But the reader will say, “Truth is great, and must prevail. The picture of Rossetti that now exists in the public mind is the true one. The former picture was a lie.” But here the reader will be much mistaken. The romantic picture which existed in the public mind during Rossetti’s
life was the true one; the picture that now exists of him is false.
Does any one want to know what kind of a man was the painter of ‘Dante’s Dream’ and the poet of ‘The Blessed Damosel,’ let him wipe out of his mind most of what has been written about him, let him forget if he can most of the Rossetti letters that have been published, and let him read the poet’s poems and study the painter’s pictures, and he will know Rossetti—not, indeed, so thoroughly as we know Shakespeare and Æschylus and Sophocles, but as intimately as it is possible to know any man whose biography is written only in his works.
It must be admitted, however, that for those who had a personal knowledge of Rossetti some of the letters in this volume will have an interest, owing to the evidence they afford of that authorial generosity which was one of his most beautiful characteristics. His disinterested appreciation of the work of his contemporaries sets him apart from all the other poets of his time and perhaps of any other time. To wax eloquent in praise of this and that illustrious name, and thus to claim a kind of kinship with it, is a very different thing from Rossetti’s noble championship of a name, whether that of a friend or otherwise, which has never emerged from obscurity. It is perhaps inevitable and in the nature of things that most poets are too much absorbed in their own work to have time
to interest themselves in the doings of their fellow-workers.
But, with regard to Rossetti, he could feel, and often did feel, as deep an interest in the work of another man as in his own. There was no trouble he would not take to aid a friend in gaining recognition. This it was more than anything else which endeared him to all his friends, and made them condone those faults of his which ever since his death have been so freely discussed. The editor of this volume quotes this sentence from Skelton’s ‘Table-Talk of Shirley’:—
“I have preserved a number of Rossetti’s letters, and there is barely one, I think, which is not mainly devoted to warm commendation of obscure poets and painters—obscure at the time of writing, but of whom more than one has since become famous.”
Nor was his interest in other men’s work confined to that of his personal friends. His discovery of Browning’s ‘Pauline,’ of Charles Wells, and of the poems of Ebenezer Jones may be cited as instances of this. Moreover, he was always looking out in magazines—some of them of the most obscure kind—for good work. And if he was rewarded, as he sometimes was, by coming upon precious things that might otherwise have been lost, his heart was rejoiced.
One day, having turned into a coffee-house in Chancery Lane to get a cup of coffee, he
came upon a number of Reynolds’s Miscellany, and finding there a poem called ‘A Lover’s Pastime,’ he saw at once its extraordinary beauty, and enclosed it in a letter to Allingham. In this case, however, he unfortunately did not make his usual efforts to discover the authorship of a poem that pleased him; and a pity it is, for the poem is one of the loveliest lyrics that have been written in modern times. We hope it will find a place in the next anthology of lyrical poetry.