FRIENDSHIP WITH RUSKIN.--MARRIAGE,
AND DEATH OF MRS. ROSSETTI
With the year 1854 Rossetti's life entered upon a new phase. This
was the first year of his memorable connection with Ruskin. At the
same time he had by now engaged himself to marry Miss Siddal, whose
companionship and whose health became, for the next eight years, the
most absorbing facts in his private life. To speak of Ruskin first,
his was no ordinary friendship, but a curious combination of patron,
friend, and mentor. If Rossetti had been a common man, living an
ordinary life and working on regular lines, such a connection would
have been, as he jocularly described it once, "in a way to make his
fortune." For Ruskin was willing to buy within certain limits almost
everything that Rossetti produced. Furthermore, having taken a great
fancy to Miss Siddal, and admiring her poetic and artistic gifts,
which had grown in a remarkable way under Rossetti's tuition, he
tried to make an arrangement whereby he should purchase all her work
also, and there is no doubt that Ruskin's help at this critical
period was invaluable, and that without it the young couple would
have suffered even more struggling times than they did. For Rossetti
was hopelessly unthrifty, flush of money one day, out-at-elbows the
next, and invariably anticipating any money to be earned from
commissions. The Ruskin letters which have been published, throw an
interesting light upon this butterfly existence.
Before passing from the subject of Ruskin it is interesting to note
that he enlisted Rossetti as an active helper in the scheme promoted
by Frederic Denison Maurice for bringing art into the East end. His
method of teaching has been described by one who attended his
lectures. He began at once with colour. As in his own personality
and his own work, light and shade, drawing, and everything else was
subservient to colour. Without troubling about the grammar of design
he gave his pupils nature to copy and showed them how to copy it. A
later generation has come to see wisdom in Rossetti's method, and has
introduced it successfully under government auspices in elementary
schools.
In 1860 Rossetti and Miss Siddal carried out their long projected
plans of matrimony, which had been delayed by the latter's illness,
by uncertain prospects, and perhaps also by a final want of
resolution on Rossetti's part.
The marriage took place on May 23rd, and the young couple went for
their wedding trip to Paris and Boulogne. On their return the rooms
at Chatham Place were extended by opening a door into the adjoining
house. The independent bachelor habits to which both were accustomed
made life as Bohemian and irregular after marriage as before it. Men
friends came and went as they pleased; tavern dinners relieved the
strain of studio work, and little if any respect was paid to the
conventions of social intercourse. Mrs. Rossetti's delicate health
alone made it impossible for her to go about much, except amongst
devoted and intimate friends, the chief of whom in these days perhaps
were Algernon Charles Swinburne and the Madox Brown and Morris
families. In May, 1861, Mrs. Rossetti gave birth to a child,
still-born, and her slow recovery, added to the phthisical troubles
with which she was afflicted, induced a severe and wearing form of
neuralgia. For this she was prescribed laudanum, of which, on the
night of February 10, 1862, she unhappily took an overdose. Poor
Rossetti, on returning home from the Working Men's College, where he
had been lecturing, found his wife already past recovery, and,
frantic with anxiety, rushed off to Highgate Rise to summon the
ever-ready assistance of Madox Brown. The following morning she
died, after but two years of married life clouded with illness; and
for a time at least her loss deprived Rossetti of all capacity for
work and almost of all interest in his art. The most touching event
in his whole career of swift and flame-like emotions is the sudden
impulse which led him, as his wife's coffin was being closed, to bury
in her hair the drafts of all his early poems, which at her request
he had copied into a little book. Only a poet could put into words
the dramatic intensity of grief which was expressed in this now
historic sacrifice to the memory of Rossetti's dead wife.