3732. Dante Gabriel Rossetti to RB
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 22, 114–118.
London. Blackfriars Bridge
6th Feb. 1856
My dear Browning
Mea culpa! Various distractions & preoccupations have caused my delay hitherto & present apology. “Toiling & moiling, & so sic transeat[”] [1] —if you will kindly let it. Another cause has been my weekly suspicion for a month past that I might be passing through Paris again, & resolution in that case to treat myself to a day’s delay there & sight of you. Indeed, this bit of paper with the scratching of the pen along it, the grinding of the barges by the wall under my window, & the lighthouse weather here tonight, seem still very poor facts to set against the pleasant sights & sounds which that hope has in it; but I suppose they must do duty for the present–
Page’s picture is like you—very—but it isn’t you. I should say that 20 at least of those 52 sittings [2] sit heavy on the soul of it, & make it loom through a sort of fog of over anxiety. Nor, though it looks like the work of a superior man, do I like the colour & method of painting. Nor, though it is very elaborate, do I like the frame. Nor, though I vowed sincerity before seeing the picture, do I quite like now making so many objections; especially after painting such an indifferent head from the same model (now looking down at me from the mantelpiece.) [3] But to come to particulars—the mouth seems too small—the nose the reverse of its true shape, the beard stubbly & ungenerous. The eyes are, as far as shape goes, much the best part I think, & in that respect very like indeed. After all, I am not sure whether one has not one’s own view of a poet as much as of his poetry; is one much likelier to be pleased with a portrait of him than with an illustration to him? What think you? Further, I hold the portrait at your disposal, as regards exhibition. On account of its subject—the side on which I feel about it—I should not like it myself to risk the Academy. Of course there are many well-placed portraits not nearly as good; & of course that is nothing to the purpose.
Hunt is just back from the East. [4] There was no getting at his whereabouts lately, or I should have written to him of your being at Paris. He stayed there half a day, & had he known you were there, would have made bold to look you up. He says his recollections of your works have been among his pleasantest companions out there. I have seen only a few of his landscape studies as yet, his more important things not having yet arrived– [5]
I have pretty good news from Nice latterly, [6] as I am sure Mrs Browning & yourself will be glad to hear. The climate is everything that could be desired, & its results are I trust beginning to show. It seems however that no one can stay there after May; when the winter will probably just be beginning to set fairly in here, & England hardly be a place to come back to.
I’m about half-way through Ruskin’s 3rd vol. which you describe very truly. Glorious it is in many parts—how fine that passage in the “Religious false ideal,” where he describes Raphael’s Charge to Peter, [7] & the probable truth of the event in its outward aspect. A glorious picture might be done from Ruskin’s description. <Poor Ruskin has been very ill, but is getting better—overwork I think. He & I had a long spell of you one night lately.> [8]
I know you dont at every turn look to “meet your own image walking in the garden” like “the Magus Zoroaster”; [9] but as I have generally an eye in that direction, some of my news must be about Men & Women. Have you happened to see the article in the British Quarterly—by David Masson [10] I hear. I recommended the perusal of it to your uncle [11] the other day, as being the only adequate thing that has yet appeared to my knowledge. It isn’t very brilliant—but it’s usually right—& what a “Jewel of Giamschid” [12] that is! The one in Fraser is prodigiously clever at “finding you out.” Brimley of Trin. Coll. Cam. is its author; who has got up his insight to the very bottom of you within a year past, at which time I happen to know he had read none of you– [13] Masson by the bye has been reading Childe Roland to the men at the Working Men’s College in a lecture, premising that it would do them good, whether they understood it all at first hearing or not. Munro, [14] whom you met in Paris, had a long walk & long talk about you with Carlyle the other day; whereof I got him to repeat a good deal. One thing was that Lady Ashburton had been reading to Carlyle “How it strikes a contemporary”, [15] of which I need not say all he said, except that it went near to make him give up his resolution against reading poetry. The man (excepting my brother) with whom I have as yet gone most fully & congenially into the book, is Allingham—a thorough-paced reader of yours.
Patmore’s second vol. of the “Angel” is nearly out—all in print. [16] He has just lost his father, & had another child. [17]
Since seeing you, I have finished that drawing of Dante & Beatrice at the marriage-feast; [18] begun & finished two others, both rather vague & very indescribable; & put several more in hand. So I have not been excessively idle. With regard to my work, I have one shortcoming to confess to you. You were kind enough, at Paris, to give me the address of Miss Wills Sandford, to whom I was to write on the completion of that Dante drawing. To tell you the truth, when finished, it looked so obviously inadequate as a goal to anyone’s journey, that I determined on waiting till the Passover drawing, [19] which you saw begun, should also be complete, and then borrowing the other from Ruskin to show with it. This is borne well in mind & will shortly come off, though the Passover is as yet not quite done, owing to other work intervening.
This pen is most execrable, & makes me wish more than ever that we were only “hip to haunch” [20] as I am not yet without a hope that we may be before long if not for long. I must apologize by the bye for the unctuous look of this paper, but somehow to-night everything on my table seems oily & unsavory,—painter’s penance. I’m most glad to hear of your improved quarters, though the change dims my mental view of you & your surroundings. With kindest remembrances from my brother & self to all of you not forgetting Pennini, & with hopes for Mrs Browning’s continued good health & some wonderings about her work in hand,
Believe me, dear Browning
Yours very sincerely
D G Rossetti
Address: Affranchie / Robert Browning Esq / Rue du Colisée, 3 / Paris / France.
Publication: Rossetti, 2, 92–96.
Manuscript: Huntington Library.
1. “Thus let it be.” Cf. “Old Pictures in Florence” (1855), line 76; see letter 3665, note 16.
2. According to Thomas Chase, RB sat 54 times for his portrait by William Page; see SD1758 in vol. 20.
3. His water-colour portrait of RB; see letter 3641, note 1.
4. William Holman Hunt (1827–1910), a founding member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, had returned to London from the Near East on 29 January 1856 (ODNB).
5. While travelling in the Holy Land, Hunt completed “The Scapegoat,” which was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1856.
6. i.e., from Elizabeth Siddal (1829–62), who was spending the winter there for her health.
7. Raphael’s “Christ’s Charge to Peter” (1515–16) was one of the cartoons commissioned by Pope Leo X for a series of murals or tapestries he intended for the lower walls of the Sistine Chapel. Based on Matthew 16:18–19 and John 21:15–17, the cartoon depicts Christ giving Peter the keys of heaven. In chapter four (“Of the False Ideal:—First, Religious”) in Modern Painters, Vol. III (1856), Ruskin points out the discrepancies between the passage from John 21 and Raphael’s depiction: “Note their convenient dresses for going a-fishing, with trains that lie a yard along the ground, and goodly fringes,—all made to match, an apostolic fishing costume. … The simple truth is, that the moment we look at the picture we feel our belief of the whole thing taken away. There is, visibly, no possibility of that group ever having existed” (p. 55).
8. Passage in angle brackets is written in the margin. See SD1886 where Rossetti writes: “Ruskin, on reading Men & Women (& with it some of the other works which he didn’t know before), declared them rebelliously to be a mass of conundrums: and compelled me to sit down before him and lay siege for one whole night.”
9. Cf. Shelley, Prometheus Unbound (1820), I, 192–193.
10. David Mather Masson (1822–1907), editor and, from 1852, professor of English language and literature at University College, London. For the full text of his review of Men and Women in The British Quarterly Review, 1 January 1856, see pp. 357–368.
11. Presumably, Reuben Browning.
12. Cf. “Old Pictures in Florence” (1855), line 246.
14. Alexander Munro (1825–71), sculptor, was born in Inverness, the son of a dyer. In 1847 he was accepted into the Royal Academy Schools. There he met Dante Gabriel Rossetti and soon became attached to the Pre-Raphaelite circle, especially Arthur Hughes, for whom Munro served as model. He visited the Brownings at Florence in the autumn of 1858 and at that time modelled a bust of Pen in clay, which he later executed in marble (see Reconstruction, H265).
15. See the third paragraph in letter 3722.
16. The Espousals, book two of Coventry Patmore’s The Angel in the House, was published by John W. Parker & Son on 28 June 1856 (see The Athenæum, 28 June 1856, no. 1496, p. 796).
17. Patmore’s fourth child and second daughter, Bertha Georgiana Patmore (1856-1925), was born on 2 February. His father, Peter George Patmore (1786–1855), died on 25 December.
18. A copy of “Beatrice Meeting Dante at a Marriage Feast, Denies Him Her Salutation,” which had been completed in 1851 and sold the following year to H.T. Wells (see Virginia Surtees, The Paintings and Drawings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882): A Catalogue Raisonné, Oxford, 1971, p. 17). The “two others” that Rossetti mentions were probably “Arthur’s Tomb” (1855) and “Paolo and Francesca da Rimini” (1855); see Virginia Surtees, pp. 34 and 36. In the 8 January 1856 part of a letter to William Allingham (begun 25 November 1855), Rossetti writes: “Among the later of my drawings finished are Francesca da Rimini, in 3 compartments; Dante cut by Beatrice at a marriage feast; Lancelot & Guenevere parting at tomb of Arthur” (ms at Morgan).
19. Probably “The Passover in the Holy Family: Gathering Bitter Herbs,” a water-colour commissioned by Ruskin but never finished (see Virginia Surtees, p. 40).
20. Cf. “Fra Lippo Lippi” (1855), line 44.
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