Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (658 page)

But with its glamour, its swooning, its ecstasies and its all-embracing justification the Pre-Raphaelite view of mediaeval love was a very different thing from real mediævalism. That was a state of things much more like our own. Mediaeval people, took their own individual cases on their own individual merits, and guilty love exacted some kind of retribution very frequently painful, as often as not grotesque. Or sometimes there was not any retribution at all — a successful intrigue “came off” and became material for a joyous
conte.
It was a matter of individual idiosyncrasies then as it is to-day. You got roasted in hell or an injured husband stuck a dagger into you, or you were soundly cudgelled, drenched with water or thrown on to noxious dung-heaps, just as nowadays you get horsewhipped, escape or do not escape the divorce courts and do or do not get requested to resign from your club. There was not then, as there is not now, any protective glamour about it. The things happened, hard, direct and without the chance of ignoring them. Dante’s lovers in hell felt bitter cold, stinging flame, shame, horror, despair and possibly even all the eternity of woe that was before them. All the hard, direct, ferocious and unrelenting spirit of the poet went into the picture as into all his other pictures of mediaeval after-life. So it was with the Rossetti who dwelt for so long in the same house as Dante Gabriel, writing her poems on the corner of the washhand-stand in her bed-room and making no mark at all in the household, whilst all the other great figures spouted and generalized about love and the musical glasses in every other room of the gloomy and surely glamorous houses that in Bloomsbury the Rossettis successively inhabited. They talked and generalized about life and love and they pursued their romantic images along the lines of least resistance. They got into scrapes or they did not, they squabbled or they made it up, but they always worked out a moral theory good enough to justify themselves and to impress the rest of the world.

And that in essence was the note of the Victorian Great. It did not matter what they did, whether it was George Eliot living in what we should call to-day “open sin”; or Schopenhauer trying to have all noises suppressed by law because they interrupted his cogitations. No matter what their personal eccentricities or peccadilloes might be, they were always along the lines of the higher morality. I am not saying that such figures are not to be found today. If you will read the works of Mr. — you will find the attitude of the Victorian Great Man exactly reproduced. For whatever this gentleman may desire to do in a moment of impulse or of irritation, or in the search for copy or in the quest for health, at once he will write a great big book to prove that this, his eccentricity, ought, according to the higher morals, to be the rule of life for the British middle classes. And there are ten or twenty of such gentlemen nowadays occupied in so directing our lives, and waxing moderately fat upon the profits of their spiritual dictatorships, but they have not anything like the ascendancy of their predecessors. We have not any longer our Ruskins, Carlyles, George Eliots and the rest. We have in consequence very much to work out our special cases for ourselves and we are probably a great deal more honest in consequence. We either do our duties and have very bad times, with good consciences, or we do not do our duties and enjoy ourselves with occasional pauses for unpleasant reflections. But we look, upon the whole, in our little unimportantly individual ways, honestly at our special cases. The influence of Jean Jacques Rousseau, in fact, is on the wane, and the gentleman to-day who left his illegitimate children on the steps of a foundling hospital would think himself rather a dirty dog and try to forget the incident.

And this, as much as her closed bed-room door, separated Christina Rossetti from the other artists and poets and critics and social reformers that frequented her father’s house. She was not influenced by Rousseauism at all. She took her life and her love unflinchingly in hand, and how very painfully she proceeded along the straight path of duty!

“‘Does the road wind up-hill all the way?’

 
‘Yea, to the very end.’

‘Will the day’s journey last the whole long day?’

 
‘From dawn to night, my friend.’”

So writing in her early youth she forecasted her life. The record is an insensate one; still, from the point of view of the man who said that to make a good job of a given task is the highest thing in life, then surely Christina Rossetti achieved the very highest of high things. There is no anchorite who so denied himself and no Simeon upon his pillar. Of course, if we speak about the uselessness of sacrifice....

In the beginning, even from that point of view, the poetess was somewhat badly used. She bestowed her affections and became engaged to a poor specimen of humanity, one of the seven Pre-Raphaelite brethren and like herself a member of the Church of England. Shortly after the engagement this gentleman’s spiritual vicissitudes forced him to become a Roman Catholic. Christina put up with the change though it grieved her. She consented to remain engaged to him, for was not her father at least nominally Catholic and her mother Protestant? But no sooner had she adjusted herself to the changed conditions than her lover once more reverted to Anglicanism. I am not certain how many religions he essayed. But certainly there came a point when the poetess, whose religion was the main point of her life, cried that it was enough. The breaking-off of her engagement was a very severe blow and tinged her life and work with melancholy. Later, she became engaged to a very charming man of a mild humour, great gifts, a touching absence of mind and much gentleness of spirit. This was Cayley, the translator of Homer and the brother of the great mathematician. But Cayley himself offered one very serious obstacle. He was an agnostic, and in spite of Christina’s arguments and remonstrances he remained an agnostic. She found it therefore to be her duty not to marry him and they remained apart to the end of their lives. And I think that the correspondence of this essentially good and gentle man and this nun-like and saintly woman is one of the most touching products that we have of human love and abstention. As love letters theirs are all the more touching in that no note at all of passion is sounded. The lover presents the poetess with the sea-mouse, a spiny creature like an iridescent slug, and the poetess writes a poem to her mouse and chronicles its fate and fortunes; and they write about the weather and their households and all such things — little, quaint, humorous and not at all pathetic letters, such as might have passed between Abelard and Heloise if those earlier Christians had been gifted with senses of humour, decency and renunciation. So that the figure of Christina Rossetti remains mediaeval or modern, but always nun-like. And, since she suffered nearly always from intense physical pain and much isolation, there was little wonder that her poems were almost altogether introspective — just indeed as all modern poetry is almost altogether introspective. I remember being intensely shocked at reading in the Dictionary of National Biography that Dr. Garnett, himself one of the quaintest, most picturesque and most lovable of the later figures of English literary life — that Dr. Garnett considered Christina Rossetti’s poetry to be uniformly morbid. I was so distressed by this discovery that — though I suppose it was no affair of mine — I hurried to the Principal Librarian’s book-hidden study in the British Museum and I remonstrated even with some agitation against the epithet that he had selected. Dr. Garnett, however, was exceedingly impenitent. With his amiable and obstinate smile and his odd, caressing gestures of the hand he insisted that the word “morbid” as applied to literature signified that which was written by a person suffering from diseases. I insisted that it meant such writing as was calculated to disease the mind of the reader, but we got no further than the statement of our respective opinions several times repeated. Dr. Garnett, surely the most erudite man as far as books were concerned, in the world of his day was also a gentleman of strong and unshakable opinions, apparently of the Tory and High Church, but at any rate of the official, type. I remember being present at an impressive argument between this scholar and another member of my family. It concerned the retention by Great Britain of Egypt and it ran like this: —

Said Mr. R — : “My dear Garnett, the retention by Great Britain of the Egyptian Territory is a sin and a shame, and the sooner we evacuate it the sooner our disgrace will come to an end.”

Said Dr. Garnett: “My dear R — , but if we evacuated Egypt we should lose the Empire of India.”

Said Mr. R — : “My dear Garnett, the retention by Great Britain of the Egyptian Territory is a sin and a shame, and the sooner we evacuate it the sooner our disgrace will come to an end.”

Said Dr. Garnett: “My dear R — , but if we evacuated Egypt we should lose the Empire of India.”

Said Mr. R — : “My dear Garnett, the retention by Great Britain...”

So this instructive discussion continued for I cannot say how long. It reminded me of the problem: “What would happen if an irresistible force came against an immovable post?” The words of both gentlemen were uttered without any raising of the voice or without engendering the least heat. But at last one of my cousins ended the discussion by letting loose in the room a tame owl and the conversation passed into other channels.

CHAPTER
V

MUSIC AND MASTERS

When I was a very small boy indeed I was taken to a concert. In those days, as a token of my Pre-Raphaelite origin, I wore very long golden hair, a suit of greenish-yellow corduroy velveteen with gold buttons, and two stockings of which the one was red and the other green. These garments were the curse of my young existence and the joy of every street-boy who saw me. I was taken to this concert by my father’s assistant on
The Times
newspaper. Mr. Rudall was the most kindly, the most charming, the most gifted, the most unfortunate — and also the most absent-minded — of men. Thus, when we had arrived in our stalls — and in those days the representative of
The Times
always had the two middle front seats — Mr. Rudall discovered that he had omitted to put on his neck-tie that day. He at once went out to purchase one, and, having become engrossed in the selection, he forgot all about the concert, went away to the Thatched House Club, and passed there the remainder of the evening. I was left, in the middle of the front row, all alone and feeling very tiny and deserted, the sole representative of the august organ that in those days was known as the Thunderer.

Immediately in front of me, standing in the vacant space before the platform, which was all draped in red, there were three gilt arm-chairs and a gilt table. In the hall there was a great and continuing rustle of excitement. Then, suddenly, this became an enormous sound of applause. It volleyed and rolled round and round the immense space; I had never heard such a sound and I have never again heard such another. Then I perceived that from beneath the shadow of the passage that led into the artistes’ room — in the deep shadow — there had appeared a silver head, a dark brown face, hook-nosed, smiling the enigmatic, Jesuit’s smile, the long locks falling backwards so that the whole shape of the apparition was that of the Sphynx head. Behind this figure came two others that excited no proportionate attention, but, small as I then was, I recognized in them the late King and the present Queen Mother.

They came closer and closer to me; they stood in front of the three gilt arm-chairs; the deafening applause continued. The old man with the terrible enigmatic face made gestures of modesty. He refused, smiling all the time, to sit in one of the gilt arm-chairs. And suddenly he bowed down upon me. He stretched out his hands; he lifted me out of my seat, he sat down in it himself and left me standing, the very small lonely child with the long golden curls, underneath all those eyes and stupefied by the immense sounds of applause.

The King sent an equerry to entreat the Master to come to his seat; the Master sat firmly planted there smiling obstinately. Then the Queen came and took him by the hand. She pulled him — I don’t know how much strength she needed — right out of his seat and — to prevent his returning to it she sat down there. After all it was
my
seat. And then, as if she realized my littleness and my loneliness, she drew me to her and set me on her knee. It was a gracious act.

There is a passage in Pepys’s Diary in which he records that he was present at some excavations in Westminster Abbey when they came upon the skull of Jane Seymour, and he kissed the skull on the place where once the lips had been. And in his Diary he records: “It was on such and such a day of such and such a year that I did kiss a Queen,” and then, his feelings overcoming him, he repeats: “It was on such and such a day of such and such a year that I did kiss a Queen” — I have forgotten what was the date when I sat in a Queen’s lap. But I remember very well that when I came out into Piccadilly the cabmen, with their three-tiered coats, were climbing up the lamp-posts and shouting out: “Three cheers for the Habby Liszt!” And indeed the magnetic personality of the Abbé Liszt was incredible in its powers of awakening enthusiasm.

A few days later my father took me to call at the house where Liszt was staying — it was at the Lytteltons’, I suppose. There were a number of people in the drawing-room and they were all asking Liszt to play. Liszt steadfastly refused. A few days before he had had a slight accident that had hurt one of his hands. Suddenly he turned his eyes upon me, and then, bending down, he said in my ear:

“Little boy, I will play for you, so that you will be able to tell your children’s children that you have heard Liszt play.”

And he played the first movement of the
Moonlight Sonata.
I do not remember much of his playing, but I remember very well that I was looking, whilst Liszt played, at a stalwart, florid Englishman who is now an earl. And suddenly I perceived that tears were rolling down his cheeks. And soon all the room was in tears. It struck me as odd that people should cry because Liszt was playing the
Moonlight Sonata.

Ah! that wonderful personality; there was no end to the enthusiasms it aroused. I had a distant connection — oddly enough an English one — who became by marriage a lady-in-waiting at the Court of Saxe-Weimar. I met her a few years ago, and she struck me as a typically English and unemotional personage. But she had always about her a disagreeable odour that persisted to the day of her death. When they came to lay her out, they discovered that round her neck she wore a sachet, and in that sachet there was the half of a cigar that had been smoked by Liszt. Liszt had lunched with her and her husband thirty years before.

And ah! the records of musical enthusiasms! How dead they are and how mournful is the reading of them! How splendid it is to read how the students of Trinity College, Dublin, took the horses out of Malibran’s carriage, and, having amidst torchlight drawn her round and round the city, they upset the carriage in the quadrangle and burnt it to show their joy. They also broke six hundred and eighty windows. The passage in the life of Malibran always reminds me of a touching sentence in Carlyle’s Diary:

“To-day on going out I observed that the men at the corner were more than usually drunk. And then I remembered that it was the birthday of their Redeemer.”

But what becomes of all the once-glorious ones? When I was a boy at Malvern my grandfather went about in a bath-chair because he was suffering from a bad attack of gout. Sometimes beside his chair another would be pulled along. It contained a little old lady with a faint and piping voice. That was Jenny Lind.

I wonder how many young persons of twenty-five to-day have even heard the name of Jenny Lind? And this oblivion has always seemed to me unjust. But perhaps Providence is not so unjust after all. Sometimes, when I am thinking of this subject, I have a vision. I see, golden and far away, an island of the Hesperides — somewhere that side of Heaven. And in this island there is such an opera-house as never was. And in this opera-house music is for ever sounding forth, and all these singers are all singing together — Malibran and Jenny Lind and Scalchi and even Carolina Bauer. And Mario stands in the wings smoking his immense cigar and waiting for his time to go on. And beside him stands Campanini. And every two minutes the conductor stops the orchestra so that twenty bouquets, each as large as a mountain, may be handed over the footlights to each of the performers.

The manifestation of the most virtuous triumph that was ever vouchsafed me to witness occurred when I was quite a child. A
prima donna
was calling upon my father. She had been lately touring round America as one of the trainloads of
prime donne
that Colonel Mapleson was accustomed to take about with him. Mme. B — was a dark and fiery lady, and she related her triumphant story somewhat as follows:

“My best part it is Dinorah — my equal in the
‘
Shadow Song’ there is not. Now what does Colonel Mapleson do but give this part of Dinorah to Mme. C — . Is it not a shame? Is it not a disgrace? She cannot sing, she cannot sing for nuts, and she was announced to appear in
Dinorah
for the whole of the tour. The first time she was to sing it was in Chicago, and I say to myself: ‘Ah! only wait, you viper, that has stolen the part for which the good God created me!’ Mme. C — she is a viper! I tell you so! I, Eularia B — ! But I say she shall not sing in
Dinorah.
You know the parrots of Mme. C — . Ugly green beasts, they are the whole world for her. If one of them is indisposed she cannot sing — not one note. Now the grace of God comes in. On the very night when she was to sing in
Dinorah
in Chicago, I passed the open door of her room in the hotel; and God sent at the same moment a waiter who was carrying a platter of ham upon which were many sprigs of parsley. So by the intercession of the blessed saints it comes into my head that parsley is death to parrots. I seize the platter from the waiter” — and Mme. B—’s voice and manner became those of an august and avenging deity—”I seize the platter, I tear from it the parsley, I rush into the room of Mme. C — . By the grace of God Mme. C — is absent, and I throw the parsley to the ugly green fowls. They devour it with voracity, and they die; they all die. Mme. C — has fits for a fortnight, and I — I sing
Dinorah.
I sing it like a miracle; I sing it like an angel, and Mme. C — has never the face to put her nose on the stage in that part again. Never!”

This was perhaps the mildest of the stories of the epic jealousies of musicians with which my father’s house re-echoed, but it is the one which remains most vividly in my mind, I suppose because of the poor parrots.

It was the dread of these acridities that eventually drove from my mind all hope of a career as a composer. There was something so harsh in some of the manifestations that met me, I being at the time an innocent and gentle boy, that I am filled with wonder when I consider that any composer ever has the strength of mind to continue in his avocation or that any executant ever struggles through as far as the concert platform. At the last public school which I attended — for my attendances at schools were varied and singular, according as my father ruined himself with starting new periodicals or happened to be flush of money on account of new legacies — at my last public school I was permitted to withdraw myself every afternoon to go to concerts. This brought down upon me the jeers of one particular German master who kept order in the afternoons, and upon one occasion he set for translation the sentence:

“Whilst I was idling away my time at a concert, the rest of my classmates were diligently engaged in study of the German language.”

Proceeding mechanically with the translation — for I paid no particular attention to Mr. P — , because my father, in his reasonable tones, had always taught me that schoolmasters were men of inferior intelligence to whom personally we should pay little attention, though the rules for which they stood must be exactly observed — I had got as far as
Indem ich faulenzte
... when it suddenly occurred to me that Mr. P — in setting this sentence to the class was aiming a direct insult not only at myself, but at Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, Wagner and Robert Franz. An extraordinary and now inexplicable fury overcame me. At all my schools I was always the good boy of my respective classes, but on this occasion I rose in my seat propelled by an irresistible force, and I addressed Mr. P — with words the most insulting and the most contemptuous. I pointed out that music was the most divine of all arts, that German was a language fit only for horses; that German literature contained nothing that any sensible person could want to read except the works of Schopenhauer, who was an anglomaniac, and in any case was much better read in an English translation; I pointed out that Victor Hugo has said that to utter the lowest type of inanities, “il faut être stupide comme un maître d’école qui n’est bon à rien que pour planter des choux.” I can still feel the extraordinary indignation that filled me, though I have to make an effort of the imagination to understand why I was so excited; I can still feel the way the breath poured through my distended nostrils. With, I suppose, some idea of respect for discipline I had carefully spoken in German which none of my classmates understood. My harangue was suddenly ended by Mr. P—’s throwing his large inkpot at me; it struck me upon the shoulder and ruined my second-best coat and waistcoat.

I thought really no more of the incident. Mr.

P — was an excellent man, with a red face, a bald head, golden side-whiskers and an apoplectic build of body. Endowed by nature with a temper more than volcanic it was not unusual for him to throw an inkpot at a boy who made an exasperating mistranslation, but he had never before hit anybody; so that meeting him afterwards in the corridors I apologized profusely to him. He apologized almost more profusely to me, and we walked home together, our routes from school being exactly similar. I had the greatest difficulty in preventing his buying me a new suit of clothes, whilst with a gentle reproachfulness he reproved me for having uttered blasphemies against the language of Goethe, Schiller, Lessing and Jean Paul Richter. It was then towards the end of the term, and shortly afterwards the headmaster sent for me and informed me that I had better not return to the school. He said — and it was certainly the case — that it was one of the founder’s rules that no boy engaged in business could be permitted to remain. This rule was intended to guard against gambling and petty huckstering amongst the boys. But Mr. K — said that he understood I had lately published a book and had received for it not only publicity but payment, the payment being against the rules of the school and the publicity calculated to detract from a strict spirit of discipline.