Chapter IV

FRIENDSHIP WITH RUSKIN.--MARRIAGE,
AND DEATH OF MRS. ROSSETTI

With the year 1854 Rossetti's life entered upon a new phase. This was the first year of his memorable connection with Ruskin. At the same time he had by now engaged himself to marry Miss Siddal, whose companionship and whose health became, for the next eight years, the most absorbing facts in his private life. To speak of Ruskin first, his was no ordinary friendship, but a curious combination of patron, friend, and mentor. If Rossetti had been a common man, living an ordinary life and working on regular lines, such a connection would have been, as he jocularly described it once, "in a way to make his fortune." For Ruskin was willing to buy within certain limits almost everything that Rossetti produced. Furthermore, having taken a great fancy to Miss Siddal, and admiring her poetic and artistic gifts, which had grown in a remarkable way under Rossetti's tuition, he tried to make an arrangement whereby he should purchase all her work also, and there is no doubt that Ruskin's help at this critical period was invaluable, and that without it the young couple would have suffered even more struggling times than they did. For Rossetti was hopelessly unthrifty, flush of money one day, out-at-elbows the next, and invariably anticipating any money to be earned from commissions. The Ruskin letters which have been published, throw an interesting light upon this butterfly existence.

Before passing from the subject of Ruskin it is interesting to note that he enlisted Rossetti as an active helper in the scheme promoted by Frederic Denison Maurice for bringing art into the East end. His method of teaching has been described by one who attended his lectures. He began at once with colour. As in his own personality and his own work, light and shade, drawing, and everything else was subservient to colour. Without troubling about the grammar of design he gave his pupils nature to copy and showed them how to copy it. A later generation has come to see wisdom in Rossetti's method, and has introduced it successfully under government auspices in elementary schools.

In 1860 Rossetti and Miss Siddal carried out their long projected plans of matrimony, which had been delayed by the latter's illness, by uncertain prospects, and perhaps also by a final want of resolution on Rossetti's part.

The marriage took place on May 23rd, and the young couple went for their wedding trip to Paris and Boulogne. On their return the rooms at Chatham Place were extended by opening a door into the adjoining house. The independent bachelor habits to which both were accustomed made life as Bohemian and irregular after marriage as before it. Men friends came and went as they pleased; tavern dinners relieved the strain of studio work, and little if any respect was paid to the conventions of social intercourse. Mrs. Rossetti's delicate health alone made it impossible for her to go about much, except amongst devoted and intimate friends, the chief of whom in these days perhaps were Algernon Charles Swinburne and the Madox Brown and Morris families. In May, 1861, Mrs. Rossetti gave birth to a child, still-born, and her slow recovery, added to the phthisical troubles with which she was afflicted, induced a severe and wearing form of neuralgia. For this she was prescribed laudanum, of which, on the night of February 10, 1862, she unhappily took an overdose. Poor Rossetti, on returning home from the Working Men's College, where he had been lecturing, found his wife already past recovery, and, frantic with anxiety, rushed off to Highgate Rise to summon the ever-ready assistance of Madox Brown. The following morning she died, after but two years of married life clouded with illness; and for a time at least her loss deprived Rossetti of all capacity for work and almost of all interest in his art. The most touching event in his whole career of swift and flame-like emotions is the sudden impulse which led him, as his wife's coffin was being closed, to bury in her hair the drafts of all his early poems, which at her request he had copied into a little book. Only a poet could put into words the dramatic intensity of grief which was expressed in this now historic sacrifice to the memory of Rossetti's dead wife.