DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTORY
Dante Gabriel, or, to give him his full christening name, Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti, was born on May 12th, 1828, at No. 38, Charlotte Street, Portland Place, and was the second of four children, born in successive years. Gabriele Rossetti, his father, was a native of the city of Vasto, in the province of Abruzzi. He was a man of superior ability and force of character, and was at one time custodian of bronzes at the Naples Museum; but having made himself obnoxious to the Bourbon King Ferdinand during the suppression of the constitution in 1821, he was in consequence proscribed and obliged to fly for safety. Assisted by a British man-of-war in escaping to Malta, Gabriele Rossetti remained there for some time, practising as an instructor in his native language, until further annoyance drove him in 1824 to England. Here he settled, and obtained an appointment as Professor of Italian at King's College. Meantime, in 1826, he had married a daughter of Gaetano Polidori, for some while secretary to the notable Count Alfieri, and father of that strange being, Dr. John Polidori, who travelled with Byron as his physician, and committed suicide in 1821. Gaetano Polidori's wife, Rossetti's grandmother, was an Englishwoman, whose maiden name was Pierce. To his parentage the young Gabriel was indebted for much, but especially to his mother. One can judge of the latter's quiet sensible character, and deep religious instincts, from the portraits left us by her son. But, besides these qualities, she possessed good literary and artistic judgement, shrewd knowledge of human nature, and a fund of common sense which was strong enough to prevent the somewhat mystical spirit pervading the thoughts of her young family from deteriorating into morbid and unhealthy channels. Between D. G. Rossetti and his mother the warmest and most affectionate relations prevailed, relations that were only severed by the former's untimely death on April 9th, 1882. Mrs. Rossetti survived her son exactly four years to the very day. Her husband had died in April, 1854, honoured at the last as a patriot in his native land. Their elder daughter, Maria, departed this life in 1876, and in December, 1894, Christina Rossetti also died, leaving as sole survivor of this brilliant family the younger son, William Michael, well known as a literary critic and as the biographer of his more famous brother.
Albeit English in its main external features, the environment of the Rossetti family in London remained essentially Italian during their father's lifetime. Gabriele Rossetti was a commentator on Dante, and himself a writer of verse, mainly in a politico-patriotic vein. To the ears of the young Gabriel, familiarized by habit with the sonorous metres of the "Inferno" and "Paradiso," the name of Dante for many years conjured up no very stimulating thoughts. It was not until he had begun as a young man to read upon his own lines, that the pictorial richness and splendour of the Florentine dawned on him and seized him with its spell. "The 'Convito,'" he says, "was a name of dread to us, as being the very essence of arid unreadableness,"—an interesting fact to remember when dealing, as we shall presently have to do, with the influence which Dante was destined afterwards to exert upon two members at least of the family.
Reared in this studious atmosphere, however, it is not to be wondered at that the young Rossettis early took to literature. Before they were six years old they had made acquaintance with Shakespeare and Scott, in addition to the usual works of childhood, and were steeped in romance of a more lofty kind than is common at such an age.
Of Rossetti's early literary efforts it is sufficient to mention two: "The Slave," a bombastic drama in blank verse, which occupied his faculties at the age of five, and "Sir Hugh the Heron," a legendary poem founded on a tale by Allan Cunningham. These two productions do not sum up the juvenile work of Rossetti of which a record has been kept, but they are quite as much as it is fair to mention, and serve sufficiently to show the romantic drift of his earliest ideas. In art he was scarcely less precocious; a pretty story being told of a milkman, who came upon him in the passage sketching his rocking-horse, and expressed considerable surprise at having seen "a baby making a picture." Drawings of this date exist, and also later ones done when he was in the habit of preparing illustrations for books he read and for his own romances. In point of quality, however, these juvenile sketches are not to be compared with those of many masters of the brush who began early, for example with those of Millais, and are chiefly interesting in connection with a statement of his brother that "he could not remember any date at which it was not an understood thing in the family that Gabriel was to be a painter."
In 1837, after a short preliminary training at a private school, Dante Gabriel was admitted to King's College, where his father was Italian professor. His artistic training did not begin until 1841 or 1842, when he left school, and entered himself at a drawing academy known in those days as "Sass's," and kept by Mr. F. S. Gary, son of the translator of Dante. He remained some four years at Gary's Academy, during which period he seems to have acquired the bare rudiments of his art and to have made a small reputation for eccentricity. In July, 1846, having sent in the requisite probation-drawings, he was admitted to the Antique School of the Royal Academy. His first appearance is graphically delineated by a fellow-student, whose observant eye has preserved for us a probably accurate conception of the fiery young enthusiast:
"Thick, beautiful, and closely-curled masses of rich brown much-neglected hair fell about an ample brow, and almost to the wearer's shoulders; strong eyebrows marked with their dark shadows a pair of rather sunken eyes, in which a sort of fire, instinct with what may be called proud cynicism, burned with furtive energy. His rather high cheekbones were the more observable because his cheeks were roseless and hollow enough to indicate the waste of life and midnight oil to which the youth was addicted. Close shaving left bare his very full, not to say sensuous lips, and square-cut masculine chin. Rather below the middle height, and with a slightly rolling gait, Rossetti came forward among his fellows with a jerky step, tossed the falling hair back from his face, and, having both hands in his pockets, faced the student world with an insouciant air which savoured of thorough self-reliance. A bare throat, a falling, ill-kept collar, boots not over familiar with brushes, black and well-worn habiliments, including not the ordinary jacket of the period, but a loose dress-coat which had once been new—these were the outward and visible signs of a mood which cared even less for appearances than the art-student of those days was accustomed to care, which undoubtedly was little enough."
As a student in the dry atmosphere of the Academy Antique School Rossetti proved a failure, and never passed to the higher grades of the Life and Painting classes. Conventional methods of study were distasteful to him, and the traditions of the Academy were especially arid and cramping to the imagination. It will be necessary later on to give some description of the state into which the art of painting had fallen in England before the fresh minds of the young romantic school, breaking away under Rossetti's leadership, caused such a turmoil and revolution; but in the meantime, at the period we are dealing with, it is probably correct to say that Rossetti grew tired of, rather than disapproved of, the teaching in the school, that he was full of ideas craving utterance on canvas, and that he wanted to paint before he could properly draw. This impatience caused him to take a momentous and curious step, which certainly entailed harm to him as a technical executant, though it may indirectly have furthered his career as an artist. He decided to throw up the Academy training, and wrote to a painter of whom not many people at that date had heard, but whose work he himself admired, asking to be admitted into his studio as a pupil. This was Ford Madox Brown, and for his own particular needs and line of thought Rossetti could have lighted upon no man more absolutely suitable. Madox Brown was only seven years Rossetti's senior, but he had studied abroad at Ghent, Antwerp, Paris, and Rome, and had exhibited during the early forties some fine cartoon designs for the decoration of the new House of Lords. The pictures by Brown which Rossetti had seen, and which he mentioned in writing, were the Giaour's Confession, exhibited at the Academy in 1841, Parisina (1845), Our Lady of Saturday Night, and Mary Queen of Scots, of which he remarked, "if ever I do anything in art, it will certainly be attributable to a constant study of that work." This, and other rather florid compliments of the same sort, may well have impressed Madox Brown, who was not accustomed to be complimented, with a shrewd idea that he was being made fun of; and the story has been told how, in a suspicious frame of mind, he armed himself with a stick and went forth to seek his unknown correspondent. On arriving at the house he was partly reassured by a door-plate; and the evident sincerity and enthusiasm of the boy himself, when they met, overcame his generous warm-heartedness, and made him agree to take Rossetti into his studio, and to teach him painting, not for a fee, which he declined, but for the sheer pleasure of encountering and training up a sympathetic spirit.