Books: Rossetti & His Circle

THE PRE-RAPHAELITE TRAGEDY — William Gaunt—Harcourt, Brace ($3).

When Britain trembled over one of its periodic French invasion scares in 1859, the home guards were somewhat puzzled by the enlistment of four unusual volunteers. Their names were Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Morris, William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais. The guards were even more puzzled:

> When Volunteer Hunt always lost the screws to his musket during lock drill.

> When at the command Form Fours! Volunteer Rossetti always asked, “Why?”

> When at the command Left! Volunteer Morris (although an early attachment to King Arthur had gradually converted him to Marxism) always marched right.

The home guards did not know that their strange comrades-in-arms were patriotic Pre-Raphaelites, members of that oddly assorted group of late 19th-Century British poets, painters and interior decorators whose whole creative life was a revolt against practically everything that had happened in the world for the last 400 years.

“Theirs,” says Author William Gaunt, “was the tragedy of the century. . . . They had many different enthusiasms—in which, however, there is one consistent factor—a defiance of materialism.” Few novels are as absorbing as this collective biography of the Pre-Raphaelites; few are as funny. And no other book on Rossetti and his circle has set them so accurately in their historical context, has given to the queer, excessive things they did so clear a historical meaning. For the Pre-Raphaelites, says Gaunt, are the only optimistic rebel artists who have so far defied industrial civilization. “They would not adapt themselves to their age. Its most brilliant misfits, they invented time and place of their own in which to live and work.”

Chimney Sweep or Painter? Almost a pre-Pre-Raphaelite was Painter John Everett Millais. At ten, he used to clap “old daddy” familiarly on the back. “Dear creatures,” he would say tolerantly of his parents. At this tender age John Everett’s mother took her artistically precocious son to see the president of the Royal Academy. “Madam,” said the president, “you had better make him a chimney sweep.” Then he looked at John’s drawings. “Madam,” said the president, “it is your duty to bring the boy up to art.” At twelve, John Everett won the Royal Academy’s gold medal. As he tripped before the solemn Academicians, “long, light curls fell over his goffered collar, his face was fresh-colored and open, his eyes a candid blue.” “The Child” had become “the darling of the institution.”

He was the darling, too, of another boy, William Holman Hunt, also an art student, who came to the prize-giving especially to see the infant prodigy. Soon Hunt and Millais were close friends. By the time Millais was 18, the two had “agreed they must strike out a new line. Art was getting stale and empty. Raphael and the ‘Grand Manner’ were overdone.” They would go back to the golden age of painting before Raphael. A young Oxford critic, John Ruskin, had pointed out the new direction: “Go to nature in all singleness of heart, selecting nothing, rejecting nothing.” Following this undiscriminating line with loyal literalness, young Hunt went to Kew Gardens, chopped down a 12-ft. palm tree, copied it as background for his painting of Christ and the Two Marys.

Soon Millais and Hunt were joined by a third recruit, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, an eccentric Anglo-Italian poet. Under Hunt’s tutelage, Poet Rossetti became a painter, drew up a list of immortals who would constitute “the whole of our creed.” Like a current movie, each immortal was graded by stars. Christ received four stars, the author of the Book of Job three, King Alfred two, Tennyson one. Kosciusko, Columbus, Joan of Arc also ran. The young star givers decided to call themselves the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Rossetti hoped they would “abjure bohemianism, swearing and drinking; rescue fallen women.”

Farce & Agony. With a few other members, the Brotherhood thereupon started on a career which Author Gaunt calls “a mixture of the jolliest farce and the strangest agony. . . . Obliging countrymen shot water rats for Millais and held down sheep for Hunt to copy with the requisite care.” Redheaded, swan-necked Elizabeth Siddal, Rossetti’s ideal of womanly beauty, lay in an icy bath for hours on end while Millais painted her as the drowning Ophelia.

Unfortunately each had his own idea of the aims of the group. Holman Hunt’s idea was religious. He soon left for Palestine. There on the shores of the Dead Sea, with an umbrella over his head to protect him from the sun and a double-barreled rifle on his left arm to protect him from the Arabs, he painted The Scapegoat, one of the first sensational Pre-Raphaelite pictures. On the barren beach stood a white goat, symbol in Hunt’s mind of the sins of the world. Behind lay the mountains of Moab and the caves of Sodom. Said the Art Journal: “An extremely forbidding specimen of the capriformous race.”

John Everett Millais took this critical reception of his friend’s goat as a warning. “Take my advice, old boy,” he told Hunt, “accept the world as it is and don’t rub up people the wrong way.” Hastily, Millais became a regular visitor at the great country houses. “Few artists,” says Author Gaunt, “. . . have laid low so many stags and birds. . . .” Dropping his palette at the flicker of a wing, Millais would blaze away at any passing bird, once winged an old lady at her cottage door.

Eminence on Eminence. Soon he was painting the great with gentility and aplomb. “Oh, your eminence, on that eminence, if you please,” he said, waving Cardinal Newman to a model’s throne. “The attendant priests were somewhat scandalized when, seeing the cardinal hesitate, [Millais] added, ‘Come, jump up, you dear old boy.’ ” In no time at all Millais was living in a luxurious house, complete with stately columns, fountains and a black marble sea lion. “Has paint done all this, Mr. Millais?” asked Carlyle, adding in his genial way, “It only shows how many fools there are in the world.”

Millais’ greatest success came in 1885, when he painted Bubbles, a portrait of his little grandson blowing soap bubbles. Pears’ Soap bought Bubbles outright, used it as an advertisement. Result: Bubbles became one of the most famous of British paintings; Pears’ became one of the world’s biggest soap firms.

Millais himself became president of the Royal Academy. “I’ve had a good time, my boy,” he said just before his death, “I have no enemies, there’s no man with whom I would not shake hands—except one, and by Jove! I should like to shake him by the hand now.” He meant Rossetti.

Painter & Poet. For Rossetti, Pre-Raphaelitism was a neomedieval dream of romantic love and beauty. His rich, sensuous canvases became as famous as the poems he wrote to go with them. Rossetti had married the beautiful Elizabeth who for years had served as model for the dreamy, giraffe-necked ladies he painted. When his wife died Rossetti buried his book of unpublished verses in her coffin. Years later he had to exhume his wife’s coffin to recover them. Laboriously deciphering the words on the worm-eaten pages, he presented the poems to a public pre-thrilled by their funereal history.

Rossetti, who had once urged Pre-Raphaelites to “abjure bohemianism,” was the most bohemian of the group. He collected “kangaroos, a wallaby, a chameleon, some salamanders, wombats, an armadillo, a marmot, a woodchuck, a deer, a jackass, a raccoon. . . .” He bought a Brahmin bull because its eyes reminded him of one of his lady friends. Even his Pre-Raphaelite brothers were gradually estranged by Rossetti’s eccentricities. When the novelist George Meredith made an annoying remark, Rossetti simply threw a cup of tea in his face. But some hero-worshipers remained faithful. “Why is he not some great exiled king,” said one of them, “that we might give our lives in trying to restore him to his kingdom.”

Greatest satirist of the Pre-Raphaelites is artist and author Sir Max Beerbohm. His Rossetti and His Circle gently caricatured the Brotherhood’s esthetic antics, helped keep their memories green. Sir Max, one of the keenest wits and sveltest exquisites of the 1890s, came into the late Victorian world when Oscar Wilde was just a lily-loving boy and Dante Gabriel Rossetti a doddering gaffer. Now something of a gaffer himself, Sir Max celebrated his 70th birthday last fortnight with London’s Maximilian Society, a club formed and named in his honor.

Strictly stag, Sir Max’s party was a literary event to which invitations were as rare and precious as a half-pound of wartime beefsteak. Novelist Charles Morgan (The Fountain) and Poet T. S. Eliot begged so hard to come that they were finally admitted as “gate crashers.” George Bernard Shaw declined with thanks, cracked: “I suffered too much from the celebrations at my own 70th birthday 16 years ago to make myself a party to the same outrage at the expense of an old friend who has never done me any harm.”

Players’ Club artistes entertained Sir Max with nostalgic Victorian music-hall ballads. Hit of the evening was The Ballad of Sam Hall, which ends: “An’ I’ll see you all in ‘ell, an’ I ‘opes you frizzle well—damn your eyes.”

Then Dramatic Critic Alan Dent, who organized the party, presented Sir Max with 57 bottles of old wines. Sir Max blinked happily, remembered his neighbors in Abinger, the Surrey village where he now lives, said: “What will the villagers think now of old Gaffer Beerbohm?”

Author Ormsbee’s battlefield scenes are just as tough. His no man’s land is awash with blood. His hospital interludes are richly orgiastic. Lying in his hospital bed, Hero Abner hears “the nurses being chased through the halls, laughing and screaming.”

Some readers may wonder whether Abner’s conduct can properly be described as The Sound of an American. World-Telegram Reviewer Harry Hansen said that the book “pounds home that you can’t write a decent novel when you are trying to outdo your competitors in vulgarity. The only sound of an American that I could discern . . . was the razzberry.”