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The Pre-Raphaelite Vestal
By GRAHANI HOUGH HE was the devout sister of a wilful, pas- sionate brother; patient, unworldly, scrupu- lous and severe. She loved her family and went little outside the family circle; was fond, of babies and small furry animals; had two offers of marriage, both of which came to nothing: she wrote a mass of devotional verse, much of it more a religious than a poetical exercise; and a smaller, but still considerable quantity, of other verse, of great accomplishment and inex- pressible sadness; as she grew older she became more exclusively preoccupied with the consola- tions and anxieties of her religion; and she died 'in ,her early sixties in 1894. This is the received impression of Christina Rossetti's life, and in general it is a true one. It is extremely like the life of Emily Dickinson, &poet with whom she has often been compared—less deprived by situation and circumstances, but almost as much so by self-imposed limitations. In neither case would there have been very much of interest to record if they had not been poets. Apart from the poetry, their lives consisted almost entirely of things that did not happen.
Emily Dickinson's poetry is not only admired.
it is even read today; much of it appeared late and it has some accidental continuities with modern verse. Christina Rossetti's poetry has always enjoyed a full measure of esteem; but I doubt if it is actually much read. In the general eclipse of Victorian poetry her light is hardly prominent enough to draw much attention, though we all know it is there. The best service a new biography can perform is to remind us how good, beyond all expectation, the poetry is. It lies entirely within the conventions of late- romantic verse—the kind we often shy off from 110w., partly from an unwillingness to enter into its sentiment, partly from an apprehension, usually justified, that we shall be disappointed by tired rhythms, bits of cliché vocabulary and too-expected images. But with Christina Rossetti this does not happen. The sad love-poems say ''hat sad love-poems must say; but without oddity or self-assertion they say it differently. The evocative rhythms have a lingering touch of dryness and reserve that prevent them slip- Ping into violin-solo plangency. The incurable nuns are answered not by 'self-expression' or the stated love-mythology, which maybe no one can now believe, but by the oblique and authentic victory of being transformed into works of art. The emotional atmosphere from which the poems arise has been perfectly described by jebin Ironside in his book on the Pre- Raphaelite painters. 'They were born into a con- straint, age, but also into an age of social con- ..s1_ 'lint • • . Man's emotional drives, in the ab- sence of sufficient acknowledged outlet for their ,..* CHRISTINA ROSSE1TI. 'By Lona Mosk Packer. tUniversity of California and C.U.P., 65s.) LOt Tate na rvioRskosi-M ACMILLAN- LEITERS. Edited by c.u.p 350 Packer. (University of California and
indiscriminate energies, reached a level of strange intensity. The narrow limits within which the movement of the heart was circumscribed produced an extraordinary rarefying effect... . The broken pledge, in such a moral order, in- flicted an incurable wound; the long engage- ment was a corroding interval of anxiety and frustration; and all April loves were tended and guarded in the fear that they might die before the harvesting.'
This is the moral atmosphere of Christina Rossetti's life, and until the appearance of this new biography by Lona Mosk Packer* we thought we knew what little there was to know of the story. Christina was always closely in- volved with her brothers' affairs and was a sym- pathetic coadjutor of the nascent Pre-Raphaelite movement. When she was eighteen, James Col- linson, one of the original Brotherhood, pro- posed marriage to her. He was not a very promising suitor—an insipid painter and a torpid, timorous creature who was apt to respond to all the difficulties of life by simply falling asleep. He was also a Catholic, and Christina, with her strong Anglican feeling, re- fused him on that account. Collinson then reconciled himself with the Church of England and was then accepted. For two years he and Christina -were engaged. Then he developed scruples about his apostasy and reverted to the Roman Church. Christina then broke off the engagement, and, according to her brother William Michael, it was a lasting and painful shock. Again according to William Michael, there was nothing more to record of her emo- tional life till she was over thirty, when she formed a friendship with Charles Cayley, an unworldly and unsuccessful scholar. He loved her and wanted to marry her; but he had no money, again there were religious differences, and it seems that Christina did not love him; though she set the highest value on his friend- ship and continued to do so till his death in 1883.' Christina's always scrupulous devotion increased in intensity and she became more and more of a recluse until she died. This account has been followed by later biographers, and we are left with the picture of one who was almost a lay nun, untouched by temptation and passion and almost unaware of their existence.
It has always been something of a paradox that this vestal should have written the most poignant and affecting love-poetry .ever written by a woman in English. It has often seemed to her readers that these frustrated little his- tories with Collinson and Cayley simply did not provide sufficient experience to account for it. It then occurred to Mrs. Packer, in the course of the very careful research that lies behind this biography, that most of the love-poetry, which often seems to refer to a very specific situation, was written after the affair with Collinson was over and before the friendship with Cayley had properly begun. This led to the supposition that there was another object of. Christina's secular
devotion, who had always been kept concealed, and who exercised a domination over her life that seems to have been beyond the power of her two remarkably uncompelling suitors. The candidate for this office is William Bell Scott, a painter and a poet, a strong, difficult personality, and a lifelong friend. of the Rossetti brothers. There is very little in the way of external evi- dence to go on, and Mrs. Packer relies largely on a careful chronological examination of Christina's poetry and on inference to the cir- cumstances that it reveals. Now this is always a dangerous thing to do. We have no ground for supposing that the work of a lyric poet is an emotional diary arising immediately from bio- graphical circumstance. Even the most subjec- tive poets write about what nearly happened, about what did not happen, as much as about what did. Yet 1 believe that Mrs. Packer has made her case.
William Bell Scott was married. The Rossettis did not know this at first, but soon discovered it. His wife was partly an invalid and he made little pretence of living with her; soon after he met Christina Rossetti he fell in love with another woman, with whom he lived in the closest intimacy all the rest of his life. He was crotchety, frustrated, intensely attractive, both a spiritual and a physical philanderer, yet impress- ing all who met him as a real and serious character. The tenderness, the passion and the hopeless sadness of Christina's poetry attaches itself far more naturally to such a personality than to any yet recorded in her life. One can give little idea of Mrs. Packer's argument as a whole, for it depends entirely on detail, for the most part very plausibly and sensitively handled. Much weight is attached to the delicate series of Italian poems I! Rossegiar del Oriente which Christina allowed no one to see, and which speak more openly, even more sensuously than any others. It turns out, too, that all the for- merly published evidence for Christina's life comes from William Michael Rossetti. He wanted her to marry Cayley and even offered to support them at a time when he could not afford it. Kind brother and decent fellow as he Was, he was also somewhat imperceptive, besides being excessively cautious in concealing the skeletons in the Pre-Raphaelite cupboard, which were by no means absent.
All in •all, we have a convincing biographical case, of a kind that can rarely be made con- vincing. The greatest praise must be given to the care and patience with which it is worked out; and we must realise both the importance and the limitations. There is much mere speculation; poor Cayley': part is almost written out; and Christina's religious development is not treated with any great understanding. The important thing is that instead of the almost passionless devote of the received biography, spinning the most moving poetry out of half-imagined re- nunciations, we have a woman of intense feeling and powerful self-control, caught in a tragic situation. This does not make the poetry any different; but unnecessary puzzles are re- moved, and the poems can be seen as the natural product of the soil from which they grew. And this may make it possible to read them with, an attention more sympathetic and more properly directed. The biography of a poet can rarely do, more.
Incidental features of the life, and the collec- tion of letters between. the Rossettis and theitr publisher Macmillan,[ cast also a most attractive light on the generosity, unworldliness, good feeling and lack of bigotry in this attractive circle.
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