Some eminent Victorians: Personal recollections in the world of art and letters

by J. Comyns Carr

And then in a few trenchant sentences he would give his own, not very flattering, impression of what he considered to be Leighton’s imperfections on this score.

At the simple dinners to which I was at that time hospitably bidden, Rossetti, as he sat at the head of his table, was always amusing to watch. His inability to serve any dish set before him was pathetic in its helplessness. He would lunge at a joint as though it were a hostile foe, driving it from one end of the dish to the other till he got it securely cornered in its well of gravy, and then plunge his knife into it with something of deadly ferocity.

It is related of Rossetti, though I myself was not a witness to the incident, that on one occasion he was so entirely oblivious of the contents of the dish before him, that, wishing to prove its value as a specimen of oriental porcelain, he turned it over to examine the marks on its back, and all unconsciously deposited the turbot on the table-cloth.

I remember he very greatly admired some literary review which I had published in the columns of the Globe, the subject of which I now forget; and in the talk that followed he spoke with rare eloquence of the poets of the dawn of the last century, dwelling especially upon Keats, whom he knew I loved deeply, and coming at last to Landor, whose work, however beautiful, has never warmly appealed to me.

“What do you think of Landor?” he inquired.

I answered, “It seems to me through all his poetry that his genius is impersonal without being dramatic,” and Rossetti, who was always generous in his appreciation of youth, answered with a phrase that sent me home that night happy and contented.

“By Jove,” he said, “that’s the finest criticism ever made on Landor!”

I make no pretence that it was: it was enough for me then that he thought so, or that he said so.

But this friendship with Rossetti, so dearly prized by me and so indelible in its lasting impression, was not destined to endure for long. During the later days of our association he was already to some extent a sick man. Little by little the invitations, once so freely extended to me, slackened in their warmth of hospitality, until the day came when I realised the fact that my visits to Cheyne Walk were no longer welcome. It was not until years afterwards that I learned the cause, and if I give it here, it is only because it curiously illustrates that almost morbid sensitiveness of character which lay side by side in his nature with the most masculine grasp of the problems of life and art.

He had, it seems, as I had learned from the lips of a friend whose devotion to the poet endured till his death, a very high opinion of my judgment as an art critic, and he had conceived the belief, perhaps true at the time, that I thought more highly of the work of Burne-Jones than of his own. And although he himself had often said to me things of Burne-Jones’s genius which no word of mine could out-measure in generous praise, it fretted him, in the supersensitive condition in which suffering and ill-health had consigned him, to be reminded by my presence of a judgment that in his own person he would not have resented.