In 1875 Rossetti took for a time a pleasant and secluded house near Bognor,—Aldwick Lodge, standing in its own grounds, wellnigh buried in shrubbery, in a lane west of the town, and near (as Dr. Hake tells us in some delightful reminiscences of a visit there) “to the roughest bit of beach on the Sussex coast.” Here, gathering together his mother, sister, and aunts, and such intimate friends as Dr. Hake and Mr. Theodore Watts, he enjoyed at the close of this year a Christmas week to which he afterwards looked back as to one of the happiest he ever spent.
It was at Bognor that Rossetti, influenced, no doubt, by his companionship, woke for the first time to the magic of the sea. It is extraordinary that so passionately romantic a spirit as his should have remained, until the eve of his fiftieth year, absolutely unaffected by that profound and intimate sway which the sea holds over the poetic nature once brought, however distantly, within even the rumour and echo of its majestic voice. Now the spell he had so long eluded was cast upon him with irresistible force. He began to haunt the shore with a child’s eagerness for the grandeur and the urgent mystery of tides. Day after day he paced the beach for miles together, pursuing the new vision, the new rapture of the stimulated sense. The surf, tumultuous and loud on that wild coast, enthralled him like a charm; the waves drove his fancy to new spheres; his poetry was turned to fresh scenes and subjects; he began to write “The White Ship,” the first, though perhaps not the greatest, of his historic ballads. For the time, he was absorbed almost wholly in that revelation of splendour and power,—in the primal glories of sea and sky; “two symbols of the infinite,” as the captive Mazzini called them.
But when we wonder at the lateness of this æsthetic development on Rossetti’s part, we must remember that he was naturally without that love of terrestrial and cosmical Nature for her own sake that is the commonly-accepted attribute of poets. There was in his whole being no trace of Pantheism, no worship of external loveliness apart from conscious life. To him the sole joy of life was in the human; the supreme tragedy of life was in the sexual. The conception of the two elemental principles—the man-principle and the woman-principle—striving, uniting, prevailing, against all the forces of destiny, sufficed him for his conception of the universe. He was utterly alien to the Wordsworth spirit; its serene monism was abhorrent to him. Apart as he lived from intellectual speculation, he was, in his unformulated and unconscious philosophy, dualistic to the core; as all true Romance must ever be. For the essence of Romance is in its recognition of the conflict between matter and spirit, between Nature and Man. Even its joy and exultation in the physical life as the channel of the Higher Spirit takes its glory from the sense of conquest over the Lower Spirit which threatens it from the same unknown world behind all. Therefore there lies always beneath the awe and wonder of romance towards the natural and the supernatural world a deep instinct of rebellion, of antagonism, which debars it from the Wordsworth spirit, at peace with earth and heaven. Resignation there may be in romance; acquiescence, never. There may come, indeed, a passionate and whole-hearted love of natural scenery, a frank delight, as in the Celtic temper, in every external object that can minister to man’s æsthetic enjoyment of beauty as a revelation of the divine. But the limits of the divine grow more perceptible as man emerges from the childhood of the world. “There hath passed away a glory from the earth.” Rossetti knew this—“knew” it, not in the intellectual sense of the word; and therefore he could never turn to Nature for that regenerating rest and peace which in some moods—not quite the highest—she can give. He never gained that next stage of spiritual emancipation and enrichment at which the sense of conflict is its own reward; as when the soldier, with “his soul well-knit” and every nerve schooled and chastened on the eve of a great battle, feels a profound repose, a diviner calm than that of the acclaimed victor. “The man who, though his fights be all defeats, still fights”—as Coventry Patmore sang while Rossetti was yet young—has verily seen “the beginnings of peace.”