A King in Exile

Rossetti : His Life and Work. By Evelyn Waugh. (Duck- Worth. 12s. 6d.)

;` You must not say anything against Rossetti. Rossetti was a king," murmured Whistler whimsically in dying. " Why is be not an exiled king ? " cried a young enthusiast. " But

Gabriel was a genius," said the loyal Ford Madox Brown, who knew the best and worst of him, and who found it a weary )3usiness to go on painting without his approval. " In London,

in the great days of a deep, smug, thick, rich, drab, industrial reomplacency, Rossetti shone for the men and women who )(lie* him with the ambiguous light of a red torch somewhere in a dense fog " wrote the irrepressible Max Beerbohm, as he prepared to make some mirth out of the artist's esoteric circle, adding, " On se moque de cc qu'on aime." Brilliant young men were the disciples of his prime ; .devoted friends con- spired to mitigate the later agony of their sick sovereign. His early struggles over, this poet-painter of unique and vehement

ersonality, masculine in his intellect, feminine in his sensi- Nifty, this cynical idealist of an Italian who never saw the nisei!' hills or the siren shore of Naples, lived like a retired ;Renaissance despot, with his courtiers, his jesters, his mer- chants, his suppliants, even with his menagerie. And indeed

th Rossetti, and William Morris under his influence, in the Versatility of their powers and the imaginative violence of ittheii ways suggest a certain reversion to Renaissance 'psychology.

But some who did homage in their youth lived long enough to resent his dominance in the cold egoism of their age. And tohave found that in the Vanity Fair of print it is easier to market the frailties than the victories of genius. And other ',Survivors suffer from that dread of being out of date that so nfflicts the old. Only the young dare to be out of date : thus, like the fervent Pre-Raphaelites themselves, they prepare their ftvorutions. But the twentieth-century young carry the natural disparagement of their immediate ancestors back through all the generations. They are busy making their new fire by rubbing cubist stones together. So, in this most cen- tenarian year, the birthday of Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti has few tributes, and these apologetic.

Mr. Evelyn Waugh, however, will inscribe a small votive tablet :for Rossetti's grave, though rather uneasily. He thinks at least " it gives a stimulating frisson to one's aesthetic stanairds " to turn for an hour or two from " the pellucid excellences of Picasso" to the troubling insinuation of Rossettian art. Despite some execrable errors of taste, Mr. Waugh is not without intelligence or sympathy. Indeed he, is really interested in trying to discover why some of these " literary " pictures still capture his attention. The poetry he dismisses casually he does not seem. rgailze the criteria

. ' of verse.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti's genius is unpopular in this genera- tion for many reasons. It is romantic, hybrid, difficult, aristocratic, and melancholy. The cruciform double-flower of his art is rooted in a consciousness of many cultures. He expresses a vision of life at once cloistered and sumptuous in a picture-making verse and a poetic painting so impressive that their rich interchanges can but awake mistrust in austere minds or temperaments. If he was three-quarters Italian, half of him belonged to the kingdom of Naples. The Tuscan strain of Dante was present in his brain as an intellectual shaping power ; but the enchanted sensualism of Southern Italy was in his inheritance. He strove to baptize the pagan senses into the service of the spirit ; but he knew too well

what song the sirens sang ; and he had just enough Northern blood to confuse the conflict with an extravagance of remorse of which the " average sensual man " would have been incapable. This dualism of the soul and body in love, the only sacrament, he held, by which men realize absolute beauty, the effort to reconcile them, the long lamenting regret over the failure, provide the themes of his poetic experience, limited, yet at once exquisite and magnificent.

In the strange house of exiles where he passed his childhood

and where he learned' romance in three traditions, with inklings of more, the worship of Dante passed readily into his blood and intellect. If by nature Rossetti was a love-poet, the Dante of the. Vita Nuova decided what kind of love- poet—and love-painter—be should be. And if it is now un- fashionable to be a love-poet, in these days that advocate casual encounters and eugenic embraces, how preposterous must seem the mystic and chivalric love of Dante ! Rossetti's, too, is not a merely literary attitude. He is sincere. He was of one mind with Cavalcanti, Guinicelli, and the rest. Dante saw Love as an actual god, " in a mist of the colour of fire, within the which I discovered the figure of a lord of terrible aspect." This lord said also to Rossetti : " Ego dominos taus." For Rossetti, love, and that the romantic love of woman, was an ideal, a doctrine, a code, an ethic. It was also a Mystery ; and the only Mystery for him, since Woman was the goddess, the Idea of Beauty, and Love the Winged Logos that made her body one with her soul. Dante kept the division ; but Rossetti went farther :-

"Lady, I fain would tell how evermore Thy soul I know not from thy body, nor Thee from thyself, neither our love from God."

In this insistence on the mingling of the sensuous and the spiritual Rossetti occasionally approaches Donne, who is the most satisfactory love-poet in the English language. But Donne, more arrogant, flamelike, uncanonical, leaps from body to soul and wisely leaves God out of it, love being

miracle enough in itself.: -. loOkS from shut .bod_ somewhat conscious, trembling, and all too meek. The drowning ecstasy in his greatest sonnets has its beauty ; but the wild irony, the rare anger of Donne are necessary to save passion from " love's sad satiety." Still, one must remember that Rossetti's love is a kind of religion, and the fine fever,. the exaltations and relapses, the consummations and shivering dismays are marvellously written in the rubric of " The House of Life," decorated with wings, and stars, and moons, and flowers. The Beloved is an eidolon, a dreamer enchanted, " the image of all things that are."

About the mass of Rossetti's verse there does linger some sense of the narcotic and the macabre, as if the trophy wrested back from Persephone kept the fragrance of the underworld. The mythos of love and death and inconsolable regret with which his art was preoccupied merely expressed the tragic story that, much more than chloral, brought him to a prema- ture end. For Rossetti's imagery was an extension of his per- sonality. The richness of his nature wrought in many ways. If he sinned against his code, he expiated in every degree of desolation and remorse. His later poetry wanders by the borders of sleep and death, consumed by " the desire too obstinate for one irrecoverable face."

Much of his verse, of course, is of a more dramatic kind ; but all the wild and lovely figures of his romantic ballads move in that atmosphere of delight and agony he knew so well. Mr. Waugh has observed in the development of Ros- setti's painting the transition from angles to curves. Some- thing analogous happens in the change from the archaic sweetness and stiffness of " The Blessed Damozel " and " My Sister's Sleep " to the curving wavelike motions of " The House of Life " and the later lyrics. It is like the change from a mediaeval to a Renaissance manner. Something poignant is lost ; but the elaborated Latinity, the impassioned metaphor, the reverberating music of the later style weave a fabric more consummate than anything he achieved in painting. Mr. Waugh remarks that Rossetti's poetry must be read aloud. All poetry must be listened to ; the rhythm and accentuation convey more than the words, however beautiful they be. Rossetti's purgatorial poetry, his cloudy fire-music of triumph and regret, is like a concert of strings and reeds. The organ is heard ; but the violin prevails. He builds his poem ; he profoundly prepares his phrase ; he is a lord of figuration. The images descend soft and rich like ringdoves and birds of paradise. But it is the tide of music that bears him into immortality.

" The Blessed Damozel " (though our minds avenge their own staleness upon guiltless masterpieces, it is a lovely thing, a young star hung in infinite space) ; the wild " Eden Bower " " Love's Nocturn," a harping aerial as Shelley's ; " Insomnia," a blanched rose opening in the dark; " The Stream's Secret,"

winding in liquid lapses of desire ; " The Woodspurge," that with deadly simplicity conveys a subtle psychological expe- rience ; the tolling and mounting measures of "The Burden of Nineveh " ; the sensitive " Portrait " ; the exultant " Song of the Bower " ; the mysterious sweetness and sorrow of " Rose Mary " will not easily fade from the tradition of poetry. There are other intimate lyrics, of course ; and much might be said of how Rossetti wrought with the sonnet. But as " pure poetry," I think the " Staff and Scrip " remains Rossetti's masterpiece. It is ethereally beautiful, all dove colour and silver light, and music just overheard, with the fourth line of every verse falling like a sigh, and chivalric love and noble defeat laid to rest in dreamy requiem.

" It has all been said and written ; they have hardly begun to paint it," said Rossetti, heretically as we suppose, insisting that " it," the imaginative substance, is identical for words and paint. He wrote out his doctrine early, in Hand and Soul, much the same as Leonardo's. We all know of his erratic apprenticeship, and his defects of drawing. But he conic] draw well enough to let desire, sorrow, beauty, mystery come. through. It may be that those brilliant little mediaeval cloisons in pure bright water-colour, where sweet and sinister figures are prisoned in a missal-like architecture decorated with intense ingenuity, may yet prove most clearly his title to be a painter. The romantic fantasy of things like " The Wedding of St. George " and the- " Blue Closet," or " The Tune of Seven Towers," is extraordinary ; ai.d, while the attack on the eyes disengages a violent faery delight in the true mediaeval, way, it is also quite distinctly Rossetti's own original way. And even the later pictures, too steadily devoted to the Feminine Principle, when suddenly seen among the work, of others, arrest unprejudiced eyes with the shock of their imaginative design before you can know what the subject is.

" Look .where Colour, the Soul's bridegroom, makes The House of Heaven splendid for the bride."

says Meredith. Rossetti certainly hung his tapestries too exclusively for the Bride, whether she was Lilith or Beatrice. He had his triumphs though ; once when he painted " Moans Vanna," soft and insolent in her great sleeves, like a Titian picture of a Venetian courtesan ; once when he brought the Beloved unveiled before her radiant demihme of damsels ; and once when he saw Jane Morris as his own goddess Persephone, lifting the fatal pomegranate. Loveliest of all, who will refuse ti • salute the pure ecstatic face of Beata Beatrix in her caves c ! rose and green ? Not even Mr. Waugh, who loves Picasso. I have said nothing of Ro9setti as the enthusiast who wrought the Pre-Raphaelites into a Brotherhood, or as the inspirer of Morris and Burne-Jones. Of the influences on him of Keats, Shelley, Coleridge, Poe, and Blake, I have of necessity been silent. There is too much to say about his difficult art and his magnetic personality. Undoubtedly much more may be urged against both. But " the creative act is wild, un- willing, and painful," as a continental critic has well said ; and when the centenary of a sincere artist comes round, it is better to be grateful. Whatever Rossetti's faults, the accent and gesture of greatness are present in his painting, his poetry, and himself. He may be truly " a king in exile " now. The singular and intricate beauty of his language will echo more clearly when we recover some of our lost vocabulary ; and the cloud and flame of his matter will blind and burn again when Love comes back to his own.

Ricam. ANNAND TAYLOR.