I love and admire the old furious,
disconsolate, selfish fellow with all my heart; though he was a bad
husband, he was a true friend, for all his discordant cries and
groans. Then there is Rossetti--a man who wrote a few incredibly
beautiful poems, and in whom one seems to feel the inner fire and
glow of art. Yet many of his pictures are to me little but
voluptuous and wicked dreams; and his later sonnets are full of
poisonous fragrance--poetry embroidered and scented, not poetry
felt. What a generous, royal prodigal nature he had, till he sank
into his drugged and indulgent seclusion! Here then are three great
souls. Ruskin, the pure lover of things noble and beautiful, but
shadowed by a prim perversity, an old-maidish delicacy, a petulant
despair. Carlyle, a great, rugged, and tumultuous heart, brutalised
by ill-health, morbidity, selfishness. Rossetti, a sort of day-star
in art, stepping forth like an angel, to fall lower than Lucifer.
What is the meaning of these strange catastrophes, these noble
natures so infamously hampered? In the three cases, it seems to be
that melancholy, brooding over a world, so exquisitely designed and
yet so unaccountably marred, drove one to madness, one to gloom,
one to sensuality.
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