Parlour game
Benny Green
Four Rossettis Stanley Weintraub (W. H. Allen £5.95) The situation regarding the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood has now become what Dante Gabriel in his earlier days might have described as parlous. The biographer of that amazing crew, the largest repository of eccentricity and sweet unreason ever seen in the history of English culture, has always been faced with frightful problems of selection, excision and deduction; but now, as if all that wasn't enough, an added difficulty emerges. To what extent must he assume some knowledge on the part of his reader? Like the author of some multivolume saga, he has to determine how far to lard his text with a resume of what has gone before, how far to assume that the reader is already familiar with the background. Normally a biography of a painter is ever so faintly absurd a concept.
The PRB is a dazzling exception. There is no end to books about them, and those books generally are of a high standard of readability, including the one presently under discussion. In fact the PRB justifies singlehanded on behalf of the entire artistic fraternity the efficacy of the painterbiography. The Brotherhood's fame has spread far beyond the modest confines of its art. Its bibliography dwarfs that of far greater painters and scurptors and poets. For every book about Rembrandt or Constable, ten at least apprear on the PreRaphaelites, and while this is flattering for the shades of Dante Gabriel and company, who tended as they entered the valetudinarian stage to believe in things like shades, it has made life difficult for a biographer like Weintraub, who comes on the scene comparitively late in the day, a biographising crow obliged to follow the plough of Doughty, Ford, Grylls, Gaunt and several others, to say nothing of the Pre-Raphaelites themselves, who wrote letters, memoirs, diaries and reminiscences evidently with the sole aim, not of justifying their own actions, but of confusing those of future biographers.
As a result, when the constant reader runs his eye over yet another account of the
Rossettis, he begins despite himself to bring down the high art of biography to the level of a parlour game. All the obligatory counters are on his board, the wombat, the Icelandic myths, the Fleshly School, the laudanum and the Stunners. Then again, he scores the occasional bonus point, as in correcting Doughty in the matter of Rossetti's fee for The Girlhood of Mary Virgin', £80, not eighty guineas; he scores two more in drawing our attention to the remarkable prescience of Christina Rossetti's novel Maude, in which the heroine takes her own poems with her to the grave several years before her brother performed the identical service when Lizzie Siddal died. He is more explicit than some biographers about the stolen china, gives us a clearer picture of Dante Gabriel's plan for buying an elephant and, on a more serious level, will tolerate none of the customary shillyrshallying regarding Lizzie's death it was suicide after all -or about the romance between Dante Gabriel and Janey Morris
as adulterous after all.
Weintraub's confident handling of the contradictory evidence is no surprise to those who have seen how adept he has been before this in scrutinising documents which other biographers have tended to ignore; this is especially true of his Bernard Shaw 1914-1918, in which by reading letters which had been available to all but synthesised by none, he builds a brilliant picture of the genesis of Heartbreak House. Weintraub knows the English nineteenthcentury world of art and letters better than most of his English contemporaries. But I have to say that his book on the Rossettis is a slight disappointment.
Not that there is anything very wrong with it. When an American writer on an English subject reduces 'fitted' to 'fit', when he talks of Victorian like Christina Rossetti needing something called hospitalization, I wince, but I expect no better. What must have happened is that unwittingly I have already decided which PRB I prefer to believe in, and it happens not to be the sober one which Weintraub discribes. His story is neither comic nor tragic, but pathetic, and while pathos is certainly just as valid as either the farce of Ford Madox Ford or the tragedy of the PRB's own account of things, it hardly makes for reading half as entertaining. Weintraub, like most of the others in the field, never tackles the problem of the degree of veracity in Ford's wonderfully amusing memoirs. And he never once refers to William Gaunt, who continues to hold the Pre-Raphaelite field against all biographising corners. As a result, the slapstick of the RuskinMillais-Effie Gray triangle is missing, the painting of the Oxford walls hardly raises a smile, and the great Charles Augustus Howell, scene-stealer in the books by Gaunt and Hesketh Pearson, is reduced to a cipher. I think that Weintraub, who is perceptive enough to draw our attention to the links between Rossetti's hallucinatory ordeals and those of his biographer Evelyn Waugh, and who is shrewd enough to encapsulate the mixture of tragedy and knockabout by explaining away the hauntings by attributing them to a hungry raccoon, may not quite have escaped the trap of solemnity which Rossetti and company so carefully laid, for posterity's benefit.
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