Poor Splendid Wings: The Rossettis and Their Circle
By
[Atlantic Monthly Press and Little, Brown, $3.50]
THIS is too good a book to estimate and value in a few words. It has as many and diverse characteristics as the men and women with whom it deals. First of all, perhaps, it is a perfect antidote to that class of biographies, so undeservedly popular of late, whose whole reason for existence (if there is one) is the tearing down of reputations, the smirching of the memory of the dead with assorted scandal assembled from questionable sources. This is no book of that sort. Its subject matter is that seemingly abortive episode in the history of the Victorian Age once known as Pre-Raphaelitism. Included are such antecedent figures as Turner and Blake, and it runs the full course from Rossetti and Ruskin to Pater, Whistler, and Wilde of the last flicker ings of its decadence.
Under the amazingly deft hands of the author, the simulacra of these dead men and women take form and shape again: Ruskin, Rossetti, and their parents and kin, Holman Hunt and Millais, Ford Madox Brown, William Morris, Burne-Jones, Swinburne; the pitiful ghost of Elizabeth Siddal, the brooding Christina Rossetti, sterile against her passionate will: Fanny, at once consolation to the devil-haunted Dante Gabriel and nemesis. The book is written with gentleness and generosity, with delicate appreciation and an almost divine pity. Miss Winwar is no special pleader; she blinks no blemishes in any of her characters, and they were gross and numerous enough, as with all men; but the tragedy of circumstance, the dark destiny that in so many eases seemed forewritten, are accepted as palliatives, while the recorded virtues restore a balance if they do not cancel the weaknesses and the vice. There is nothing here set down in malice or for the benefit of the publishers’ market. All these ‘figures of earth,’ joyous and buoyant in youth, flaunting their high ideals and shoutit’ig their defiance of a dull and sordid generation, pass in living pageantry through disillusion to — for so many of them — despair, madness, and sorrowful death, and the reader goes with them as with friends and kin who sutler but cannot be consoled.
This is not to say that the book is gloomy. Written with distinguished and appealing style, it is as full of humor as it is of pathos. These arc living and breathing human beings, made up as ever of both good and evil; and better or more vital and varied portraiture has seldom if ever been accomplished.
Nevertheless, the whole thing is a very pitiful tragedy, and this because of the fact that the revolt of the PreRaphaelites came not when the thing they fought had reached its term, but when it was pushing powerfully onward for new triumphs that were not to reach their climax for another two generations. These men strove to redeem life from the gross ugliness — social, industrial, theological — that marked the Victorian Era, though most of them saw this ugliness in terms of art, Ruskin and Morris seeing further in this than the painters and the poets. They were in a way a part of the Romantic Movement that went hack to Walter Scott: of the fight for social reform voiced by the seventh Earl of Shaftesbury and Robert Dale Owen. The Oxford Movement was a part, and Pugin’s Gothic restoration. All Europe as well as England was aflame; but, through the Pre-Raphaelites, England saw the rise in ridicule, the brief triumph, and t lie breaking down, in melancholy failure and unwholesome decadence, of the hopeless effort to redeem the world through the ministry of art.
Poor Splendid Wings reads like the most absorbing romance, but it is perfectly documented history and biography raised to the level of a fine art. I am great ly mistaken if it does not take its place as one of the few very distinguished contributions to contemporary American literature.
To those of us who in the early eighties received the vitalizing influence of Pre-Raphaelitism as it came to us then, though adulterated by its ending phase of æthetieism, the book is full of an alchemy that makes fifty years as a day, and we put it down with a sort, of wistful nostalgia that is both pleasure and pain, It was a brave flight, ventured by these children of high vision, but the ‘splendid wings’ were broken by contact with a stubborn Life that would neither be hurried in its progress nor turned aside from its destiny.
RALPH ADAMS CRAM