“I have not attempted to write a biographical account of my brother,
nor to estimate the range or value of his powers and performances in
fine art and in literature. I agree with those who think that a
brother is not the proper person to undertake a work of this sort.
An outsider can do it dispassionately, though with imperfect
knowledge of the facts; a friend can do it with mastery, and without
much undue bias; but a brother, however equitably he may address
himself to the task, cannot perform it so as to secure the prompt and
cordial assent of his readers.”
These words will serve as a good example of the dignified modesty which
is a characteristic of Mr. W. M. Rossetti’s, and is one of the best
features of this volume. {77} In these days of empty pretence it is
always refreshing to come upon a page written in the spirit of scholarly
self-suppression which informs every line this patient and admirable
critic writes. And as to the interesting question glanced at in the
passage above quoted, though the contents of this volume will, no doubt,
form valuable material for the future biography of Rossetti, we wonder
whether the time is even yet at hand when that biography, whether written
by brother, by friend, or by outsider, is needed. That mysterious entity
“the public,” would, no doubt, like to get one; but we have always shared
Rossetti’s own opinion that a man of genius is no more the property of
the “public” than is any private gentleman; and we have always felt with
him that the prevalence in our time of the opposite opinion has fashioned
so intolerable a yoke for the neck of any one who has had the misfortune
to pass from the sweet paradise of obscurity into the vulgar purgatory of
Fame, that it almost behoves a man of genius to avoid, if he can, passing
into that purgatory at all.
Can any biography, by whomsoever written, be other than inchoate and
illusory—nay, can it fail to be fraught with danger to the memory of the
dead, with danger to the peace of the living, until years have fully
calmed the air around the dead man’s grave? So long as the man to be
portrayed cannot be separated from his surroundings, so long as his
portrait cannot be fully and honestly limned without peril to the peace
of those among whom he moved—in a word, so long as there remains any
throb of vitality in those delicate filaments of social life by which he
was enlinked to those with whom he played his part—that brother, or that
friend, or that outsider who shall attempt the portraiture must feel what
heavy responsibilities are his—must not forget that with him to trip is
to sin against the head. And how shall he decide when the time has at
last come for making the attempt? Before the incidents of a man’s life
can be exploited without any risk of mischief, how much time should
elapse? “A month,” say the publishers, each one of whom runs his own
special “biographical series,” and keeps his own special bevy of
recording angels writing against time and against each other. “Thirty
years,” said one whose life-wisdom was so perfect as to be in a world
like ours almost an adequate substitute for the morality he
lacked—Talleyrand.
Of all forms of literary art biography demands from the artist not only
the greatest courage, but also the happiest combination of the highest
gifts. To succeed in painting the portrait of Achilles or of Priam, of
Hamlet or of Othello, may be difficult, but is it as difficult as to
succeed in painting the portrait of Browning or Rossetti? Surely not.
In the one case an intense dramatic imagination is needed, and nothing
more. If Homer’s Achaian and Trojan heroes were falsely limned, not
they, but Homer’s art, would suffer the injury. If for the purposes of
art the poet unduly exalted this one or unduly abased that—if he misread
one incident in the mythical life of Achilles, and another in the
mythical life of Hector—he did wrong to his art undoubtedly, but none to
the memory of a dead man, and none to the peace of a living one. But
with him who would paint the portrait of Browning or Rossetti how
different is the case! Although he requires the poet’s vision before he
can paint a living picture of his subject, the task he has set himself to
do is something more than artistic: before everything else it is
fiduciary.
A trustee whose trust fund is biographical truth, he has, after
collecting and marshalling all the facts that come to his hand, to decide
what is truth as indicated by those generalized facts. But having done
this, he has to decide what is the proper time for giving the world the
truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth—what is the proper
time? In the biographer’s relation to the dead man on the one-hand and
to the public on the other should he be so unhappy as to forget that time
is of the very “essence of the contract”—should he forget that so inwoven
is human life that truth spoken at the wrong moment may be a greater
mischief-worker than error—he may, if conscientious, have to remember
that forgetfulness of his during the remainder of his days. He who
thinks that truth may not be sometimes as mischievous as a pestilence
knows but little of this mysterious and wonderful net of human life. But
if this is so with regard to truth, how much more is it so with regard to
mere matter of fact? Fact-worship, document-worship, is at once the
crowning folly and the crowning vice of our time. To mistake a fact for
a truth, and to give the world that; to throw facts about and documents
about heedless of the mischief they may work—wronging the dead and
wronging the living—this is actually paraded as a virtue in these days.
Here is a case in point. Down to the very last moment of his life
Rossetti’s feeling towards his great contemporary Tennyson was that of
the deepest admiration, and yet what says the documentary evidence as
given to the world by Rossetti’s brother? It shows that Rossetti used an
extremely unpleasant phrase concerning a letter from Tennyson
acknowledging the receipt of Rossetti’s first volume of poems in 1870.
Those who have heard Tennyson speak of Rossetti know that to use this
phrase in relation to any letter of his dealing with Rossetti’s poetry
was to misunderstand it. Yet here are the unpleasant words of a hasty
mood, “rather shabby,” in print. And why? Because the public has become
so demoralized that its feast of facts, its feast of documents it must
have, come what will. But even supposing that the public had any rights
whatsoever in regard to a man of genius, which we deny, what are letters
as indications of a man’s character? Of all modes of expression is not
the epistolary mode that in which man’s instinct for using language “to
disguise his thought” is most likely to exercise itself? There is likely
to be far more deep sincerity in a sonnet than in a letter. It is no
exaggeration to say that the common courtesies of life demand a certain
amount of what is called “blarney” in a letter—especially in an eminent
man’s letter—which would ruin a sonnet. And this must be steadily borne
in mind at a time like ours, when private letters are bought and sold
like any other article of merchandise, not only immediately after a man’s
death, but during his lifetime.
With regard to literary men, their letters in former times were simply
artistic compositions; hence as indications of character they must be
judged by the same canons as literary essays would be judged. In both
cases the writer had full space and full time to qualify his statements
of opinion; in both cases he was without excuse for throwing out anything
heedlessly. Not only in Walpole’s case and Gray’s, but also in Charles
Lamb’s, we apply the same rules of criticism to the letters as we apply
to the published utterances that appeared in the writer’s lifetime. But
now, when letters are just the hurried expression of the moment, when
ill-considered things—often rash things—are said which either in literary
compositions or in conversation would have been, if said at all, greatly
qualified—the greatest injustice that can be done to a writer is to print
his letters indiscriminately. Especially is this the case with Rossetti.
All who knew him speak of him as being a superb critic, and a superb
critic he was. But his printed letters show nothing of the kind. On
literary subjects they are often full of over-statement and of biased
judgment. Here is the explanation: in conversation he had a way of
perpetrating a brilliant critical paradox for the very purpose of
qualifying it, turning it about, colouring it by the lights of his
wonderful fancy, until at last it became something quite different from
the original paradox, and full of truth and wisdom. But when such a
paradox went off in a letter, there it remained unqualified; and they
who, not having known him, scoff at his friends who claim for him the
honours of a great critic, seem to scoff with reason.
No one was more conscious of the treachery of letters than was Rossetti
himself. Comparatively late in his life he realized what all eminent men
would do well to realize, that owing to the degradation of public taste,
which cries out for more personal gossip and still more every day, the
time has fully come when every man of mark must consider the rights of
his friends—when it behoves every man who has had the misfortune to pass
into fame to burn all letters; and he began the holocaust that duty to
friendship demanded of him. But the work of reading through such a
correspondence as his in order to see what letters must be preserved from
the burning took more time and more patience than he had contemplated,
and the destruction did not progress further than to include the letters
of the early sixties. Business letters it was, of course, necessary to
preserve, and very properly it is from these that Mr. W. M. Rossetti has
mainly quoted.
The volume is divided into two parts: first, documents relating to the
production of certain of Rossetti’s pictures and poems; and second, a
prose paraphrase of ‘The House of Life.’
The documents consist of abstracts of and extracts from such portions of
Rossetti’s correspondence as have fallen into his brother’s hands as
executor. Dealing as they necessarily do with those complications of
prices and those involved commissions for which Rossetti’s artistic
career was remarkable, there is a commercial air about the first portion
of the book which some will think out of harmony with their conception of
the painter, about whom there used to be such a mysterious interest until
much writing about him had brought him into the light of common day. In
future years a summary so accurate and so judicious as this will seem
better worth making than it, perhaps, seems at the present moment; for
Mr. W. M. Rossetti’s love of facts is accompanied by an equally strong
love of making an honest statement of facts—a tabulated statement, if
possible; and no one writing of Rossetti need hesitate about following
his brother to the last letter and to the last figure.
To be precise and perspicuous is, he hints in his preface, better than to
be graphic and entertaining; and we entirely agree with him, especially
when the subject discussed is Rossetti, about whom so many fancies that
are neither precise nor perspicuous are current. Still, to read about
this picture being offered to one buyer and that to another, and rejected
or accepted at a greatly reduced price after much chaffering, is not, we
will confess, exhilarating reading to those to whom Rossetti’s pictures
are also poems. It does not conduce to the happiness of his admirers to
think of such works being produced under such prosaic conditions. One
buyer—a most worthy man, to be sure, and a true friend of Rossetti’s, but
full of that British superstition about the saving grace of clothes which
is so wonderful a revelation to the pensive foreigner—had to be humoured
in his craze against the nude. After having painted a beautiful
partly-draped Gretchen (which, we may remark in passing, had no relation,
as Mr. W. M. Rossetti supposes, to the Marguerite alluded to in a letter
to Mr. Graham in 1870) from a new model whose characteristics were a
superb bosom and arms, he, Rossetti, was obliged to consent to conceal
the best portions of the picture under drapery.
That this was a matter of great and peculiar vexation to him may be
supposed when it is remembered that unequalled as had been his good
fortune in finding fine face-models (ladies of position and culture, and
often of extraordinary beauty), he had in the matter of figure-models
been most unlucky. And this, added to his slight knowledge of anatomy,
made all his nude pictures undesirable save those few painted from the
beautiful girl who stood for ‘The Spirit of the Rainbow’ and ‘Forced
Music.’ What his work from the nude suffered from this is incalculable,
as may be seen in the crayon called ‘Ligeia Siren,’ a naked siren playing
on a kind of lute, which Rossetti described as “certainly one of his best
things.” The beauty and value of a crayon which for weird
poetry—especially in the eyes—must be among Rossetti’s masterpieces are
ruined by the drawing of the breasts.
The most interesting feature of the book, however, is not that which
deals with the prices Rossetti got for his pictures, but that which tells
the reader the place where and the conditions under which they were
painted; and no portion of the book is more interesting than that which
relates to the work done at Kelmscott:—
“At the beginning of this year 1874 Rossetti was again occupied with
the picture which he had commenced in the preceding spring, entitled,
‘The Bower Maiden’—a girl in a room with a pot of marigolds and a
black cat. It was painted from ‘little Annie’ (a cottage-girl and
house assistant at Kelmscott), and it ‘goes on’ (to quote the words
of one of his letters) ‘like a house on fire. This is the only kind
of picture one ought to do—just copying the materials, and no more:
all others are too much trouble.’ It is not difficult to understand
that the painter of a ‘Proserpine’ and a ‘Ghirlandata’ would
occasionally feel the luxury of a mood intellectually lazy, and would
be minded to give voice to it—as in this instance—in terms wilfully
extreme; keeping his mental eye none the less steadily directed to a
‘Roman Widow’ or a ‘Blessed Damozel’ in the near future. As a matter
of fact, my brother painted very few things, at any stage of his
career, as mere representations of reality, unimbued by some
inventive or ideal meaning: in the rare instances when he did so, he
naturally felt an indolent comfort, and made no scruple of putting
the feeling into words—highly suitable for being taken _cum grano
salis_. Nothing was more alien from his nature or habit than ‘tall
talk’ of any kind about his aims, aspirations, or performances. It
was into his work—not into his utterances about his work—that he
infused the higher and deeper elements of his spirit. ‘The Bower
Maiden’ was finished early in February, and sold to Mr. Graham for
682_l._, after it had been offered to Mr. Leyland at a rather higher
figure, and declined. It has also passed under the names of ‘Fleurs
de Marie,’ ‘Marigolds,’ and ‘The Gardener’s Daughter.’ After ‘The
Bower Maiden’ had been disposed of, other work was taken up—more
especially ‘The Roman Widow,’ bearing the alternative title of ‘Dîs
Manibus,’ which was in an advanced stage by the month of May, and was
completed in June or July. It was finished with little or no
glazing. The Roman widow is a lady still youthful, in a grey
fawn-tinted drapery, with a musical instrument in each hand; she is
in the sepulchral chamber of her husband, whose stone urn appears in
the background. I possess the antique urn which my brother procured,
and which he used for the painting. For graceful simplicity, and for
depth of earnest but not strained sentiment, he never, I think,
exceeded ‘The Roman Widow.’ The two instruments seem to repeat the
two mottoes on the urn, ‘Ave Domine—Vale Domine.’ The head was
painted from Miss Wilding, already mentioned; but it seems to me
partly associated with the type of Mrs. Stillman’s face as well.
There are many roses in this picture—both wild and garden roses; they
kept the artist waiting a little after the work was otherwise
finished. ‘I really think it looks well,’ he wrote on one occasion;
‘its fair luminous colour seems to melt into the gold frame (which
has only just come) like a part of it.’ He feared that the picture
might be ‘too severe and tragic’ for some tastes; but could add (not,
perhaps, with undue confidence), ‘I don’t think Géricault or Régnault
would have quite scorned it.’”
The magnificent design here alluded to, ‘Dîs Manibus,’ entirely suggested
by the urn, which had somewhat come into his possession (probably through
Howell), and also ‘The Bower Maiden,’ suggested by his accidentally
seeing a pretty cottage-child lifting some marigolds to a shelf, formed
part of the superb work produced by Rossetti during his long retirement
at Kelmscott Manor—that period never before recorded, which has at this
very moment been brought into prominence by his friend Dr. Hake’s
sonnet-sequence ‘The New Day,’ just published. As far as literary and
artistic work goes, it was, perhaps, the richest period of his life; and
that it was also one of the happiest is clear not only from his own
words, but also from the following testimony of Dr. Hake, who saw much of
him there:—
O, happy days with him who once so loved us!
We loved as brothers, with a single heart,
The man whose iris-woven pictures moved us
From nature to her blazoned shadow—Art.
How often did we trace the nestling Thames
From humblest waters on his course of might,
Down where the weir the bursting current stems—
There sat till evening grew to balmy night,
Veiling the weir whose roar recalled the Strand
Where we had listened to the wave-lipped sea,
That seemed to utter plaudits while we planned
Triumphal labours of the day to be.
It was at Kelmscott, in the famous tapestried room, that besides painting
the ‘Proserpine,’ ‘The Roman Widow,’ &c., he wrote many of his later
poems, including ‘Rose Mary.’
Considering how deep is Mr. W. M. Rossetti’s affection for his brother’s
memory, and how great is his admiration for his brother’s work, it is
remarkable how judicial is his mind when writing about him. This is what
he says about the much discussed ‘Venus Astarte’:—
“Into the ‘Venus Astarte’ he had put his utmost intensity of
thinking, feeling, and method—he had aimed to make it equally strong
in abstract sentiment and in physical grandeur—an ideal of the
mystery of beauty, offering a sort of combined quintessence of what
he had endeavoured in earlier years to embody in the two several
types of ‘Sibylla Palmifera’ and ‘Lilith,’ or (as he ultimately named
them in the respective sonnets) ‘Soul’s Beauty’ and ‘Body’s Beauty.’
It may be well to remark that, by the time when he completed the
‘Venus Astarte,’ or ‘Astarte Syriaca,’ he had got into a more austere
feeling than of old with regard to colour and chiaroscuro; and the
charm of the picture has, I am aware, been less, to many critics and
spectators of the work, than he would have deemed to be its due, as
compared with some of his other performances of more obvious and
ostensible attraction.”
Though Mr. W. M. Rossetti is right in saying that it was not till the
beginning of 1877 that this remarkable picture was brought to a
conclusion, the main portions were done during that long sojourn at
Bognor in 1876–7, which those who have written about Rossetti have
hitherto left unrecorded. Having fallen into ill health after his return
to London from Kelmscott, he was advised to go to the seaside, and a
large house at Bognor was finally selected. No doubt one reason why the
preference was given to Bognor was the fact that Blake’s cottage at
Felpham was close by, for businesslike and unbusiness-like qualities were
strangely mingled in Rossetti’s temperament, and it was generally some
sentiment or unpractical fancy of this kind that brought about Rossetti’s
final decision upon anything. Blake’s name was with him still a word to
charm with, and he was surprised to find, on the first pilgrimage of
himself and his friends to the cottage, that scarcely a person in the
neighbourhood knew what Blake it was that “the Londoners” were inquiring
about.
To the secluded house at Bognor—a house so surrounded by trees and shrubs
that the murmur of the waves mingling with the whispers of the leaves
seemed at one moment the sea’s voice, and at another the voice of the
earth—Rossetti took not only the cartoon of the ‘Astarte Syriaca,’ but
also the most peculiar of all his pictures, ‘The Blessed Damozel,’ which
had long lain in an incomplete state. But it was not much painting that
he did at Bognor. From a cause he tried in vain to understand, and tried
in vain to conquer, his thoughts ran upon poetry, and refused to fix
themselves upon art. Partly this might have been owing to the fact that
now, comparatively late in life, he to whom, as his brother well says,
“such words as _sea_, _ship_, and _boat_ were generic terms admitting of
little specific and still less of any individual and detailed
distinction,” awoke to the fascination that the sea sooner or later
exercises upon all truly romantic souls. For deep as is the poetry of
the inland woods, the Spirit of Romance, if there at all, is there in
hiding. In order for that Spirit to come forth and take captive the soul
something else is wanted; howsoever thick and green the trees—howsoever
bright and winding the streams—a magical glimmer of sea-light far or near
must shine through the branches as they wave.
That this should be a new experience to so fine a poet as Rossetti was no
doubt strange, but so it chanced to be. He whose talk at Kelmscott had
been of ‘Blessed Damozels’ and ‘Roman Widows’ and the like, talked now of
the wanderings of Ulysses, of ‘The Ancient Mariner,’ of ‘Sir Patrick
Spens,’ and even of ‘Arthur Gordon Pym’ and ‘Allan Gordon.’ And on
hearing a friend recite some tentative verses on a great naval battle, he
looked about for sea subjects too; and it was now, and not later, as is
generally supposed, that he really thought of the subject of ‘The White
Ship,’ a subject apparently so alien from his genius. Every evening he
used to take walks on the beach for miles and miles, delighted with a
beauty that before had had no charms for him. Still, the ‘Astarte
Syriaca’ did progress, though slowly, and became the masterpiece that Mr.
W. M. Rossetti sets so high among his brother’s work.
“From Bognor my brother returned to his house in Cheyne Walk; and in
the summer he paid a visit to two of his kindest and most considerate
friends, Lord and Lady Mount-Temple, at their seat of Broadlands in
Hampshire. He executed there a portrait in chalks of Lady
Mount-Temple. He went on also with the picture of ‘The Blessed
Damozel.’ For the head of an infant angel which appears in the front
of this picture he made drawings from two children—one being the baby
of the Rev. H. C. Hawtrey, and the other a workhouse infant. The
former sketch was presented to the parents of the child and the
latter to Lady Mount-Temple; and the head with its wings, was painted
on to the canvas at Broadlands.”
Mr. W. M. Rossetti omits to mention that the landscape which forms the
predella to ‘The Blessed Damozel,’ a river winding in a peculiarly
tortuous course through the cedars and other wide-spread trees of an
English park, was taken from the scenery of Broadlands—that fairyland of
soft beauty which lived in his memory as it must needs live in the memory
of every one who has once known it. But the wonder is that such a mass
of solid material has been compressed into so small a space.
Mr. W. M. Rossetti’s paraphrase of ‘The House of Life’—done with so much
admiration of his brother’s genius and affection for his memory—touches
upon a question relating to poetic art which has been raised
before—raised in connexion with prose renderings of Homer, Sophocles, and
Dante: Are poetry and prose so closely related in method that one can
ever be adequately turned into the other? Schiller no doubt wrote his
dramas in prose and then turned them into rhetorical verse; but then
there are those who affirm that Schiller’s rhetorical verse is scarcely
poetry. The importance of the question will be seen when we call to mind
that if such a transmutation of form were possible, translations of
poetry would be possible; for though, owing to the tyrannous demands of
form, the verse of one language can never be translated into the verse of
another, it can always be rendered in the prose of another, only it then
ceases to be poetry.
That the intellectual, and even to some extent the emotional, substance
of a poem can be seized and covered by a prose translation is seen in
Prof. Jebb’s rendering of the ‘Œdipus Rex’; but, as we have before
remarked, the fundamental difference between imaginative prose and poetry
is that, while the one must be informed with intellectual life and
emotional life, the other has to be informed with both these kinds of
life, and with another life beyond these—rhythmic life. Now, if we
wished to show that rhythmic life is in poetry the most important of all,
our example would, we think, be Mr. W. M. Rossetti’s prose paraphrase of
his brother’s sonnets. The obstacles against the adequate turning of
poetry into prose can be best understood by considering the obstacles
against the adequate turning of prose into poetry. Prose notes tracing
out the course of the future poem may, no doubt, be made, and usefully
made, by the poet (as Wordsworth said in an admirable letter to Gillies),
unless, indeed, the notes form too elaborate an attempt at a full prose
expression of the subject-matter, in which case, so soon as the poet
tries to rise on his winged words, his wingless words are likely to act
as a dead weight. For this reason, when Wordsworth said that the prose
notes should be brief, he might almost as well have gone on to say that
in expression they should be slovenly. This at least may be said, that
the moment the language of the prose note is so “adequate” and rich that
it seems to be what Wordsworth would call the natural “incarnation of the
thought,” the poet’s imagination, if it escapes at all from the chains of
the prose expression, escapes with great difficulty. An instance of this
occurred in Rossetti’s own experience.
During one of those seaside rambles alluded to above, while he was
watching with some friends the billows tumbling in beneath the wintry
moon, some one, perhaps Rossetti himself, directed attention to the
peculiar effect of the moon’s disc reflected in the white surf, and
compared it to fire in snow. Rossetti, struck with the picturesqueness
of the comparison, made there and then an elaborate prose note of it in
one of the diminutive pocket-books that he was in the habit of carrying
in the capacious pocket of his waistcoat. Years afterwards—shortly
before his death, in fact—when he came to write ‘The King’s Tragedy,’
remembering this note, he thought he could find an excellent place for it
in the scene where the king meets the Spae wife on the seashore and
listens to her prophecies of doom. But he was at once confronted by this
obstacle: so elaborately had the image of the moon reflected in the surf
been rendered in the prose note—so entirely did the prose matter seem to
be the inevitable and the final incarnation of the thought—that it
appeared impossible to escape from it into the movement and the diction
proper to poetry. It was only after much labour—a labour greater than he
had given to all the previous stanzas combined—that he succeeded in
freeing himself from the fetters of the prose, and in painting the
picture in these words:—
That eve was clenched for a boding storm
’Neath a toilsome moon half seen;
The cloud stooped low and the surf rose high;
And where there was a line of sky,
Wild wings loomed dark between.
* * * *
’Twas then the moon sailed clear of the rack
On high on her hollow dome;
And still as aloft with hoary crest
Each clamorous wave rang home,
Like fire in snow the moonlight blazed
Amid the champing foam.
And the remark was then made to him with regard to Coleridge’s
‘Wanderings of Cain,’ that it is not unlikely the matchless fragment
given in Coleridge’s poems might have passed nearer towards completion,
or at least towards the completion of the first part, had it not been for
those elaborate and beautiful prose notes which he has left behind.
And if the attempt to turn prose into poetry is hopeless, the attempt to
turn poetry into prose is no less so, and for a like reason—that of the
immense difficulty of passing from the movement natural to one mood into
the movement natural to another. And this criticism applies especially
to the poetry of Rossetti, which produces so many of its best effects by
means not of logical statement, but of the music and suggestive richness
of rhythmical language. That Rossetti did on some occasions, when told
that his sonnets were unintelligible, talk about making such a paraphrase
himself is indisputable, because Mr. Fairfax Murray say that he heard him
say so. But indisputable also is many another saying of Rossetti’s,
equally ill-considered and equally impracticable. That he ever seriously
thought of doing so is most unlikely.