Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 848
* It should be remembered that Rossetti from his having exhibited practically no pictures, had very generally escaped contact with the particular worlds of art and letters in which parochial criticisms do abound. The abuse of the Pre-Raphaelites had been too egregious to make anyone wince or leave any sore withers. It had besides been comparatively impersonal.
It is the more pitiable in that his sunny generosity of character was, perhaps, his most perfect expression of himself, more complete than either of his arts with their undefined boundaries. And that a man of his temperament should be brought to see a hostile mob in a crowd come out for a fairing; to hear in the whistle of a blackbird the signals of ambushed spies and scoffers; that, in fact, suspicion should become an exaggerated part of his mental scheme, is tragedy as nearly as may be in this world.
Rossetti, in fact, was unstinted in his givings of all that he had; of his money, his sympathies, his enthusiasms. He expected unstinted givings from those he came in contact with. And, as a rule, he found what he expected. The friends he had were very many and very good — one says that he had a magnetic personality. “What a supreme man is Rossetti!” Philip Marston wrote to Oliver Madox Brown. “Why is he not some great exiled king, that we might give our lives in trying to restore him to his kingdom?” And this was the sort of feeling and saying that Rossetti inspired all his life through. It was, because Rossetti’s own human sympathies were so boundless; because he was ready to take any man at his own value — and to idealise him to boot; because, in fact, he was Romantic.
Romanticism, of course, has its qualifying defects; your Romantics look at things in a convex mirror, as it were, and see the world with a strong character of its own but out of focus. It has been said that one of its perilsis that those under the glamour are apt to tire. Mr Ruskin, for instance, had by this date very definitely tired of Rossetti. Another salient instance is that of Mr William Bell Scott, who remained throughout Rossetti’s life his excellent good friend, loyal, helpful and always hospitable. But when Mr Scott came to write his memoirs the reaction had already set in, had perhaps reached a pitch of violence that called for re-reaction. Rossetti is then written of with a bitter twist that one would have liked to see straightened out. A friend who never “rounded on” Rossetti was Madox Brown, to whose, on the whole, sane and undying affection, the present writer can very intimately testify — whose almost last words were... “But Gabriel was a genius!” Another qualifying defect of a Romantic friendship is, as has been said, the tendency of one friend to spur another to sympathetic efforts, to encourage him to exaggerate. Something of these tendencies in Rossetti’s art-work has already been said. The Pre-Raphaelites had encouraged him towards Primitive methods; Ruskin towards Florentinism; Morris and his friends towards Decorativism. Madox Brown probably always incited him towards intellectual or “literary” painting — towards pictures, that is, more or less definitely anecdotic. On the other hand Madox Brown’s advice in matters of pure painting, of proportion and composition was almost always sane, practical, and founded on real knowledge. He was, on the whole, outside the family, Rossetti’s best friend.* Mr
* Mr William Rossetti in his “Letters and Memoirs of D. G. R.,” says: “Most of his friends, myself included, combated these ideas” [i e. Rossetti’s belief in a conspiracy], “I question whether his closest confidant Madox Brown did so with adequate energy, for he himself, though reasonable and clear-headed, was of a very suspicious temper in professional matters.” If it be the fact that Brown did aggravate Rossetti’s case — and the present writer is not concerned to deny it — it is merely a definite proof the more that Rossetti’s friends, good friends as they were, did encourage him to exaggerations of tendencies of his that happened to be in sympathy with their own. Madox Brown’s suspicions were, however, entirely professional — i e he believed that other painters, principally Royal Academicians, did not go out of their way to do him good turns and even “ran him down.” He certainly vigorously combated Rossetti’s fantastic delusions — such as that the British Government was engaged in a conspiracy to hound Rossetti to suicide.
and Mrs Morris remained firm friends of Rossetti. They shared with him at first Kelmscott Manor near Lechlade in the early seventies.
Very much the same of good and ill may be said of Rossetti’s literary friendships. These included in early days Coventry Patmore, the Brownings, and to a less extent Tennyson. In the early sixties he housed, at Cheyne Walk, with Mr Meredith (whose more precise personal “tastes comparatively soon made him abandon the experiment, but who none the less really liked Rossetti), and with Mr Swinburne, who remained his most fervid friend and admirer. Later, in 1873, came Mr Theodore Watts, without whose practical friendship and advice, and without whose literary aids and sustenance, life would have been from thenceforth an impracticable affair for Rossetti. Then came the “Pre-Raphaelite” poets like Philip Marston, O’Shaughnessy, and B. V. Afterwards there came a whole host of young men like Mr William Sharp who were serious admirers, and to-day are in their places or are dead or forgotten; others like Mr Hall Caine, who for a long time was practically Rossetti’s attendant; and others again who came for the “pickings.” They were all more or less enthusiasts.
To all this there remain the drawbacks. It is sufficiently obvious that neither Mr Swinburne nor Mr Watts were wanting in the critical faculty (Mr Watts indeed was at times more than exigent in matters of verse). But both poets were too much in sympathy with Rossetti to be very coldly critical, and a certain amount of adversity would have been probably chastening to Rossetti as a poet. From most of the others, at any rate, Rossetti got very much more applause than criticism. It was inevitable in the relationships of young, romantic men with one already more than eminent and glamorous. The temper of those who wished him to be a great king that they might lay down their lives for him must of necessity have been the reverse of chastening.
Rossetti left a large body of original poetry of a kind that stands alone in English literature It has a great luxuriance, an impulse, a great importance. Its appearance may be said to have altered the aspect of the modern literary field — to have enlarged its bounds. It is, as a whole, almost purely sensual — as opposed to purely intellectual. And, in its impulse, it is purely natural. It is, in fact, a thing for which there was room.
Its most radical defects are entirely technical ones; the most salient a simple want of selection, a too great profusion. There are, so to speak, too much of sweetness, too many jewels. And these jewels are contrasted with passages of comparatively threadbare work in a way that seems incomprehensible but that is really open enough to explanation.
In the “White Ship,” for instance, there are whole tens of verses that are merely rhymed chronicle—” King Henry of England’s realm was he and Henry Duke of Normandy.” *
* It should be pointed out that “The White Ship” was one of Rossetti’s last works and that in it he was aiming at simplicity of narration, under the advice of Mr Theodore Watts. In this he was undoubtedly on the right track and the “rhymed chronicle” might have disappeared had Rossetti lived long enough to revise the poem as sedulously as he did his earlier work — and to revise it with the knowledge of narrative-technique that the greater part of the poem shows was coming to be his. He would, for instance, have realised that the old ballads that have really “ survived” always open definitely with a scene or incident and take it for granted that the hearer knew who was King of England or why ships happened to be going from France to England.
The ballad might have begun at line thirty-one, or even, if considered as pure poetry, with the starting of the White Ship from the harbour mouth. Yet it is worth reading a long way to come to —
“And the ship was gone and the crowd was gone,
And the deep shuddered and the moon shone.”
If only, in fact, Rossetti could have lived to look upon his verses with a cold eye, disillusioned of enthusiasms and with the keen knife of the surgeon and the great courage to cut!
Directly opposed to this we have, say, the first sonnet of the “House of Life”—” Love Enthroned.” Here such an idea as —
“And Fame whose loud wings fan the ashen Past To signal fires...
a wonderful enough jewel surely, is robbed of all its effect by being bedded in jewelled images and lost in a catalogue of pictures of Abstract Ideas. And there is the same tendency all through the “House of Life” — the discounting of things really and brilliantly seen, with images willed to complete by analogy the literary idea. What in fact could be more beautiful than —
“On this sweet bank your head thrice sweet and dear
I lay, and spread your hair on either side,
And see the new-born wood-flowers bashful-eyed
Look through the golden tresses here and there.
On these debateable borders of the year
Spring’s foot half falters....”
But it comes after a great deal of forcing of ideas and images that will not carry conviction. This arose very much from the desire to leave nothing to the imagination; from a desire to be clear, in fact. [Thus the Beryl Songs were introduced as explanations, pure and simple, into the ballad of “Rose Mary.”] Yet an immense part of the technique and of the charm of poetry is in the fact that it is suggestive — lies in a contrast of clear statement with reticence. That is selection. Upon the whole, “Jenny” is the most satisfying of Rossetti’s works as a poet, probably because it is the most directly observed and less consciously “felt-poetic.” And upon the whole the best and most vital of all Rossetti’s moral-drawings, the most dispassionate and most surprisingly-flashed piece of observation is contained in the lines —
“How Jenny’s clock ticks on the shelf!
Might not the dial scorn itself
That has such hours to register?”
There is very much of the ironic, subtle, and true aspects of life written in these three lines.{1} Rossetti, in fact, could see very straight and very keenly.
This may bring us at once back to the question of Rossetti’s later paintings. The
Veronica Veronese, a work full of charm, was painted in 1872. It, according to Mr William Rossetti, “embodies some of Rossetti’s more abstract ideas as to the relation between Nature and Art.” Mr William Sharp offers with the material he worked in. His metrical ear was full of such lines as —
* With regard to the actual English, the Chromatics, the Phonetic Zyzygy, the choice of words and the non-musical quality of Rossetti’s verse, a great deal might be said that would be out of place in a monograph upon Rossetti’s art. The following points do however throw some light upon Rossetti’s temperament. Condemning Rossetti’s shorter poems for their lack of lyrical quality, in words accepted by Rossetti himself, Dr Franz Hueffer said : “ The poet is supposed to utter his individual feelings ; and our faith in the genuineness of those feelings is somewhat severely shaken if we find that they are clad in a mode of expression which a poet of Dante age might have used if he had been able to read Shake’s pear” This is true as far as it goes, but the trouble is deeper seated still. One might write the language of Shakespear and have the Dantesque temperament to-day, without any serious trouble. Christina Rossetti did it, in fact, and the technical qualities of her best verse place her very far above her brother, above indeed almost any modern poet. A poet must trouble himself about the metrical sound, about the vowel and consonantal sounds, about the exact sense and application, of the words he uses. To produce a perfect poem he must take care that each word that he uses is the right word in all these particulars. If he do that it matters very little what be his temperament ; whether his vocabulary be that of Shakespear or that of a private in a modern line regiment. Rossetti neglected both metrical fitness and the justness of his word-meanings in the attempt to be always sonorous. The “just” word and the “musical” word was almost always sacrificed to the long word fitted to be read ore rotundo.
This very probably arose, if the matter be worth pursuing, in part from the very fact that Rossetti was not English ; that he was not entirely acquainted lines containing effects and vowel-sounds that it is simply hopeless to attempt to render in English. And without doubt, too, as regards their meanings, Italianate words had for him special meanings and special associations which influenced him in his choice. [One observes, for instance, a similar, but different kind of influence in Mr Swinburne’s Roundels where look and sound are alike purely French.] It is too early in the day to do more than point out these tendencies, perhaps. The English language is an instrument so malleable that there is no reason to proclaim them radically and essentially wrong. It is, in fact, as essentially wrong to attempt to use none but Anglo-Saxon words. And Rossetti, as a poet, is still too near us for one to try to estimate how much or how little these purely technical defects will ultimately affect the important position that his “ poetic temperament” has won for him.
“Guardami ben, ben son, ben son Beatrice” —
a spirited account of an anecdote which the picture is supposed to be founded upon.
What the picture itself shows is a very charming woman listening to a canary. She has an abstracted expression and her hands are occupied with a violin and a bow, as if she were trying to catch the keynote of the bird’s song. The success of the picture is undoubtedly in the listener’s expression, which is observed and caught. The hands and arms are mannered and as such are not convincing. Similar in attempt and success is the Ghirlandata, another wonderfully charming picture, which in 1873 practically succeeded the Veronica. Here again the expression of a girl’s head is the mainly valuable point. She has at hand a harp and is going either to sing or to play from memory. The keen way in which these transitory and definite expressions are unerringly fixed, show the real significance of Rossetti as an artist to-day. Similar in feeling is the Roman Widow, a fine pastel of 1874. It is notable, as an indication, that the lady is simply not Roman-classical in type at all.
More or less contemporary with these is the
Proserpine, which as a rendering of a very fine woman of a certain type in a place lit from afar by daylight is a very wonderful piece of work. As a physical impression she is somewhat markedly “Rossettian”; specialised, that is, and in pose a little exaggerated. But these things must be allowed to any and every artist. What is most distinctly worthy of remark is the disproportionate size of the right hand. Rossetti, with a perfectly truly observed idea, used his figures’ hands to emphasise their characters, their moods. And it was here, his draughtsmanship being uncertain, and his sense of proportion never very trained, that his particular form of intellectual mysticism and moral didacticism generally found its Nemesis in the later years.
Rossetti continued painting more or less irregularly for some seven years more, but his powers for one reason and another declined rather rapidly. It would perhaps be more correct to say that his level of excellence fluctuated much, but with a generally downward trend.
* The version here spoken of is the third painting that of 1873-4. There were several other replicas. One may say that his most satisfactory subsequent works were several very individual and convincing portraits in pastel; those of Mr Watts-Dunton, Mrs Stillman, and the double portrait of his mother and Christina may be taken as examples of a very high level. Of large pictures, the Bower Meadow, the background of which had been painted at Sevenoaks in 1849, is one of the tenderest and most charming. The Sea Spell is a brilliant piece of work which does not fit its title. One or two like the Astarte Syriaca, the Mnemonyse, and the last, Salutation of Beatrice show distressing signs of failing powers.
In 1881 Rossetti completed the large oil replica of the Dante s Dream, and published his “Ballads and Sonnets.” In 1882 he died at Birchington.
CHAPTER IX
Rossetti has been dead twenty years, but the time has not yet come when it may be possible to “place” him even as approximately as we can place the other dead of twenty years ago and less. His death, as far as the public is concerned, was only his birth as an artist. He had exhibited practically no pictures, and his fame had been a matter almost purely of rumour. Then the Royal Academy made an Old Master of him, and exhibited a rather “scratch” collection of his pictures, badly hung and representative only of his later works. Since then other exhibitions have given opportunities for seeing him piecemeal, and his fame probably stands higher than it ever did. He has, in fact, been alive nearly twenty years, having been dead in the flesh as many.
His influence upon the Nation is probably large and is felt in unexpected places. Men, under it, often enough choose their wives; ladies who look “like Rossetti’s” even to-day stand a very excellent chance of getting married on the strength of that and little else. Such things “count” — and what is more, they count towards an ultimate reaction, because the Poetry of to-day is only too often the sentimentality of to-morrow, the Book of Beauty of to-day only too inevitably the trunk-lining of the immediate future. What then is to be the lot of Rossetti’s fame and influence?
The Critic’s is after all the saddest lot of mortal man; to him, more than to any other, are revealed the fallibility of men’s judgments, the futility of men’s efforts. He must strive to discover Principles, knowing always too well that the Principles of To-day are the fallacies of To-morrow; that he himself is a speck in the immensity of To-day, and To-day itself but a particle in the infinite actions and reactions of Tastes, of Time, of Mankind. Confronted by a To-day that has unanimously enough accepted what Rossetti did; by a Today that without much thought has accepted what Rossetti thought he stood for; the Critic’s easiest subterfuge is to say: To-morrow there will be a reaction. To-morrow there will be a reaction. It becomes one’s task to say what that reaction will be. It has been forcibly put already, that Rossetti — who at one time was “honoured among painters as a painter and among poets as a poet” — was “an amateur who failed in two Arts.” It is true. Yet it hardly harms Rossetti or touches his standing. On the contrary it defines* both very brilliantly. Because, in the infinite scale of things, there is room enough for the amateur — for the man whose love for his art transcends his technical abilities. Every age does not lay the same stress on “technique.” The eighteenth century demanded an excellent technique from its poets, and the eighteenth century is very dead. And the small word “failed” is a small word and little more to artists who are for ever going on until they give over a game that must be lost. Every artist when confronted by the immensities of Art which is Life must confess to failure.* And failure is a thing very relative.
