Letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti to William Allingham, 1854-1870

Front matter

CORNELL

UNIVERSITY

LIBRARY

Preface

" The best of all Rossetti's letters, so far as hitherto published, are those to William Allingham, printed by Dr. Birkbeck Hill in the Atlantic Monthly for 1896." Such is the judgment passed by Dr. Garnett in his article oft-Dante Gabriel Rossetti in the Dictionary of National Biography. Though the editor of the American magazine was liberal in the space which he allowed me, nevertheless in my four papers it was only a selection, though a large selection, that I was able to give. In reading through the original letters a second time this summer I was surprised to find how much of necessity had been omitted that in point of interest was scarcely inferior to what had been inserted. All these passages I am including in the present volume, with the exception of one or two which might, it was thought, give pain either to those criticised by Rossetti or to their surviving friends. Were I, however, to print all that he wrote little fault could be found with it on the score of severity. In these letters, at all events, the writer was not often harsh in his judgment of his fellow-men.

The additions, both in the text and in the notes, vi PREFACE

are so considerable that it will be found, I believe, that the four articles have been increased to nearly thrice their original size.

In writing my notes I have made great use of the following works : — The Letters and Memoir of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, by William Michael Rossetti ; Dante Gabriel Rossetti as Designer and Writer, by the same author ; The Autobiography of William Bell Scott ; The Life of Ford Madox Brown, by Ford H. Hueffer ; The Life of Anne Gilchrist, by H. H. Gilchrist, and three articles in the Contemporary Review for 1886 by Holman Hunt.

In the Introduction will be found an acknowledgment of my obligations to Mrs. Allingham, Mr. W. M. Rossetti, and Mr. Arthur Hughes. Without their assistance my part of the work would have been imperfect indeed.

For the illustrations and fac-similes I have to thank Mrs. Allingham, Mr. G. F. Watts, R.A., Mr. W. M. Rossetti, Mr. Arthur Hughes, Mr. J. G. Kershaw, and Mr. C. Fairfax Murray.

G. B. H.

Table Of Contents

DATE. LETTER PAGE

Introduction ... ... ... xvii-xxviii

1854. 1. Spring. Reproaches himself for neglect .. . ... 1

Introduction

Life seems to me strangely varied this sunny January day, as, sitting at my desk in the parlour of a pleasant villa on the outskirts of the little town of Alassio, I look beneath palm-trees upon the blue waters of the Mediterranean, and listen to the measured beat of the waves on the sandy shore. Lying open before me are copies of the letters which Dante Gabriel Rossetti wrote to his friend William Allingham. In the table drawer are copies of another set of letters, which, more than a century and a half ago, Swift wrote to an Irish country gentleman. This double correspondence, written by men wide as the poles asunder, I have brought from England to edit in Italy for readers on both sides of the Atlantic. Have I not good reason for finding a strange variety in life ?

Delightful as is this spot where winter seems to have gone a-maying, yet it better suits a poet or a painter than an editor, who needs long shelves of books far more than trees laden with oranges and xviii INTRODUCTION

bushes weighed down with roses. From England and libraries I have been driven far away by weakness of health. In editing Rossetti's letters — that part of my twofold task to which I have turned first — I have had the help of friends at home. Mr. W. M. Rossetti has read a great part of the correspondence, and has furnished me with elucidatory notes. My old friend Mr. Arthur Hughes, of Eastside House, Kew Green, who, though not one of the seven Praeraphaelite Brothers, lived in great intimacy with many of them, has let me draw on his reminiscences. More than forty years ago he was painting in Rossetti's studio ; his hand, happily, has lost none of its exquisite skill. Mrs. Allingham, whose pictures of English cottagesare not surpassed in refinement and in beauty by the best of her husband's verses, enables me to give a brief sketch of that graceful poet's uneventful life. He had made some beginning in writing his autobiography. From what he had written she sends me a few extracts. Some day, I am told, a memoir of him will be published. It will be delightful indeed if it contains the full records he kept of his long talks with Tennyson and Carlyle. Of Carlyle he saw much more than most of that great man's friends, for during some years scarcely a week went by in which they did not walk together. Strange to say, this intimacy has been passed over in total

INTRODUCTION xix

silence by Mr. Froude. In the four volumes of his hero's Life there are sins of omission as well as of admission.

Allingham used to recount how Carlyle would sometimes begin by flatly contradicting him, and end by tacitly adopting what he had said. One day the old man was describing his interview with the Queen at the Dean of Westminster's. " She came sliding into the room," he said — " as if on wheels," exclaimed Allingham, interrupting him. " Not at all, Allingham," he gruffly replied. A few days later his friend overheard him telling the story to Mr. Lecky. "The Queen," he said, "came sliding into the room as if on wheels," and in that form he ever afterwards told it. He used to add that he saw that he was expected to stand during the interview ; but that he took hold of a chair, and saying that Her Majesty would allow an old man to sit down, down he sat.

William Allingham was born at Ballyshannon, County Donegal, in March, 1824, of a good stock, for he was sprung from one of Cromwell's settlers. Of his birthplace he gives the following description : " The little old town where I was born has a voice of its own, low, solemn, persistent, humming through the air day and night, summer and winter. Whenever I think of that town I seem to hear the voice. The river which makes it rolls over rocky ledges xx INTRODUCTION

into the tide. Before spreads a great ocean in sunshine or storm ; behind stretches a many-islanded lake. On the south runs a wavy line of blue mountains ; and on the north, over green, rocky hills, rise peaks of a more distant range. The trees hide in glens or cluster near the river ; grey rocks and boulder lie scattered about the windy pastures. The sky arches wide over all, giving room to multitudes of stars by night and long processions of clouds blown from the sea, but also, in the childish memory where these pictures live, to deeps of celestial blue in the endless days of summer. An odd, out-of-the-way little town ours, on the extreme western verge of Europe ; our next neighbours, sunset way, being citizens of the great new republic, which indeed, to our imagination, seemed little, if at all, farther off than England in the opposite direction."

Of the cottage in which he spent most of his childhood and youth he writes : " Opposite the hall door a good-sized walnut-tree leaned its wrinkled stem towards the house, and brushed some of the second-story panes with its broad, fragrant leaves. To sit at that little upper window when it was open to a summer twilight, and the great tree rustled gently, and sent one leafy spray so far that it even touched my face, was an enchantment beyond all telling. Killarney, Switzerland, Venice, could not,

THE PURT, BALLYSHANNON.

(From a ivater-colour sketch by Mrs. Allingham.)

\To face page xx.

INTRODUCTION xxi

in later life, come near it. On three sides the cottage looked on flowers and branches, which I count as one of the fortunate chances of my childhood ; the sense of natural beauty thus receiving its due share of nourishment, and of a kind suitable to those early years."

Allingham's schooling was far too brief to satisfy his thirst for knowledge. He was scarcely fourteen, if indeed quite so old, when he was placed as a clerk in the town bank, of which his father was manager. The books which he had to keep for the next seven years were not those on which his heart was set. He was a great reader. Year after year he kept adding to the scanty stock of learning which he had brought from school, till in the end he had mastered Greek, Latin, French, and German. His father, proud though he was of his son's intelligence, had little sympathy with his constant craving for knowledge. In the bank manager's eyes it was not the scholar, but the thorough business man who ranked highest. From the counting-house the young poet at last succeeded in escaping. " Heart-sick of more than seven years of bankclerking, I found a door suddenly opened, not into an ideal region or anything- like one, but at least into a roadway of life somewhat less narrow and tedious than that in which I was plodding." A place had been found for him in the customs, as it was found xxii INTRODUCTION

for another and a greater dreamer on the other side of the Atlantic.

"In the spring of 1846 I gladly took leave for ever of discount ledgers and current accounts, and went to Belfast for two months' instruction in the duties of Principal Coast Officer of Customs, a tolerably well-sounding title, but which carried with it a salary of but ^80 a year. I trudged daily about the docks and timber-yards, learning to measure logs, piles of planks, and, more troublesome, ships for tonnage ; indoors, part of the time practised customs book-keeping, and talked to the clerks about literature and poetry in a way that excited some astonishment, but on the whole, as I found at parting, a certain degree of curiosity and respect. I preached Tennyson to them. My spare time was mostly spent in reading and haunting booksellers' shops, where, I venture to say, I laid out a good deal more than most people, in proportion to my income, and managed to get glimpses of many books which I could not afford or did not care to buy. I enjoyed my new position, on the whole, without analysis, as a great improvement on the bank - and for the rest, my inner mind was brimful of love and poetry, and usually all external things appeared trivial save in their relation to it. Yet I am reminded by old memoranda that there were sometimes overclouding anxieties : sometimes, but

INTRODUCTION xxiii

not very frequently, from lack of money ; more often from longing for culture, conversation, opportunity ; oftenest from fear of a sudden development of some form of lung' disease, the seeds of which I supposed to be sown in my bodily constitution." This weakness he outgrew.

Having gone through his apprenticeship, he returned to Donegal, where he was stationed for some years. Close to his office he had a back room, where he kept all his books and where he read for hours together. Here, no doubt, he covered many a sheet of paper with verse. From Mr. Arthur Hughes I have the following account of the young poet : —

" D. G. R., and I think W. A. himself, told me, in the early days of our acquaintance, how, in remote Ballyshannon, where he was a clerk in the customs, in evening walks he would hear the Irish girls at their cottage doors singing old ballads, which he would pick up. If they were broken or incomplete, he would add to them or finish them ; if they were improper, he would refine them. He could not get them sung till he got the Dublin ' Catnach ' of that day to print them, on long strips of blue paper, like old songs ; and if about the sea, with the old rough woodcut of a ship on the top. He either gave them away or they were sold in the neighbourhood. Then, in his evening xxiv INTRODUCTION

walks, he had at last the pleasure of hearing some of his own ballads sung at the cottage doors by the crooning lasses, who were quite unaware that it was the author who was passing by."

He liked, his widow tells me, to see all sorts of people and all sides of life. He knew every cottage for twenty miles round Ballyshannon. When she visited the place with their children, after his death, "very many," she writes, "were the friendly greetings we had from folk who remembered him kindly." He sought for sympathy outside the narrow limits of this secluded spot. "I had," he says, "for literary correspondents, Leigh Hunt, George Gilfillan, and Samuel Ferguson, and for love correspondent F. [one of his cousins], whose handwriting always sent a thrill through me at the first glance and the fiftieth perusal." Gilfillan had not the good fortune to win the esteem of Coventry Patmore, who wrote to Allingham in 1850 : — " I hear that you have had the misfortune to be publicly praised by that coxcomb of coxcombs, Gilfillan." To Samuel Ferguson Allingham dedicated his Laurence Bloomfield with "admiration, gratitude, and love."

In June, 1847, he paid his first visit to London, and called on Leigh Hunt. " I was shown into his study, and had some minutes to look round at the bookcases, busts, old framed engravings, and to glance

INTRODUCTION xxv

at some of the books on the table, diligently marked and noted in the well-known neatest of handwritings. Outside the window climbed a hop on its trellis. The door opened, and in came the genius loci, a tallish young old man, in dark dressing-gown and wide, turndown shirt collar, his copious iron-grey hair falling almost to the shoulders. The friendly brown eyes, a simple yet fine-toned voice, easy hand-pressure, gave me greeting as to one already well known to him. Our talk fell first on reason and instinct. He maintained (for argument's sake, I thought) that beasts may be equal or superior to men. He has a light earnestness of manner, a toleration for almost every possible different view from his own. I ask him about certain highly interesting men. ' Dickens, a pleasant fellow, very busy now, lives in an old house in Devonshire Terrace, Marylebone. Carlyle, I know him well. Browning lives at Peckham, because no one else does ! He's a pleasant fellow, has few readers, and will be glad to find that you admire him (!!).' " In 1850 I ventured to send my first volume of verse to Tennyson. I don't think he wrote to me, but I heard incidentally that he thought well of it ; and during a subsequent visit to London (in 1852, perhaps) Coventry Patmore, to my boundless joy, proposed to take me to call on the great poet, then not long married, and living at Twickenham.

xxvi INTRODUCTION

We were admitted, shown upstairs, and soon a tall and swarthy man came in, with loose dark hair and beard, very near-sighted ; shook hands cordially, yet with a profound quietude of manner ; immediately afterwards asked us to stay to dine. I stayed. He took up my volume of poems, which bore tokens of much usage, saying, ' You can see it has been read a good deal ! ' Then, turning the pages, he asked, ' Do you dislike to hear your own things read ? ' and, receiving a respectfully encouraging reply, read two of the sEoliari Harps. The rich, slow, solemn chant of his voice glorified the little poems."

These two poems, which are included in Ailingham's Day and Night Songs, are mentioned by Rossetti in one of his letters as among his favourites. He too glorified his friend's verse by his recitation. " I remember," writes Mr. Hughes, "before I knew Allingham, Rossetti speaking of him to me and of his poems, and reciting, as he only could, The Ruined Chapel, beginning : —

' By the shore a plot of ground Clips a ruined chapel round, Buttressed with a grassy mound, Where day and night and day go by, And bring no touch of human sound.'

He was the most splendid reciter of poetry, deep,

INTRODUCTION xxvii

full, mellow, rich, so full of the merits of the poem and its music." Nevertheless, his recitation, fine though it was, must have been marred by one great defect; the man who made "calm" rhyme with "arm" had no ear for one of the most beautiful sounds in the English language. Tennyson, to whom in early years he sent some of his poems in manuscript, found fault with these " cockney rhymes," though he himself had been guilty of them, and guilty of them in print. In the first version of The Lady of Shalott "river" rhymes with "lira."

As years went by, Allingham saw much more of the world and of those men of letters whose society he loved. In the course of his official duties he was moved first to one station and then to another in England. Twice he had an appointment in London. In 1 870 he retired from the customs, being appointed sub-editor of Frasers Magazine under Froude. He succeeded him as chief editor in 1874. In the same year he married. He died in 1889.

"He had," as Mr. W. M. Rossetti tells me, "a good critical judgment ; he was a man who could pounce on defects in a poem." Madox Brown described him as " keen and cutting." It will be seen in the course of these letters that Rossetti not only sought his criticism of his poetry, but often acknowledged its justice. Coventry Patmore was xxviii INTRODUCTION

scarcely less eager to have his opinion, but was not so willing to submit to it. " You horrify me with your talk about pruning," he once wrote to his friend, who had found The Angel in the House somewhat too long. " You have marked for omission several of my pet passages." Early in their correspondence he described Allingham as "a grave and truthful character, combined with a strong and quick intelligence."

It is much to be regretted that of Allingham's letters to Rossetti not a single one has been preserved. The great painter was in the habit from time to time of clearing out his drawers by the' simple method of destroying all their accumulations. The loss, however, is the less serious owing to Rossetti's admirable clearness as a letter writer. However thick may be the mist which in places covers his poetry, when he writes in prose his thoughts and the words in which they are set forth are as clear as day. It is time, however, to bring this introduction to an end, and allow him to speak for himself.

I. Chatham Place

[Blackfriars Bridge],

Midnight 12* \^Z iP rob " bl y o S P_r in i * - {Saturday of 1854J.

Yea, unto 70 times 7 ! — and what a beast I was not to write all that time. And you to call after all on such a beast ! And I to be absolutely prevented from being here just now in the daytime — as I am painting elsewhere.

Pray do come instead in the evening after 8, — • or else write me word where we can meet. In a day or two I trust to be free. I will wait here for you to-morrow evening. But if impracticable to come, never mind keeping me in.

D. G. R.

Note on I.

Nathaniel Hawthorne recorded at Liverpool on February 23, 1854: — "There came to see me the other day a young gentleman with a moustache and a blue cloak, who announced himself as William Allingham. His face was intelligent, dark, pleasing, and not at all John-Bullish. He said that he had been employed in the Customs in Ireland, and was now going to London to live by literature. His manners are good, and he appears to possess independence of mind." Allingham did not this time succeed in escaping from the counting-house into literature. Rossetti, writing from Hastings on May 25th of this same year, says : — " I heard from Millais yesterday, who tells me Allingham is going back to Ireland and the Customs."

II. Saturday [probably spring of 1854J

We forgot, I believe, to settle last night whether we go to dinner at Mr. Marshall's, 85, Eaton Square, at 7 to-morrow. I am going. If you do not, will you write to him, or indeed in any case. Perhaps we had better go separately to avoid trouble in meeting.

Your D. G.

In turning your things over, will you keep an eye to that lost MS. of mine.

Let's call together on the Martins soon.

Note on II.

" Mr. Marshall was a millionaire from Leeds, who had a large estate in Cumberland." Rossetti wrote of him on May 15, 1856 : — " He is disposed to be very useful to me, I think, in purchasing my works, and also in very generously paying for them, as he always declares the prices I ask to be trifles."

III. Monday, \ past 6 d clock

{April, 1 8 54. J Dear Allingham,

I suppose you are gone to bask in the Southon [sic] ray. I should follow, but feel very sick, and moreover have lunched late to-day with Ruskin. We read half the Day and Night Songs together, and I gave him the book. He was most delighted, and said some of it was heavenly.

I took Miss S. to Hastings, and Bessie P. behaved like a brick. I have told Ruskin of my pupil, and he yearneth. Perhaps I may come down on Anna Mary to-night, as I believe she leaves on Wednesday with Barbara S. I am going now to my family, and if you feel inclined to come down to 45, Upper A. St., we will go to the Hermitage together. Otherwise I am not sure of going.

Notes on III.

On April 14th of this year, a few days before the date of this letter, Rossetti wrote to Madox Brown : " Mac Cracken sent my drawing \Dante drawing an Angel in Memory of Beatrice] to Ruskin, who the other day wrote me an incredible letter about it, remaining mine respectfully ( ! !), and wanting to call. I of course stroked him down in my answer, and yesterday he called. His manner was more agreeable than I had always expected. ... He seems in a mood to make my fortune."

A few months later Ruskin wrote to Rossetti : " I forgot to say also that I really do covet your drawings as much as I covet Turner's ; only it is useless self-indulgence to buy Turner's, and useful self-indulgence to buy yours. Only I won't have them after they have been more than nine times rubbed entirely out — remember that."

Miss S. was Miss Siddal, with whom Rossetti had fallen in love so early as 1850, though it was not till i860 that he married her. His brother has told us how her striking face and " coppery -golden hair" were discovered, as it were, by Deverell in a bonnet-shop. She sat to him, to Holman Hunt, and to Millais, but most of all to Rossetti. The following account was given me one day as I sat in the studio of Mr. Arthur Hughes, surrounded by some beautiful sketches he had lately taken on the coast of Cornwall : —

" Deverell accompanied his mother one day to a milliner's. Through an open door he saw a girl working with her needle ; he got his mother to ask her to sit to him. She was the future Mrs. Rossetti. Millais painted her for his Ophelia — wonderfully like her. She was tall and slender, with red coppery hair and bright consumptive complexion, though in these early years she had no striking signs of ill health. She was exceedingly quiet, speaking very little. She had read Tennyson, having first come to know something about him by finding one or two of his poems on a piece of paper which she brought home to her mother wrapped round a pat of butter. Rossetti taught her to draw. She used to be drawing while sitting to him. Her drawings were beautiful, but without force. They were feminine likenesses of his own.''

Rossetti's pet names for her were Guggum, Guggums, or Gug. A child one day overheard him, as he stood before his easel, utter to himself over and over again the words, " Guggum, Guggum." "All the Ruskins were most delighted with Guggum," he wrote. "John Ruskin said she was a noble, glorious creature, and his father said by her look and manner she might have been a countess." Ruskin used to call her Ida.

Anna Mary was Miss Howitt (afterwards Mrs. Howitt-Watts). The Hermitage (Highgate Rise), her father's house, was swept away long ago.

Barbara S. was Barbara Leigh Smith (afterwards Madame Bodichon), by whose munificence was laid the foundation of Girton College, Cambridge, the first institution in which a university education was given to women. Rossetti wrote to his sister on November 8, 1853 : — "Ah, if you were only like Miss Barbara Smith ! a young lady I meet at the Howitts', blessed with large rations of tin, fat, enthusiasm, and golden hair, who thinks nothing of climbing up a mountain in breeches, or wading through a stream in none, in the sacred name of pigment." " She was a most admirable woman," adds Mr. W. M. Rossetti, " full of noble zeal in every good cause, and endowed with a fine pictorial capacity."

Bessie P. was Miss Bessie Rayner Parkes, .laughter of " Joe " Parkes, whom Carlyle hits off in his Reminiscences (vol. i. p. 254), afterwards Madame Belloc. In A Passing World she writes : --"' Barbara Smith suggested the conception of Romola to George Eliot, who has thus sketched an immortal [?] portrait of her face and bearing in early youth."

Speaking of Rossetti at the time of his visit to Hastings, she says : — " There was about him in his youth a singular good breeding, enforced and cherished by all the women of his family. ... I did not think his wife in the least like 'a countess,' " she adds ; " but she had an unworldly simplicity and purity of aspect which Rossetti has recorded in his pencil drawings of her face. Millais has also given this look in his Ophelia, for which she was the model. The expression of Beatrice \Beata Beatrix, now in the National Gallery] was not hers. . . . She had the look of one who read her Bible and said her prayers every night, which she probably did."

In 45, Upper Albany Street (now 166, Albany Street), Rossetti's father died. Here the painter, on the death of his wife, sought refuge for a time.

IV. 26th April, 1854

My dear Allingham,

We lost my father to-day at |-past 5. He had not, I think, felt much pain this day or two, but it has been a wearisome, protracted state of dull suffering, from which we cannot but feel in some sort happy at seeing him released.

I shall call on you soon, and meanwhile and ever am yours sincerely,

D. G. Rossetti.

Will you tell Mrs. Howitt, should you see her?

P.S. I have forgotten two or three times to remind you of your promise to write a word of introduction to Routledge for my cousin, Mr. Teodorico Rossetti.

Would you kindly do so, and send it me ? It is merely to say that he has a MS., which he wants Routledge to look at, and advise him about, and of course buy if it is possible.

Notes on IV.

Dante Rossetti, a year before his father's death, sketched the old man as he sat at his desk deep in study. This striking likeness is reproduced in the Letters and Memoir. The son of an Italian blacksmith, early in life Gabriel Rossetti showed that he had that double gift by which his own son was to become famous, The painter's art, however, he neglected for poetry. His love of freedom, under the despotic Bourbons, brought his life into danger. After lying hid in Naples for three months of the spring of 1821, he escaped to Malta on an English man-of-war. There he was befriended by that witty versifier, Hookham Frere. " One of my vivid reminiscences," writes his son William, "is of the day when the death of Frere was announced to him, in 1846. With tears in his half-sightless eyes and the passionate fervour of a southern Italian, my father fell on his knees and exclaimed, ' Anima bella, benedetta sii tu, dovunque sei ! ' (Noble soul, blessed be thou wherever thou art !) " He settled in London, where he supported himself by teaching Italian. With all the fervour of a poet and the enthusiasm of an exiled patriot, he was, like Mazzini, a man of the strictest conduct. By hard work and thrift, aided by an excellent wife, he always kept his family in decent comfort, and never owed a penny to any man. "He put his heart into whatever he did." His learning was great, though his application of it was often fanciful. In the literature of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance he found far deeper meanings than had ever been dreamed of bv the authors. As his little son looked over the woodcuts of some old volume, he would be awed by his father's declaration that it was a libro sommamente mistico — a book in the highest degree mystical. Freethinker though he was, nevertheless " for the moral and spiritual aspects of the Christian religion he had the deepest respect." In his early years he had been a famous improvisatore. Throughout life he was great in declamation and recitation. If on one side of his character he affected his son by sympathy, on another side he no less affected him by a spirit of antagonism. Of politics he and his brothers in exile talked far too much for the young painter. Of gli Austriaci (the Austrians) and Luigi Filippo (Louis Philippe) Dante Rossetti heard so much in his youth that he seems to have registered a vow " that he, at least, would leave Luigi Filippo and the other potentates of Europe and their ministers to take care of themselves." At all events, for the whole of his life, as regards current politics, he was a second Gallio — he cared for none of those things."