RECOLLECTIONS OF DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI.* A POET - PAINTER whose claims to
greatness on the ground of actual achievements in either art are sufficiently balanced to make us doubt for a moment on which side his true greatness: lies, is so rare a combination, that we welcome with eager curio- sity any book which promises to give us knowledge of such a man, and•to help us to understand his character. We naturally imagine that the mental gifts required for such twofold use must have been of strange diversity and richness, or that the circumstances, at least, must have been exceptional which, instead of bringing the gifts required in the one art into full play, and leaving the others to bear fruit in accom- plishments only, admitted of the full and even develop- ment of both. Clearly, Mr. Hall Caine, in giving us these " Recollections . of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, interwoven with * Recollection* of atete Gebri l Rossetti. By T. Hall Caine. London.: Mot Rook.,
letters and criticisms," has chosen a good subject. We thank him for his book. It is marked by sympathy with genius, and a certain rightness of feeling in poetical matters ; but it is injured by many a clumsy and ill-constructed sentence, due, perhaps, to unwise haste, which makes us wonder that Mr. Caine has not had more regard for his credit as a . critic and writer of English prose. His intercourse with Rossetti, epistolary and personal, extended over a period of between three and four years. A lecture delivered in Liverpool, in which he had de- fended him agaiust the charge of being a poet of the " assthetio class," was the origin of a correspondence. This was continued until, in the autumn of 1880, personal acquaintance began. In 1881 he became Rossetti's housemate, and he was one of the few friends who were with him when he died. It will be seen that the most interesting part of Rossetti's life, his days of vigorous health, work, and influence, did not come within Mr. Caine's per- sonal knowledge. A short summary of it is given, as he says, " for the elucidation of subsequent records."
Dante Gabriel, or as the names are given by some, Gabriel Charles Rossetti, was born in 1828. He was the eldest son of an Italian poet and political refugee, who had only escaped the vengeance of his Sovereign, Ferdinand I., of Naples, by being smuggled out of his hiding-place, in disguise, by Sir Graham Moore, the Admiral in command of the English Fleet then lying in the bay. It is pleasant to think of an English Admiral at Naples doing' so good a deed. An uncle on the mother's side was the Dr. Polidori who will be remembered as Byron's physician, and as one of the group who engaged in the creation of rival romances on ghostly subjects. Byron and Shelley dropped out of the contest, but Mrs. Shelley pro- duced her Frankenstein. and Dr. Polidori his Vampyre. The young Rossetti took to verse-writing, and that of the epic sort, by instinct at a wonderfully early age. Painting, however, was chosen as his craft, and he became a student in the Royal Academy, but did not pass beyond the antique school. The world has morel fast since the day when the renewal of Art life which is commonly called Pre-Raphaelitism divided studios into hostile camps, shook Academies, and finally did its work of reinvigorating English Art. Whatever great men were practising painting among us in 1848, the year of Rossetti's studentship, it may truly be said that the general character which then prevailed in all things plastic, graphic, monumental, and ornamental, was one of serene deadness, so far as any exercise of imagination was concerned. What formal prettiness, what lifeless colour, the ideal picture of those days would seem to offer to us now ! The success of the revolt against this reign of dullness which was begun in 1849 by a few students, with Holman Hunt, Millais, and Rossetti for leaders, and aided soon afterwards by the powerful alliance of Ruskin, was almost as swift and decisive as Tel-el-Kebir itself. It must be owned, if we bring retrospective criticism to bear on some of the pictures of the brotherhood over which the battle once raged. so fiercely, that this victory was gained at some points by startling, as well as brilliant means. Rossetti's picture exhibited about this time, one of the very few which he ever did exhibit, was called " The Girlhood. of Mary Virgin." We have heard it described by an artist of sympathetic leanings as a marvel of hard and thinly-rigid painting, looking as if everything—figures, dress, leaves of books—were all cut out of one, and that not the noblest of metals. But Rossetti, although destined to supply so large a share of intellectual power to the movemen4, was then far behind some other Pre-Raphaelites in mastery of the art of painting. Yet already, and before he was nineteen years of age, he had written what we hold to be one of his most beautiful poems, "The Blessed Damozel." It was first published in the Germ, the Pre-Raphaelite magazine, any one of the four numbers of which, for its life rau no further, is now so valuable a curiosity ; and afterwards in the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, which likewise soon exhausted itself. We do not wonder, as we look back, at the delight—we might almost say, the tumult of acclaim, among the younger members of the set—with which the poem was received by the art-revivalists. It is a medimval picture, with a perfectly clear, material setting and background, translated into verse of rare sweetness, so as to convey a vision of pure and undying love. As Rossetti himself said, in a conversation with Mr. Caine—it was a reversal of the conditions of Poe's " Raven "—" Poe had done the utmost it was possible to do with the grief of the lover on earth. He determined to give utterance to the yearnings of the loved one in heaven." And very near, and capable of vivid
delineation, is the heaven from which the loved one looks dowtr on her lover on earth, and sighs for the reunion which shall know no severance ; but the magic of the verse, and the com- plete harmony of the whole, keep our dream unbroken, and our medimval paradise, with its deep-toned, twilight calm, all unquestioned. Tho artistic nature, we know, is• complex be- yond any other; but we can easily understand that to the author of such a poem as this, the charge of belonging to a school of poetry which entirely ignored the spiritual element (" The Fleshly School," it was called, but we detest the name)' must have been cruel indeed. Of course, revolt against Philistia has its dangers. It may easily be pushed too far. Indeed, Mr. Caine tells us that Rossetti himself once owned to him that on one occasion, from sheer perversity, or, at best, for amusement, he had made the late Dean Stanley (no Philistine, he !) aghast with horror at his reckless talk. But we should as soon think of classing Coleridge himself among the poets with whom the religious instinct was weak or wanting, as Rossetti. His reply to Mr. Caine, on receiving a copy of the lecture already mentioned, shows that he "claimed for the im- pulses which influenced his poetry a noble origin," and was grateful in the highest degree to any one who spoke up for him in this regard. If intensity of passion, sensuousness, dramatic force, are strong characteristics of his poetry, it is certain that the sense of eeriness—of the supernatural, and more than all, of sorrow dogging sin—finds magnificent expression there also.
We must admit that to us Rossetti is greater as a poet than as a painter. His poetry was due to an innate gift, of which he could not have forborne the exercise. It was otherwise, we hold, with his painting. His own account, as repotted by Mr. Caine, of his method of work, would lead us to suspect, if we were not persuaded differently by our own eyes, that his pic- tures were not the fine things they are. Mr. Caine asked if his work usually took much out of him, in physioal energy ? " Not my painting," ho replied ; "though in early years it tormented me more than enough. Now I paint by a set of unwritten, but clearly defined rules, which I could teach to any man as sys- tematically as you could teach arithmetic." This is really enough to make us feel as if one or two Academicians who really had genius might be right, after all, in refusing to be persuaded that Rossetti's pictures deserved rapturous admiration for their colouring, if for nothing else, One of them was a colourist of the highest order, who most probably would have declare() himself innocent of any rule, but that which is naturally the simplest and the readiest of all to a hand-worker. Rossetti must have been thinking of some of the very first steps in the process of colouring, for in the last steps, it is hard for us to conceive a true colourist insensible to the delightful ex- citement of undefined risks and of triumph only just secured, which belongs to the highest refinement of his art. Or perhaps Rossetti, as Turner is said to have done, thought it was all work together, and prided himself only on the poetical intention. Many of his drawings, more especially the smaller ones, fascinate us by the power with which the poetical energy is stamped upon. them,—the elevation of thought which expresses itself in every symbol, so frankly used, and by the splendour, or richness, or lurid quality of the colour, which is the perfect counterpart of the dominant feeling. Others, on the contrary, repel us by discordant colour-notes which, to ourselves at least, make no imaginative appeal ; while his larger pictures seem often, to us, wanting in unity of colour-impression. Truth to nature, in the ordinary sense, had little or nothing to do with his creations. Symbolism stood to him in the relation of natural fact to other artists. If a flame-coloured dress was, symbolically, the proper vesture of Love in a picture, there the mass of flame-colour must be, and no natural shadow or texture need interfere much with its brilliancy.
The marvel of Rossetti's twofold greatness becomes less, when we see how completely, if we put technicalities aside, his mental, activity was in both arts one and the same. In both, his world of thought was one over which lay, as it were, the manifold colours and transparent gloom of a magnificent cathedral window. Naturally, he had uo love for the clear light of Wordsworth's world, and, as he himself said, grudged him every vote he got. Mr. Caine's book is interesting as an outline of the biography of a man of genius, but we wait with much • interest for the work of an older friend, with deeper insight and more complete knowledge.
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