Raphaelites' post
Benny Green Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Jane Morris: Their Correspondence edited hY John Bryson and Janet Camp Troxell (Oxford University Press £7.50)
Exactly how illicit was the illicit affair between Janey Morris and Dante Gabriel Rossetti? Rossetti of course made a mYstery out of it, but then that cabbalistically inclined gentleman made a mystery out of everything. What is clear a hundred years later is that for all their efforts to shield themselves from adverse publicity, the two lovers might just as well have inserted an advertisement acknowledging their mutual fascination in the personal columns of The Times. All their circle knew what was going °°. Even Morris knew, and acquiesced. Historians and biographers have been burrowing ever since, scrutinising the laundry lists of the Pre-Raphaelites in an attempt to tidy everything up. No note is so prosaic that it cannot give birth to innumerable footnotes; no letter is so non-committal that it cannot inspire at least three contradictory theses. Now we get a book about Dante Gabriel and Janey entitled Their Correspondence. It is not quite that. Much of the correspondence has been lost or was destroyed. What is left is very nearly a Dante Gabriel Monologue, with a few brief interpolations from Janey. Reading the letters in that form, °Pe is left with an unfortunate impression °fa nagging suitor whose remonstrances fall O n deaf ears.
Dante Gabriel wrote to others freely enough about the passionate kisses he had exchanged with his friend's wife, but no hint of such fleshy pursuits is ever allowed to s,hadow the pages of his letters to the lady aerself. Instead we get interminable shoptalk, notes on the market prices of the Paintings Janey has sat for, gossip about the cik°11Bs of fellow-artists, detailed reports of !rift this or that canvas is coming along. here are letters about the desirability of this or that item of real estate, fragments of Poetry which Dante Gabriel has written, rePorts on the poor unfortunate animals hich languished through disgraceful neglect in the Rossetti household, but almost n°thing about love. Had Mr. Bell anticiated himself by a few years and bestowed t °cm the Pre-Raphaelites the benison of the elePhone, I doubt if half these letters would have been written at all. And yet there is one aspect of the colieteticm which very cruelly, and, let us admit almost comically, sums up the predicaient of the two lovers. Never have I read so en der a chronicle so bursting with illness egvnd minor disease. Neuralgia throbs on cry Page; lumbago stabs at every para graph; sciatica strikes in every line. People languish on sofas, are too weak to write long letters, go away for their health, exchange medicines, discuss bread pudding cures, lose weight, have headaches, and generally give the impression of being so utterly wretched the whole time as to suggest that perhaps, after all, those doom-laden portraits which the Pre-Raphaelites inflicted on each other are something approaching the truth. There is little doubt that Janey's indispositions were at least partly psychosomatic:they certainly bear the hallmark of such complaints, which is that nobody is ever sure exactly what they are. A recent biographer of William Morris refers to Janey's 'indefinite ailments'. Rossetti, who had once achieved a precarious balance between the sacred and the profane in his own nature by sponsoring Lizzie Siddal and Fanny Cornforth simultaneously, was a born hypochondriac, and a man who appears to have cherished best of all the Dantesque love that is unattainable.
Janey, one suspects, had a great deal more common sense than the whole crew put together; considering the violent change in her situation once she was married to Morris, she coped remarkably well, and her .brief notes to Rossetti sound less theatrical, less egocentric, less neurotic. On the few occasions Rossetti passes a judgment on somebody else, the result is comically disastrous: 'a French idiot named Manet, who certainly must be the greatest and most conceited ass who ever lived'. What did Rossetti have to offer that was an improvement on the greatest and most conceited ass? This:
Silence holds in one hand a branch of peach, the symbol used by the ancients; its fruit being held to resemble the human heart and its leaf the human tongue. With the other hand she draws together the veil enclosing the shrine in which she sits. Some love letter.
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