But there is, indeed, no surer testimony to the magic of his personality than is betrayed in the restive spirit with which his two comrades of those earlier days endeavoured afterwards to assert their independence of his influence. Both Sir John Millais and Mr. Holman Hunt, in their later life, went out of their way to try to prove to the world that the pre-Raphaelite movement would have been in no way changed in its direction if Rossetti had not been one of the original group. I often talked with Millais on this subject, and it was easy to perceive that he harboured something almost of resentment at the bare suggestion that the direction of his art was in any sense due to the example or teaching of Rossetti; and of the Millais of later years, who had partly discarded the poetic impulses of his youth, it may be readily conceded that he owed nothing to the man whose art, whether in its splendour or in its decay, was governed always by the spirit of imaginative design.
And equally of Holman Hunt who, in his two long volumes, has so laboriously and so needlessly laboured to vindicate his own independence, it may be admitted without reservation that his kinship with the spirit in which Rossetti worked was transient and almost accidental. But it remains, nevertheless, unquestionably true that during that brief season of close comradeship, the supremacy of Rossetti’s genius is very clearly reflected in the work of both. The aftergrowth of talents as great as—and in some respects greater than—his, led each of these men into ways of Art that owned, it may be freely confessed, no obligation to Rossetti; and of the rich gifts of Millais as a painter, extraordinary in their precocity and developed in increasing power almost to the end of his career, no one could exhibit keener or truer appreciation than Rossetti himself. I recall on one of those nights in Cheyne Walk with what power and fulness of expression he paid willing homage to Millais’ genius. “Since painting began,” he said, “I do not believe there has ever been a man more greatly endowed.” And then he went on to speak with genuine humility of his own many shortcomings in technical accomplishment, wherein he admitted that Millais stood as the unchallenged master of his time.
Rossetti was the kindest, but most careless, of hosts, and the many little dinners at which I was permitted to be a guest always had about them something of the air of improvisation. Of the actual details of the feast, from a culinary point of view, he seemed to take little heed, and there was something quaint and humorous in the way in which, at the head of his table, he would attack the fowl or joint that happened to be set before him, lunging at it with the carving knife and fork almost as if it were an armoured foe who had challenged him to mortal combat. I remember on one of those occasions an incident occurred that showed in striking fashion the quick warmth of his heart at the sudden call of friendship. We were in the midst of cheeriest converse. Fred Leyland, one of his staunchest and earliest patrons, was of the company, when the news came by special messenger that young Oliver Madox Brown was stricken with serious illness. It chanced that we had been talking of the young man’s youthful essays, both in art and in literature, and Rossetti had spoken in almost exaggerated praise of the promise they displayed, when the letter was handed to him. He remained silent for a moment, though it was easy to see by the working of his face that he was deeply distressed. “Brown is my oldest friend,” he said. “His boy is ill, and I must go to him; but that need not break the evening for you.” And then, without any added word of farewell, he left us where we sat, and in a moment we heard the street door close, and we knew that he had gone. For a time we lingered over the table, but Cheyne Walk was no longer itself without the presence of its host. We passed into the studio, where Rossetti was wont to coil himself up on the sofa in preparation for long hours of talk, and we felt as by common consent that the evening was at an end.
The circumstance was slight enough in itself, but I remember feeling afresh how magical and inspiring was the spell he exercised over us all, and I little realised then that this friendship with Rossetti, which had proved so powerful a factor in moulding the intellectual tendencies of my own life, was not destined much longer to endure. For a time, indeed, the old welcome always awaited me, but after a time I thought I detected a certain reserve and restraint in our intercourse which I was unable to explain. A little later those longed-for invitations to dine at Cheyne Walk ceased altogether, and once or twice when I called the studio door, always open to me heretofore, was closed, on the excuse that the painter was too busily engaged. It was not, indeed, until after his death, that I learnt from his truest and most trusted friend the cause of our alienation.
Rossetti, although he never exposed his own pictures to public criticism, was, like every artist who has ever lived, eager for the praise of those whose praise he valued; and his nature, already grown morbid under the stress of influences that were undermining his health, was not without an element of jealousy that seemed strangely inconsistent with the tribute he could on many an occasion offer to the work of others. He saw but little of Burne-Jones in those days, but he knew that I saw him often. He knew, also, from my published criticism, that I was strongly attracted to his genius, and although I have heard Rossetti himself speak of his pupil and follower in terms of laudation that could not be surpassed, the thought, as I learnt later, had already begun to poison his mind that my allegiance to himself had suffered diminution; and he frankly confessed to the friend from whom little in his life was hidden that my presence in Cheyne Walk became to him, for this reason, a source of irritation, which, in the condition of his health, he was unable to endure.
Such flaws in a nature so splendidly endowed count for nothing in remembrance of the picture of him that remains to me as I first knew him in the plenitude of his intellectual powers. For a time it seemed as if the great movement at the head of which his name must enduringly remain was likely to suffer eclipse. The taste of later years had taken an entirely different direction, and the ideals which the small band he led had striven so manfully to recapture from a renewed study of nature and a finer understanding of the artistic achievements of the past appeared to have sunk into oblivion. It was therefore a delight to find in Rome in the spring of two years ago how enthusiastic was the welcome accorded to a man who, while he ranks so high among English painters, owned in his veins the blood of Italy and from whose painters, at that bewitching season when the spirit of the Renaissance was in its youth, he had drawn the inspiration which was destined to kindle his own genius.
EDWARD BURNE-JONES
“I think Morris’s friendship began everything for me; everything that I afterwards cared for; we were freshmen together at Exeter. When I left Oxford I got to know Rossetti, whose friendship I sought and obtained. He is, you know, the most generous of men to the young. I couldn’t bear with a young man’s dreadful sensitiveness and conceit as he bore with mine. He taught me practically all I ever learnt; afterwards I made a method for myself to suit my nature. He gave me courage to commit myself to imagination without shame—a thing both bad and good for me. It was Watts, much later, who compelled me to try and draw better.
“I quarrel now with Morris about Art. He journeys to Iceland, and I to Italy—which is a symbol—and I quarrel, too, with Rossetti. If I could travel backwards I think my heart’s desire would take me to Florence in the time of Botticelli.”
So Burne-Jones wrote of himself more than forty years ago. It chanced I had just then written a series of papers on living English painters; and, with the thought of their re-publication, had asked him for some particulars of his earlier career. The scheme, I remember, was never carried into effect; but his answer to my inquiry, from which I have drawn this interesting fragment of autobiography, served as the beginning of a long friendship that was interrupted only by death.