49. Evelyn Waugh, Rossetti: His Life and Works
Mr Evelyn Waugh is a courageous writer. He is opposed to ‘period’ biographies – those char-a-banc trips in time when literary tourists bring home ‘a present from Victorialand’. He is also opposed to certain elements in contemporary aesthetic theory. Holding such views, he has ventured to test them where the strain is greatest.
Rossetti, with his self-deception, his avarice, and his table turning, seems almost designed to tempt the biographer to an abstract Stracheyan ‘humour’. Rossetti's work – the painting so literary, the poetry so steeped in facile ‘Weltanschauung’, and both so erotic – invites the surgery of the ‘pure’ school of criticism. Yet Mr Waugh has resisted both solicitations. The result is an interesting, if not perfectly successful, book. On the theoretical side Mr Waugh's case is this: if you cannot fit things like the Beata Beatrix into the ‘pure’ theory, and if, none the less, amidst the emotions which they apparently arouse (I am taking the author's word for it), there remains something not to be accounted for by vicarious sexuality, human sympathy, literary associations, and the like, what is to be done?
At present, he can hardly pass beyond the iteration of his question. Wonder, however, is ‘broken knowledge’: and Mr Waugh is wondering very hard about matters on which the prevalent modes of thought do not encourage him to wonder. That is a merit not to be passed over. On the biographical side his work is much firmer. He has failed, I think, to make us see the early days of the PRB. as they must have appeared to the actors themselves: we are left with the feeling that it was funny, but we know that it was not funny from the inside. On the whole, however, Mr Waugh's picture is convincing. The ‘minor characters’ are particularly good – Madox Brown, Millais, and, above all, Ruskin.
Mr Waugh had every temptation to exploit Ruskin as a comic prig: he might thus have flattered the vulgar appetite for funny old Victorians and at the same time displayed one passage of his own hero's life in a more favourable light. Yet the real Ruskin is allowed to pass across the stage, and, in so doing, to confirm our confidence in the author's good sense and insight. We look forward with interest to Mr Waugh's next book.