THE COLLECTED WORKS

OF

DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI

---

Printed by Hazell, Watson, & Viney, Ld., London and Aylesbury.

DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI

DIED 9 APRIL 1882 AGED 53

FRANCES MARY LAVINIA ROSSETTI

DIED 8 APRIL 1886 AGED 85

TO

THE MOTHER'S SACRED MEMORY

THIS FIRST COLLECTED EDITION OF

THE SON'S WORKS

IS DEDICATED BY

THE SURVIVING SON AND BROTHER

W M R

The most adequate mode of prefacing the Collected

Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, as of most

authors, would probably be to offer a broad general

view of his writings, and to analyse with some critical

precision his relation to other writers, contemporary or

otherwise, and the merits and defects of his performances.

In this case, as in how few others, one would also have

to consider in what degree his mind worked con-

sentaneously or diversely in two several arts—the art of

poetry and the art of painting. But the hand of a

brother is not the fittest to undertake any work of this

scope. My preface will not therefore deal with themes

such as these, but will be confined to minor matters,

which may nevertheless be relevant also within their

limits. And first may come a very brief outline of the

few events of an outwardly uneventful life.

Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti, who, at an early stage

of his professional career, modified his name into Dante

Gabriel Rossetti, was born on 12th May 1828, at No.

38 Charlotte Street, Portland Place, London. In blood

he was three-fourths Italian, and only one-fourth Eng-

lish; being on the father's side wholly Italian (Abruzzese),

and on the mother's side half Italian (Tuscan) and half

English. His father was Gabriele Rossetti, born in

1783 at Vasto, in the Abruzzi, Adriatic coast, in the then

kingdom of Naples. Gabriele Rossetti (died 1854) was a man of letters, a custodian of ancient bronzes in the

Museo Borbonico of Naples, and a poet; he distinguished

himself by patriotic lays which fostered the popular

movement resulting in the grant of a constitution by

Ferdinand I. of Naples in 1820. The King, after the

fashion of Bourbons and tyrants, revoked the constitution

in 1821, and persecuted the abettors of it, and Rossetti

had to escape for his freedom, or perhaps even for his

life. He settled in London towards 1824, married, and

became Professor of Italian in King's College, London,

publishing also various works of bold speculation in the

way of Dantesque commentary and exposition. His

wife was Frances Mary Lavinia Polidori (died 1886),

daughter of Gaetano Polidori (died 1853), a teacher of

Italian and literary man who had in early youth been

secretary to the poet Alfieri, and who published various

books, including a complete translation of Milton's

poems. Frances Polidori was English on the side of

her mother, whose maiden name was Pierce. The

family of Rossetti and his wife consisted of four

children, born in four successive years—Maria Fran-

cesca (died 1876), Dante Gabriel, William Michael, and

Christina Georgina, the two last-named being now the only

survivors. Few more affectionate husbands and fathers

have lived, and no better wife and mother, than Gabriele

and Frances Rossetti. The means of the family were

always strictly moderate, and became scanty towards

1843, when the father's health began to fail. In or about

that year Dante Gabriel left King's College School, where

he had learned Latin, French, and a beginning of Greek;

and he entered upon the study of the art of painting, to

which he had from earliest childhood exhibited a very

marked bent. After a while he was admitted to the school of the Royal Academy, but never proceeded be-

yond its antique section. In 1848 Rossetti co-operated

with two of his fellow-students in painting, John Everett

Millais and William Holman Hunt, and with the sculptor

Thomas Woolner, in forming the so-called Præraphaelite

Brotherhood. There were three other members of the

Brotherhood—James Collinson (succeeded after two or

three years by Walter Howell Deverell), Frederic

George Stephens, and the present writer. Ford Madox

Brown, the historical painter, was known to Rossetti

much about the same time when the Præraphaelite

scheme was started, and bore an important part both in

directing his studies and in upholding the movement,

but he did not think fit to join the Brotherhood in any

direct or complete sense. Through Deverell, Rossetti

came to know Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal, daughter of a

Sheffield cutler, herself a milliner's assistant, gifted with

some artistic and some poetic faculty; in the Spring of

1860, after a long engagement, they married. Their

wedded life was of short duration, as she died in

February 1862, having meanwhile given birth to a still-

born child. For several years up to this date Rossetti,

designing and painting many works, in oil-colour or as

yet more frequently in water-colour, had resided at

No. 14 Chatham Place, Blackfriars Bridge, a line of

street now demolished. In the autumn of 1862 he re-

moved to No. 16 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea. At first

certain apartments in the house were occupied by Mr.

George Meredith the novelist, Mr. Swinburne the poet,

and myself. This arrangement did not last long,

although I myself remained a partial inmate of the house

up to 1873. My brother continued domiciled in Cheyne

Walk until his death; but from about 1869 he was

frequently away at Kelmscot manorhouse, in Oxford-

shire, not far from Lechlade, occupied jointly by himself,

and by the poet Mr. William Morris with his family.

From the autumn of 1872 till the summer of 1874 he

was wholly settled at Kelmscot, scarcely visiting London

at all. He then returned to London, and Kelmscot

passed out of his ken.

In the early months of 1850 the members of the

Præraphaelite Brotherhood, with the co-operation of

some friends, brought out a short-lived magazine named

The Germ (afterwards Art and Poetry); here appeared

the first verses and the first prose published by Rossetti,

including The Blessed Damozel and Hand and Soul .

In 1856 he contributed a little to The Oxford and

Cambridge Magazine , printing there The Burden of

Nineveh . In 1861, during his married life, he published

his volume of translations The Early Italian Poets , now

entitled Dante and his Circle . By the time therefore of

the death of his wife he had a certain restricted yet far

from inconsiderable reputation as a poet, along with his

recognized position as a painter—a non-exhibiting painter,

it may here be observed, for, after the first two

or three years of his professional course, he ad-

hered with practical uniformity to the plan of abstaining

from exhibition altogether. He had contemplated bring-

ing out in or about 1862 a volume of original poems;

but, in the grief and dismay which overwhelmed

him in losing his wife, he determined to sacri-

fice to her memory this long-cherished project, and he

buried in her coffin the manuscripts which would have

furnished forth the volume. With the lapse of years he

came to see that, as a final settlement of the matter,

this was neither obligatory nor desirable; so in 1869 the

manuscripts were disinterred, and in 1870 his volume

named Poems was issued. For some considerable

while it was hailed with general and lofty praise,

chequered by only moderate stricture or demur; but

late in 1871 Mr. Robert Buchanan published under a

pseudonym, in the Contemporary Review , a very hostile

article named The Fleshly School of Poetry , attacking

the poems on literary and more especially on moral

grounds. The article, in an enlarged form, was after-

wards reissued as a pamphlet. The assault produced

on Rossetti an effect altogether disproportionate to its

intrinsic importance; indeed, it developed in his cha-

racter an excess of sensitiveness and of distempered

brooding which his nearest relatives and friends had

never before surmised,—for hitherto he had on the whole

had an ample sufficiency of high spirits, combined with

a certain underlying gloominess or abrupt moodiness of

nature and outlook. Unfortunately there was in him

already only too much of morbid material on which this

venom of detraction was to work. For some years the

state of his eyesight had given very grave cause for appre-

hension, he himself fancying from time to time that the

evil might end in absolute blindness, a fate with which

our father had been formidably threatened in his closing

years. From this or other causes insomnia had ensued,

coped with by far too free a use of chloral, which may

have begun towards the end of 1869. In the summer of

1872 he had a dangerous crisis of illness; and from that

time forward, but more especially from the middle of

1874, he became secluded in his habits of life, and often

depressed, fanciful, and gloomy. Not indeed that there

were no intervals of serenity, even of brightness; for in

fact he was often genial and pleasant, and a most agreeable

companion, with as much bonhomie as acuteness for wiling

an evening away. He continued also to prosecute his

pictorial work with ardour and diligence, and at times he

added to his product as a poet. The second of his original

volumes, Ballads and Sonnets , was published in the

autumn of 1881. About the same time he sought change

of air and scene in the Vale of St. John, near Keswick,

Cumberland; but he returned to town more shattered in

health and in mental tone than he had ever been before.

In December a shock of a quasi-paralytic character struck

him down. He rallied sufficiently to remove to Birching-

ton-on-Sea, near Margate. The hand of death was then

upon him, and was to be relaxed no more. The last

stage of his maladies was uræmia. Tended by his

mother and his sister Christina, with the constant com-

panionship at Birchington of Mr. Hall Caine, and in the

presence likewise of Mr. Theodore Watts, Mr. Frederick

Shields, and myself, he died on Easter Sunday, April 9th

1882. His sister-in-law, the daughter of Madox Brown,

arrived immediately after his latest breath had been

drawn. He lies buried in the churchyard of Birchington.

Few brothers were more constantly together, or shared

one another's feelings and thoughts more intimately, in

childhood, boyhood, and well on into mature manhood,

than Dante Gabriel and myself. I have no idea of

limning his character here at any length, but will de-

fine a few of its leading traits. He was always and

essentially of a dominant turn, in intellect and in

temperament a leader. He was impetuous and vehe-

ment, and necessarily therefore impatient; easily

angered, easily appeased, although the embittered

feelings of his later years obscured this amiable quality

to some extent; constant and helpful as a friend where

he perceived constancy to be reciprocated; free-handed

and heedless of expenditure, whether for himself or for

others; in family affection warm and equable, and (except

in relation to our mother, for whom he had a fondling

love) not demonstrative. Never on stilts in matters of

the intellect or of aspiration, but steeped in the sense

of beauty, and loving, if not always practising, the good;

keenly alive also (though many people seem to discredit

this now) to the laughable as well as the grave or solemn

side of things; superstitious in grain, and anti-scientific

to the marrow. Throughout his youth and early man-

hood I considered him to be markedly free from vanity,

though certainly well equipped in pride; the distinction

between these two tendencies was less definite in his

closing years. Extremely natural and therefore totally

unaffected in tone and manner, with the naturalism

characteristic of Italian blood; good-natured and hearty,

without being complaisant or accommodating; reserved

at times, yet not haughty; desultory enough in youth,

diligent and persistent in maturity; self-centred always,

and brushing aside whatever traversed his purpose or

his bent. He was very generally and very greatly liked

by persons of extremely diverse character; indeed, I

think it can be no exaggeration to say that no one ever

disliked him. Of course I do not here confound the

question of liking a man's personality with that of

approving his conduct out-and-out.

Of his manner I can perhaps convey but a vague

impression. I have said that it was natural; it was

likewise eminently easy, and even of the free-and-easy

kind. There was a certain British bluffness, streaking

the finely poised Italian suppleness and facility. As he

was thoroughly unconventional, caring not at all to

fall in with the humours or prepossessions of any

particular class of society, or to conciliate or approxi-

mate the socially distinguished, there was little in him

of any veneer or varnish of elegance; none the less he

was courteous and well-bred, meeting all sorts of persons

upon equal terms— i.e., upon his own terms; and I am

satisfied that those who are most exacting in such

matters found in Rossetti nothing to derogate from the

standard of their requirements. In habit of body he was

indolent and lounging, disinclined to any prescribed

or trying exertion of any sort, and very difficult to stir

out of his ordinary groove, yet not wanting in active

promptitude whenever it suited his liking. He often

seemed totally unoccupied, especially of an evening;

no doubt the brain was busy enough.

The appearance of my brother was to my eye rather

Italian than English, though I have more than once

heard it said that there was nothing observable to

bespeak foreign blood. He was of rather low middle

stature, say five feet seven and a half, like our father;

and, as the years advanced, he resembled our father

not a little in a characteristic way, yet with highly

obvious divergences. Meagre in youth, he was at

times decidedly fat in mature age. The complexion,

clear and warm, was also dark, but not dusky or sombre.

The hair was dark and somewhat silky; the brow grandly

spacious and solid; the full-sized eyes blueish-grey;

the nose shapely, decided, and rather projecting, with an

aquiline tendency and large nostrils, and perhaps no

detail in the face was more noticeable at a first glance

than the very strong indentation at the spring of the

nose below the forehead; the mouth moderately well-

shaped, but with a rather thick and unmoulded under-

lip; the chin unremarkable; the line of the jaw, after

youth was passed, full, rounded, and sweeping; the ears

well-formed and rather small than large. His hips were

wide, his hands and feet small; the hands very much

those of the artist or author type, white, delicate,

plump, and soft as a woman's. His gait was resolute

and rapid, his general aspect compact and deter-

mined, the prevailing expression of the face that

of a fiery and dictatorial mind concentrated into re-

pose. Some people regarded Rossetti as eminently

handsome; few, I think, would have refused him the

epithet of well-looking. It rather surprises me to

find from Mr. Caine's book of Recollections that that

gentleman, when he first saw Rossetti in 1880, con-

sidered him to look full ten years older than he really

was,—namely, to look as if sixty-two years old. To my

own eye nothing of the sort was apparent. He wore

moustaches from early youth, shaving his cheeks; from

1870 or thereabouts he grew whiskers and beard, mode-

rately full and auburn-tinted, as well as moustaches. His

voice was deep and harmonious; in the reading of poetry,

remarkably rich, with rolling swell and musical cadence.

My brother was very little of a traveller; he disliked

the interruption of his ordinary habits of life, and the

flurry or discomfort, involved in locomotion. In boy-

hood he knew Boulogne: he was in Paris three or four

times, and twice visited some principal cities of Belgium.

This was the whole extent of his foreign travelling.

He crossed the Scottish border more than once, and

knew various parts of England pretty well—Hastings,

Bath, Oxford, Matlock, Stratford-