CHAPTER IV
FRIENDSHIP WITH RUSKIN.—MARRIAGE,
AND DEATH OF MRS. ROSSETTI
With the year 1854 Rossetti's life entered upon a new phase. This was the first year of his memorable connection with Ruskin. At the same time he had by now engaged himself to marry Miss Siddal, whose companionship and whose health became, for the next eight years, the most absorbing facts in his private life. To speak of Ruskin first, his was no ordinary friendship, but a curious combination of patron, friend, and mentor. If Rossetti had been a common man, living an ordinary life and working on regular lines, such a connection would have been, as he jocularly described it once, "in a way to make his fortune." For Ruskin was willing to buy within certain limits almost everything that Rossetti produced. Furthermore, having taken a great fancy to Miss Siddal, and admiring her poetic and artistic gifts, which had grown in a remarkable way under Rossetti's tuition, he tried to make an arrangement whereby he should purchase all her work also, and there is no doubt that Ruskin's help at this critical period was invaluable, and that without it the young couple would have suffered even more struggling times than they did. For Rossetti was hopelessly unthrifty, flush of money one day, out-at-elbows the next, and invariably anticipating any money to be earned from commissions. The Ruskin letters which have been published, throw an interesting light upon this butterfly existence.
Before passing from the subject of Ruskin it is interesting to note that he enlisted Rossetti as an active helper in the scheme promoted by Frederic Denison Maurice for bringing art into the East end. His method of teaching has been described by one who attended his lectures. He began at once with colour. As in his own personality and his own work, light and shade, drawing, and everything else was subservient to colour. Without troubling about the grammar of design he gave his pupils nature to copy and showed them how to copy it. A later generation has come to see wisdom in Rossetti's method, and has introduced it successfully under government auspices in elementary schools.
In 1860 Rossetti and Miss Siddal carried out their long projected plans of matrimony, which had been delayed by the latter's illness, by uncertain prospects, and perhaps also by a final want of resolution on Rossetti's part.
The marriage took place on May 23rd, and the young couple went for their wedding trip to Paris and Boulogne. On their return the rooms at Chatham Place were extended by opening a door into the adjoining house. The independent bachelor habits to which both were accustomed made life as Bohemian and irregular after marriage as before it. Men friends came and went as they pleased; tavern dinners relieved the strain of studio work, and little if any respect was paid to the conventions of social intercourse. Mrs. Rossetti's delicate health alone made it impossible for her to go about much, except amongst devoted and intimate friends, the chief of whom in these days perhaps were Algernon Charles Swinburne and the Madox Brown and Morris families. In May, 1861, Mrs. Rossetti gave birth to a child, still-born, and her slow recovery, added to the phthisical troubles with which she was afflicted, induced a severe and wearing form of neuralgia. For this she was prescribed laudanum, of which, on the night of February 10, 1862, she unhappily took an overdose. Poor Rossetti, on returning home from the Working Men's College, where he had been lecturing, found his wife already past recovery, and, frantic with anxiety, rushed off to Highgate Rise to summon the ever-ready assistance of Madox Brown. The following morning she died, after but two years of married life clouded with illness; and for a time at least her loss deprived Rossetti of all capacity for work and almost of all interest in his art. The most touching event in his whole career of swift and flame-like emotions is the sudden impulse which led him, as his wife's coffin was being closed, to bury in her hair the drafts of all his early poems, which at her request he had copied into a little book. Only a poet could put into words the dramatic intensity of grief which was expressed in this now historic sacrifice to the memory of Rossetti's dead wife.
CHAPTER V
WORK FROM 1854 TO 1857
Rossetti's work, during the earlier part of the period we have been glancing through, was of a particularly interesting, and towards the latter end of a sufficiently varied character. In range of subject it belongs to the category described in Chapter III, with the important addition that now for the first time is added to his sources of romantic inspiration the "Morte Darthur" of Sir Thomas Malory. This cycle of old Celtic legends had been for many years practically a sealed book in England, and its popularity to-day is largely owing to the interest revived in it by Rossetti, and later by the famous group of Oxford friends, including William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones. Rossetti had become acquainted with Malory by 1854, which is the date of that strange, sad little water-colour, King Arthur's Tomb, representing, in an imaginary scene, Launcelot bidding a last farewell to Guenevere. Apart from this Rossetti had in hand a number of drawings which were continually put on one side as fresh ideas crowded into his restless brain, and were often not finished until many years later. The statement could easily be verified, that many, if not most, of Rossetti's later pictures were planned during these early strenuous years of his life, so that it is not to be wondered at that the actual finished work of these early years was sparse in quantity and slight in quality—much slighter, for instance, than the two religious paintings with which he had begun his career. On the other hand, for many people these little water-colours of Rossetti's second period have a charm that nothing in his larger and more elaborated later work can recall.
In the early part of 1854 Rossetti wrote to Ruskin that he was occupied with ideas for three subjects, Found, Mary Magdalene at the Door of Simon, and another which is not named, but which from the context one may infer to have been the water-colour diptych of Paolo and Francesco da Rimini. In August of the same year he wrote that he was at work on a Hamlet and Ophelia, "deeply symbolical of course," and predestined for the folio which Millais had presented, and which was still supposed to be in circulation among the members of a select sketching club. About the same time he submitted to Ruskin two designs for The Passover, one of which was chosen to be begun at once, while Ruskin also commissioned seven drawings from the "Purgatorio," of which one certainly, Matilda gathering Flowers, was very shortly put in hand. None of these undertakings saw the light for at least another year; the Hamlet not for four or five. The Matilda was finished first and delivered in September 1855, and on the 2nd December Madox Brown records in his diary, apropos Miss Siddal being stranded in Paris without money, "Gabriel, who saw that none of the drawings on the easel could be completed before long, began a fresh one, Francesca da Rimini, in three compartments; worked day and night, finished it in a week, got thirty-five guineas for it from Ruskin, and started off to relieve them." This was the earliest version of a subject that Rossetti returned to more than once, representing in one compartment the lover's kiss, and in the second their two souls floating clasped together in Hell through a rain of pale sulphurous flames. Between the compartments are two figures meant for Dante and Virgil, with the words "O Lasso!" Within the same period, viz., by October, 1855, another Dante subject, The Vision of Rachel and Leah, was taken up and completed.