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045 - A Cheap Edition of a Great Man · Reviews

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  Speaker 1: Section forty four of reviews by Oscar Wilde. This is
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  Speaker 1: a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain.
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  Speaker 1: For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox dot org.
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  Speaker 1: Recording by Karen Savage, Reviews by Oscar Wilde, edited by
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  Speaker 1: Robert Ross, Section forty four. A cheap edition of A
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  Speaker 1: Great Man, pal Marle Gazette, April eighteenth, eighteen eighty seven.
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  Speaker 1: Formerly we used to canonize our great men. Nowadays we
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  Speaker 1: vulgarize them. The vulgarization of Rosetti has been going on
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  Speaker 1: for some time past, with really remarkable success, and there
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  Speaker 1: seems no probability at presents of the process being discontinued.
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  Speaker 1: The grass was hardly green upon the quiet grave in
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  Speaker 1: Birchington Churchyard when mister hall Caine and mister William Sharp
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  Speaker 1: rushed into print with their memoirs and recollections. Then came
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  Speaker 1: the usual mob of magazine hacks with their various views
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  Speaker 1: and attitudes. And now mister Joseph Knight has produced, for
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  Speaker 1: the edification of the British public a popular biography of
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  Speaker 1: the poet of the Blessed, Damosel, the painter of Dante's Dream.
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  Speaker 1: It is only fair to state that mister Knight's work
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  Speaker 1: is much better than that of his predecessors in the
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  Speaker 1: same field. His book is, on the whole modestly and
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  Speaker 1: simply written. Whatever its other faults may be, it is
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  Speaker 1: at least free from affectation of any kind, and it
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  Speaker 1: makes no serious pretense at being either exhaustive or definitive.
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  Speaker 1: Yet the best we can say of it is that
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  Speaker 1: it is just the sort of biography Guildensterne might have
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  Speaker 1: written of Hamlet. Nor does its unsatisfactory character come merely
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  Speaker 1: from the ludicrous inadequacy of the materials at mister Knight's disposal.
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  Speaker 1: It is the whole scheme and method of the book
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  Speaker 1: that is radically wrong. Rosetti's was a great personality, and
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  Speaker 1: personality such as his do not easily survive shilling primers.
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  Speaker 1: Sooner or later they have inevitably to come down to
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  Speaker 1: the level of their biographers. And in the present instance,
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  Speaker 1: nothing could be more absolutely commonplace than the picture mister
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  Speaker 1: Knight gives us of the wonderful seer and singer whose
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  Speaker 1: life he has so recklessly essayed to write. No doubt
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  Speaker 1: there are many people who will be deeply interested to
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  Speaker 1: know that Rosetti was once chased round his garden by
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  Speaker 1: an infuriated zebu he was trying to exhibit to mister Whistler,
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  Speaker 1: or that he had a great affection for a dog
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  Speaker 1: called Dizzy, or that sloshy was one of his favorite
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  Speaker 1: words of contempt, or that mister Goss thought him very
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  Speaker 1: like Chaucer in appearance, or that he had an absolute
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  Speaker 1: disqualification for whist playing, or that he was very fond
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  Speaker 1: of quoting the bad ballads, or that he once said
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  Speaker 1: that if he could live by writing poetry, he would
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  Speaker 1: see painting. Damned. For our part, however, we cannot help
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  Speaker 1: expressing our regret that such a shallow and superficial biography
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  Speaker 1: as this should ever have been published. It is but
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  Speaker 1: a sorry task to rip the twisted ravel from the
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  Speaker 1: worn garment of life and to turn the grout in
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  Speaker 1: a drained cup. Better after all, that we knew a
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  Speaker 1: painter only through his vision, and a poet through his song,
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  Speaker 1: than that the image of a great man should be
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  Speaker 1: marred and made mean for us by the clumsy geniality
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  Speaker 1: of good intentions. A true artist, and such Rosette undoubtedly was,
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  Speaker 1: reveals himself so perfectly in his work that unless a
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  Speaker 1: biographer has something more valuable to give us than idle
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  Speaker 1: anecdotes and unmeaning tales, his labor is misspent and his
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  Speaker 1: industry misdirected. Bad However, as is mister Knight's treatment of
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  Speaker 1: Rosetti's life, his treatment of Rosette's poetry is infinitely worse.
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  Speaker 1: Considering the small size of the volume and the consequently
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  Speaker 1: limited number of extracts, the amount of misquotation is almost incredible,
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  Speaker 1: and puts all recent achievements in this sphere of modern
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  Speaker 1: literature completely into the shade. The fine line in the
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  Speaker 1: first canto of Rosemary, what glints there like a lance
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  Speaker 1: that flees appears as what glints there like a glance
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  Speaker 1: that flees, which is very painful nonsense. In the description
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  Speaker 1: of that graceful and fanciful sonnet Autumn Idleness, the deer
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  Speaker 1: are represented as grazing from hilloc eves instead of gazing
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  Speaker 1: from hillock eves. The opening of Dantes Tenebre is rendered
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  Speaker 1: quite incomprehensible by the substitution of my for thy in
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  Speaker 1: the second line. Even such a well known ballad as
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  Speaker 1: Sister Helen is misquoted and indeed from the Burden of Nineveh,
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  Speaker 1: the Blessed Damosel, the King's Tragedy, and Guido Cavalcanti's Lovely
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  Speaker 1: Ballata down to the Portrait, and such sonnets as love Sweetness,
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  Speaker 1: Farewell to the Glen, and a Match with the Moon.
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  Speaker 1: There is not one single poem that does not display
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  Speaker 1: some careless error or some stupid misprint. As for Rosetti's
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  Speaker 1: elaborate system of punctuation, mister Knight pays no attention to
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  Speaker 1: it whatsoever. Indeed, he shows quite a rollicking indifference to
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  Speaker 1: all the secrets and subtleties of style, and inserts or
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  Speaker 1: removes stops in a manner that is absolutely destructive to
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  Speaker 1: the lyrical beauty of the verse. The hyphen, also so
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  Speaker 1: constantly employed by Rosetti, in the case of such expressions
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  Speaker 1: as hilloc eves quoted above, hill fire, birth hour and
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  Speaker 1: the like, is almost invariably disregarded, And by the brilliant
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  Speaker 1: omission of a semicolon, mister Knight has succeeded in spoiling
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  Speaker 1: one of the best stanzas in The Staff and Script,
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  Speaker 1: a poem by the way that he speaks of as
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  Speaker 1: the Staff and the Scrip Sick. After this tedious comedy
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  Speaker 1: of heires, it seems almost unnecessary to point out that
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  Speaker 1: the earliest Italian poet is not called Chulo Dalcano Sick,
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  Speaker 1: or that the bovy of toberonaf Fouche Sick is not
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  Speaker 1: the title of Cluff's boisterous epic, or that Dante and
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  Speaker 1: his cycle Sick is not the name Rosetti gave to
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  Speaker 1: his collection of translations. And why troy Town should appear
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  Speaker 1: in the index as Tory Town is really quite inexplicable,
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  Speaker 1: unless it is intended as a compliment to mister hall Kane,
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  Speaker 1: who once dedicated, or rather tried to dedicate, to Rosetti
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  Speaker 1: a lecture on the relations of poets to politics. We
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  Speaker 1: are sorry, too to find an English dramatic critic misquoting Shakespeare,
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  Speaker 1: as we had always been of the opinion that this
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  Speaker 1: was a privilege reserved specially for our English actors. We
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  Speaker 1: sincerely hope that there will soon be an end to
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  Speaker 1: all biographies of this kind. They rob life of much
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  Speaker 1: of its dignity and its order, add to death itself
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  Speaker 1: a new terror, and make one wish that all art
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  Speaker 1: were anonymous, Nor could there have been any more unfortunate
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  Speaker 1: choice of a subject for popular treatment than that to
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  Speaker 1: which we owe the memoir that now lies before us,
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  Speaker 1: a pillar of fire to the few who knew him,
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  Speaker 1: and of cloud to the many who knew him. Not
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  Speaker 1: Dante Gabriel Rosetti lived apart from the gossip and tittle
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  Speaker 1: tattle of a shallow age. He never trafficked with the
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  Speaker 1: merchants for his soul, nor brought his wares into the
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  Speaker 1: market place for the idol to gape at. Passionate and
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  Speaker 1: romantic though he was, yet there was in his nature
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  Speaker 1: something of high austerity. He loved seclusion and hated notoriety,
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  Speaker 1: and would have shuddered at the idea that within a
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  Speaker 1: few years after his death he was to make his
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  Speaker 1: appearance in a series of popular biographies Sandwich between the
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  Speaker 1: author of Pickwick and the great lexicographer one man alone,
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  Speaker 1: the friend his verse one for him did he desire
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  Speaker 1: should write his life. And it is to mister Theodore
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  Speaker 1: Watts that we too must look to give us the
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  Speaker 1: real Rosette. It may be admitted at once that mister
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  Speaker 1: Watts's subject has for the moment been a little spoiled.
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  Speaker 1: For him. Rude hands have touched it, and unmusical voices
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  Speaker 1: have made it sound almost common in our ears. Yet
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  Speaker 1: none the less is it for him to tell us
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  Speaker 1: of the marvel of this man, whose art he has
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  Speaker 1: analyzed with such exquisite insight, whose life he knows as
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  Speaker 1: no one else can know it, whom he so loyally
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  Speaker 1: loved and tended, and by whom he was so loyally
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  Speaker 1: beloved in turn. As for the others, the scribblers and
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  Speaker 1: nibblers of literature, if they indeed reverence Rosetti's memory, let
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  Speaker 1: them pay him the one homage he would most have valued,
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  Speaker 1: the gracious homage of silence. Though you can fret me,
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  Speaker 1: yet you cannot play upon me, says Hamlet to his
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  Speaker 1: false friend. And even so might Rosette speak to those
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  Speaker 1: well intentioned mediocrites who would seem to know his stops
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  Speaker 1: and would sound him to the top of his compass. True,
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  Speaker 1: they cannot fret him now, for he has passed beyond
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  Speaker 1: the possibility of pain. Yet they cannot play upon him either.
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  Speaker 1: It is not for them to pluck out the heart
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  Speaker 1: of his mystery. There is, however, one feature of this
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  Speaker 1: book that deserves unstinted praise. Mister Anderson's bibliography will be
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  Speaker 1: found of immense use by every student of Rosetti's work
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  Speaker 1: and influence. Perhaps Young's very powerful attack on pre raphlotism,
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  Speaker 1: as expounded by mister Ruskin Longman's eighteen fifty seven, might
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  Speaker 1: be included. But in all other respects it seems quite complete,
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  Speaker 1: and the chronological list of paintings and drawings is really admirable.
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  Speaker 1: When this unfortunate Great Writers Series comes to an end,
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  Speaker 1: mister Anderson's bibliographies should be collected together and published in
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  Speaker 1: a separate volume. At present they are in a very
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  Speaker 1: second rate company. Indeed, Life of Dante Gabriel Rosetti by
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  Speaker 1: Joseph Knight, Great Writers Series, Walter Scott, end of section
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  Speaker 1: forty four. A cheap edition of a great Man