LETTERS TO THE EDITOR.
THE LIFE OF D. G. ROSSETTI.
[To TEN EDITOR or TIM • BPRCTAT0161 SIR, —In your review of Mr. W. M. Rossetti's memoirs of his brother, the following words occur :—" Mr. William Rossetti expresses regret that the task of writing his brother's biography should have fallen upon his shoulders, and not as was originally intended upon those of an old friend who had once seemed to be willing to undertake it."
If you will refer to the words in the preface to which allusion is here made, you will, I think, see that they are not intended to imply that I have abandoned the idea of writing upon the poet-painter, but merely that the idea of my joining my friend, Mr. W. M. Rossetti, in the book reviewed was aban- doned reluctantly by me. I still hope to fulfil my promise to D. G. Rossetti that I would, when the right time should come, give a picture of him as he appeared to a friend who loved him very dearly and had every reason to do so, a friend to whom, as Mr. Hall Caine eloquently says, "he unlocked the most sacred secrets of his heart." And I will here so far anticipate the account I hope to give of him as to eay that I shall be able, and honestly able, to paint a much more cheerful picture of him than any that has yet been painted.
All those who have written about him, including his brother, have written candidly and lovingly (except in one instance), but the fact is that for certain reasons which I shall be able to make clear when I come to write about him, it was impossible daring the latter period of Rossetti's life for them to see the more cheerful side of his character that was revealed to me, impossible for them to know what a delightful companion he was even at his worst moments. There were periods between 1872 and 1882 when, as I said in my article upon him in the "Encyclopaedia Britannica," he and I spent many hours together almost every day, and when he rarely saw even so affectionate a brother as Mr. W. M. Rossetti and so devoted a friend as Madox-Brown—when, in short, for many weeks at a stretch he saw scarcely any face but mine.
The truth is that there was in him a sort of wilfulness of the spoilt child, unreasonable, and to me unaccountable, which impelled him, except when alone with me, to assume that gloom and that air of the misanthrope which deceived even his brother. And the only excuse—if indeed there be one— for the distressing asperities which disfigure my old friend Bell Scott's mention of him in his autobiography is to be found in this fantastic whim, so painful to many a friend and so cruelly unjust to himself. Mr. William Roasetti's simple and noble passion for exactitude of statement may possibly have in some cases caused him to forget that in depicting a complex personality like that of his brother, any given fact should not be presented as isolated and all smooth
and round, bat as being only one among a thousand other facts whose function is to explain it, give it tone, and indeed largely govern it. Biography, however, is the most difficult of all forms of literary art, and Mr. W. M. Rossetti has given as a book that will be prized. Nevertheless, what he says about his brother's having a sharp eye for a bargain has actually, but perhaps inevitably, been so misunderstood in -some quarters that Rossetti, who was generosity incarnate, has been characterised as a man of mercenary impulses Why, among all the men I have ever known he was one of the most generous. He would give away what he needed for himself, and as to rivalry, he could take a more passionate interest in *is friends' work than ever he took in his own. All this, however, I shall set right some day, unless death should be so cruel as to close my mouth before the time has fully come for me to speak. This, indeed, is the only terror that death leas for me now.—I am, Sir, &c.,
THEODORE WATTS DI7NTON.
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