Memorials of Rossetti

“ EGOTISM,” says Thackeray, “ is good talk. Even dull biographies are pleasant to read.” This, while true enough in a general sense, is too elastic a statement to be serviceable in criticism, which must draw its meshes close if it would ascertain what is worth keeping. Of egotism there is certainly something in the two volumes on Rossetti now given to the world so punctually, within less than a year after his death ; and noticeably in the work of Mr. T. Hall Caine,¹ which we shall consider first. Curiously enough, this egotism comes to the front by reason of the writer’s effort to preserve his modesty in explaining why he must allude so much as he does to himself and his own work. He consumes, besides, a good deal of time in brief dissertations on the most desirable mode of arranging his material, and in expressing various literary opinions, which are not always strictly relevant. To this, however, he is in part constrained by the circumstances of his first acquaintance with Rossetti, which had its origin in a correspondence growing out of his public championship of the poet before he knew him. It does not, of course, follow that, because there is egotism, there is also dullness ; yet we cannot escape the conviction that, if Mr. Caine had confined himself to the plainest and most succinct narrative form, he would have given us a much more valuable record and one much pleasanter to read than that which he has produced. Another disadvantage under which Mr. Caine labors, as well as Mr. William Sharp, in his more formal work, is the supposed necessity of dwelling at considerable length on the beauties of Rossetti’s several longer poems. Critical or laudatory opinion is really not what we crave from these writers, both of whom are young ; and Mr. Caine is most interesting when he adheres, as in the first chapter, to a recital of events in the early part of the poet’s life, or, as in the closing chapters, to incidents and impressions of his actual intercourse with him. It was the singular fortune of the author of these Recollections, although the junior of Rossetti by twenty-five years, to become his intimate friend, housemate, and to some extent confidant, during the final twelvemonth of that remarkable poet-painter’s life ; and such a fact alone gives permanent value to whatever he may have to tell from his own observation. As an example of the unprofitable matter with which he too often clogs his pages, this sentence may be cited : “ The Blessed Damozel is a conception dilated to such spiritual loveliness that it seems not to exist within things substantially beautiful, or yet by aid of images that coalesce out of the evolving memory of them, but outside of everything actual,” It seems to us that the view stated in these extraordinarily infelicitous terms does a radical injustice to Rossetti’s exquisite youthful masterpiece, which simply could not exist without the aid of images that “ coalesce out of ” memories of the substantially beautiful ; and we sincerely hope that the English Renaissance is not destined to crumble into the dust and rubbish of such verbiage as this. There are various traces of hasty composition in the volume, as where letters are spoken of as being “ called forth in the course of an intercourse ; ” and again, where it is said that “ his reception of my intimation of an intention to call upon him was received,” etc. But, passing over the fact that Mr. Caine has no style and relates his story cumbrously, we are able to derive a good deal of satisfaction from the glimpses which he gives of a singular and striking person, who will undoubtedly hold hereafter a distinctive place in the annals of English poetry, and one of great importance relative to the development of English art in our time. There is, apparently, not a great deal to be told in the way of incident connected with the subject’s career. The son of an Italian poet and patriot, who was obliged to fly from Naples in 1820, he was born in England, and was christened Gabriel Charles Dante (as we learn from Mr. Sharp), but dropped the middle name, and reversed the others, so that he has passed into history as Dante Gabriel Rossetti. At the age of eighteen he wrote the Blessed Damozel; and by the time he was twenty he had also written a powerful, though short, artistic romance, executed in somewhat archaic style, called Hand and Soul, and had painted a crude but remarkable picture, The Girlhood of Mary Virgin, which still holds high rank. Both his poetic and his pictorial work were marked by maturity at the very start, so that they do not offer any spectacle of striking changes or developments, unless it be in those two late ballads, The King’s Tragedy and The White Ship, which indicate a tendency to become more objective, impersonal, and dramatic than he had previously been. Mr. Caine says Rossetti saw this tendency, and had resolved not to write anything more as from himself; but that was not long before his sudden death, at fifty-two. At thirty-two he married a Miss Siddall, who had been his model, and herself showed talent in painting; but his wife, resorting to laudanum for relief from neuralgia, died by an overdose of the poison when they had been married only two years. This event appears to have thrown a heavy shadow over the whole of Rossetti’s subsequent life. Becoming more and more subject to insomnia, he was led by medical advice to use chloral, gradually became a slave to the drug, and was eventually killed by it, although for some years he did not feel its evil effects, and pursued his avocation as a painter with great success. There was an alarming nervous collapse in 1872, from which he recovered ; but his days were thenceforth embittered by the delusions attendant on the use of chloral, until within a few weeks of his death. At that time, a partial paralysis occurring, he was forced by his physician to abandon chloral at once and wholly. There was a terrible struggle of nature ; he was delirious for many hours. At length he came to himself, calm, happy, freed from the old delusions, and looking forward healthily to fresh achievements. But the crisis had occurred too late, and his long-undermined vitality soon flickered and faded out. Although he had no English blood in him, he regarded himself as entirely an Englishman. He had never been out of England except for one tour in Holland, undertaken as a young man, where he was lastingly impressed by Memmeling and Jan Van Eyck, and two brief visits to Paris. “ He seemed always to me an unmistakable Englishman,” says Mr. Sharp, “ yet the Italian element was frequently recognizable.”

We judge from Mr. Caine’s account that, since it was possible for him to leave off chloral at all, his life might have been prolonged and rendered much brighter had his friends earlier insisted on forcibly restraining him from the ruinous indulgence. But it must be remembered that they had an individual of exceptional difficulty to deal with; a man imperious and forceful, though also tender and dependent,—one who had always, no doubt, been morbidly sensitive and seclusive. For example, during the two years before Mr. Caine met him he had not been out of his house afoot, excepting when he walked in the garden at its back ; and on the occasion of the garden — the leasehold of which had been severed from that of the house — being plowed up, preparatory to building, he remained immured for a week. It is only confirmatory of the impression many must have received from the simple reading of Rossetti’s poems to have Mr. Caine declare a belief that “ irresolution, with melancholy, lay at the basis of his nature.” Into the causes of the morbidness, unquestionable as it is, we can hardly penetrate with comprehensiveness until further data are provided; but we suspect that they lay in the physical as well as mental constitution of Rossetti. At all events, it is clear, from his poetry, that his mind was one which brooded over every phase of being laid before it with an intensity that passed almost at once into pain. He was like a person born too far-sighted, whose every effort to contract the gaze upon the near objects of daily life must result in a straining pressure upon eye and brain ; he looked through existing things, in order to get at their spiritual basis and meaning; yet at the same time few men have been gifted with a more precise, vivid, and colorific vision for immediate physical beauty than he. This simultaneous fixing of the mind on the near and the far, the substance and the essence, was very possibly the fundamental cause of his melancholy. There could hardly be a more exact illustration of passion in its literal and etymological sense of “suffering” than his mental nature affords; for, with him, all emotion was so acute that it became a pang and a burden. This explains the oppressive atmosphere of which we are conscious in reading his strong, often beautiful poems, which are heavy with compressed meaning and packed phrase, like a too-honeyed cluster of tube-roses or magnolia-blooms. It gives us the key, also, to that misunderstanding of his spiritual aims by sundry critics, which caused him so much Unhappiness. In contemplating the wonder and fairness of the body, he was doubtless aware of a perception in himself that reached out towards the most subtile and refined significance of what be beheld ; and, to convey this, what more natural than that he should depict in the most glowing words the physical presence that awoke such a perception ? But, in doing so, he frequently lost the spiritual significance, and some readers saw nothing in the result but a “ fleshly ” picture. We have not the least thought of accusing his intention, but we think that, owing to his overstrained sensibility, his execution laid him fairly open to misunderstanding. Beauty became his disease. Composition itself was an anguish to him. “ I lie on the couch,” he said, speaking to Mr. Caine of the way in which his poems were produced, “ the racked and tortured medium, never permitted an instant’s surcease of agony until the thing on hand is finished.” Strikingly consonant with this sad and impassioned personality were the habits and surroundings of the man. Mr. Caine makes no secret of the dismal influence which he himself felt on first going into Rossetti’s habitation at 16 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, known as Tudor House, from the tradition that Elizabeth Tudor once lived there, and supposed to be the one that Thackeray took as a model for the home of the Countess of Chelsey, in Henry Esmond. On another page he says that when he left the house, “outside, the air breathed freely. Within, the gloom, the mediæval furniture, the brass censers, sacramental cups, lamps, and crucifixes conspired, I thought, to make the air heavy and unwholesome.” Mr. Caine observes of Rossetti, “ He constantly impressed me, during the last days of his life, with the conviction that he was, by religious bias of nature, a monk of the Middle Ages ; ” and further, “ His life was an anachronism. Such a man should have had no dealings with the nineteenth century : he belonged to the sixteenth, or perhaps the thirteenth, and in Italy, not England.” The inference is, perhaps, too obvious to be well founded; in the Middle Ages this identical Rossetti might have failed of his development altogether, but precisely the conflict between his inherent tendencies and our modern conditions enabled him to become a new and valuable force, at a time when one was needed, though he himself may have been in a measure the victim of the conflict. It is quite natural that many should have supposed, from the known fact of Rossetti’s retired mode of life and the quiet exclusiveness which has characterized the group to which he belonged, — that of Morris, Swinburne, Madox Browne, Burne Jones, Watts, Stanhope, and the like, — that he was indifferent to the merits of distinguished contemporaries with whom he had no outward affiliation ; but Mr. Caine’s testimony must quite dissipate this notion. There is ample evidence that he cordially admired Tennyson, Mrs. Browning, Robert Browning, and various less known poets of his period. “ Probably,” he once said, “ the man does not live who could write what I have written more briefly than I have done,” — an utterance which involves something of pardonable over-estimate; but the sense of his own power seems not to have excluded the sincerest appreciation of what others were doing. With equally frank criticism of himself, he wrote in a letter, “ All poets nowadays are redundant except Tennyson.” The eighth chapter of this volume, which consists mainly of extracts from the poet’s letters, contains a number of extremely interesting remarks on the English sonnet in general and in particular, and bears amazing testimony to the persistence of his intellectual activity, even under the deadly sway of the drug to which he was subjected. It is a pity that Mr. Caine did not decide to give the letters in full, seeing what encomiums he has passed upon them as comparable with the best in English literature in “ freedom of phrase, in power of throwing off parenthetical reflections always faultlessly enunciated, in play of humor, often in eloquence, . . . sometimes in pathos.’ His selections produce but a fragmentary effect, yet they give one an intimate insight into Rossetti’s taste for careful study of the poetic art and its history in England. That he possessed a true critical faculty is not made evident, even in connection with his frequent and minute revision or amplification of his own published pieces; but indirectly, a knowledge is gathered of the elaborate way in which a great deal of his own work must have been built up, notwithstanding that he sometimes wrote very rapidly. Here may be mentioned an emphatic maxim which escapes him in one of these letters: “ Conception, fundamental brain-work, is what makes the difference in all art. Work your metal all that you like, but first take care that it is gold, and worth working.” His humor comes out pleasantly in this passage: “ I am sure I could write one hundred essays, on all possible subjects (I once did project a series under the title Essays Written in the Intervals of Elephantiasis, Hydrophobia, and Penal Servitude), without once experiencing the ‘aching void,’ which is filled by such words as ‘ mythopœic ’ and ‘anthropomorphism.’ I do not find life long enough to know in the least what they mean.” This certainly is an unexpected burst from the author of Dante at Verona, and brings us to know him and like him better as a man.

It is interesting to hear that Rossetti spoke of Mrs. Carlyle as “ a bitter little woman ; ” and though he added that she was always kind to the poor, this phrase may some time serve to mitigate the offenses of the great humorist and historian in the eyes of those who have shown so much vindictiveness towards him since the publishing of the Reminiscences. There is but one other kindred allusion to a public contemporary, and that is to Longfellow, who called upon him, but “ seemed to know little about painting as an art,” and also made the mistake of supposing that it was Rossetti’s brother who was the poet. Rossetti’s own dictum upon the painter’s art is a trifle unexpected : that it depends upon unwritten rules, which are as systematically to be taught as arithmetic ; and that, aside from “ fundamental conception, . . . the part of a picture that is not mechanical is often trivial enough.” That Rossetti did not see more of the famous men and women about him, and that, accordingly, he appears in the memorials of him as rather mournfully alone and unrelated, is due to the unhealthy isolation in which he dwelt. Mr. Caine has a remark of no little penetration on the cause of his retirement: “ There are men who feel more deeply the sense of isolation amidst the busiest crowds than within the narrowest circle of intimates. . . . Perhaps, after all, he wandered from the world rather from the dread than with the hope of solitude.”

Mr. Caine’s outline of this peculiar character as he saw it has a certain jagged and uncomely reality, which will inevitably make it an important contribution : he has drawn from the life sympathetically, yet relentlessly. On the other hand, Mr. William Sharp, himself a poet, though far more sympathetic, and going deeply into the characteristics of Rossetti’s product in two arts, presents a portraiture which, because it is less unconventional and less detailed than the other, does not yield so graphic an impression.² Mr. Sharp, however, says, “ Again and again I have seen instances of those marvelous gifts which made him at one time a Sydney Smith in wit and a Coleridge in eloquence,” and adds this description of Rossetti’s appearance: “ He was, if anything, rather over middle height, and, especially latterly, somewhat stout; his forehead was of splendid proportions, recalling instantaneously to most strangers the Stratford bust of Shakespeare; and his grayblue eyes were clear and piercing, and characterized by that rapid penetrative gaze so noticeable in Emerson.” Touches like these, by calling up the personal presence, are of more service just now than many pages devoted to discriminating and appreciative study upon the writings or the pictures. It transpires also, in Mr. Sharp’s record, that Rossetti, at about the age of twenty, was greatly impressed by Browning’s poems: wrote to Browning; afterwards painted his portrait ; and projected, but only half carried out, some designs illustrating works of his. He at last “held Tennyson to be the greatest poet of the period, and be was gratified as if by a personal pleasure when Mr. Watts, also an ardent believer in Tennyson, wrote his fine sonnet to the Laureate. . . . He appreciated to a generous extent the poetry of present younger writers, but failed to see in nine tenths of it any of that originality and individual aura that characterize work that will stand the stress of time.” It is not hard to conceive how a man who united with his own artistic mastery so much cordial admiration for that of others ; who, if sometimes unjust and harsh to his friends, was always manfully and pathetically penitent afterwards ; who had such great powers of conversation, and was so susceptible to feeling that he could seldom read his own poems aloud without shedding tears, — how such a man should have won a number of devoted friends, and should have exercised a potent influence on the art of his period, difficult though that influence may be to trace through all its channels. Mr. Sharp devotes only one chapter to the Life. This is succeeded by a chapter on the PreRaphaelite idea, historical, but taking besides a controversial tone, which is inadvisable at this late day. The best point in it is the author’s establishing of a connection between the Pre-Raphaelite movement and the Tractarian stir at Oxford, made by Newman, Pusey, and Keble. Religion and art at that time were “ closelier” drawn together, and a few artists banded themselves in favor of choosing higher themes, and working them out with an earnestness and faithfulness that were devotional. Nevertheless, Mr. Sharp thinks, the primary impulse of these men was one of skeptical revolt against the feeble traditions of English art, which was in part a reflex of the prevailing skepticism in science and philosophy. Although it wears a mask of paradox, such a theory of the movement doubtless rests upon truth, and would account for the points of serious divergence between the Pre-Raphaelites and the Tractarians, who had in common a desire to rekindle the devout enthusiasms of the mediæval time. Mr. Sharp gives an extended account of The Germ, the organ of the “ Brotherhood,” and quotes suggestively from its contents; so that we get from him what it is now very difficult, for American readers in particular, to obtain elsewhere. The rest of the volume is assigned to a close and long review of Rossetti’s complete labors as both painter and poet. His pictures in water-color and oils, his sketches and replicas, are all described in chronological order; and a table at the end of the book presents a still fuller list of the three hundred and ninety-five pictorial productions which Rossetti left, with their dates and ownership attached. We own to a good deal of weariness in toiling through these chapters, which, being without any kind of illustration, place the frightful tax on the mind of reimagining, by aid of a few bald words, the pictures enumerated. But there can be no doubt that for purposes of reference Mr. Sharp’s review will remain exceedingly convenient, in fact indispensable, to students of modern art. It cannot be said that his critical survey of the poetical works is of equal worth, although he gives a good many curious facts as to corrections made by the author in different editions, and shows a commendable independence in his judgments. In one instance Mr. Sharp seems to us strangely undiscerning : that is, where he refers to the peculiar and impressive design called How They Met Themselves as being simply a pictorial representation of the Doppelgänger legend. The whole penetrating and fine significance of the design in question lies in the marvelous variation between the actual lovers and their doubles, whom they meet in the forest, — a variation introduced without disturbing the likeness. The spectral pair represent the man and woman as they once were, and show an ideality, a youthful grace and fervor, which the real man and woman have lost. These latter find themselves confronted, by this apparition, with the tragedy of their own slow, unsuspected deterioration. But if he has failed in his interpretation here, Mr. Sharp makes amends by his fine analysis (pages 114 and 115) of the female facial type which Rossetti created,— the type that reappears in many of his works, and is perhaps his most remarkable contribution to art. As Mr. Sharp well says, “there are occasions when the intensity of its inner significance is so strong as to constrain the beholder to the strange spiritual personality represented, alone, leaving him altogether oblivious to the details of the rendering.”

Mr. Sharp’s style, unfortunately, is often loose and ungrammatical. He speaks of “ regarding” a picture “ a fine production,” instead of “considering” it so ; and in another place says exactly the opposite of what he means, thus: “ The pressure of as many commissions for pictures as he could . . . execute . . . prevented little being done ” upon a proposed work of translation. Perhaps his masterpiece of bad construction is the clause, “ Reflecting as it does in undertone the subdued murmur of ' wan water, wandering water weltering,’ and for the reason that the cause of its beauty is not at first perceptible is doubtless how it grows more and more with every reading, till, I am certain, with many it becomes one of the chief favorites.” But all this does not prevent him from laying his finger with precision on “ the constant union of poetic emotion with artistic idea in everything that came from the pencil or the brush of Dante Rossetti,” as the circumstance which raised the painter high above the plane of English art in general. He also notes that Rossetti’s development in painting was much slower than his literary growth: in poetry he matured almost immediately, but there was a long term during which his pictorial work was crude. This fact, as we apprehend it, points indirectly to his possession of a larger possibility as an artist than as a poet, which required a longer period for its realization. In painting he perfected a depth and splendor of coloring which is unrivaled except by that of Titian and Giorgione; but to English literature he did not add anything, we think, of corresponding distinctiveness or importance, nor did he in that field invent anything so original as the facial type already mentioned. Therefore, although a master in both his arts, he will, unless our estimate be falsified by time, stand higher as a painter than as a poet. His poems were rather the accompaniment of his art than the results of a nature inclined by its deepest promptings to expression in language ; they were the musical overflow of a genius too richly endowed to find complete satisfaction even in the art to which it was best adapted. Their being in a manner secondary, notwithstanding the strong individuality with which they are imbued, may be one reason why they reflect so much more of the bitterness and sadness of life than his pictures do. But, whatever conclusion we may reach on this head, we are indebted to Mr. Caine and Mr. Sharp for making us better acquainted with the source from which both the pictures and the poems proceeded. Mr. Caine’s book contains, fur thermore, a striking photograph of Rossetti, which brings before us his singular, sensuous, melancholy, intent visage, with the noble forehead and the “ bar of Michael Angelo ” between the eyes ; and Mr. Sharp has had reproduced as a fronispiece a beautiful design, in which the poet inclosed his transcript of the sonnet on the sonnet,

which, the lettering in one corner records, “ D. G. Rossetti pro matre fecit.”It is a mournful study that is laid before us in these volumes, that of a greatly gifted man, whose life was clouded by sorrow and blasted by a fatal weakness. He comes before us as a sort of Keats (without the joy), who had weathered adversity and gained middle life only to become a hypochondriac, whom no successes could console ; while in his weakness, and in the sloth he himself condemned, he resembles a Coleridge modified into the pure artist. But, in addition, he is himself ; and it is of this self, which has been indicated to us only in its salient points, that we should like to know more. It is to be hoped that those who knew Rossetti longest and most intimately will join their forces with his friend Theodore Watts (another artist and poet) in perfecting an adequate biography.