The other evening I had the pleasant experience of meeting
one to whom I have for about two years looked with interest
as a poet of the native rustic kind, but often of quite a
superior order. I don’t know if you noticed, somewhere about
the date referred to, in _The Athenæum_, a review of poems
by Joseph Skipsey. Skip-sey has exquisite--though, as in all
such cases (except of course Burns’s) not equal--powers in
several directions, but his pictures of humble life are the
best. He is a working miner, and describes rustic loves and
sports, and the perils and pathos of pit-life with great
charm, having a quiet humour too when needed. His more
ambitious pieces have solid merit of feeling, but are much
less artistic. The other night, as I say, he came here, and
I found him a stalwart son of toil, and every inch a
gentleman. In cast of face he recalls Tennyson somewhat,
though more bronzed and brawned. He is as sweet and gentle
as a woman in manner, and recited some beautiful things of
his own with a special freshness to which one is quite
unaccustomed.
Mr. Skipsey was a miner of North Shields, and in the review referred to
much was made, in a delicate way, of his stern environments. His volume
of lyrics is marked by the quiet humour. Rossetti speaks of, as well as
by a rather exasperating inequality. Perhaps the best piece in it is a
poem entitled _Thistle and Nettle_, treating with peculiar freshness of
a country courtship. The coming together of two such entirely opposite
natures was certainly curious, and only to be accounted for on the
ground of Rossetti’s breadth of poetic sympathy. It would be interesting
to hear what the impressions were of such a rude son of toil upon
meeting with one whose life must have seemed the incarnation of artistic
luxury and indulgence. Later on I received the following:
Poor Skipsey! He has lost the friend who brought him to
London only the other day (T. Dixon), and who was his only
hold on intellectual life in his district. Dixon died
immediately on his return to the North, of a violent attack
of asthma to which he was subject. He was a rarely pure and
simple soul, and is doubtless gone to higher uses, though
few could have reached, with his small opportunities, to
such usefulness as he compassed here. He was Ruskin’s
correspondent in a little book called (I think) _Work by
Tyne and Wear_. I got a very touching note from Skipsey on
the subject.
From Mr. Skipsey he received a letter only a little while before his
death, and to him he addressed one of the last epistles he penned.
The following letter explains itself, and is introduced as much for
the sake of the real humour which it displays, as because it affords an
excellent idea of Rossetti’s view of the true function of prose: