"Waugh is me!": Reading Evelyn Waugh on Dante Gabriel Rossetti

"By birth, Mrs [sic] Rossetti was half Italian and wholly pedagogic." (p. 10)*

"He learned some Latin and a little Greek." (p. 13)

". . . while [Benjamin] Hayden was dying of neglected vanity." (p. 19)

*when the family had financial troubles: "Maria Francesca reverted to the family trade of governess" (p. 55)

The OUP Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh describes Rossetti: His Life and Works thus:

This, Waugh's first published book [the second book was his first novel, Decline and Fall], marked the centenary of the birth of the painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882). Waugh was fascinated by the bohemian lives of the Pre-Raphaelite painters, and by his own family connection with them (William Holman Hunt had married, successively, two cousins of his grandfather). Rossetti is both compassionate towards its subject and critical of his self-destructive nature. The incisive analysis of Rossetti's painterly techniques contributed to the resurgence of public interest in Rossetti's art and poetry. The biography was also an early expression of Waugh's lifelong interest in narrative art, and laid the foundations for his own belief in the importance of the spiritual as well as the aesthetic vision of the artist. Although Rossetti was hastily compiled, it is nevertheless elegant and witty.

And how! 

I purchased and read the Penguin edition, which I wish had more and color plates of his artwork. While I found some of Waugh's wit distracting (like the examples above), he does analyze Rossetti's art, life, trials, poetry, character, achievement, and difficulties both judiciously and sympathetically. One of the more surprising comments Waugh often makes is that Rossetti did not really know how to paint: he had not acquired the proper techniques of preparing a canvas--when he and other Pre-Raphaelites worked on some frescoes for the Oxford Debating club for example, they did not begin with fresh lime plaster, and thus the works soon deteriorated. Rossetti used water color brushes for oil paint, Waugh tells us; he did not master the rules of perspective, etc.

Part of Waugh's effort in the book--the part that I didn't track that well with--is the analysis of how art criticism developed in the age of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Art criticism seems to have been so personal, addressing the character (indeed the morality) of the artist as the basis for praising or denigrating the work.

One of the saddest passages is when Rossetti, who had buried manuscripts of his early poems with his wife, Elizabeth Siddal, decided he wanted to review, revise, and publish them. He doesn't go to the grave; he waits for the papers to be delivered to him; then he must wait until the "poems had been dried and disinfected" and piece "together his work from among the stains and worm-holes of seven and a half years in the grave." (p. 205) (This reminded me of a line from Dominick Argento's opera The Aspern Papers when the Lodger is shocked that he might be thought capable of "desecrating a grave" to retrieve a lost opera by the composer.)

As for Waugh's analysis of Rossetti's art and poetry, I found it fascinating. There is one quibble I have with a comment about reading Rossetti's poetry: Waugh says it should be/must be read aloud (p. 210). I think all poetry must be read aloud, unless the author really didn't want us to hear the sounds of the words in our ears as we discerned the meaning and the music of her expression. (And then, has she really written a poem?)

One fun passage in chapter four, "The Good Years, 1862-1867", lists all the animals and bric-a-brac he collected in Tudor House. One of his obsessions was fine china. Fortunately, he had collected enough and it was valuable enough that when he desperately needed money (in chapter six, 'The Fleshly School') it could be sold for 650 pounds! (£650.00 in 1872 is worth £98,250.98 in 2025 with a "Purchasing Power Decrease: 99.34%"!)

Rossetti's life story is, like all of ours, a mixture of good and bad, but one of aspects Waugh constantly highlights is that he had a circle of friends who helped him over and over again as he suffered depression, ill health, mourning his wife, etc--in spite of how often, over and over again he subverted their attempts to help him or demonstrated a lack of gratitude. But they came back to help him anyway, knowing that illness, and addiction (to a prescribed medication, Chloral) and his absolute need moved them to great sacrifice and difficulty. He recovered from several crises, but entered his last illness on Good Friday, April 7 and died on Easter Sunday, April 9, 1882.

One musical note: Dante Gabriel Rossetti wrote "The Blessed Damozel", which Claude Debussy, among other composers, set to music ("La damoiselle élue") and submitted to the Académie des beaux-arts as an entry for the Prix de Rome in 1892. And of course, Rossetti depicted the blessed Damozel, leaning out "From the gold bar of Heaven" with "three lilies in her hand," and seven stars in her hair.

An entertaining and enlightening read.

Image credit (Public Domain): An illustration of Rossetti's poem