he had actual physical delusions or hallucinations. I cannot remember—then or afterwards—any visual delusions; but there were auditive delusions, as I shall have over-much occasion to specify. _____ [W. M. Rossetti’s account of his brother’s illness, which led to a failed suicide attempt, continues at this point, but there is no further reference to Buchanan.] _____ p. 332 It deserves some consideration moreover that the habit of walking out in the late evening, and not in the day, was not altogether a novelty with Rossetti, brought on by that general change of feeling which resulted from the Buchanan pamphlet of 1872. There is a letter of his to Mr. Shields, 24 December 1869 (published in The Century-guild Hobbyhorse, No. 16), which says that he was then, in fine weather, in the practice of taking long walks in Battersea Park, “whereas my habit had long been to walk only at nights, except when in the country.” This habit, bad as it was in hygiene, can easily be accounted for. He rose late; painted all day as long as light served him; then dined; and, whether winter or summer, all was darkness tempered by gaslight or moonlight by the hour he left the house. _____ p. 338 During Rossetti’s stay near Bognor a libel-case was going on in London, Mr. Buchanan suing Mr. Peter Taylor, then proprietor of The Examiner. Rossetti was not in the faintest degree concerned in writing or prompting any of the matter charged as libellous; but this matter involved in part an attack upon the conduct of Mr. Buchanan in relation to his article in the Contemporary Review. My brother was extremely desirous of avoiding all sort of intermixture in this trial, and that may, I think, have been one reason why his stay at Aldwick Lodge was so prolonged. He returned to Chelsea almost as soon as the trial was over. Let me add, in fairness to Mr. Buchanan, that the jury agreed with him in considering he had been libelled, and they gave him damages to the amount of £150. Whether they were right or wrong is a question I can leave alone. _____ p. 373-375 My brother’s volume of 1870, the Poems, went through six editions. Towards the beginning of 1879 it was out of print, and no further issue of it appeared. He made about £700 by it altogether. By March 1881 he had determined to re-print the Poems in a somewhat altered form; and to follow it up by a separate volume, containing Rose Mary, The White Ship, The King’s Tragedy, The House of Life in a completed form, and various other compositions. But very soon afterwards he decided to reverse the process, and bring out first the new Ballads and Sonnets, and then in close sequence the revised Poems. Into the latter —to compensate for the removal of the original and unfinished House 374 of Life—some fresh work was introduced; especially the uncompleted yet rather long poem, chiefly of very early years, named The Bride’s Prelude. Before the end of March the copy for Ballads and Sonnets was sent to the printer, to be published by Messrs. Ellis & White. This liberal firm offered for it the same terms as for the volume of 1870 —a royalty of 25 per cent, to be paid down as soon as the book should be published, without waiting for actual sale. For the re-issued Poems the terms were to be a like royalty, but only accruing in proportion as sales were effected. As in the previous instance, I assisted my brother with the proofs. The Ballads and Sonnets, very properly dedicated to Mr. Watts, were fully in print by 16 September, and various copies were distributed. The full publication ensued on 17 October. The book was a thorough success, for by the 25th of the latter month the first edition of 1,000 copies was exhausted; and before the end of November 2,000 copies altogether had been issued and paid for. Rossetti wished to write two other historical ballads: Joan of Arc, for which he took some preparatory steps; and the Death of Abraham Lincoln, which was intended to include a tribute to another great American, John Brown, the “faithful unto death”; also, according to Mr. Sharp, The Death Ride of Alexander III. of Scotland (1286). Of this I remember nothing, nor does the subject seem to supply much material for a ballad. The Poems, in their revised form, came out likewise in 1881. This volume sold of course less rapidly, but continuously until some while after my brother’s decease.
Critics were laudatory, some of them enthusiastic; and, so far as memory serves me, there was no repetition of abuse at all resembling The Fleshly School of Poetry, or even following on the same lines. “Live it down” is a very sound axiom. My brother had lived it down, and might from the first have been sure that he would do so. But, unhappily for himself and all others concerned, he had supposed that the influence of [detraction and fallacy is much greater than it really is, and 375 the votaries of those powers much more numerous than in fact they are.
Painful to say, no scintilla of pleasure or of cheerfulness seemed to come to Dante Rossetti from his double achievement in 1881. He was of course, in a faint way, gratified that his leading picture was sold to a public institution, and that his poetry was, by a renewed experiment, recognized as an honour to our period. He sometimes expressed to me and he did so particularly in February 1880 a much higher value for his poetical than for his pictorial work. But the curtains were drawn round his innermost self, and the dusk had closed over him, and was fast darkening into night. Not for the applause of a big or a little crowd had he worked all his life long, rather for adequate self-expression and attainment in art. The work was done, but—except in a remote or abstracted sense—it did not prove to be its own exceeding great reward. _____ p. 377 All this about the blood-spitting “at intervals for years”—not to speak of the superabundant coughing— sounds odd, and perhaps some of my readers will suppose it was mere fantasy or semi-conscious imposture on Rossetti’s part. And yet I believe it was real in its degree. As far back as November 1871 (which was some months before the appearance of the Buchanan pamphlet, and therefore before any obvious disturbance of his mental equilibrium) he told me that he had brought up blood that day, and had done so earlier in the year at Kelmscott, which was prior to the appearance even of the article in the Contemporary Review; and he made a similar statement at the beginning of April 1872. However, I have not the least reason to think that his lungs were, from first to last, otherwise than sound. _____ p. 386 My own Diary now resumes:— “Friday, January 6, 1882. In the evening I went to Gabriel’s. He has for some days past been down in his studio, and the numbness in the left leg is now greatly diminished; in fact he walks about the studio without any sort of assistance, and very much as before the attack. The left arm he still regards as in the same state and much the same degree of numbness. I suspect however that, by a proper exertion of will, he would find it not so very much amiss. Maudsley urges him to set his palette to-morrow, and see what he can do. Gabriel’s spirits are still extremely low—the uncertainty as to his being able to resume his profession as a painter weighing painfully upon him. I saw (copied out by Sharp) the verses ‘To an Old Enemy,’ which Buchanan has prefixed to his latest novel God and the Man. They are generally, and I think correctly, assumed to be addressed to Gabriel, and they certainly form a handsome retractation of past invidious attacks. Gabriel thinks the verses may really be intended for Swinburne [but I don’t believe that he long persisted in any such supposition]. __________ From SOME REMINISCENCES OF WILLIAM MICHAEL ROSSETTI
(London: Brown, Langham & Co., New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1906.) From Volume II, Chapter XXXI: DEATHS IN THE FAMILY: DANTE, FRANCES, LUCY, AND CHRISTINA ROSSETTI, AND OTHERS. pp. 516-517. In my Memoir of Dante Rossetti I have set forth so many particulars regarding the sequence of his illnesses, culminating in death, that I may spare myself any long recital of them here. I will only very briefly summarize as follows. Insomnia began in 1867. In the same year his sight became badly affected, compelling him at times to intermit painting. From this date onwards his eyes were permanently somewhat infirm, but the evil did not proceed to a great extreme. As a palliative against insomnia he took doses of chloral. This commenced in 1870, and after an interval was renewed—the doses, to which a glass of whisky was made an adjunct, becoming abnormally and noxiously heavy. This chloral mitigated his troubles from want of sleep, and for a while it did not seem to do any particular harm; but it acted injuriously upon his nervous system and his spirits and power of self-control. The fact became only too apparent in June 1872, when he entirely broke down under the irritation and strain caused by Mr. Buchanan’s abusive pamphlet, The Fleshly School of Poetry. He then became the victim of exaggerated, and sometimes of absolutely delusive, fancies. The question arises whether the chloral or the pamphlet had most to do with his then shattered condition. For many years past my conviction has been that both were concerned in the crisis, but that the pamphlet would have produced only a comparatively faint impression, had it not been for the chloral. My brother in the course of three months threw off the acuter forms of the attack, but he was never quite the same man that he had been before it. His health was often broken, his spirits often gloomy; not so constantly, however, as some persons seem to suppose. He went on painting with energy and success, and produced some of his best poems. A severe illness which prostrated him in 1877 had a cause quite other than insomnia, chloral, or hypochondria; though it may be that his persisting with the drug rendered him less capable of rallying. He did however rally, and up to the autumn of 1881 was in much the same general condition as before this illness. On 11 December he had a sudden attack of a paralytic character. This again was subdued to some fair extent; he discontinued chloral, and he went to Birchington-on-Sea (near Margate) to recruit. But the grasp of Death was to be relaxed no more. He died of uræmia at Birchington on Easter Sunday, 9 April 1882. I was present, with others, at the moment when his breathing ceased. Uræmia was indeed the medically certified cause of death; but, taking a wider view of the matter, I do not believe that I exaggerate in saying that chloral brought him to his grave. _____ pp. 521-525 I have referred briefly (p. 516) to Mr. Robert Buchanan and his Fleshly School of Poetry: in other writings of mine I have spoken of them—not, I think, with any inordinate amount of acerbity. Mr. Buchanan is now dead, and I should not here have said anything further on the subject if only people would leave it where he himself left it in 1881. But that has not been done: his biographer, Miss Harriet Jay, has had her say, and I will have mine. The obvious and indisputable stages in the case were as follows, (1) Dante Rossetti, in the spring of 1870, published his volume Poems; it was received with general and warm yet not unmingled applause. (2) In 1871, Mr. Buchanan wrote an article, The Fleshly School of Poetry, Mr. Dante Rossetti: it was published in October of that year in The Contemporary Review, under the pseudonym of Thomas Maitland. It was a fierce attack, and was replied to by Rossetti, in a temperate spirit, in an article in The Athenæum named The Stealthy School of Criticism. (3) In the spring of 1872 Mr. Buchanan re-issued in pamphlet form his article, not a little amplified and further envenomed. (4) Late in 1881 Mr. Buchanan dedicated one of his novels, God and the Man, to Rossetti, in some prefixed verses, wherein he totally withdrew his charges against both his poetry and himself: he did so in other forms as well. This—though it furnished no sort of explanation as to why Buchanan had at first denounced as highly impure poems which he afterwards declared to be pure—was a handsome, and in some degree a touching, apology. He termed Rossetti “an Old Enemy”; but in fact there had been no enmity on the part of Rossetti, but only of Buchanan. Rossetti died very soon afterwards, and there the matter remained wound up, and the evil of it, so far as was possible, atoned for.
Not long before his final illness Mr. Buchanan recurred in print to the subject—as I deem, both needlessly and indiscreetly. But, as he is not here to prolong the controversy, I will not dwell on that. Now comes Miss Jay, and professes to vindicate him, and to re-besmirch that same Rossetti whom he in 1881 greeted as “pure in purpose, blameless in song, and sweet in spirit.”
What is the gist of Miss Jay’s vindication? It makes matters much worse than before for “Thomas Maitland.” The only plausible—I could not in conscience say tenable—excuse for that pseudonymist would be that he genuinely believed Rossetti’s poems to be vile and deleterious, and that, fired by zeal for moral right, he said so in severely aggressive terms. But Miss Jay will not have it thus: she avers that the whole affair was one of rancour, and of rancour vicariously applied. Here in brief is her account of the sequence of events, necessarily supplemented by me now and again, (1) Mr. Swinburne expressed in print a slighting opinion of the poetry of David Gray, then deceased, with whom Buchanan had been intimate. Buchanan resented this, and we can sympathize with his feelings as a friend, though surely Swinburne must have had a right to his own critical views about David Gray. (2) (But this Miss Jay abstains from mentioning) Buchanan, after the publication of Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads in 1866, printed in The Spectator some verses, not free from ribaldry, abusing the author; and I thereafter (which Miss Jay does mention) in my Criticism of the Swinburne volume, termed Buchanan “a poor and pretentious poetaster.” My reference to him was limited to those words. They expressed the opinion which I then truly entertained, founded upon extracts from Buchanan’s poems cited in laudatory reviews; but I believe that at a later date he produced work (I have read it little or hardly at all) deserving to be spoken of in a different tone. (3) (But this again Miss Jay leaves unstated) Mr. Buchanan wrote in The Athenæum in 1870 a very damnatory critique of my edition of Shelley. Here one might have supposed that these “alarums and excursions” would come to an end. Mr. Buchanan had had it out with Mr. Swinburne for not admiring David Gray’s poems, and with me for not admiring his own. I had not in any way replied. But, according to Miss Jay, he continued to nurse a grudge, not only against Swinburne and me, but against any one in the same “set,” and consequently (4) he attacked my brother in The Contemporary Review about a year and two-thirds later. How far this explanation goes towards “white-washing” Mr. Buchanan I will not discuss: the facts, as affirmed by his own advocate, are sufficient.
There is one curious detail involved in the pleading. Miss Jay, quoting from Buchanan himself, says that a certain sonnet published by Dante Rossetti was reprobated by Tennyson in energetic language. This is the sonnet entitled Nuptial Sleep, which in 1870 was included in the provisional form of The House of Life series, but was omitted by my brother from the series when completed in the volume of 1881. But we have another and a very diverse account of the opinion which Tennyson entertained and expressed as to that sonnet. In the Life of Tennyson by his son, Vol. II, p. 505, we find the following for all men to read: it is among the Personal Recollections by F. T. Palgrave, who was an intimate, of old standing, of the Laureate. “In Rossetti’s [volume] the passion and imaginative power of the sonnet Nuptial Sleep impressed him (Tennyson) deeply.” Which statement are we to believe? Or both? If it is true that Tennyson denounced the sonnet as averred, I can only surmise that some one misrepresented the composition to him, and that he, reading it hurriedly if at all, took the misrepresentation on trust. Besides, I have in my hands an authentic copy of a letter written on 22nd November 1871 by another friend of Tennyson. I have no authority for mentioning his name: were I to do so, it would be seen that on this particular subject no one has a better right to be heard. He wrote as follows: “Mr. Tennyson was among the first to object to Buchanan’s article that it was by no means a fair appraisement of Rossetti; much of whose work he rates extremely high, the sonnets especially.”
Thus much for Miss Harriet Jay’s “rehabilitation” of Mr. Robert Buchanan. Of Mr. Buchanan himself I had no knowledge, and am not conscious of having ever seen him—and my acquaintance with the general body of his writings is, as aforesaid, scanty in the extreme. That he had some personal as well as some literary merits I do not doubt. I presume that on the other hand he was open to the imputation of being “ill-conditioned”—irritable, litigious, self-assertive, and, when roused into ire, not duly scrupulous. In relation to Dante Rossetti he committed an offence, and at the end of several years he did his best to wipe it out: that last is what I prefer to remember of him. “After life’s fitful fever he sleeps well.” To him it appears to have been highly feverous. __________ Back to The Fleshly School Controversy |
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