ROSSETTI AND HIS FRIENDS
Of a life so desultory, fragmentary rather, it is useless to keep the
chronology. At no period of it have I been able to direct it with
primary reference to pecuniary considerations, nor have I ever
succeeded in anything I undertook with primary reference to pecuniary
return. My impulses, erratic or otherwise, have always been too strong
for a coherent and well subordinated career, and the aimlessness of my
early life, favored by the indulgence of my brother and the fondness
of my mother, might well account for a life without a practical aim or
gain. It is too near its end for regrets or reparation--so that if
it ends well it will be well, but it is hardly fitted for systematic
record.
During the two years between my leaving Crete and Athens and my second
marriage I spent the larger part of my life in London, engaged in
literary pursuits and in fugitive work. I prepared the history of the
Cretan insurrection, but the dissolution of the publishing company
which undertook it left the actual publication to Henry Holt & Co. in
1874. All interest in the subject having long lapsed, it was hardly
noticed, and was as a publication a complete failure, but I sent
copies of it to some English friends who were interested in Greek
affairs, and amongst others to Professor Max Müller, who made an
extended review of it for the "Times," which had on my subsequent
career an important influence. During the time I spent in England I
naturally saw a great deal of the Rossettis, especially of Dante, with
whom I became intimate. He lived in Cheyne Walk, and I in Percy Street
near by, so that there were few days of which a part was not spent
with him. I had made in America, about 1856 or 1857, the acquaintance
of Mme. Bodichon, an Englishwoman married to a French physician, who
is equally well known by her maiden name, Barbara Leigh-Smith, a
landscape painter of remarkable force, and one of the most delightful
and remarkable Englishwomen I have ever been privileged to know. When
I knew her in America, she had taken an interest in my painting, which
she regarded as promising a successful career, and when I came to
England, I renewed the acquaintance. As the spring came on, she
offered me for a few weeks her house at Robertsbridge, a charming
cottage in the midst of woodland, and with her consent I asked
Rossetti to share it with me.
Rossetti was then in the beginning of the morbid attacks which
some time later destroyed his health completely. He was sleepless,
excitable, and possessed by the monomania of persecution. His family
had tried to induce him to go away for a change, but the morbid
condition made him unwilling to do so, and he never left his house
until late in the evening, under the prepossession of being watched by
enemies. I recommended him to try chloral, then a nearly new remedy
which I had used by prescription with excellent effect for my own
sleeplessness, and which I always carried with me. I gave him twenty
grains dissolved in water to be taken at three doses, but, as he
forgot it on the first two nights, he took the whole on the third, and
complained to me the next day that it made him sleep stupidly for a
few hours, and then made him so wakeful that he was worse than without
it, so that he refused to make any further experiment with it, nor did
he at that time, and as long as we remained in touch with each other,
venture another trial of it. At a subsequent time, taking it on the
prescription of a physician, he fell into the habit of using it to his
great injury, from the want of self-control in the employment of it.
At the time I am writing of, I succeeded in getting him away from
London to stay for a long visit at Robertsbridge, where the quiet and
long daily walks in the woodland, a simple life and freedom from
all causes of excitement, rapidly brought him back to his natural
condition, and he resumed work, doing some of his best drawings there,
and completing his poems for publication. Indeed, several of the poems
in his first volume were written there. Sleep returned, and health,
with cessation of all the morbid symptoms, the result of overwork
and night work, for he used at Cheyne Walk to begin painting in the
afternoon, and, lighting a huge gasalier on a standard near his easel,
keep at his drawing far into the night, sleeping late the next day. At
Robertsbridge he returned to natural habits, having no gas and falling
in with my hours perforce, as otherwise he had no company.
And Rossetti was one of the men most dependent on companionship I have
ever known. When not at work he needed some one to talk with, and in
our long walks he unfolded his life to me as he probably never did
to any other man, for he had a frank egotism which made him see
everything and everybody purely in their relation to him. And in these
circumstances he and I were, after a manner, the only people in our
world. As he himself said, "In this Sussex desert one tells all his
secrets," and I doubt if even in his own family he ever threw off
reserve so completely as with me in the solitude of Robertsbridge,
where he was very happy and very well.
Rossetti's was one of the most fascinating characters I ever knew,
open and expansive, and, when well, he had a vein of most delightful
talk of the things which interested him, mostly those which pertained
to art and poetry, the circle of his friends and his and their poetry
and painting. To him, art was the dominant interest of existence, not
only of his own, but of existence _per se_, and he tolerated nothing
that sacrificed it to material or purely intellectual subjects. I
remember his indignation at the death of Mrs. Wells, the wife of the
Royal Academician, herself a talented painter, who died in childbed,
"a great artist sacrificed to bringing more kids into the world, as if
there were not other women just fit for that!" he exclaimed; and when
Regnault was killed in the sortie from Paris, he burst out in an angry
protest at this throwing away valuable lives like Regnault's in a
stupid war. The artist was to him the _ultima ratio_ of humanity, and
he used to say frankly that artists had nothing to do with morality,
and practically, but in a gentle and benevolent way, he made that the
guiding principle of his conduct. Whatever was to his hand was made
for his use, and when we went into the house at Robertsbridge he at
once took the place of master of the house, as if he had invited me,
rather than the converse, going through the rooms to select, and
saying, "I will take this," of those which suited him best, and "You
may have that" of those he had no fancy for.
He was the spoiled child of his genius and of the large world of his
admirers; there was no vanity about him, and no exaggeration of his
own abilities, but other people, even artists whom he appreciated,
were of merely relative importance to him. He declined to put himself
in comparison with any of his contemporaries, though he admitted his
deficiencies as compared to the great Venetians, and repeatedly said
that if he had been taught to paint in a great school he would have
been a better painter, which was, no doubt, the truth; for, as he
admitted, he had not yet learned the true method of painting. He
refused to exhibit in the annual exhibitions, whether of the Academy
or other, not because he feared the comparison with other modern
painters, but because he was indifferent to it, though I have heard
him say that he would be glad to exhibit his pictures with those of
the old masters, as they would teach him something about his own. Like
every other really great artist, he had a very just appreciation of
the work of other men, and his criticisms were, _me judice_, very
sound and broad from the point of view of art; the only painter of any
note I ever heard him speak of with strong dislike was Brett, whom he
could not tolerate. But he had a higher opinion of his own natural
abilities than of his actual achievement,--his self-appreciation was
not the conceit of a man who understood only what he himself did, but
a full consciousness of what at his best he would be capable of doing
and hoped to do before he died. In my opinion he understood himself
and his merits justly, but he was to himself the centre of his own
system; other stars might be as great, and probably there were many
such, but they were remote, and judged in perspective.
He was undoubtedly the most gifted of his generation of artists, not
only in England, where art is, if not exotic, at least sporadic, but
in Europe, and I consider that if he had been of Titian's time he
would have been one of the greatest of the Venetians. His imaginative
force and intensity were extraordinary, and some of the elaborate
compositions he drew in pen and ink, for future painting, are as
remarkable in invention and dramatic feeling as anything I know in
art, and all drawn without a model. The "Hector," the "Hamlet and
Ophelia," the "Magdalene at the door of Simon the Pharisee," are
designs of unsurpassed power, eminent in all the great qualities of
design, harmony of line, invention, and dramatic intensity. His early
work had all the purity and intensity of feeling of the primitive
Italians, and the designs alluded to are of a little later period and
of his highest imaginative activity. Had he always maintained the
elevation of that period he would have done more and better work,
but he fell into irregularities of life which wasted his powers and
destroyed the precious exaltation of his early art. The sensuous
quality of his painting, the harmony of color and the play of it, like
the same qualities in his poetry, remained as long as I knew anything
of his life, but his drawing and even his intellectual powers fell off
through his unsystematic, excessive demands on them, night work and
overwork. In his later years his work was nearly always more or less
jaded, his eye failing in the perception of forms, as has so often
been the case in even the greatest painters in their decay.
No doubt chloral was ultimately one of the agencies of his
prostration, though not of his death, but he did not have recourse to
it until his power of recuperation from overwork had begun to fail;
and, when he had become accustomed to the effect of the chloral, he
took it as the means of a form of intoxication, a form well understood
by those who have had any experience, personal or by observation, in
the use of the drug. The craving for this intoxicant, once it becomes
a habit, is, like the use of morphia, invincible, and Rossetti
indulged in it to such an extent that he used to take the original
prescription to several druggists to obtain a quantity that one would
not have given him. The crisis came long after my close personal
relations with him had ceased, and I had become only an occasional
correspondent, living in Italy. But to make his decline the
consequence of the use of chloral, even when it was finally become
habitual, as some do, is absurd. It had been prescribed for him by a
competent physician, because some remedy for his malady had become
necessary. Even before I had recommended his first experiment with it
he had been incapacitated from work by sleeplessness, and was in
a very precarious condition of nerves and brain, and, though he
recovered at Robertsbridge a comparative health, so that he was
enabled to do some of his best work, his return to London, and
gradually to his old habits of life and work, ultimately reproduced
the old symptoms.
During the earlier days of the return of the malady I was in London
again and saw a great deal of him, was witness to his having become
subject to illusions, and heard his declarations that he was beset
by enemies and that he continually heard them in an adjoining room
conspiring to attack him, and he attributed the savage criticism of
Buchanan on his volume of poems to his being in the conspiracy to ruin
him. The attack of Buchanan had a most disastrous effect on his mind.
It was the first time that Rossetti had experienced the brutalities of
criticism, and his sensitiveness was excessive. No reassurance had
any effect; he had heard, he declared, the voices of those who had
combined to ruin his reputation discussing the measures they were
going to take, and it was evident that it had become a mania closely
resembling insanity. Buchanan's criticism had a rancor and breath of
personality in it which had no excuse; it was a savage, wanton attack
on the poet which he felt not only as poet and artist but as personal;
for, to Rossetti, the two were the silver and golden sides of the
shield. Though the morbid state was there, I think that the article
of Buchanan had more to do with the intensification of the mania of
persecution than anything else that occurred. And at that time he had
not yet contracted the habit of taking chloral.
In the diary of Ford Madox Brown, published by William Rossetti, there
is an amusing story of Dante's keeping Brown's overcoat, and keeping
the room needed for other occupants, with the unconscious oblivion of
any other convenience than his own, which was quite characteristic of
the man, and which was shown on a larger scale at Robertsbridge. He
not only took possession of whatever part of the house pleased him
best, but, without in the least consulting me, he invited his friends
to come and occupy it. As the agreement was that we should pay share
and share alike of the expense, and as I invited no one, the burden
on me was out of all proportion to our respective means. Rossetti's
income, according to his own statement, was, at that time, £3000 a
year, but he was always in debt. He denied himself nothing that struck
his fancy, and he had the most costly Oriental porcelain in London,
and the most beautiful old furniture to be found, and the most
princely disregard of expenditure. I had finally to refuse to continue
the life in common. Dante invited Mr. and Mrs. Ford Madox Brown, and
then Mr. and Mrs. Morris, and as they were all excellent friends of
mine I could make no objection, though ill able to bear my share of
the expense of the ménage incurred, and finally I broke away, leaving
him in possession, with Madame Bodichon's consent. He was generous to
the same degree of extravagance that he was indifferent to the claims
of others; he made no more account of giving you a treasured curio
than he did of taking it. His was a sublime and childlike egotism
which simply ignored obligations until, by chance, they were made
legal, at which, when it happened, he protested like a spoiled child.
And he had been so spoiled by all his friends and exercised such a
fascination on all around him, that no one rebelled at being treated
in his princely way, for it was only with his friends that he used it.
He dominated all who had the least sympathy with him or his genius.
Had Rossetti's knowledge of the technique of painting, its science,
been equal to his feeling for it, he had certainly founded a school of
the truest art; but, for schools, the grammar is the first requisite,
and Rossetti had himself never been taught what he would have had
to teach. His feeling for color was on a par with his power of
composition, and it seems to me that since Tintoret no one has equaled
him in the combination. Of modern men, I know only Baron Leys and
Delacroix who possessed to the same degree the power of spontaneous,
harmonious composition, except Turner in landscape; all other modern
art has, to my mind, more or less of the _pose plastique_, the air of
the _tableau vivant_. His death, at a time when he should have been
at the height of his powers, a premature victim of his undisciplined
temperament and the irregularities it led him into, coupled with the
over-intense mental vivacity, equally undisciplined, is one of the
most melancholy incidents in the chaotic artistic movement of our
time.
Ford Madox Brown, who was his first master, and is commonly considered
to have exercised a great influence on Rossetti, in my opinion had
none that was permanent. He was Rossetti's antithesis, and in
himself as inconsequent as Rossetti was logical. He was severely and
uncompromisingly rationalistic; with the conscience of a Puritan he
was an absolute skeptic, with a profound contempt for all religious
matters, while Rossetti, with all his irregularities, never could
escape from his religious feeling, which was the part of his
constitution he possessed in common with his sisters. Brown had, of
the purely artistic qualities, only the academic; he was neither a
colorist nor a great draughtsman; his art was literary, didactic, and,
except for occasional dramatic passages, unemotional and unpoetic. The
predominance of the intellectual powers in him was so great that the
purely artistic view of nature was impossible to him; and his artistic
education, while curiously erratic and short-sighted in its elementary
and technical stage, was intellectually large in academic and literary
qualities, and comprehensive. It appears to me that the telling of
the story was, in his estimation, the highest office of art, so
that, while his drawing was bad in style, his execution scrappy
and amateurish and deficient in breadth and subordination, his
compositions were often masterly, fine in conception, and harmonious
in line, in the pen-and-ink study; but the want of _ensemble_ and the
insubordination of the insistent detail generally made his work less
imposing when it was on canvas than in the first study. His habit of
finishing from corner to corner, without having the whole work broadly
laid out before him to guide him in the proper subordination of the
details to the general effect, made it impossible for him to make
his pictures broad and effective. His most successful pictures were,
therefore, the small ones, in which the impossibility of too much
insistence on detail proved an advantage.
I shall always regard Brown as a man carried by a youthful enthusiasm
for art out of his true occupation, which was history; for his
literary and scientific tendencies and his vehement love of truth were
the larger part of his mind, and these qualities are of secondary
importance in art. He sympathized strongly with the early phase of the
pre-Raphaelite movement, which was what he had attempted with less
intensity himself; but when Rossetti entered upon his true artistic
development, it was only the personal influence of the past that gave
the elder painter any power of influencing the younger. It is possible
that Rossetti owed something of his manner of painting--a fragmentary
method of completion--to the teaching of Brown; if so, he was indebted
to his friend for the weakest side of his art. But, for the rest, this
system of working is very general amongst English painters, in whom
the amateur is persistent--the building the picture up in detail,
with minor reference to the mass of the structure; and this was the
weakness of Brown's art, for what he did was done with such intensity
that no after treatment could bring it into complete subordination to
the general effect. Theodore Rousseau's maxim, "If you have not got
your picture in the first five lines you will never get it," seems to
me the true golden rule of the art of painting, as in all creation. A
picture should grow _pari passu_ in all its parts; otherwise there is
no certainty of its keeping together when finished.
Rossetti's influence, though always partial and never leaving a
genuine pupil, was very wide, in the end, it seems to me, much
exceeding that of Millais and that of Holman Hunt; but it is a
question in which of his two functions--poet or painter--it was most
effective. I have heard Swinburne say that but for Rossetti's early
poetry he would never have written verses, but this I think must be
taken conditionally. Swinburne has the poetic temperament so decided
and so individual, and his musical quality is so exalted, that it was
impossible that he should not have shown it at some time; but it is
possible that Rossetti furnished the spark that actually kindled the
fire. Perhaps Swinburne himself cannot trace the vein to its hidden
sources, and confounded the mastery of Rossetti's temperament and the
personal magnetism he exercised on those who came into close relations
with him with an intellectual stimulus which, strictly speaking,
Rossetti did not exercise. He was too specialized, too exclusively
artistic in all his developments, to carry much intellectual weight,
and Swinburne was more fully developed in the purely intellectual man;
but the warmest friendship existed between them. I often saw Swinburne
at Cheyne Walk, and, when they were together, the painter's was
certainly the dominant personality, to which Swinburne's attitude was
that of an affectionate younger brother.
One day Rossetti had invited us all to dinner, and when we went down
to the drawing-room there was great exhilaration, Swinburne leading
the fun. Morris was, as usual, very serious, and, in discussing some
subject of conversation, Swinburne began to chaff and tease him, and
finally gave him a vigorous thrust in the stomach, which sent him
backwards into a high wardrobe, on the outer corners of which stood
Rossetti's two favorite blue and white hawthorn jars, a pair unrivaled
in London, for which he had paid several hundred pounds each. The
wardrobe yielded and down came the jars. I caught one, and Morris,
I believe, the other, as it was falling on his head. Rossetti was
naturally angry, and, for the first and only time in my experience of
him, lost control of his temper, bursting out on the culprit with a
torrent of abuse which cooled the hilarity of the poet instantly, and
reduced him to decorum with the promptness of a wet bath. To hear
Swinburne read his own poetry was a treat, and this I enjoyed several
times at Rossetti's; the terrible sonnets on Napoleon III. after
Sedan, amongst the readings, being the most memorable and effective.
The influence of Rossetti on Morris and Burne-Jones is unquestionable,
and they probably both owed their embarking in an artistic career to
the stimulus given by the advent of a purely artistic nature which
set a new light in their firmament. The little we have of Morris's
painting shows only that he had the gift, but his own appreciation of
his work was too modest to encourage him to face the strain of going
through the necessary education, made more difficult by his want of
early training, even of the imperfect and incorrect kind against
which Rossetti had so successfully had to make his way to a correct
conception of his art. On the whole, I consider Morris to have been
the largest all-round man of the group, not merely on account of the
diversity of his faculties, for he had in his composition a measure,
greater or less, of most of the gifts which go to make up the
intellectual man and artist, but because he had, in addition to those,
a largeness and nobility of nature, a magnanimity and generosity,
which rarely enter into the character of the artist; and perhaps the
reason why his gifts were not more highly developed was that his
estimation of them was so modest. His facility in versification led
him to diffuseness in his poems, and the modest estimation in which he
held his work, when done, was a discouragement to the _limae labor_ so
necessary to perfection. He told me that he had written eight hundred
lines of one of his tales in one night, but at the same time he
regretted that he could not invent a plot, though the exquisite manner
in which he carried out the old plots which have been the common
property of poets since poetry existed in the form of tales is honor
enough.
But in the feeling for pure decoration, which is the essential element
in art, in the universality of his application of it, and the high
excellence to which he brought it in each branch to which he devoted
himself, I doubt if Morris has had a rival in our day; and I am
inclined to think that in the default of an early education in art,
such as the great Italian painters received, we lost one of the
greatest artists who have ever lived. For with the high degree in
which he possessed taste, technical abilities never fully developed in
work, and exquisite feeling for color and invention in design, he had
the large human mould which would have made his work majestic beyond
that of any of his great contemporaries and co-workers. He remained,
owing to the late discovery of himself and the poor opinion of his
abilities, only a large sketch of what his completed self would
have been. He had that full, sensuous vitality which Madox Brown so
completely lacked to his great injury, without the excess of it which
was so treacherous with Rossetti. Mr. Mackail's recent life of Morris
does great injustice to Rossetti without in any way exalting his
friend, for Rossetti always urged Morris to follow his artistic
tendencies with the largest and most liberal encouragement and
appreciation, and all the stimulus derivable from a most exalted
opinion of his native abilities. Rossetti would have set everybody to
painting, I think, for, in his opinion, it was the only occupation
worth living for, and he was absolutely free from personal jealousy.
Of Burne-Jones I saw little in those days. He was still working out
his artistic problem, and came now and then to the studio of Rossetti,
who had the highest opinion of his abilities. And, taking art in its
special function, that of the decorator, there can hardly be a dispute
as to his rank amongst the greatest of romantic designers of the
centuries following that of Giotto. His fertility of invention was
very great; and, considering that his studies began at a period which
for most artists would have been too late for the acquisition of
technical excellence of a high degree, his attainment in that
direction was most remarkable. Entirely original, if that quality
could be predicated of any artist, he certainly was not, and he
borrowed of his predecessors to an immense extent, not slavishly but
adaptingly, and what he borrowed he proved a good right to, for he
used it with a high intelligence and to admirable effect. It seems to
me that though he added little or nothing to the resources of art, as
Rossetti undoubtedly did, he employed the precedents of past art, and
especially of the Italian renaissance, to better effect than any other
artist of our epoch; and, in borrowing as he did, he only followed the
example of most of the great old masters, who used material of any
kind found in their predecessors' works, in perfectly good conscience.
His industry was prodigious, and his devotion to art supreme.