It might, perhaps, be said that there are three kinds of poetical temperament which have never yet been found equally combined in any one poet-not even in Shakespeare himself. There is the lyric temperament, as exemplified in writers like Sappho, Sh.e.l.ley, and others; there is the meditative temperament-sometimes speculative, but not always accompanied by metaphysical dreaming-as exemplified in Lucretius, Wordsworth, and others; and there is the dramatic temperament, as exemplified in Homer, aeschylus, Sophocles, and Shakespeare. In a certain sense the Iliad is the most dramatic poem in the world, for the dramatic picture lives undisturbed by lyrism or meditation. In aeschylus and Sophocles we find, besides the dramatic temperament, a large amount of the lyrical temperament, and a large amount of the meditative, but unaccompanied by metaphysical speculation. In Shakespeare we find, besides the dramatic temperament, a large amount of the meditative accompanied by an irresistible impulse towards metaphysical speculation, but, on the whole, a moderate endowment of the lyrical temperament, judging by the few occasions on which he exercised it. For fine as are such lyrics as "Hark, hark, the lark," "Where the bee sucks," &c., other poets have written lyrics as fine.
In a certain sense no man can be a pure and perfect dramatist. Every ego is a central sun found which the universe revolves, and it must needs a.s.sert itself. This is why on a previous occasion, when speaking of the way in which thoughts are interjected into drama by the Greek dramatists, we said that really and truly no man can paint another, but only himself, and what we call character-painting is at the best but a poor mixing of painter and painted-a third something between these two, just as what we call colour and sound are born of the play of undulation upon organism.
Very likely this is putting the case too strongly. But be this as it may, it is impossible to open a play of Shakespeare"s without being struck with the way in which the meditative side of Shakespeare"s mind strove with and sometimes nearly strangled the dramatic. If this were confined to "Hamlet," where the play seems meant to revolve on a philosophical pivot, it would not be so remarkable. But so hindered with thoughts, reflections, meditations, and metaphysical speculations was Shakespeare that he tossed them indiscriminately into other plays, tragedies, comedies, and histories, regardless sometimes of the character who uttered them. With regard to metaphysical speculation, indeed, even when he was at work on the busiest scenes of his dramas, it would seem-as was said on the occasion before alluded to-that Shakespeare"s instinct for actualizing and embodying in concrete form the dreams of the metaphysician often arose and baffled him. It would seem that when writing a comedy he could not help putting into the mouth of a man like Claudio those words which seem as if they ought to have been spoken by a metaphysician of the Hamlet type, beginning,
Ay, but to die and go we know not where.
It would seem that he could not help putting into the mouth of Macbeth those words which also seem as if they ought to have been spoken on the platform at Elsinore, beginning,
To-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow.
And if it be said that Macbeth was a philosopher as well as a murderer, and might have thought these thoughts in the terrible strait in which he then was, surely nothing but this marvellous peculiarity of Shakespeare"s temperament will explain his making Macbeth stop at Duncan"s bedroom door, dagger in hand, to say,
Now o"er the one half world Nature seems dead, &c.
And again, though Prospero was very likely a philosopher too, even he steals from Hamlet"s mouth such words of the metaphysician as these:-
We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep.
That this is one of Shakespeare"s most striking characteristics will not be denied by any competent student of his works. Nor will any such student deny that, exquisite as his lyrics are, they are too few and too unimportant in subject-matter to set beside his supreme wealth of dramatic picture, and his wide vision as a thinker and a metaphysical dreamer.
Now on which of these sides of Shakespeare does Tennyson touch? Is it on the lyrical side? Shakespeare"s fine lyrics are so few that they would be lost if set beside the marvellous wealth of Tennyson"s lyrical work.
On one side only of Shakespeare"s genius Tennyson touches, perhaps, more closely than any subsequent poet. As a metaphysician none comes so near Shakespeare as he who wrote these lines:-
And more, my son! for more than once when I Sat all alone, revolving in myself The word that is the symbol of myself, The mortal limit of the Self was loosed, And pa.s.sed into the Nameless, as a cloud Melts into Heaven. I touch"d my limbs, the limbs Were strange not mine-and yet no shade of doubt, But utter clearness, and thro" loss of Self.
The gain of such large life as match"d with ours Were Sun to spark-unshadowable in words, Themselves but shadows of a shadow-world.
Here, then, seems to be the truth of the matter: while Shakespeare had immense dramatic power, and immense meditative power with moderate lyric power, Tennyson had the lyric gift and the meditative gift without the dramatic. His poems are more full of reflections, meditations, and generalizations upon human life than any poet"s since Shakespeare. But then the moment that Shakespeare descended from those heights whether his metaphysical imagination had borne him, he became, not a lyrist, as Tennyson became, but a dramatist. And this divides Shakespeare as far from Tennyson as it divides him from any other first-cla.s.s writer. We admirers of Tennyson must content ourselves with this thought, that, wonderful as it is for Shakespeare to have combined great metaphysical power with supreme power as a dramatist, it is scarcely less wonderful for Tennyson to have combined great metaphysical power with the power of a supreme lyrist. Nay, is it not in a certain sense more wonderful for a lyrical impulse such as Tennyson"s to be found combined with a power of philosophical and metaphysical abstraction such as he shows in some of his poems?
IV. CHRISTINA GEORGINA ROSSETTI.
18301894.
I.
Although the n.o.ble poet and high-souled woman we have just lost had been ill and suffering from grievous pain for a long time, Death came at last with a soft hand which could but make him welcome. Since early in August, when she took to her bed, she was so extremely weak and otherwise ill that one scarcely expected her (at any time) to live more than a month or so, and for the last six weeks or thereabouts-say from the 15th of November-one expected her to die almost from day to day. My dear friend William Rossetti, who used to go to Torrington Square every afternoon, saw her on the afternoon of December 28th [1894]. He did not, he told me, much expect to find her alive in the afternoon of the 29th, and intended, therefore, to make his next call earlier. She died at half-past seven in the morning of the 29th, in the presence only of her faithful nurse Mrs. Read. It was through her sudden collapse that she missed at her side, when she pa.s.sed away, that brother whose whole life has been one of devotion to his family, and whose tireless affection for the last of them was one of the few links that bound Christina"s sympathy to the earth.
[Picture: Christina Rossetti. From a crayon-drawing by D. G. Rossetti reproduced by the kind permission of Mr. W. M. Rossetti]
Her illness was of a most complicated kind: two years and a half ago she was operated on for cancer: functional malady of the heart, accompanied by dropsy in the left arm and hand, followed. Although on Friday the serious symptoms of her case became, as I have said, accentuated, she was throughout the day and night entirely conscious; and so peaceful and apparently so free from pain was she that neither the medical man nor the nurse supposed the end to be quite so near as it was. During all this time, up to the moment of actual dissolution, her lips seemed to be moving in prayer, but, of course, this with her was no uncommon sign: duty and prayer ordered her life. Her sufferings, I say, had been great, but they had been encountered by a fort.i.tude that was greater still.
Throughout all her life, indeed, she was the most notable example that our time has produced of the masterful power of man"s spiritual nature when at its highest to conquer in its warfare with earthly conditions, as her brother Gabriel"s life was the most notable example of the struggle of the spiritual nature with the bodily when the two are equally equipped. It is the conviction of one whose high privilege it was to know her in many a pa.s.sage of sorrow and trial that of all the poets who have lived and died within our time, Christina Rossetti must have had the n.o.blest soul.
A certain irritability of temper, which was, perhaps, natural to her, had, when I first became acquainted with her family (about 1872), been overcome, or at least greatly chastened, by religion (which with her was a pa.s.sion) and by a large acquaintance with grief, resulting in a long meditation over the mystery of pain. In wordly matters her generosity may be described as boundless; but perhaps it is not difficult for a poet to be generous in a worldly sense-to be free in parting with that which can be precious only to commonplace souls. What, however, is not so easy is for one holding such strong religious convictions as Christina Rossetti held to cherish such generous thoughts and feelings as were hers about those to whom her shibboleths meant nothing. This was what made her life so beautiful and such a blessing to all. The indurating effects of a selfish religiosity never withered her soul nor narrowed it. With her, indeed, religion was very love-
A largess universal like the sun.
It is always futile to make guesses as to what might have been the development of a poet"s genius and character had the education of circ.u.mstances been different from what it was, and perhaps it is specially futile to guess what would have been the development under other circ.u.mstances of her, the poet of whom her friends used to speak with affection and reverence as "Christina."
On the death of her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti (or as his friends used to call him Gabriel) in 1882, I gave that sketch of the family story which has formed the basis of most of the biographical notices of him and his family; it would, therefore, be superfluous to reiterate what I said and what is now matter of familiar knowledge. It may, however, be as well to remind the reader that, owing to the peculiar position in London of the father Gabriele Rossetti, the family were during childhood and partly during youth as much isolated from the outer English world as were the family between whom and themselves there were many points of resemblance-the Brontes. The two among them who were not in youth of a retiring disposition were he who afterwards became the most retiring of all, Gabriel, and Maria, the latter of whom was in one sense retiring, and in another expansive. In her dark brown, or, as some called them, black eyes, there would suddenly come up and shine an enthusiasm, a capacity of poetic and romantic fire, to the quelling of which there must have gone an immensity of religious force. As to Gabriel, during a large portion of his splendid youth he exhibited a genial breadth of front that affined him to Shakespeare and Walter Scott. The English strain in the family found expression in him, and in him alone. There was a something in the hearty ring of his voice that drew Englishmen to him as by a magnet.
While it was but little that the others drew from the rich soil of merry England, he drew from it half at least of his radiant personality-half at least of his incomparable genius. Though he was in every way part and parcel of that marvellous little family circle of children of genius in Charlotte Street, he had also the power of looking at it from the outside. It would be strange, indeed, if this or any other power should be found lacking in him. I have often heard Rossetti-by the red flicker of the studio fire, when the gas was turned down to save his eyesight-give the most graphic and fascinating descriptions of the little group and the way in which they grew up to be what they were under the tuition of a father whose career can only be called romantic, and a mother whose intellectual gifts were so remarkable that, had they not been in some great degree stifled by the exercise of an entire self-abnegation on behalf of her family, she, too, must have become an important figure in literature.
[Picture: Mrs. Rossetti. From a crayon-drawing by D. G. Rossetti reproduced by the kind permission of Mr. W. M. Rossetti]
The father died in 1854, many years before I knew the family; but Gabriel"s description of him; his conversations with his brother-refugees and others who visited the house-conversations in which the dreamy and the matter-of-fact were oddly blent; his striking skill as an improvisatore of Italian poetry, and also as a master of pen-and-ink drawing; his great musical gift-a gift which none of his family seemed to have inherited; his fine tenor voice; his unflinching courage and independence of character (qualities which made him refuse, in a Protestant country, to make open abjuration of the creed in which the Rossettis had been reared, though he detested the Pope and all his works, and was, if not an actual freethinker, thoroughly lat.i.tudinarian)-Gabriel"s pictures of this poet and father of poets were so vivid-so amazingly and incredibly vivid-that I find it difficult to think I never met the father in the flesh: not unfrequently I find myself talking of him as if I had known him. What higher tribute than this can be made to a narrator"s dramatic power? Those who have seen the elder Rossetti"s pen-and-ink drawings (the work of a child) will agree with me that Gabriel did not over-estimate them in the least degree. All the Rossettis inherited from their father voices so musical that they could be recognized among other voices in any gathering, and no doubt that clear-cut method of syllabification which was so marked a characteristic of Christina"s conversation, but which gave it a sort of foreign tone, was inherited from the father. Her affinity to the other two members of the family was seen in that intense sense of duty of which Gabriel, with all his generosity, had but little. There was no martyrdom she would not have undertaken if she thought that duty called upon her to undertake it, and this may be said of the other two.
In most things, however, Christina Rossetti seemed to stand midway between Gabriel and the other two members of her family, and it was the same in physical matters. She had Gabriel"s eyes, in which hazel and blue-grey were marvellously blent, one hue shifting into the other, answering to the movements of the thoughts-eyes like the mother"s. And her brown hair, though less warm in colour than his during his boyhood, was still like it. When a young girl, at the time that she sat for the Virgin in the picture now in the National Gallery, she was, as both her mother and Gabriel have told me, really lovely, with an extraordinary expression of pensive sweetness. She used to have in the little back parlour a portrait of herself at eighteen by Gabriel, which gives all these qualities. Even then, however, the fullness in the eyes was somewhat excessive. Afterwards her ill health took a peculiar form, the effect of which was that the eyes were, in a manner of speaking, pushed forward, and although this protuberance was never disagreeable, it certainly took a good deal of beauty from her face.
Dominant, however, as was the father"s personality among his friends, the mother"s influence upon the children was stronger than his; and no wonder, for I think there was no beautiful charm of woman that Mrs.
Rossetti lacked. She did not seem at all aware that she was a woman of exceptional gifts, yet her intellectual penetration and the curious exact.i.tude of her knowledge were so remarkable that Gabriel accepted her dicta as oracles not to be challenged. One of her specialities was the p.r.o.nunciation of English words, in which she was an authority. I cannot resist giving one little instance, as it ill.u.s.trates a sweet feature of Gabriel"s character. It occurred on a lovely summer"s day in the old Kelmscott manor house in 1873, when Mrs. Rossetti, Christina, and myself were watching Gabriel at work upon "Proserpine." I had p.r.o.nounced the word _aspirant_ with the accent upon the middle syllable. "Pardon me, my dear fellow," said he, without looking from his work, "that word should be p.r.o.nounced with the accent on the first syllable, as a purist like you ought to know." On my challenging this, he said, in a tone which was meant to show that he was saying the last word upon the subject, "My mother always says _aspirant_, and she is always right upon matters of p.r.o.nunciation." "Then I shall always say _aspirant_," I replied. And I may add that I now do say _aspirant_, and, right or wrong, intend to say _aspirant_ so long as this breath of mine enables me to say _aspirant_ at all. Afterwards Christina, as we were strolling by the weir, watching Gabriel and George Hake pounding across the meadows at the rate of five miles an hour, said to me, "I think you were right about _aspirant_."
"No," I said, "it is a dear, old-fashioned way. Your mother says _aspirant_; I now remember that my own mother said _aspirant_. I shall stick to _aspirant_ till the end of the chapter." And Christina said, "Then so will I."
Among Mrs. Rossetti"s accomplishments was reading aloud, mainly from imaginative writers, and I cannot recall without a thrill of mingled emotions a delightful stay of mine at Kelmscott in the summer of "73, when she, whose age then was seventy-three, used to read out to us all sorts of things. And writing these words makes me hear those readings again-makes me hear, through the open cas.e.m.e.nt of the quaint old house, the blackbirds from the home field trying in vain to rival the music of that half-Italian, half-English voice. To have been admitted into such a charmed circle I look upon as one of the greatest privileges of my life.
It is something for a man to have lived within touch of Christina Rossetti and her mother. From her father, however, Christina took, either by the operation of some law of heredity or from early a.s.sociation with the author of "Il Mistero dell" Amor Platonico del Medio Evo" and "La Beatrice di Dante," that pa.s.sion for symbolism which is one of the chief features of her poetry. There is, perhaps, no more striking instance of the inscrutable lines in which ancestral characteristics descend than the way in which the pa.s.sion for symbolism was inherited by Christina and Gabriel Rossetti from their father.
While Christina"s poetical work may be described as being all symbolical, she was not much given, like her brother, to read symbols into the every-day incidents of life. Gabriel, on the contrary, though using symbolism in his poetry in only a moderate degree, allowed his instinct for symbolizing his own life to pa.s.s into positive superst.i.tion. When a party of us-including Mrs. Rossetti, Christina, the two aunts, Dr. Hake, with four of his sons, and myself-were staying for Christmas with Gabriel near Bognor, a tree fell in the garden during a storm. While Gabriel seemed inclined to take it as a sign of future disaster, Christina, whose poetry is so full of symbolism, would smile at such a notion. Yet Gabriel could speak of his father"s symbolizing (as in "La Beatrice di Dante") as being absolutely and hopelessly eccentric and worthless. This is remarkable, for one would have thought that it was impossible to read those extraordinary works of the elder Rossetti"s without being impressed by the rare intellectual subtlety of the Italian scholar.
Of course the opportunities of brother and sister of studying Nature were identical. Both were born in London, and during childhood saw Nature only as a holiday scene. Christina would talk with delight of her grandfather"s cottage retreat about thirty miles from London, to which she used to go for a holiday in a stage coach, and of the beauty of the country around. But these expeditions were not numerous, and came to an end when she was a child of seven or eight, and it was very little that she saw outside London before girlhood was past. I have myself heard her speak of what she has somewhere written about-the rapture of the sight of some primroses growing in a railway cutting. It is, of course, a great disadvantage to any poet not to have been born in the country; learned in Nature the city-born poet can never be, as we see in the case of Milton, who loved Nature without knowing her. It is here that Jean Ingelow has such an advantage over Christina Rossetti. Her love of flowers, and birds, and trees, and all that makes the earth so beautiful, is not one whit stronger than Christina"s own, but it is a love born of an exhaustive detailed knowledge of Nature"s life.
On a certain occasion when walking with a friend at Hunter"s Forestall, near Herne Bay, where she and her mother were nursing Gabriel through one of his illnesses, the talk ran upon Sh.e.l.ley"s "Skylark," a poem which she adored. She was literally bewildered because the friend showed that he was able to tell, from a certain change of sound in the note of a skylark that had risen over the lane, the moment when the bird had made up its mind to cease singing and return to the earth. It seemed to her an almost supernatural gift, and yet an ignorant ploughman will often be able to do the same thing. This kind of intimacy with Nature she coveted. With the lower animals, nevertheless, she had a strange kind of sympathy of her own. Young creatures especially understood the playful humour of her approach. A delightful fantastic whim was the bond between her and puppies and kittens and birds. Her intimacy with Nature-of a different kind altogether from that of Wordsworth and Tennyson-was of the kind that I have described on a previous occasion as Sufeyistic: she loved the beauty of this world, but not entirely for itself; she loved it on account of its symbols of another world beyond. And yet she was no slave to the ascetic side of Christianity. No doubt there was mixed with her spiritualism, or perhaps underlying it, a rich sensuousness that under other circ.u.mstances of life would have made itself manifest, and also a rare potentiality of deep pa.s.sion. It is this, indeed, which makes the study of her great and n.o.ble nature so absorbing.
Perhaps for strength both of subject and of treatment, Christina Rossetti"s masterpiece is "Amor Mundi." Here we get a lesson of human life expressed, not didactically, but in a concrete form of unsurpa.s.sable strength, harmony, and concision. Indeed, it may be said of her work generally that her strength as an artist is seen not so much in mastery over the rhythm, or even over the verbal texture of poetry, as in the skill with which she expresses an allegorical intent by subtle suggestion instead of direct preachment. Herein "An Apple Gathering" is quite perfect. It is, however, if I may venture to say so, a mistake to speak of Christina Rossetti as being a great poetic artist. Exquisite as her best things are, no one had a more uncertain hand than she when at work.
Here, as in so many things, she was like Blake, whose influence upon her was very great.
Of self-criticism she had almost nothing. On one occasion, many years ago now, she expressed a wish to have some of her verses printed in _The Athenaeum_, and I suggested her sending them to 16, Cheyne Walk, her brother"s house, where I then used to spend much time in a study that I occupied there. I said that her brother and I would read them together and submit them to the editor. She sent several poems (I think about six), not one of which was in the least degree worthy of her. This naturally embarra.s.sed me, but Gabriel, who entirely shared my opinion of the poems, wrote at once to her and told her that the verses sent were, both in his own judgment and mine, unworthy of her, and that she "had better buckle to at once and write another poem." She did so, and the result was an exquisite lyric which appeared in _The Athenaeum_. Here is where she was wonderfully unlike Gabriel, whose power of self-criticism in poetry was almost as great as Tennyson"s own. But in the matter of inspiration she was, I must think, above Gabriel-above almost everybody.
If English rhymed metres had been as easy to work in as Italian rhymed metres, her imagination was so vivid, her poetic impulse was so strong, and, indeed, her poetic wealth so inexhaustible, that she would have stood in the front rank of English poets. But the writer of English rhymed measures is in a very different position as regards improvisatorial efforts from the Italian who writes in rhymed measures.
He has to grapple with the metrical structure-to seize the form by the throat, as it were, and force it to take in the enormous wealth at the English poet"s command. Fine as is the "Prince"s Progress," for instance (and it would be hard to find its superior in regard to poetic material in the whole compa.s.s of Victorian poetry), the number of rugged lines the reader has to encounter weighs upon and distresses him until, indeed, the conclusion is reached: then the pa.s.sion and the pathos of the subject cause the poem to rise upon billows of true rhythm. On the other hand, however, it may be said that a special quality of her verse is a _curiosa felicitas_ which makes a metrical blemish tell as a kind of suggestive grace. But I must stop; I must bear in mind that he who has walked and talked with Christina Rossetti, burdened with a wealth of remembered beauty from earth and heaven, runs the risk of becoming garrulous.
II.
In regard to unpublished ma.n.u.scripts which a writer has left behind him, the responsibilities of his legal representatives are far more grave than seems to be generally supposed. In deciding what posthumous writings an executor is justified in giving to the public it is important, of course, to take into account the character, the idiosyncrasy of the writer in regard to all his relations towards what may be called the mechanism of every-day life. Some poets are so methodical that the mere fact of anything having been left by them in ma.n.u.script unaccompanied by directions as to its disposal is _prima facie_ evidence that it was intended to be withheld from the public, either temporarily for revision or finally and absolutely. And, of course, the representative, especially if he is also a relative or a friend, has to consider primarily the intentions of the dead. If loyalty to living friends is a duty, what shall be said of loyalty to friends who are dead? This, indeed, has a sanction of the deepest religious kind.
No doubt, in the philosophical sense, the aspiration of the dead artist for perfect work and the honour it brings is a delusion, a sweet mockery of the fancy. But then so is every other aspiration which soars above the warm circle of the human affections, and if this delusion of the dead artist was held worthy of respect during the artist"s life, it is worthy of respect-nay, it is worthy of reverence-after he is dead. Now every true artist when at work has before him an ideal which he would fain reach, or at least approach, and if he does not himself know whether in any given exercise he has reached that ideal or neared it, we may be pretty sure that no one else does. Hence, whenever there is apparent in the circ.u.mstances under which the MS. has been found the slightest indication that the writer did not wish it to be given to the public, the representative who ignores this indication sins against that reverence for the dead which in all forms of civilization declares itself to be one of the deepest instincts of man.
That the instinct we are speaking of is really one of the primal instincts is the very first fact that archaeology vouches for. Of many lost races, such as the Aztecs and Toltecs, for instance, we have no historical traces save those which are furnished by testimonials of their reverence for the dead. But that this fine instinct is now dying out in the Western world-that it will soon be eliminated from the human const.i.tution of races that are generally considered to be the most advanced-is made manifest by the present att.i.tude of England and America towards their ill.u.s.trious dead. In the literary arena of both countries, indeed, so entire is the abrogation of this most beautiful of all feelings-so recklessly and so shamefully are not only raw ma.n.u.scripts, but private letters, put up to auction for publication-that at last the great writers of our time, confronted by this new terror, are wisely beginning to take care of themselves and their friends by a holocaust of every sc.r.a.p of paper lying in their desks.
So demoralized has the literary world become by the present craze for notoriety and for personal details of prominent men that an executor who in regard to the disposal of his testator"s money would act with the most rigid scrupulousness will, in regard to the MSS. he finds in his testator"s desk, commit, "for the benefit of the public," an outrage that would have made the men of a less vulgar period shudder. The "benefit of the public," indeed! Who is this "public," and what are its rights as against the rights of the dead poet, whose heartstrings are woven into "copy" by the disloyal friend he trusted? The inherent callousness of man"s nature is never so painfully seen as in the relation of this ogre, "the public," to dead genius. Without the smallest real reverence for genius-without the smallest capacity of distinguishing the poetaster it always adores from the true poet it always ignores-the public can still fall down before the pedestal upon which genius has been placed by the select few-fall down with its long ears wide open for gossip about genius, or anything else that is talked about.
It was with such thoughts as these that we opened the present somewhat bulky volume {195}-not, however, with many misgivings; for Christina Rossetti, before she made her brother executor, knew what were his views as to the rights of the public as against the rights of genius. And if he has printed here every poem he could lay hands upon, he may fairly be a.s.sumed to have done so with the consent of a sister whom he loved so dearly and by whom he was so dearly loved. Fortunately there are not many of these relics that are devoid of a deep interest, some from the biographical point of view, some from the poetical.
Again, what is to be said about such part of a dead author"s writing as, having appeared in print, has afterwards pa.s.sed through the author"s crucible of artistic revision? What about the executor"s duty here, where the case between the author and the public stands on a different footing? At the present time, when newspapers and novels alone are read, it is not the poet"s verses which most people read, but paragraphs about what the author and his wife and children "eat and drink and avoid": a time when, if the poet"s verses are read at all, it is the accidents rather than the essentials of the work that seem primarily to concern the public. At such a time an editor is not entirely master of his actions.
Doubtless, there is much reason in the wrath of Tennyson and other great poets against the "literary resurrection man," who, though incapable of understanding the beauties of a beautiful work, can take a very great interest in poring over the various stages through which that work has pa.s.sed on its way to perfection. These poets, however, are apt to forget that, after a poem or line has once pa.s.sed into print, its final suppression is impossible. And perhaps there are other reasons why, in this matter, an editor should be allowed some indulgence.