Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Dante Gabriel Rossetti was the eldest son of Gabriele Rossetti and Frances Polidori, daughter of Alfieri’s secretary, and sister of the young physician who travelled with Lord Byron. Gabriele Rossetti was a native of Yasto, in the district of the Abruzzi, kingdom of Naples. He was a patriotic poet of very considerable distinction; and, as a politician, took a part in extorting from Ferdinand I. the Constitution of 1820. After the failure of the Neapolitan insurrection, owing to the treachery of the King (who asked leave of absence on a pretext of ill-health, and returned with an overwhelming Austrian army), the insurrectionists were compelled to fly. Some of them fell victims; others lay long in concealment. Rossetti was one of the latter; and, while he was in hiding, Sir Graham Moore, the English admiral, was lying with an English fleet in the bay. The wife of the admiral had long been a warm admirer of the patriotic hymns of Rossetti, and, when she learned his danger, she prevailed with her husband to make efforts to save him. Sir Graham thereupon set out with another English officer to the place of concealment, habited the poet in an English uniform, placed him between them in a carriage, and put him aboard a ship that sailed next day to Malta, where he obtained the friendship of the governor, John Hookham Frere, by whose agency valuable introductions were procured, and ultimately Rossetti established himself in England. Arrived in London about 1823, he lived a cheerful life as an exile, though deprived of the advantages of his Italian reputation. He married in 1826, and his eldest son was born May 12, 1828, in Charlotte Street, Portland Place, London. He was appointed Professor of Italian at King’s College, and died in 1854. His house was for years the constant resort of Italian refugees; and the son used to say that it was from observation of these visitors of his father that he depicted the principal personage of his Last Confession. He did not live to see the returning glories of his country or the consummation we have witnessed of that great movement founded upon the principles for which he fought and suffered. His present position in Italy as a poet and patriot is a high one, a medal having been struck in his honour. An effort is even now afoot to erect a statue to him in his native place, and one of the last occasions upon which the son put pen to paper was when trying to make a reminiscent rough portrait for the use of the sculptor. Gabriele Rossetti spent his last years in the study of Dante, and his works on the subject are unique, exhibiting a peculiar view of Dante’s conception of Beatrice, which he believed to be purely ideal, and employed solely for purposes of speculative and political disquisition. Something of this interpretation was fixed undoubtedly upon the personage by Dante himself in his later writings, but whether the change were the result of a maturer and more complicated state of thought, and whether the real and ideal characters of Beatrice may not be compatible, are questions which the poetic mind will not consider it possible to decide. Coleridge, no doubt, took a fair view of Rossetti’s theory when he said: “Rossetti’s view of Dante’s meaning is in great part just, but he has pushed it beyond all bounds of common sense. How could a poet--and such a poet as Dante--have written the details of the allegory as conjectured by Rossetti? The boundaries between his allegory and his pure picturesque are plain enough, I think, at first reading.” It was, doubtless, due to his devotion to studies of the Florentine that Gabriele Rossetti named after him his eldest son.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, whose full baptismal name was Gabriel Charles Dante, was educated principally at King’s College School, London, and there attained to a moderate proficiency in the ordinary classical school-learning, besides a knowledge of French, which throughout life he spoke well. He learned at home some rudimentary German; Italian he had acquired at a very early age. There has always been some playful mention of certain tragedies and translations upon which he exercised himself from the ages of five to fifteen years; but it is hardly necessary to say that he himself never attached value to these efforts of his precocity; he even displayed, occasionally, a little irritation upon hearing them spoken of as remarkable youthful achievements.

One of these productions of his adolescence, Sir Hugh the Heron, has been so frequently alluded to, that it seems necessary to tell the story of it, as the author himself, in conversation, was accustomed to do. At about twelve years of age, the young poet wrote a scrap of a poem under this title, and then cast it aside. His grandfather, Polidori, had seen the fragment, however, and had conceived a much higher opinion of its merits than even the natural vanity of the young author himself permitted him to entertain. It had then become one of the grandfather’s amusements to set up an amateur printing-press in his own house, and occupy his leisure in publishing little volumes of original verse for semi-public circulation. He urged his grandson to finish the poem in question, promising it, in a completed state, the dignity and distinction of type. Prompted by hope of this hitherto unexpected reward, Rossetti--then thirteen to fourteen years of age--finished the juvenile epic, and some bound copies of it got abroad. No more was thought of the matter, and in due time the little bard had forgotten that he had ever done it. But when a genuine distinction had been earned by poetry that was in no way immature, Rossetti discovered, by the gratuitous revelation of a friend, that a copy of the youthful production--privately printed and never published--was actually in the library of the British Museum. Amazed, and indeed appalled as he was by this disclosure, he was powerless to remedy the evil, which he foresaw would some day lead to the poem being unearthed to his injury, and printed as a part of his work. The utmost he could do to avert the threatened mischief he did, and this was to make an entry in a commonplace-book which he kept for such uses, explaining the origin and history of the poem, and expressing a conviction that it seemed to him to be remarkable only from its entire paucity of even ordinary poetic promise. But while this was indubitably a just estimate of these boyish efforts, it is no doubt true, as we shall presently see, that Rossetti’s genius matured itself early in life.

Whilst still a child, his love of literature exhibited itself, and a story is told of a disaster occurring to him, when rather less than nine years of age, which affords amusing proof of the ardour of his poetic nature. Upon going with his brother and sisters to the house of his grandfather, where as children they occupied themselves with sports appropriate to their years, he proposed to improvise a part of a scene from Othello, and cast himself for the principal rôle. The scene selected was the closing one of the play, and began with the speech delivered to Lodovico, Montano, and Gratiano, when they are about to take Othello prisoner. Rossetti used to say that he delivered the lines in a frenzy of boyish excitement, and coming to the words--

Set you down this: And say, besides,--that in Aleppo once, Where a malignant and a turban’d Turk Beat a Venetian, and traduced the state, I took by the throat the circumcised dog, And smote him--thus!--

he snatched up an iron chisel, that lay somewhere at hand, and, to the consternation of his companions, smote himself with all his might on the chest, inflicting a wound from which he bled and fainted.

He is described by those who remember him, at this period, as a boy of a gentle and affectionate nature, albeit prone to outbursts of masterfulness. The earliest existent portraits represent a comely youth, having redundant auburn hair curling all round the head, and eyes and forehead of extraordinary beauty. It is said that he was brave and manly of temperament, courageous as to personal suffering, eminently solicitous of the welfare of others, and kind and considerate to*such as he had claims upon. This is no doubt true portraiture, but it must be stated (however open to explanation, on grounds of laudable self-depreciation), that it is not the picture which he himself used to paint of his character as a boy. He often described himself as being destitute of personal courage when at school, as shrinking from the amusements of schoolfellows, and fearful of their quarrels; not wholly without generous impulses, but, in the main, selfish of nature and reclusive in habit of life. He was certainly free from the meaningless affectation--for such it too frequently is--of representing his school-days as the happiest of his life. If, after so much undervaluing of himself, it were possible to trust his estimate of his youthful character, he would have had you believe that school was to him a place of semi-purgatorial probation,--which nothing but love of his mother, and desire to meet her wishes, prevented him, as an irreclaimable antischoliast, from obstinately renouncing at a time when he had learned little Latin, and less Greek.

Having from childhood shown a propensity towards painting, the strong inclination was fostered by his parents, and art was looked upon as his future profession. Upon leaving school about 1843, he studied first at an art academy near Bedford Square, and afterwards at the Eoyal Academy Antique School, never, however, going to the Eoyal Academy Life School. He appears to have been an assiduous student. In after life when his habit of late rising had become a stock subject of banter among his intimate friends, he would tell with unwonted pride how in earlier years he used to rise at six A.M. once a week in order to attend a life-class held before breakfast. On such occasions he was accustomed, he would say, to purchase a buttered roll and cup of coffee at some stall at a street corner, so as not to dislocate domestic arrangements by requiring the servants to get up in the middle of the night. He left the Academy about 1848 or 1849, and in the latter year exhibited his picture entitled the Girlhood of Mary Virgin. This painting is an admirable example of his early art, before the Gothicism of the early Italian painters became his quest. Better known to the public than the picture is the sonnet written upon it, containing the beautiful lines--

An angel-watered lily, that near God Grows and is quiet.

While Rossetti was still under age he associated with J. E. Millais, Holman Hunt, Thomas Woolner, James Collinson, F. G. Stephens, and his brother, W. M. Rossetti, in the movement called pre-Raphaelite. At the beginning of his career he recognised, in common with his associates, that the contemporary classicism had run to seed, and that, beyond an effort after perfection of technique, the art of the period was all but devoid of purpose, of thought, imagination, or spirituality. At such a moment it was matter for little surprise that ardent young intellects should go back for inspiration to the Gothicism of Giotto and the early painters. There, at least, lay feeling, aim, aspiration, such as did not concern itself primarily with any question of whether a subject were painted well or ill, if only it were first of all a subject at all--a subject involving manipulative excellence, perhaps, but feeling and invention certainly. This, then, stated briefly, was the meaning of pre-Raphaelitism. The name (as shall hereafter appear) was subsequently given to the movement more than half in jest. It has sometimes been stated that Mr. Ruskin was an initiator, but this is not strictly the case. The company of young painters and writers are said to have been ignorant of Mr. Ruskin’s writings when they began their revolt against the current classicism. It is a fact however, that, after perhaps a couple of years, Mr. Ruskin came to the rescue of the little brotherhood (then much maligned) by writing in their defence a letter in the Times. It is easy to make too much of these early endeavours of a company of young men, exceptionally gifted though the reformers undoubtedly were, and inspired by an ennobling enthusiasm. In later years Rossetti was not the most prominent of those who kept these beginnings of a movement constantly in view; indeed, it is hardly rash to say that there were moments when he seemed almost to resent the intrusion of them upon the maturity of aim and handling which, in common with his brother artists, he ultimately compassed. But it would be folly not to recognise the essential germs of a right aspiration which grew out of that interchange of feeling and opinion which, in its concrete shape, came to be termed pre-Raphaelitism. Rossetti is acknowledged to have taken the most prominent part in the movement, supplying, it is alleged, much of the poetic impulse as well as knowledge of mediaeval art. He occupied himself in these and following years mainly in the making of designs for pictures--the most important of them being Dante’s Dream, Hamlet and Ophelia, Cassandra, Lucretia Borgia, Giotto painting Dante’s Portrait, The First Anniversary of the Death of Beatrice Mary Magdalene at the Door of Simon the Pharisee, The Death of Lady Macbeth, Desdemona’s Death-song and a great subject entitled Found, designed and begun at twenty-five, but left incomplete at death.