CHRISTINA ROSSETH AND SOME REFLECTIONS.

Dominion, Volume 4, Issue 1144, 3 June 1911, Page 9

CHRISTINA ROSSETH AND SOME REFLECTIONS.

Ruskin pooh-poohed her because sho was not Important. And I fancy he disliked her intuitively because Importance was the last thing in this world that she would have desired. I remember informing her shortly after tho death of Lord Tennyson that there was a very strong movement, or at any rate a very strong feeling, abroad that tho Laureateship should be conferred upon her. She shuddered. And I think that she gave evidence then to as strong an emotion as lever knew- her to evince. The idea of such a position of eminence filled her with real horror. She wanted to be obscure, and to be a humble handmaiden of the Lord, as fervently as she desired to be exactly correct in her language. Exaggerations really pained her. I remember that when I told her that I had met hundreds of people who thought the appointment would be most appropriate, she pinned me down until sho had extracted from me tho confession that not moro than nine persons had spoken to me on the subject. . . . And thero wo have one symptom of the' gulf that separated Christina ltcssetti as a modernist from ltuskin and the old Pre-Raphaelite circle. ' Tho very last thing that these, tho last of thr Romanticists, desired was precision. On one page of one of Mr. Ruskin's books I have counted tho epithet "golden" six times. Thero were "golden clays," "golden-mouthed," "distant golden Bpire," "golden peaks," and "golden sunset," all of them describing one picturo by Turner, in which the nearest approach to gold discernible by a precise eye, is a mixture of orango red and madder brown. It was, you see, another method; it was precisely the last kick of Romanticism—of that Romanticism that is now so very dead With its glamour, its swooning, if • ecstasies, and its all-embracing justk cation, tho Pre-Raphaelito view of mediaeval love was a very different thing from real mediaevalisrn, which was a state of things much more like our own. Tor the mediaeval people, very much as we do to-day, took their own individual cases on their own individual merits, and guilty love exacted some kind of retribution very frequently painful, as often as not grotesque. Or sometimes thero was not any retribution at all —a successful intrigue "came off," and became material for n joyous c-onte. It was a matter of individual idiosyncrasies then as it is to-day. You got roasted in hell or an injured husband stuck a dagger into you, or you were soundly cudgelled, drenched with water, or thrown on to noxious dung-heaps, just as nowadays you get horsewhipped, escape or do' not escape the Divorce Court, and do or do not get requested to resign from your club. Thero was not then, as there is not now, any protective glamour about it. Tho things happened, hard, direct, and there was no ;hance of ignoring them. Dante's lovers In hell felt bitter cold, stinging name, shame, horror, despair, and possibly even all the eternity of woe that was before them. And all the bard, direct, ferocious, and unrelenting spirit of the poet went into the picture, as into all tiis other pictures of mediaeval afterlife, i And so it was with tho woman Rossctti, who dwelt for so long in the same house as Danto Gabriel, writing her poems on the comer of tho washhand stand in her bedroom, and making no mark at all iu' tho household,

whilst all tho other great figures spouted and generalised about love and tho musical glasses in every other room of tho gloomy and surely glamorous houses that in Bloomsbury tho Eosscttis successively inhabited. They talked and generalised about Life and Love, and they pursued their romantic images along the lines of least resistance. They got into scrapes or they did not, they squabbled or they mado it up; but in any caso they always worked out a moral theory good enough to justify themselves and to impress tho rest of tho world. And that in the essence was. tho note of tho Victorian Great. It did not matter what they did, whether it was George Eliot living in what we should call to-day "open sin," or, let us say, Schopenhauer trying to have, all noises suppressed, by law, they interrupted his cogitations. No matter what their personal eccentricities or peccadilloes might be, they wore always along the lines of the higher morality. I am not saying that such figures are not to bo found to-day. If yon will read the works of Mr. , you will find tho attitude of the Victorian Great Man exactly reproduced. For whatever tihis gentleman may desire to do in a moment of impulse or of irritation, or in the search for copy, or in' tho quest for health, at once ho will write a great big book, for all the world like Mr. Ruskin, to prove thai this his eccentricity ought, according to the higher morals, to be tho rule of life for tho British middle classes. And there are ten or twenty of such gentlemen nowadays so" directing our lives and waxing moderately fat upon tho profits of their spiritual dictatorship, but they have not anything like the ascendency of their predecessors. We have not any longer our Buskins, C'arlyles, Gccrgo Eliots, and the rest. '. , Wo have in consequence very much more to work out our special cases for ourselves, and wo aro probably a groat deal moro honest in consequence. Wo either do [our duties and have very bad times with good consciences, or wo do not do our duties, and enjoy ourselves with occasional pauses or unpleasant reflections. But wo look, upon tho whole, in our little unimportantly individual ways, honestly at our special cases. The influence of Jean Jacques Rousseau, in fact, is on tho wane, and the gentleman to-day who left his illegitimate children on the steps of a foundling hospital would think himself rather a dirty dog, and try to forget the incident.

—Ford Mador Hueffer, in the "Fortnightly."