As he was to the outer
world of his own day, so too to posterity Rossetti, the man, is
conjectural and mysterious. We know that he was in his prime the most
inspiring and splendid of companions. But we know this only by faith.
The evidence is as vague as it is emphatic. Of the style and substance
of not a few great talkers in the past we can piece together some more
or less vivid and probably erroneous notion. But about Rossetti
nothing has been recorded in such a way as to make him even faintly
emerge. I suppose he had in him what reviewers seem to find so often
in books a quality that defies analysis. Listening to Watts-Dunton, I
was always in hope that when next the long-lost turned up--for he was
continually doing so--in the talk, I should see him, hear him, and
share the rapture. But the revelation was not to be. You might think
that to hear him called `Gabriel' would have given me a sense of
propinquity. But I felt no nearer to him than you feel to the
Archangel who bears that name and no surname.
It was always when Watts-Dunton spoke carelessly, casually, of some to
me illustrious figure in the past, that I had the sense of being
wafted right into that past and plumped down in the very midst of it.
When he spoke with reverence of this and that great man whom he had
known, he did not thus waft and plump me; for I, too, revered those
names.
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