BOOKS

A brutish band of brothers

Bevis Hillier

PRE-RAPHAELITES IN LOVE by Gay Daly

Collins, f15, pp.468 magazine for the newly-founded British Museum Society (a 'Friends' organisation).

What should it be called? The obvious title was Colonnade. This suggested both col-

umns of type and the classical colonnade of Robert Smirke's museum building. ('Wipe that silly Smirke off your façade this minute!') But I found that this ideal title had already been bagged by the museum's internal Civil Service magazine. So we ended up with something boringly called The British Museum Society Bulletin, though it did have, on the back cover, pin-ups of girls who worked in the museum.

Gay Daly must have felt similarly frus- trated and pipped at the post when, mid- way through her researches for this book, Jan Marsh brought out a book called

Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood (Quartet, 1985). It was so much the obvious title for a book about the womenfolk of the Pre-

Raphaelite Brotherhood — the group of artists founded in 1848 and led by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais. Gay Daly was

left with the Nancy Mitfordish title Pre- Raphaelites in Love. In a sporting, not to

say gushing, footnote, she pays tribute to her rival:

While I was writing this book, a marvelous volume that focuses specifically on the lives of the Pre-Raphaelite wives and models was published . . . The quality and range of Dr Marsh's research are truly impressive, and her book is fascinating. Readers who want to know more about these women and their relationships with the artists will want to read it.

Clearly, one could not consider Daly's book without a sidelong glance at Marsh's.

A very crude estimate might be that Marsh's is a feminist book, while Daly's is feminine. In common, perhaps, with most Victorian men, the Pre-Raphaelite paint- ers treated women atrociously. When Rossetti met the 'refined shopgirl' Lizzie Siddal, he 'felt his destiny was defined' (his words — has there been a better précis of falling in love?) Yet Daly admits to a 'small

ungenerous seed of suspicion' that when Lizzie was dying, Rossetti's 'love for her was now bound inextricably to the prospect of her death' — 'the tragedy of losing his beloved would provide the stuff of great art, the raw material he needed, even craved.' His attitude reminds one of Tru-

man Capote's waiting eagerly for the young murderers he had befriended to be electrocuted so that In Cold Blood could appear. Lizzie's death may well have been hastened by Millais's callousness in leaving

her in a bathtub of freezing water while he painted her as the drowned Ophelia. Her hands and feet 'shriveled like prunes', she was chilled to the bone and contracted pneumonia. Her father threatened to sue Millais for £150 damages; only after five months of threats and correspondence did Millais agree to settle the doctors' bills, which came to just over £30.

Rossetti 'oozed self-reproach' about Liz- zie, but for years delayed marrying her. He borrowed money for a marriage licence but did not buy one. He allowed her to feel that 'her failure to marry was in some way her fault' — that she had not made the required social grade. When, just before he did finally marry her at Hastings, he told his brother of his fears for her life, 'all his fears were for himself,' Daly suggests. 'He was worried about the effect her death would have on him; a marriage would mean that he wouldn't have "so much to reproach myself with".' Lizzie became a laudanum addict. Daly is fair enough to concede that Oscar Wilde's story about the couple could be a tall one ('. . . that Lizzie had acted silly at dinner and that Gabriel, losing patience, had thrust her into a cab, taken her home, and pressed the bottle of laudanum into her hands, shrieking "Take the lot!" ').

Then of course there was the disgusting melodramatic scene, of which Ken Russell made inevitable capital in one of his early films, of Rossetti's having Lizzie's corpse dug up to retrieve the poems he had buried with her. (`Please, ma'am, may I have my ballad back?') Her hair, which had con- tinued to grow, filled the coffin, shining red and gold. For once, reality outstripped Rossetti's artistic fantasies — all those yearning women with goitrous necks and lips like pneumatic tyres left out in the rain. (Daly writes of 'the great composite face that he would churn out in the 1860s and 70s'.) In addition, Rossetti carried on a long affair with William Morris's wife Jane. We should never be too censorious about other people's love lives (All's fair, etc.), and possibly Morris, as Daly claims, took a masochistic pleasure in knowing Rossetti was sleeping with Jane; but it is under- standable that Morris was eventually 'pre- pared to admit that beneath his veneer of generosity and patience, he had suffered grievously and had grown to detest the friend who had stolen his wife'.

Holman Hunt was another brute. On a trip to Cairo in 1854, he visited a brothel. Finding the prostitutes scarred and gap- toothed, 'I took one by the neck . . . and gently hurled her on to the floor for having attempted to intercept my passage to the door.' He would not marry his beautiful barmaid girlfriend Annie Miller because he 'feared that she would drag him down'. He made arrangements with a Mrs Bramah to teach Annie elocution and deportment. He sent Mrs Brahmah firm directives: Annie must use a handkerchief instead of her sleeve to blow her nose, and she must begin wearing underclothes and change them every day.

The Pygmalion treatment didn't do the trick.

Claiming that she hadn't made sufficient progress in her studies to make a proper wife, he admonished her to redouble her efforts. Annie, abashed and hurt, didn't know what to say.

Hunt married Fanny Waugh (a kinswoman of Evelyn) instead. When she was preg- nant, he was too mean to hire a profession- al model and made Fanny pose for him until she was too weak to stand — then he painted her lying in bed. Still pregnant, she meekly agreed to go to the Middle East with him. She died soon after the child was born. Daly writes:

Standing in a twisted posture so that her husband could paint her may have exhausted her to the point that she had no reserves with which to fight the infection that ravaged her body . . . Mr Waugh [Fanny's father] was sick at heart. If he had not let Fanny marry such a wilful, selfish man, if he had put his foot down and forbidden her to leave the country, an English doctor might have known how to save her.

Hunt then married his deceased wife's sister Edith — a relationship which then amounted to incest in the view of the law. (They had to marry on the Continent.) She became a social outcast, like the `Scapegoat' Hunt had painted on the Dead Sea shore in 1855. Her parents cut her off without a penny. A Mrs Durham who continued to receive her felt she needed to tell her other friends when Edith was going to be present. One of them replied: `My dear Mrs Durham, of course I should be civil to anyone I met in your house. But really she is a concubine.'

Hunt can hardly be blamed for what Edith suffered from the benighted social attitudes of Victorian England; and he lobbied (with eventual success) against the law which prohibited marriage with de- ceased wives' sisters. But he behaved towards her almost as badly as towards Fanny. Long after she had confessed her infatuation with him, he kept her waiting — and then, Daly suggests, married her only as a convenience, `a generous, hard- working woman to care for him and his boy'.

Millais was sexually insatiable. In 1855 he married Effie Ruskin, whose marriage to the art critic had been annulled. Ruskin was an easy act to follow: he was impotent, or `stoneless', as the painter Ford Madox Brown termed it in his diary. But Mary Lutyens, in Millais and the Ruskin (1967) suggested that

Millais's dread of the honeymoon was very understandable for he, like Ruskin, was almost certainly a virgin, and the thought of Ruskin's failure must have increased his own nervousness a thousandfold.

Daly does not take up this notion in her book, though she quotes some revealing letters which show Millais's agitated state. As Lutyens observes, 'All seems to have gone well . . .'. Effie was constantly preg- nant. Millais was 'occasionally apologetic about his needs,' Daly writes, `but always consistent'. When Effie was away nursing her sick mother, he wrote from London, complaining that he was in agony and unable to work:

I don't think I can properly wait until my picture is done. My hands tremble so I can scarcely write . . . I am past all control. Tell me when I might come, and I would come with the small picture and paint there . . . You mustn't be upset . . .

In these circumstances, what the Victor- ians knew about birth-control is relevant, and Daly treats us to mini-lectures on the subject which sort oddly with parfaits knights and blessed damozels (`By the 1870s vulcanisation of rubber had made condoms more widely available . . .'). She points out the frequency of courtship as a Pre-Raphaelite subject: courtship was more attractive than marriage, which brought pregnancies, hard work and a need for more money. Edward Burne-Jones's figures usually look as if they have been recently drained by a peckish vampire — but there was nothing anaemic about his love life. He was a terrible old goat. Married to the rarefied, intellectual Georgiana Mac- donald, he had a big fling with his model Maria Zambaco, a redhead with `almost phosphorescent white skin'. `Georgie' found out, and Daly thinks she was meant to. Burne-Jones was also selfish in wanting to keep his daughter unmarried and near him: the Sleeping Beauty theme had a special attraction for him, and he wrote to Lady Leighton-Warren to ask for `the fattest thorn bushes' from her garden `thick as a wrist and with long, horrible spikes' — to put in his Briar Rose series.

Morris gets bonus marks for having said

Nor do I consider a man a socialist at all who is not prepared to admit the equality of women. Also that as long as women are compelled to marry for a livelihood real marriage is an exception and prostitution or legalised rape the rule.

So Morris's nastinesses are tactfully glos- sed over by Daly:

It has been argued that Morris's violent temper was largely responsible for the cou- ple's estrangement, that it must have been difficult for Jane to live with someone who might put his fist through a door or throw a pot of stew out of the window. But these outbursts were tempests of the moment, sudden surges of fury, with no grudge carried.

Daly, however, also relays the comment of Morris's biographer J. W. Mackail, that the painter was sometimes guilty of `almost supernatural rudeness'.

A morally dubious group of men, then; and one can imagine what mincemeat would be made out of them by a common- or-garden feminist such as Margaret Wal- ters (The Nude Male, 1978), or even by a far more intelligent feminist, such as Ger- maine Greer. Jan Marsh is much harder on the Pre-Raphaelite men than Daly is. Marsh's is altogether the more scholarly and analytical treatment, but I must sheepishly admit that I found Daly's a more relaxing read. It is a series of stories of fractured love, told with more of the art of Barbara Cartland than of Nancy Mit- ford. Holman Hunt was `thrilled when he had painted the last thorn in Christ's crown'; Hunt's `wavy dark blond hair made a lovely contrast with his violet eyes'; and he `no doubt' chose lavender doeskin trousers for his first wedding `to match his eyes' (a bizarre speculation). But, like Cartland, Daly knows how to tell a story. She also keeps an open mind.

At the end of the book, she admits that she started with some preconceptions. She assumed that many of the Pre-Raph mod- els wanted to be artists; she found that, in general, that was wrong. `To insist that these women wanted work of their own is to impose our consciousness on theirs.' (Maybe the `want' itself atrophied through social oppression?) Also, Daly expected to find 'little but emotional carnage'; instead, she was amazed to discover 'how often these men and women did touch and delight and amuse each other, despite their problems and illnesses and the endless anxiety of creation.' But Daly does not hide from us the frustration that a Pre- Raphaelite woman could feel. Georgie Burne-Jones, discussing a book of fairy tales which she and Lizzie Siddal planned to write and illustrate together, but which never came to pass, observed:

It is pathetic to think how we women longed to keep pace with the men, and how gladly they kept us by them until their pace quickened and we had to fall behind.

Daly quietly notes: 'Not "fell behind", but "had to fall behind".'

It is irritating that a book on a group of British artists, published by Collins in England, should be spattered with horrid Americanisms. I can just about take °prog- ram', `cozy', 'meager', 'honored', 'accouterments', `marvelous', `worshiping' and `somber'. But surely a merciful sub- editor could have got rid of `a cute snub nose' (Hunt's); 'Henry Newman converted to Roman Catholicism in 1845' (sounds like something to do with rugger); 'The Rudyard Kiplings bought a house'; `Geor- gie broke up when he asked . . .' (meaning she burst out laughing); and `She may have gotten wind of the threat'. And, talking of cute snub noses, this book perpetuates one of the most grotesque misprints in Western literature — about the young woman who found Hunt to be a

very genial, young-looking creature, with a large yellow beard, clear blue laughing eyes, a nose with a little messy upward turn on it, and dimples in the cheek . . .

Hunt may not have kept his nose clean metaphorically, but the word intended is `merry'.