P.R.B.

POOR SPLENDID WINGS--Frances Winwar--Little, Brown ($3.50).

Today's generation is beginning to look back on the Victorian Age with a kinder eye than its fathers did. The late Lytton Strachey et al. laid the 19th Century's haunting ghost with many a mocking exorcism; succeeding scholars are now finding a sympathetic task in recreating its soul. A sign of the times, this latest study of Poet-Painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his earnest men is a credit not only to its authoress' heart but to her scholarship and her mind. Poor Splendid Wings got the pre-eminence over 800 other mss., won for Authoress Winwar the Atlantic Monthly-Little, Brown $5,000 non-fiction prize for 1933.

At the 1849 Royal Academy Exhibition in London, peering connoisseurs were puzzled but incurious to observe on some of the pictures the mystic initials P.R.B. Gradually the secret leaked (or was given) out: the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was arming for Art's sake, preparing to rescue her from her official keepers. They called themselves Pre-Raphaelites because they believed that not since Raphael's day had sincerity and art been candid friends. Most promising painter of the group was facile John Everett Millais; most agonizingly honest, William Holman Hunt; but the most dynamic personality and the acknowledged leader was one Charles Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

Soon their pictures--religious, symbolic, realistically detailed--were the talk of London. Critics-in-the-street like Charles Dickens were indignantly disgusted, but Arch-Critic John Ruskin put his seal of approval on them, and the Pre-Raphaelites were made. From Oxford came Edward Coley Burne-Jones and William Morris to follow the new star. Morris was so enchanted with medievalism that he got an Oxford blacksmith to forge him a suit of armor. When he lowered the helmet's visor it stuck and he had to be extricated; but the coat of mail he wore the whole day and would not even take it off for dinner. The Brotherhood's enthusiasm was sometimes greater than their thoroughness. Commissioned by Ruskin to fresco the walls of the new Oxford Union, they went to work with a will on the damp plaster walls, filled them with a profusion of Arthurian legends which peeled and faded within a year.

Many were the Pre-Raphaelitish extracurricular activities. They published a short-lived magazine, Germ. They were charter readers and enthusiasts over Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, Edward Fitz-Gerald's translation of the Rubaiyat. They started an interior decorating company, "destined to banish Plush and Fuss from the Victorian drawing-room. . . ." But their most enthusiastically-pursued activity was the cult of Pre-Raphaelite woman. First came Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal, called "Lizzie" for short, a long-necked, beauteous but goitrous milliner's assistant. For a while their common model, she became by tacit consent the property of Rossetti. He often said he would marry her but put it off so long that when he finally did she was ungrateful and obviously dying. But she lived long enough to suspect Rossetti often of unfaithfulness, to bear him a still-born child, and to die at last of an overdose of laudanum. Safely dead, she became again his idol; he buried with her the only copy of his poems.

Seven years later he had her dug up again, published the poems. The Pre-Raphaelites had lost their ascetically youthful idealism. By the time Algernon Charles Swinburne joined Rossetti the upright Ruskin had washed his hands of him; Pre-Raphaelite Rossetti had graduated into "the fleshly school." Drugs, his guilty conscience, his Cockney mistress Fanny Cornforth, helped him downhill fast. By 1885 the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was long dead, buried, waiting for its resurrection.

The Author is only five years old as a U. S. citizen, as a writer, 15, as a person, 33. Known to the census as Mrs. Bernard D. N. Grebanier, fellow-Sicilians remember Frances Winwar as Francesca Vinciguerra. Born in Taormina, where her great-uncle was caretaker of the Graeco-Roman amphitheatre, she went to the U. S. with her family when she was eight. A shining advertisement for Manhattan's public schools, College of the City of New York and Columbia University, she speaks seven languages, has published a translation of Boccaccio's Decameron, three historical novels (The Ardent Flame, The Golden Round, Pagan Interval).

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