Page:Great Men and Famous Women Volume 8.djvu/136

ARTISTS AND AUTHORS discussion of picture-frames. This was but the undercurrent of his influence ; as we shall see more and more every year as the central decades of this century become history, its main stream directed the two great arts of painting and poetry into new channels, and set a score of diverse talents in motion. But, as far as anything can be seen plainly about Rossetti at present, to me the fact of his immovability, his self-support, his curious reserve, seems to be the most interesting. He held in all things to the essential and not to the acci- dental ; he preferred the dry grain of musk to a diluted flood of perfume. An Italian by birth and deeply moved by all things Italian, he never visited Italy ; a lover of ritual and a sympathizer with all the mysteries of the Roman creed, he never joined the Catholic Church ; a poet whose form and substance alike influ- enced almost all the men of his generation, he was more than forty years of age before he gave his verse to the public ; a painter who considered the attitude of the past with more ardor and faith than almost any artist of his time, he never chose to visit the churches or galleries of Europe. It has been said, among the many absurd things which his death has provoked, that he shrank from publicity from timidity, or spurned it from ill-temper. One brilliant journalist has de- scribed him as sulking like Hector in his tent. It used to be Achilles who sulked when I was at school ; but it certainly never was Gabriel Rossetti. Those who only knew him, after his constitution had passed under the yoke of the drug which killed him, cannot judge of his natural reserve from that artificial and mor- bid reserve which embittered the last years of his life. The former was not con- nected with any objection to new faces or dislike of cordial society, but with the indomitable characteristic of the man, which made him give out the treasures of the spirit, and never need to receive them. So far from disliking society, it is my impression that he craved it as a necessity, although he chose to select its constituents and narrow its range. He was born in 1828. The story of his parentage is well known, and has been told in full detail since his death. He was born in London and christened Gabriel Charles Rossetti ; it was not, I am told, until he was of age to appreci- ate the value of the name that he took upon himself the cognomen which his father had borne, the Dante by which the world, though not his friends, have known him. Living with his father in Charlotte street, with two sisters and a brother no less ardently trained in letters than himself, he seems to have been turned to poetry, as he was afterward sustained in it, by the interior flame. The household has been described to me by one who saw it in 1847 : the father, titu- lar professor of Italian literature, but with no professional duties, seated the live- long day, with a shade over his eyes, writing devotional or patriotic poetry in his native tongue ; the girls reading Dante aloud with their rich maiden voices ; Gabriel buried here in his writing, or darting round the corner of the street to the studio where he painted. From this seclusion he wrote to the friend who has kindly helped me in preparing these notes, and whose memories of the poet extend over a longer period than those of any survivor not related to him. Mr. W. B. Scott, now so well known in more arts than one, had then but