A House of Air

Her faith, Tennyson wrote in the dedication to his last poems, was ‘clear as the heights of the June-blue heaven.’ Easy enough to treat this ironically or even satirically, but Ann Thwaite has done neither—she has gone right in among these people like a good, if inquisitive, neighbour who becomes a lifelong friend. She persuades us, or almost persuades us, that Emily mustn’t be thought of as a victim, since she believed her work was as important as it was possible to be. This doesn’t mean that she was satisfied with it. ‘I could have done more,’ she said on her deathbed.

Times Literary Supplement, 1996

Twice-Born

Christina Rossetti: A Divided Life, by Georgina Battiscombe

Christina Rossetti (1830—1894) wrote ‘If I had words’ and ‘I took my heart in my hand’ and ‘If he would come today, today’ and ‘What would I give for a heart of flesh to warm me through’ and:

I bent by my own burden must

Enter my heart of dust.

Her poetry she described as ‘a genuine “lyric cry,” and such I will back against all skilled labour.’ Biographers, though not Christina herself, feel themselves obliged to explain where the passion came from, how it was restrained, and what ought to have been done with it. Then they have to face her preoccupation not only with death but with the grave, and the sensation of lying, remembered or forgotten, under the turf. There was, too, a sardonic Christina, whose comment on art and life was this:

The mangled frog abides incog,

The uninteresting actual frog:

The hypothetic frog alone

Is the one frog we dwell upon.

But she was also, and this was central to her whole existence, twice-born. At the age of about thirteen she became, in company with her mother and sister, a fervent High Anglican. The keynote, which Pusey and Keble had set, was self-sacrifice. To find enough to sacrifice and to suffer for, ‘not to keep back or count or leave’—the same impulse as Eliot’s ‘Teach us to care and not to care’—became her prayer, in extremity. She saw herself as a stranger and a pilgrim in this world, waiting for release.

She was born the youngest of a family of happily settled Anglo-Italian exiles: a pedantic, sentimental, slightly cracked father, an imperturbable mother, Italian visitors and refugees in and out at all hours. The children had their grandfather’s fruit garden near Amersham for a paradise, poverty to keep them from contact with the outside world, admiring relatives to pet them and their mother to educate them. Dante Gabriel and Christina were the ‘storms’ of the family, and, when in a rage, Christina could be a ripper and a smasher. The elder sister, Maria, and loyal William Michael were the ‘calms.’ On ‘My heart is like a singing bird’ William’s editorial comment was: ‘I have more than once been asked whether I could account for the outburst of exuberant joy evidenced in this celebrated lyric; I am unable to do so.’ Christina needed both the saintly narrow-minded sister and the ‘brothers brotherly,’ and there they were: ‘wherever one was, the other was, and that was almost always at home.’

Like Emily Brontë, Charlotte Mew, and Eleanor Farjeon, she knew the greatest happiness of her hushed life-drama very early on. No wonder that the most radiant of her lyrics are the children’s verses of ‘Sing-Song,’ or others that children readily understand (‘In the Bleak Midwinter,’ ‘Does the Road Wind Uphill?’) or half-understand and can’t get out of their minds, like ‘Goblin Market.’ It is easy to remember this luscious and suggestive temptation poem not quite as it is—or perhaps one remembers it wrong on purpose. ‘The central point,’ as William insisted, is that ‘Laura having tasted the fruits once, and being at death’s door through inability to get a second taste, her sister Lizzie determines to save her at all hazards; so she goes to the goblins, refuses to eat their fruits, and beguiles them into forcing their fruits upon her with so much insistency that her face is all smeared and steeped with the juices; she gets Laura to kiss and suck these juices off her face, and Laura, having thus obtained the otherwise impossible second taste, rapidly recovers.’ It is a story of salvation, which Christina, for what reason we can’t tell, dedicated to her sister Maria.

As it turned out, she never left the family’s shelter. She became a fountain sealed, a Victorian daughter ageing in the company of her aunts and her beloved mother. Dante Gabriel described her ‘legitimate exercise of anguish under an almost stereotyped smile.’ She broke off two engagements to be married on religious grounds—not, surely, as Maurice Bowra thought, because she was afraid of ‘the claims of the flesh,’ but because she had twice found a sacrifice that was worth the offering.

Of the dozen or so biographies of Christina, the latest, by Georgina Battiscombe, is the most readable and certainly the most judicious. As an Anglican who has written lives of both Keble and Charlotte M. Yonge, Mrs Battiscombe understands the wellspring of Christina’s religious experience, and she explains it admirably. She is very good, too, on the dutiful day-to-dayishness of the outer life. With calmness and accuracy she counters earlier interpretations that seem to her out of proportion—by Lona Mosk Packer (obsessed with the idea that William Bell Scott was Christina’s lover), Maureen Duffy (engrossed in the phallic symbolism of ‘Goblin Market’), Maurice Bowra, Virginia Woolf. She has, of course, her own explanation. She sees Christina as a warm-blooded Italian conforming through strength of will to a strict Anglicanism—an awkward fit. ‘The poetry’s tension arises when her thwarted experience of eros spilled over into her expression of agape; but to explain her intense love of God simply in terms of repressed sex is too cheap and easy an answer. Love is none the less genuine because it is “sublimated.”’ The subtitle of the book is A Divided Life. On the technique of the poetry, as apart from its subject matter, she has less to say, and she doesn’t do much about relating it to the Tractarian mode, as Professor G. B. Trevelyan has done in his recent Victorian Devotional Poetry. But the story itself could not be more clearly told.

London Review of Books, 1982

WILLIAM MORRIS His Daily Bread (#ulink_d6217506-f62c-5a84-8873-e6bbc9dc50ca)

William Morris: An Approach to the Poetry, by J. M. S. Tompkins

As a schoolboy, Rudyard Kipling used to stay in North End Road, Fulham, with his aunt and uncle, the Burne-Joneses. One evening William Morris came into the nursery and, finding the children under the table and nobody else about, climbed onto the rocking-horse and

slowly surging back and forth while the poor beast creaked, he told us a tale full of fascinating horrors, about a man who was condemned to dream bad dreams. One of them took the shape of a cow’s tail waving from a heap of dried fish. He went away as abruptly as he had come. Long afterwards, when I was old enough to know a maker’s pains, it dawned upon me that we must have heard the Saga of Burnt Njal…Pressed by the need to pass the story between his teeth and clarify it, he had used us.

Morris’s open-heartedness, his shyness, his reckless treatment of the furniture, his concentration on whatever he had in hand as though the universe contained no other possible goal, all these can be felt clearly enough. Kipling, however, was really listening not to Burnt Njal but to the Eyrbyggia Saga. This was first pointed out by a sympathetic but strong-minded scholar, Dr J. M. S. Tompkins.

For twenty years, both before and after publishing her Art of Rudyard Kipling, Joyce Tompkins worked on her study of Morris’s poetry. In December 1986 she died, at the age of eighty-nine. Now her book is out at last, not quite in finished form. She grew old and ill, never had the chance to consult the original manuscripts, and could not make her final revisions.

Morris did, though, and protested forcibly against so many things that the critic has to protect himself. He may know a lot about the first generation of European Communists but less about papermaking or indigo or Victorian business management, Morris being one of the pioneers of a ‘house style.’ In spite of this, all the emphasis today is on his wholeness. In the annotated bibliography that they bring out in two-yearly instalments, David and Sheila Latham ‘resist categorising under such subjects as poetry and politics because we believe that each of Morris’s interests is best understood in the context of his whole life’s work.’ Joyce Tompkins, also, wants to see Morris whole. ‘The wide and varied territory,’ she says, ‘has an integrity which adds to the complexity of study.’ But commentators have to advance in separate fields, keeping in touch as best they can. Although she doesn’t make the claim herself, her book can be seen as a complement to E. P. Thompson’s William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary (1961). ‘We have to make up our minds about William Morris,’ Thompson said. ‘Either he was an eccentric, isolated figure, personally admirable, but whose major thought was wrong or irrelevant and long left behind by events. On the other hand, it may be that [he] was our greatest diagnostician of alienation.’ Joyce Tompkins is making the case for the Morris who has lost his readers, the narrative poet.

The telling of tales, as Kipling had realized, was essential to Morris, both before and after he declared for socialism. ‘They grew compulsively,’ Joyce Tompkins writes, ‘from his private imaginative life. It is this imaginative life which is my subject.’ But stories, Morris believed, were also necessary as daily bread to human beings, who should listen willingly. If, a hundred years later, they seem to be unwilling, what can be done?

Her book is divided into six parts, each one aimed at ‘the chief omissions in contemporary understanding and evaluation.’ She begins with The Defence of Guenevere. This was Morris’s first book of poems, appearing in 1858, the year before Tennyson’s Idylls of the King. Ballads inspired by (or possibly the inspiration of) Rossetti’s watercolours stand side by side ‘with hard-edged Froissartian themes: “The Haystack in the Floods,” “The Judgment of God.”’ Here Joyce Tompkins believes that modern readers are adrift through ignorance. They are no longer familiar with the field of Arthurian reference. She has noticed, however, that although they have lost the sense of magic, they respond to the tougher element in the poems, the sound ‘between a beast’s howl and a woman’s scream.’

Godmar turned grinning to his men,

Who ran, some five or six, and beat

His head to pieces at their feet.

Ten years later, in The Earthly Paradise, Morris’s voice has changed. This was to be ‘the Big Book,’ his dearest project in the late 1860s, in which he hoped to unlock the world’s tale-hoard from the North, the Mediterranean, and the Middle East. But in spite of their wide range, it was the serene and even soporific quality of the stories that gave them great success. (Florence Boos, in a study of the Victorian response to The Earthly Paradise, quotes Alfred Austin’s review: ‘Under the blossoming thorn, with lazy summer sea-waves breaking at one’s feet—such were the fitting hour and mood in which—criticism all forgot—to drink in the honeyed rhythm of this melodious storier.’) Knowing that ‘it is not easy now to feel good will towards Morris’s linear narrative,’ Joyce Tompkins tells us to read the stories with attention to their rich detail. We ask, she thinks, not too much of them, but too little. There are two kinds of movement in The Earthly Paradise, one defined by Walter Pater as ‘the desire of beauty quickened by the desire of death,’ the other a gradual progress through the melancholy and distress of the second and third parts to the ‘tolerance and resolution’ of the fourth, where in ‘Bellerophon in Lycia’ the hero learns first to forgive himself, then to forgive others.

To Sigurd the Volsung, the great epic of the North drawn from all the versions of the Volsung and Nibelung story that Morris could lay hands on, her approach is somewhat different. Jessie Kocmanova, in The Maturing of William Morris, interpreted Sigurd as corresponding to three stages of society—the barbarian, the early Nordic, and the feudal—which brought dissent and ruin. Joyce Tompkins sees Sigurd as a redeemer, and the whole poem not as Christian, but presented at least ‘in words and images that recall the Christian legacy.’

This is one of the underlying ideas or perhaps hopes of her book. She takes, for example, the cold and empty glance of the King of the Undying in The Story of the Glittering Plain as representing Morris’s loss of faith as a young man. About this, however, he never showed the slightest regret, anchoring himself in human happiness and human work, and to ‘the earth and all things that deal with it, and all that grows out of it.’ He refused, in any case, to discuss religion, and ‘in the circumstances’—as she says— ‘there is perhaps nothing to do but to imitate his silence.’

The last section of the book is left for the late romances, on which so much work has been done in the past few years. As always, Joyce Tompkins is thorough, discussing in detail the neglected Child Christopher and Fair Goldilind and the unfinished Desiderius and Killian of the Closes. One of her main concerns is to rescue Morris’s land-wights, sending-boats and magic islands from a rigid political interpretation. Both the young Morris and the harassed middle-aged socialist looking back on his former self can, she thinks, be recognized here. The stories ‘testify to the constant habits of his imagination.’

London Review of Books, 1988

Something Sweet to Come

An introduction to The Novel on Blue Paper, by William Morris

The novel that William Morris began to write early in 1872 is unfinished and unpublished and also untitled. I have called it The Novel on Blue Paper because it was written on blue lined foolscap, and Morris preferred to call things what they were.

The only firsthand information we have about it is a letter that Morris wrote to Louie Baldwin, Georgie Burne-Jones’s sister, on 12 June 1872.

Dear Louie,

Herewith I send by book-post my abortive novel: it is just a specimen of how not to do it, and there is no more to be said thereof: ’tis nothing but landscape and sentiment: which thing won’t do. Since you wish to read it, I am sorry ’tis such a rough copy, which roughness sufficiently indicates my impatience at having to deal with prose. The separate parcel, paged 1 to 6, was a desperate dash at the middle of the story to try to give it life when I felt it failing: it begins with the letter of the elder brother to the younger on getting his letter telling how he was going to bid for the girl in marriage. I found it in the envelope in which I had sent it to Georgie to see if she could give me any hope: she gave me none, and I have never looked at it since. So there’s an end of my novel-writing, I fancy, unless the world turns topsides under some day. Health and merry days to you, and believe me to be

Your affectionate friend,

William Morris

The tone of gruff modesty, and in particular the catchphrase from Dickens (the Circumlocution Office’s ‘How Not to Do It’), is habitual to Morris and can be taken for what it is worth. In spite of the disapproval of Georgiana Burne-Jones, whose opinion he valued at the time above all others, he did not destroy his MS, but kept it, and after what was presumably further discouragement from Louie, he kept it still. He must have been aware, too, why he had been given no hope. J. W. Mackail tells us, in his Life of Morris (1899), that Morris ‘had all the instinct of a born man of letters for laying himself open in his books, and having no concealment from the widest circle of all,’ and (of the Prologues to The Earthly Paradise) that there is ‘an autobiography so delicate and so outspoken that it must needs be left to speak for itself.’ That, we have to conclude, was the trouble with the novel on blue paper; it did speak for itself, but much too plainly.

The background of the novel—the ‘landscape’—is the Upper Thames valley, the water meadows, streams, and villages round about Kelmscott on the borders of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire. Morris had gone down to inspect Kelmscott Manor House in May 1871, and in June he entered into a joint tenancy of the old house with Rossetti at £60 a year. The grey gables, flagged path, enclosed garden cram-full of flowers, lime and elm trees ‘populous with rooks,’ white-panelled parlour, are all recognizably described in this novel, although Morris when he wrote it had never spent a summer there. It was the house he loved ‘with a reasonable love, I think.’ Rossetti, not a countryman, had hoped that the place would be good for his nerves. But in the seclusion of the marshes his obsession with the beauty of Jane Morris, and his compulsion to paint her again and again, reached the point of melancholy mania. Morris had a business to run and was obliged to be in London a good deal. The seemingly intolerable tension arose between the three of them that has been so often and so painfully traced by biographers. To Morris it was ‘this failure of mine.’ Mackail, cautiously describing the subject of the novel as ‘the love of two brothers for the same woman,’ evidently saw no farther into it than the failure. Once, however, when I was trying to explain the situation, and its projection as myth, to a number of overseas students, one of them asked a question that I have never seen in any biography: ‘Why then did Morris not strike Rossetti?’

I hope to show that this question is very relevant to the novel on blue paper. Certainly Morris was not ‘above,’ or indifferent to, his loss. It is a mistake to refer to his much later opinions, as reported by Shaw (‘Morris was a complete fatalist in his attitude towards the conduct of all human beings where sex was concerned’) or Luke Ionides (‘Women did not seem to count with him’) or Wilfrid Scawen Blunt (‘He was the only man I ever came in contact with who seemed absolutely independent of sex considerations’). It is a mistake, too, to refer to opinions expressed in News from Nowhere to his ‘restless heart’ of 1868—73. Which of us would like to be judged, at thirty-nine, by our frame of mind at the age of fifty-seven? Morris himself knew this well enough. ‘At the age of more than thirty years,’ he wrote in Killian of the Closes (1895), ‘men are more apt to desire what they have not than they that be younger or older.’

And Morris might have been pressed into a violent demonstration at this time by yet another cruel test, the profoundly unsettling behaviour of his greatest friend, Edward Burne-Jones. Burne-Jones had been married since 1860 to Georgie, the charming, tiny, and indomitable daughter of a Methodist minister. The Neds had started out in lodgings with £30 between them, and their happy and stable marriage, together with Burne-Jones’s designs for the Firm, were part of the very earth out of which Morris’s life and work took growth. But in 1867 the quiet Ned suddenly claimed, much more openly than Rossetti, the freedom to love unchecked. He had been totally captivated by a most tempestuous member of the Greek community in London, Mary Zambaco. Of this radiantly sad and unpredictable young woman he drew the loveliest by far of his pencil portraits; ‘I believed it to be all my future life,’ he told Rossetti. The affair came and went and came again, to the fury of Ionides and the sympathetic interest of the Greek women. It lingered on, indeed, until 1873.

(#ulink_70627fce-9f77-50bf-8a5e-9063a7dc8d6e) Morris, stalwart, stood by his friend, but the effect of this new confounding of love and loyalty, on top of his own ‘failure,’ must have been hard to master; the effect of Mary herself can be guessed at, perhaps, from the strange intrusion of one of the characters, Eleanor, into the novel on blue paper.

Meanwhile, Georgie was left to manage her life and her two children as best she could. In his loneliness and bewilderment Morris felt deeply for her, and at this time he was unquestionably in love with her.

Some of his drafts and manuscript poems of 1865—70 show this without disguise, though always with a chivalrous anxiety. He must not intrude; he thanks her because she ‘does not deem my service sin.’ A pencil note reads on one draft ‘we two are in the same box and need conceal nothing—scold me but pardon me.’ He is ‘late made wise’ to his own feelings, and can only trust that time will transform them into the friendship that will bring him peace. Meanwhile the dignity and sincerity with which she is bearing ‘the burden of thy grief and wrong’ is enough, in itself, to check him.