The trouble about forming an estimate as to the literary or aesthetic value of Rossetti the painter-poet was just Rossetti himself. There are, of course, many writers whose personalities have very much affected or very much obscured the merits or the defects of their work. Yesterday, as it were, we had Henley, the day before yesterday, FitzGerald, a hundred years ago or so, Dr Johnson. (As I have been very much hauled over the coals lately, for using dates figuratively, I should like to add that these dates are also used figuratively. I am, for instance, aware that Henley has been dead more than twenty-four hours, and FitzGerald more than forty-eight.) But Rossetti’s personality did not swamp his work, as did those of Johnson or the other two. Nobody really knew – in spite of the ham and egg story – whether he ate his meals with his waistcoat buttoned or unbuttoned. No one really had as clear an idea of him as they had even of Thackeray or of Dickens. (In the interests of strict accuracy I should like to add that when I say ‘no one had an idea of his personality’ I am speaking only figuratively. I do not mean to say that Miss Sidall, the servant at Red Lion Square, Mr W. M. Rossetti, Mr Watts-Dunton, or Mr Hall Caine, who served the poet-painter so faithfully – I do not mean to say that none of these gentlemen or ladies had a personal acquaintance with Rossetti.) But what I mean is that, during Rossetti’s life, the large body of his readers, the large body of those who never read him, the personages who formed public opinion, and the more numerous persons who tried to form public opinion – none of these persons had anything but the very haziest idea of what Rossetti the man really was. There was really an extraordinary buzz about his personality during the seventies and eighties – a romantic clamour. But since no one knew anything at all about the figure itself, the buzz and the clamour were extraordinarily vague. It was as if all these people were talking romantically about the equator. The imaginary line was certainly there, and there, romantically, Rossetti undoubtedly was, cloistered with Mr Watts-Dunton, or with Mr Hall Caine, as the case might be. But, in the popular estimation – in everybody’s estimation – Rossetti was just a solar myth, a golden vision, a sort of Holy Grail that the young poets of the seventies pursued, but seldom saw. And I think this romantic vacuum was extraordinarily good for the seventies. It meant that they had the feeling – that everybody had the feeling – that somewhere in the world there was a glorious, a romantic figure, cloistered up and praying for the poetry, the romance, and the finer things of this world. I think it was a good thing for the seventies, just as I think it is a good thing for me every now and then to remember that in the cloisters of Catholic Christianity there are, even today, a great many religious spending all their hours in just praying for the poor souls of all of us. (In the interest of accuracy I should like to add when I here write ‘all of us’, I am stating an exact and not a figurative fact.)
The edifying log-rolling by which in the seventies Rossetti’s poems were, very properly, forced into the hands of the public – the organized and efficient log-rolling was again worked with extreme decency. Rossetti’s poems were boomed – just as my works have been boomed, and just as the works of every writer of any position or merit must be boomed if he is to continue to live by his pen. But Rossetti’s poems were forced upon the public without his publishers, his friendly critics, or his uncritical friends calling in the aid of personalities. They decently let Rossetti alone. They did not ask anybody to buy the volume which contained ‘Jenny’ or the volume which contained ‘The White Ship’ because Rossetti wore eccentric trousers, collected postage stamps or disliked caviare. At that date he was hardly even celebrated in public places or weekly periodicals because, very sensibly, he desired to spread the fame of his beloved wife and so he took the manuscript of his poems out of her coffin, where in his first grief at her loss he had placed them. No, none of the energetic gentlemen who boomed this poet-artist tried to do it by means of sarcophagic details. They did their work decently, talking only of the glorious sonority of the polysyllabic lines, of the romance, of the tenderness, of the splendour, of the morbidness, of the high moral purpose, of the mystic inner meaning that were contained in ‘The Stream’s Secret’, in ‘Sister Helen’, in ‘The King’s Tragedy’, or in all those glamorous poems with the golden haze around them.
And so for every one the personality of Rossetti became the personality that is expressed in his poems, and in the very few pictures of his that had really been seen. According to what was our idea of the personally poetic (again in the interests of accuracy I should like to add that here I am employing a purely figurative modesty when I write ‘our’, for of course I knew what Rossetti was like) – according to what was our ideal of a poetic personality, so we vaguely imagined Rossetti in the seventies – all we young writers, young painters, middle-aged merchants, royal princesses, peers, and bankers, all we unimportant persons who so enthusiastically blazed abroad the Rossetti legend. We imagined him as well-fleshed, bearded, or with ascetically scraped lean features; we imagined him hollow-eyed, or with the perpetual tolerant smile of Shakespeare. But we had not the least idea of what he looked like. (Again in the interests of accuracy I should like to add that this does not represent my state of mind during the seventies, and that during that period I was not either a peer of a royal princess, either a merchant prince or a banker. I was not even a young writer. No, at the end of the seventies I was a child of seven. But I have been trying to identify myself with the spirit of that age.) Of course there was the reverse of the medal. The other day I was travelling from Nauheim to Frankfort. There got into my carriage an elderly pepper-and-salt bearded, well-brushed gentleman with a strong North-country burr. He revealed himself in conversation as a survival of the merchant princes of the seventies. He had kept himself alive by taking the waters of Nauheim yearly, and by constantly consulting a Frankfort physician about his gout. In short, he was a keen, sensible Lancashire man. He began to talk about George Rae, the Leatharts, the Grahams, the Leylands, about many picture buyers and about many picture bargains. He related how, cheque-book in hand, he had gone into the studios of Royal Academicians and had bought off their easels unfinished pictures which he had afterwards sold at greatly advanced prices. He was a keen business man, and talking to him was delightful to me. I seemed to hear in his voice the accents of all those dead and gone merchant princes and picture buyers. Yes, it was a voice from the past. And suddenly he said: ‘Now there was Rossetti! What a warm man Rossetti might have been if he had not wasted his talents in those extravagant dissipations!’
And this again was the dear old voice of the seventies. My North-country friend was uttering the pleasing remarks that he had heard in the studios of Academicians when he went to buy pictures. And he spoke of Rossetti with a sort of sincere regret exactly as he would have done of a friend of his who had not made all that he might have done out of an iron foundry with excellent prospects inherited from his father. He gave me other horrid details of Rossetti’s career and habits (they were all of them quite untrue, and most of them quite impossible). Yet this gentleman had never seen Rossetti, had never read a word of his writings. He had never so much as read one of the innumerable biographies – not even Mr Hall Caine’s. No, he was just echoing the whispers of academic studios of the seventies.
And after Rossetti’s death the biographies began. They poured forth, official and unofficial, sending out smuts or deluges of whitewash. Frenchmen wrote them, Germans wrote them, Japanese wrote them; I wrote them, Mr Hall Caine wrote them, Mr Watts-Dunton did not write them, Mr William Rossetti did. For thirty years or so they poured from the press, nearly all of them exceedingly dull, nearly all of them misleadingly accurate in things that did not matter. For thirty years or so Rossetti’s figure was perpetually before the public, getting more and more pompous, more and more priestly, more and more like a German professor of the beautiful, growing duller and duller and duller, and at last he was dead. Last year he was as dead as a doornail. And that was a thousand pities, a triumph of obscuring pompousness over a man who was very great, and a poet who was very rare.
To get at the value of Rossetti the poet, as to get at the value of any original spirit, there is only one test. You have to ask yourself what you would be, what your mental development would have been, how your intimate self would have grown, if that man had never existed. And think of what we should all have been if Rossetti had never existed!
For, putting ethics and the technical criticism of art and letters for the moment aside, we have to consider that the real value of the work of Rossetti and his school was the preaching that the Arts are joyful and comfortable things – are things as joyful, as comfortable, and as natural as is the light of the sun. They are indeed the sunshine of the soul.
Think then, again, of what England would have been without the influence of Rossetti during these last thirty years. We should have been Prussianized, we should have been Americanized. No doubt it would have been a good thing had we paid more attention to the evolution of a cast-iron military class as they have done in Prussia, which began to grow so mighty about the time when Rossetti published his first volume of poems. No doubt we should have had a few still more and still richer men had we developed enormous industrial systems like that of the Standard Oil Company, which began its depredatory career about the time when Rossetti published his second volume of poems. But I do not know that we should have had a better England or a happier.
I do not mean, of course, to say that Rossetti, alone and unaided, repelled armed invasions from the Mark of Brandenburgh, or that he said to Mr Rockefeller ‘thus far and no farther’. But Rossetti was a great man. He was great in the exact sense of the word – for greatness in a writer, as in a statesman, as in a world conqueror, implies the power to voice great multitudes. A technically perfect artist may create characters that will live for ever and yet he may not be a great man. For a great man does not merely win battles or create characters – no, he creates frames of minds, he creates enthusiasms in great bodies of people. ‘Create’ is perhaps not exactly the just word. What he does, rather, is to prove to large bodies of people that they have enthusiasms slumbering within them. He strikes within us little silver bells, or the great chords of large war harps. And the measure of his greatness lies in the wideness of his appeal. So that my own private image of Rossetti the writer and the painter is of something a little vague, very romantic and exceedingly great. He seems to sweep his fingers over the harp-strings of innumerable hearts, calling out the music that is in them.
Nowadays, Rossetti is generally called the poet of the young. And this is a curious fact, creditable enough to Rossetti, but not very creditable to us who are no longer young. And it contributes still more to the general glamour of vagueness that surrounds his personality and his greatness as a painter and as a poet. We cannot say how wide his appeal is because his appeal is to the young, and the young have little opportunity of voicing themselves. They don’t get into the papers, we don’t listen to them at our clubs; they are generally packed away in their universities, and when they are at home we manage to shut them up over the dinner-table. So in those mysterious young hearts things are going on, and it is certain that Rossetti holds a large share of their enthusiasms. It is certain, because we can divine it from our own hearts where ‘Rossetti’ – the mere sound of the name ‘Rossetti’ – causes to arise a whole strain of vague and yet regretted emotions. It suggests something fine, generous. It suggests that part of our youth which, although we have outgrown it, we regret. There are the many follies of our youth which were not fine and which, we thank God, we are permitted to forget. But if we no longer think very often of Rossetti, it is just because we no longer read poetry. We have outgrown that and we are not really glad of it, for it was one of the finenesses of our youths.
And of course in a sense it is the biographers who have killed Rossetti for grown men and women, just as chatter about Harriet, atheism, and advanced opinions killed Shelley as a poet. For you cannot read the ‘Ode to the West Wind’ without having it at the back of your mind that Shelley and his mistress rode about Italy on a donkey, and that many excellent people have used this fact in order to prove that marriage as an institution ought to be abolished. And in that way your enjoyment of the ‘Ode to the West Wind’ has been spoiled. Yet the ‘Ode to the West Wind’ is a noble poem and has nothing to do with Italy, donkeys, or the fact that Shelley found his first wife to be an imbecile schoolgirl. No doubt he found his second wife trying enough, but the whitewashers have washed that out, so Mary Shelley for many excellent people remains an arid argument for free love.
Much the same thing has happened to Rossetti. For most of us he is the gentleman who dug his poems out of his wife’s coffin, a solitary fact which does not, if a respectable paper will allow me the expression, matter a damn. Nothing that Rossetti did matters a damn. He was a great poet of not flawless technical gifts. He was a great literary painter, with a defective technical education, but with a great skill in shirking difficulties. And he was a great man. To attempt to whitewash the private character of Rossetti, Shelley, Lord Nelson of the Nile, Goethe, or the Emperor Tiberius is profitless folly. You can say that you believe that they had the highest moral purposes, but some other man will always come along and prove in black and white that each of them ran away from his own wife, or with someone else’s. The fact is that it is utterly unprofitable to expect to find greatness and a personal high moral purpose in the same body. It cannot be done. There is not room for them, alas! I used to know a great writer who always lost his ticket when he travelled. Always! I had many hundred hours of pleasure in reading the works of this writer. But I never could understand how he could be such a fool as to lose his railway tickets. It seemed a silly sort of a habit to me and it upset him very much. I went on reading his books and getting the utmost pleasure from them, and then, one day, the answer to this riddle came to me. The great writer in losing his railway tickets was paying for my pleasure. He lost them because his mind was taken up by his work.
In his life Rossetti lost quite a number of railway tickets of one kind and another – perhaps, if Providence is not more just than are we in our anecdotal blindness, than we with all the whitewash in our eyes – perhaps he even lost his ticket to Heaven. But it was because he was thinking of other things – of the things that have given us pleasure, that have saved us from Prussianization and the adoption of American methods. In a sense he is our scapegoat – the scapegoat of you and me, who in our intellectual vacuities have time and the duty to attend to all the tickets and all the labels of the world. In one of my several dull biographies of this painter-poet I have said that he had the private tastes of a pork butcher. This was true. Whistler on his death-bed said: ‘You mustn’t say anything against Rossetti, Rossetti was a king’, and this also was true, and any proper man will understand how these two irreconcileable truths came to reside in the same body, But the fact is there are millions and millions of pork butchers. We are all pork butchers,1 if we are not all socialists. But every now and then one of us, forgetting that the sole end and aim of humanity is not to be found out and so to die churchwarden or, at least, sidesman of our church or chapel – every now and then one of us keeps his eyes on the pale light of the stars, the golden light of the grail or of romance, or the blood-red light that hangs over battlefields.
Then he walks on with his eyes upon those lights of the horizons. His feet will not avoid any puddles if they are in the way. But we, the whitewashers and the gentlemen of the other persuasion, shall observe only the feet and the puddles. That is because that is our nature. But the exceptional pork butcher1 will walk on and will become such a saint as was Augustine; such a saviour of his country as was Nelson, or such a poet as was Shakespeare – being one or two in a million million, in an infinite multitude of pork butchers.1 But saint, or saviour of his country, or poet, this pork butcher was a king, and you must not say anything against him or you will be a dirty, ungrateful little pork butcher.1 That is the penalty that you will pay, not the king. Such a great, easy, fine king was, to the measure of his lights, Rossetti. It is well to get it said and to leave it at that. He once gave a sovereign to a beggar, he once borrowed some books and did not return them. We cannot afford to do either of these things, because with us they matter. They are – such things – our achievement. But then Rossetti wrote ‘Jenny’ and painted The Annunciation –
(In the interests of accuracy I should like to add that I do not know that Rossetti ever gave a sovereign to a beggar. What I mean is, that it is the sort of thing that he would have done. I should like also to add that in the later years of his life – 1869 to 1882 – Rossetti did not lose, or, at any rate, it is unlikely that he lost, his railway tickets. They were probably taken for him and carefully guarded during the journey by Mr Watts-Dunton, Mr Hake, or Mr Hall Caine. But what I meant is, that if he had travelled alone he probably would have lost his railway tickets. Besides, in this context I am using the words ‘railway tickets’ as a figure of speech meaning one or other of the Commandments.)
Bookman (London), 40 (June 1911), 113–20.
1 This will not bear statistical examination. I mean hommes moyen sensuels.