SOURCE: "Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Betrayal of Truth," in Victorian Poetry, Vol. 26, No. 4, Winter, 1988, pp. 339-61.

In the following essay, McGann traces Rossetti's career-spanning concern with disillusionment and the betrayal of artistic ideals.

Rossetti has a notebook entry dating from the early 1870s in which he speaks of certain "Days when the characters of men came out as strongly as secret writing exposed to fire."¹ What is illuminating and complex in this figure centers in the pun on the word "characters," where both people and writing are imagined as encrypted forms—indeed, as encrypted transforms of each other. Their respective truths appear only when the false innocence of the surface is removed.

As with Blake, when he spoke of a similar process in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, the agent of revelation here is fire, and a fire associated, as in Blake, with hell. But in...