BOOKS OF THE DAY
The True Rossetti ?
Dante Gabriel Rossetti : His Friends and Enemies. By Helen Rossetti Angeli. (Hamish Hamilton. 15s.) THE reader of this book can appreciate the feelings of the unsus- pecting citizen who is suddenly snatched away from his ordinary pursuits for jury service in a case of great complexity. He arrives . perhaps late (this is an imaginary jury !), only just in time to hear Counsel for the Defence. He listens with growing interest to the arguments of an advocacy far too warm and eloquent to be pro- fessionally disinterested. A fascinating procession of witnesses passes before him to undergo skilful examination as best they may : Ford Madox Brown, Holman Hunt, Millais, Ruskin, William Morris, Meredith, Browning and many others. Women whose faces he has seen in the picture galleries stand one after the other in the witness- box to whisper their barely audible testimony : Lizzie Siddal, Jane Morris, Fanny Cornforth, Christina Rossetti. The whole strange " dated " Pre-Raphaelite -tapestry is unrolled with the object of con- vincing him that the man with the names of a poet and an archangel was not after all a beast and a devil. That is the matter for trial, the reputation of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, not primarily as painter or poet, but as a man.
How far an artist need have a reputation apart from his art, or for how long he needs it after his death, is a matter for con- sideration, but they are hardly apposite where a biography is written by a member of the family to whom the personal reputation of her kinsman is, naturally enough, of the greatest moment. Family piety, however, is only one of the motive forces inspiring a book which derives its real life from a sense of injustice and its sparkle from its thrusts against opponents and, in particular, against one special opponent.
Rossetti's behaviour, viewed from outside, offers so much for hostile criticism that it is not surprising that during and after his life there was a good deal of it. In the Contemporary Review of October, 187x, Thomas Maitland (alias Robert Buchanan) attacked the " fleshly school of poetry " from the point of view of an outraged moralist. The arguments were weak, but the shafts were expertly barbed. In the Victorian heyday it did not do to write poems evincing sym- pathetic knowledge of prostitutes (" Jenny "), or uninhibited joy in thalamic experiences ("Nuptial Sleep"), especially when they could be illustrated from a gallery of female portraits such as " Joli Coeur," " Belcolore " or " Bocca Baciata." It was difficult for many to recon- cile the " churchy " subjects of some pictures with the sensuous ladies who adorned them. What exactly was the meaning of those many brooding beauties who, under whatever pseudo-mystic titles, were all the wife of William Morris ? Then Rossetti despised the Academicians ; never exhibited ; was three-parts foreign ; and took drugs 1 It is on the whole surprising that he came off better in the reign of Queen Victoria than Byron in the reign of George III. It is not this type of criticism that is most resented by Mrs. Angeli,
although the prejudices from which it grew lie behind, and to some extent explain, the attitude of modern authors who "work up" a story out of a life that lends itself to scandalous treatment. Amongst these she considers Miss Violet Hunt one of the worst offenders against truth and decency in regard to Rossetti. To prove Miss Hunt wrong in her facts and wrong in her estimate of her uncle's character and motives she carefully considers his behaviour through- out his life and, in particular, his relations with his associates, both men and women. The result is a fascinating view of the artistic circles of that day and the most intimate study of Rossetti's character that we have seen. To pronounce a judgement on the controversial points at issue is not to be attempted in a short review, but it is easy to agree that Miss Hunt's The Wife of Rossetti should be moved from " biography " to "fiction" unless she could have substantiated the statements attacked by Mrs. Angeli. The most painful of these concerns the wording of the scrap of paper found pinned to the dead body of Lizzie Siddal, Rossetti's wife.
It is not, however, the polemical aspects of the book that will be most interesting to the ordinary reader, although without them it would have been different and probably less absorbing ; it is the revealing light thrown on the generation of artists and poets who revolted against the Sir Sloshuas of their time by one who can still remember many of them. They all live again, and despite the bio- graphies they wrote of one another, and the autobiographies they wrote of themselves, and the considerable library of books written since their day, one has the feeling that one had hardly understood them properly before. Mrs. Angeli pulls down the lay-figures and, forgoing the circumspection that had such a moderating effect on William Michael Rossetti as a historian, speaks from her heart, intensely concerned to give us a true idea of what these people were really like.
Rossetti himself emerges from these pages curiously aloof from all the pother. Until the chloral period he was not much worried by hostile criticism, and after that he was a sick man with delusions. He was an artist in a world of art. In a letter to Hall Caine he wrote: " My mind is a childish one, if to be isolated in Art is child's play." He had no interest in the plans for social betterment of Morris and his friends. Despite the material benefits he derived from Ruskin, he would not allow himself to be organised by that arch-planner. He minded his own business. His business was art, and in the long run he must stand or fall by that. E. R. VINCENT.
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