i8 
LAND & WATER 
2£ifc anl) itcltcrs 
By J. C. Squire 
December 6, 1917 
Sidelights on the Victorians 
•• "¥~^l-ST by Woollier." This phrase is familiar onoiigli 
1 ^in catalogues and guide books, but very few people 
fmknow wiio Woolncr was or what sort of person he 
JL#was. Nevertheless, Woollier was one of the 
original seven members of the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood. 
As such he must necessarily be of some interest to tlie histonaii 
of nineteenth centurv art." And one opened his long-delayed 
Biography {Thomas Woolner. His Life in Letters. Chapman 
and Hall," iSs. net), in tlie expectation of learning something 
new alK)Ut the \"ictoriaii era. By sometliing new one does not 
mean something really surprising : such as that the great 
Victorians had blue beards or walked on their heads. What 
one means i^ that one expected something more than the tiny 
driblet of unknown letters that one usually gets in a book 
publisluHl so long after the event as is this oiie. One has nf>t 
be<>n disapjiointed. Woolner's daughter has had the extremely 
sensible idea of giving us an idea of his life through the letters 
he wrote and received instead of telling us in the first i»erson, 
and at prodigious length, what her father said to her mother 
at breakfast on November 22nd, 1870, and recording at length 
the births, careers, deaths, and tombstones of the various 4ogs 
he owned in his life. Woolner corresponded with many of the 
most eminent men of his time. His most profuse corre- 
spondent was Mrs. Tennyson— whose husband, usually fc- 
ferred to here as the Bartl. was evidently too lazy to write 
letters himself— and amongst the others were Rossetti, 
Coventry Patmore, Carivle, Mrs. Carlyle, Vernon Lushington 
and others of the Pre-Raphaelite and Tennysonian sets. 
The book is a sort of tail-piece to the existing literature of the 
period, and all future writers about the Victorian age or its 
principal figures, will find something in it which they will 
have to quote. It is a noticeable thing— and one that 
thmws a genial light ufjon Woolner 's character — that almost 
all the hundreds of letters given are familiar and homely in 
tone. There are very few rahpsodies and there is very Jittle 
line writing ; when communicating with Woolner people 
did not pour out their inmost souls, but, on the other hand, 
they refrained from anything forced or in the nature of hum- 
bug. The book as a whole, therefore, though uninspiring 
is amusing throughout. 
If * tf * * 
Woolner was born in 1825 and died in 1892, In his early 
stages he was the friend of Rossetti, at his death he was an 
honorary member of a City Company. So it is to be expected 
that his earlv correspondence would be more interesting than 
his later, and the expectation is fulfilled. Especially good 
are the letters he received from Rossetti when, having despaired 
of earning his living as a sculptor, he was seeking his fortune 
in the gold fields of Australia. Later disciples of the Prc- 
Raphaelites tended rather to forget that the Pre-Raphaelites 
were the most robust of men. The apparent discordance 
lietween their characters and their works is not difficult to 
explain. They were artists, they were living in a smug, 
materialistic vvorld which ignored the finer impulses of the 
spirit, and thev went to extremes. It might almost be said 
that since the world around them thought of nothing but 
money, they deliberately painted and wrote alxiut peopk; 
who could not conceivably earn their living, and because they 
saw around them a generation peculiarly gross and bustling 
they were forced into the extravagance of creating ideal 
figures who might be deemed incapable of eating, and who 
in no circumstances could be conceived of as jumping a five- 
barred gate. But the languorous and swan-necked women 
of Rossetti, the attenuated, almost transparent, princesses of 
Burne Jones, the gentle Utopians of William Morris, were 
merely the escapes, as it were, of full natures starved in actual 
life. Burne Jones was one of the wittiest and jolliest talkers 
of the nineteenth century, and filled his letters with uncom- 
plimentary caricatures of himself. The most characteristic 
story about WiUiam Morris is tljat which records the horror 
of a high ecclesiastic who, after standing a quarter of an hour 
in the poet's waiting-room, heard a loud voice come down the 
stairs : " Now send up that bloody bishop." Rossetti, until 
he took to drugs, was another of the same mould : and it 
gives one peculiar pleasure to find from Woohier's biography 
that, even at the beginning, when the Pre-Raphaelites stood to 
gain everything from the commendation of so celebrated a 
man, Rossetti could not stand tlie humbug of that f)ompous 
though well-meaning pontiff, John Ruskin. " As," he writes, 
" he is only half informed about art, anything he savs 
in favour of one's work is, of course, sure to prove invaluable 
in a professional -way." Then ver>' shortly afterwards 
Woolncr sub-joins the following remarks : 
1 should like Ruskin to know what he nev cr knew— the want 
of money for a year or two ; then he might come to doubt 
liis infallibility and give an artist working on the right road 
the benefit of any little doubt that might arise. The little 
despot imagines himself the Pope of Art, and would weai 
3 crowns as a right, only they might make him look funny 
in London ! 
Add to this Rossetti's description of his own early and much 
photogravured Annunciation as " my white abomination.' 
and the gentleman who tought it as " an Irish maniac," and 
we get a fairly good indication of the essential healthiness of 
the Pre-Raphaelite movement. 
All through the book there are supplementary scraps for 
the biographers. In 1S57 Woohier wrote to Mrs. Tennyson : 
I wa.s grieved to hear the death of Mr. liarrett, not on the old 
gentleman's accomit, but because I know the distress it will 
occasion to poor .Mrs. I?rowning, who quite worshipped tht 
old man, however unworthy of it he was. He never would 
be reconciled to her after her marriage, but adopted the 
somewhat odd flan of hating her for the deed. Poor Mrs. 
i3rowning bribed the butler to let her father's dining-room 
blind remain up a little wav that she miglit obtain one glimpse 
of )iim from the street before she started for I'lorcncc. She 
was so weak the poor little creature had to hold on by area 
rails while she looked her last at her cruel father, then went 
home and spent the evening in crying. 
Another of the old gentleman's whims was not to allow either 
of his sons to learn any business or profession. 
There is a very typical letter from Carlyle (1864) beginning : 
Dear Woolner, — I at once sign and return ;^I would even 
walk in suppliant procession to the Hon. House (if neccssar>-| 
bareheaded and in sackcloth and ashes, entreating said Hon. 
Long-eared Assembly to deliver us from that most absurd 
of all I'arce-Tragedie's daily played under their supervision. 
The House of Commons we have always with us. That some 
politicians have their feelings is, however, shown in the story 
about Mr. Gladstone and " Granny " Granville weeping, in 
unison, over one of Tennyson's Idylls. This subject is suitable 
for the pencil of Mr. Max Beerbohm, as is also that other 
picture, given in a letter from the present Lord Tennyson 
(then a child) of The Bard painting a summerhousc. He did 
it, we are assured, " all by himself." The best story in 
the book, however, concerns a notability whose name is, 
unfortunately, not given. He took the' sculptor's wife 
into dinner and almost completely ignored her. .\ftcr dinner, 
in the drawing-room, he came up to her and said : " Mrs. 
Woolncr, if I had known who you were I should ha\e paid 
you more attention." Can if have been Sir \Mlloughl>\' 
l-*atterne ? 
But what of Woolner ? The truth is I have been shirking 
him. He was evidently the friend of great men and himself 
a model of all the virtues. He could certainly make good 
busts and his earlv portraits of Tennyson — before the poet 
became a prophet and covered his beautiful mouth and chin 
with a Pentatcuchal beard — are. masterly. Sonic of the besl 
are reproduced in this volume : of Sidgwick and Carditw. 
Newman no stronger or more informative portraits exist 
than Woolner's. But busts are one thing. Imaginative 
sculpture is another. Woolner, with something interesting 
before him, could see what was there and model what he saw, 
though he usually began j^ttifying when he was doing a 
medallion — which he always, irritatingly, called a " med." 
Genuine creative faculty he had none : rio powerful thoughts 
or passions insisting on expression : nothing more than a 
taste for the drooping, and a mild affection for the softer 
virtues. His statues of blind boys, bluecoat boys, Heavenly 
Welcome, Achilles shouting from the Trenches,' Feeding the 
Hungry, Lady Godiva, and (good Lord !) The Housemaid, are 
not Pre-Raphaelitism, nor anything else except sheer un- 
diluted, uninspired, smooth, sentimental, degenerate Victorian 
descendants of Flaxman. Mr. Dombey might have bought any 
of them in his softer moments, and one is forced to admit 
that the most interesting thing about Woolner is his diary 
of two years in the early Australian diggings. It is vividly . 
and vigorously written and, unlike most stories pf tl/c sort, '' 
it does not conclude its depressing record of failure with the 
discovery of a nugget as large as a baby's head. Woolner 
came home richer by nothing save experience, and of that, to 
all appearances, he made little use. 
