Old Familiar Faces

by Theodore Watts-Dunton

A largess universal like the sun.

It is always futile to make guesses as to what might have been the development of a poet’s genius and character had the education of

circumstances been different from what it was, and perhaps it is specially futile to guess what would have been the development under other circumstances of her, the poet of whom her friends used to speak with affection and reverence as “Christina.”

On the death of her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti (or as his friends used to call him Gabriel) in 1882, I gave that sketch of the family story which has formed the basis of most of the biographical notices of him and his family; it would, therefore, be superfluous to reiterate what I said and what is now matter of familiar knowledge. It may, however, be as well to remind the reader that, owing to the peculiar position in London of the father Gabriele Rossetti, the family were during childhood and partly during youth as much isolated from the outer English world as were the family between whom and themselves there were many points of resemblance—the Brontës. The two among them who were not in youth of a retiring disposition were he who afterwards became the most retiring of all, Gabriel, and Maria, the latter of whom was in one sense retiring, and in another expansive. In her dark brown, or, as some called them, black eyes, there would suddenly come up and shine an enthusiasm, a capacity of poetic and romantic fire, to the quelling of which there must have gone an immensity of religious force.

As to Gabriel, during a large portion of his splendid youth he exhibited a genial breadth of front that affined him to Shakespeare and Walter Scott. The English strain in the family found expression in him, and in him alone. There was a something in the hearty ring of his voice that drew Englishmen to him as by a magnet.

While it was but little that the others drew from the rich soil of merry England, he drew from it half at least of his radiant personality—half at least of his incomparable genius. Though he was in every way part and parcel of that marvellous little family circle of children of genius in Charlotte Street, he had also the power of looking at it from the outside. It would be strange, indeed, if this or any other power should be found lacking in him. I have often heard Rossetti—by the red flicker of the studio fire, when the gas was turned down to save his eyesight—give the most graphic and fascinating descriptions of the little group and the way in which they grew up to be what they were under the tuition of a father whose career can only be called romantic, and a mother whose intellectual gifts were so remarkable that, had they not been in some great degree stifled by the exercise of an entire self-abnegation on behalf of her family, she, too, must have become an important figure in literature.

The father died in 1854, many years before

I knew the family; but Gabriel’s description of him; his conversations with his brother-refugees and others who visited the house—conversations in which the dreamy and the matter-of-fact were oddly blent; his striking skill as an improvisatore of Italian poetry, and also as a master of pen-and-ink drawing; his great musical gift—a gift which none of his family seemed to have inherited; his fine tenor voice; his unflinching courage and independence of character (qualities which made him refuse, in a Protestant country, to make open abjuration of the creed in which the Rossettis had been reared, though he detested the Pope and all his works, and was, if not an actual freethinker, thoroughly latitudinarian)—Gabriel’s pictures of this poet and father of poets were so vivid—so amazingly and incredibly vivid—that I find it difficult to think I never met the father in the flesh: not unfrequently I find myself talking of him as if I had known him. What higher tribute than this can be made to a narrator’s dramatic power? Those who have seen the elder Rossetti’s pen-and-ink drawings (the work of a child) will agree with me that Gabriel did not over-estimate them in the least degree. All the Rossettis inherited from their father voices so musical that they could be recognized among other voices in any gathering, and no doubt that clear-cut method of syllabification which was so marked a characteristic

of Christina’s conversation, but which gave it a sort of foreign tone, was inherited from the father. Her affinity to the other two members of the family was seen in that intense sense of duty of which Gabriel, with all his generosity, had but little. There was no martyrdom she would not have undertaken if she thought that duty called upon her to undertake it, and this may be said of the other two.