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diff --git a/old/52008-0.txt b/old/52008-0.txt deleted file mode 100644 index e440406..0000000 --- a/old/52008-0.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,8251 +0,0 @@ -The Project Gutenberg EBook of Dante Rossetti and the pre-Raphaelite -movement, by Esther Wood - -This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most -other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions -whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of -the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at -www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you'll have -to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. - -Title: Dante Rossetti and the pre-Raphaelite movement - -Author: Esther Wood - -Release Date: May 5, 2016 [EBook #52008] - -Language: English - -Character set encoding: UTF-8 - -*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DANTE ROSSETTI--PRE-RAPHAELITE MOVEMENT *** - - - - -Produced by KD Weeks, Clarity, HathiTrust and the Online -Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This -file was produced from images generously made available -by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.) - - - - - - - Transcriber’s Note: - -This version of the text cannot represent certain typographical effects. -Italics are delimited with the ‘_’ character as _italic_. - -Errors, when reasonably attributable to the printer, have been -corrected. Please see the transcriber’s note at the end of this text for -details. Corrections made to the text are summarized there. - -Footnotes have been resequenced to be unique across the book, and have -been gathered at the end of each chapter. - -The illustrations have been moved to avoid falling within a paragraph. -Each plate was prefixed by a caption and attribution on a previous page, -and both caption and illustration were blank on their verso, and all -four pages were not included in the pagination. The blank pages are not -included here, obviously. - - DANTE ROSSETTI AND - THE PRE-RAPHAELITE - MOVEMENT - -[Illustration] - - “THE DAY-DREAM.” - - From the chalk. - - _By permission of Mr. Theodore Watts._ - - - - -DANTE ROSSETTI -AND THE PRE-RAPHAELITE -MOVEMENT - - - - -BY ESTHER WOOD - - - - -LONDON: SAMPSON LOW, MARSTON -AND COMPANY, LIMITED, SAINT -DUNSTAN’S HOUSE, FETTER LANE -FLEET STREET, E.C. MDCCCXCIIIJ - - - - - CHISWICK PRESS:—C. WHITTINGHAM AND CO., - TOOKS COURT, CHANCERY LANE, LONDON, E.C. - - - - - PREFACE. - - -The following pages do not afford any material additions to what is -already known of Dante Rossetti, or of the history and purpose of the -Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The authoritative biography of Rossetti has -yet to be written; and while availing myself fully of such new details -as may cast fresh side-lights upon the dominant personalities of the -Pre-Raphaelite movement, my aim has rather been to present the main -features of that movement in their relation to the larger intellectual -tendencies of the age, and to the moral principles which have determined -the growth of taste and feeling in the nineteenth century. To this end I -have avoided as far as possible the proper domain of the art critic, and -endeavoured to deal with the Pre-Raphaelite movement more as an ethical -than an æsthetic revolution. - -“It was always known to be Rossetti’s wish,” says Mr. Hall Caine in his -interesting and graphic “Recollections of Rossetti,” “that if at any -moment after his death it should appear that the story of his life -required to be written, the one friend who during many of his later -years knew him most intimately, and to whom he unlocked the most sacred -secrets of his heart, Mr. Theodore Watts, should write it; unless indeed -it were undertaken by his brother William. But though I know that -whenever Mr. Watts sets pen to paper in pursuance of such a purpose and -in fulfilment of such charge, he will afford us a recognizable portrait -of the man, vivified by picturesque illustration, the like of which few -other writers could compass, I also know from what Rossetti often told -me of his friend’s immersion in all kinds and varieties of life, that -years (perhaps many years) may elapse before such a biography is given -to the world.” - -In the meantime, the present writer is indebted to Mr. J.A. Vinter, -Rossetti’s fellow-student at the Royal Academy Schools, for some -interesting reminiscences of class-room and studio life, and to the Rev. -Walter Tuckwell, rector of Stockton, Rugby, for personal recollections -of the Pre-Raphaelites at Oxford. Mr. Gerald Massey has also assisted -with suggestions and notes. - -Through the courtesy of present owners of Rossetti’s pictures, several -important drawings and studies are here engraved for the first time. -Lord Battersea and Overstrand has kindly permitted a photograph to be -made from the sketch in his possession, “Mary Magdalene at the Door of -Simon the Pharisee.” A similar privilege has been granted by the -Corporation of Birmingham in regard to their monochrome, “The Boat of -Love,” and the beautiful unfinished study of “Our Lady of Pity.” I have -also to acknowledge the kindness of Mr. Moncure D. Conway, in giving -access to the fine study of the “Head of Christ” in his collection, and, -by no means least, of Mr. Theodore Watts, in the matter of his two -superb crayons, “The Day-dream” and “Pandora.” The “Beata Beatrix” and -“Ecce Ancilla Domini” are from the now familiar paintings in the -National Gallery. - - ESTHER WOOD. - - HAMPSTEAD, - - _February, 1894_. - - - - - CONTENTS. - - - CHAPTER I. - - THE PREPARATION FOR REFORM IN ART. - - PAGE - - Constable prophecies the Decay of English Art—The New - Impulse from Italy—The English Renaissance of 1850— - Rossetti and the Specialistic Temperament—Classicism of - the Eighteenth Century—Influence of the French Revolution— - Revival of Romance—Contrast between Mediæval and Modern - Romance—Pessimism in Pre-Raphaelite Painting—Nature as a - Background—Moral Significance of the Change 1 - - CHAPTER II. - - THE RENAISSANCE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. - - Childhood of Rossetti—Religious and Literary Influences—Art - Training—Conflict between Imagination and Technique— - Friendship with Millais and Holman Hunt—The Westminster - Hall Competitions—Ford Madox Brown—Influence of Ruskin’s - “Modern Painters”—The Early Italian Masters—The - Renaissance in Mediæval Europe—Relation of Paganism to - Christianity—Revival of Hellenism, and blending of Classic - with Romantic Art—Growth of Technique and Return to - Convention—The Rule of the Raphaelesque 18 - - - CHAPTER III. - - THE PRE-RAPHAELITE BROTHERHOOD. - - The Revolt from the Raphaelesque—Influence of Keats and the - Romantic Poets—The Pre-Raphaelite Brothers and their Early - work—Travels of Rossetti with Hunt—Publication of “The - Germ”—Hunt and Millais in the Royal Academy—Ruskin’s - letters to the “Times”—Pre-Raphaelitism at Liverpool—The - Pre-Raphaelites as Colourists 56 - - CHAPTER IV. - - PERIOD OF TRANSITION. - - Influence of Browning and Tennyson—Comparison of Rossetti - and Browning—Influence of Dante—Introduction to Miss - Siddal—Rossetti’s Water-Colours—Madox Brown and Romantic - Realism—The Dispersal of the Brotherhood—Departure of - Woolner—Ideals of Portraiture—Rossetti and Public - Exhibitions—Death of Deverell—Rossetti’s Friendship with - Ruskin—Apostasy of Millais—The Rank and File of the - Movement—Relation to Foreign Schools 92 - - CHAPTER V. - - LATER DEVELOPMENTS OF THE MOVEMENT. - - The Pre-Raphaelites as Book-Illustrators—Moxon’s “Tennyson”— - The “Oxford and Cambridge Magazine”—The Oxford Frescoes— - Oxford Patrons of Millais and Hunt—Departure of Hunt for - Palestine—The Pictures of Madox Brown—Further Developments - of Rossetti’s Painting—Marriage and Bereavement—“Beata - Beatrix”—Replicas—Life at Chelsea—Later Models—Designs for - Stained Glass—Visit to Penkill—“Dante’s Dream”—Publication - and Reception of the “Poems”—Paintings of Rossetti’s Last - Decade—Death at Birchington 136 - - CHAPTER VI. - - TREATMENT OF RELIGIOUS SUBJECTS. - - The Re-birth of Religious Art—“God, Immortality, Duty”—The - Pre-Raphaelites and the Reconstruction of Christianity—The - Halo in Painting—Ideals of Womanhood—“The Girlhood of Mary - Virgin” and “Ecce Ancilla Domini”—The Problem of - Suffering—“Christ in the House of His Parents,” ”The - Passover in the Holy Family,” “The Shadow of Death,” “The - Scapegoat”—Hunt’s Symbolism—“The Light of the World”— - Rossetti’s Symbolism—“Mary Magdalene at the Door,” and - “Mary in the House of John”—The Idea of Victory through - Suffering—Bethlehem Gate”— “The Triumph of the Innocents”— - The Spirit of Inquiry—“Christ in the Temple”—The - Atonement—“The Infant Christ Adored”—Comparison with Madox - Brown and Burne-Jones—“The Entombment”—“The Tree of Life” 196 - - CHAPTER VII. - - TREATMENT OF MEDIÆVAL AND MODERN ROMANCE. - - The Christian Element in Neo-Hellenism and Romance—“How they - Met Themselves” and “Michael Scott’s Wooing”—Mediævalism - and Romantic Love—“Romeo and Juliet” and “Ophelia”— - Millais’s Romantic Landscapes—“The Woodman’s Daughter,” - “The Blind Girl,” “The Vale of Rest,” “Autumn Leaves”— - Keats’s “Isabella”—Tennyson’s “Mariana” and “Idylls of the - King”—The Idea of Retribution—“King Arthur’s Tomb,” “Paolo - and Francesca,” “Death of Lady Macbeth,” “The Awakening - Conscience,” “Hesterna Rosa,” “The Gate of Memory,” - “Found,” “Psyche,” “Proserpine,” “Pandora”—The Idea of - Duty—“The Hugenot,” “The Black Brunswicker,” “Claudio and - Isabella”—Old and New Chivalry— “Sir Isumbras” and “The - Rescue”—“The Merciful Knight,” “St. Agnes’ Eve”—Ideal and - Platonic Love—“The Salutation of Beatrice,” “The Boat of - Love,” “Beata Beatrix,” “Dante’s Dream,” “Our Lady of - Pity” 222 - - - CHAPTER VIII. - - THE POETRY OF DANTE ROSSETTI. - - The “Pre-Raphaelite” in Literature—The Complexity of Talent - in an Age of Re-birth—The Restoration of Romance in - England—The Latin and the Saxon in Rossetti—Latin Diction - for the Sonnets as Reflective Poetry—Saxon Diction for the - Ballads as Dramatic Poetry—“The House of Life”—Treatment - of Romantic Love—Illustrations of Sonnet-Structure— - Miscellaneous Lyrics— “The Portrait,” “The Stream’s - Secret,” “Dante at Verona,” “The Staff and Scrip,”—The - Ballads—“The White Ship,” “The King’s Tragedy,” “Sister - Helen,” “Rose Mary,” “The Bride’s Prelude,” “The Blessed - Damozel”—“A Last Confession”—“Jenny”—Relation of - Rossetti’s Poetry to his Painting 259 - - LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. - - PAGE - - THE DAY-DREAM _Frontispiece_ - - ECCE ANCILLA DOMINI 78 - - MARY MAGDALENE AT THE DOOR OF SIMON THE PHARISEE 116 - - PANDORA 157 - - BEATA BEATRIX 162 - - THE BOAT OF LOVE 180 - - HEAD OF CHRIST (STUDY FOR “MARY MAGDALENE”) 214 - - OUR LADY OF PITY 256 - - - - - DANTE ROSSETTI AND THE - PRE-RAPHAELITE - MOVEMENT. - - - - - CHAPTER I. - THE PREPARATION FOR REFORM IN ART. - -Constable prophesies the Decay of English Art—The new Impulse from - Italy—The English Renaissance of 1850—Rossetti and the Specialistic - Temperament—Classicism of the Eighteenth Century—Influence of the - French Revolution—Revival of Romance—Distinction between Mediæval - and Modern Romance—Pessimism in Pre-Raphaelite Painting—Nature as a - Background—Moral Significance of the Change. - - -A study of the Pre-Raphaelite movement in England at the zenith of the -nineteenth century opens up perhaps a wider field for controversy in the -ethics of art than is afforded by any other phase of modern painting. -Between the ridicule which, for the most part, greeted Rossetti’s first -picture, “The Girlhood of Mary Virgin,” in 1849, and the enthusiastic -homage which exalted him, thirty years later, to the dominance not -merely of a school, but almost of a religion, lies a ground of infinite -question and dispute, still awaiting the historian who shall adjust the -issues of the strife to the main thought-current of the period. - -“In thirty years,” said Constable in 1821, “English art will have ceased -to exist.” - -The words were significant of that first stirring of weariness and -discontent which precedes either a collapse or a revolution. It was -impossible that the conventions of the eighteenth century, persisting in -pictorial art long after they had been cast off by literature, should -suffice for an age which had wholly outgrown the conceptions of life on -which they were founded. Landscape and portraiture, however enriched by -the last gleams of a flickering classicism in the genius of a Turner, a -Lawrence, or a Constable, were still in the “bondage of corruption” to -traditional schools. Turner, indeed, is too great to be bracketed with -his contemporaries, or with the pioneers of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. -He stands as much alone as Titian. But the thrall of the conventional, -of the accepted canons of what should be perceived and conceived, and -how things ought to look in pictures, lay yet upon English art. One -other painter, a solitary and uncouth herald of the new day, holds a -unique position in that transition period. Blake alone, working his -fantastic will like a sanctified Rabelais run riot in all supernal -things, discerned weird glimpses of the coming light; such glimpses as -Chatterton, in the world of poetry, caught brokenly before the neo- -romantic dawn. - -Posterity may decide that the catastrophe thus prophesied by Constable -was only averted by the grafting of an Italian genius upon English -stock, and that to the country of the Great Renaissance England owes—at -least in the field of painting—her own Renaissance of the nineteenth -century. Spontaneous as was the impulse of revolt in kindred minds, and -worthily as it issued in the hands of others, the supreme achievement of -the Pre-Raphaelite movement abides with Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Without -him there might have been—and indeed was already begun—a breaking up of -the old pictorial conventions; an experiment both significant and -fruitful in contemporary art. Failing this ready soil, the genius -brought over by Rossetti from a Latin race could hardly have been -naturalized as it was in early life by interchange of thought and method -with fellow-schismatics from the English schools. But whether that vital -change of spirit which found its fullest expression in the Pre- -Raphaelite movement would have produced anything like its present -results independently of Rossetti, is a question still entangled in that -injudicial partisanship of opinion from which no contemporary judgment -can quite shake itself free. A final estimate of Rossetti’s debt to his -comrades, and of the original and intrinsic merit both of their own work -and of his, is beyond the reach of the present century. Meanwhile, a -verdict of no inconsiderable weight is available in the words of Ruskin: -“I believe Rosetti’s name should be placed first on the list of men who -have raised and changed the spirit of modern art; raised in absolute -attainment, changed in the direction of temper.” - -Probably, if one were called upon to name a score of typical pictures of -the Pre-Raphaelite School, the first rough catalogue rising to the lips -would be strangely inadequate to the question. Rossetti’s “Girlhood of -Mary Virgin,” “Ecce Ancilla Domini,” “Found,” “Beata Beatrix,” “Dante’s -Dream,” and “The Blessed Damozel;” Madox Brown’s “The Last of England,” -“The Entombment,” and “Romeo and Juliet;” Holman Hunt’s “Christ in the -Temple,” “The Scapegoat,” and “The Light of the World;” Millais’s “Eve -of St. Agnes,” “A Huguenot,” and “Ophelia;”—these, if among the most -familiar to English eyes, are but a small fraction of the product of -that fruitful thirty years, leaving altogether out of count the later -and important work of G.F. Watts and E. Burne-Jones, to say nothing of -such worthy adherents as Arthur Hughes, James Collinson, Henry Wallis, -Walter Deverell, J.M. Strudwick, and others who fairly claim the shadow -of the Pre-Raphaelite wing. Yet even in so imperfect a group the student -may read at least the dominant features of the painting, and especially -in the work of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Here for the first time in -English art is _colour_ supreme, triumphant, as in Titian; _form_ -ethereal and chastened, like the visions of a Fra Angelico; _subjects_, -rather than objects, set forth in so direct and often crude an imagery; -not figures merely, but symbols; fragments of human history, actual and -urgent, full of problems and wonders, weighty with meanings and desires. -The draped and ordered models of the past—the Ladies Sophia, Elizabeth, -and Lavinia as the three Graces, and the Countess Agatha as a species of -Muse—have given place to a new “dream of fair women,” not posing or -self-conscious, but as if caught and painted unaware; knights like young -monks, sad-eyed but alert in a rapt sobriety; Madonnas more human than -angelic, with the sweet cares of womanhood upon them all; Christs -neither new-born nor dying, but seen in full child-life and manhood, -artless and simple and strong. Here, certainly, is the utterance of men -who if they have not looked broadly over life have at least seen deeply -into it, and concerned themselves not so much with its rare crises as -with the permanent conditions and problems of human experience. - -It is easily argued that all criticism, all appreciation even, resolves -itself ultimately into a question of temperament. To some minds, and -these not the least discriminate, the very limitations and extravagances -of Pre-Raphaelitism appeal with a peculiar force. There are whole -aspects of life which Romance, if it touch, can never transfigure. The -passionate, brooding loveliness of Rossetti’s women, the remote and -subtle pathos of Holman Hunt, the dreamy and yet vivid tenderness of -Millais’s earlier style,—these are not qualities of universal charm: -they are the outcome of special moods and conditions which find neither -voice nor answer save in the channels they themselves create. It is only -given to a rarely catholic genius—a Shakespeare, a Handel, or a Raphael— -to move, as it were, the broad currents of common feeling, and to -command the general sympathies of the educated world. Artists of more -distinctive and personal quality—a Shelley in poetry, a Chopin in music, -or a Rossetti in painting—will rather gain each an elect circle of -interpreters through whom to sway less immediately the thought of their -generation; the more so since in the realm of the fine arts is felt most -potently the growing tendency to specialize both thought and utterance -in the tension of modern life. “Our age,” it has been aptly said, “has -seen a specialization of emotions as well as of studies and industries. -Let us not then expect all things from any man. Let us welcome the best -representative of every mood of the mind.”[1] - -The private life of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, though leaving to those who -loved him an inexhaustible harvest of tender and pathetic memories, was -outwardly uneventful enough, save for the one romance and tragedy of his -early manhood by which he is vaguely known to the outer world. But -behind the veil of recordable history, few artists have suffered greater -mental vicissitudes in a lifetime of half a century, or have lived at -such high spiritual pressure and imaginative strain. London-born and -London-bred though he was, the force of his Italian parentage and -temperament isolated him—save for a very few congenial spirits—in an -alien world; and though his work in painting and poetry was largely -Saxonized by training and environment, the man himself was oppressed -with the burden of an imagination steeped in the very soul of mediæval -Florentine romance. His whole nature was overstrung and at the mercy of -physical and social “weather.” Memory, daily experience, his own -conceptions and creations in design and poetry, small incidents of life -woven by his own feverish brain into actual calamity, possessed him with -a power simply incomprehensible to the average mind. Like Sir Bedevere, -striding from ridge to ridge in Lyonness,— - - “His own thought drove him like a goad.” - -At the last, his death, it has been affirmed by Mr. Theodore Watts, was -due but indirectly to physical disease; primarily to the prolonged and -terrible fervour of writing “The King’s Tragedy.” Out of such conditions -of artistic expression came a depth and intensity of feeling -incompatible with wide versatility or range of vision. Such a -temperament must either specialize or achieve nothing. - -But it is the business of the historian to look behind temperament -towards the deep and primal impulses of a nation and a century. To him -the sum of temperaments becomes the spirit of an age; or rather, the -nation itself, in the grasp of the age, is conceived as a living, -thinking, struggling personality; complex, problematic, self- -contradictory, but strong to inspire the same loyalties, the same -aspirations, as the old world found in Rome, or mediæval Europe in the -great mother-cities which were at once her burden and her pride. To -study a temperament like Rossetti’s in its relation to the intellectual -life of the age, and to ask how such a temperament was in its turn -brought to bear upon some of the problems of that life, is to be -confronted with much more than a personality or a career; is to deal -with a wide and crucial phase in the history of a people. - -For the Pre-Raphaelite movement was much more than a revolution in the -ideals and methods of painting. It was a single wave in a great -reactionary tide—the ever rising protest and rebellion of our century -against artificial authority, against tradition and convention in every -department of life. It broke out, socially, with the French Revolution; -it found voice in the poetic impulse which followed it in Coleridge, -Shelley, and Keats; it spread from ethics to politics, it touched all -morality and all knowledge, and it affected the whole literature of -Europe from philosophy to fiction and from the drama to the lyric poem. -Schumann and Chopin breathed it into music; Darwin, re-forming the world -of science, laid in the doctrine of evolution the foundations of the new -cosmogony. It remained for painting, the youngest of the arts, to enter -last into the van of progress and take its stand against the classic and -orthodox scholasticism now discredited and void. - -Not that the classicism of eighteenth century art was without a beauty -and a meaning of its own. It was at least the relic of a noble ideal, -the outworn garment of a spirit once vigorous and sincere. The true -classic temper—the mental ordering of the visible world into types and -models according to academic rule—is the natural outgrowth of man’s -effort to select and classify those objects around him which it gives -him pleasure to contemplate. The “choosing-spirit” of an age—its -preference for certain aspects of life and indifference to other -aspects—embodies itself in set forms and modes of artistic expression -which are accepted by that age as sufficient and final, and stereotyped -by common usage into conventions from which, in the progress of a -growing people, all vitality gradually ebbs away. Just as in science or -philosophy the theories and methods of authoritative men are established -as “classic” till fresh facts and fresh problems come to light, so in -literature, in music, and in painting, certain types and modes are -adopted by general consent as the fit vehicles for the thought to be -expressed, and these persist, by force of authority and usage, into a -new age bringing new ideas into play and seeing the _subject-matter_ of -all art—namely life itself—in a new light. Thus the accepted canons of -art, which were at first the natural reflection of the highest culture -of the period, become at last the barren dogmas of an outgrown habit of -mind. The thought of the people has outrun the language of the schools. -The strife of the new thought with the old language is begun. - -Such a strife it was that came upon the western world under the outward -turmoil of the French Revolution. Europe was in the mood for great -reactions. The vast and sordid materialism of the eighteenth century, -with its prodigious hypocrisies and its flippant sensuality,—its -sentimentality even, which, as Heine reminds us, is always a product of -materialism—was rudely broken up. The disruption of the settled order of -worldly things awoke men’s dormant questions as to the divine order of -things, the moral government of the universe. Or rather, the rejection -of external authority was but the evidence of the rejection of authority -within—the rejection of traditional standards of right and wrong, beauty -and happiness, wisdom and truth; and the demand for new standards for -the criticism of life, for new ethics, new ideals, new gods. - -Now the pure and lofty classicism of the seventeenth century, as -exemplified supremely in the poetry of Milton, was saved from -materialism by the robust piety of a Puritan world. It was not until the -beginning of the eighteenth century, when the accession of imperial and -commercial power brought with it a certain coarsening of the moral fibre -of the nation, that the “grand” style became petrified, as it always -tends to do, into the grandiose. A people nurtured in the somewhat -tawdry luxury of the Hanoverian period was not likely to take very -serious views of life, but was well content with superficial -philosophies. In the blaze of outward prosperity the inward vision grew -dim. Art became the slave of tradition instead of the handmaid of a -living will. - -Then the great wave of rebellion, surging through the life of Europe, -swept into the deep backwaters of imaginative and creative thought. Men -born into the storm and stress of revolution, and confronted with the -great problems of practical life, were driven back to question ultimate -things; were thrown once more upon the spiritual world. And as the -outward struggle spent itself, its full significance weighed more upon -the peoples. The deep charm of the contemplative, the reflective, the -critical, fell once more upon the European mind. - -So the “classic” temper—the love of order and authority (degraded at -last into mere acceptance of tradition and rule)—gave place to the -“romantic” temper,—the temper of enquiry and experiment, the sense of -the mystery and the reality of life, the openness of the mind towards -spiritual things. And with this new consciousness of the invisible world -and all its significance upon the life of man, comes the utter -discarding of _self_-consciousness; the repudiation of “pose.” Life has -become too real for attitudinizing. - -The first result of this change of spirit upon the art of a nation -appears in the choice of subject for artistic treatment. The painter -begins to portray not merely things and persons but incidents and -conditions; to picture men and women as they are in actual life; in -short, to _state the problems_ fairly; to see facts and examine -circumstances, in order to reach the solutions and the meanings, vaguely -guessed and earnestly desired by the soul awakened to the perception of -the supernatural and the divine. This was the initial task of the neo- -romantic revival; in this lay the primary significance of the new school -of painting which appeared soon after the year 1845 on English -exhibition walls. - -And to do this it became necessary to set out, as it were, the _terms_ -on which life is lived; to deal not merely with the beauty which man -loves and the joy which he desires, but also with the stern conditions -of their attainment. The struggle between the present evil and the -recognized good, the conflict of the soul with earthly bonds, Love -baffled in dire cross-currents of fate and duty, or wasted and despoiled -in sin, Faith shaken by the storms of circumstance, Hope bowed down -before the closing doors of death; and, on the other hand, the glory of -consummated joys (though never without the under-thought of their -transiency), or the strength of human fidelity and endurance—these are -the themes of the second renaissance. - -It is hardly surprising that the considerable class of critics (more -numerous in the eighteen-forties than to-day) to whom all seriousness is -melancholy and all mystery painful, should have dismissed much of the -Pre-Raphaelite work under the inaccurate label of “pessimism.” To bring -the mood of awe, of sadness, of perplexity, into art at all, and more -especially to present serious themes with the directness of familiar -life, and without the stage-craft glamour of the heroic and the -exceptional, is, in the judgment of such persons, to be indisputably a -pessimist. Yet from this standpoint we should have to exclude no small -part of the greatest art the world has ever seen. If we accept Heine’s -dictum that no man is truly a man until he suffers, we shall call no -nation great in art until it is great in tragedy. There comes with every -awakening of an age (whether in ancient Greece, Elizabethan England, or -mediæval Italy) to problems new to the world at large, or which the -preceding age had lost sight of, a straining of the vision towards -ultimate meanings and purposes. And the cry for light is answered often -by a lurid dawn. - -But the temper of Pre-Raphaelitism differs both from that of Greek -tragedy (in being essentially romantic and ascetic), and from the -mediæval mysticism of which it is to some extent a revival. However -sincerely Rossetti and his comrades may have found their inspiration in -the early and purest period of the Italian Renaissance (as we shall have -to consider in examining the name “Pre-Raphaelite”), it was impossible, -in the middle of the nineteenth century, to return absolutely to the -mediæval habit of mind. All that was best in the romance of the middle -ages, the passionate idealism, the abiding sense of the reality of the -unseen, the self-abandonment of devotion to the transcendental and the -super-sensuous life, the exquisite childlikeness of spirit which comes -of the highest maturity—all these indeed were regained, but with a -difference. For the enigma of the universe, regarded by the mediæval -world as a mystery of faith, has come upon our own age rather as a -mystery of doubt. The silence of the natural world towards man’s -eagerest questionings of the Power behind it, was to those pious souls -only the holy reticence of an all-wise and all-sufficient God. They -accepted with a brave resignation what the modern world endures with a -no less courageous but far less trustful mind. - -Therefore the much-debated mysticism of the Pre-Raphaelite School -carries with it a deeper sombreness than that of a purely mediæval type, -and makes the relations between man and external Nature more problematic -and obscure. The sense of the impassive irony of Nature behind the -little drama of man’s life on earth comes again and again into the dim -vistas of landscape behind Rossetti’s loveliest women, and into the -mingling of scenic grandeur with an atmosphere of desolation in some of -the backgrounds of Holman Hunt. Even Millais, the least subjective of -the Brotherhood, achieves, in “The Vale of Rest,” something of that -subtle contrast, half discord and half harmony, between the glory and -absolute peace of sunset and the dumb unquestionable night of death -foreshadowed in the open grave. The classic method of rendering natural -background to human tragedy is rather to adjust the mood of Nature to -the subject in hand; to depict natural forces either as warring (as in -Turner) in the blind anger and fury of the elements against man, or -assuming an aspect in harmony with his own pain. But the romantic method -finds more tragedy in the ironic beauty and indifference of Nature in -the face of human vicissitude, and comes nearer to tears than the -affectation of dramatic sympathy; just as, in great crises of suffering -and doubt, no anger wounds us so deeply as a smile. - -Of this special phase of nature-feeling, a later artist, of strong -affinity of spirit with certain undercurrents of Pre-Raphaelite thought— -Frederick Walker—is perhaps a greater exponent. But the old-world -Nature-worship, independent of human interest and moral significance, is -as dead in art as it is in science. Unconsciously perhaps, but surely, -art in all its forms has cast off the yoke of the old cosmogony which -the implacable Time-Spirit has overthrown. The criticism of life has -passed from the self-satisfied, the confident, the epicurean, to the -reflective, the questioning, and the experimental stage. - -Where, then, is the secret of the changed attitude of English culture -towards the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood? What was it that was actually -accomplished by this little band of young reformers with their visions -of a world of beauty and meaning undreamed of in Royal Academy -philosophy? The controversy that raged for years round the work of the -leaders—least of all round that of Millais, more round that of Holman -Hunt, and most bitterly round the work of Rossetti—was it primarily over -a technical question, a matter of pigments and perspective, of anatomy -and composition? If so, the house was divided against itself and should -have fallen, for Millais soon forsook (if indeed he ever adopted) the -path of his early comrades, and a total divergence in method and manner -finally separated Rossetti from Holman Hunt. Or was it concerned with -underlying principles and purposes with which English culture had not -for three hundred years been troubled? Was it essentially an ethical -revolt; the first impulse towards that fusion of ethics with æsthetics -which will be the task of the twentieth century; the inmost stirring, at -the nation’s heart, of a new life which the intellect still fails to lay -hold of, and the laggard will, for the most part, yet resists? - ------ - -Footnote 1: - - F.W.H. Myers, “Rossetti and the Religion of Beauty.” - - - - - CHAPTER II. - THE RENAISSANCE OF THE NINETEENTH - CENTURY. - -Childhood of Rossetti—Religious and Literary Influences—Art Training— - Conflict between Imagination and Technique—Friendship with Millais - and Holman Hunt—The Westminster Competitions—Ford Madox Brown— - Influence of Ruskin’s “Modern Painters”—The Early Italian Masters— - The Renaissance in Mediæval Europe—Relation of Paganism to - Christianity—Revival of Hellenism, and blending of Classic with - Romantic Art—Growth of Technique and Return to Convention—The Rule - of the Raphaelesque. - - -Into this atmosphere of revolt and aspiration, charged as with electric -forces of long-gathering change, a little band of young painters and -poets came, when the time was ripe, to play their part in the great -_Aufklärung_ of the century. Students they were in more than the -conventional significance of the word; men of widely different -endowments, and of the most diverse mental quality, but sensitive at all -points to the drift of thought beneath the surface of the life around -them. Their task it was to translate into art the message already -proclaimed in poetry, and to make, even of the poetic vehicle, a finer -and more exquisite setting for the new evangel. - -The greatest poet of their company, if not in a literal sense the -greatest painter also, was born within a year of Blake’s death,—on the -12th of May, 1828, at 38, Charlotte Street, Portland Place, London: the -successor of Blake in English romance, yet an alien in the land of his -birth. Rossetti suffered, as M. Gabrièl Sarrazin has aptly expressed it, -a double banishment; remote alike from his country and his age. -Essentially Italian by heritage and temperament, he belonged no less to -the fifteenth century than to Tuscany, and bore about with him, though -perhaps unconsciously, the burden of the exile as well as of the -reformer and the pioneer. He was as one born out of due time; or rather, -let us say, reborn; a spirit anew-incarnate from the golden age; brought -back, indeed, from a still earlier re-birth, so that men almost deemed, -as they saw his work and dimly understood its purport, that one of the -prophets was risen from the dead. - -Beyond his inheritance from the far-off past, from the dormant but -undying influences of the Italian Renaissance, Rossetti held from his -immediate ancestry no mean estate of talent and of character. His -mother, half Tuscan and half English (on her mother’s side), was sister -to the “Dr. Polidori” known to history as Byron’s travelling companion -and friend. These were the children of Gaetano Polidori, an accomplished -and successful _littérateur_. Gabriele Rossetti, the father of Dante -Gabriel, was wholly Italian, of Neapolitan family. He also was a man of -high literary tastes and achievements; a poet of genuine quality, and a -patriot exiled for his political faith. His popular lays, as well as his -personal activities, fanned the flame of democratic insurrection under -Ferdinand of Naples in 1820, and three years later he found himself -compelled to flee in disguise. He left Italy, never to return; but, -happily, not without honour in his own country, for, a quarter of a -century later, a medal was struck in recognition of his services, and a -statue subsequently erected to his memory in the chief piazza of Vasto, -Naples, which also bears his name. In 1824 Gabriele Rossetti settled in -England. He married in 1826, and was shortly appointed professor of -Italian at King’s College, London; in which adopted city—the great -foster-mother of so much of the world’s best genius—his four children, -Dante Gabriel and his brother and sisters, were brought up. - -Trained from the first in the Protestant faith, though inheriting on -both sides the mental bias of Roman tradition, the children entered -early into the age-long conflict between the tender mysticism and -spiritual glamour of catholic piety and the robuster spirit of -intellectual truth. Herein lay the key to that strange mingling of -rationalism and superstition which, both in his poetry and in his -painting, has perplexed many critics of Dante Rossetti’s philosophy. -Hence came his insatiable symbolism, and his acutely realistic detail; -his remoteness of vision, and his keen alertness to present and actual -things. His own perpetual struggle between the real and the ideal, his -ceaseless strivings to reconcile the inward spirit with the outward -sense,—or rather, to set them in their right relations to each other, -the sense as the instrument and vehicle of the soul,—these were but the -epitome, in his own many-sided nature, of the larger strife that ceases -not from age to age; only the battle-ground and the weapons of the fight -are altered. - -To the simple Christian creed which they professed, was added in the -Rossettis’ household the religion of an ardent and unwavering -patriotism. From their earliest childhood the little ones were -accustomed to hear around their own fireside high talks of national -liberty and the popular cause. Their home, unpretentious but hospitable -as it always was, became the resort of many a political refugee; a -gathering-place for kindred souls oppressed with the same misfortunes, -or fired with the supreme enthusiasm of a common ideal. Hither came -Mazzini, the greatest patriot of the century, and one of her truest -seers. All that was best in the young democracy of the mid-century, its -eager idealism, its narrow but profound hero-worship, its poetry, its -self-devotion, was here brought before the children’s eyes; its coarser -elements eliminated by the personal distinction of such men as Gabriele -Rossetti loved to gather to his side. The little circle was thus open, -in those crucial years, to influences more potent upon art than was then -apparent, since the humanitarian impulse first manifested in political -and social life had not yet adjusted itself to pictorial expression. - -Nor was the literary side of Dante Rossetti’s genius less -sympathetically nurtured in the home atmosphere. His father was an -enthusiastic student and commentator of Dante, after whom he named his -eldest son,—a baptism strangely prophetic of his destiny; of that -fortuity of fate by which, in after years, bereft of love, maligned by -criticism, robbed of health and power, he was made partaker in the -sufferings as well as in the glory of the great Florentine poet. Thus -was fostered in the young Dante of a later day that love of old romance -and noble allegory which remained both with him and with his younger -sister—perhaps the choicest of our women-poets—as an abiding passion and -an inspiration to the highest artistic service. - -At the age of fifteen Rossetti passed from King’s College School to -Cary’s Art Academy in Queen Street, Bloomsbury, and thence to the -Antique School of the Royal Academy; there to pursue the artistic -training to which a strong inclination and evident talent had long -called him. Rossetti, however, was a very wayward pupil, and extremely -irregular in his attendance. A fellow-student with him at that time, Mr. -J.A. Vinter, well recalls one morning when the truant was taken to task -for his absence on the previous day. “Why,” said Mr. Cary, “were you not -here yesterday?” Rossetti answered coolly, “I had a fit of idleness.” -But when the master’s back was turned, an interesting explanation of the -avowed idleness was soon forthcoming. Rossetti pulled from his pocket a -bundle of manuscript sonnets, which he proceeded, with impartial -generosity, to paste inside all his friends’ hats! Fortunately for the -subsequent peace of the hyper-sensitive and fastidious author, none of -these early effusions seem to have been preserved. Mr. Vinter’s -impression of Rossetti was—like that of many who knew him in youth—that -beneath a certain brusquerie and unapproachableness of bearing there lay -an unbounded warmth of affection and a ready generosity and kindliness -of heart. But his delight in practical jokes, his high spirits and his -boisterous hilarity in the classroom sometimes put Mr. Cary (the son, by -the way, of the eminent translator of Dante) to considerable -embarrassment. There was one song in particular which Rossetti was never -tired of singing; and he sang it with all the vigour of his strong young -voice, almost to the nauseation of his classmates,—in praise of a -certain “Alice Gray.” One morning Mr. Cary, entering the room, besought -him to abate his tune awhile, for a clergyman had called with his son to -see the school, with a view to enrolling the lad as a pupil. Rossetti -lowered his voice, but only for a moment. When the visitors appeared on -the threshold, his thrilling notes were heard again in passionate -protestation of his willingness to die for “Alice Gray.” - -The school was visited on Saturdays by Mr. Redgrave, R.A., who speedily -observed Rossetti’s favourite amusement of drawing grotesque caricatures -of antique figures round the margin of his board, and protested that -“such liberties were hardly consistent with the dignity of the antique.” - -Rossetti’s outlining is said to have been very beautiful in effect, -though produced in a highly unconventional manner. Mr. Cary forbade -charcoal outlines altogether, but Rossetti, who obeyed no rules, -invariably made a thick, solid charcoal line which he gradually pared -away on either side with pellets of bread till he had reduced it to the -desired minimum. It is noticeable that one at least of Rossetti’s -friends of this period, and intimately associated with him in the -movement which he subsequently led, has always retained the hardness of -outline which Rossetti afterwards outgrew. - -Yet it must be admitted that with all his ardour, his real though very -fitful diligence, and his sincere delight in his chosen profession, -Rossetti never fully conquered that imperfection of technique in -draughtsmanship which has been the stronghold of hostile criticism -throughout the Pre-Raphaelite movement, but which in fact arose from the -inevitable deficiency of a mind too impatient for ideas, too eager for -subject-matter, to be steadfastly concerned with the science of -expression. - -That neither Rossetti nor any other of the Pre-Raphaelites _as such_ -have attained to technical greatness, still less to technical -perfection, is a charge weightily preferred, and not without reason, but -hardly of so fatal an import as at first appears. It must be remembered -that no new message comes to the world ready-clothed in the full grace -of accurate and harmonious speech. The voice crying in the wilderness is -apt to be harsh and unmusical. The visions of the seer are at first too -vivid, too bewildering in the fresh glory of revelation, to be told (if -he would set them forth on canvas) in any but broken lights and shadowy -images. In every art, the gospel of a new epoch has been proclaimed with -faltering speech and stammering tongue. The torrent of denunciation -outpoured on Wagner’s transgressions of strict form, yet powerless, as -it has proved, to drown his music, was not more sweeping than the -judgment of authority against the metrical solecisms of Walt Whitman’s -poetry; nor has the storm still raging round the modern Scandinavian -drama been less fierce than that which overtook the leaders of the Pre- -Raphaelite van. - -Obviously a certain measure of the faculty of expression is necessary if -the meaning is to be intelligible at all. Our judgment of an artist, -though determined primarily by the nature of his message, must -ultimately rest on his ability to deliver it. In Rossetti’s case it must -depend upon the degree in which the greatness of his material can create -a technique of its own, and take the imagination by storm, as Rossetti -does, with those exquisite surprises of design, those marvellous _tours- -de-force_ among his earlier pen and ink drawings, or those southern, -almost tropical colour-triumphs of his maturity, which were perhaps -rather the divine accidents of genius than its habit, either natural or -acquired. They were, in truth, inspirations of utterance, wielding the -imperfect instrument to their own high purposes. The verdict given upon -such achievements by the thoughtful world outside the charmed circle of -the initiate—by that unlearned but not unworthy “outer circle,” as it -were, who, approaching art with intelligence and sympathy, are yet -without the knowledge to assess its technical worth—will always, as we -have already suggested, be decided by the temperament of the spectator— -whether he be as peculiarly sensitive to beauty of idea as his neighbour -is to beauty of expression. And after all, the supreme mission of art is -to the great world of the _un_initiate. By the authority of its priests -and prophets must its form and practice be directed and controlled; but -the final test of its greatness is not satisfied until the exquisite -consolations of beauty, the moral significances of artistic truth, the -proclamation of noble ideals, are “understanded of the people.” - -But the new gospel, when Rossetti entered the Academy Schools, had only -reached the initial stage of a “gospel of discontent.” It was still -negative, indefinite, unpromising. Yet even in that early phase, the -old, simple instincts of the missionary spirit are often potent, and -fruitful in the development of ideas. “Andrew ... first findeth his own -brother Simon,” and “Philip findeth Nathaniel,”—not designedly, perhaps, -but rather by the spontaneous attraction of kindred souls; not -necessarily with the deliberate aim of a propagandist, for it would be -pretentious to credit a group of nineteenth-century young Britons in -their teens with a very exalted conception of their artistic mission. -There is every evidence that they were as unaffectedly boyish, and even -school-boyish, as the most orthodox Englishman could wish them. It was -well that they should not yet know the meaning of their own rebellion, -or guess the effect to be wrought upon English art by Rossetti’s meeting -with the first fellow-student who can in any sense be called his -disciple. Probably it was an impulse of purely personal affection, or -that magnetic charm of character which Rossetti exercised over almost -all impressionable natures around him, rather than any deep affinity of -purpose and ideal, that won to his side a younger and in many respects -more brilliant aspirant, John Everett Millais, who had passed through -his two years’ elementary training at Cary’s at a very early age, and in -technical proficiency was already far ahead of his new friend. Born on -the 8th of June, 1829, in Portland Place, Southampton, the first five -years of his life were chiefly spent in Jersey (his father’s ancestral -home), and the succeeding four at Dinan, in Brittany. In 1838, at the -age of nine, he was entered at Cary’s Academy, then under the direction -of Mr. Sass, where his drawing from the antique soon won a silver medal -from the Society of Arts. In 1840, at the age of eleven, he entered the -Royal Academy Schools; the youngest pupil ever admitted within their -walls. Here he won a silver medal in 1843, and four years later a gold -medal for historical painting with “The Benjamites Seizing their -Brides,” shown at the British Institution in 1848. In 1846 his first -exhibited picture, “Pizarro before the Inca of Peru,” appeared at the -Royal Academy, where “Elgiva Seized by Odo” was shown in 1847. - -Millais himself, meanwhile, had made acquaintance with an older and -still more earnest student not yet pursuing the Academy curriculum, but -for whom the future had in store a place second only to Rossetti’s in -the movement which united and inspired them in their youth. William -Holman Hunt, indeed, may claim to have been earlier than any of his Pre- -Raphaelite brethren upon the field of reform; for in the hard solitude -of mercantile life, under the stress of poverty and amid the most -uncongenial surroundings, he had already thought out and pursued those -methods of direct and veracious artistic expression which were -afterwards enforced by Pre-Raphaelite rule. Born in London on the 27th -of April, 1828, and destined by his father for commercial life, the lad -secured from chance companions some occasional help in the artistic -studies which he loved. He took a few lessons from a city portrait- -painter, and at last gave up his business career, and threw himself upon -his own artistic resources for a livelihood. - -Admission to the schools of the Royal Academy at that time was by a test -as arbitrary and inadequate as the teaching to which it led. Each -student was required to produce a drawing from the antique, in chalk or -charcoal, laboriously stippled in the conventional style; and in this -task the half-trained and inexperienced Hunt very pardonably failed on -two successive occasions. It was not until the year 1846 that he was at -last admitted as a student, and at almost the same time secured a place -on the Academy Exhibition walls, where he was represented by a small -picture entitled “Hark!”—a little child holding a watch to her ear. It -was in the antique galleries at the British Museum, while toiling -forlornly at his trial-drawing among a host of similar candidates, that -he came across the more successful but sympathetic and genial Millais. -The story of Millais’s friendship with the poor and struggling student -somewhat older than himself, and of the generous pecuniary help afforded -from his own private resources to Hunt at a moment when the magic -portals of Art seemed closed for ever against him, has already been told -by Mr. Harry Quilter in his history of those early years. - -In the autumn of 1845 Mr. Cary sent up five students, including Rossetti -and J.A. Vinter, for admission to the Academy Schools. His classes were -held in high esteem as a means of introduction to that orthodox fold, -already regarded by many neophytes with impatience and distrust, but -offering at that time the only possible entrance to professional life. -Both the competitors just mentioned were successful, and the admission -of Holman Hunt was independently gained soon afterwards. Mr. Vinter has -a characteristic reminiscence of the opening day of the ensuing term, -when the freshmen were assembled in a class-room, and required to give -their names to the keeper, Mr. Jones. When it came to his turn, -Rossetti, who was rather proud of his mellifluous designation, greatly -amused his companions and impressed the venerable official by slowly -rolling out, in his rich, sonorous tones, “Gabriel—Charles—Dante— -Rossetti!” “Dear me, sir,” stammered Mr. Jones, in confused amazement, -“Dear me, sir, you _have_ a fine name!” - -A probation of three months was necessary, however, before the -candidates were finally accepted as students in the Royal Academy -Schools. It is doubtful whether Rossetti ever finished his probationary -drawings: at all events he never entered the Life School, and does not -appear to have passed beyond the elementary stages of the Antique. But -whatever may have been the deficiencies of their early training in art, -a result of ample significance was now realized by the intercourse which -united in close friendship the illustrious trio—Rossetti, Millais, and -Holman Hunt—who were shortly to be recognized as the prime movers in the -Pre-Raphaelite revolt. - -There was yet, however, another reformer at work, unknown to them, upon -the same problems as perplexed themselves, stirred with the same -restless discontent with the vain canons of conventional art, and -pursuing, in his own obscure studio, methods which came upon the younger -trio as the revelation that they needed. Ford Madox Brown, with whom -they now became acquainted, was seven years older than Dante Rossetti, -having been born at Calais, of English parents, on the 16th of April, -1821. He studied first under Van Hanselaer at Ghent, and afterwards -spent two years under Baron Wappers at the Antwerp Academy (1837–1839), -three in Paris, (1841–1844), and one in Rome (1845). In his twentieth -year he married his cousin, Miss Elizabeth Bromley, who died in 1846. -His experiences of the foreign schools seem to have kindled in him the -same dissatisfaction with current standards of perfection as was gaining -ground among his contemporaries at home. At all events, when Rossetti -was vaguely casting about for kindred spirits aflame with revolutionary -fire, Madox Brown was the poor and unknown painter of a few decorative -cartoons exhibited during the eighteen-forties in Westminster Hall, for -a competition organized by the government with a view to selecting the -best available fresco-work for the ornamentation of the new House of -Lords. The competition was carried over several years, and served in a -great measure to define and organize the growing revolt against the -tyranny of the Academy, under which, as early as the year 1840, the -younger generation of painters was already beginning to writhe. The -leading Academicians of that time were men whose names, as far as the -outer world is concerned, have scarcely outlived their owners. Etty, -Mulready, Maclise, Leslie, Herbert, Chalon, Cooper, Collins, Eastlake, -Howard, Hart, Jones, Unwins, Patten, Charles Landseer, Redgrave, Shee,— -who knows them now beyond the student and the connoisseur? Webster, -indeed, has earned a more enduring fame, and gained a secure if -unpretentious rank in the portrayal of village life, fairly comparable -to that of Mrs. Gaskell in fiction. But for the rest, even the few -gifted and sincere aspirants outside the Academy, but still in the -thrall of conventional methods, such as Cope, Dyce, Ward, Egg, Elmore, -Goodall, Pickersgill, Hook, Poole, Stone, Martin, Haydon, and David -Scott, were but a heterogeneous group, without clear aims or common -aspirations. The Westminster competition attracted and developed new -talent from independent quarters. It was the first deliberate effort of -English art to shake itself free from academic control. Its effect was -to revive, for the time being, a decorative method noble in itself, but -still more valuable as a training in breadth and dignity of expression, -especially for the young artist to whom the fresco was practically a -foreign language, full of latent possibility and charm. Practice in -fresco-work had a directly good effect on the technique of new and -unknown men at the precise stage of their studies at which it was -afforded them. Madox Brown’s style in particular was strongly and -permanently influenced by such exercise, and the competitions evoked -from him a series of historical and dramatic _genre_ paintings which won -Rossetti’s special admiration. Chief among them were “The Body of Harold -brought before William the Conqueror,” which still ranks with the -artist’s finest productions of its kind, “Justice,” a widow pleading -before a Norman baron, “Adam and Eve after the Fall,” “Wiclif reading -his Translation of the Bible to John of Gaunt,” “Our Lady of Good -Children,” and “The Infant’s Repast.” One fine cartoon from the hand of -another artist also drew Rossetti’s delighted attention, “Caractacus led -Captive in Triumph through the Streets of Rome,” by G.F. Watts, a -painter worthily representative of the noblest phase of Pre-Raphaelite -work, though never openly associated with the movement. He too had -vainly traversed the desert of academic studentship, as we may gather -from his own naïve record: “Finding there was no teaching, I very soon -ceased to attend.” His picture of “Caractacus,” however, was now -rewarded with a first-class prize of £300. Millais also competed in the -exhibition of 1847; taking for his subject “The Widow bestowing her -Mite.” - -In the spring of 1848, Rossetti, deeply impressed by the originality and -power of Madox Brown’s designs, wrote to the artist and begged -permission to enter his studio as a pupil. Mr. Brown did not receive -pupils professionally, but, with a generosity which he showed to many an -eager votary at that period, he welcomed Rossetti to his studio as a -friend, and from that time became one of his kindest and most valued -counsellors. - -At the date of Rossetti’s self-introduction to Madox Brown, the latter -was engaged upon a somewhat elaborate picture, “Chaucer reading the -Legend of Custance before the Court of Edward III.”; and Rossetti was -invited to sit to him for the head of the poet. Hunt and Rossetti were -now working together in a studio which they shared in Cleveland Street, -Fitzroy Square; whither soon came Madox Brown to encourage their -tentative efforts, and to aid them both with practical and friendly -instruction. - -And now a new influence from the world of literature came upon the -little student-band. It was the inspiration and stimulus of Ruskin’s -“Modern Painters.” For Ruskin also was at war with the old conventions -that lay chill and heavy upon English art; he too was weary of the dead -level of triviality and scholasticism to which painting had sunk, and -saw with prophetic eyes, through the murk of present life and the -shadowy vistas of history, a higher and attainable ideal. - -“Modern Painters” struck the keynote of the coming change. A fellow- -student lent the volumes to Holman Hunt, who in his turn shared them -with his friends; and reading together, they found therein, not only a -sympathy for their own revolt, but a definite guidance for their -aspirations. With the authority of the trained draughtsman and -_connoisseur_ as well as with the force and fascination of the literary -artist, Ruskin declared for originality and truth in design, as against -the imitations and artifices of degenerate schools, in a voice that -would brook no compromise. Like Carlyle, his whole being was possest -with that passionate scorn of pretensions and shams, that hatred of -formalism and of every species of cant, which swept like a cleansing -wind over Europe after the French Revolution, and which, if its -immediate results were iconoclastic and disruptive, was so much the -better preparation for the reconstruction to follow. - -Ruskin bade men turn, from the Art of the past, to Nature, and seek -fresh inspiration at its primal source. Through Nature alone, he said, -they would reach truth, and finding it, gain also the power to interpret -and reveal. And Nature was a jealous mistress; only to a faithful lover -would she unveil the exquisite mysteries of her beauty; unto his ear -alone would she whisper the high secrets of her soul; she would endure -no translator, no partial and distorted reflection of her face: the man -himself must worship at her inmost shrine, and learn her lesson there -direct and clear. - -—A truism, it seems to us, who have seen the swinging of the pendulum -still further in the naturalistic direction, since the reaction in -divers quarters against convention and precedent has carried many to the -opposite extreme. Yet, in the history of the world, the demand for -precedent and conformity, the love of imitation, the morbid hatred of -novelty and the dread of original experiment, which appear in almost -every crisis of man’s development, exhibit one of the most curious -phases of the human mind. Psychologists might argue at length as to the -relation between indolence and cowardice in the strange game of “follow- -my-leader” played by humanity from age to age,—and might attribute both -to a vague and deep sense of the bitter cost of all knowledge, and a -consequent and not wholly vain tenacity towards things apparently -knowable and known. - -Ruskin, with a vision large enough to retain all that was eternally -precious in the past, began by recognizing the elements of real vitality -even in the outworn classicism which was the occasion of his readers’ -revolt; and led them thence to the higher places of refreshment and -advance. “We must be careful,” said he, “not to lose sight of the real -use of what has been left us by antiquity, nor to take that for a model -of perfection which is, in many cases, only a guide to it. The young -artist, while he should shrink with horror from the iconoclast who would -tear from him every landmark and light which has been bequeathed him by -the ancients, and leave him in a liberated childhood, may be equally -certain of being betrayed by those who would give him the power and the -knowledge of past time, and then fetter his strength from all advance, -and bend his eyes backward on a beaten path; who would thrust canvas -between him and the sky, and tradition between him and God.” - -Again, Ruskin insisted continually upon the essential and supreme moral -purpose of art as a “criticism of life”—as a later authority has called -it. He made clear the relation between _thought_ and _language_ in -painting, wherein lies for ever the crux of art; and pointed to examples -of the contrast and the conflict between those two principles whereof -the right adjustment is art’s final aim. “Most pictures,” said Ruskin, -“of the Dutch school, for instance, excepting always those of Rubens, -Vandyke, and Rembrandt, are ostentatious exhibitions of the artist’s -power of speech, the clear and vigorous elocution of useless and -senseless words; while the early efforts of Cimabue and Giotto are the -burning messages of prophecy, delivered by the stammering lips of -infants. It must be the part of the judicious critic carefully to -distinguish what is language and what is thought, and to rank and praise -pictures chiefly for the latter, considering the former as a totally -inferior excellence, and one which cannot be compared with, nor weighed -against thought in any way or in any degree whatsoever. The picture -which has the nobler and more numerous ideas, however awkwardly -expressed, is a greater and a better picture than that which has the -less noble and less numerous ideas, however beautifully expressed.” - -Thus the author of “Modern Painters” did for his readers what was more -helpful than all precept,—he showed them the high paths trodden -aforetime by men of like aspirations after a similar revolt. He led them -back to an age which had seen the same struggle between the old art and -the new; an age in which the difficulty of presenting human life and its -environment in faithful colours and in natural images had already been -met, and in some measure overcome. That age was the mother of modern art -in Europe. The fourteenth century, waking from mediævalism, felt the -first quickenings of the Renaissance in Italy. - -To that momentous impulse of new life wherein lay, deep-rooted in the -laws of reaction and development, the destinies of modern Europe, the -historian of the Pre-Raphaelite movement must turn if he would read -aright the motive and the message of to-day. For the impulse sought in -the records of the past by the reformers of a later age was of a spirit -kindred with their own, though grappling with its problems under a -somewhat different guise. It was a revolt, not from materialism as we -commonly understand it, namely, the acceptance of matter as the sole and -ultimate reality, and a tacit or open disavowal of the spiritual life; -but rather from that more subtle and insidious form of materialism so -often mistaken for its opposite—the asceticism of mediæval Christianity. -To deny the dignity and sanctity of the physical as the garment of the -spiritual world is surely as blank a materialism as that which makes the -physical sufficient and supreme. To see no spirit in the flesh is to be -no less blind than they who see no spirit _beyond_ the flesh. The innate -cynicism of the monastic idea—its radical _faith_lessness, its utter -distrust of the Spirit’s power to transfigure and ennoble the noble life -of man—is sufficiently evidenced by the fact that the results of that -idea upon the art of the nation were almost identical with the results -wrought upon England by the materialism of the eighteenth century. Art -became a fashion instead of a mission, a cult instead of a worship; it -became the prerogative of a ruling class which conventionalized—as such -must ever do—the spontaneous utterance of the many into the vain -repetitions of the few. That class in modern England was the -_bourgeoisie_: in mediæval Italy it was the priesthood. Herein arose the -narrow religiosity of the early Italian painters, no less than the -ascetic barrenness of the dark ages which preceded them. Art had been -subsidized by a ruling class, however beneficent, for its own purposes, -however sincere and high. The gradual establishment of Christianity as -the state religion of the later Roman period involved the repudiation—or -at least the effort to repudiate—the whole intellectual or æsthetic -heritage of the Græco-Roman world. - -There is a curious pathos in the attempt of every vigorous outgrowth of -human endeavour to disown the prior activity which gave it birth. The -ancient fable of the chick and the egg-shell is of perennial meaning and -pertinence. Militant Christianity marched forward wholly unconscious of -its own vast debt to the very paganism upon which it thrust itself in -holy war. The novel fervour of asceticism had extinguished science -before the end of the third century, art in the sixth and seventh, and -the Greek language by the ninth. But the transition of Italy from -paganism to Christianity was not a substitution of wholly new ideals for -old. It was the gradual absorption of all the permanent elements in -pagan culture into a religion of which the germ only was brought from -the Hebrew world, and which owed most of its strength and much of its -weakness to the rich and heterogeneous soil in which it was planted. The -extravagances of mediæval Christianity—its austere intolerance and -contempt of the natural and obvious, its demand, in the first strenuous -tension of novelty and triumph, for the subjective and the -transcendental life—breaking up, when the strain was relaxed, into a -hard formalism of thought and practice—these were but the inevitable -reaction from the grossness of a degenerate paganism whose vital force -was spent. The immense lapse of time occupied by the transition from -paganism to Christianity, as Mr. Bernard Bosanquet ably points out in -dealing with the issues of that change, gave room for as many secondary -waves of action and reaction within itself as did the movement of the -Renaissance which succeeded it. “From the first distinct breach in naïve -or natural paganism to the assumption of a definitely doctrinal and -orthodox form of Christianity, there is an interval which cannot be -reckoned at less than seven hundred years, from the death of Socrates to -the triumph of Christianity under Constantine. So far from being a new -thing, contrasting with the degradation of the pagan world, the -establishment of Christianity was the issue of the advance of that world -during four centuries, and it was not thoroughly completed until, in a -further development of five centuries, it had adopted from paganism the -germs of almost all permanently valuable elements that the latter -contained.... The Dark Ages are not a proof that the great classical -culture had lost its power for human welfare; they prove only how long a -discipline was needed by the mass of humanity before it could appreciate -more than the first stammering misapprehension of its great -inheritance.”[2] - -The dawn, then, of the Renaissance in Italy, was the waking of the -mediæval world to the sense of this lost inheritance, yet to be -regained; this hidden dower of beauty and gladness, and of strong and -abundant life. The old message of the Galilean Christ had to be re- -translated, as it has to-day: “I am come that they might have life, and -that they might have it more abundantly,”—not a one-sided life, not a -spiritual life at the cost of the body, any more than a bodily life at -the cost of the soul, but a life robust, many-sided, catholic; -harmonized at all points with what is good and sweet and fair in the -physical world as well as what is high and pure and noble in the life -within. And that message led men back to the great first principles of -conduct and consciousness, till they were confronted afresh with the -want of equipoise between physical instinct and moral law which is the -root-problem of human history. The struggle for _existence_ in the -animal world rises in humanity from a physical to a moral sphere, and -passes into a struggle for _life_. - -“History,” says Buckle, “is a record of tendencies, not of events.” The -first tendency of the people thus waking, as we have said, to the sense -of their own birthright and heritage, partook rather of the first of -these two impulses. It was a revolt against the spiritual exclusiveness -of the monastic ideal, and a recoil upon Nature,—especially upon the -apotheosis and worship of Nature already achieved for them in the -Hellenic world. The imperious demands of the physical life, so long -starved and neglected, drove men back upon external things; slowly to -re-discover, through outward and visible realities, the deeper meanings -of which they were in search. The end of the twelfth and the beginning -of the thirteenth century saw a new turn of the current of feeling -towards liberty and expansion of the whole life of man. The painters set -themselves to humanize religion; to bring it into relation with the -vital interests of the so-called secular sphere. And as the fine arts -became emancipated from sacerdotal control, the spirit of free culture -spread into other departments of intellectual activity. In the next -century, the revival of learning followed upon the emancipation of art. -Literature, religion, painting and sculpture, were infused with the same -spirit of experiment and research. Art was brought into touch with -scholarship, and scholarship in its turn graced and dignified by art. -The essence of romance lies in its utter fidelity to immediate and -present life. Its concern is with particular instances, not with -abstractions and generalities. Romance is primarily analytic and -experimental; classicism, synthetic and positive. Romance is inductive, -classicism deductive in its reasoning. Herein romance—deemed for the -most part antagonistic to reason and science, approaches more nearly to -the scientific spirit than any canons of classic art. Its root and base -is in that patient observation of actual things, that sure simplicity -and directness of vision, which is the narrow way to knowledge. Hence -comes the realism of romance,—the realism both of the early Renaissance -and of its later maturity. A dominant characteristic (for instance) of -Michaelangelo—the greatest and most fascinating personality of the whole -Renaissance period—was, as his latest biographer, Mr. John Addington -Symonds, has pointed out, that “he invariably preferred the particular -to the universal, the critical moment of an action to suggestions of the -possibilities of action.” This feature of the highest Renaissance work, -though it seem at first sight to disprove the general theory of romance -as the meditative, contrasted with the classic or dramatic form of art, -is really consonant with it, since one example of one action is more -analytic and reflective in quality than the suggestion of action -generally. Our assertion, then, that the first manifestation of the -break-up of the monastic system was a return to Nature as revealed and -worshipped in the Hellenic ideal, must be qualified by a recognition of -another tendency modifying and chastening the first. - -The second tendency was towards the reconciliation of the superb -naturalism of Grecian art with the Christian spirit of self-discipline -and heroic denial. It was an effort after that ultimate balance and -harmony prophesied (to bring a modern instance) in Ibsen’s “Third -Kingdom;” the kingdom in which the realism of the flesh and the idealism -of the spirit shall be blended into one perfect humanity. “It was a -movement,” to quote again from Mr. J.A. Symonds, “towards that further -point outside both Paganism and mediæval Christianity, at which the -classical ideal of a temperate and joyous natural life shall be restored -to the conscience educated by the gospel.” The vision of this union was -the inspiration of Pre-Raphaelite art. It quickened the hands of the -painters to great tasks; it stirred the scholars to a new energy of -labour and of hope. The poets, interpreting its meaning for the life of -a future Italy, began to speak one to another across the mediæval gloom, -as waking birds call and answer, while it is yet dark, with a sure -instinct prophetic of the dawn. - -Thus the unruffled calm and dignity of Hellenism was troubled, in its -re-birth, with a sense of moral conflict and perplexity unknown to the -ancient world. A peculiar mysticism resulted upon literature from that -revival of the Platonic spirit which was initiated by Pico della -Mirandola and his successors in metaphysical thought. Throughout the -Pre-Raphaelite epoch, from Cimabue (124O) to Perugino, the master of -Raphael (1446), the impulse of naturalism is seen adjusting itself, -through much crudeness of expression, through many blunders, solecisms -of taste, errors of selection, to the great spiritual passion of -Christianity which was still warm at the heart of the thinking world. -There is, especially in early Renaissance work, an effect as of divided -aims, or of methods long habituated to the old ideal and brought -suddenly into the service of the new,—like Heine’s “decayed gods, who, -to maintain themselves after the fall of paganism, took employment under -the new religion.” The physical loveliness of the saints and angels of -Botticelli and Fra Angelico—the last of the purely “religious” painters, -in the common acceptance of the word—is hardly congruous with the -loftiness of their themes, and almost belies the spiritual intensity and -rapture of thought which Botticelli, in later life, drew largely from -the influence of Savonarola, and infused increasingly into his own work. -Giotto, the pride of the Florentine school and the dominant genius of -the fourteenth century, was no less profoundly religious than these; but -in the final roll of art he ranks rather as the first great _Nature_- -painter than as one of a distinctly Christian lineage. Taken, like -David, from the sheepfold, he brought into art a breezy, pastoral air, -and painted before a wide horizon under an open sky. Fra Lippo Lippi -added to that wholesome strength and sanity of sight an even clearer -perception of natural beauty and grace. The glories of the physical -realm, in landscape, in the power of men and in the loveliness of women, -were handled now with a growing boldness which outran the delicate -timidity that had restrained it in the shadow of the Church. And with -the enlargement of intellectual range there came a steady increase of -technical power. The skill of choice, of selectiveness in art, of -composition, draughtsmanship, colouring,—in a word, the science of -_expression_, was brought to bear upon the ready message waiting for the -perfecting of its vehicles. The adaptation of language to thought, which -was the task of the fifteenth century, was achieved by the immediate -predecessors of Raphael in a measure unequalled in the history of the -modern world. And that such an adjustment should resolve itself, as it -did, into a fresh conflict between the forces momentarily reconciled, -proves, not that the success of the effort was spurious, but rather that -the struggle between thought and language in art is but one -manifestation of the eternal striving of the Spirit with the imperfect -medium of the flesh. - -But this rare consummation of harmony between the erstwhile conflicting -principles of classicism and romance, though reaching its highest point -in Leonardo and Michaelangelo, achieved in the Venetian school a -technical effect which appealed even more strongly to the æsthetic -passion re-born in Rossetti and his friends, as they looked back across -the ages in their search for example and light. In Giorgione, the -creator of idyllic _genre_ painting in the fourteenth century, and in -Titian, of whom Rossetti himself was in due course the natural -successor, they found all the mystic sensuousness of the new Paganism in -a setting which, to adapt a well-worn phrase, revealed instead of -concealing the soul within. Here, at least, was the apotheosis of -_colour_, which is itself a characteristic quality of all romantic -revivals: wherefore painting has always been specifically the romantic -medium in art, while the classic temper finds in sculpture its most -congenial sphere. Classicism invariably compromises with the tints of -nature; it resolves the ever-varying hues of earth and sky into the -formula of the spectroscope; it tends, in its purest and noblest phases, -towards marble and the statuesque. Here was the perfection of artistic -language, as Ruskin would call it; the delight in strong and full -utterance for its own sake, wherein lurks the perennial danger of -greatness in technique. With all its glow and glory of natural life, the -Venetian school was primarily decorative in character, and therefore -merged the more readily into the gradual substitution of form for -matter, the general deterioration of naturalism into sensuality, which -overtook Italian art after the decadence of Raphael. - -Together with the more robust conception of the physical life which -supervened in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, there came a -change, partial indeed, but progressive, in the ideals of womanhood. The -Madonnas of Botticelli were instinct with a warmth and sensitiveness -unknown before in Christian art. If they were immaculate, their -perfectness was that of a God-possest humanity rather than of a -humanized Godhead. Their faces shine with natural pity and awe and -tenderness and love,—the love of the true _Mater Dolorosa_, sad with - - “The burden of the mystery, - ... the heavy and the weary weight - Of all this unintelligible world.” - -They see the shadow of the Cross upon the holy Child, and their -passionate life quivers before the Death to be. The same brooding sense -of mystery, the same large and intense compassion for the “world- -sorrow,” yet mingled with a certain austerity of outlook upon its -strife, is the dominant note of Leonardo’s masterpiece of a later date, -“La Gioconda” (“Our Lady of the Rocks”); often compared with that -triumph of a more modern Renaissance, Albrecht Dürer’s “Melancholia,” -with which it shares in the attainment of perfect harmony between -classic and romantic art. - -Yet the return of art in the fourteenth century from the angelic to the -human world did not go far enough to affect the ideals of womanhood -beyond this single aspect—the aspect of maternity. The early Renaissance -painters did indeed humanize, in conception and presentment, the virgins -and the venerable mother-saints of Christendom; but their imagination -never concerned itself with what may be termed the independent humanity -of womanhood. They painted always under the sway of that central and -dominant _motif_ of the Christian mythology,—the idea of woman as the -receptive and passive vehicle of the God-man; and never presented woman -as daughter, sister, lover, or wife, apart from the concurrent idea of -potential motherhood. This limitation—unfortunately for art—instead of -being removed by a further broadening of thought and vision as the -Renaissance proceeded, was emphasized in the fifteenth century by the -influence of Raphael, who cultivated and stereotyped his own ideal of -the “for-ever-motherly” until—so subtle is the influence of fixed types -in pictorial art upon the current standards of truth and beauty—the -maternal function came to be regarded as the sole and sufficient object -of a woman’s existence; and the conventional Madonna-face of Raphael -became a bondage from which Christianity has taken more than three -centuries to set itself free. - -For the advent of Raphael into Italian art marked the beginning of the -degradation of the pure and wholesome naturalism achieved in the -Renaissance into a coarse materialism which in its turn degenerated into -a false and shallow conventionality, and had an effect infinitely -mischievous upon Italy, still more so upon France, and through France -upon the England of the Stuart and Hanoverian periods. It might almost -be said that the greatness of Raphael was the weakness of modern art. -The immediate result of a triumph in technique—of a great success in the -wedding of perfect utterance to noble thought—is sometimes to produce, -in the moral atmosphere around it, a sense of finality, a relaxing of -tension, in which the soul is overpowered by its own conquest of the -medium, and loses itself in the facile freedom thus attained. The -disciples of Raphael, counting him to have achieved the highest -perfection, modelled themselves upon his manner, and thence upon his -mannerisms, without question or reserve; just as, in metaphysics and -philosophy, the schoolmen argued from Aristotle without any reference to -the external world, and, bound in the thrall of his genius, followed -implicitly the narrow trend of his reasoning, until, entangled in -theoretical cobwebs of their own spinning, they lost altogether the use -of the inductive method, founded upon observation and experiment, which -is the only true basis of knowledge. Imitation may be the sincerest form -of flattery, but it is sometimes a fatal hindrance to progress. Its -maleficence in the world of mental science is not greater than the -mischief wrought in art by a spirit which does as much harm to the work -of the copyist as to the reputation of the model. As Ruskin says, “All -that is highest in art, all that is creative and imaginative, is formed -and created by every great master for himself, and cannot be repeated or -imitated by others.” Raphael at first-hand was always great, often -sublime. Raphael second-hand,—stereotyped, formalized, degraded by three -centuries of imitations, each more laboured than the last,—became vapid, -artificial, meaningless. The original inspiration was destroyed. Art -lost its hold on Nature; and, severed from that sole source of power, -fell into inevitable decay. - -History repeats itself, but with a difference. Man’s struggle, as we -have said, for balance, for self-adjustment to the forces around him, -and to the greater forces within, recurs in every age of the world’s -life, but under conditions ever new. The nineteenth century supplied -such new conditions for the old task. The ground that had long lain -fallow was not wasted in its time of barrenness, but made ready in -unfruitful autumns for fresh seed; prepared by silent and secret forces -for a new harvest. Shaken by social revolution, roused by the pressure -of intellectual problems on every side, Art was confronted once more -with the great realities of life and death, good and evil, and turned -for guidance to the witness of the past: as a soul, once quick to action -but long sunk in apathy, awakes again to the mystery of the ideal, and -gathering itself together for fresh strife, calls urgently upon the old -wisdom and the remembered strength of yore. - -In such a spirit did Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his comrades turn from -the dull abstractions of academic tradition, and lift their eyes towards -that golden age whose dawning answered their own cry for light. Not to -the material and redundant splendours of Raphaelesque art did they look -for the inspiration of the hour; not to the pseudoclassicism of the -later Renaissance, but to the pristine freshness and purity of its -youth: just as we now look for the true significance of the romantic -revival, not to the Postlethwaite of fashionable society, or to the weak -sensuality of a drawing-room æstheticism; not to the latter-day -apotheosis of lust which is but a gross travesty of the vigorous -naturalism of Hellenic and early Renaissance art, but to the gracious -innocence and seriousness of Rossetti’s “Virgin,” the noble beauty and -pathos of his dying “Beatrice,” and the austere tenderness of Hunt’s -sore-tempted “Isabella,” confronting Claudio’s painful face with the set -resolve of her impregnable womanhood. So, seeking and following all that -was best in the past, and facing, with vision clarified by that high -discipline, the intellectual, social, and moral strife of the nineteenth -century, the young painters set themselves “to disengage,” as Sainte- -Beuve says, “the elements of beauty,” and to put them forth in some sort -of order and lucidity, even if it were but in a tentative formula, yet -to be subjected to the tests of time. - ------ - -Footnote 2: - - “Some Thoughts on the Transition from Paganism to Christianity.” - - - - - CHAPTER III. - THE PRE-RAPHAELITE BROTHERHOOD. - -The Revolt from the Raphaelesque—Influence of Keats and the Romantic - Poets—The Pre-Raphaelite Brothers and their Early Work—Travels of - Rossetti with Hunt—Publication of “The Germ”—Hunt and Millais in the - Royal Academy—Ruskin’s Letters to the “Times”—Pre-Raphaelitism at - Liverpool—The Pre-Raphaelites as Colourists. - - -The impulse thus given by Ruskin, in the minds of the young painters, -towards the larger spiritual life and vision of the Pre-Raphaelite -period, was strengthened, as Mr. Holman Hunt has told us, by the almost -accidental sight of a book of engravings from the frescoes in the Campo -Santo at Pisa, which fell into the hands of Rossetti and his friends -while spending an evening together at Millais’s house. To such aspirants -as they, “crying bitterly unto the gods for a kingdom wherein to rule -and create,” the work of the early Italian masters here set forth, -though already partially known to them in the National Gallery, opened -up a new world to be conquered and explored. In the suggestive rather -than successful achievements of Cimabue, Giotto, Ghiberti, and Masaccio, -they discerned the wealth of _thought_ to which Ruskin had directed -them, though the _language_ was still in the course of adjustment to the -meaning within. One cannot but think with a half-amused tenderness of -the eager experimentalism of the young schismatics, shaking off from -their feet the dust of academic propriety, and wandering back, half in -jest, half in earnest, in the buoyant prowess of their youth, to the -free fields wherefrom - - —“the harvest long ago - Was reaped and garnered in the ancient barns.” - -It is a pleasant picture which rises in the memory, of the diverse trio, -destined in after years for widely different paths of effort and -success, yet welded at first in the glow of a common enthusiasm of -revolt. It was impossible that they should perceive, at this early age, -that the reaction in which they were united was but a preparing of the -way for an artistic reconstruction which would demand from its leaders -congruity of ideal as well as community of protest. The principle of -non-conformity may embrace almost opposite poles of doctrine and -practice, but the positive elements of a faith must possess alike the -minds of its prophets if they are to pursue in permanent fellowship the -goal at which they aim. As George Eliot has said, “If men are to be -welded together in the glow of a transient feeling, they must be made of -metal that will mix, else they will inevitably fall asunder when the -heat dies out.” - -But there was as yet a strong practical cohesion between the grave and -gentle Hunt, the brilliant, warm-hearted, and impressionable Millais, -and the ardent, mercurial, and passionately imaginative Rossetti, whose -personal magnetism was the immediate welding-force of the Pre-Raphaelite -movement. Rossetti’s proselytizing powers, and his inexhaustible -enthusiasm (at least in youth) for dogmatic propaganda, were indeed a -source of some embarrassment and many disappointments in the progress of -artistic reform. The doctrine of Pre-Raphaelitism, however, if we may so -call it—namely that in the age preceding Raphael would be found the -touchstone of art, grew up too imperceptibly through mutual influences -and interchange of thought to be attributed as a special tenet to -Rossetti or any other of the student-band. - -It was in the year 1847, before the formation of the Pre-Raphaelite -Brotherhood, that the spell of Keats had come with special power upon -its future leaders. Rossetti, an omnivorous reader of poetry, had -already perceived both in Keats and Coleridge the essential elements of -the highest romance. It is the more remarkable that Chatterton, now -acclaimed as the herald of the romantic revival in poetry, as was Blake -in art, had no such charm for Rossetti until quite late in life, when -the tardy discovery led to an exaggerated worship. But in Keats, whose -life (by Lord Houghton) Rossetti, Holman Hunt, and Millais had been -reading together about this time, they found the supreme example in -English poetry of that attainment of harmony between the classic and the -romantic temper which was their aim in art. Eager as they now were for -subject-matter whereon to exercise the artistic principles as yet but -crudely formulated in their minds, they turned with new delight to the -wonder-world revealed to them by the spirit of Keats, and looked with -him through - - —“magic casements, opening on the foam - Of perilous seas in faëry lands forlorn.” - -They saw that the reconciliation of the flesh to the spirit, which is -the task of the second Renaissance as of the first, had already been -achieved in poetry, and was waiting its translation into pictorial art. -Keats had attained that perfect blending of the Greek spirit with the -temper of romance which Rossetti was to reach in “Venus Astarte” and -“Pandora.” - -The first organized union of workers imbued with the Pre-Raphaelite -ideal, and further knit together by a common enthusiasm for the poetry -of Keats, appears to have taken the form of a cyclographic society, in -which the dominant spirits—Rossetti, Millais, and Holman Hunt—were soon -surrounded by a group of more or less gifted companions and friends. The -members were pledged to contribute original drawings in regular -succession to a portfolio which was passed round for criticism by their -fellows. Rossetti, who liked to rule his little kingdom with an absolute -sway, seldom disputed by those who deemed submission to his imperious -ways but a small price to pay for his friendship, selected from Keats’s -“Isabella” the following series of subjects to exercise the talents of -the society:—1. “The Lovers;” 2. “The Brothers” (of Isabella); 3.“Good- -bye,” (the parting of Isabella and Lorenzo); 4. “The Vision” (Isabella -sees in a dream the murder of her lover by her brother); 5. “The Wood” -(Isabella visits the scene of the crime and secretly bears away the head -of her lover); 6. “The Pot of Basil” (she buries the head in her flower- -pot); 7. “The Brothers discover the Pot;” 8. “Madness of Isabella.” - -It does not appear that any member executed this exhaustive series of -proposed sketches in its entirety. The suggestion of subjects from -Shelley’s “Prometheus Unbound” seems to have been no less barren of -results. The only drawings from Rossetti’s hand that remain to us from -that portfolio are an illustration of Keats’s “Belle Dame sans Merci;” a -study from Coleridge’s “Genevieve,” over which he sat up a whole night, -completing it at daybreak, and a sketch of “Gretchen in the Chapel” from -Goethe’s “Faust.” The society included Walter Howell Deverell, an artist -of rare delicacy and grace, and a man of singular personal charm, -destined to play a memorable part in the life-history of Rossetti; F.G. -Stephens, an intimate friend of Holman Hunt; Thomas Woolner, a young -sculptor whose acquaintance Rossetti had made at the Academy Schools; -J.A. Vinter, now well known as a portrait painter; and such lesser -though by no means insignificant lights as J.B. Keene, F. Watkins, -William Dennis, John Hancock, J.T. Clifton, and N.E. Green. It was -evident that among the rising generation of painters, long before the -formation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood,—even before Hunt or -Rossetti had entered definitely upon such art training as they ever had— -the revolt against the tyranny of the Academy was already begun, and -even those least in sympathy with the Pre-Raphaelite idea found -themselves drawn towards Rossetti and his friends in a common -disaffection with the existing _régime_. Moreover, the success of -Millais, who at the age of seventeen had gained the highest academic -prize for historical painting, and was already earning well with his -book-illustrations in black and white, afforded a valuable connecting- -link with a larger circle of critics and sympathizers from whom were -drawn some of the most faithful aides-de-camp of the Pre-Raphaelite -campaign. - -The poetry of Keats afforded at all events an inexhaustable treasure- -house of subject-matter for the young painters, not only in their first -efforts towards the romantic revival, but for many years then to come. -“The Eve of St. Agnes,” for example, afterwards yielded the theme of the -picture regarded by some critics as Millais’s greatest work, as well as -of the first important painting by Holman Hunt, “The Flight of Madeline -and Porphyro.” This was completed at Millais’s studio, at his home in -Gower Street, early in 1848, and exhibited in the Royal Academy of that -year; Millais having been at work meanwhile upon his “Cymon and -Iphigenia.” - -It was not until the autumn of 1848 that a definite attempt was made to -band together, in a common purpose and under a distinctive name, those -of the little company of students and friends who were prepared to -accept and follow openly the principle of fidelity to Nature in general -and to the romantic conception of Nature in particular,—the conception, -namely, of the physical world as the veil and vehicle of an immanent -spirit, fateful, mysterious, and occult. An informal meeting was held at -Rossetti’s studio, then at 83, Newman Street, and seven members enrolled -themselves under the name of “The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.” The union -consisted of Rossetti, Millais, Holman Hunt, William Michael Rossetti, -the younger brother of the painter, Thomas Woolner, F.G. Stephens, and -James Collinson—the least stable of the Brotherhood and the first -seceder from its ranks. In the Academy of that year a picture by -Collinson had already been exhibited, entitled “The Charity Boy’s -Début.” He was a painter of uncertain artistic _calibre_, and of a -lethargic and mystical temperament; converted to Pre-Raphaelitism by the -ardour of Rossetti, but shortly forsaking his art studies and joining -the Roman Catholic communion with a view of qualifying for the -priesthood. This ambition also was subsequently given up, and, thus -vacillating between the church and the studio, his probation ended in no -particular career. The remaining members of the Brotherhood—apart from -the leading painters—may be said to represent the minor literature of -the movement. F.G. Stephens and W.M. Rossetti have attained permanent -distinction as art-critics, while Thomas Woolner, before winning his -later fame as a sculptor, gave in the form of poetry his chief -contribution to the early propaganda of the Brotherhood. - -The rules laid down as to method in painting,—such as, that every -subject and accessory should be studied direct from nature, and from one -model—do not seem to have been stringently enforced: indeed in one of -Rossetti’s most rigidly Pre-Raphaelite pictures, “Ecce Ancilla Domini,” -the face of the Virgin was avowedly painted from several models, while -in that of the Angel the artist has produced a curious blending of his -brother’s features with those of another sitter. - -It is improbable that an aversion to the one-model rule, which has been -attributed to Ford Madox Brown as a reason for holding aloof from the -Brotherhood, had very much to do with his decision to remain independent -of it. Mr. Madox Brown was from the first in cordial sympathy with the -movement, and on terms of intimate friendship with its leaders, but he -foresaw the dangers of an artistic clique, and, perhaps, the -impossibility of permanent consonance of method between temperaments so -diverse as those of the seven members enlisted. Nor was his own strong -and individualistic style of painting quite in harmony with the manner -of his younger friends. He was pre-eminently an historical painter; and -the critical and romantic treatment of history, though bordering very -closely on Pre-Raphaelite ground, hardly came within the immediate scope -of the Brotherhood. Though frequently acknowledged by his later critics -as the father—or sometimes the grandfather—of the Pre-Raphaelite -movement, Mr. Madox Brown consistently disclaimed any such title, and -did so with no less justice than modesty. At the same time, his work was -so intimately connected with that of the men whom he powerfully -influenced and inspired that it may fairly be studied side by side with -theirs in illustration of the dominant principles common to all. - -In the autumn of 1848 it was agreed that the three chief painters should -select their next subjects from Keats’s “Isabella.” Millais, at that -time under the influence of Hunt rather than of Rossetti (who indeed was -still far from adopting any definite line of _technique_), decided upon -a scene depicting Lorenzo at supper with Isabella and her brothers. The -pensive and earnest face of Lorenzo was painted from W.M. Rossetti. Mrs. -Hodgkinson, the wife of Millais’s half-brother, sat for Isabella. It -would not be easy to disprove Holman Hunt’s generous but weighty verdict -on the finished picture, as “the most wonderful painting that any youth -still under twenty years of age ever did in the world.” - -Hunt and Rossetti, however, were not so steadfast in their adhesion to -the agreement as to the choice of subjects from Keats. Hunt indeed -planned, and probably commenced about this time, his afterwards notable -picture, “Isabella and the Pot of Basil;” but this, though taking rank -among the best examples of his earlier style, was not finally painted -until 1867. He decided to finish, for the next Academy, a picture -already in hand, “Rienzi swearing revenge over the body of his brother.” -In this design the figure of Colonna, who endeavours to pacify the -would-be avenger, was painted from W.M. Rossetti, while Dante Rossetti -sat for the head of Rienzi,—and neglected, in spite of much urging from -his comrades, to fulfil his own share in the “Isabella” project; but -pursued work upon the most original and remarkable of his early -pictures, “The Girlhood of Mary Virgin.” Prior to this, he had proposed, -and partly sketched, a design entitled, “Retro me, Sathana,” -representing a young girl walking, and earnestly reading, in a cloister, -in the company of a venerable priest, while the retreating figure of -Satan threatens her from the shade. This conception was never carried -out; but it is probable that the now familiar sonnet bearing the same -title was written about this time. The only painting of any note -hitherto accomplished by Rossetti was a life-size and nearly half-length -portrait of his father, finished in this same year 1848, and -commissioned and bought by his godfather, Mr. Charles Lyell, of -Kinnordy, Forfar, the father of the eminent geologist. This was the only -male portrait Rossetti ever did in oils. In his new picture, “The -Girlhood of Mary Virgin,” (called at first “The Education of the -Virgin”) the face of the lovely child-angel was painted from a young -half-sister of Woolner (though greatly modified, if not wholly re- -painted, afterwards); while St. Joiachim was taken from an old family -servant, and Saint Anna and St. Mary from Mrs. Rossetti and Miss -Christina Rossetti respectively. - -In the spring of 1849 the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood held their first -“private view” with three important pictures, Rossetti’s “Girlhood,” -Hunt’s “Rienzi,” and Millais’s “Lorenzo and Isabella,” duly signed and -monogramed with the initials P.R.B. after the painters’ names, ready for -exhibition; the first appearing at the Free Gallery (formerly known as -the Chinese Gallery), Hyde Park Corner, then under the management of the -Association for Promoting the Free Exhibition of Modern Art, the other -two at the Royal Academy, where they were favourably hung. Rossetti’s -picture was sold to the Marchioness of Bath on “private view” day for -£80, and Hunt’s “Rienzi” found a purchaser soon afterwards. “Lorenzo and -Isabella,” sold for £100 in 1849, was bought in 1883 by the Corporation -of Liverpool for £1,120. - -A tour on the Continent with Holman Hunt in September, 1849, gave -Rossetti fresh inspiration from the early Italian masters and the best -representatives of the Dutch school. The impressions made upon him in -his twenty-first year by travel in France and Belgium are recorded for -us in the wonderfully vivid and sharply-cut vignette-poems of this -period. Eager as ever for emotional experience, and with the divine -passion of hero-worship strong upon him, his holiday among the great -painters was a delightsome pilgrimage, full of suggestion and stimulus -for future work. In Paris, the sight of Giorgione’s great idyll in the -Louvre, “A Venetian Pastoral,” drew from the young tourist a sonnet -unsurpassed for sheer verbal colour and atmosphere by any of his later -poems. Here, too, were written the great memorial sonnets, “Place de la -Bastille,” and “The Staircase of Notre Dame.” On the cliffs at Boulogne -Rossetti wrote “Sea-Limits.” He - - —“climbed the stair in Antwerp church, - What time the circling thews of sound - At sunset seem to heave it round. - Far up, the carillon did search - The wind, and the birds came to perch - Far under, where the gables wound.” - -Van Eyck and Memmeling at Bruges, Leonardo, Fra Angelico, Giorgione, and -Titian in Paris, lacked no due meed of homage from Rossetti and Hunt. - -It is remarkable that Rossetti never visited Italy, nor even retained, -in later years, the patriotic sentiment which had so strongly pervaded -the home life of his boyhood. - -On the return of the travellers to London, a new development was -proposed and accomplished in the public propaganda of the Pre-Raphaelite -Brotherhood. It was decided to issue a monthly magazine for the -promulgation of Pre-Raphaelite principles in painting and poetry. -Members and sympathizers met at Rossetti’s studio in Newman Street to -discuss the project, and decide upon the title and contents of the -manifesto. The suggestion of Mr. Cave Thomas was ultimately adopted, -that it should be called “The Germ.” The first number, extending to -forty-eight large octavo pages, illustrated with etchings, appeared in -January, 1850, published by Messrs. Aylott and Jones, of 8, Paternoster -Row. The primary tenet with regard to art was thus enunciated in the -preface: “The endeavour held in view throughout the writings on Art will -be to encourage and enforce an entire adherence to the simplicity of -nature.” It would be captious, perhaps, to argue, in the face of so -ingenuous an implication, that nature is not simple, but, alas! -infinitely and fatefully complex without and within; presenting to the -seer’s eye a tangled web of visible phenomena no less intricate than the -secret woof of destiny whose threads are the lives of men. To young -minds, as to a young world, the vision of nature broadly outlined in -generalities and clear with purpose is one of the fairest of illusions. -The sternest discipline of life is to discover chaos where we imagined -order and lucidity: to find interminable mazes and cross-roads for our -bewilderment where in the morning mirage we had seen a plain path, an -open road to the Ideal. Then we cry that Nature, and not ourself, is -altered: that “there hath passed away a glory from the earth.” - -Happily, this disillusionment was yet far off in the future of the Pre- -Raphaelite Brotherhood. In the preface to “The Germ,” a special claim -was made for poetry in its relation to the principles of simplicity of -expression already enforced in painting; and with better reason, since -painting must perforce speak exclusively by the representation of -visible things, while poetry reaches directly to their inner -significance. For while the painter strives so to order and depict the -phenomena around him as to arrive at some sort of moral simplicity in -the effect of his picture, the poet—if he be a seer—penetrates at once -to the spirit of his theme, and clothes it at his own will with symbolic -or dramatic expression. Hence the application of the Pre-Raphaelite -principle to the writing of poetry was even more fruitful than in -painting; and produced in modern English ballad and lyric verse, and -even in the best prose of our own generation, a swift and incisive -directness of touch, a broad and vivid clarity of impression, never so -fully effected in the pictorial medium. - -The first literary _débutant_ in “The Germ” was Mr. Woolner, who -occupied the opening pages of the January number with two short poems -admirably illustrative, within their unpretentious scope and modest aim, -of that naïve simplicity in the handling of complexities—the eternal -childlikeness of pure romance—which is inherent in almost all great art. -“My Beautiful Lady” and “Of my Lady in Death” were accompanied by an -etching in two parts by Holman Hunt. Then followed an unsigned sonnet by -Ford Madox Brown, and a paper by Mr. J.L. Tupper on “The Subject in -Art.” Mr. Coventry Patmore contributed anonymously a poem called “The -Seasons,” and Mr. Tupper was also represented in verse. Criticism of -contemporary poetry was afforded by W.M. Rossetti’s paper on Arthur Hugh -Clough. The remaining pages were worthily filled by the two greatest -poets of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, Dante Gabriel and Christina -Rossetti: the latter with “Dreamlands” and another short lyric, signed -“Ellen Alleyn,” the former with “My Sister’s Sleep,” a characteristic -example of his earliest manner, written in the then uncommon metre since -naturalized in our language by Tennyson’s “In Memoriam,” and the -wonderful prose allegory “Hand and Soul.” This poem—as verily it should -be called, with its rich and haunting diction and its magical rhythm of -imagery—is almost the sole example of Rossetti’s strength in prose, only -paralleled by a similar composition, entitled “St. Agnes of -Intercession,” of a later date. “Hand and Soul” is largely -autobiographical in its narrative, being the story of a young art -student of Arezzo, named Chiaro dell’Erma, possessed by new and high -ideals of the painters mission, and stimulated to the better application -of his own talents by the success of a younger comrade,—as we may well -believe Rossetti to have been stirred and impelled by the progress of -the more studious and at the same time more fortunate Millais. The -speech of Chiaro in “Hand and Soul” may be taken as a declaration of -Rossetti’s artistic faith and principles at that period. - -The second number of “The Germ,” though no less interesting and -significant in subject-matter, did not increase the scant support -accorded to the venture by the public at large; and since the expense of -such an issue was too heavy to be borne by the little band of young and -struggling aspirants responsible for its existence, the future of the -magazine had to be seriously reconsidered by the Brotherhood. Mr. -Tupper, however, to whose hands the printing had been entrusted, came to -the rescue, and gave “The Germ” a new lease of life under the title of -“Art and Poetry.” The change did not serve to commend the somewhat crude -propaganda to the mind of the British Philistine, and after the April -number the issue was reluctantly given up; but not until its pages had -glowed with the first fires, at least, of Rossetti’s noblest poetic -inspiration. Here first appeared “The Blessed Damozel,” for which we -might surely paraphrase the words of Holman Hunt on Millais, and call it -“the most wonderful poem that any youth still under twenty years of age -ever did in the world.” Here, too, were the lyric first-fruits of his -continental tour (if sonnets may, by elasticity of definition, be -included in lyric poetry), “The Carillon,” “From the Cliffs—Noon,” -afterwards called “Sea-Limits,” “Pax Vobis,” largely rewritten later and -entitled “World’s Worth,” and the sonnets on “A Virgin and Child,” “A -Marriage of St. Katherine,” “A Dance of Nymphs” (from Andrea Mantegna, -in the Louvre), “A Venetian Pastoral” (from Giorgione, in the Louvre), -and “Ruggiero and Angelica” (from the picture by Ingres). - -Among other contents of “The Germ” and “Art and Poetry” may be mentioned -Ford Madox Brown’s paper on “The Structure of an Historical Picture,” -John Orchard’s “Dialogue on Art,” and Coventry Patmore’s “Criticism of -Macbeth.” Mr. F.G. Stephens wrote under the pseudonym of “John Seward,” -and the publication was edited by W.M. Rossetti, then twenty years of -age. Yet one more poet remains in the list of contributors, James -Collinson, whose somewhat desultory but genuinely imaginative lines, -“The Child Jesus: a record typical of the five sorrowful mysteries,” -together with an etching by the same hand, illustrate very markedly the -peculiar phase of religious symbolism, combined with half-ascetic, half- -æsthetic melancholy, upon which the Pre-Raphaelites were entering at -this period, and which remained with one, at least, of their leaders, as -a permanent and dominating element in the artistic work of a lifetime. - -But while “The Germ” was speeding through its brief career, and -achieving at all events some sort of _apologia_ for the Pre-Raphaelite -Brotherhood, the leading band of painters were further expressing and -developing their principles on canvas. For the Royal Academy Exhibition -of 1850, Millais had prepared two pictures destined to draw down upon -himself the concentrated fury of that storm of vituperative criticism -from the public press which raged unabated for five years around the -work of the Brethren, and ultimately spent itself on their more or less -worthy disciples and successors. It is remarkable that the chief burden -of the abuse heaped upon the Pre-Raphaelites by the art censors of the -period should have been borne in the first instance by one, in some -respects the most brilliant of the band, who in after years departed -more entirely from his early principles in painting than any other -member of the Brotherhood, and gained thereby a far greater measure of -general popularity than has been won, or is likely to be won at present, -by any of his former comrades. Upon no example of Pre-Raphaelite work -were the diatribes of the press more scathing than upon Millais’s two -pictures of 1850, “Christ in the House of His Parents,” (often called -“The Carpenter’s Shop”), and “Ferdinand Lured by Ariel.” “Men who knew -nothing of art,” says a fellow-member of the Brotherhood, Mr. F.G. -Stephens, “reviled Millais because he was not of the art, artistic. -Dilettanti, who could not draw a fingertip, scolded one of the most -accomplished draughtsmen of the age because he delineated what he saw. -Cognoscenti, who could not paint, rebuked the most brilliant Gold Medal -student of the Royal Academy on account of his technical proceedings. -Critics of the most rigid views belaboured and shrieked at an original -genius, whose struggles and whose efforts they could not understand. -Intolerant and tyrannical commentators condemned the youth of twenty -because he dared to think for himself.... Intense and unflinching -fidelity to nature, ardent love for colour, and a rigid resolution to -paint the light of day as brightly as pigments could allow him, were -among the aims of Millais, who, following the principles he championed -with all his heart, found his models among his friends of English birth, -and failing Eastern types, employed all his skill on British materials, -relying on the really devout spirit in which he worked, and the poetic -quality of his design, to produce the effect desired. He was sorely -disappointed in this reliance.” No less sane a journal than Charles -Dickens’s “Household Words,” thus wrote on June 15:—“In coming before -this Holy Family you must discharge from your mind all religious -aspirations, all elevating thoughts, all tender, awful, sorrowful, -ennobling, sacred, graceful, or beautiful associations, and prepare -yourself for the lowest depth of what is mean, odious, repulsive, and -revolting. You behold the interior of a carpenter’s shop. In the -foreground is a hideous, wry-necked, blubbering, red-headed boy in a -bed-gown, and at his side a kneeling woman so horrible in her ugliness -that she would stand out from the rest of the company as a monster in -the vilest cabaret in France, or the lowest gin-shop in England. The two -almost naked carpenters might be undressed in any hospital where dirty -drunkards in a high state of varicose veins are received. Their very -toes have walked out of St. Giles’s.” Another writer likened the figure -of the boy Christ, whose hand, in the picture, has been wounded at his -task, to “a miserable child scratching itself against a rusty nail in -Seven Dials.” To such criticism it might easily be retorted that the -world is more deeply concerned to-day with the dark problems of Seven -Dials and St. Giles’s than with the life of any child in history, save -in so far as the latter may illumine and interpret the mysteries of the -importunate hour; and that the painter who so translates into present- -day life the eternal tragedy of toil and pain as to press home to the -conscience of a nation the daily re-crucifixion of the Christ in its own -vast labour-houses,—whose modern reading of the ancient tale suggests -the divine potentialities of all childhood and the universal pathos of -human love “wounded in the house of friends,”—has given us a greater -picture, and a more religious picture, than if he had painted for us all -the angels in Heaven. - -“Ferdinand Lured by Ariel” may be taken as the first landscape produced -by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. It was painted—according to the rule— -directly from nature. The background was taken from a spot in a park -attached to Shotover House, near Oxford, where Millais was staying as -the guest of Mr. Drury. A lady who saw the young artist at work upon -this subject distinctly recalls his application of a magnifying-glass to -the branch of a tree he was painting, in order to study closely the -veins of the leaves. This was a literal following of that patient -analysis of minutiæ in nature which characterized the Italian Pre- -Raphaelites, and is especially noticeable in the early landscapes of -Leonardo da Vinci; though he departed in his maturity from his former -love of detail, and began to conventionalize items into generalities. -Even the lizards in the foreground of “Ferdinand and Ariel” were -faithful portraits of certain small favourites brought by Millais from -Jersey to serve their turn among his sitters. The friend who sat for -Ferdinand relates that the painting of the face, though a marvel of -finish, and perfect in technique, was accomplished in a single sitting. -A detailed pencil drawing was already on the canvas, and the laying on -of the colour occupied only five hours. The vivid colouring of the whole -picture, and the use of metal instead of pigment for the gold-cloth worn -by Ferdinand (after the method of the early Italian masters, followed -also by Rossetti in “Ecce Ancilla Domini”), were the subject of scarcely -less vehement denunciation by the critics than the painter’s treatment -of the Holy Family. “We do not want,” they said, “to see Ariel and the -Spirits of the enchanted isle in the attitudes and shapes of green -goblins, or the gallant Ferdinand twisted like a posture-master by -Albrecht Dürer.... A Ferdinand of most ignoble physiognomy is being -lured by a pea-green monster, intended for Ariel, whilst a row of -sprites, such as it takes a Millais to devise, watch the operation with -turquoise eyes. It would occupy more room than the thing is worth to -expose all the absurdity and impertinence of this work.” - - -[Illustration: - - “ECCE ANCILLA DOMINI!” - - _From the National Gallery._ -] - - -From such extravagance of hostility the efforts of Holman Hunt were -spared for the present; and his contribution to the Academy of 1850, -“Christian Priests Escaping from Druid Persecution” (better known as -“The Christian Missionary,”) though sharing in the general condemnation -of the Pre-Raphaelite “heresy and schism,” was not singled out for -special objurgation. Rossetti’s great achievement of the year was the -most beautiful, and at the same time the most dramatic, of his strictly -Pre-Raphaelite work, the “Ecce Ancilla Domini” (“The Annunciation,”) now -in the National Gallery. The first rough sketch for this picture—a small -water-colour not more than six inches by four—was painted as early as -1847 in the Cleveland Street studio shared with Hunt. The completed work -was rejected by the Academy, and seen only in the obscure little -Portland Gallery in Regent Street. - -But the following season brought a larger measure of opprobrium to -Holman Hunt. In the autumn of 1850 he had spent some weeks with Rossetti -at Sevenoaks, Kent, and there painted the greater portion of his picture -for the next year’s Academy, “Valentine rescuing Sylvia from Proteus;” a -scene from Shakespeare’s “Two Gentlemen of Verona.” The beech-tree -forest background was painted in Lord Amherst’s park at Knowle, and Mr. -James Lennox Hannay (who died in 1873) was the model for Valentine. The -whole work was characterized by the same bold colouring and exuberance -of highly wrought detail, the same rugged unconventionality of pose and -gesture in the composition of the figures, that had so incensed the -organs of Academic tradition in the previous year. Its appearance in the -Academy of 1851 evoked a fresh outburst of official contumely, in which -the painter of “Valentine and Sylvia” (as it was ultimately called), was -no less severely dealt with than his comrade Millais, who exhibited at -the same time “The Return of the Dove to the Ark,” “Mariana of the -Moated Grange,” and “The Woodman’s Daughter”—one of the finest -combinations of Pre-Raphaelite landscape with the peculiar intensity of -figure-drawing and character-study which was a dominant motive with the -Brotherhood at this period. The assailant critics again sought to cover -insinuations of gracelessness and deformity of conception beneath the -looser charge of defective technique. - -It was at this juncture that Mr. Ruskin, then personally unknown to the -Pre-Raphaelites, and hearing privately of their aims and endeavours -through Mr. Coventry Patmore, took upon himself to espouse their cause, -perhaps with more ardour than discrimination, and wrote, in the spring -of 1851, the now famous Letters to the “Times” which constituted the -first public and authoritative vindication of the Pre-Raphaelite -movement. - -That Mr. Ruskin may have taken the early achievement and promise of the -young painters a little too seriously, and attributed to them a more -exalted conception of their mission as prophets and reformers than they -actually cherished, and that he did undoubtedly misinterpret certain -aspects of their religious paintings, is now widely acknowledged; nor -need we hesitate to say that his influence upon the movement from first -to last has been considerably exaggerated. Yet it is unquestionable that -the first inspiration of Pre-Raphaelitism was largely due to his -writings, and that his open championship of Hunt and Millais at a crisis -of popular feeling rendered immense service to their crusade against the -blind Philistinism of the British _bourgeoisie_. Replying at once to the -technical indictments, Mr. Ruskin said:—“There was not a single error in -perspective in three out of the four pictures in question [‘The -Woodman’s Daughter,’ ‘Mariana of the Moated Grange,’ ‘The Return of the -Dove to the Ark,’ and ‘Valentine and Sylvia’].... I doubt if, with the -exception of the pictures of David Roberts, there were one architectural -drawing in perspective on the walls of the Academy; I never met with but -two men in my life who knew enough of perspective to draw a Gothic arch -in a retiring plane, so that its lateral dimensions and curvatures might -be calculated to scale from the drawing. Our architects certainly do -not, and it was but the other day that, talking to one of the most -distinguished among them, I found he actually did not know how to draw a -circle in perspective.... There is not a single study of drapery in the -whole Academy, be it in large works or small, which for perfect truth, -power, and finish, could be compared with the black sleeve of Julia, or -with the velvet on the breast and the chain mail of Valentine, of Mr. -Hunt’s picture; or with the white draperies on the table of Mr. -Millais’s ‘Mariana.’ And further: that as studies both of drapery and of -every minor detail, there has been nothing in art so earnest or so -complete as these pictures since the days of Albrecht Dürer. This I -assert generally and fearlessly.” “Let us only look around at our -exhibitions,”—continued the writer, proceeding to compare the work of -the Pre-Raphaelites with the current standard of academic art—“and -behold the cattle-pieces, and sea-pieces, and fruit-pieces, and family- -pieces, the eternal brown cows in ditches, and white sails in squalls, -and sliced lemons in saucers, and foolish faces in simpers, and try and -feel what we are, and what we might have been.” - -Mr. Ruskin’s letters to the “Times” were revised and republished a few -years later in pamphlet form, introduced by the following statement in -the preface:—“Eight years ago, in the close of the first volume of -‘Modern Painters,’ I ventured to give this advice to the young artists -of England: That they should go to Nature in all singleness of heart, -and walk with her, laboriously and trustingly, having no other thought -but how best to penetrate her meaning; rejecting nothing, selecting -nothing, and scorning nothing: advice which, whether bad or good, -involved infinite labour and humiliation in the following it; and was -therefore, for the most part, rejected. It has, however, at last been -carried out, to the very letter, by a group of men who, for their -reward, have been assailed with the most scurrilous abuse which I ever -recollect seeing issue from the public press.” - -Upon this endorsement of the Pre-Raphaelite aim there followed an -indictment of the Raphaelesque tradition still surviving in the -training-schools of British art, in a passage which, through much -quotation, has now become a familiar example of the controversial -literature of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. “We begin,” said Mr. Ruskin, -“in all probability, by telling the youth of fifteen or sixteen that -Nature is full of faults, and that he is to improve her; but that -Raphael is perfection, and that the more he copies Raphael the better; -that after much copying of Raphael he is to try what he can do himself -in a Raphaelesque but yet original manner; that is to say, he is to try -to do something very clever, all out of his own head, but yet this -clever something is to be properly subjected to Raphaelesque rules, is -to have a principal light, occupying one-seventh of its space, and a -principal shadow, occupying one-third of the same; that no two people’s -heads in the picture are to be turned the same way, and that all the -personages represented are to possess ideal beauty of the highest order, -which ideal beauty consists partly in a Greek outline of nose, partly in -proportions expressible in decimal fractions between the lips and the -chin; but partly also in that degree of improvement which the youth of -sixteen is to bestow upon God’s work in general.” - -It is not difficult to trace, in the light of those utterances, the -point of departure between Mr. Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites in their -conception of that universe of Nature which they had studied with the -like faithful care. Revolting from the quasi-perfection of Raphaelesque -art, Ruskin had thrown himself upon Nature with the confidence of -finding in her the absolute perfection vainly sought in the work of man. -He had embraced without question the monistic theory of Nature as -essentially beneficent and beautiful, and had never faced the principal -of dualism which has been and must yet remain the crux of modern -philosophy. Hence he failed to grasp the more romantic and subtle -conception of the physical world as the scene, and not the drama, of -life, which was immanent in the beginnings and revealed with the -maturity of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. It has been remarked by an -astute critic that three of the greatest writers of the Victorian age— -Ruskin, Carlyle, and Browning—have been ruined as thinkers by their -ignorance of the law of Evolution, with all that it implies of waste and -suffering, of sacrifice and conflict and loss. Ruskin’s philosophy of -nature was founded upon an old and discredited cosmogony; and however -remote may have been the thought of the Pre-Raphaelite painters from the -purely intellectual conclusions of physical and mental science in the -nineteenth century, however apart they may have lived from theological -and ethical controversy, it can safely be said that no contemporary -artist save Tennyson, in poetry or painting, has imbibed more completely -that spirit of mystical and irresponsible conflict with Nature which -they drew from the atmosphere of mediæval romance. They understood that -he who returns to Nature, returns, as another writer has bluntly -expressed it, to a great many ugly things. “We need,” says Mr. Frederic -Harrison, “as little think the natural world all beauty as think it all -horror. It is made up of loveliness and ghastliness, of harmony and -chaos, of agony, joy, life, death. The nature-worshippers are blind and -deaf to the waste and the shrieks which meet the seeker after truth. -What a mass there is in Nature which is appalling—almost maddening to -man, if we coolly resolve to look at all the facts, as facts!”[3] It was -well that the Pre-Raphaelite painters should return, as they did, to the -reverent and unbiassed portrayal of the natural world as it presented -itself to their eyes. That they should follow with absolute fidelity the -phenomena around them, “rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and -scorning nothing,” was the essential preparation for artistic reform. -But that they should advance from such a discipline to something of the -selectiveness of fine art, was a step from the analytic method to a -constructive effort based on that analysis and not—as in the -Raphaelesque convention—independent of it. In all the highest Pre- -Raphaelite work we feel instinctively that Nature is not the subject, -but only the accessory, of the painting. Undoubtedly the new note struck -in 1849 was, as Ruskin says, a note of resistance and defiance. But the -revolutionary impulse had yet to be developed on reconstructive lines; -and this development, though powerfully stimulated by the independent -genius of Millais in the first four years of the Brotherhood, passed -ultimately into the hands of Rossetti and Holman Hunt. - -But Ruskin’s championship of Hunt and Millais when the powers of -orthodoxy were against them and their friends were few, and his no less -generous patronage of Rossetti in the succeeding years, did much to turn -the current of critical favour in the direction of the Pre-Raphaelite -ideal. Hunt’s picture, “Valentine and Sylvia,” after its merciless -ordeal of ridicule and abuse in London, was rewarded by a £50 prize at -the Academy of Liverpool,—the first English city to give public -recognition and support to the rising school. The story of the steadfast -encouragement accorded to the Pre-Raphaelites by the Liverpool Academy -during the next six years, in which the annual prize of £50 was granted -in every instance to pictures either by Millais, Holman Hunt, Ford Madox -Brown, or a painter of kindred aims—Mark Anthony,—and of the dissensions -which arose in and round the Academic Council when in 1857 the prize was -once more won by Millais, affords an interesting side light upon the -artistic controversy of the period. A leading literary newspaper -attacked the Liverpool Academy in the bitterest terms for what it called -“the Pre-Raphaelite heresy,” and Mr. Ruskin again came forward in the -press to the defence of the painters. In the following year another -nomination of Madox Brown by the Council for the award in question -brought the strife to a crisis; the Town Council withdrew its financial -support from the Academy, and rival exhibitions were opened, resulting -in failure on both sides. Time, however, worked a significant revenge. -Not long after the press attack upon the Academy Council, one of the -original members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Mr. F.G. Stephens, -was appointed art-critic of the very journal that had so violently -forsworn “the Pre-Raphaelite heresy.” Twenty years later, the finest -English art gallery outside London was erected in Liverpool through the -munificence of Mr. (afterwards Sir) A.B. Walker, recently deceased; and -yielded some of the most important spaces on its walls to pictures of -the highest level of the English Pre-Raphaelite school. - -The history of the last two decades has indeed wrought a sufficient -vindication of the general methods of these young painters, and -supremely of their practice as colourists; and it is in the sphere of -the colourist that their influence upon contemporary art has made itself -felt more deeply, perhaps, than in any other branch of technique. But to -the vindication of history has been added in recent years, by the -painter most bitterly attacked at the time for his innovations in -colour—Sir John Millais—a defence which has now become almost an -aphorism in English studios. “_Time_ and _Varnish_ are two of the -greatest Old Masters,” says the artist, writing in 1888 under the title -“Some Thoughts on our Art of To-day”; “and their merits are too often -attributed by critics to the painters of the pictures they have toned -and mellowed. The great artists all painted in _bright_ colours, such as -it is the fashion now-a-days for men to decry as crude and vulgar, never -suspecting that what they applaud in those works is merely the result of -what they condemn in their contemporaries. The only way to judge of the -treasures which the old masters of whatever age have left us, is to look -at the work and ask oneself ‘What was that like when it was new?’ Take -the ‘Bacchus and Ariadne’ in the National Gallery, with its splendid red -robe and its rich brown grass. You may rest assured that the painter of -that red robe never painted the grass brown. He saw the colour as it was -and painted it as it was—distinctly green; only it has faded with time -to its present beautiful mellow colour. Yet many men now-a-days will not -have a picture with green in it; some even going so far, in giving a -commission, as to stipulate that the canvas shall contain none of it. -But God Almighty has given us green, and you may depend upon it, it’s a -fine colour.”[4] - -The writer then describes the gradual fall of Sir Joshua Reynolds before -the short-sighted demand for “subdued colour” which had become current -among the art _connoisseurs_ of his day, and which at last induced him, -against his better judgment, to create immediate “tone,” at the -sacrifice of durability, by the use of that pernicious medium, -asphaltum; with the result that all his extant work so accomplished is -now in a deplorable state of decomposition and ruin. - -With such examples before them of the evil of yielding to the demands of -ignorance, and lowering in any way one’s standard of practice before a -popular cry, the Pre-Raphaelite Brothers, whose first word in art -sounded, as Ruskin said, the note of resistance and defiance, did not -scruple to make merry over the weaknesses of a school of painting -founded on Sir Joshua Reynold’s “Discourses.” Mr. Madox Brown tells us -how Rossetti loved to quote from the diary of B.R. Haydon:—“Locked my -door and dashed at my picture with a brush dripping with asphaltum.” But -of Rossetti’s cordial admiration for Haydon’s genius a contrasting -anecdote is evidence:—A friend, discussing with him the relative merits -of Haydon and Wilkie, contended that the head of Lazarus was the only -fine thing Haydon ever produced. “Ah!” burst out Rossetti, “but that one -head is worth all the puny Wilkie ever produced in his life!” - -Rossetti’s practice, it may here be said, differed from that of his Pre- -Raphaelite comrades in the matter of varnish. The strong impulse towards -the fresco-method, which was initiated in him, in his student days, by -Madox Brown and the Westminster Cartoon competitions, resulted in his -avoidance, throughout the best years of his work, of glaze and sheen in -painting. From the first, Rossetti hated varnish: hence were developed -the fresco-like, pure, and lustreless depths of colour which mark his -finest technical level. But his entire confidence in the “Old Master,” -Time, to enhance and vindicate his rich green glories in drapery and -background is sufficiently attested by his unhesitating and masterly use -of green in nearly all his greatest pictures. Not even the verdant -gorgeousness of “Ferdinand and Ariel” can compare with the deep, -chastened splendour of the green in “Beata Beatrix” and “Mnemosyne,” or -in “The Beloved,” “Veronica Veronese,” “La Ghirlandata,” “The Blue -Bower,” or, more daring still, in the wonderful series of water-colours -which occupy the transition period of Rossetti’s Pre-Raphaelite work. - ------ - -Footnote 3: - - “On Pantheism and Cosmic Emotion.” - -Footnote 4: - - “The Magazine of Art,” 1888. - - - - - CHAPTER IV. - PERIOD OF TRANSITION. - -Influence of Browning and Tennyson—Comparison of Rossetti and Browning— - Influence of Dante—Introduction to Miss Siddal—Rossetti’s Water- - colours—Madox Brown and Romantic Realism—The Dispersal of the - Brotherhood—Departure of Woolner—Ideals of Portraiture—Rossetti and - Public Exhibitions—Death of Deverell—Rossetti’s Friendship with - Ruskin—Apostasy of Millais—The Rank and File of the Movement— - Relation to Foreign Schools. - - -While Millais and Holman Hunt were outwardly dominant in the region of -reform, and, in the exhibitions of 1850–51, were leading the Brotherhood -Militant boldly into the enemy’s camp, Rossetti was entering upon a -phase of doubt and perplexity, of self-distrust and hesitation, which -resolved itself into an important crisis in his artistic development. A -variety of circumstances diverted him in 1850 from the special line of -religious painting, exemplified in “The Girlhood of Mary Virgin” and -“Ecce Ancilla Domini,” which had been the chief outlet of his early -enthusiasms in art,—if indeed so inadequate a phrase be permissible in -regard to pictures which must rank with the purest products of his -genius in its pristine robustness and simplicity. An incident in the -studio-annals of the Brotherhood now turned him aside from the mediævo- -religious manner adopted directly and literally from the early Italian -masters. Rossetti’s convert and disciple, James Collinson, striving to -imitate afar off the sincere habit of his leader, set to work upon a -congruous subject, “The Renunciation of St. Elizabeth,” and produced a -picture so mystical in conception and so hysterical in sentiment, albeit -not without a certain grace and beauty of its own, that the sound and -practical good sense which tempered the mysticism of Rossetti revolted -at once from the extravagance of such a style. He now perceived the -danger of pursuing too exclusively a path bordering on the metaphysical -and occult, and quickly sought to brace and strengthen both his own -imagination and that of his comrade, by departing for a time from the -field of what is commonly called “sacred” art, and seeking fresh -inspirations in a less rarefied air. - -Other influences, chiefly of a personal kind, began to play around -Rossetti at this time. He had moved, early in the year 1850, to a suite -of rooms at 14, Chatham Place, Blackfriars; a block of houses since -demolished, but then hospitable enough in a sober charm of environment; -within view of the river and the historic horizon of its shores, and of -certain grim but not wholly unromantic vistas of the great metropolis. -In this home was spent the happiest decade of Rossetti’s life. Here -began, soon after his settlement in the new abode, his friendship with -the greatest poet of the Victorian age, and with another conspicuous in -the second rank of its singers,—Tennyson and Browning,—both destined to -exercise a strong influence on Rossetti’s art, though (singularly as it -happened) not on his poetry; which remained, through years of -intellectual intercourse and the reading together of each other’s verse, -absolutely unaffected by either of the widely different poetic styles of -the then Laureate and his great contemporary. - -It is not easy for a succeeding generation to understand with what -enthusiasm, with what delight and invigoration, the little company of -painter-poets plunged into the writings of Browning when, following -Rossetti, who was first on the track of the new fount of refreshment, -they discovered therein the tonic which they needed. No better antidote -to the sensuous mysticism into which some of the Pre-Raphaelites were -threatening to lapse could have been found than the wholesome modernity -and salutary brusquerie of the author of “Pauline” and “Bells and -Pomegranates.” It was probably because they stood most in need of his -gospel that the influence of Browning was at first more strong upon the -readers than that of Tennyson, who affected them in the direction of -pure romance, and distilled for them all that was sanest and noblest in -the mediæval world. - -In the autumn of 1850 Rossetti began, during his stay with Hunt and F.G. -Stephens at Sevenoaks, a number of sketches with a view to a large and -elaborate picture of “Kate the Queen,” from Browning’s well-known lyric. -But he could never satisfy himself with the design, and after much toil, -disheartenment, and perplexity, the subject was abandoned, like many -more promising themes which from time to time inspired Rossetti. The -entire year, save for the success of “Ecce Ancilla Domini,” had been one -of disappointment to him, and of disconsolate struggles for a new -departure. He had made many futile attempts at designs for “The Germ,” -but none pleased him, and now he was casting about for new matter and -media. For, as his standard of excellence rose higher, he began to feel -more acutely his technical shortcomings,—the results partly of his -incomplete training and desultory study in youth, partly of singular -ill-luck in his figure-models, and partly also of a curious -constitutional deficiency—not of industry _per se_, but of the faculty -to direct and apply his industry along right lines. No modern artist has -disproved more completely than Rossetti the barren platitude which -defines genius as “the capacity for taking infinite pains.” Comparison -between Rossetti and Browning in their struggle with mental tendencies -unfavourable to lucid and well-ordered art is too obvious to demand -pursuit in detail. Both took the prescribed “infinite pains,” but -neither in the most profitable directions. Browning was over-charged -with thought; Rossetti with imagination; and both were cumbered with the -difficulties of artistic speech. The art of Browning has frequently been -pronounced crude, raw, and “undigested.” One would hesitate to apply -such terms to any work of Rossetti’s; for his, even at its most -elemental stages, generally erred in the direction of strained and -laboured purism, being over-wrought rather than unripe in conception or -performance. In both artists, an exuberant activity of output was -combined with a curious inability to undergo the full discipline of just -and coherent expression. Browning’s prolific and incorrigible chaos of -diction and metre, and Rossetti’s want of balance and sobriety in -draughtsmanship, are but instances of the too frequent impediments of -genius in the process of transmission. Rossetti, when he attained -perfection in technique—and that he did so absolutely and repeatedly can -no longer be questioned—seemed to stumble on it, as we have already -suggested, by a sort of exquisite chance, a divine surprise, rather than -a logical issue. And, manfully as he strove to recover in technical -science, and did indeed recover to a marvellous degree, the lost ground -of early days in a splendid maturity, his sense of perfect drawing was -too fine for him not to suffer keenly—so long as that sense remained -unimpaired—from that inability to realize at will his own ideals of -perfection, which to every true worker is the only thing to be called -failure. - -Distracted as Rossetti was throughout his life by the very richness and -fertility of his own genius, torn ever between divided aims and -conflicting purposes, the more mutually obstructive because of the -restless and hyper-sensitive nature which was the field and victim of -their strife, the difficulty of concentrating that genius upon the -highest aim and purpose within its proper sphere was never more stubborn -than at this period. So largely did the poetic impulse, in his youth, -predominate over the pictorial method, that, as he himself declares in a -letter written in retrospect, it was not until 1853, when he was twenty- -five years of age, that he definitely adopted painting as his life-study -and profession, and relegated his literary efforts to a subordinate -place. Subordinate they were in name and for a time only: to be put -forth with fresh ardour and greater mastery at intervals of his -painting, and to surpass it in some respects in the essentials of fine -art. Rossetti had yet to learn that he, even more than Hunt and Millais, -was primarily and supremely a colourist in the broadest sense of the -word. - -But a still deeper and more abiding influence from the literature of the -past was by this time ascendant in Rossetti’s mind. The love of Dante, -already inherent in him, was nurtured by many tender associations of -youth: it now increased and swayed him as a direct and urgent spiritual -power. In 1845 the vague spell of the old name upon the young namesake -had changed, for the latter, into an eager study of his great poetic -inheritance. The magic and majestic visions of the “Purgatorio” and -“Paradiso,” and still more, the unforgettable life-tragedy of their -seer, had sunk deeply into Rossetti’s thought, until, from his own -recreative alembic of fantasy, he began, about 1850, to bring them forth -again on paper and canvas, in a rich and profuse miscellany of rough -sketches and brilliant vignettes and colour-studies, too often left -unfinished at a point of high promise and alluring suggestions of -success. - -It is not difficult to trace, through the strange parallels of -circumstance and destiny, the sombre charm that bound the exiled poet of -the fourteenth to him of the nineteenth century. It has been said that -no ascendancy of a great poetic personality over one born in a later age -has been more potent and fruitful in art than that of Dante Alighieri -over Dante Gabriel Rossetti. In 1849–50 we find the latter sketching, -first in ink and then in colours, the historic or legendary meeting of -Dante and Beatrice Portinari at a marriage feast, when Beatrice is said -to have laughed with her companions at the shyness and confusion of the -young patriot-guest. The second of these sketches was severely -criticised when exhibited in 1851–52, on account of a daring -juxtaposition of bright light green and bright light blue in the colour -scheme. This bold experiment was afterwards defended by Ruskin by -analogy with the natural disposition of green grass, etc., against a -summer sky. - -It was at this time also that another new and important personal -influence came upon Rossetti’s life. James Collinson had now separated -from the Brotherhood, and was succeeded, at all events probationally, by -Walter Howell Deverell, through whom, by one of those strange chances -which sometimes modify in a moment the destinies of a lifetime, Rossetti -made the acquaintance of Miss Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal; a young girl of -such remarkable beauty that Deverell at once asked her to sit to him as -a model, and introduced her to Rossetti for the same purpose. The story -runs to the effect that Deverell, who was himself of singularly handsome -and winning presence, accidentally caught sight of Miss Siddal’s face, -with its regular, delicate features and profusion of rich, dark auburn -hair, in the background of a shop-window where she—the daughter of a -Sheffield cutler—was engaged as a milliner’s assistant. To Deverell, -being at that time in search of a model for his new picture, “Viola,” -from Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night,” the sight of such a face was doubly -welcome. He quickly made such frank and honourable advances as his -graces of person and character facilitated, and Miss Siddal’s _début_ in -the studios of the Brotherhood brought not only to Deverell a perfect -Viola, but to Rossetti an ideal and actual Beatrice. For the young -artists soon found their model to be—in the old fairy-tale phrase—“as -good as she was beautiful.” Of that goodness and beauty, that -incomparable charm of talent and of character, of manner and -temperament, which soon made her the centre of the warmest admiration -and affection, enough has long since been written, by those who knew -her, to render the tardy praise of less qualified historians alike -needless and impertinent. The members of the Brotherhood vied with each -other in the endeavour to immortalize her in their paintings. Rossetti, -Hunt, and Millais did so with unqualified success. Rossetti, in his -turn, discovered that she herself possessed extraordinary aptitude for -art. He gave her lessons in drawing and painting, and the two worked -together upon kindred ideals. Her presence in the studios was soon upon -the footing of equal friendship and pleasant _cameraderie_. The vigour -of her imagination is best seen in a water-colour drawing, “Sir Patrick -Spens,” in Mr. Theodore Watts’s collection. It represents the wives of -the men on the doomed ship waiting in agonized expectancy upon the -shore. - -Soon a different and deeper attachment sprang up between teacher and -pupil. Her exquisite spirit, her gracious ways, appealed as deeply to -Rossetti’s sensitive and passionate nature as did her beauty to his -æsthetic judgment. His love for her was as the gathering up of all the -scattered forces of his being into one consecrated worship. It may well -be that the progress of courtship was not invariably favourable to the -progress of art, but several rough portraits by Rossetti of himself and -Miss Siddal, and of Rossetti by his fair companion, remain as pleasant -witnesses of idle hours, and are at the same time drawn with singular -vividness and force. - -Early in 1851, or perhaps at the close of the previous year, Miss Siddal -appears to have given sittings to Holman Hunt for the face of Sylvia in -his picture of “Valentine and Sylvia,” already referred to. Rossetti sat -with her as the Jester in Walter Deverell’s “Viola”—his most successful -picture; taken from the scene in which the Duke asks the Jester to “sing -again that antique song he sang last night.” The artist served as his -own model for the Duke. - -It appears probable that Rossetti and Miss Siddal were engaged as early -as 1853, though the relationship was not openly avowed for a -considerable period, and did not terminate in marriage until 1860. -Rossetti’s pecuniary position, at the outset of his career, was -naturally uncertain; nor did it materially improve with subsequent -prosperity and fame; for his tastes and habits, according to the -traditions of artistic Bohemia, were as luxurious and improvident as his -earnings were precarious. Miss Siddal, too, was delicate in health. An -early sketch of her, from Rossetti’s hand, and now in the South -Kensington Museum, representing her as she stands by a window, in a gown -of quaint simplicity and soberness, gives perhaps the truest impression -of her personality that could be selected from the portraits of that -period. The artless and yet somewhat austere pose, the fragile grace and -slightly languid sweetness of aspect, afford a key to the criticism once -passed to the effect that “she would have been a Puritan if she had not -been an invalid.” The latter she never was in the sense of chronic -inactivity, but of such delicacy as to give a peculiar tenderness to her -service as a model, and unhappily both to delay and abbreviate the short -period of married life. - -To some critics it has been a source of regret that Rossetti should have -come in youth so unreservedly under the spell of a type of beauty as -exclusive as that of this well-beloved model. The rare blending of -spiritual with sensuous charm which she presented in feature and -expression so fully satisfied his own ideal of that harmony as to make -him dwell upon, and perhaps specialize it, in a way which constituted a -danger to his art; inducing him to read into other feminine types the -individual characteristics of the one. Fortunate as he was in after life -in obtaining for his models some of the most beautiful and cultured -women in the artistic and literary circles of London, his tendency was -almost always to look at them, as it were, in the light of that -established ideal, and to conceive them as versions merely of that -elemental loveliness which so dominated his thought. But it was -inevitable that a temperament like Rossetti’s should specialize, through -their very intensity, the dominant characteristics most familiar to his -pencil and his brush. The case of Miss Herbert, an accomplished actress -who gave him a number of sittings in the next decade, is perhaps the -most striking exception to the rule; but her style of beauty was in too -complete a contrast to that of Miss Siddal (being of a severe, robust, -and Hellenic type) to allow of any compromise between the features of -the two. - -The combined influence of Browning and Tennyson among contemporary -poets, and the increasing sway of Dante over the young painter, -inclining him the more strongly in the direction of historic romance, -produced, as we have seen, a somewhat desultory course of pen-and-ink -sketches and water-colour studies during the next few years. The -interval from 1850 to 1858 may be reckoned as Rossetti’s second period. -After the completion of “Ecce Ancilla Domini,” he painted no important -oil picture until the Llandaff “Triptych” of 1859, and the contemporary -“Bocca Baciata,” which stands first in point of time, and high in point -of merit, among the masterpieces of his maturity. - -Yet the water-colours of the second period, capricious and experimental -in treatment as many of them are, include some of the most valuable, -because the most characteristic and significant, of Rossetti’s work in -the realm of pure romance. In these rough and often hasty sketches, -sometimes less than twelve by twenty inches in size, his imagination -seems to have been exercising itself upon the poetic subjects that -haunted him by turns with the vividness of actual life, more vital and -urgent than the realities of every day. Several, indeed, of the finest -of these water-colours are now dated, on good authority, as early as -1848–49; such as the lovely little sepia sketch, “The Sun may Shine and -we be cold,” given to his friend, Alexander Monro, a young Scottish -sculptor of high promise, whose early death from consumption removed an -artist who could ill be spared from the small and never very strong -sculpture-branch of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. To this period also -belong some of the most important of the Dante subjects. From 1849 is -dated “A Parable of Love,” one of the best of Rossetti’s early drawings -in pen and ink. The lady is seated at an easel on which she has been -painting her own portrait from a mirror at her side. Her lover, bending -over her from behind, lays his hand upon hers to guide the brush anew. -Mr. Woolner served as the model for the lover. A pen-drawing from -Browning’s “Sordello,” entitled “Taurello’s First Sight of Fortune,” -also belongs to 1849, together with the powerful little sketch, “The -Laboratory,” from the same poet, showing a strange, brilliant, witch- -like or almost serpent-like woman in an alchemist’s shop, procuring from -him some fateful elixir wherewith to play upon her rival and avenge -herself upon the lover, once her own. - -One of the most beautiful water-colours of 1850 is the “Morning Music;” -a dainty little half-length figure of a white-clad girl seated at her -toilet, another maiden brushing her long bright hair, while her lover -stands, making music from some archaic instrument, at her side. At this -time also Rossetti made the first sketch of a subject which fascinated -him with peculiar force almost throughout his artistic career, and to -which he returned again and again in several media, even within a short -time of his death, but without ever achieving a finished picture— -“Michael Scott’s Wooing.” - -In 1851 were made the best of several water-colour drawings from the -subject of “Lucretia Borgia,” and the first pen and pencil sketches of a -subject suggested by the famous Döppelgänger legends of northern Europe. -The design for “How they met themselves” remains among the very highest -of Rossetti’s conceptions in pure romance. The final pen-and-ink version -was not done till 1860, nor the water-colour till 1864. The subject -demands further study in a separate chapter, together with the principal -Dante sketches in this group. Several drawings from Shakespearean -subjects, including “Benedick and Beatrice” (“Much Ado about Nothing”) -and “Orlando and Adam in the Forest” (“As You Like It”), were also -executed about this time. - -Mr. F.G. Stephens traces some interesting modifications of Rossetti’s -technique between the years 1850 and 1853 to the influence of his -comrades in the course of associated work. From Millais he seems to have -gained something of the easy grace and suavity of style which was -lacking in his first too strenuous work; from Holman Hunt, the -scrupulous and laboured detail which readily became as exhaustively (and -sometimes exhaustingly) symbolic as Hunt’s own; and from Ford Madox -Brown a certain robust breadth and dramatic mastery which was needed to -lift his subjective creations into a large and quickening atmosphere. -Probably it was the influence of Madox Brown that led him to the field -of stern and practical social problems, of everyday romance; to deal -with the eternally crucial relationship of frail womanhood to passionate -manhood, and all its sweet and bitter and profound significance upon the -life of humanity, as he dealt with it in the wonderful “Hesterna Rosa” -(“Yesterday’s Rose”) of 1851, in “The Gate of Memory” six years later, -and in the great realistic picture, “Found,” which was begun in 1852, -but which, after many vicissitudes of neglect, spasmodic effort, and -frequent despair, remained still unfinished at the painter’s death. It -may be wished that Rossetti had pursued more thoroughly the _motif_ -which thus yielded some of the most remarkable and suggestive of his -designs. This group, however, again affords a subject for consideration -on a future page. - -But the year 1853 saw also the first outward signs of the breaking-up of -the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Thomas Woolner, the oldest member of the -Brotherhood, at this time twenty-eight years of age, being still unable -to earn a living in London by his art, now determined to emigrate to -Australia, where some friends of his family were already established at -Melbourne, and to try his luck at the gold-diggings, which were at that -time a source of much excitement and speculation in English circles. -Woolner had already achieved some unpretentious but exceedingly -thoughtful and conscientious work in sculpture, but he had not met with -much academic recognition, nor with any substantial favour from the art- -patronising public. For many years a pupil of Behnes, he entered the -Academy Schools in 1842, and contributed a large composition of life- -size figures representing “The Death of Boadicea” to the Westminster -Cartoon Competition of 1844. His contributions to the Royal Academy -exhibitions in Trafalgar Square had included “Eleanor Sucking the Poison -from the Wound of Prince Edward” (1843), “Alastor” (from Shelley, 1846), -“Feeding the Hungry” (bas-relief, 1847), “Eros and Euphrosyne” and “The -Rainbow” (1848), and portraits of Carlyle and Tennyson. At the British -Institution he had also exhibited a statuette of “Puck” (1847) and -“Titania Caressing the Indian Boy” (1848). He sailed for Australia in -the spring of 1853, accompanied by a promising young sculptor named -Bernhard Smith (who died somewhat prematurely in 1885), and followed -shortly afterwards by E.L. Bateman, another close sympathizer with Pre- -Raphaelite aims. Woolner returned to England early in 1857, and then -executed the fine bust of Tennyson recently placed in Poets’ Corner, -Westminster Abbey. His later work, however, can hardly be classed with -that of the Pre-Raphaelite band. He died on the 7th of October, 1892. - -In the summer of the same year the Brethren agreed to paint together a -group of their own portraits, in order to send them over as a gift to -their distant comrade on the gold-fields of the Antipodes. Accordingly, -they met one day at Millais’s studio in Gower Street. There were present -Dante and W.M. Rossetti, F.G. Stephens, Millais, and Holman Hunt. Mr. -W.M. Rossetti, ranks the results in the following order of merit:—The -portrait of Stephens by Millais, of Millais by Hunt, of W.M. Rossetti by -Millais, of Dante Rossetti by Hunt, and of Hunt by Dante Rossetti. - -Rossetti himself, as we have already seen, produced but very few male -portraits. The large oil-painting of his godfather, Mr. Charles Lyell, -and the pencil drawings of his father and grandfather; the water-colour -sketches of Browning and Swinburne, and the admirable life-size chalks -of Mr. Ruskin, Mr. Theodore Watts (said by Mr. Swinburne to be his -masterpiece in portraiture), Mr. F.R. Leyland, Dr. Gordon Hake, Mr. -George Hake, and Mr. W.J. Stillman, two or three pencil drawings of -Madox Brown, and the painting of Holman Hunt, as above recorded, seem to -exhaust the list of his efforts in that field, if we exclude the -consideration of many excellent likenesses which occur among his -_genre_-pictures. W.M. Rossetti, for instance, sat more than once to his -brother for the head of Dante, and many other important figures; in -fact, there was a general practice of mutual accommodation among the -Brothers in serving as models one to another. - -Yet the immense influence of the Pre-Raphaelite movement upon English -portraiture in the latter half of the nineteenth century would be -difficult to over-estimate. It must be remembered that the first -principle of Pre-Raphaelitism—namely, that nature, including human -nature, is to be painted truthfully and unflinchingly as it presents -itself to the painter’s eye—strikes directly at the root of the -conventional habit, which aimed at “idealizing” the subject into -something far superior to the present reality. Still, as “the eye sees -what it brings the power to see,” so the rightly-trained artist sees -infinitely more than the casual observer, and his purest realism becomes -the highest ideality. For in order to represent nature truly, something -more is demanded than imitation. Diderot tells a story of a painter well -known to him and to fame, who, on beginning work upon a new subject, -always went down upon his knees and prayed to be delivered from the -model. There was a grain of truth in his notion. To be delivered from -the letter in order to apprehend the spirit, yet to follow faithfully -the visible in order to attain the invisible, is the task of the -portrait-painter. The mistake of the pseudo-classic idealists, as of the -impractical folk in other walks of life, is to suppose that by aiming at -the spirit they are absolved from the letter altogether; not perceiving -that to gain the spirit they must reach _through_ the letter, and -_beyond_ it. Every true portrait-painter is an idealist in this highest -sense, that he perceives and reproduces the inmost and essential Self of -his sitter, and in supreme moments resolves, as Spinoza would have it, -the “potential human” into the “actual divine.” He portrays scrupulously -the outward aspect, but interprets the whole by that pervading spirit -from within to which the outward aspect has given him—as a seer—the key. -The face he paints is not transfigured by his own imagination, his own -conceit, however fair, of what that face might or ought to be; but it is -revealed in its own distinct and actual being by a witness which, if -truthful, must be as generous as stern. It is the immortal and -inevitable “Thou Thyself” of which Rossetti sings: - - “I am Thyself—what hast thou done to me? - —And Thou Thyself to all eternity!” - -Yet if we may risk a paradox, it is precisely in the _reality_ that -there lies the _potentiality_ of the life within; behind the physical -_is_ abides the spiritual _may be_; the “everlasting no” of the -uncompromising realist, sifting, limiting, and analyzing down the human -unit into bare and rigid matter, often conceals the hidden hope and -promise of the idealist’s “everlasting yea.” Hence a great portrait is -charged to the full with latent possibilities of character and destiny. -It suggests forces as well as phenomena, causes as well as effects, -inherent tendencies as well as facts. Someone has said that a human face -should be either a promise or a history. The definition is too narrow. -Every face, save perhaps in childhood, and not always with that -exception, contains both promise and history inextricably blended each -with each. A great portrait must be passionately personal, intensely -individual; presenting one single, complete, and separate identity to -the eye and mind, and yet in a very real sense _im_personal, having a -certain universal, humanitarian significance. For the artist’s hand sets -the human unit in its place in the great Family; lifts it on to the -broad planes of the world’s common life. As his eye sees all things, -like Spinoza, _sub specie eternitatis_—sees Time in the light of -Eternity—so it sees one Man in the light of Humanity. He knows no -isolations of being, conceives no man as “living to himself;” but is -concerned ever with relationships and imperative sympathies between the -subject of his portrait and the rest of mankind; so that the personality -that looks forth from his canvas, faithfully and profoundly interpreted -by his own, has in it the elements of appeal and challenge, and sends -out a radiance of vitality to its spiritual kin. - -In this ideal of portraiture the young Pre-Raphaelites had been -confirmed by Ruskin long ago; and he had pointed them to the -incomparable portraits of Dante by Giotto, of Petrarch by Simon Memmi, -and of Savonarola by Fra Bartolomeo, as examples among the Italian Pre- -Raphaelites of the attainment of such success. Rossetti and his comrades -in their turn, more especially some of the younger and more independent -spirits not actually or permanently connected with the Brotherhood, -developed and perfected the ideal to a degree incalculably fruitful in -contemporary art. It will hardly be disputed that in Mr. G.F. Watts, one -of the truest Pre-Raphaelites in aspiration and temper, though utterly -distinct from them in original genius and intellectual range, England -has found at last her greatest portrait painter, while to Millais, one -of the original members of the Brotherhood, the judgment of posterity -will attribute a scarcely less exalted place. They found the art of -portraiture degraded, almost without exception, to the lowest level of -trivial prettiness as regards women, and vulgar affectation in dealing -with men. “The system to be overthrown,” as Ruskin said, “was one of -which the main characteristic was the pursuit of beauty at the expense -of truth.” And such pursuit leads in all ages to the same inexorable -fatality,—the beauty so gained is always of a false and spurious kind. -The ancient allegory of Pandemos and Urania is for ever true in art. The -seeker for ideal beauty seeks it only in visible forms, pursues it -through the physical world alone, awaits it at the doors of sense -merely, and is straightway ensnared by the earthly Pandemos, the Venus -of the flesh. But let him steadfastly set his soul to the higher -worship, let him seek reverently the moral and spiritual loveliness of -human character in the great _is_ and the greater _may be_ of the -throbbing, actual life around him, and surely he will be brought into -the near presence of the heavenly Urania; surely he will pass, with -Rossetti, through “Body’s Beauty” to “Soul’s Beauty,” and worship with -him - - —“that Lady Beauty in whose praise - Thy voice and hand shake still,—long known to thee - By flying hair and fluttering hem,—the beat - Following her daily of thy heart and feet, - How passionately and irretrievably, - In what fond flight, how many ways and days!” - -The attention of Mr. Ruskin had meanwhile been diverted to some extent -from the work of Millais and Hunt by his entrance in 1854 upon a close -personal friendship with Rossetti, which lasted in cordial fidelity for -some ten or twelve years. At the time of his first public championship -of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Mr. Ruskin had known nothing of -Rossetti’s work, inasmuch as it had never yet appeared on the walls of -the Academy or in any of the popular exhibitions of the period. But, for -such unintentional and unconscious neglect of the real leader of the -movement which he so warmly endorsed, the great critic now made ample -reparation. He became a constant and generous patron of Rossetti’s -pictures until the painter passed, about the year 1865, into his third -artistic period, and developed methods less in accordance with Ruskin’s -especial tenets. That the gradual severance of intimacy between artist -and buyer should have been brought about by the former’s independence of -spirit and resolute adherence to his own inspirations and aims, in the -face of some, perhaps, over-officious criticism and counsel from his -patron, is certainly no discredit to Rossetti. At the same time, the -art-world owes a debt of gratitude to Mr. Ruskin for having so long -encouraged, by his support and sympathy, the production of those -exquisite water-colours which Rossetti, unsettled as he then was in -habits of painting, might not otherwise have accomplished in such -splendour and cogency during his transition period. - -And to these years of intimacy with Ruskin belong nearly all the finest -drawings of his “Morte D’Arthur” series, such as “King Arthur’s Tomb” -(called sometimes “The Last Meeting of Launcelot and Guinevere,” though -the design by no means gives the impression of a meeting in the flesh), -“The Damozel of the Sanct Grael,” “The Chapel before the Lists,” “The -Meeting of Sir Tristram and Iseult,” “Sir Galahad in the Ruined Chapel,” -“Sir Galahad and Sir Bors,” “Launcelot Escaping from Guinevere’s -Chamber,” and “The Death of Breuse sans Pitié;” together with a fresh -and important group of Biblical subjects treated in a more daringly -romantic manner than before, including “The Passover in the Holy -Family,” “Bethlehem Gate,” “Ruth and Boaz,” “The Crucifixion,” “Mary in -the House of John,” and the first sketch for “Mary Magdalene at the Door -of Simon the Pharisee;” also the “Triptych” for the altar-piece of -Llandaff Cathedral, “The Infant Christ Adored by a Shepherd and a King.” -The Dante subjects again appear in 1854–55, with “Francesca di Rimini,” -“Paolo and Francesca,” “Matilda Gathering Flowers” (from the -“Purgatorio”), “Dante’s Vision of Rachel and Leah,” “Dante at Verona,” -and the first version of the picture afterwards among Rossetti’s -masterpieces, “Dante’s Dream.” The little drawings of “The Tune of the -Seven Towers” in 1850, “Carlisle Tower,” “Fra Angelico Painting,” and -“Giorgione Painting” in 1853, “The Queen’s Page” (from Heine) in 1854, -“Fra Pace” and “Monna Rosa” in 1856, “The Blue Closet,” “The Blue -Bower,” “The Bower Garden,” and the first design for a favourite subject -variously known as “Aurelia” and “Bonifazio’s” or “Fazio’s Mistress” in -1857; these, together with some further sketches for “La Belle Dame sans -Merci,” a number of portraits of Miss Siddal, Browning, Tennyson, and -Swinburne, whom he knew in 1857, are but a selection from the almost -countless studies, in pencil, pen and ink, neutral tint, water-colour, -and occasional oil, scattered over Rossetti’s transition period. - - - “MARY MAGDALENE AT THE DOOR OF SIMON THE PHARISEE.” - - From a drawing. - - _By permission of Lord Battersea and Overstrand._ - -[Illustration: Mary Magdalene] - - -“St. Luke the Painter,” in 1857, is notable as being Rossetti’s first -success in coloured chalk; a medium which he affected more freely in -after years, and with extraordinary power and felicity; the medium, in -fact, in which some of the noblest of his later half-length symbolic -figures were executed. - -After the year 1850 Rossetti almost ceased to exhibit in picture -galleries. A very few of his pictures, including the “Bocca Baciata” and -a version of “Lucretia Borgia,” were thenceforth seen in the Hogarth -Club, a small society of artists and amateurs to which he belonged, and -others afterwards in the Arundel Club, which he joined in 1865. An -important exception, however, was made to this rule of seclusion in -1856, when a small but highly representative Pre-Raphaelite Exhibition -was opened at 4, Russell Place, Fitzroy Square. Among Rossetti’s -contributions were the first water-colour draft of “Dante’s Dream,” -already alluded to, and its pendant, “The Anniversary of the Death of -Beatrice,” “Hesterna Rosa,” “The Blue Closet,” and “Mary Magdalene.” The -other exhibitors were Millais, Holman Hunt, Madox Brown, Arthur Hughes, -Charles Collins, William Davis, W.L. Windus, Inchbold, Seddon and Brett. -The “Dante’s Dream” re-appeared at the Liverpool Academy in 1858, -together with “A Christmas Carol,” and “The Wedding of St. George”; -“Fair Rosamund,” and “The Farmer’s Daughter” (study for “Found”) went to -the Royal Scottish Academy in 1862; and “Mary in the House of John” -appeared at the Fine Art Society’s Galleries in 1879. A version of -“Pandora,” in 1877 or 1878, and a lovely little water-colour, “Spring,” -in 1879, were lent by their purchasers to the Glasgow Institute of Fine -Arts; “Tibullus’s Return to Delia” was similarly lent to the Albert -Gallery Exhibition at Edinburgh in 1877; and in 1881 the Loan Exhibition -at the Royal Manchester Institution included four important water- -colours—“Proserpine,” a “Lucretia Borgia,” “Hesterna Rosa,” and “Washing -Hands;” and five oils—“Proserpine,” “Two Mothers,” “Joli Cœur,” “A -Vision of Fiametta,” and “Water-Willow.” These instances complete the -brief list of Rossetti’s pictures exhibited in public galleries during -the lifetime of the artist. - -In the year 1854, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, already practically -broken up by divergence of method in the leading painters, and changes -of aim and sphere among the lesser lights of the revolutionary dawn, may -be said to have been finally dispersed by the lamented death of Walter -Deverell, and the departure of Holman Hunt for a lengthy sojourn in the -East, there to paint directly from nature—according to the much boasted -but oft-broken rule—the backgrounds and appurtenances of those Biblical -subjects to which he was now strongly drawn. The death of Deverell at an -early age was a heavy personal bereavement to Rossetti, and an occasion -of genuine grief to all the Brotherhood, with whom he was exceedingly -popular. Nor was the loss to art easily reparable, or the work of his -surviving comrades unaffected by the removal of a painter of such -singular purity and grace. He was a son of the Secretary of the Schools -of Design, which were the precursor of the South Kensington Science and -Art Department. - -Rossetti and Millais were thus, in 1854, left alone as practical -painters; W.M. Rossetti having been from the first exclusively a -_littérateur_, while F.G. Stephens, after having produced in youth some -work of high quality on strictly Pre-Raphaelite lines, had by this time -adopted the same sphere of energy, especially in the realm of the art- -critic. - -But the phase of doubt and hesitation, of compromise (in no invidious -sense) between the first inflexible attitude of revolt and the further -impulse of re-construction, which had overtaken the Brotherhood in 1851, -was by no means the special ordeal of Rossetti. It came soon afterwards -upon Millais with an equal import and significance; as though each must -pass, in individual experience, through the several stages of -destructive and re-creative energy, first of protest, then of reform, -and afterwards of reconciliation and progress, which they had recognized -in the history of the past, and which their own work as a whole afforded -to the history of the nineteenth century. They had to exemplify, each -for himself, the resolute overthrow of partial and degenerate -principles, and the pursuit, more or less successful, of a further and -perhaps undefined ideal, or the reaction towards that very order against -which their own strenuous protest had been set. And it is remarkable -that, in the case both of Rossetti and of Millais, the painter should -have reached his highest level of excellence in art precisely at the -moment when his methods were the most unsettled and his principles the -least assured. The most discerning critics now agree in placing the -high-water mark of Rossetti’s genius in the midst of this transition -period, ranging from 1850 to 1860, or, if the decade may be stretched by -a license of etymology, covering the “Beata Beatrix” of 1863. And it is -scarcely disputable that the supreme achievements of Millais lie within -a narrower space, comprising chiefly the “Hugenot” and “Ophelia” of -1852, “The Order of Release” of 1853, “Autumn Leaves” and “The Blind -Girl” of 1856, and “The Eve of St. Agnes” in 1863, which really belongs -in conception and spirit to the Keats epoch, if we may so call it, which -gave birth to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Just as in the dawn of the -Italian Renaissance the point of absolute greatness in art was gained at -the momentary coalition of the old forces with the new, when the classic -spirit was conquered and absorbed by the spirit of romance, and the -romantic spirit still beat tremulously about the new world’s doors, so -in the struggle of the modern Pre-Raphaelites to reconcile the new -impulse with the heritage of the past, the triumph came in the midst of -the conflict rather than after the victory. Just as Leonardo and -Michaelangelo gathered up and combined the discordant elements of the -strife around them into a noble harmony of art, so did the Pre- -Raphaelites attune and interpret the diverse forces of their own -revolution when they felt its import most acutely, and least knew -whither it would lead them. And to almost opposite poles of thought and -sentiment were Millais and Rossetti led. - -The extraordinary change which gradually came over the work of Millais -after his election to the Associateship of the Royal Academy in 1854—the -youngest painter, with the exception of Lawrence, ever admitted to that -rank—has been the subject of much criticism and controversy. It has been -contended by several writers that Millais lacked original imagination, -and could not sustain his early level without the constant inspiration -and stimulus of Rossetti and Hunt, both of whom were by this time -absorbed in fresh developments of their own. More ardent apologists have -claimed that his Pre-Raphaelite period was but a curious episode in -Millais’s career; a mere incident in the growth of a genius too -brilliant to submit for long to bias from without; and that his -impressionable nature was only temporarily swayed by the proselytizing -enthusiasm of his comrades. It is hard to attribute the qualities of his -finest work—qualities of a high imaginative order, as in “The Eve of St. -Agnes,” or “The Enemy Sowing Tares,” to any genius but his own, or to -believe that the painter of “Ophelia” and the “Blind Girl” was not -himself profoundly moved by the pathos and tragedy which he therein -conceived. Nor can it be urged that the exigencies of ill-fortune, the -stress of poverty, or any of those dire necessities of fate which have -driven many a true artist on the downward road, drove Millais to paint -as unblushingly for the Philistine market as he had formerly done for an -obscure and despised coterie of artistic revolutionists. Free as he -always was of pecuniary care, and favoured by destiny with all the -pleasures of domestic and social prosperity, if he was spoilt, it was by -success, not failure; if corrupted, it was by popularity, not neglect: -though it must be remembered that none of the Pre-Raphaelites can justly -pose as martyrs in the matter of a livelihood. - -Nor is it permissible to urge that fame, at first well earned and richly -justified, entitles any great painter to repudiate the convictions and -ideals on which that fame was built, or to play with a reputation won at -a heavy cost to himself and others. It can only be assumed that Millais, -in forsaking the high and steep paths which he had once chosen, -sincerely followed what he felt to be a more excellent way, and honestly -believed his decadence to be an advance upon his maturity. To doubt this -would be to pass the sternest moral condemnation on an artist of -incomparable endowments, and to brand him as the wanton betrayer of a -sacred trust, the deliberate concealer of a divine talent, for which, at -the ultimate judgment-seat of art, the inevitable account must at last -be given. - -Speaking of this turning-point in Millais’s career, Mr. Ruskin said in -1857:—“The change in his manner from the years of ‘Ophelia’ and -‘Mariana’ to 1857 is not merely Fall; it is Catastrophe; not merely a -loss of power, but a reversal of principle; his excellence has been -effaced ‘as a man wipeth a dish—wiping it and turning it upside down.’” - -But the Pre-Raphaelite movement, so far from being at an end, was now -only emerging from the first tentative phase of its activity. It had yet -to be absorbed in a larger reformation, and to act thereby even more -potently than if it had remained the specific crusade of a clique or -faction. The difficulty which the historian finds at this crisis in the -artistic career of Rossetti and his friends, and still more so in their -subsequent developments,—the difficulty of defining strictly Pre- -Raphaelite work, and of deciding as to who of the now rapidly expanding -circle of painters may justly be claimed as Pre-Raphaelites, is itself -evidence of the permeating force of the initial movement, and of the -ready soil which was prepared for the dissemination of its dominant -ideas. For the circle of literary and artistic aspirants, patrons, -students, amateurs, and connoisseurs of many grades and varied gifts who -now surrounded Dante Rossetti, included men whose names afterwards -became honoured in fields of art quite untouched by Pre-Raphaelitism in -its distinctive form, but imbued through their influence with fresh and -quickening impulses of revival. - -One of the most poetic of the painters intimately associated with the -Brotherhood was Arthur Hughes, who, though only eighteen at the time of -its formation, took an active share in its practical work, and painted, -according to its main tenets, with a rare facility and tender charm. He -was born in London in 1832, passed through the Academy Schools without -much recognition, but won cordial admiration among the limited company -who could then appreciate his work, by his beautiful “April Love” in the -Academy of 1854. He was also singularly successful at a later date in a -subject from Keats’s “Eve of St. Agnes”—the source of inspiration for -some of the finest work of the Pre-Raphaelite leaders at various times. -Like Millais and several others of the band, he attained considerable -popularity as an illustrator of books. His religious paintings, -moreover, will demand attention among those of his more illustrious -friends. “The Cottager’s Return” and “The Reaper and the Flowers” may be -remembered, among others of his always graceful pictures, by those who -recall the first decade of Pre-Raphaelite propaganda in public -exhibitions. He sat as the model for the hero in Millais’s “Proscribed -Royalist” of 1853. - -Charles Allston Collins, a son of William Collins, R.A., and brother of -Wilkie Collins, painted for some time in the manner of the Pre- -Raphaelites, but subsequently devoted himself to literature. His first -exhibited picture, “Convent Thoughts,” in the Academy of 1850, shared -with Millais’s “Christ in the House of His Parents,” the torrent of -opprobrium showered on the innovators in that eventful year. Yet three -of his works were accepted by the Academy the following season,—“Lyra -Innocentium,” on a verse from Keble; representing a young girl in a -white gown against a background of blue; “May in the Regent’s Park,” a -wonderfully minute study of foliage, as if seen through a window opening -close upon the trees; and “The Devout Childhood of Saint Elizabeth of -Hungary,” calling to mind the treatment by James Collinson of the -familiar renunciation-legend anent the same much-maligned saint. The -Elizabeth of the “Childhood” is depicted as a homely-looking little girl -of thirteen, kneeling at the iron-barred oaken door of a chapel in the -Palace grounds. Her missal is laid on the doorstep beside her, and she -is imagined, according to the account of her early piety, to be at -prayer on the inhospitable threshold of the shrine to which she cannot -for the moment gain access. Charles Collins acted as Millais’s model for -“The Hugenot” and “The Black Brunswicker.” He married a daughter of -Charles Dickens, who posed with him as the lady in the “Hugenot.” - -William L. Windus, a Liverpool artist and member of the Academy of that -city, made his modest but genuine fame chiefly through his powerful -romantic picture of “Burd Helen,” the “burd” or sweetheart of the -Scottish border ballad, who swam the Clyde in order to avenge herself -upon a faithless lover. The work was pronounced by Ruskin to rank second -only in order of merit to Millais’s “Autumn Leaves” in the Royal Academy -of 1856. He painted altogether some eight or ten pictures of a very -earnest and imaginative kind, of which one of the finest was entitled -“Too Late,” and represented a dying girl whose lover had forsaken her -and returned too late for reparation. “The Surgeon’s Daughter” is also -remembered as a composition of much chastened and subdued power. Windus -ceased painting at an early age, and was lost sight of by the -Brotherhood. - -Robert B. Martineau was a pupil of Holman Hunt, but painted, among some -three or four pictures which constitute the brief total of his -achievements, only one of striking merit,—“The Last Day in the Old -Home,” which for sincerity and depth of feeling won considerable -appreciation in 1865. His career was cut short by untimely death soon -afterwards. - -Cave Thomas, who so infelicitously christened “The Germ,” had gained a -prize in the Westminster Cartoon competition, and was the painter of one -very beautiful picture, “The Protestant Lady,” exhibited in the Academy, -and greatly admired by the Brotherhood. He published in 1860 a monograph -entitled “Pre-Raphaelitism Tested by the Principles of Christianity;” -and subsequently became art professor to the Princess of Wales. - -Mr. Frederick Sandys was not personally known to the leading Pre- -Raphaelites until 1857, and was by that time too original and -accomplished an artist to be claimed by them as a disciple, but his work -was for some time intimately associated with theirs. He was to the last -a valued friend of Rossetti, who always affirmed that while in -draughtsmanship he had no superior in English art, his imaginative -endowment was of the richest and rarest kind. - -Mr. Henry Wallis is justly remembered by his one great picture, “The -Death of Chatterton,” which touched popular feeling as its true pathos -and dignity deserved to do, and won universal praise. - -Mark Anthony is rightly regarded by the Pre-Raphaelites as the most -poetic of their landscape painters. His grandly simple and reposeful -“Old Churchyard” will compare even with Millais’s “Vale of Rest,” and -his “Nature’s Mirror” with Mr. Burne-Jones’s “Mirror of Venus” in later -years. Mr. John Brett, now famous in seascape, was for some time -intimate with the Brotherhood; and among friends and sympathizers on a -similar footing may be mentioned Val Prinsep, Thomas Seddon, J.D. -Watson, J.F. Lewes, W.S. Burton, Spencer Stanhope, M.F. Halliday, James -Campbell, J.M. Carrick, Thomas Morten, Edward Lear, William Davis, W.P. -Boyce, J.W. Inchbold, and, by no means least, John Hancock, a young -sculptor who won an Art Union prize in 1848 with a bas-relief of -“Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem.” He was a friend and fellow-worker with -Woolner, and fell so far (with Rossetti) under the fascination of the -Dante legends as to accomplish a very fine statue of “Beatrice” in or -about 1852. One other artist of the first rank in his generation remains -to be named,—Frederick Shields, an intimate and warmly-loved friend of -Rossetti, cherished by him in close and unbroken companionship even to -the hour of death; and in point of critical estimate pronounced by him -to be one of the greatest of living draughtsmen, taking rank with Sir -Frederick Leighton, Sir Noel Paton, and Mr. Sandys. - -Such were a few of the personalities that gathered between 1848 and 1858 -around the three prime movers in the Pre-Raphaelite revolt. To claim -them as merely, or chiefly, satellites drawn into the orbit of genius, -or as forming a distinct and coherent school, would be both foolish and -unjust. To attempt an estimate of their relative merit independent of, -or in proportion to, the artistic work of the Brotherhood, would be no -less invidious than unprofitable. The glory of Pre-Raphaelitism was that -it gave the utmost play to individual methods, and even idiosyncrasies,— -nay, that its very first principle was “each for himself”—painting his -own impressions, his own ideals—and no imitation of one artist by -another. Its primary insistence lay on the watchword of all -Protestantism—the authority of the individual conscience as against that -of a class or a system, and the immediate access for every soul to the -source of its highest inspiration. Therefore the “diversities of gifts” -which flourished and increased under the sway of the Pre-Raphaelite -spirit were the best evidence of that spirit’s quickening power. “A man -will always emphasize,” says Mr. P.G. Hamerton, writing on the ultimate -effects of the movement, “those truths about art which most strongly -recommend themselves to his own peculiar personal temperament. This -comes from the vastness of art and the variety of human organizations. -For art is so immense a study that no one man ever knew the whole truth -about it.” In other words, all the Pre-Raphaelite painters in any sense -worthy of the name are intensely individual in quality, and cannot be -classed, arranged, or compared together in the order of a system or a -school. Each artist must make his original and distinctive contribution -to the sum-total of artistic truth; must paint the single aspect, or the -most familiar aspect, of the life around him which presents itself to -his mind. The more honest he is, and the more true to his own -observations and convictions, the more inevitably will he see the world -through his own spectacles—well for his superficial happiness, at all -events, if they be rose-coloured, and not of a more sombre hue. “We -all,” says another art-critic,[5] “have a sense of some particular -colour, and because we can paint this colour best we do so at all times -and in all places. This may be unconscious on our part—this predilection -for a particular colour; but we all unconsciously blab the fact to -others; we talk in our dream of art, and tell all our secrets. Old David -Cox, when out sketching with his pupils, would go behind them while at -work and say to one, ‘Ah, you see green;’ to another, ‘You see purple,’ -‘You see red,’ ‘You see yellow.’ So it is with the colour vision of many -who are called Masters. We can identify almost any landscape of our more -prominent painters by their special idiosyncrasy of colouring, such as -Cuyp with his evening yellows, Linnell with his autumnal browns, or -Danby with his sanguinary sunsets. These colours, which are exceptional -with external nature, are the rule with them. Not only is this so with -regard to colour, but, more or less, we put ourselves, form and feature, -into our work, and paint our own character, physical as well as mental, -in all we do. Raphael, on being asked where he obtained the type of his -Madonna, replied, ‘out of his own head,’ which really meant that he had -unconsciously painted his own fair features: and this ideal was what he -eternally repeated. So was it with Michaelangelo, Leonardo, Murillo, -Rubens, Vandyke—they all portrayed themselves recognizably. There is a -picture of Jesus and the twelve Apostles in which the whole thirteen -faces are all alike, and every one an identifiable copy of the painter’s -own. Of course where the face and form are noble we have the less to -object to.” - -This indeed is the crux of the whole matter. As the man is, so will his -work be. To portray one’s very self—and first to have such a self as can -dignify the portrayal; to paint faithfully what one sees—and first to -see the true and the beautiful in the familiar and the commonplace; to -depict the world in which one lives—living in a world apart, noble and -fair, full of opportunities, if also of mysteries, with bright horizons, -however low the sun; and yet to be ever conscious of wider worlds than -the imagination can compass though the heart may yearn over them like -the heart of him who said _Homo sum; nihil humana mihi alienum puto_: -this is fine art; this is “the vision and the faculty divine.” “Produce -great Persons!” cries Browning,—“the rest follows.” Therefore it is safe -for those who in any real sense know Rossetti to prophesy, with Mr. -Harry Quilter, that “the day will surely come when it will be seen that -the essence of what is now known as Pre-Raphaelitism was not the -influence of a school or a principle, but simply the influence of one -man, and that man Dante Gabriel Rossetti.” Personal ascendency, says -Emerson, is the only force much worth reckoning with. And if that -ascendency, over many who never saw Rossetti on earth, has become an -intimate and precious inspiration, a motive-impulse abidingly sacred and -high, what must it have been to those who knew him in the flesh? - -Mr. W.M. Rossetti thus succinctly sums up the immediate issue of the -movement which his brother inspired:—“As it turned out, the early phases -of the movement did not repeat themselves on a more extended scale. -Partly, no doubt, through the modification of style of the most popular -Pre-Raphaelite, Mr. Millais, and partly through the influx of new -determining conditions, especially the effect of foreign schools and of -Mr. Leighton’s style (this was written in 1865), Pre-Raphaelitism -flagged in its influence towards the production of what are -distinctively termed Pre-Raphaelite pictures just at the time when it -had virtually won the day. But the movement had broken up the pre- -existing state of things, and the principles and practices which it -introduced took strong root, and germinated in forms not altogether -expected. Pre-Raphaelitism aimed at suppressing such styles of painting -as were exemplified by Messrs. Elmore, Goodall, and Stone at the time of -its starting; _and it did suppress them_.”[6] - -The relation of Pre-Raphaelitism to the “foreign schools” here referred -to is as much a matter of historical controversy as the relation of -Rossetti to Italy is of biographical criticism; nor is it easy to -determine how far the Pre-Raphaelite movement in England was the effect -or the cause of similar waves of experiment in France and Germany, and -how far all such impulses were but the symptoms of a great social and -ethical development in European life. But while the Barbizon School must -be seriously recognized as working side by side with the Pre-Raphaelites -upon kindred ideals, and even surpassing them at some points in a -certain largeness of outlook on humanitarian themes, the influence of -Cornelius and Overbeck in Germany, with the very crude and sickly -mediævalism which they affected, has no doubt been greatly overrated, -and may be dismissed as having very little to do with the main current -of the romantic revival. In France, Corot and Millet, Daubigny and -Rousseau, had taken their stand against the old Heroic School in art, -just as Théophile Gautier and Victor Hugo had taken it against the -Academies of literature. In England, it was the task of Rossetti and his -comrades “to force,” as it has been aptly expressed, “an artificial art -backed upon nature’s reality; and they did it amid neglect, -misunderstanding, and even coarse vituperation.” - ------ - -Footnote 5: - - Gerald Massey: “Lectures on Pre-Raphaelitism,” 1858. - -Footnote 6: - - W.M. Rossetti: “Fine Art; Chiefly Contemporary.” - - - - - CHAPTER V. - LATER DEVELOPMENTS OF THE MOVEMENT. - -The Pre-Raphaelites as Book-Illustrators—Moxon’s “Tennyson”—The “Oxford - and Cambridge Magazine”—The Oxford Frescoes—Oxford Patrons of - Millais and Hunt—Departure of Hunt for Palestine—The Pictures of - Madox Brown—Further Developments of Rossetti’s Painting—Marriage and - Bereavement—“Beata Beatrix”—Replicas—Life at Chelsea—Later Models— - Designs for Stained Glass—Visit to Penkill—“Dante’s Dream”— - Publication and Reception of the “Poems”—Paintings of Rossetti’s - Last Decade—Death at Birchington. - - -The first and most fruitful decade of Pre-Raphaelitism in painting and -poetry saw also the excursion of several of its leaders into the realm -of book-illustration. In 1855 Rossetti, Millais, and Arthur Hughes -combined to make a series of drawings for the second edition of a little -volume of verse entitled “Day and Night Songs,” by William Allingham, a -young poet well known to the Brotherhood since 1849. The efforts were -not of an ambitious character. The weird little group of fairies dancing -in the moonlight, by Arthur Hughes, reflected vividly the influence of -Blake. Rossetti’s “Maids of Elfinmere” were of his most angelic-mediæval -type, ascetically beautiful, and yet, if the phrase may be permitted, -with a certain sensuous severity of look, a delicate and half-mystic -passion, as of pure spirits newly wakened to the tenderness of the -flesh. - -A more important experiment in the same direction was made in 1857, when -Rossetti, Millais, and Holman Hunt appeared among the illustrators of -Moxon’s edition of “Tennyson.” Intimately charmed as they had all been -with the “Idylls of the King,” and with such entirely “Pre-Raphaelite” -poetry as “The Lady of Shalott,” the draughtsmen could hardly have found -a more congenial sphere for design. The volume affords one of the most -interesting records of the transitional work of the three painters. -Woolner’s fine medallion of the young laureate formed the frontispiece. -Then followed Millais’s “Mariana”—a composition wholly distinct from, -and far inferior to, his “Mariana in the Moated Grange,” which had been -shown in the Academy of 1851. The face of this Mariana is hidden in her -hands as she turns with bowed head from the window, and from the sunset -that mocks her grief with its imperturbable glory heedless and afar. -Much less conventional in spirit is the passionate, strained figure of -Rossetti’s “Mariana in the South,” crouching on her unrestful bed, and -kissing the feet of the crucifix above her as she draws from her bosom -the “old letters breathing of her worth.” - -In the design for “The Lady of Shalott” Holman Hunt exhibits traces—very -unusual for him—of the influence of Rossetti upon his own work. For -pathetic dignity and sensuous grace, the entangled lady, girt about with -the web of dreams, might well stand among Rossetti’s children, and not -be detected as of other birth. Rossetti’s own “Lady of Shalott” is much -less fair a type, and belongs to the earliest and most archaic manner of -his Arthurian period. Much more characteristic of the painter’s -individuality is Holman Hunt’s “Oriana,” a grave, strong woman like his -later Madonnas, whose mien belies the conventional sex-theory which -ascribes to man alone the “wisdom-principle,” and assigns to womanhood -the principle of “love.” - -Rossetti, again, seems to have been largely influenced by Madox Brown in -his illustration to “The Palace of Art,” save for the highly -characteristic drawing of the girl at the organ, whose pose is almost -identical with that of the dead Beatrice in “Dante’s Dream,” of a much -later date. “Sir Galahad” is, however, entirely original in manner, and -represents the best level of Rossetti’s Arthurian designs. It shows the -knight halting, weary but not dispirited, at a wayside shrine, and -bending with worn and yet resolute face over the holy water that awaits -the pilgrim-worshippers. His horse, bearing the white banner marked with -the red cross of sacred chivalry, stands at the gate, and a group of -nuns are seen within, ringing the chapel bell. - -The facile simplicity and grace of Millais, who was more accustomed to -the task of book-illustration than his collaborateurs, found favourable -scope in “Edward Grey” and “The Day-dream,” in which the figure of the -half-awakened girl in the Sleeping Palace is drawn with exquisitely -tender charm. - -The edition, on the whole, probably tended to increase the reputation of -the Pre-Raphaelites as draughtsmen, and to dispel some hard-dying -illusions as to their distinguishing qualities in design, though its -independent merits were not of exceptional mark. - -Only once again does Rossetti appear in the field of book illustration. -In 1862 he executed two designs for the first volume of poems published -by his sister, Miss Christina Rossetti, under the title of “Goblin -Market.” These drawings (“Buy from us with a golden curl” and “Golden -head by Golden head”) were followed in 1866 by two more of a similar -character (“The long hours go and come and go,” and “You should have -wept her yesterday”), to illustrate the second volume of poetry from the -same pen, entitled, “The Prince’s Progress.” - -But the fame of the Pre-Raphaelites as poets was already enhanced, -within an increasing circle of appreciators, by the publication, in -1856, of a journal which may, to some extent, be regarded as a successor -to the “The Germ.” “The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine,” edited by Mr. -Godfrey Lushington, had the better fortune to survive for a year, in -monthly numbers; though all its contents were anonymous, and its issue -involved no less labour and anxiety on the part of its sponsors, if not -so much pecuniary onus as in the case of the more luxuriously printed -and illustrated “Germ.” The new publication contained several of -Rossetti’s finest poems, such as “The Staff and Scrip,” and “Nineveh,” -and a series of mediæval romances and poems by two young artists -destined henceforth to be intimately associated with the Pre-Raphaelite -movement, and to exert important influence on its later developments— -William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones. Both were Oxford men, and had -been close friends at Exeter College, whence in 1856 came Burne-Jones to -London with the express desire of meeting and knowing Dante Rossetti, -his senior by five years; he having been born in Birmingham on the 28th -of August, 1833, and educated at King Edward’s School in that city, -proceeding to Oxford in 1853. - -It was at the Working Men’s College in Great Ormond Street that Burne- -Jones first saw Rossetti, and, through the introduction of Mr. Vernon -Lushington, entered upon the friendship which was to save him (as his -friend William Morris was similarly saved) from adopting, as had been -intended, the Church as his profession, and thus depriving, the world of -a service no less religious in the highest sense, and no less potent a -factor in the ethical awakening of to-day. - -The Working Men’s College, now rich in annals of some of the most -significant intellectual movements of the mid-century, was at that time -a centre of enthusiastic work in art and literature. Rossetti and his -friends took a considerable share in the lecturing and class-teaching of -which Charles Kingsley and F.D. Maurice were the popular and -indefatigable leaders. Hither also came Ruskin, of whom Rossetti records -with loyal admiration how one night, being asked in an emergency to -address the drawing-class, he made, without any preparation, “the finest -speech I ever heard.” - -Rossetti’s growing intimacy with Oxford collegians, and the ties of -sympathy already formed in Oxford round the Pre-Raphaelite painters by -the _clientèle_ of Millais and Hunt, now led him into an enterprise -which has been the subject of much Philistine mirth, and of some -laboured apologetics on the part of the too-serious historian. There is -no doubt that Rossetti and his collaborateurs made quite as merry as any -of their critics over the ludicrous failure of their _début_ as fresco- -painters in 1857. But it was very natural that Rossetti, with his early -enthusiasm for the fresco style yet awaiting an outlet, should have -seized eagerly at the chance of trying his ’prentice hand on so -engagingly favourable an area as the new hall of the Oxford Union -Debating Society. Visiting the city in company with William Morris -during the summer months, Rossetti was shown over the freshly completed -building by his friend Mr. Woodward; and observing the blank spaces of -the gallery window-bays, impulsively offered to paint on them a series -of the “Morte D’Arthur” subjects which had so much engrossed his fancy -during the past three years. The suggestion was readily agreed to, and -Rossetti began to collect recruits for the campaign, which he perceived -would afford ample scope for other labour than his own. Accordingly, at -the commencement of the long vacation, a company of six young -enthusiasts, embarrassingly ignorant of the first technical elements of -mural painting, but unabashed by any such details in the path of -success, fell confidently upon their fascinating task. The party -consisted of Rossetti, Burne-Jones, William Morris, Arthur Hughes, Val -Prinsep, Spencer Stanhope, Alexander Monro, and J. Hungerford Pollen, -then Proctor at the University, who had already won some distinction by -his painting of the beautiful roof in Merton College Chapel. The roof of -the Debating Hall was now successfully painted, in a grotesque design, -by William Morris, who also undertook one of the window-bays, and -proposed as his subject “Sir Palomides’ Jealousy of Sir Tristram and -Iseult.” Alexander Monro, the sculptor of the party, executed the stone -shield over the porch. Burne-Jones selected for his fresco “Nimuë brings -Sir Peleus to Ettarde after their Quarrel;” Arthur Hughes proposed -“Arthur Conveyed by the Weeping Queens to Avalon after his Death;” Val -Prinsep, “Merlin Lured into the Pit by the Lady of the Lake,” and J. -Hungerford Pollen, “King Arthur Receiving the Sword Excalibur from the -Lady of the Lake.” Rossetti’s subjects were “Sir Galahad Receiving the -Sangrael” and “Sir Launcelot before the Shrine of the Sangrael.” The -knight, in this last design, has just attained the sacred goal of his -pilgrimage, and in his weariness has sunk down in sleep upon the -threshold; but his sleep, even in that hour, is haunted by the face of -Guinevere. So powerful was this composition in romantic force and -imaginative fervour, especially in the haunting, passionate face of the -Queen, as to make the speedy obliteration of this and its companion -frescoes the more deplorable, in spite of the obvious crudities and -incompetencies that blemish the whole series of designs. Obliterated -they became, however, and hopelessly beyond restoration, within a very -short time of their commencement;—finished they never were. Incredible -as it seems, in these days of superior wisdom in the Young Person anent -matters of Art, these brilliant young painters of 1857—three at least of -them now in the first rank of fame in their several spheres—had not even -attempted to prepare the raw brick surface for the reception of their -pigments, but had cast their ordinary oil-colours direct upon the -inhospitable wall. Time and the atmosphere made short work of such -artless challenges of decay; and before any of the frescoes had attained -completion the ardent little band were obliged to confess themselves -defeated, and to retire somewhat ignominiously from the field. The -enterprise had its pathetic, its humorous, and its entirely delightful -side. The financial arrangement with the Oxford Union Council was that -they should defray all necessary expenses incurred by the artists; and -of this advantage the young Bohemians appear to have availed themselves -to the full. Anecdotes abound to tell of the hilarious but very harmless -festivities which mitigated the discouragements of their task. A -contemporary undergraduate well recalls the mirth and chatter which he -heard day by day as he sat in the adjacent library. Such a group of -congenial spirits could not fail to enjoy the conditions of their -companionship as much as the audacity of their task. They were favoured, -further, with a new acquaintanceship of a very welcome kind; for it was -here that another young poet, Algernon Charles Swinburne, was now -introduced, as an undergraduate at the university, to the artists at -their work, and added an important link to the chain of memorable -friendships woven in these early years among the galaxy of genius which -has illumined the England of to-day. It was in Oxford also, at the -theatre one evening, that Rossetti saw, and succeeded in getting -introduced to, the beautiful lady who afterwards became William Morris’s -wife, and Rossetti’s most cherished friend through all his troubles. She -was the model for his “Day-dream” and several others of the finest of -his maturer works. - -The hapless frescoes are now hardly recognizable upon the Oxford walls, -but their dim ghosts linger, like the kindly witnesses of days fruitful, -at least, in loves and friendships of sacred import on the lives of the -young sojourners in that “home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and -unpopular names, and impossible loyalties,” as Matthew Arnold called it. - -Moreover, it was at Oxford that the Pre-Raphaelite movement, five or six -years earlier, had found some of its first and most generous patrons; -such as Mr. James Wyatt, the well-known picture-dealer, who was among -Millais’s readiest buyers, but died in 1853, and Mr. Thomas Combe, the -University printer, who, through Millais’s influence, purchased Holman -Hunt’s youthful and little-known picture, “Christian Priests Escaping -from Druid Persecution,” in 1850. About three years later, Holman Hunt -was on a visit to Mr. and Mrs. Combe while his greater work, “The Light -of the World,” was in process; and at their house he became acquainted -with the young curate of St. Paul’s, Oxford; Venables by name. He was a -man saintly in face and character; afterwards Bishop of the Bahamas, and -long since dead. Whether he actually gave sittings to Hunt, or was -avowedly the model for the Christ of the picture, does not appear, but -those who knew Venables at the time insist upon the absolute -faithfulness of the portraiture. This face it was which certain critics, -unable to dissociate their conception of the Saviour from the -conventional Raphaelesque type, condemned instantly as “the face of a -Judas.” The picture was purchased by Mr. Combe, and subsequently -presented by his widow to Keble College, Oxford, where it hangs to-day. -Of the difficulties which attended the painting, and of the -extraordinary labour bestowed upon it as it slowly grew beneath his hand -in the little studio then at Chelsea, Mr. Hunt has given us his own -significant record,—how, night after night, when the moon was in a -favourable quarter, he would so dispose his curtains and draperies, -easels and lamps, as to yield him the peculiar light for which he was -striving, and at the same time to afford for curious observers an -endless speculation as to the mysterious proceedings of the eccentric -young artist within. “The Light of the World” is now perhaps the most -familiar, to English eyes, of any Pre-Raphaelite pictures, unless we -except the less esoteric “Hugenot” of Millais. - -The “Hugenot,” indeed, would undoubtedly be taken by general estimate to -point the high-water mark of Millais’s fame and genius, in spite of the -splendour of the “ninth wave”—if one may push the metaphor so far—which -issued ten years later in “The Eve of St. Agnes” and “The Enemy Sowing -Tares.” The “Hugenot” appeared with “Ophelia” in 1852; Hunt’s “Light of -the World” in 1854. And the “Hugenot” it was that first took -unmistakable hold upon the public taste, and created a higher taste than -it appealed to, carrying the emotion awakened with it on to higher -planes than had yet been reached in English criticism. “The Order of -Release,” in the following year, consummated the triumph of the young -painter, and was enhanced in fame by Kingsley’s allusion to it in “Two -Years Ago.” “The Proscribed Royalist” and the “Portrait of Ruskin” may -be regarded as the last products of Millais’s rigidly Pre-Raphaelite -period, which terminated, with Rossetti’s, about 1853. “The Rescue” and -“The Random Shot,” or “L’Enfant du Regiment,” in 1855, “Sir Isumbras at -the Ford: A Dream of the Past,” or “Knight Crossing a Ford,” in 1857, -and “The Vale of Rest,” in 1858, are purely transitional works, while, -with the notable exception of the two later masterpieces specified -above, “The Black Brunswicker” of 1860, may be said to mark the final -merging of the Pre-Raphaelite heretic into the popular Royal -Academician. His formal election as R.A. took place in 1863. He was -made, in 1883, a member of the Institute of France, and was, in 1885, -the first English artist to be offered and to accept a baronetcy of the -United Kingdom. He has also become a member of the Academies of -Edinburgh, Antwerp, Rome and Madrid, and has been honoured at Oxford -with the complimentary degree of D.C.L. His marriage in early life with -Miss Euphemia Chalmers Gray was anticipated in one of the most pleasing -of his female portraits in 1853. - -Meanwhile the companion of his student days had entered upon a path of -more obscure and arduous toil, in the pursuit of an ideal too exalted to -endure compromise with any standards of the merely picturesque, or to -lend itself readily to fluent and attractive expression. The work of -Holman Hunt, among all the Pre-Raphaelite painters, has remained the -most consistent and exclusive in its aims and methods, and the least -affected by surrounding influences, either from his comrades or from the -critical world. His artistic development has been the most faithful to -its origins, and has presented the most unbroken continuity of thought -and sentiment in its progress from the first “note of resistance and -defiance” to the larger harmony of maturer years. The boundaries of his -transition-period are more difficult to define than in the case of -Millais and Rossetti; but, at the same time, the pictures that issued -from his studio while Rossetti was dabbling in experimental water- -colours, and Millais compromising brilliantly between original genius -and the sweet laxities of fame, were of a passion and mastery which he -never exceeded. Before the completion of “The Light of the World,” in -1854, Hunt had already painted “The Awakening Conscience” (1853), -“Claudio and Isabella” (1851), “The Hireling Shepherd” (1852), and “The -Strayed Sheep,” called also “Our English Coasts” (1853). He now departed -to commence those long, solitary, and most fruitful sojourns in -Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and less frequented parts of Palestine, which gave -us, at the cost of years of intense and continuous labour, such great -imaginative creations as “The Scapegoat” in 1855, “Christ in the Temple” -in 1860, “The Shadow of Death” in 1874, and “The Triumph of the -Innocents” in 1885. “The Shadow of Death” was purchased for £10,500; a -price unparalleled for the work of any other living painter. The picture -now hangs in the Manchester Corporation Gallery. Seven years were spent -over “The Triumph of the Innocents,” pronounced by Ruskin to be “the -greatest religious picture of the age.” The final version, completed in -1885, has recently been acquired by the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, -where it completes, with Millais’s “Lorenzo and Isabella” and Rossetti’s -“Dante’s Dream,” a noble trio of the best Pre-Raphaelite type. -Reverting, as he did but once, to more purely romantic subjects, and to -that haunting theme of Keats which first inspired the young Brotherhood, -Mr. Holman Hunt produced in 1867 the finest of his work in that -direction, in the brilliant “Isabella and the Pot of Basil,” which was -the outcome of a visit to Florence in that year. His only important -picture of later years has been the “May Morning on Magdalen Tower,” a -fascinating reminiscence of Oxford life, exhibited in 1889. - -Even more obscure and remote from the general routine of the modern -studio, more independent of criticism or of patronage, was the earnest -and thoughtful work of Madox Brown. In his case the early discipline of -art study, and the isolation of unconventional ideals, had been -courageously survived before he knew Rossetti, and his path already -chosen on the heights of original thought. “He was,” says Mr. W.M. -Rossetti, “distinctly an intellectual painter; intellectual on the side -chiefly of human character. The predominant quality in all his works is -a vigorous thinking out of the subject, especially as a matter of -character, and of dramatic incident and expression thus resulting. This -is the sort of intellect peculiarly demanded by pictorial art.” - -It is noticeable also that the two senior members, if they may be so -claimed, of the Pre-Raphaelite circle, though not of the actual -Brotherhood—Ford Madox Brown and George Frederick Watts—were the only -painters who brought into the movement any direct training from the -continental schools. The latter, one year older than Madox Brown, was -born in London in 1820, and succeeded in getting a picture into the -Royal Academy as early as 1837. The prize of £300 gained in 1843 in the -Westminster Hall Competitions enabled him to spend three years in Italy, -after which, on his return, he won a prize of £500 in the same contest, -with two more colossal frescoes of a similar kind. - -Madox Brown, meanwhile, was entering upon the more uncompromising phase -of reform. It was during his studies in Rome and Paris, when the Gothic -traditions of Belgium had been strongly tempered by the Latin heritage -of the south, that the Pre-Raphaelite idea began to shape itself in his -mind, and to develop in him an original art which should create its own -conditions and methods, yield a rich harvest of artistic if not of -professional success, and exercise an immense power for good over the -movement which his own single-handed battle with convention largely -stimulated and inspired. - -“Wicliff Reading his Translation of the Bible to John of Gaunt” was -afterwards acknowledged by Madox Brown as his first distinctly Pre- -Raphaelite picture; begun in 1845, and shortly followed by “Pretty Baa- -Lambs”—the only other work which the artist claimed as being painted -implicitly in the early Italian style. The latter was subjected to much -derisive criticism in the press. Yet the later work of this -unquestionably great painter, maintained as it was on his own rigidly -independent lines, and never merging into the fervid neo-Romanticism of -Rossetti, Millais, and Hunt, may justly be accepted, like theirs at its -best, as a consistent and superb development, in a modern atmosphere and -in the face of modern problems, of the principles followed by the -Italian Pre-Raphaelites, and which _as principles_ are adaptible in -infinite variety to the fresh needs and new perplexities of successive -generations of men. - -In 1849 the work of Madox Brown appeared for the first time beside that -of Rossetti. “Cordelia’s Portion,” a highly imaginative and nobly -dramatic composition, was hung in the Free Exhibition at Hyde Park -Corner, in company with Rossetti’s “Girlhood of Mary Virgin.” His next -important picture, “Chaucer at the Court of Edward III.,” occupied the -painter for several years, and was produced at the Royal Academy of -1851—the memorable season of Hunt’s “Valentine and Sylvia,” and -Millais’s “Woodman’s Daughter.” The “Chaucer,” now in Australia, -received the Liverpool Academy’s annual prize of £50 in 1852, and was -selected by Government for the Paris Exhibition Loan Collection of -English paintings in 1855. - -The departure of his young friend Woolner for Australia in 1854 -suggested to Madox Brown the subject of his most popular and in some -respects his most successful picture, “The Last of England,” finished in -1855, and now exhibited in the Art Gallery of the Corporation of -Birmingham. It was his visit to Gravesend, to bid farewell to Woolner as -he embarked for the Antipodes, at the time when the emigration movement -was at its height, that inspired the elder painter with that homely -idyll of emigrant life—that masterpiece in the dramatic and emotional -presentment of modern and familiar romance. In 1857 he painted his great -symbolic picture “Work,” which has been pronounced “the finest Pre- -Raphaelite picture in the world;” a verdict not without justification, -but bordering on those facile abstractions of criticism wherein the -sense of comparative excellence is apt to lose itself in the confusion -of diverse methods in art. The picture now hangs with the masterpieces -of Rossetti, Millais, and Holman Hunt, in the Walker Art Gallery at -Liverpool. Among the many friends of that period who gave sittings to -the artist for the principal figures were Frederick Denison Maurice and -Thomas Carlyle. - -Of the achievements of Madox Brown in the more obviously romantic and -naturalistic fields, perhaps the best known is the intensely passionate -and brilliant “Romeo and Juliet” parting at daybreak in the loggia to -Juliet’s chamber. In the same category, though of various range and -style, may be briefly mentioned “Waiting” (1855), a fine study of -firelight and lamplight, which appeared in the Russell Place Pre- -Raphaelite Exhibition of 1856, “The Death of Sir Tristram,” “King René’s -Honeymoon,” the much earlier “Parisina and Manfred on Jungfrau,” and -“The Dream of Sardanapalus,” a work of recent years. The romantic -treatment of historical subjects is represented by the cartoons before -mentioned, executed prior to 1848, and by such later compositions as -“Cromwell Dictating to his Secretaries,” “Milton and Marvel,” and -“Cromwell on his farm at St. Ives,” completed in 1873. Of his religious -pictures perhaps the most familiar is the austerely beautiful -“Entombment;” but it is not easy to excuse the discreditable oblivion -permitted in this country to such paintings as “Jesus Washes Peter’s -Feet,” “The Transfiguration,” “Our Lady of Good Children,” or “Elijah -and the Widow’s Son;”—oblivion only too explicable by a single trait of -national character: that the average Briton will accept any innovation -of taste or doctrine that will allow him to take his pleasure with the -least amount of intellectual disturbance, but he will never forgive the -artist who calls upon him to _think_. Happily some worthier, though very -far from adequate, recognition has been accorded to the almost colossal -task of the painter’s later years—the great series of historical -frescoes on the walls of the Town Hall, Manchester, commencing with the -building of Manchester by the Romans, and bringing the history of the -city pictorially down to the present day. Outliving many younger leaders -of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, Madox Brown died on the 6th of October, -1893. - -The artistic development of Madox Brown does not, then, offer any abrupt -or marked transition from the first crude workings to the perfected -application of the Pre-Raphaelite idea. This he pursued steadfastly, and -with an unhasting diligence and quiet independence of spirit which -indicates his kinship of temperament to Holman Hunt rather than to his -impulsive and volatile pupil Rossetti, or to the impressionable Millais -of early days. The complete outward divergence between the art of Madox -Brown and that of Rossetti after, let us say, the “Triptych” for -Llandaff Cathedral, painted by the latter in 1859–1860, illustrates not -only the consistent progress of the former in his own distinctive line, -but also the extraordinary fertility and cumulative splendour of -Rossetti’s genius, which could create for itself during the next fifteen -years so much more original and versatile a habit wherewith to clothe -the noble and exquisite visions that thronged his imagination, each with -the urgency of “a presence that is not to be put by.” - - -[Illustration: - - “PANDORA.” - - From the chalk. - - _By permission of Mr. Theodore Watts._ -] - - -For the last twenty years of Rossetti’s artistic life he was known, and -should be judged, supremely as a colourist; and from 1862 to 1874 his -technical power reached its highest level. After completing in oils the -“Triptych” for the Llandaff altar-piece, “The Infant Christ Adored by a -Shepherd and a King,” Rossetti began to pursue more carefully, and with -increasing success both from the æsthetic and the professional point of -view, the system of half-length or three-quarter length female figure- -studies, chiefly symbolic in motive, which he had already attempted -brilliantly in the “Bocca Baciata” (“The Kissed Mouth”) of 1859, and -which afterwards yielded such imaginative and technical triumphs as -“Beata Beatrix” (1863), “The Blue Bower,” one of the most brilliant and -sensuous of his paintings (1864); “Lady Lilith,” the type of purely -physical loveliness, described in his sonnet “Body’s Beauty” (1864); “Il -Ramoscello” (“The Branchlet”), or “Bellebuona” (“Fair and Good”), a gem -of pearl-white colouring (1865); “Monna Vanna,” a superb study in white -and gold (1866); “Venus Verticordia,” personifying again the earthly -Pandemos, with the apple of temptation in her hand (1864–1877); “The -Beloved, or the Bride of the Canticles;” and “Sibylla Palmifera” -(“Beauty the Palm-giver”), both typifying intellectual and spiritual -beauty (1866–1873); “The Loving Cup” (1867); “Aurelia,” or “Fazio’s -Mistress” (Angiola of Verona, loved by Fazio degli Uberti, mentioned by -Dante), another somewhat sensuous model (1863–1873); “La Pia,” the -unhappy and captive wife of Nello della Pietra (from Dante’s -“Purgatorio”), seen in her prison overlooking the Maremma (1868–1881); -“Mariana,” from Shakespeare’s “Measure for Measure” (1869–1871); -“Pandora opening her fatal casket” (1869–1875); “Proserpine,” empress of -Hades, enchained to the nether world (1872); and “La Ghirlandata”—“The -Garland Girl”—(1873). Into these splendid and highly finished studies of -the mystic beauty of womanhood, Rossetti poured the full soul of his -gospel of romantic love—the love of absolute Beauty absolutely -worshipped to the utmost reaches of a consecrated sense,—“Soul’s Beauty” -and “Body’s Beauty” now analyzed and set in contrast each with each, now -reconciled and made at one in the last harmony of perfect life. And in -these great creations—revelations rather, and perceptions of the inmost -verities of things, Rossetti attains the consummation of imaginative -art—the crowning of romanticism with the purged inheritance of the -classic ideal. It has been claimed that romance treats of characters -rather than types; prefers, as we have said, the particular to the -universal; and that Rossetti’s women are but splendid models, lovely -sitters brought by a happy chance into his path, and used by him as the -illustrations of that individual beauty which appealed most strongly to -his taste. But in these rich harvests of his technical maturity the very -realism has discovered the ideal, and as in pure portraiture, the -sincere essence of classicism is regained. - -A peculiar pathos must for ever be associated with one of the first, -and, in the judgment of many, the most beautiful, of these half-length -oils, the exquisite “Beata Beatrix,” now in the National Gallery. It is -the supreme pictorial record of that central tragedy of Rossetti’s life, -even more intimately revealed to us in his verse, which set him at the -side of Dante among mourning poets. On the 23rd of May, 1860, Rossetti -married, at Hastings, the beautiful and gifted woman of whom his -courtship had lasted nearly ten years. The wedding had been delayed -again and again through the uncertain health of Miss Siddal and the -precarious circumstances of the brilliant but wayward young painter’s -life. It was now accomplished with every augury of long-anticipated joy. -The honeymoon was spent in a brief tour through Belgium, concluding with -a few days in Paris, where Rossetti made his little impromptu sketch—so -entirely out of his wonted trend of themes—“Dr. Johnson and the -Methodist Ladies at the Mitre;” a pen-and-ink drawing which he -afterwards repeated in water-colours. - -Thence to the old rooms in Chatham Place, Blackfriars, partially rebuilt -and redecorated for the happy event, Rossetti brought home his bride. -The face of the long-desired wife now haunts the painter’s easel more -continually than before, and recurs with ever-varying charm in nearly -all his sketches and the very few finished pictures of the next two -years. To this period belong “Lucretia Borgia” (entirely distinct from -the “Borgia” of 1851); “The Heart of the Night” (from Tennyson’s -“Mariana in the South”); the beautiful “Regina Cordium”—“Queen of -Hearts” (a title also used for other portraits at different dates); -“Bethlehem Gate,” and the best of several subjects dealing with the -legend of “St. George and the Princess Sabra,” together with “Monna -Pomona” and “The Rose Garden” of 1864, “Sir Tristram and Iseult Drinking -the Love Potion” (1867), “Washing Hands” (1865), and many replicas of -the Dante pictures of the previous decade. And in the numerous rough and -half-finished portrait sketches, nameless but unmistakable, of -Rossetti’s “Queen of Hearts” during those two brief years, the shadow of -the coming bereavement can be traced in the gradually sharpened -features, the more and more fragile hands, the look of increasing pallor -and weariness in the earnest face which rests, in one of the latest -drawings, on the pillow all too suggestive of its habitual place. On the -2nd of May, 1861, Mrs. Rossetti gave birth to a still-born son. From the -consequent illness she rallied considerably during the autumn of that -year, and the immediate cause of her death in February, 1862, was, -unhappily, an overdose of laudanum, self-administered after a day of -fatigue, during the brief absence of her husband from the house. Of the -circumstances of the fatal mischance, in so far as they can ever be -gleaned from that calamitous hour, of the utterly unexpected shock -awaiting Rossetti’s return, and of the grief-stricken apparition which -aroused the household of Mr. Madox Brown on Highgate Hill at dead of -night with incoherent news of the fatality, enough has already been -written by those whose sad privilege it was to share in some measure -with the overwhelmed sufferer the long pain of that supreme bereavement. -The pathetic incident that added to the sadness of the burial, when the -young widower hastily gathered up all his poetic manuscripts of the past -ten years and laid them beside the fair face in the coffin, a symbol of -that best part of himself which he felt must go also to that untimely -grave, has become an oft-told tale; and may now be laid in the reverent -silence of affection and regret. Nor can the agony and prostration of -the succeeding months be fitly recorded save in his own chronicles of -song—the great elegiac “Confessio Amantis” of the “House of Life” -sonnets. - -Recruiting at last in slow degrees his powers upon brush and canvas, he -dedicated their first-fruits to the painting of that most beautiful and -faithful memorial of the beloved dead—“Beata Beatrix,” the Blessed -Beatrice—Dante’s Beatrice; for the immortal story loved in youth had now -redoubled its hold upon his heart. The picture was commissioned by Lord -Mount Temple, who was from this time one of Rossetti’s most generous -patrons and intimate friends. It was begun at Mr. Madox Brown’s house, -“The Hermitage,” on Highgate Hill, but finished at Stobhall, in -Scotland, whither Mr. Brown and an equally devoted friend, Dr. John -Marshall, had taken the painter in the hope of restoring his now -shattered health and assuaging the sorrow that had occasioned its -collapse. Rossetti afterwards said of the “Beata Beatrix” that no -picture had ever cost him so much to paint, but that in no other task -had he been conscious of so perfect a mastery of his instruments. - - - “BEATA BEATRIX.” - - _From the National Gallery._ - -[Illustration] - - -It should be remembered that of this picture, and indeed of several of -Rossetti’s finest and best-known works, certain indifferent replicas -exist which have been frequently mistaken for their originals. The -“Beata Beatrix” in the Birmingham Art Gallery was only half painted by -Rossetti, and finished by Madox Brown. Again in the case of “The Blessed -Damozel” of a much later date, the more familiar version is the inferior -one. There was also a smaller replica of “Dante’s Dream,” shown in -London at the Guildhall Loan Exhibition of 1892. Moreover, it was -Rossetti’s habit to execute most of his pictures in more than one -medium; thus many of his early pen-and-ink drawings were presently -reproduced in water-colour; the water-colour designs of 1852–1862 were -afterwards transferred to oils; and most of the important oil-paintings -of his maturity were duplicated in coloured chalk; some even passing -through the pencil, ink, and water-colour stages also. Not infrequently -it happened that the chalk version surpassed all the others, as, for -instance, in the grand “Pandora” of 1878–79, the most powerful of all -his drawings in that medium, and perhaps the greatest of his symbolic -figures. Very often, too, he would begin a picture on a very small -scale, and gradually enlarge it through successive stages to its final -size, as in the case of “Monna Rosa,” concerning which he writes on the -18th of June, 1867, to his patron, Mr. F.R. Leyland, one of the most -constant and sympathetic of his buyers and friends,—“The picture is much -advanced and in every way much altered, as I have again had it -considerably enlarged! To begin a fresco as a pocket-miniature seems to -be my rule in Art.” - -The domestic calamity of 1862 rendered a change of residence imperative -to the young widower, left desolate amid surroundings charged to the -utmost with poignant memories of the past. The old rooms in Chatham -Place became unbearable to Rossetti, full as they were of associations -of courtship as well as of married life. He sojourned for a time in -chambers in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and in the autumn of the same year he -moved to No. 16, Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, where he lived intermittently up -to the time of his death. It was a fine old house, well suited to be an -artist’s abode; and especially fortunate in a large garden, which became -a valuable resource to Rossetti in those sad days in store for him when -any emergence from the seclusion of home grew more and more distasteful -to his mind. - -By the end of October Rossetti seems to have been established in his new -dwelling, which thenceforth it was his pleasure to adorn with all the -quaint old curios he could lay his hands on. In the natural revulsion of -overwrought feeling, he threw himself upon decorative hobbies of many -kinds; developed a passion for blue china and antique pottery; -cultivated oriental textures and old oak; and haunted second-hand -furniture warehouses with the pertinacious enthusiasm of the devout -lover of a bargain. His shelves groaned under their picturesque load of -reliquary wares and studio-properties gathered from every age and clime. -Here, too, flourished a whole colony of curious animals, such as he -delighted to indulge with unbridled license in his domains,—to the -produce of countless anecdotes of their pranks, and of the embarrassment -of their victims. - -The house was shared for some time with three brother-poets,—Swinburne, -George Meredith, and W.M. Rossetti. The last-named was for a -considerable period a constant inmate; the others, less domesticated, -and of strong peculiarities (as is the way of genius) of habit and of -taste, presently departed, and their places knew them only as visitors -to the brilliant haunt of many other literary celebrities of the day. It -has been observed that the most intimate friends of Rossetti’s later -years were drawn from the ranks of literature rather than art,—a -circumstance which need not, however, be too closely paralleled with his -own frequent and increasingly successful reversions to the poetic field. -It must be remembered that the Pre-Raphaelite movement presents a -combination of the highest poetry with the highest pictorial and -decorative art incomparable with anything since the days of -Michaelangelo. It was natural that the poetic wing of Pre-Raphaelitism, -so to speak, should attach itself more and more firmly to the great -group of independent and specialistic poets of the age, of whom no -counterparts in original genius are to be found outside Pre-Raphaelitism -in modern English art. As early as 1855 we find Rossetti well acquainted -with Tennyson and in close friendship with Browning and Mrs. Browning; -afterwards with William Morris, several of whose poems were inspired by -Rossetti’s pictures; whose first volume, “The Defense of Guenevere,” was -dedicated “To my Friend Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Painter,” in 1858; and -whom Rossetti pronounced to be “the greatest literary identity of our -time;” then with Swinburne, whom he placed “highest in inexhaustible -splendour of execution,” and whose first-fruits in the tragic drama, -“The Queen Mother,” in 1860, were similarly inscribed; and later still -with Philip Bourke Marston, the blind poet; with George Meredith, Edmund -Gosse, John Payne, and many others of the choicest if not the most -popular qualities of song. From among the earliest of those memorable -friendships there is preserved to us a fascinating record of one autumn -evening, typical of many more, when the Rossettis and the Brownings -assembled together to listen to Tennyson as he read from manuscript his -latest poem;—it is the now familiar pen-and-ink sketch of “Tennyson -Reading Maud;” one of those marvellously vigorous and convincing thumb- -nail drawings which it was Rossetti’s wont to evolve, in his inimitable -method, from the initial focus of a single blot. - -In 1865 we find Rossetti writing to the “Athenæum” to correct a -statement which seems to have been made to the effect that he, known -chiefly as a water-colour painter, was now attempting a return to oils. -The artist protested that he was then, and always had been, an oil- -painter; and indeed, as we have seen, he was just now at his zenith of -power in that medium, though the contrary impression made on the public -is easily explicable in the light of his water-colour work of the -previous decade, and of the Russell Place Exhibition of 1856. - -By this time the irreparable loss of the one loved model of his early -prime was in some degree mitigated, from the artistic side, by the good -fortune which secured for him henceforward some of the most beautiful -sitters known to the artistic world of the day; women of high culture -and distinction, who added to their willing service in the studio the -grace of personal friendship and, in several instances, of patronage of -the most sympathetic kind. The austere and robust beauty of Miss -Herbert, the accomplished actress to whom he was introduced in 1859, -lay, as has been already said, entirely apart from his most cherished -ideals, and seldom appears in his symbolic paintings. But Mrs. Aldham -Heaton, a frequent and valued purchaser, and a lady of presence more -congruous with his favourite type, sat for what appears to have been a -second “Regina Cordium” in 1861; while in 1864 was commenced his long -and most artistically fruitful acquaintance with Miss Wilding, the -beautiful girl who served as the model for “Sybilla Palmifera,” “La -Ghirlandata,” “Dis Manibus,” “Veronica Veronese,” “The Sea-Spell,” and -several others of his most delicate and spiritual faces, including a -third “Regina Cordium” in 1866. Miss Spartali, afterwards Mrs. Stillman, -was also a favourite model for some years, and sat for “Fiametta” -(distinct from “A Vision of Fiametta” in 1878), and for the lady on the -right of the funeral couch in “Dante’s Dream,”—a work which remained on -hand throughout this period. - -Apart from the models of his principal pictures, Rossetti painted at -different times a goodly number of female portraits, commencing the list -of sitters with his mother and younger sister (the elder died at a -somewhat early age), and including Lady Mount Temple, who became, with -her husband, one of the few intimate friends of his seclusion in later -years, Miss Alice Boyd, the kindly hostess of some of his happiest -visits to Scotland, yet to be recorded, Mrs. William Morris and her -daughters—among them Miss May Morris, now Mrs. Halliday Sparling, who -also appears in the “Rosa Triplex” of 1869 and 1874, Mrs. Burne-Jones, -Mrs. Dalrymple, Mrs. H.T. Wells, Mrs. Leathart, Mrs. Lushington, Mrs. -Virtue Tebbs, Mrs. C. A. Howell, Mrs. Coronio, Miss Heaton, Miss -Williams, Miss Kingdon, the Misses Cassavetti, Miss Baring, and Mrs. -Banks. - -Twice during these years of the gradual maturing of his technical power -in oils did Rossetti make excursions into a distinctive branch of -decorative art, the practice of designing for stained-glass. As early as -1860, William Morris, Burne-Jones, and a few others interested in this -much-neglected craft established a firm which was known for some time -under the name of Morris and Co., and for which in 1861 Rossetti -executed a series of seven effective cartoons for church windows -illustrating the “Parable of the Vineyard,” or the “Wicked Husbandmen.” -Both designs are of extraordinary vigour and dramatic intensity; -strongly mediæval in directness and simplicity, but with a large -coherence and fulness of conception, and a harmonious richness of -workmanship breathing a more modern spirit into the ancient tale. The -dignity and earnestness of the drawing places it on a level with the -best work of his purely romantic period, but its technical finish shows -the more perfect balance between conception and execution which he was -rapidly attaining in his maturity. The designs are now to be seen in the -church of St. Martin on the Hill, Scarborough. - -A similar work was undertaken by Rossetti six years later, when it was -proposed to dedicate a memorial window to his aunt, Miss Margaret -Polidori, in Christchurch, Albany Street, Regent’s Park, where she had -long been a regular attendant until her death in 1867. Rossetti chose -for his subject “The Sermon on the Plain.” This design also was executed -in stained-glass by the firm of Morris and Co., and placed in the church -in 1869. - -By this time Rossetti’s commissions for pictures had happily become so -numerous as to justify his seeking competent assistance in his studio. -His friend Mr. Knewstub, at first a pupil, filled for some time the -office of assistant. Then Mr. Henry Treffry Dunn was engaged in 1867, -and remained with Rossetti almost up to the date of his death. It seems -to have been in the years 1867–68 that his health, never fully re- -established after the physical and mental prostration of 1862, began to -give way beneath that most terrible and relentless of nervous maladies, -the special curse of the artistic temperament—insomnia. To that slow and -baffling torment, by which Nature sometimes seems to be avenging herself -in a sort of frenzied jealousy upon her own handiwork, Rossetti’s highly -wrought sensibilities and overwhelming imagination made him the more -easy prey. His whole being was constitutionally endowed with that fatal -faculty of visualizing the invisible, of suffering more acutely under -imagined than under realized pains (though both were laid upon him) -which, like an all-consuming fire, burns itself out only with the life -that feeds it. Of such sleepless nights as thus become the terror of -their victims, haunted with all memories and all fears, Rossetti has -left us many a painfully vivid word-picture in his poetry; supremely, -perhaps, in that most tragic sonnet, “Sleepless Dreams”— - - “Girt in dark growths, yet glimmering with one star,” - -ending with the despairing cry upon the deaf goddess of repose— - - “O Night, Night, Night! art thou not known to me, - A thicket hung with masks of mockery, - And watered with the wasteful warmth of tears?” - -Many such nights Rossetti bore, we may well believe, before he fled at -last, when rational means seemed of no avail against his malady, to that -most dangerous source of ease, the too free use of chloral. Several -times he partially shook off the habit, and intervals of comparative -comfort and cheerfulness were frequent until 1872, when other phases of -illness, independent of it though still of nervous origin, further -undermined the constitution already weakened by years of abnormal -strain. A respite of a very pleasant kind was afforded him in the -successive autumns of 1868–69 by his visits to Miss Boyd at Penkill, in -Perthshire, where, in company with other congenial spirits, he spent -some weeks of comparative happiness and ease. Here he was induced to -resume his poetry, which, save for a few significant sonnets, had lain -in abeyance since that sad day on which he had buried his manuscripts in -the grave of his early love. Now, yielding with much reluctance and -conflict of heart to the persuasion of friends who knew the value of the -poems thus lost to literature, he gave permission for the coffin to be -exhumed, and the manuscripts removed. The story of this delicate task, -and of its judicious and successful fulfilment under the personal -superintendence of two or three intimate friends of the widower, has -already been related in detail by one of the eye-witnesses aforesaid. -The poems, after seven years’ concealment in the quiet grave in Highgate -Cemetery, were duly restored to their author’s hand. This having been -done, he set to work arranging, re-writing, and adding some of the -finest work of his poetic maturity to a collection of poems which should -be an immortal record and perpetuation of his love. - -Towards the close of 1869 Rossetti began to share with his friend -William Morris the romantic and picturesque old manor house of -Kelmscott, near Lechdale, in Gloucestershire; a district full of -interesting landscape, and haunted by the inspiring shade of Shelley, -who there wrote his characteristic fragment, “A Summer Evening in -Lechdale Churchyard.” The scenery of the surrounding country is brought -in vivid glimpses here and there into Rossetti’s poetry, as, for -instance, in “Down Stream” (“Between Holmscote and Hurstcote”) and other -lyrics of his later life. Here he painted “The Bower Maiden”—a pretty -country lass with marigolds. But a great part of his time was still -spent at home in Chelsea, where in 1871 he at last completed the finest -oil version of “Dante’s Dream.” Save for the incomparable “Beata -Beatrix,” it is the summing-up of all his highest interpretations of the -Dante spirit; the consummation of his gospel of romantic love. His -friend Mr. Val Prinsep quotes Rossetti as writing in a letter about this -time:—“I should like of all things to show you my big picture ‘Dante’s -Dream’ now, if you are ever in town. Indeed, I should probably have -written to you before this of the picture being in a state to see, on -the chance of its accelerating your movements townwards, but was -deterred from doing so by the fact that every special appointment I have -made to show it has been met by the clerk of the weather with such a -careful provision of absolute darkness for that day and hour, that I -tempt my fate no more in that way, as the picture cannot absolutely be -seen except in a fair light, and one’s nerves do not hold out for ever -under such onslaughts.... Everyone who has seen the ‘Dante’s Dream’ (not -yet quite finished, but close upon), has seemed so thoroughly pleased -with it that I think I may hope without vanity some progress has been -made, and this I feel sure I shall carry on in my next work. Of course I -have only shown the ‘Dante’ to a few, as otherwise I might spend my time -in nothing else, the picture blocking up the whole studio when -displayed.” - -Ten years later, in 1881, the “Dante’s Dream” gained for the painter one -of the very few popular triumphs of his lifetime. It was exhibited at -Liverpool, bought by the Corporation of that city for £1,500, hung in -the Walker Art Gallery, where it now remains; and instantly took rank -among the greatest masterpieces of modern art. “Fifty years hence,” said -Sir Noel Paton, “it will be counted among the half-dozen supreme -pictures of the world.” - -The story of the last ten years of Rossetti’s private life, clouded by -frequent ill-health, and disturbed by that most intolerable of a poet’s -trials, a literary controversy, remains yet to be told by him who shared -most intimately the seclusion and the affliction of that troublous -period, Mr. Theodore Watts; whose oft-quoted sonnet to his friend, as -Mr. Coulson Kernahan has said, gives a fuller picture of Rossetti than -volumes of prose could do, and therefore commands insertion here: - - “I told thee of an island, far and lone, - Whose shores are as a harp, where billows break - In spray of music, and the breezes shake - O’er spicy seas a woof of colour and tone, - While that sweet music echoes like a moan - In the island’s heart, and sighs around the lake, - Where, watching fearfully a watchful snake, - A damsel weeps upon her emerald throne. - - Life’s ocean, breaking round thy senses’ shore - Struck golden song, as from the strand of day: - For us the joy, for thee the fell foe lay— - Pain’s blinking snake around the fair isle’s core, - Turning to sighs the enchanted sounds that play - Around thy lonely island evermore.” - -The mingled pain and privilege of Mr. Watts’s ministry was shared to a -great degree by Lord and Lady Mount Temple, Mrs. Sumner, Dr. Gordon Hake -and his son, Mr. George Hake, Mr. Madox Brown, Mr. Frederick Shields, -and Mr. Sandys. Mr. Leyland also saw him frequently, and added generous -and unremitting friendship to his patronage of the wayward painter’s -work. He was the purchaser of some of the most important pictures of -Rossetti’s last decade, including the beautiful “Dis Manibus,” or “The -Roman Widow,” (1874), which remains unsurpassed for delicate purity and -depth of colour by any of the masterpieces of his prime; “Mnemosyne,” or -“La Ricordanza,” or “The Lamp of Memory” (1876–78), one of his most -noble and impressive symbolic figures; “The Sea-Spell,” (1875–77), and a -replica of “The Blessed Damozel” (1873–77), which he painted for Mr. -William Graham in illustration of his own poem: - - “The Blessed Damozel leaned out - From the gold bar of heaven; - Her eyes were deeper than the depths - Of water stilled at even: - She had three lilies in her hand - And the stars in her hair were seven.” - -The publication, in 1870, of Rossetti’s volume of “Poems,” containing, -together with some of his loveliest short lyrics, “The Blessed Damozel,” -and the “House of Life” sonnets, led the way for that unfortunate attack -upon him in the critical press which undoubtedly contributed to the -shortening of his days, however regrettable may have been the hyper- -sensitive manner in which the poet met his arraignment. In 1871 an -article signed “Thomas Maitland” was published in the “Contemporary -Review,” entitled “The Fleshly School of Poetry,” in which Rossetti’s -poems were attacked, from an avowedly moral point of view, on the ground -of sensuality. Ignoring the essential principles of all Rossetti’s work— -the sacredness of the senses as the instruments of the soul—the meaning -of all physical beauty as the witness of an immanent God—the writer -deliberately charged him with pandering to the lowest instincts of his -readers, and being, in short, the prophet of that later and grossly -materialistic phase of European art of which the very name _Pre_- -Raphaelite was a repudiation. It is not surprising that to a deeply (if -undefinedly) religious nature like Rossetti’s this should have seemed -the hardest blow that could have been dealt at his art and at him. The -publication of the magazine article, however, seriously disconcerted him -at the moment. It was not until the offensive and wholly unfair -indictment was re-issued in the following year in pamphlet form that it -began to assume a more serious aspect in the victim’s eyes. Criticism of -his poetic methods he could have borne with equanimity. Indifference and -neglect seldom troubled him. He cared little for popularity, and was no -seeker after fame, although he naturally desired the appreciation of -those whose judgment was of real account in literature. But he did care -for his general reputation as a clean-lived and pure-minded man. This -charge assailed the ethical foundations of all his work. He had seen in -the loveliest things of earth the vessels and channels of the loveliness -of heaven. And that this should be counted to him for sensuality—that -the love which had been to him “a worship and a regeneration” should be -held up to scorn as a gross and carnal passion—that was the intolerable -thing! - -Not that he lacked defenders. His own answer, under the title of “The -Stealthy School of Criticism,” in the columns of the “Athenæum,” was -more than supported by Mr. Swinburne’s indignant challenge, “Under the -Microscope;” and other loyal friends contributed to a sufficient -vindication. Save in the too morbid imagination of the poet, the attack -soon lapsed, for the most part, into the oblivion it deserved; more -especially since the writer, a few years later, had the manliness to -retract his charge, and to make a candid apology, though a tardy one,for -having uttered it. But not so easily could the pain given to Rossetti be -overcome. He now began to shrink intensely from society, fearing at all -points to encounter that suspicion of his artistic work. Suffering -acutely from nervous prostration and insomnia, he yielded himself the -more fully to the fatal chloral habit which only aggravated his -condition. In the autumn of 1872 he spent some weeks at the house of Dr. -Gordon Hake at Roehampton, and proceeded thence with Mr. Madox Brown, -Mr. George Hake, and Mr. Bell Scott to Stobhall in Perthshire, on the -Tay. Returning to the south in improved health, Rossetti and Mr. George -Hake proceeded at once to Kelmscott Manor, where they settled for a -considerable time. Rossetti indeed remained for nearly two years, -gradually resuming his artistic work, and regaining at times something -of his old vivacity and high spirits: only a few friends went to and fro -in visits full of mutual delight and inspiration. The beautiful old -house, and the quaint, romantic chamber that served for studio, became -the resort of poets and artists, critics and connoisseurs, disciples and -aspirants, in companies small indeed, but brilliant and memorable as any -that gathered round the young Pre-Raphaelites in Newman Street or the -maturer masters of art and song that assembled in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea. -Mr. William Morris and his family were there frequently; Dr. Gordon Hake -made a visit, and afterwards embodied his memories in his sequence of -sonnets addressed to Mr.Theodore Watts, “The New Day,” one of which -deserves quotation: - - “O happy days with him who once so loved us! - We loved as brothers, with a single heart, - The man whose iris-woven pictures moved us - From Nature to her blazoned shadow—Art. - How often did we trace the nestling Thames - From humblest waters on his course of might, - Down where the weir the bursting current stems— - There sat till evening grew to balmy night, - Veiling the weir whose roar recalled the strand - Where we had listened to the wave-lipped sea, - That seemed to utter plaudits while we planned - Triumphal labours of the day to be. - The words were his: ‘Such love can never die;’ - The grief was ours when he no more was nigh.” - -And as his health continued to improve, Rossetti’s poetry and painting -rose again to their highest level. The former, indeed, is thought by -some sound critics to reach at this juncture a superb merit unattained -before; for it was here that he wrote the first of the three great -romantic ballads which mark the zenith of his poetic power. “Rose Mary” -stands supreme in this incomparable category. Nor did he ever far -surpass, if at all, his pictures of this period,—“The Bower Maiden” -(1873) for frank and vigorous natural beauty in the pretty child with -the fresh-blowing marigolds, “Dis Manibus” or “The Roman Widow” (1874) -for delicate and simple pathos in the treatment of the classic world; -and “Proserpine” (1874) for the sombre moral tragedy symbolized in the -classic story, seldom, if ever, so interpreted on canvas before. - -In these years also he painted the beautiful “Garland Girl,” “La -Ghirlandata” (1873), and “Veronica Veronese” (1872), called at first -“The Day-dream,” but wholly distinct from the later work of that date; -reverted, or endeavoured to revert in sketches, to his old fantasy of -“Michael Scott’s Wooing,” and resumed a subject begun in 1864, but never -quite fully worked out, “The Boat of Love,” suggested by Dante’s second -Sonnet,—“Guido, vorrei che tu e Lapo ed io,” and representing Dante and -Beatrice embarking in a boat with his friend and brother-poet Guido -Calvacanti, and his lady Giovanna, and Lapo degli Uberti and his love. - - - “THE BOAT OF LOVE.” - - _By permission of the Corporation of Birmingham._ - -[Illustration] - - -In the autumn of 1874 Rossetti returned to Chelsea, and again made his -headquarters at 16, Cheyne Walk, where he remained, save for two visits -to the seaside, until 1880. Here he worked from time to time at the -picture illustrative of his own early poem, “The Blessed Damozel,”—the -sole instance, by the way, of Rossetti’s completion of a subject in -verse before attempting it on canvas; and began what promised to be -among the most profound of his mystical creations, “The Sphinx” or “The -Question,” and also the last subject he ever took from the “Vita Nuova” -of Dante, “La Donna della Finestra,” or “Our Lady of Pity.” These two, -as well as “The Boat of Love,” remained unfinished in his studio. To -this fruitful decade belong an excellent replica of an early water- -colour, “The Damozel of the Sanct Grael” (1874); the exquisite crayon -drawing “The Spirit of the Rainbow” (1877); and four splendid oils, “The -Sea Spell” (1876), “A Vision of Fiametta” (1878), “The Day-dream” and -“Mnemosyne” or “The Lamp of Memory” (1880). To 1875 is due “La Bello -Mano” (“The Beautiful Hand”). In 1879 he made a crayon drawing, which he -called “Sancta Lilias,” for an Annunciation; depicting a girl unfolding -a white scarf from a tall lily which she carries in her hand; but the -sketch was never finished, nor advanced beyond the crayon stage. - -In 1875 Rossetti took for a time a pleasant and secluded house near -Bognor,—Aldwick Lodge, standing in its own grounds, wellnigh buried in -shrubbery, in a lane west of the town, and near (as Dr. Hake tells us in -some delightful reminiscences of a visit there) “to the roughest bit of -beach on the Sussex coast.” Here, gathering together his mother, sister, -and aunts, and such intimate friends as Dr. Hake and Mr. Theodore Watts, -he enjoyed at the close of this year a Christmas week to which he -afterwards looked back as to one of the happiest he ever spent. - -It was at Bognor that Rossetti, influenced, no doubt, by his -companionship, woke for the first time to the magic of the sea. It is -extraordinary that so passionately romantic a spirit as his should have -remained, until the eve of his fiftieth year, absolutely unaffected by -that profound and intimate sway which the sea holds over the poetic -nature once brought, however distantly, within even the rumour and echo -of its majestic voice. Now the spell he had so long eluded was cast upon -him with irresistible force. He began to haunt the shore with a child’s -eagerness for the grandeur and the urgent mystery of tides. Day after -day he paced the beach for miles together, pursuing the new vision, the -new rapture of the stimulated sense. The surf, tumultuous and loud on -that wild coast, enthralled him like a charm; the waves drove his fancy -to new spheres; his poetry was turned to fresh scenes and subjects; he -began to write “The White Ship,” the first, though perhaps not the -greatest, of his historic ballads. For the time, he was absorbed almost -wholly in that revelation of splendour and power,—in the primal glories -of sea and sky; “two symbols of the infinite,” as the captive Mazzini -called them. - -But when we wonder at the lateness of this æsthetic development on -Rossetti’s part, we must remember that he was naturally without that -love of terrestrial and cosmical Nature for her own sake that is the -commonly-accepted attribute of poets. There was in his whole being no -trace of Pantheism, no worship of external loveliness apart from -conscious life. To him the sole joy of life was in the human; the -supreme tragedy of life was in the sexual. The conception of the two -elemental principles—the man-principle and the woman-principle—striving, -uniting, prevailing, against all the forces of destiny, sufficed him for -his conception of the universe. He was utterly alien to the Wordsworth -spirit; its serene monism was abhorrent to him. Apart as he lived from -intellectual speculation, he was, in his unformulated and unconscious -philosophy, dualistic to the core; as all true Romance must ever be. For -the essence of Romance is in its recognition of the conflict between -matter and spirit, between Nature and Man. Even its joy and exultation -in the physical life as the channel of the Higher Spirit takes its glory -from the sense of conquest over the Lower Spirit which threatens it from -the same unknown world behind all. Therefore there lies always beneath -the awe and wonder of romance towards the natural and the supernatural -world a deep instinct of rebellion, of antagonism, which debars it from -the Wordsworth spirit, at peace with earth and heaven. Resignation there -may be in romance; acquiescence, never. There may come, indeed, a -passionate and whole-hearted love of natural scenery, a frank delight, -as in the Celtic temper, in every external object that can minister to -man’s æsthetic enjoyment of beauty as a revelation of the divine. But -the limits of the divine grow more perceptible as man emerges from the -childhood of the world. “There hath passed away a glory from the earth.” -Rossetti knew this—“knew” it, not in the intellectual sense of the word; -and therefore he could never turn to Nature for that regenerating rest -and peace which in some moods—not quite the highest—she can give. He -never gained that next stage of spiritual emancipation and enrichment at -which the sense of conflict is its own reward; as when the soldier, with -“his soul well-knit” and every nerve schooled and chastened on the eve -of a great battle, feels a profound repose, a diviner calm than that of -the acclaimed victor. “The man who, though his fights be all defeats, -still fights”—as Coventry Patmore sang while Rossetti was yet young—has -verily seen “the beginnings of peace.” - -It was at Bognor, too, that he began work upon the most ambitious of all -his great symbolic figures, the “Venus Astarte,” or “Astarte Syriaca,” -in which he strove—vainly perhaps, but with a superb effort towards a -superhuman task—to combine and express all the mystic sensuousness and -occult magic of Orientalism with the clear and scientific wisdom of the -Western world. The Syrian Venus stands “between the sun and moon a -mystery,” attended by winged and torch-bearing choristers; eloquent of -the painter’s long and last struggle to reconcile sense, emotion, and -intellect in the highest consummation of pictorial art. - -In the following summer (1876) Rossetti paid a pleasant visit, at the -invitation of Lord and Lady Mount Temple, to their house at Broadlands, -in Hampshire, where he made some progress with the best version of “The -Blessed Damozel.” The predella to this work, in which the lover left on -earth is seen waiting beside a river for the vision of the Beloved, was -painted from the beechwoods of the neighbourhood. - -In 1876 Rossetti went with Madox Brown, Mr. George Hake, Mr. Theodore -Watts, and his mother and sister to Herne Bay. Ill health had now -settled permanently upon him, and painting became more difficult and -intermittent, yet his technical power remained for the most part -singularly unimpaired. In 1878 he completed “A Vision of Fiametta,”—an -admirable and wholly new version of the subject from Boccaccio which he -had treated some years back. Fiametta is in the painter’s thought an -angel of immortality: - - “Gloom-girt ’mid Spring-flushed apple-growths she stands” - -—his bright Easter-maiden, with the crimson bird on the bough beside -her, the symbol of warm, full-blooded life, as is the soft red robe she -wears,—of life so rich and sweet as to yield the guarantee of victory; -the spirit that can defy death and be its own assurance of resurrection. -The apple-blossoms fall in scattered petals to the ground as she pushes -the boughs apart with her lifted hand. Behind her is a stormy April sky, -but around her head there plays a light, as of hope beyond the grave. -She is the covenant of eternal spring, for she - - —“with re-assuring eyes most fair, - A presage and a promise stands; as ’twere - On Death’s dark storm the rainbow of the soul.” - -But now the time was nigh when “Death’s dark storm” must break upon -Rossetti. The last great and sane strength of his genius was spent upon -poetry,—in the crowning of his romantic ballads with the masterpiece of -their class, “The King’s Tragedy.” This was published, in a volume -entitled “Ballads and Sonnets,” in 1881. The previous year had seen the -completion of the last important picture that ever came fully finished -from his hand,—an oil version of the almost full-length figure -replicated several times, under the name of “The Day-dream,” and -consisting of the most beautiful and perfect of his portraits of Mrs. -William Morris. - -Of the laborious conscientiousness of Rossetti’s practice in painting it -may here be said that it has been greatly under-estimated by those who -only saw the less serious side of his complex and self-contradictory -nature. That “the capacity for taking infinite pains” developed with the -genius which gave it scope is abundantly attested by those who witnessed -not only his restless roving from one task to another, but also the -ungrudging concentration of toil which he bestowed in turns upon them -all. Mr. Shields, who for years was a constant companion in Rossetti’s -studio, says in his too-brief record of that intimacy:—“One evening when -the fine full-length figure, holding an open book and honeysuckle, -called ‘The Day-dream,’ was nearly completed, I found him standing far -off from it in the dusky light and searching it critically. ‘It seems to -me, that the lower limbs are too short: what do you think?’ An -examination compelled me to endorse his fears. It was enough. -Condemnation to the effacement of half the picture was instantly passed. -Long sprays of young sycamore, rich with the ruddy buds of early spring, -crossed before the lady’s green skirt. That sacrificed, it was not -possible to save the foliage, and the season was too far advanced for -fresh reference to nature. The first necessary step therefore was to -copy these on to a clean canvas; that done, he determinately scraped out -the large erring surface, corrected the proportions of the figure, and -then calmly re-painted all, striking lastly the sycamore boughs into -their new places from the rescued studies.” An even more laborious re- -painting, says the same authority, was effected in the final oil version -of “Dante’s Dream,” completed in 1871. The figure of one of the ladies -attendant at the bedside of the dead Beatrice failed to satisfy him in -the disposition of her drapery. At the last moment he set to work to -make entirely new studies for the robe in question, and almost wholly -re-painted the figure that wore it. - -In the autumn of 1881, which witnessed the publication of his second -volume of original poetry, Rossetti went with his friend Mr. Hall Caine, -the eminent novelist, to spend some weeks at a little farmhouse in the -Vale of St. John, near Keswick, Cumberland. The surrounding scenery was -of a wildly beautiful kind, well calculated to soothe and inspire the -city-pent poets; but Rossetti was by this time too ill to find relief -from nervous strain in the long walks which he had enjoyed at Bognor. He -paced instead, for hours together, the quaint little sitting-room where, -night after night, he would read aloud from the treasures of modern -fiction. Of Rossetti’s acute critical faculty, and his sound literary -judgment alike in poetry and prose romance, abundant testimony has been -given by the many privileged to enjoy from year to year, especially in -the period of his prime, the inestimable help and delight of his -enthusiastic counsel and his frank, outspoken, but never ungenerous -criticism. Such witness is fully endorsed by Mr. Caine’s records even of -this last autumn of his life, when, through shattered health and failing -hopes for his own future, he retained in a great measure the mental -vision and acumen of happier days, as well as his own creative power in -design and poetry. Rossetti never tired of these nightly discussions of -the inexhaustible topics of literary art: he loved to prolong them far -into the morning hours; and often, as his friend has told us, they saw -the sunrise break over the great hills as they went at last to rest. - -Nor was the year without fruit in painting. The pathetic picture of “La -Pia,” a new design in oils, though with a title used for a sketch in -1867, ranks high among his later performances. The subject, briefly -broached in Dante’s “Purgatorio,” deals with the imprisonment of the -young wife of Nello dell’ Pietra of Siena in a fortress in the Maremma, -in the midst of a noxious swamp. Rossetti was still at work, too, upon -the great symbolic picture in which he was endeavouring to sum up all -that he had implied in his maturer treatment of womanly beauty,—the -mystic and solemn “Venus Astarte” or “Astarte Syriaca” (the Syrian -Venus). The “Cassandra” proposed by him somewhile previously was never -far advanced, but he had painted in 1880 a somewhat inferior oil version -of a subject which had been the favourite of his youth, “The Salutation -of Beatrice.” - -One of the very few public triumphs which came to Rossetti in his -lifetime stands in the annals of 1881. His great picture, “Dante’s -Dream,” painted ten years earlier, was purchased by the Corporation of -Liverpool for £1,500, and hung in the Walker Art Gallery, where it was -at once hailed with general and almost unalloyed praise. - -Early in February, 1882, prostrated by an attack of a semi-paralytic -character, Rossetti was removed to Birchington-on-Sea, near Margate, -where his old friend, Mr. John P. Seddon, had generously placed a house -known as West Cliff Bungalow at his disposal. Mr. Hall Caine went with -him, and they were soon joined by the artist’s mother, sister, and -brother, and visited frequently by Mr. Watts, and by the young poet Mr. -William Sharp, Mr. Shields, and Mr. Leyland, who brought with him -Rossetti’s long-trusted medical adviser, Dr. John Marshall, to add his -counsels to the unremitting care of the local physician, Dr. Harris. - -Even within sight of the fast-approaching end, his earnest spirit did -not falter in its aspirations, nor was the grasp of the busy hand upon -its loved work relaxed altogether. He now executed a beautiful little -oil sketch of a subject which he had attempted many years before—“Joan -of Arc Kissing the Sword of Deliverance;” a striking and pathetic -allegory of his own soul’s attitude, as he stood ready to greet with -glad and fearless reverence the long-impending sword of the last -Deliverer. He was one of those to whom, as George Eliot once said, early -death takes the aspect of salvation. - -At Birchington he reverted also to his picture of ten years back, -“Proserpine.” His last poetry was written less than a week before his -death, in two sonnets illustrative of his yet unfinished picture, “The -Question,” or “The Sphinx,” in which the figures of Youth, Manhood, and -Age appear before the Mother of Mystery. Early in youth Rossetti had -made a resolution that no day should pass without some piece of work, -however imperfect, issuing from his hands, and amid much pain and -weakness, sorrow and discouragement, he kept that resolution almost till -his dying day. - -On Good Friday, the 7th of April, he became rapidly worse, but remained -cheerful and composed. On Easter Day the shadow of death hung over the -little household. In the evening the group of watchers gathered with -increasing apprehension round the bed. “I think I shall die to-night,” -said Rossetti quietly, some hours before the end. Soon after nine -o’clock a momentary struggle gave warning of the approaching rest. His -mother, sister, and brother, Mr. Theodore Watts, Mr. Shields, Mr. Hall -Caine, Dr. Harris and the nurse were with him, when, twenty minutes -later, he passed away, meeting the Deliverer in perfect calm; seeing, as -he himself expressed it, “on Death’s dark storm the rainbow of the -soul.” - -On Easter Monday Mr. Shields, at the request of the bereaved family, -made a careful and accurate pencil drawing of the head of his late -friend as he lay ready for the last sad rites. A plaster cast of the -head, by Brucciani, was also made, but was not considered satisfactory. - -It was decided that the funeral should take place at Birchington; and -there, in the quiet little graveyard on the cliffs, Rossetti was laid to -rest. Mr. William Sharp and Philip Bourke Marston (who died five years -later) were among the mourners, besides those already gathered in the -house of grief. - -The quiet hamlet of Birchington-on-Sea is now a well-loved place of -pilgrimage. The quaint, un-English-looking house in which the poet- -painter died is honoured as “Rossetti Bungalow.” In the old, shingle- -towered, ivy-grown church, a stained-glass memorial window, his mother’s -gift, shows, in the one light, his own design, “The Passover in the Holy -Family,” and, in the other, Christ giving sight to a blind minstrel,—the -work of his old friend, Mr. Shields. In the churchyard, opposite the -south-west porch, the old verger shows, with touching pride and -enthusiasm, a beautiful Runic cross, on the face of which is this -inscription: - - HERE SLEEPS - GABRIEL CHARLES DANTE ROSSETTI, - HONOURED UNDER THE NAME OF - DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI, - AMONG PAINTERS AS A PAINTER, - AND AMONG POETS AS A POET. - BORN IN LONDON, - OF PARENTAGE MAINLY ITALIAN, 12 MAY, 1828. - DIED AT BIRCHINGTON, 9 APRIL, 1882. - -And at the back the following: - - THIS CRUCIFORM MONUMENT, - _BESPOKEN BY DANTE ROSSETTI’S MOTHER_, - WAS DESIGNED BY HIS LIFELONG FRIEND, - FORD MADOX BROWN, - EXECUTED BY J. & H. PATTESON, - _And erected by his brother William and sister Christina Rossetti_. - -Another interesting memorial has since been established in the form of a -drinking fountain, designed by Mr. Seddon, with a bronze bust modelled -by Mr. Madox Brown, erected by subscription in 1887 in front of the old -house, 16, Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, which was Rossetti’s home for twenty -years. - -An estimate of the disposition and character of such a man as Rossetti -will not be lightly attempted by those who can only honour his memory -from afar; having never added to the deep enjoyment of his art the -privilege of personal intercourse with the artist. His tender and -passionate affection, his chivalrous loyalty, his gracious _bonhomie_, -his winning dignity, are matters so familiar to all who really knew him, -as to render eulogy alike superfluous and impertinent. Of the other side -of that magnetic personality,—of his hyper-sensitive pride, his morbid -isolation of his suffering self from those healthy breezes of broad -intellectual life which it is so easy to prescribe, so bitterly hard for -a nature such as his to stand against,—of these things it may be said -with all sympathy and reverence that they were the price of his -greatness. There are some temperaments so finely organized, so -delicately strung, that even joy is painful to them. They cannot lose in -the sense of delight the consciousness of what that delight has cost -them. They perceive so acutely the realities, the conditions, of life, -that an hour of rapture makes them more quick to the pain behind and -before. Such was Shelley, such were Keats and Byron; such was Dante -Gabriel Rossetti. It is the curse of the artistic temperament: it is the -blessing of Art. - -“There are some of us,” said Shelley, “who have loved an Antigone before -we visited this earth, and must pursue through life that unregainable -ideal.” “I think,” he added, in words that might well be applied to -Rossetti, “one is always in love with something or other; the error -consists in seeking in a mortal image the likeness of what is, perhaps, -eternal.” In other words, Rossetti was an idealist, and for the idealist -there is no primrose path to heaven. His soul was too open to the ideal -to be proof against the actual. His whole nature was like an Æolian -harp, responsive through the whole gamut of thought and sense to every -breath of circumstance or destiny that played about the world around it. -For him there was no life without emotion. He craved sensation, as one -craves a narcotic, to destroy its own results. _Ennui_ was his bane. -Nothing in his history is more pathetic than his need, in later years, -of the perpetual ministry of close friends. The delicate instrument that -could never be silent was hard to keep in tune. It demanded a firm and -tender hand laid upon all those quivering strings of being to merge the -discords into some sort of harmony, even if it were always in a minor -key. Such a hand he found more than once among those that knew and loved -him, but he found it supremely in the friendship of Mr. Theodore Watts, -to whom his last poems were dedicated. - - - - - CHAPTER VI. - TREATMENT OF RELIGIOUS SUBJECTS. - -The Re-birth of Religious Art—“God, Immortality, Duty”—The Pre- - Raphaelites and the Reconstruction of Christianity—The Halo in - Painting—The Responsibility of Womanhood—The “Girlhood of Mary - Virgin” and “Ecce Ancilla Domini”—The Problem of Suffering—“Christ - in the House of His Parents,” “The Passover in the Holy Family,” - “The Shadow of Death,” “The Scapegoat”—Hunt’s Symbolism—“The Light - of the World”—Rossetti’s Symbolism—“Mary Magdalene at the Door,” and - “Mary in the House of John”—The Idea of Victory Through Suffering— - “Bethlehem Gate”—“The Triumph of the Innocents”—The Spirit of - Inquiry—“Christ in the Temple”—The Atonement—“The Infant Christ - Adored”—Comparison with Madox Brown and Burne-Jones—“The - Entombment”—“The Tree of Life.” - - -“God—Immortality—Duty;” such were the weighty words chosen by one of the -greatest women of our century as the text of a now historic conversation -in the shadow of St. John’s College, Cambridge. The student to whom she -spoke has told us with what a tender solemnity she approached the great -postulations which those words conveyed, and challenged them in her -inflexible judgment one by one;—to her, how inconceivable the first, how -unbelievable the second, but yet how imperative and irresistible the -third. - -The attitude of George Eliot, even in the phase of intellectual -scepticism from which she then spoke, was deeply significant of that -fundamental change in the constitution of religion, that entire -transference of Christian or non-Christian “evidences,” from the -intellectual to the moral sphere, from the argument to the instinct, -which is now largely accepted as the supreme result of modern thought in -Europe. For the repudiation of prior conceptions of “God” and -“Immortality,” so far from precluding a reconstructive faith, rather -prepared the way for it; making the belief in unseen goodness a -deduction from instead of a premise to the recognition of visible -goodness in the present world, and leaving the more scope for that -growing reverence for the physical nature of man which,—having its -origins in Paganism and its highest sanction in the Gospel of Galilee, -and revealing itself in a passionate exaltation of bodily beauty as a -symbol of the divine, a resolute acceptance of the laws of nature and -destiny, and a strenuous blending of resignation to those laws with -conquest of them by spiritual powers,—has inspired the great -humanitarian movement of to-day, wherein the faith of the future finds -the witness and the justification of its ideal. - -To what degree, then, has the Pre-Raphaelite movement in English art -affected, or reflected, that momentous revolution? The pictures of -Rossetti, Millais, and Holman Hunt have been by turns exalted and -condemned by the apologists of contending theological schools, and the -painters stigmatized, now as followers of Tractarianism and instruments -of Popery, now as leaders of the coarsest rationalism in sacred art, now -as apostles of a sensual neo-Paganism brought over from the Renaissance, -and credited to hold mystic and sceptic in equal defiance. One clerical -critic, indeed, in 1857, sought in an ineffectual volume to prove the -essential atheism of all Pre-Raphaelite work. His protest was but -typical of that still extant species of mind to which the worship of the -body implies the profanation of the soul. It remains to be decided -whether such paintings touched the deepest religious principles which -underlie all change of creed or ritual, and if so, in what way the art -of the Pre-Raphaelites has joined or swayed the general current of -humanitarian feeling which is slowly absorbing all forms of religion -into a universal spirit and will. - -These questions bring us to the great group of pictures in which English -artists for the first time have aspired to deal in all simplicity and -earnestness with the bases and principles of the Christian religion. It -should not be difficult to discern the dominant idea, the moral keynote, -so to speak, of the highest utterances of art in an age of such -religious revolution as has been suggested by the proposition of George -Eliot. The philosophy of “Duty,” presented by her in its sternest -aspect, but brought more into line with the common heritage of religious -thought by Browning, Tennyson, F.D. Maurice, and other contemporaries of -the Pre-Raphaelite band, has in fact led in art, as it has led in -religion, directly, if unconsciously, to that reverent re-discovery of -“God,” that transfiguration of the ideal of “Immortality,” which the -revival of the spirit of romance has made possible to modern England. It -has been said that “the romantic temper is the essentially Christian -element in art.”[7] Let us rather say that it is the medium through -which Christianity itself has been renewed and quickened into a richer -and fuller life. The romantic temper, in Pre-Raphaelite art, takes hold -of the eternal verities of the Christian faith, and humanizes its whole -cycle of history and legend in the atmosphere of the real and present -world. It ignores any sort of dividing line between sacred tragedy and -the great problems of modern time. It abjures for ever the “glass-case -reverence” of relic-worship, the superstition which isolates Christian -history as a record of exceptional events, instead of an interpretation -of universal experiences. Ruskin justly says that “imagination will find -its holiest work in the lighting-up of the Gospels;” but the -illumination must have a reconstructive as well as an analytic -consequence; must be, as the late Peter Walker Nicholson expresses it in -his fine critique on Rossetti,[8] _instinctively synthetic_—which is the -quality of genius: and all true art is synthetic in its essence and its -end. The tendency of modern religious science to discredit the -exceptional and the unique, and set the basis of morals in universal and -familiar things,—in other words to deduce “God” and “Immortality” from -the instinct of “Duty” and not “Duty” from the arguments for -“Immortality” and “God,”—finds its correlative in the tendency of -romantic art to subject the remote specialities of classicism to the -test of known conditions and actual character. - -Therefore the four gospels, to the Pre-Raphaelite painters, do not stand -alone as “religious” history, distinct from the world-wide record of -human aspiration and struggle from age to age. They merely afford the -supreme examples of man’s apprehension of “God, Immortality, Duty,” and -of his capability of heroic labour and self-sacrifice in the pursuit of -an ideal. The Pre-Raphaelites draw their first principle of religion -from the beauty and glory of the natural world, and the intrinsic -dignity and sacredness of human life. Their Christ is re-incarnate in -the noblest manhood of all time; their Virgin Mary lives again in every -pure girl that wakes to the solemn charm, the mysterious power and -responsibility of womanhood. In humanity itself, with all its -possibilities, in its triumphs and in its degradations, its labours and -its sufferings, they re-discover “God,”—an “unknown God,” it may be; -“inconceivable,” if we will; but evident in the quickened conscience of -a growing world, and in the invincible instincts of human pity and love. -Millais sees a young Christ in the delicate boy with the wounded hand in -the dreary and comfortless carpenter’s shop. Hunt sees a crucified -Christ in the tired workman, over-tasked and despairing amid the calm -sunlight of eventide. Rossetti sees a risen Christ in the noble poet -whose great love could conquer death and enter upon the New Life in the -present hour. The true Pre-Raphaelitism does not take the halo from the -head of the Christ of history; but it puts the halo on the head of every -suffering child, of every faithful man and woman since the world began. -It is not that the historic Christ is less divine; but that all humanity -is diviner because He lived and died. - -In such a spirit does Rossetti conceive “The Girlhood of Mary Virgin,”— -not as a miraculous but an exquisitely natural thing; miraculous, at -least, in Walt Whitman’s sense of the word,—the sense in which all -beauty and all goodness are miracles to man. He shows us the up-growing -of a simple country girl, in a home full of the sweetness of family -love; remote and quiet, yet with no artificial superiority or isolation -from the average world. The maiden in the picture, with an innocent -austerity of face, sits at an embroidery-frame by her mother’s side. In -front of her is a growing lily, whose white blossoms, the symbol of her -purity, she is copying with her needle on the cloth of red, beneath St. -Anna’s watchful eye. The flower-pot rests on a pile of books, inscribed -with the names of the choicest virtues, uppermost of which is Charity. -Near to these lie a seven-thorned briar and a seven-leaved palm-branch, -with a scroll inscribed “Tot dolores tot gaudia,” typical of “her great -sorrow and her great reward.” The lily is tended by a beautiful child- -angel, the guardian both of the flower and the girl who is herself, in -Rossetti’s words, - - “An angel-watered lily, that near God - Grows and is quiet.” - -Around the balcony trails a vine, which St. Joiachim is pruning above; -significant of the True Vine which must hereafter suffer “the -chastisement of our peace.” The dove that broods among its branches -promises the Comforter that is to come. The realism of the picture is a -realism of the mediæval kind, that takes possession of, instead of -ignoring, the spiritual world, and overleaps the boundaries of visible -things; depicting the invisible with the daring confidence of -imaginative faith. The child-angel with her crimson pinions is as -substantial on the canvas as the soberly-clad virgin at her symbolic -task. - -In the companion-picture, “Ecce Ancilla Domini” (“Behold the handmaid of -the Lord!”) Rossetti repeats and develops much of the same symbolism in -the accessories of the painting, but the universal meaning of the -Virgin’s call is far more clearly brought out. The design differs from -all familiar versions of the Annunciation in that the message is -delivered to Mary as she wakes out of sleep, and that she is depicted, -not among beautiful and well-ordered surroundings, but in a poor and -bare chamber, rising, half-awake, in a humble pallet-bed, and sitting -awed before the angel whose presence, perhaps, is but the visualized -memory of her dream. The rapt stillness of her look recalls the pregnant -line in which Byron speaks of a troubled waking,—“to know the sense of -pain without the cause.” In Mary’s mind there should rather be a sense -of joy without the cause; but even in her joy there lies a mystery, a -burden of responsibility and foreboded sorrow, that makes it heavy to -bear. It is as if some simple girl, waking to the golden glories of a -summer morn, should wake at the same time to the thought of the world’s -pain, and realize, in a sudden exaltation of pity and love, that -somehow, by whatever path of grief and loss, her purity, her goodness, -must help humanity and bless the race to be. The angel at her side is a -girl-child no longer, but a youth, full of strength and graciousness, as -if to suggest that the sanctities of manhood are now to be revealed to -the maid. In his hand the radiant Gabriel holds the full-grown and -gathered lily, whose image is now completed on the embroidered cloth, -which hangs near the bed. The dove, the symbol of the Holy Spirit, flies -in at the window, and the light is soft and warm from the sun-bathed -landscape without. - -Once again did Rossetti attempt the subject of “The Annunciation,” but -only in a water-colour sketch, which found a place, however, in the -small but choice collection in the Burlington Club. Here also the lily -affords the symbolic keynote of the design,—the Virgin is seen bathing -among the water-lilies in a stream; but the singularly fine conception -of the angel’s salutation gives a special value and interest to the -work. The figure that appears before her on the bank assumes for the -moment the aspect of a cross; being so enfolded with his golden wings -that the Virgin sees not only the glory of her visitant but the dire -portent of the message which he brings. “The Annunciation” of Mr. Arthur -Hughes is more conventional in spirit, with its veiled Virgin and its -stiffly self-conscious Gabriel, and lacks the note of prescience which -gives solemnity to Rossetti’s designs. Mr. Burne-Jones, on the other -hand, gives us a more mature and stately maid. His Mary, nobly simple -though she is, seems better prepared for the sacred honour of her -destiny, and does not touch us so deeply as the shrinking girl in “Ecce -Ancilla Domini,” or even as the poor beggar-maiden (for so she appears) -in Mr. Hughes’s “Nativity,” bending timid and reverent on her knees in -the straw before the Holy Child. - -But the note of prescience, as we have seen,—the prophetic symbolism -which brings to mind in every incident of the Saviour’s life the whole -scheme of sacrifice and redemption, dominates all the greatest Pre- -Raphaelite work. The suggestions of the inevitable Cross recur in -Rossetti’s early picture, “The Passover in the Holy Family,” in -Millais’s “Christ in the House of His Parents,” and in Holman Hunt’s -“Shadow of Death,” with a force and urgency that points at once to the -universal significance of the history. “The Passover in the Holy Family” -shows us the boy Christ carrying a bowl filled with the blood of the -newly-slain Paschal lamb, and gazing at it with a mysterious foreboding -in his eyes. In the dim background St. Joseph and St. Anna (or, -according to Mr. William Rossetti, and as seems more probable, St. -Elizabeth), are seen kindling a fire for the ritual. Mary is gathering -bitter herbs, and Zacharias is sprinkling the door-posts and lintel with -the lamb’s blood. The youthful John Baptist is kneeling at the feet of -Christ, binding His shoe. - -Rossetti, however, does not attempt quite so bold a translation of the -Biblical narrative into modern form as does Millais when, depicting -“Christ in the House of His Parents,” he sets the poor and mean-looking -child in the midst of almost wholly English surroundings, in a -carpenter’s workshop, looking out upon a landscape of thoroughly English -meadow-land;—a literalism of method since adopted with more daring -fidelity to local colour in their respective fields by such later -realists as Fritz von Uhde and Vassili Verestchagin, and others of the -German and neo-French schools, but never pursued to the same length in -any later experiment from the studios of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. -Critics probably will long be divided as to the legitimacy of such a -process, and its success must be judged largely by the intention of the -painter,—whether he seeks merely to present an historical incident with -vividness and force, and employs familiar scenery to emphasize the hard -reality of his narrative, and whether he rather aspires to interpret the -universal truth beneath the incident, and to illustrate its bearing upon -present life; in other words, whether he desires to impress us (for -example) with the reality of the sufferings of Christ, or with the -problem of human suffering in all ages, of which the sacred story is at -once the type and the key. It can scarcely be argued that the latter -object does not come within the scope of art. The point at issue, -however, seems to be that the sense of anachronism aroused by the -presentation of great historical or legendary figures in present-day -garb, amid the surroundings of contemporary life, is apt to endanger the -solemnity of the theme, and to some extent defeat the object of the -painter,—in which case it may be urged that the failure is quite as -likely to lie upon the spectator’s side. - -But the literalism of Millais’s picture is eclipsed by the exhaustive -symbolism which he uses in common with his colleagues of the -Brotherhood, though never carrying it into the elaborate detail -cultivated by Mr. Holman Hunt. The “house” of Christ’s Parents is a -wooden shed, strewn with shavings and hung with tools. The young Christ -has torn his hand on a nail, and St. Joseph, turning from his bench, -holds up the wounded palm, which Mary hastens to bind with a linen -cloth. John the Baptist brings water to bathe the hurt before she covers -it, and the elder woman bends forward to remove the tools with which the -boy, perhaps, has carelessly played. - -The nail-mark in the palm is an obvious presage of the coming Cross. The -rough planks and the half-woven basket convey the idea of unfinished -work; and on a ladder overhead broods the ever-present dove. The picture -is inscribed from the verse in Zechariah,—“And one shall say unto him, -‘What are these wounds in thine hands?’ Then shall he answer, ‘Those -with which I was wounded in the house of my friends.’” - -To recover the actual conditions of the early life of Christ—to -reproduce the aspect of a Nazarene cottage eighteen centuries ago—and -yet to charge the historic figure with a vitality and emotion that -brings it home with irresistible significance to the heart of the -spectator of to-day, is perhaps a higher triumph of art than could be -achieved by Millais’s neo-realistic method. Rare as is success in this -dual effort—the union of archæological accuracy with profound insight -into the eternal meanings of the ancient tragedy—it has been attained -beyond question by Holman Hunt in his greatest picture, “The Shadow of -Death.” Sojourning for four years at Nazareth and Bethlehem (the latter -on account of the alleged resemblance of its people to the ancient House -of David), the painter equipped himself with knowledge of every detail -of domestic life, furniture, custom, and dress that could heighten the -literal truthfulness of his work. To that scientific fidelity he added -the elaborate symbolism of which he made a studious art, and through -that symbolism he poured a wealth of imagination, a dignity of thought -and an intensity of feeling which steeped the subject in a moral glow -hitherto unknown to English painting. The scene is laid at sunset in the -carpenter’s shop. The Christ, whose face and form, now grown to manhood, -speak utter weariness of body and soul, seems to stand there for all -humanity, confronting the whole problem of labour and suffering and -death. There is something more than physical exhaustion, though that is -paramount, in the drooping figure of the tired workman as He lifts His -arms from the tools and stretches them out in the evening sunlight, all -unconscious that as He does so, the slant rays cast His shadow, in the -semblance of a crucifix, upon the cottage wall behind, where a wooden -tool-rack forms as it were the arms of the cross on which the shadow of -His arms is cast; and near it a little window, open to the east, makes -an aureole of light around His head. His mother, kneeling on the floor, -examining the casket in which she keeps the long-treasured gifts of the -Magi—gold, and frankincense, and myrrh, glances up and sees the terrible -image on the wall. It is the cross of a daily crucifixion, rather than -of the final death, that weighs upon the soul of Christ;—the crucifixion -of unhonoured labour in obscurity; the hard, despised routine of toil -endured by the uncomplaining workers of all time. He knows both the -dignity of labour and its shame;—the dignity, that is, of all honest, -healthy, and profitable toil; the shame of that industrial slavery which -in any land can make a man too weary to enjoy the sunset glories or to -revel in the calm delights of eventide. - -In turning to Hunt’s earlier picture, “The Scapegoat,” we pass from the -problem of the slavery of labour to the deeper question of vicarious -sacrifice. The solitary figure of the dumb and helpless animal, dying in -the utter desolation of the wilderness, the unconscious and involuntary -victim of human sin, speaks more eloquently than any words of the -reality and pathos of the suffering of innocence for guilt. Seldom if -ever has the problem been so directly urged upon us in pictorial art,— -Can the law of vicarious sacrifice be reconciled with our highest ideals -of moral justice? Can a beneficent and omnipotent God permit one -innocent being, without choice or knowledge, to pay another’s penalty? -Or, on the other hand, can we formulate any other method by which -humanity could be taught its own solemn power, and its absolute -community and interdependence of soul with soul? The painter’s business -is to state that problem, not to solve it; and this Hunt does with the -utmost simplicity, sincerity, and earnestness. Pitching his tent in the -most inhospitable region on the shores of the Dead Sea, the artist -painted the actual landscape upon which the ancient victim was cast -adrift, to perish slowly in the desert without the camp; and from that -strange, wild studio his picture came full-charged with the loneliness -and terror of the scene, and the momentous meaning of the scapegoat’s -sacrifice. - -“The Light of the World,” frequently regarded as Holman Hunt’s greatest -work, though more mystical and appealing less directly to common -sentiment than “The Shadow of Death,” is purely symbolic in design and -character; and indeed may be taken to represent the high-water mark of -abstract symbolism, as distinct from Biblical history, in the paintings -of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The circumstances of its execution, -partly at Oxford, and partly in his studio at Chelsea by moonlight, have -already been referred to. The picture tells no story; deals with no -incident or condition of the human life of Christ, but presents the -ideal figure in the threefold aspect of prophet, priest, and king. The -Saviour appears in the guise of a pilgrim, carrying a lantern, and -knocking in the night at a fast-closed door. He wears the white robe of -inspiration, typical of prophecy; the jewelled robe and breastplate of a -priest; and a crown of gold interwoven with one of thorns. The legend -from Revelation, iii. 20, gives the keynote of the work: “Behold I stand -at the door and knock. If any man hear my voice and open the door, I -will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with Me.” The fast- -barred door, with its rusty nails and bolts overgrown with ivy, and its -threshold blocked up with brambles and weeds, is the door of the human -soul. The light from the lantern in Christ’s hand is the light of -conscience (according to Mr. Ruskin’s well-known description of the -picture), and the light which suffuses the head of the Saviour, issuing -from the crown of thorns, is the hope of salvation. The lamp-light rests -on the doorway and the weeds, and on a fallen apple which gives the -suggestion of hereditary sin. The thorns in the crown are now bearing -fresh leaves, “for the healing of the nations.” - -It has been charged against many Pre-Raphaelite paintings that their -elaborate symbolism, and the highly subjective development of the -designs, require not merely titles and texts, but footnotes also, for -their explanation. In the pictures of Holman Hunt especially, this -charge may have some weight; but it may be fairly met by the -consideration of the close and deep thought, the prolonged spiritual -fervour—unexampled since the Italian Pre-Raphaelites—in which each -masterpiece is steeped, and which surely brings a claim upon such -intelligent study as would enable all but those wholly ignorant of -Christian symbology to interpret the details for themselves. Rossetti -said of one of Hunt’s pictures that “the solemn human soul seems to -vibrate through it like a bell in a forest.” That sound, once caught, -yields the keynote to the pictorial scheme, and attunes all the latent -music to its perfect end. - -Rossetti, however, in no case employed the symbolic-figure method, so -triumphantly used in “The Light of the World,” for his Biblical -subjects; but reserved it for the realm of romantic allegory and classic -myth. His illustration of the eternal truths of penitence and -aspiration, of “the awakening conscience” and the resurrection of the -soul, is given us in his beautiful drawing of “Mary Magdalene at the -door of Simon the Pharisee.” The scene is laid amid the revelry of a -village street at a time of festival. Mary, passing with a throng of gay -companions, sees, through the window of a house, the face of Christ; and -with a sudden impulse leaves the procession and tears the flowers -passionately from her hair, seeking to enter where He sits; the while -her lover, following, strives to dissuade her, and to lead her back to -the mirthful company. The appeal of passion and the answer of the -repentant woman, beautiful in her mingled shame and triumph, are best -recounted in Rossetti’s own words, from the most successful of his -sonnets on his own designs: - - “Why wilt thou cast the roses from thine hair? - Nay, be thou all a rose,—wreath, lips, and cheek. - Nay, not this house,—that banquet-house we seek; - See how they kiss and enter; come thou there. - This delicate day of love we too will share - Till at our ear love’s whispering night shall speak. - What, sweet one,—hold’st thou still the foolish freak? - Nay, when I kiss thy feet they’ll leave the stair.” - - “Oh loose me! Seest thou not my Bridegroom’s face - That draws me to Him? For His feet my kiss, - My hair, my tears, He craves to-day:—and oh! - What words can tell what other day and place - Shall see me clasp those blood-stained feet of His? - He needs me, calls me, loves me, let me go!” - - - “HEAD OF CHRIST.” - - Finished study for “Mary Magdalene.” - - _By permission of Mr. Moncure D. Conway._ - -[Illustration] - - -The face of the Magdalene has been said to present Rossetti’s ideal of -spiritual beauty, in contrast with the physical beauty of “Lilith” and -the intellectual beauty of “Sibylla Palmifera;” but as Rossetti himself -afterwards applied the title of “Soul’s Beauty” to “Sibylla Palmifera,” -the distinction can hardly be pursued very far. The head of Christ (for -which Mr. Burne-Jones is said to have sat as a model) is of a more -peculiar interest and value; being the only serious attempt at the -portrayal of the central figure in Christian art which remains to us -from Rossetti’s hand. Some highly-finished studies were made by him for -this head, from one of which the present illustration is taken. -Rossetti’s Christ differs markedly in conception from that of Holman -Hunt. The Christ of the older painter is pre-eminently the “Man of -Sorrows,” the martyr whose whole life was a crucifixion. Rossetti shows -us rather the Galilean dreamer, the peasant poet, the gentle idealist -whom women and children loved. The realism of suffering, though -delicately suggested by the slightly-drawn brow, the quiet tension of -the features, and the bright, glowing depths of the eye, is here in -abeyance. Christ is for the time an honoured guest, receiving the -hospitality of the Pharisee with a gracious self-possession and an -exquisite simplicity of mien. The sole suggestion, in the surrounding -objects, of the tragedy that is to come, is given in the vine that -trails on the walls of the house, symbolic of the great Sacrifice. - -The shadow of the Cross—no longer cast into the future, but abiding on -the mourners after the death of Christ—is figured by a device of -singular beauty in Rossetti’s sketch of “Mary in the House of John.” In -a small drawing of “The Crucifixion” he had depicted St. John leading -the Madonna from the foot of Calvary. Now he shows us the new home, so -strangely ignored by painters of the sacred tale, wherein the Mother and -the adopted son are together at eventide. Through the window is seen a -distant view of Jerusalem, and in the uncertain light the window-bars -assume the form of a cross, which thus appears to rest upon the Holy -City, and to stand between that quiet household and the outer world. St. -John has been writing a portion of his Gospel, and pauses to strike a -light, with which the Mother of Jesus kindles a lamp, hanging at the -intersection of the bars; so that the light shines from the centre-point -of the Cross, where the Head of Christ should be. This delicate emblem -gives the touch of hope, the promise of glory through sacrifice, which -lightens the darkness of the hour. So fine a use of simple imagery, so -perfect an adjustment of the hope to the penalty, admirably illustrates -the highest triumph of Pre-Raphaelite art,—the reconciliation of the -“crucifixion principle,” the essentially Catholic element in religion, -with the “resurrection principle,” peculiar to Protestantism. Mr. -Forsyth, whose essays on the Pre-Raphaelites have already been quoted, -makes the suggestive remark, that “In Hunt’s technique shadow always -means colour as well as darkness: to see colour in shadow is the last -triumph of a great painter,” and adds that “Rossetti’s colour is not -merely luminous matter; it is transfigured matter.” This conception of -the dual truth of Christianity—the necessity of suffering and the -assurance of victory—is consistently presented both by Rossetti and -Hunt; and it is not merely victory _over_ suffering, as Protestantism -insists on, which they teach; but rather victory _through_ suffering; -which is the fusion of Catholic ethics with Protestant faith. - -And it is remarkable that the Pre-Raphaelites find as much inspiration -for the thought of victory through suffering in the incidents of -Christ’s childhood as in the story of His martyrdom. Rossetti, in his -early picture of “Bethlehem Gate,” in which the Holy Family are seen in -flight from the massacre of the Innocents, depicts at the side of the -Virgin Mother an angel bearing a palm-branch,—the symbol of deliverance -and reward. Holman Hunt begins the Resurrection with “The Triumph of the -Innocents,” applies, that is, the principle of Immortality to universal -life; and by the ruddy, healthy faces of his angel-children watching -from Heaven over the child-Christ, he insists, as Rossetti insisted in -“The Blessed Damozel,” that the unknown world must be something -intimately related to the one we know, and that immortal life must be -something more than the continuance of spiritual being in an immaterial -sphere,—must, in short, afford real and eternal activities beyond the -grave. - -This recognition of the relation of sacrifice to victory leads the -painters beyond the reconciliation of the individual man with God to the -reconciliation of the social man with man. Something of this idea of -“peace on earth” is suggested by Rossetti’s picture, “The Infant Christ -Adored by a Shepherd and a King,” which now forms a triptych in Llandaff -Cathedral,—the only picture directly from his hand which occupies a -permanent position in an English church. In the left compartment is seen -the young David as a shepherd before Goliath; in the right, the psalmist -is depicted in old age, crowned as a king before God. In the centre, the -Infant Christ appears as the mediator between the high and the lowly, -the rich and the poor; the messenger of the “at-one-ment” of all ranks -of men, united in a common worship of the Divine Child, and a common -love of that Humanity of which He is the type. - -A similar interpretation of the childhood of Jesus, as typical of the -growth of all humanity, may fairly be drawn from Holman Hunt’s picture -of “Christ in the Temple,”—a work now thoroughly familiar to English -eyes, and perhaps the most popular because the least mystical of his -masterpieces. The bright, bold, ingenuous face and figure of the boy, -confronting with his eager questions the venerable Rabbis of the -congregation, seems instinct with the life of the present age, charged -with the very essence of the spirit of inquiry—of sceptical inquiry -even—before which the apologists of tradition and legalism are -dumfounded, and through which, from the dogma of the old world, is -wrested the faith of the new. - -It would be impracticable here to follow in detail the influence of the -Pre-Raphaelites upon the religious paintings of their contemporaries and -successors, or to estimate the exact relation of their work to that of -their nearest precursor, Madox Brown. But a single example from the -last-named artist, and another from the youngest of the Pre-Raphaelite -group, but never numbered with the Brotherhood—Mr. Burne-Jones—may serve -to illustrate still further the great religious principles of which -these painters steadfastly took hold. “The Entombment” remains among the -finest works of Madox Brown, and embodies, in its simple austerity, its -direct pathos, a spiritual fervour akin to the highest inspirations of -Holman Hunt. The dignity of the human body, the solemnity and awfulness -of physical death, the tender charm of child life and child innocence, -the mystery of immortality, and the apprehension of a “risen” life,—all -these things are brought within the range of thought opened up by that -sombre and majestic design. Seldom in modern art has the intense realism -of death been so delicately handled, and yet with such uncompromising -force. The faces of the women bending over the loved corpse are full of -grief and perplexity, yet even in the atmosphere of death there is a -subtle breath of triumph and of hope, a sense that the body is not all, -that what is left is but the shell, the “house of Life;” the true Life -is not dead, but gone—whither? The tender light that plays around the -mourners, and the contrast of the vigorous little body of the young -child with the aged and shattered frame of the dead martyr, seem to -voice the eternal protest of the heart against annihilation, the -irrepressible demand of the soul for a future life. - -Thirty years apart from “The Light of the World” and “Mary in the House -of John,” but akin to both in motive and spirit, is “The Tree of Life,” -one of the latest and noblest of Mr. Burne-Jones’s paintings. This -sombre monochrome, so absolutely original in design, so chastened and -restrained in execution, ranks with the highest symbolic work of the -Pre-Raphaelites in its grasp of the idea of victory through suffering. -For “The Tree of Life” is the Cross. Its roots are in the very -foundations of the earth; its branches are fed with the heart’s blood of -humanity, and its fruit reaches unto Heaven. The Figure that hangs upon -it is brooding in benediction over the whole world; the supreme type of -that immortal love which fulfils the divine law of sacrifice; embodying -in one great symbol the lesson of all history,— - - “Knowledge by suffering entereth, - And Life is perfected by Death.” - -Man, woman and children are gathered beneath the shadow of the Tree. On -the one side is a garden of flowers, and on the other a harvest of corn. -Along the margin of the earth is the inscription:—“In Mundo pressuram -habebitis; sed confidite; ego vici mundum.” (“In the world ye shall have -tribulation; but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.”) The -painting is carried out in a very low key of colour, and a kind of -austere and grave conventionalism restrains the sweeping outlines and -the sober light. The accessories of the landscape are of the simplest -character; no extraneous detail intrudes upon the perfect harmony of the -at-one-ment; no over-elaboration mars the calm of that absolute -resignation, that unquenchable hope. The Christ upon the Cross is at -once the interpretation of the mystery of pain, and the covenant of a -complete redemption wherein man at last “shall see of the travail of his -soul and shall be satisfied.” - ------ - -Footnote 7: - - Rev. P.F. Forsyth: “Religion in Recent Art.” - -Footnote 8: - - The Round Table Series: “Rossetti,” by P.W. Nicholson. - - - - - CHAPTER VII. - TREATMENT OF MEDIÆVAL AND MODERN - ROMANCE. - -The Christian Element in Neo-Hellenism and Romance—“How They Met - Themselves” and “Michael Scott’s Wooing”—Mediævalism and Romantic - Love—“Romeo and Juliet” and “Ophelia”—Millais’s Romantic Landscapes— - “The Woodman’s Daughter,” “The Blind Girl,” “The Vale of Rest,” - “Autumn Leaves”—Keats’s “Isabella”—Tennyson’s “Mariana” and “Idylls - of the King”—The Idea of Retribution—“King Arthur’s Tomb,” “Paolo - and Francesca,” “Death of Lady Macbeth,” “The Awakening Conscience,” - “Hesterna Rosa,” “The Gate of Memory,” “Found,” “Psyche,” - “Proserpine,” “Pandora”—The Idea of Duty—“The Hugenot,” “The Black - Brunswicker,” “Claudio and Isabella”—Old and New Chivalry—“Sir - Isumbras” and “The Rescue”—“The Merciful Knight”—“St. Agnes’ Eve”— - Ideal and Platonic Love—“The Salutation of Beatrice,” “The Boat of - Love,” “Beata Beatrix,” “Dante’s Dream,” “Our Lady of Pity.” - - -It is but an arbitrary classification that divides the so-called -“religious” art of the Pre-Raphaelites from their portrayals of that -half historic, half legendary wonder-world we vaguely called “romance.” -Rossetti, it has been rightly said, “was a pilgrim who had got out of -the region of shrines, but who at every cross-like thing knelt down by -the force of thought and muscle.”[9] Above all other qualities of Pre- -Raphaelite painting, it is the instinctive perception of “cross-like -things” that gives nobility and tenderness to the work of Rossetti and -his colleagues. By the light of that inward vision do they choose and -transfigure every theme. The haunting sense of the mysteries of -existence, of the immanence of the supernatural in the natural sphere, -and of the divine possibilities of human nature; the apprehension of the -moral law, of sacrifice, reward and penalty, and of the consummation of -earth’s good and evil in an immortal realm;—these abide with the -painters when they pass from the holy ground of Judea and Galilee to the -Pagan splendours of the Hellenic age, the later glories of mediævalism, -and the hard prose conditions of modern life. The same great drama of -humanity is set before us, but on another stage, with other players. The -ideas which dominate the minds of the artists, the principles by which -they interpret alike the history of Jerusalem and the problems of -London, are of universal application. A classic myth to them is as rich -in meaning as a Christian parable; a legend of chivalrous manliness or -heroic womanhood as sacred as if written in a canonical gospel. Holman -Hunt’s “Awakening Conscience” and “Claudio and Isabella” are as -profoundly religious as “Mary Magdalene at the Door;” Rossetti’s “Lady -of Pity” and “Beata Beatrix” glow with a spiritual fervour as pure as -that of “Ecce Ancilla Domini;” the lessons of Burne-Jones’s “Merciful -Knight” and of Millais’s “Hugenot” are as clear as any that “The Light -of the World” can teach us;—and this, not that the painters have -secularized the highest things, but that they have sanctified the lower; -have pierced to the common sources of religious thought and feeling, and -have brought into the labour of the present hour the wide and eternal -meanings of the past. - -In the most naïve phase of romantic mysticism, with its devout faith in -the presence of spiritual forces in play at all points upon the human -soul, and in the power of the imagination to visualize conjectured -things, Rossetti conceived the finest of his early dramatic sketches,— -“How They Met Themselves” and “Michael Scott’s Wooing;” the former -showing the influence of Blake in a more marked degree perhaps than any -other drawings of the same period. The lovers that “meet themselves” are -confronted, while walking in a wood, with the apparitions of their own -persons, reflected, as it were, in the air before them, in exact and -startling similitude,—a conception found in the well-known Döppelgänger -legends of German folk-lore, which credit a dual existence to every -human soul, endowing it with a sort of spectral “double” after the -manner of the Buddhistic “astral body,” save that the Döppelgänger -appear to be independent of the subject’s consciousness and will. The -sudden terror of the lovers,—the lady sinking to the ground, the knight -drawing his sword in her defence against the mysterious phenomenon, yet -hesitating, like Marcellus on the ramparts of Elsinore, to “offer it the -show of violence,” is shown with a force that emphasizes the reality of -the vision to those who see it. In this picture, as in Rossetti’s -treatment of a more exalted theme, “The Girlhood of Mary Virgin,” the -barrier is over-leaped that separates the visible from the unseen; the -outer and inner worlds are merged naturally and imperceptibly the one -into the other—an hypothesis in which the previsions of art may yet be -vindicated by scientific discovery; and the forms of the spectral lovers -are scarcely more shadowy than those who stand aghast before them in the -flesh. It has been suggested that the design may typify the meeting of -the human soul with its prototype in ages long gone by; the recognition -of unknown kinships (as if brought over from a prior existence) through -that strange sense of familiarity which sometimes surprises us when we -wander in spirit through the dim mazes of the historic past. - -In the sketch for “Michael Scott’s Wooing,” the wizard-hero conjures up, -for the entertainment of his lady-love, a magical pageant of Life, Love, -and other symbolic figures, which appear before her in a glass. Here the -purely subjective nature of the vision is brought out; the lady alone -can see the pageant; her attendants are as blind to it as Hamlet’s -mother to the ghost of the murdered king. - -From this initial belief in the potency of the unseen there comes the -apprehension of the mystery of fate, of the burden of impenetrable -destiny, of the evil powers that assail mankind from within. Something -even of the ancient fear of the jealousy of the gods against men’s -happiness returns in the mediæval awe of human joys or triumphs, and its -ascetic suspicion of prosperity, more especially in the field of -romantic love. A profound insight of the dualism of nature keeps the -romantic spirit in remembrance of the cost of all earthly pleasure, and -of the price set by the laws of being upon all aspiration and desire. -This it is that gives its subtlest charm to the “Romeo and Juliet” of -Madox Brown, with its embracing lovers on the balcony at break of day, -full of the passionate poetry of protest against the pitiless caprice, -as it seems, of the fate that tears them asunder; and to the “Ophelia” -of Rossetti,—now sitting troubled and half-frightened before Hamlet’s -earnest gaze, now offering him the treasured letters from the casket at -her side, now led away in her “first madness,” by the hand of Horatio, -from the presence of the king and queen; or of Hughes,—singing dreamily -to herself as she sits by the waterside on a fallen tree; or of Watts,— -gazing down with yearning eyes into the pool beneath the willow; or—best -of all—of Millais, floating downstream to her death, with her slackening -hands full of flowers, the very embodiment of the pathetic helplessness -of weak and isolated womanhood against the tide of the world’s strife,— -weak, indeed, through the isolation of ages, having never known, in life -or ancestry, the bracing discipline of a free and responsible existence. -No one of the Pre-Raphaelites has equalled Millais at his best in the -landscape setting of the struggle between the human soul and the -circumstance that hems it in; and the scenery of “Ophelia” is among the -most exquisite of his work. The beauty of the river and its richly -wooded banks, its overhanging branches, and its current-driven weeds, -gives the greater pathos to the dying girl’s face, on which the wraith -only of its past and lost beauty lingers to mock the sadness of her end. -“The Woodman’s Daughter” suggests even more finely the contrast of the -unimpassioned glory of nature and the tragedy of romantic love; for here -it is not death but life, the complexity of life and duty, that -separates the lovers each from each. Between the rough and uncomely -peasant girl and the shy young aristocrat who stands so awkwardly before -her with his proffered gift of hothouse fruit, there is a gulf fixed -which will take a higher civilization than ours to bridge over. And -again, in treating of the broader and more common loves and joys of -humanity, does Millais set before us the same contrast in “The Blind -Girl” and “The Vale of Rest.” The Blind Girl is a poor and uncomely -vagrant halting by the road-side, wrapping her shawl round her child- -guide, who nestles against her in the April weather. But around her is -the loveliness of an English village landscape after rain. The warmth of -the bursting sun consoles her as she turns her face to its light; the -rainbow which she cannot see gives radiance to the humble cottages; the -wet grass is cool to her hand, and the peace of resignation seems to -fill her maimed and darkened life. But the contrast of her sorrow with -nature’s joy is very real, though for the moment she forgets it in the -little comfort that may yet be hers. The same resignation in the face of -the unanswered problem transfigures the mourners in “The Vale of Rest,”— -the two calm, almost stoical nuns in a convent garden at sunset time. -The younger woman is digging a grave; the elder, who sits on a recumbent -tombstone hard by, is gazing at the burning gold and crimson of the -west, and sees in the midst of its splendour the darkness of the coffin- -shaped cloud which, by a widespread superstition, was long deemed the -omen of approaching death. The superb “Autumn Leaves,” which Mr. Ruskin -pronounces “among the world’s masterpieces,” may perhaps be added to -this great group of romantic landscapes, inasmuch as the pathos of its -poetry is no less deep, though more subtle, than that of “Ophelia,” “The -Woodman’s Daughter,” “The Blind Girl,” and “The Vale of Rest.” A group -of children are burning dead leaves in the twilight of a mellow autumn -day. Oblivious of the changing seasons, realizing nothing of the -solemnity of autumn, or the sad significance of the waning year, they -revel merely in the bonfire they have made, and are troubled by no fear -for the winter, or for the chance of spring. - -In the several paintings from Keats’s “Isabella”—that favourite subject -of the early days of the Brotherhood—the contrast lies mainly in the -direction of individual character; the tragedy, in the power of such -character to work for evil against the good. Especially in Millais’s -masterpiece, “Lorenzo and Isabella,” are the beauty and graciousness of -Isabella and her lover set with a passionate intensity against the icy -cynicism and sensuous brutality of the brothers and their guests, and -the conflict is felt to be directly between malicious cruelty and -innocent love. On the other hand the devotion and self-abandonment of -Isabella’s thwarted passion find noble expression in the picture by -Holman Hunt. The figure of the weeping girl, who has risen from her bed -to worship at her strange and terrible shrine,—the Pot of Basil -containing her murdered lover’s head, is seen in the early light of -dawn, that almost quenches, in its pitiless coldness, the more tender -light of the lamp that burns in the little sanctuary of secret love. The -altar-cloth spread for the sacred relic is embroidered with a design of -passion-flowers, and every accessory is symbolic of Isabella’s grief and -despair. The same unique subject, it may here be noted, has inspired one -of the finest paintings of an artist worthily representative of the -younger generation of Pre-Raphaelites (if the name may be perpetuated -beyond its immediate and temporary significance)—Mr. J.M. Strudwick; -whose design, however, deals with the culmination of the tragedy, the -theft of the Pot of Basil by the guilty brothers, and the on-coming -madness of Isabella. - -A stronger moral element is soon perceptible in the work of Rossetti and -Millais when they approach the poetry of Tennyson for subject matter, -and begin to draw upon the great cycle of Arthurian legends which he -restored in modern garb to English literature. Even outside the “Idylls -of the King,” in their paintings of Tennyson’s “Mariana,” the passion -and the mystery of romantic love are tempered with the growing -consciousness of moral responsibility, of Love’s heroic power to conquer -destiny—if only the appeals of the lower nature were not so urgent and -so sweet. In other words, the lower dualism has given place to the -higher; the conflict is not so much between the earthly joy and the -misfortune that threatens it in death or any calamity from the physical -sphere, but rather between the baser and the better life within. Of such -a spirit is the “Mariana” of Rossetti, kneeling and weeping in her -dimly-lit chamber in “The Heart of the Night,” or of Millais, wearily -casting away her unfinished work in the close prison of the “moated -grange”—that perfect allegory of modern love, pent in by the mire of -indolence and conventionality, and vainly dreaming of an unearned ideal; -waiting for the deliverance which, as Mariana scarcely comprehends, must -be a self-deliverance into nobler aims and higher standards of duty and -of intelligent sacrifice. The sense of a lofty spiritual destiny re- -enters at this point into Pre-Raphaelite art; the meaning of the search -for the Holy Grail is apparent still more clearly in Rossetti’s “Sir -Galahad in the Ruined Chapel,” and later, in Burne-Jones’s more severe -and chastened types of the pilgrim-knight. It has been charged against -both these painters that the physical beauty and glory of manhood was -almost wholly absent from their conception of life. Even in the nearest -approach to such a concession, in the latest romantic masterpiece of the -younger artist, “The Legend of the Briar Rose,” the asceticism learnt at -the Arthurian shrines persists, indeed, in the mellowness of his -maturity. The heroes of the Pre-Raphaelites are no muscular warriors, as -conventional art would portray them. They are concerned with inward -conflicts rather than with outward foes. They are the knights-errant of -a new chivalry,—to whom moral righteousness is a higher thing than -physical courage; self-conquest a nobler triumph than the routing of -armies. For they “wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against -principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of -this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” The whole -series of the Arthurian designs, from the illustrations to Moxon’s -“Tennyson” and the frescoes at Oxford, onward to the latest work of -Burne-Jones and his followers, are dominated by this idea of a spiritual -pilgrimage, as of beings exiled from a higher realm, which to regain -they must needs pass through the lower. “Their sojourn on earth,” says -M. Gabriel Sarrazin,[10] “oppresses these Pre-Raphaelites, lost among -our pre-occupations of business and of ease.” - -And further, the sense of the supernatural world, of the struggle -between the spiritual and the physical in man, leads onward to the -conception of retribution and punishment, “not” (as Hegel puts it) “as -something arbitrary, but as _the other half of sin_.” The inexorableness -of the moral law could hardly be more finely suggested than in -Rossetti’s treatment of the guilty love of Lancelot and Guinevere. “King -Arthur’s Tomb,” despite its crudity and harshness of drawing, remains -among the most superb of his early drawings. The aged queen, now an -abbess honoured and revered, is visiting the tomb of the dead Arthur. -But not all her long atonement of remorse and piety can avail wholly to -blot out the sin of her youth. For even here, as she kneels to pray, the -dark and terrible ghost of Lancelot thrusts itself between her and the -pure effigy whose marble face she seeks in penitence and tears. The -converse of the picture was that of which Rossetti sought to make a -fresco on the ill-fated walls of the Oxford Debating Union. The design -represents “Sir Lancelot before the Shrine of the Sangrael.” He seems to -have almost attained the goal of his pilgrimage; the Holy Grail is just -within his grasp; but in the hour that might have brought victory, the -old sin brings mockery and defeat: the face that looks out at him from -the place of his hope is the sad, reproachful face of Guinevere. - -With scarcely less of tragic force and direct solemnity does Rossetti -carry this thought of retribution into the world of mediæval Italy, into -the cycle of legend and romance that gathers round the name of Dante. -The love-story of “Paolo and Francesca da Rimini,” recorded by Dante in -the “Divina Comedia,” has been the theme of poets and painters for many -a year, and is the subject of one of the finest water-colour drawings -made in Rossetti’s transition period. Francesca, the wife of Lanciotto, -the deformed son of the lord of Rimini, fell in love with her husband’s -brother Paolo; and Lanciotto, discovering the two in guilty -companionship, put them both to death. In the fifth canto of the -“Inferno,” Dante describes the terrible sight permitted to him of the -condemned lovers in the second circle of Hell. Rossetti’s picture is in -triptych form, and in the centre are the figures of Dante and Virgil, -his guide. Above them is the brief inscription, “O Lasso!” In the left -compartment is depicted the fatal embrace of Paolo and Francesca at the -moment of the avowal of their love, when in reading together the story -of Lancelot, the book suddenly fell from their hands, and, as the -narrator simply confesses, “that day we read no more.” In the right-hand -space are seen the lovers, clasping each other wildly in the darkness -and among the furious storms of hell, unable to release themselves from -that fixed embrace. The characteristic idea of making the penalty -consist in the involuntary perpetuation of the sin,—the guilty love -becoming, as it were, its own sufficient punishment, belongs, of course, -to Dante, but is worked out with singular power in Rossetti’s design. -Not only is the stern and relentless fate portrayed with the utmost -sincerity in the sequel, but even in the first panel the thought of the -coming retribution is finely suggested by the introduction of one -sufficient touch at the background of the scene. Beneath the edge of a -curtain is seen the foot of the approaching husband, bringing his -vengeance and the lovers’ doom. The same subject has been more -elaborately and completely treated by Mr. G.F. Watts, whose picture -shows Francesca telling her sad tale to Dante and Virgil as they pass; -and the poet who is said to have known her on earth, and to have written -the record quoted from the “Inferno” in the house at Rimini in which she -was born, is depicted sinking in a swoon before her, overcome with pity -and with awe. - -Again, and in a widely different field of dramatic narrative, does -Rossetti bring this passionate sense of retribution into play. His -drawing for the never-finished picture, “The Death of Lady Macbeth,” is -full of the same half-pitiful and half-triumphant spirit of righteous -vengeance, and the same perception of inexorable penalty. The aged and -dying woman crouching on her bed has once been comely and of commanding -countenance; and in her last hour the remembered beauty of her face, the -lingering majesty of her figure, seem to overawe her attendants, one of -whom presses a sponge to her head. In that changed face the conflict -between remorse and pride, ambition and terror, is still fierce and -strong; but she is dying utterly alone: there is no love, no tenderness, -in the ministry of those who gather round the murderess. - -Still more clearly and resolutely is this perception of moral issues -sustained by the Pre-Raphaelites when they pass from history and legend -to classic mythology, to allegorical type, or to the dramatic -presentation of modern life. In the “Awakening Conscience” of Holman -Hunt, in the exquisitely pathetic “Psyche” of G.F. Watts, in the -“Hesterna Rosa,” “Gate of Memory,” and “Found” of Rossetti, the bitter -cost of sin is realized with unfaltering consistency. Rossetti’s long- -laboured and yet uncompleted “Found” may be taken as the companion, if -not the sequel, to his poem, “Jenny.” It shows us the last humiliation -of a ruined girl who is “found”—dying on the streets of London—by the -lover of her youth,—a countryman who has driven in with his milk-cart -through the chill light of a London dawn. All the pride and struggle of -the past is written on her once lovely face, and she shrinks in shame -and terror from his touch. - - “Ah! gave not these two hearts their mutual pledge, - Under one mantle sheltered ’neath the hedge - In gloaming courtship? And, O God! to-day - He only knows he holds her;—but what part - Can life now take? She cries in her locked heart,— - ‘Leave me—I do not know you—go away!’”[11] - -It might almost be the same sad girl that stands at “The Gate of -Memory,” watching a group of young and innocent maidens at play beside a -well. - - “She leaned herself against the wall - And longed for drink to slake her thirst - And memory at once.” - -A more original and striking composition is “Hesterna Rosa”—“Yesterday’s -Rose.” All the weird realism of Rossetti’s most mediæval manner pervades -this painfully impressive design;—mediæval in spirit, and yet almost -Hogarthian in its bold handling of human degradation and debauchery. The -motive is taken from “Elena’s Song” in Sir Henry Taylor’s “Philip van -Artevelde,” Part II., Act v.: - - “Quoth tongue of neither maid nor wife - To heart of neither wife nor maid, - ‘Lead we not here a jolly life, - Betwixt the shrine and shade?’ - - “Quoth heart of neither maid nor wife - To tongue of neither wife nor maid, - ‘Thou wag’st, but I am worn with strife, - And feel like flowers that fade.’” - -The scene is in a tent at early daybreak, amid a group of gamblers and -depraved women throwing dice. But one of them is a girl still beautiful, -and not yet hardened by the coarseness of her new life. She shrinks from -the kiss of the player who bends over her hand. “Yesterday’s Rose” is -not wholly faded; only her first fresh bloom is gone; she has bartered -it irretrievably for her chance in the desperate game of passion, like -the vengeful woman in “The Laboratory,” offering her pearls to buy -poison for her enemy. The contrast between the shamed “rose” and her -brutalized companions is emphasized by the tender light of the dawn, -which creeps through the orchard trees outside, and makes the lamp -within appear more yellow and dull and weak. - -Entirely modern in spirit and execution is Holman Hunt’s treatment of a -similar theme. The “Awakening Conscience” is that of a girl idling with -her paramour in a newly and luxuriously furnished room. He has been -singing to her, not noticing the change in her face, and his hands still -pass carelessly over the pianoforte keys. But the words of the song— -Moore’s “Oft in the Stilly Night”—have stirred a sudden anguish in her -heart; she has started up, tortured with long pent memories and overcome -with shame and despair. The utter falsity of her new surroundings seems -to strike her as she gazes round the cruelly unhomelike home. A terrible -symbolism confronts her on every side; the showy tapestry is woven with -a design of ripe corn on which the carrion birds are feeding; the -picture hanging above the mantelpiece represents the woman taken in -adultery. The tragic intensity of the painting is hardly surpassed by -any other of the artist’s work. - -Far back in the golden ages of classic myth, the ever-significant story -of “Psyche” suggests the same stern lesson,—of the irretrievable loss -which comes by violation of the moral law or disobedience to the dicta -of those “gods” by which the men of old time knew the divine and -imperative instincts of the soul. The fall of Psyche has its message for -to-day. It was made known to her that the god Eros should come to earth -to be her husband. In the darkness of the night he should visit her bed, -and there he should vouchsafe to her the sacrament of his love,—but on -one condition: that she should never seek to look upon his face, or lift -the veil of mystery by which Nature shrouded the sanctities of the -godhead from her eyes. But Psyche’s curiosity overcame her reverence and -trustfulness. In her eagerness to know Love’s sacred secrets and lay -bare the holiest of holies upon earth, she took a lamp, and would have -looked boldly at her visitant. But immediately the spell was broken; the -heavenly Eros fled from her, never to return. The widowed Psyche, in Mr. -Watts’s picture, stands ashamed and broken-hearted, knowing too late the -prize that she has forfeited. Her drooping figure is the embodiment of -dazed remorse. She has dared to trifle with the divinest things, to be -familiar with that which is rare, to probe too curiously into the mystic -borderland between earth and heaven. The devout sense of the limitations -of man’s knowledge, and of the penalty attaching to any impious -familiarity with the supernatural world, has thus its roots in -Hellenism, but attains its finest flower in the spirit of romance. It is -the blending of the sensuous dignity of classicism with the subtle -tenderness of romance that gives so fine a pathos to this poor -“Psyche,”—typical as she is of the modern age, mourning the lost mystery -which its own thirst for knowledge at all hazards has dispelled; or -again, that places Rossetti’s “Pandora” and “Proserpine” in the highest -rank of contemporary art. For Proserpine too has eaten the forbidden -fruit of the lower knowledge, whereby the higher wisdom is driven away. -She has eaten one grain of the fatal pomegranate of Hades, which -enchains her to the lower world; and only at rare seasons can her -sullied spirit attain the upper air. Her troubled face, as she stands in -the picture, in a gloomy corridor of her prison-palace, with the broken -fruit in her hand, seems to tell of the long struggle of a soul that, -having once tasted the coarser joys, has become less sensitive to the -higher, and is torn between the baser enchantment and the pure delights -which it longs to regain. A critic already quoted[12] has pointed out -that there is “always in Rossetti’s women the kind of sorrow that -ennobles affection.” The painter never loses the sense of conflict -between the dangers of the physical nature and the glories of the spirit -which it serves. The sorrow of his great “Pandora,” even more than of -the beautiful “Proserpine,” is the sorrow of a goddess over her own -infirmity. She has opened the mystic casket which she was bidden to keep -sealed, and now she stands helpless before the witness of her deed. The -potent spirits are escaping from the box, and she can never undo the -mischief she has done. “The whole design,” says Mr. Swinburne, “is among -Rossetti’s mightiest in its godlike terror and imperial trouble of -beauty, shadowed by the smoke and fiery vapour of winged and fleshless -passions crowding from the casket in spires of flame-lit and curling -cloud round her fatal face and mourning veil of hair.” - - “What of the end, Pandora? Was it thine, - The deed that set these fiery pinions free? - Ah! wherefore did the Olympian consistory - In its own likeness make thee half divine? - Was it that Juno’s brow might stand a sign - For ever, and the mien of Pallas be - A deadly thing? And that all men might see - In Venus’ eyes the gaze of Proserpine? - - What of the end? These beat their wings at will, - The ill-born things, the good things turned to ill,— - Powers of the impassioned hours prohibited. - Ay, clench the casket now! Whither they go - Thou may’st not dare to think: nor canst thou know - If Hope still pent there be alive or dead.”[13] - -It follows, then, that the earnest apprehension of the spiritual sphere, -and of a divine justice and retribution for sin, will give a special -power and reality to pictures dealing with a crisis of duty, or a moment -of choice between martyrdom and sin. Such a choice, such a -responsibility, is the motive of some of the finest work of Millais’s -transition period,—“The Hugenot,” “The Proscribed Royalist,” “The -Rescue,” and “The Black Brunswicker.” “The Hugenot” is probably the most -popular, as it is the most perfect, of the painter’s earlier -masterpieces. The story which it tells is explained in its full title: -“A Hugenot, on St. Bartholomew’s Day, refusing to shield himself from -danger by wearing the Roman Catholic badge.” “When the clock of the -Palais de Justice shall sound upon the great bell at daybreak” (so ran -the order of the Duke of Guise), “then each good Catholic must bind a -strip of white linen round his arm, and place a fair white cross in his -cap.” A Catholic lady is beseeching her Protestant lover to wear the -white scarf which will preserve him from the coming massacre. Her -beautiful face is drawn with anxious terror as she tries to bind the -kerchief round his arm, but he, embracing her, draws it resolutely away; -the mental struggle is not his, but hers; in spite of the tenderness of -his face, there is a certain sternness and solemnity in it which tells -that nothing will move him from his purpose; that he is ready, and -gladly ready, for martyrdom. The girl’s love pleads vainly against his -duty and his doom. In “The Black Brunswicker,” which formed the pendant -to “The Hugenot,” the same drama of conflicting love and duty is set -forth, though with less convincing fervour and exalted passion than -before. The lady seems to be of French family, and is somewhat pettishly -delaying the departure of her lover, an officer of the Black Brunswick -corps, before the Battle of Waterloo. The converse of the choice of man -and woman between disloyalty and death is nobly given us by Holman Hunt -in his “Claudio and Isabella” (from Shakespeare’s “Measure for -Measure”), where the heroism and the devotion lie on the woman’s side. -Claudio has been condemned to death, and his sister’s honour is asked as -the price of his release. She visits him in prison, clad in her nun’s -garb, and Claudio—the human craving for life conquering for the moment -his better nature, cries out in a half shamed appeal, “O Isabel, ... -death is a fearful thing.” But Isabella, standing before him, pressing -her hands against his heart, her face full of pity and distress, gives -back her resolute answer, “And shaméd life a hateful!” - -Together with the conception of duty in its relation to romantic love is -linked the ideal of chivalry,—of the immediate glory of duty and its -supreme rewards, especially when exercised in championship of the weak, -of a defenceless foe, or of womanhood. The splendour of physical courage -tends always to give place to the power of moral courage, as in mercy -and forgiveness rather than in revenge; or if the physical courage be -brought into play, it will, in progress of civilization be applied to -deeds of helpfulness instead of cruelty. The nobility of true -knighthood, which Rossetti conceived almost exclusively in the mediæval -spirit, and presented with exquisite verve and passion in his little -sketches of “St. George” and the “Princess Sabra,” and of which the -converse—the potential knightliness of woman—was suggested both by -Rossetti and Millais in their “Joan of Arc” designs, finds full -expression in the latter’s picture of “Sir Isumbras at the Ford.” An -aged knight, clad in splendid armour, and bearing with courtly dignity -his honours and his years, is fording a river on his war-horse, and -pauses to lift up two little peasant children who have asked him to -carry them to the other side. The simple graciousness and humility of -the act seem to transfigure the old warrior’s face, which is further lit -by the rich light of the landscape in the setting sun. By the side of -this great painting should be set the earlier, but in great measure the -companion work, “The Rescue,” in which the same artist translates the -thought of beneficent chivalry into modern and familiar life. For the -knight of “The Rescue” is a London fireman, in the act of saving three -children from a burning house. The light that suffuses his calmly heroic -face is not the natural radiance of a sunset glow, but the fierce glare -of flames around the staircase, down which he brings his precious burden -safe and sound. “The Rescue” is a poem of modern chivalry in a great -crisis: “Sir Isumbras” celebrates mediæval chivalry in common things. -The strong self-possession of the fireman in the midst of imminent -peril, beset on all sides by heat, smoke, water, and burning brands, not -callous or insensible to fear, but superior to it, gives us, as it were, -the other side of that perfect knighthood suggested by the simple -kindness of “Sir Isumbras at the Ford.” In both these pictures, as -indeed in “The Hugenot” and in Hunt’s “Claudio and Isabella,” the -impression conveyed is not merely of a momentary heroism of choice or -deed, but of the long discipline which must have gone to produce it, and -of what all goodness costs to the life and lives behind it. It is in -these aspects that the Pre-Raphaelites portray, as we have already -contended, not merely action but character; not drama only, but the -hidden forces of human struggle and circumstance which give the drama -its meaning for all time. - -But great as are these pictures in thought and emotion, excellent as are -most of them in technical quality, they are even surpassed, in the sheer -passion of romantic worship, in the purest essence of religious -chivalry, by one of the earliest and, technically, crudest paintings of -Burne-Jones in what may fairly be called his Rossettian period. “The -Merciful Knight” stands apart, in its desperate realism, its mystic -exaltation and fervour, its emotional abandonment, from all the ethereal -and chastened ideals of his imaginative maturity. It represents a phase -of feeling very transitory, for the most part, with the Pre-Raphaelite -Brotherhood,—a return to the most devout and ascetic mediævalism, -untempered by the larger Hellenic spirit which re-awoke in modern -romance. And, full charged as it is with the inspiration of Rossetti in -drawing and colour, its religious severity links it rather to the manner -of Holman Hunt. It tells the story “of a knight who forgave his enemy -when he might have destroyed him, and how the image of Christ kissed -him, in token that his acts had pleased God.” Low at a wayside shrine -bends the Merciful Knight, prostrated by the spiritual struggle between -magnanimity and vengeance which he has just passed through. And as he -kneels in mingled prayer and thankfulness over his own self-conquest and -moral victory, the image of Christ, rudely carved and hanging on a -simple cross, bends down, miraculously moved, to kiss his cheek. Rarely -if ever have the Pre-Raphaelite painters surpassed in any field the -emotional power of this great design. The conflict between loyalty to a -cause and charity towards its fallen enemy was for some years a -favourite subject with the Pre-Raphaelites of every grade. It yielded -the motive, for instance, of Millais’s “Proscribed Royalist,” in which a -Puritan lady secretly conveys food to her lover, a Cavalier, who is in -hiding in a woodland oak; of W.S. Burton’s “Puritan,” where the austere -lady, walking with her lover, takes pity on a dying Cavalier, wounded by -Roundhead soldiers in a wood; and of W.L. Windus’s “Outlaw,” similarly -hurt and tended in an equally sylvan scene. But in none of these cases -is the spiritual struggle of the ministering visitant portrayed with an -intensity at all to be compared with the exalted passion that dominates -“The Merciful Knight.” - -Such are the principal stages of thought and feeling through which the -Pre-Raphaelite painters pass—in no given order indeed, but with a wholly -intelligible sequence of ideas—from the first impulses of romance—the -apprehension of the supernatural, of the mystery of fate, of the moral -order, and the divine possibilities of human life—to that highest -idealism of romantic love, and of its power over death and destiny, -which we find in their interpretation of Keats’s “Eve of St. Agnes,” and -supremely in Rossetti’s imaginative treatment of the love of Dante for -Beatrice. Something of the mystical glory of a pure and lofty passion, -and of the power of perfect womanhood to raise, as in Keats’s poem, the -earthlier elements of love into the very essence of worship, appears in -Hunt’s early picture, “The Flight of Madeline and Porphyro,” and in the -triptych of “The Eve of St. Agnes,” by Arthur Hughes; but its most -complete expression, apart from Rossetti, must be sought in Millais’s -“St. Agnes’ Eve,”—in the opinion of many, the greatest of his paintings; -the consummation of that wonderful aftermath of poetic genius which -followed a full decade later than what seemed to be his prime. For the -beauty of Madeline, by a significant paradox, is that she is not -beautiful. Her attitude is daringly simple; she is standing by her bed -in the moonlight, half-unclad; her gown has slipped from her waist to -her feet, and the keen, silver-blue rays creep softly about her slender -figure and shed a faint light into the foreground of the deep-shadowed -room. Yet with all the mellow tenderness of colour and atmosphere that -wrap her round, there is in no detail of her form or gesture, or the -aspect of her averted face, the slightest appeal to the sensuous -possibilities of the scene. There is about her an extraordinary -spiritual loveliness, born of the utter artlessness and sincerity of her -pose and the girlish innocence of her look, as if the absolute -naturalness of the situation were its own protection from all thought of -ill. Everything around her speaks of her simple holiness and purity, and -seals, as it were, the pledge of the answering purity of Porphyro’s -love. - -But it is in the presence of the greatest romantic passion known to -European poetry—the ideal, immortal love of Dante for Beatrice—that Pre- -Raphaelite painting reaches, in the art of Rossetti, the acme of its -power to transfigure and interpret the highest experiences of the human -soul. With the most chastened symbolism, the finest selectiveness of -design and colouring, the loftiest fervour of thought and expression, -Rossetti unfolds to us the inmost glories of Platonic love, as Dante -knew it, and Michaelangelo; and as our own age vaguely but with -increasing aspiration seeks it through many an error and much pain. He -leads us in imagination through the sacred course of that all-embracing -worship which upheld the soul of Dante through every vicissitude of toil -and trial, from the first hour in which the smile of the Blessed -Beatrice made the boy’s heart tremble for joy, until the solemn moment -of resignation when “it was made known to him that his beloved Lady must -die.” Again and again did Rossetti attempt the unwearying subject of -“The Salutation of Beatrice.” The most important that remain to us of -those efforts, which in one medium or another cover nearly the whole of -his artistic career, are the early water-colour sketches in which the -scene of the fateful meeting is laid in the portico of a church; the -diptych showing in one compartment Beatrice saluting Dante in a street -in Florence, while in the other she appears to him in a field of lilies -in Paradise (“Il Purgatorio,” canto 30); the triptych repeating the same -designs, but having in the centre panel a figure of Love holding a dial -whereon is marked the date (June 9, 1290) of the salutation; and a much -later version in single form, representing Beatrice, walking alone in -Florence, within sight of Dante, but watched over by the guardian figure -of Love, with crimson robe and wings. Of these works, the triptych is -perhaps the most perfect. The left compartment is inscribed with Dante’s -words, “E cui saluta fà tremar lo core,” and the right with those of the -salutation in Paradise, “Guardami ben; ben son, ben son Beatrice” -(“Behold and see if I am truly Beatrice”). - -Again we see the gracious lady passing before the eyes of her young -lover in a procession through the chapel at Bargello, while above her is -depicted “Giotto painting the portrait of Dante,”—a portrait actually -discovered five centuries later on the chapel wall. Once more, Rossetti -pictures Beatrice embarking with Dante in “The Boat of Love.” The motive -of this work is taken from Dante’s sonnet to Guido Calvacanti, his poet- -friend (who figures, together with Cimabue, the master of Giotto, in the -sketch above mentioned), beginning: - - “Guido, I would that Lapo, thou, and I - Were taken by some skilled enchanted spell, - And placed on board a barque that should speed well - Through wind and wave, and with our will comply.” - -With reverent humility and tenderness Dante is leading Beatrice into the -enchanted boat of which he dreamed. She yields her hands to him and -seems to pause beneath his earnest gaze as she steps down. Around her -are the companions of their voyage,—Guido Calvacanti with his lady -Giovanna, also known as Primavera, and Lapo degli Uberti and his love. - -“Beata Beatrix,”—“The Blessed Beatrice,”—depicts, not the actual death -of Dante’s beloved, but rather a mystic trance in which is made known to -her the nearness of her end. She sits on a balcony overlooking the city -of Florence, which is already shadowed by the coming loss. Before her is -a sundial, marking the fatal hour. A dove, flying into her lap, carries -a poppy-blossom, the symbol of sleep. The lovely face of Beatrice is -upturned, as if to greet the unseen messenger, and full of perfect -peace. She seems to have attained the sight of blessedness, and to be -yielding her spirit to a deep and sweet content, but the earthly -weariness lingers about her brows and on her pale and parted lips. In -the background, Dante and the figure of Love are seen passing in the -street below. Love holds a flaming heart in his hands, and they both -gaze in grief and awe at the rapt countenance which the dignity of the -coming death suffuses with exquisite pathos and transcendent charm. In -the features of this Beatrice, more than in any other, Rossetti has -regained and embodied the thought that found superlative expression in -Michaelangelo,—“the notion of _inspired_ sleep, of faces charged with -dreams.”[14] - -A more familiar passage from the “Vita Nuova” is illustrated by the -largest, and in many respects the finest, of Rossetti’s completed -pictures, “Dante’s Dream;” dealing with the poet’s record of the vision -in which “it was revealed to him that the Lord God of Justice had called -his most gracious lady unto Himself.” “Then feeling bewildered,” says -Dante, writing of that strange experience, which occurred to him at the -age of twenty-five, “I closed mine eyes, and my brain began to be in -travail, as the brain of one frantic. And I seemed to look toward -Heaven, and to behold a multitude of angels who were returning upwards, -having before them an exceedingly white cloud. Then my heart, that was -so full of love, said unto me, ‘It is true that our lady lieth dead;’ -and it seemed to me that I went to look upon the body wherein that -blessed and most noble spirit had had its abiding place. And so strong -was this idle imagining that it made me to behold my lady in death; -whose head certain ladies seemed to be covering with a white veil, and -who was so humble of her aspect that it was as though she had said, ‘I -have attained to look on the beginning of peace.’” On a red-draped couch -in the chamber of death lies the Blessed Beatrice, clad in white robes, -her hands folded on her bosom, and her bright hair spread about her -pillow. Her maidens, at her head and feet, are hanging over her a purple -pall, filled with May-blossoms, the emblem of the spring-time of her -life, in which she died. The floor is strewn with poppies, symbolizing -again the sleep in which she takes her unbroken rest; and on the frieze -above are roses and violets, suggestive of the beauty and purity of the -departed soul. Over the couch hangs a lamp, glimmering with a fast- -expiring flame; and high up in air, through an opening in the roof, is -seen a flight of angels, garbed in the deep red of a damask rose,— -symbolic of the Platonic love which should immortalize the beloved in -the sight of all men,—and bearing the white cloud that represents the -life that has fled. The crimson doves, of which Rossetti made his -constant symbol of heavenly ministries, flutter up and down the -staircases on either side of the room. Before the couch stands the -figure of Love, with his flame-coloured robes fastened at the shoulder -by a scallop-shell, signifying pilgrimage. In one hand he holds a winged -arrow—his weapon for the heart—and a bunch of rosemary; with the other -he leads Dante, who, clad in the black garb of mourning, tinged with the -purple of consecration, advances as if in a dream, and shrinks, dazed -and awed, before the beauty of the dead Beatrice. And Love, still -holding Dante by the hand, bends forward and kisses the face of the -beloved, thus making himself the mediator between Dante and Beatrice, -and the reconciler of life with death. It is as though the poet’s life- -long worship were summed up and presented at the gate of heaven by a -higher power than his own, and a benediction wrested for him, by the -very humility and devoutness of his passion, from the glorified spirit -beyond the grave. The dominant note of the design is one of resignation -and hope; the passionate, strenuous, mystical resignation which -Platonism brought into Christianity at the dawn of the Renaissance, and -hope, born of the quickened fervour and resolution of romantic love. - -In two notable subjects Rossetti deals with incidents recorded by Dante -of himself after the death of Beatrice. In a early water-colour of -singular dignity and elevation of feeling, he celebrates “The -Anniversary of the Death of Beatrice.” “On that day,” says Dante in the -“Vita Nuova,” “which completed the year since my lady had been made of -the citizens of eternal life, I was sitting in a place apart, where, -remembering me of her, I was drawing an angel upon certain tablets; and -as I drew, I turned my eyes, and saw beside me persons to whom it was -fitting to do honour, and who were looking at what I did: and according -as it was told me afterwards, they had been there awhile before I -perceived them. Then I arose for salutation and said, ‘Another was -present with me.’” The poet, kneeling at a window overlooking the Arno, -absorbed in his memorial task, has suddenly become conscious of his -visitors, and is overwhelmed with delicate pride and shame. - - “OUR LADY OF PITY.” - - From an unfinished study. - - _By permission of the Corporation of Birmingham._ - -[Illustration] - - -Again, among the latest of Rossetti’s unfinished works, we have the -illustration of another passage in the “Vita Nuova,” telling of Dante’s -mourning for his lady’s death. “La Donna della Finestra” (“The Lady of -the Window”), better known as “Our Lady of Pity,” represents the -beautiful woman who looked down on Dante from a window when, as he -passed weeping through the streets, and fearing lest the passers-by -should mock him, he glanced up, craving for some sign of sympathy, and -was consoled by her calm and pitying gaze. Sketches for this design were -made in several media, but the head in the unfinished painting at -Birmingham is the most perfect of the series, and in fact ranks among -the finest of the female heads in all Rossetti’s single-figure pictures. -The artist has caught with rare felicity the expression so acutely -described by the poet: - - “Whereupon she, after a pitying sigh, - Her eyes directed towards me with that look - A mother casts on a delirious child.” - -All the depth, all the tenderness, all the heroic strength of a divine -sorrow that sees the end of sorrow, shines in this full-souled face. It -is the ideal of the highest womanhood, and indeed of the highest -humanity; of the love that has attained to be godlike, redeeming the -world by infinite compassion; a love that “hopeth all things and -endureth all things,” and in whose steadfast courage lies the conquering -principle of the life to be. It is the companion picture—and in some -respects it is a nobler, healthier version—of “The Blessed Damozel,” -leaning from the bar of heaven to console the mourner on the earth -below. The love that can so take hold of immortality, bring comfort even -from the gates of death, and bridge over, by the sweet persistence of -its ministry, by the passionate reality of its inspiration, the gulf -between the physical and the spiritual world, is the love which of old -was the source of the “Vita Nuova,” and which springs anew in our own -age through “Our Lady of Pity” and “The Blessed Damozel.” In such -designs Rossetti has restored to us all that was best in the mediæval -thought of womanhood,—adding the “ever-motherly” to the “ever-womanly” -of the Hellenic model, and the Divine Motherhood to the Divine -Fatherhood of the Christian ideal; and enriched it with the whole wealth -of psycho-sensuous beauty brought over from the region of romance. And -in this consummation is justified the verdict of Ruskin: that “Rossetti -was the chief intellectual force in the establishment of the modern -romantic school in England.” - ------ - -Footnote 9: - - William Tirebuck: “D.G. Rossetti; his work and influence.” - -Footnote 10: - - Gabriel Sarrazin: “Poètes Modernes d’Angleterre.” - -Footnote 11: - - Rossetti’s sonnet, “Found.” - -Footnote 12: - - Rev. P.F. Forsyth: “Religion in Recent Art.” - -Footnote 13: - - Rossetti’s sonnet, “Pandora.” - -Footnote 14: - - Walter Pater, “The Renaissance: Studies of Art and Poetry.” - - - - - CHAPTER VIII. - THE POETRY OF DANTE ROSSETTI. - -The “Pre-Raphaelite” in Literature—The Complexity of Talent in an Age of - Re-birth—The Restoration of Romance in England—The Latin and the - Saxon in Rossetti—Latin Diction for the Sonnets as Reflective - Poetry—Saxon Diction for the Ballads as Dramatic Poetry—“The House - of Life”—Treatment of Romantic Love—Illustrations of Sonnet - Structure—Miscellaneous Lyrics—“The Portrait,” “The Stream’s - Secret,” “Dante at Verona,” “The Staff and Scrip”—The Ballads—“The - White Ship,” “The King’s Tragedy,” “Sister Helen,” “Rose Mary,” “The - Bride’s Prelude,” “The Blessed Damozel”—“A Last Confession”—“Jenny”— - Relation of Rossetti’s Poetry to his Painting. - - -The poetry of Dante Gabriel Rossetti lies apart from the main current of -contemporary verse, both in its highly specialized quality of thought -and language, and in the conditions and circumstances of its production. -Inasmuch as he followed openly the profession of a painter, pursuing -poetry, for the most part, as a recreative rather than a principal study -(though never with less seriousness than his accepted vocation), and -publishing his first volume of original poems in his forty-second year, -he is exempt to some extent from the standards of criticism applied to -him whose creative energies are concentrated in the field of literature. -Whether Rossetti’s genius, as he himself believed, found its highest and -most perfect embodiment in poetry rather than in painting,—whether the -essential qualities of his art will be more evident to posterity in the -modest volume of his collected poems than in the pictures now dispersed -through England and America—is still an open question. It may, however, -be admitted that his mastery of the verbal medium was almost always more -complete, his discipline in metrical structure more thorough, and his -natural habit of diction more facile, than any skill which he attained -in brush and pencil. To estimate his final influence upon contemporary -thought in the one realm as against the other is yet more difficult than -to assess the relative merit of his actual work in either sphere: so -intimately was the poet incarnate in the painter; so largely did the -painter’s vision inspire and dominate the poet. - -But it would be a poor analysis that should divide too finely the -interwoven threads of a radiant and many-coloured genius. In an age of -intellectual re-birth, of artistic and social revolution, the re- -adjustment of forces and functions in the ethical and æsthetical realms -is apt to produce a strange complexity of talent, not always beneficial -to a single art, not always well for the diversely endowed artist, but -often tending to the unification of many activities into one effective -stream of purpose, moved by the impulse that infused the nation with a -Time-Spirit potent for immortal things. Such a combination of talent in -single personalities, in a period of rare national fertility in -scholarship and creative power, reveals at the same time the basic unity -of the æsthetic life and its inseparable interdependence with the moral -ideal. Michaelangelo, at the zenith of the Italian Renaissance, standing -at the parting of the ways, gathered up, as it seemed, the several arts -into his representative genius, and left to the land that was soon to -swamp the æsthetic spirit in the mire of a materialistic decadence the -threefold heritage of his painting, his sculpture, and his song. -Rossetti, at the zenith of the English Renaissance, drew a twofold -inspiration from the struggle of the modern world, and left the double -dower of painting and of poetry, to urge the coming generation to the -higher issues of fine art, or to stand, the witness of rejected ideals -to ages recalcitrant to the vision and the impulse of to-day. - -For the first greatness of Rossetti’s poetry is that it assumes for ever -the reality and the immanence of a spiritual—and more—a moral world. Not -that he ever misuses the vehicles of art as tools of philosophy, or -stoops to a didactic application of æsthetic truth. But his art is all -moral (as Mr. Ruskin would put it) because it is all fine art. And the -moral purpose of art is the better secured when art is trusted to effect -that purpose in its own way. The consciously didactic poet is less sure -to mould the will and character of a people, than he the form and -substance of whose utterance are so perfected in truth and virility of -thought, in majesty and grace of speech, as to be a fit oblation to his -own ideal. Not “how can I best teach others and influence them aright?” -but “how can I best express the highest things I know and feel?” is the -self-examination of the true artist. Rossetti’s poetry is self- -expressive, self-revealing to the very heart’s core. The ultimate test -of poetry is not “what did this man intend to teach us?” but “of what -sort is the manhood here revealed? what are the visions by which it -lived? what the ideals in which it grew? Is such a soul’s experience -wide, deep, typical, and profitable to the rest of mankind?” - -In applying such a test to the writings of Rossetti, it is necessary to -distinguish between what may be roughly termed the “personal” and the -“impersonal” poems. In the one class, supremely exemplified by the -“House of Life” sonnets, but including also “Dante at Verona,” “The -Stream’s Secret,” “The Portrait,” and many of the shorter lyrics, the -personal note of love or grief, of memory or hope, is wholly dominant; -the poet’s soul is absorbed with its individual being, and sees in all -the life around him the illustration and interpretation of his own. In -the other class, in the great romantic ballads, in “Rose Mary” and “The -Blessed Damozel,” in “The White Ship” and “The King’s Tragedy,” in “The -Bride’s Prelude” and “Sister Helen,” the imagination takes a higher and -a larger range; the one soul interprets others, waiting not to be -interpreted. The art becomes impersonal in this sense only—that the -thought of self is merged in the full and immense life of humanity, -laying hold of the universal consciousness through its own initiative -experience; the heart beats with the world’s heart, shares its eternal -struggles, contributes to its eternal growth; and the spirit knows -itself one fragment of an infinite whole. In such a sphere the art -remains the more vitally personal, in that the poet brings the mysteries -of existence, the abiding problems and realities of the conscious world, -to the touchstone, as it were, of his own spirit, and submits himself -thereby to the more crucial test,—of how he can interpret humanity to -man, and make more clear the knowledge, more possible the realization, -of his highest ideals. - -With this general division of the subject-matter of Rossetti’s poetry, -the classification of its metrical cast and forms of diction will be -singularly parallel. Most of his finest compositions might be -distinguished as purely Saxon or pre-eminently Latin poems; and it is -notable that the more intimately subjective and analytic the thought -within, the more persistently does it assume the Latin garb; while as -the imagination ranges from the introspection of the hyper-conscious -self, and finds, on the heights of common human feeling and aspiration, -a larger and a freer air, the mode passes into the more keen and -rarified Saxon speech. No other English poet has resolved the breadth -and simplicity of the Gothic, and the depth and intensity of the Italian -habit of expression, into such distinctive poetic vehicles. But at the -same time few have blended the diverse elements of the modern English -tongue into the harmony and sonority with which Rossetti’s music thrills -when he tempers the sharper Saxon with a deep undertone of polysyllabic -song; or stirs the languorous pulses of a sonnet with some swift cadence -of familiar words. He had the finest perception of national and racial -properties of form and rhythm; and discerning the characteristics of the -poetry of action in the literature of the north, and the poetry of -reflection in the literature of the south, he cast his great historical -lyrics in the highest narrative—that is to say, the ballad form; and -chose the sonnet—the most remote, chastened, and exclusive vehicle—for -the meditative, and yet sensuous, self-delineative love-poetry. - -These broad generalizations, however, cannot be closely pressed upon the -entire sequence of Rossetti’s poems. The exigencies of the English -language alone elude their literal application. They will rather serve -to illustrate the duality of his endowments, and the singular power of -his genius both to conserve and specialize the characteristics of his -Italian heritage, and also to waive them in the Saxon mode as utterly as -though the latter were more native to his tongue. - -Nor does such a superficial distinction affect the spiritual qualities -which pervade Rossetti’s poetry as a whole. From first to last, in -dramatic description or narrative, in sonnet-argument or meditative -questioning, his verse remains full-charged with the very essence of -romance. As a poet, he is neither less nor more Pre-Raphaelite than as a -painter. The vivid and intense simplicity of his Saxon diction, the -verbal lightnings of his ballad-style, seem to correspond with the tone -and method of his water-colour painting, and the more laboured splendour -of the sonnets with the properties of his work in oils. Nor is it -difficult to detect an analogy between that stage of his painting in -which the pristine lucidity of expression was partially lost in the -painful tension of his later thought, and the tendency of some few of -his sonnets towards decadence into the over-laborious and the obscure. -Yet if by “Pre-Raphaelite” we understand that fusion of the naïve -mysticism of romance with austere Platonic Hellenism which we discern in -the best Renaissance art, Rossetti never falls in spirit from that -standard of beauty and truth; and rarely lapses, through the very -richness and fecundity of the language at his command, into the -redundant verbiage towards which his sensuous imagery was easily led. It -has remained for a brother-poet of the romantic revival to cultivate a -more marvellous dexterity of rhyme and rhythm, and to develop the -technical resources of our language to the utmost limits of intelligible -song. The lyrics of Mr. Swinburne, like the superb decorative -extravagances of the later Renaissance, represent that culmination of -mastery over the forms of expression wherein to-day, as of yore, the -purity of the thought is lost in the splendour of the setting, and -poetic power wastes itself in a magic facility of verse. - -The poetry of Rossetti, modern as it is in its passionate grasp of human -interests, its deep insight into present and perpetual things, links -itself nevertheless to an English past; takes up, as it were, the -dropped threads of Elizabethan glory; re-inspires the circling breath of -life which passed round Europe in the fifteenth century, kindling -England from the fires of re-awakened Italy in the golden age of song. -It has already been pointed out by one of Rossetti’s biographers that -“the malign influence over our literature in post-Shakespearean times -has been French.” It was reserved for a second Renaissance, heralded by -Chatterton and Blake, led by Shelley, Keats, and Coleridge, and -culminated by Dante Rossetti, to blot out two centuries of foreign -tradition and control, and take us back to the broad simplicity and -dignity of Shakespeare’s England. - -Our reiteration, therefore, of the term “Pre-Raphaelite” in approaching -Rossetti’s work as a poet, leads us to expect, not mysticism merely, but -a certain robust sensuousness, as of Pagan origin, in his interpretation -of life and destiny. The romantic temper in its highest manifestations, -absorbing and transfiguring, rather than conflicting with, the classic -ideals, implies much more than receptivity to newer beauty and truth. It -has a moral basis and an intellectual range: it apprehends the spiritual -world as something closely bound up with familiar things: it finds the -human soul striving for expression through material forms: it recognizes -the divine possibilities of individual and social life, the force and -responsibility of personal character, and the solemnity of the choice -between good and evil daily made by man. - -But the controversy excited by Rossetti’s pictures has been neither more -intemperate nor more significant than that which has raged around his -poems;—interpreted by one section of his critics as a pæan of sensuality -and materialism, by another as the most spiritual and chastened love- -poetry of the age. The laureate of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood indeed -summed up, in what now affords but one volume of original verse, the -inmost vicissitudes of a spirit so rare and rich of vision as to -transcend at once the canons of conventional experience. But the -personal note, in the self-delineative poems, is struck with a peculiar -dignity of reserve; and even while the most sacred depths of individual -consciousness are laid bare, the actual _ego_ is never intruded upon the -surface of the speech,—never portrays directly its own character, seldom -describes its own sensations as Byron or Shelley would; but veils -itself, even in the profusion of luminous imagery and searching analysis -of thought and sense. - -The eternal mysteries and sanctities of sexual love, conceived in its -highest aspects and known as a revelation and a sacrament, afford the -theme of nearly all Rossetti’s autobiographic poetry. The conditions of -its production were ordained by the stern fate that linked him afar off -to Dante among his countrymen, and near at hand to two brother-mourners -among minor English bards—James Thomson and Philip Bourke Marston—in the -sad fraternity of poets whom death has prematurely robbed of the beloved -object that once inspired their song. The exalted spirituality which -marks Rossetti’s treatment of this theme was doubtless largely due to -the influence of Dante, and especially to the fruitful inspiration and -discipline of the great literary task of his youth—the translation of -the “Vita Nuova” and kindred examples of the early Italian poets—than -which Rossetti could have hardly found a better preparation for his work -that was to come. - -Into his great sonnet-sequence, “The House of Life,” Rossetti poured the -full passion of his mystic love,—partially inherent in his own sensuous, -imaginative, and introspective nature, partially instilled at the feet -of Dante; and learned—a bitter and a costly lesson—at the school of -experience also; fraught with inestimable joy and sorrow to his own -soul. “At an age,” says one writing of that hard probation, “when most -men have outlived the romances of their youth, Rossetti was laying, in -‘The House of Life,’ the foundations of a new school of love-poetry.” He -was in fact re-creating the æsthetic life of a nation; restoring to it, -through the alembic of mediæval and Renaissance thought, the lost glory -of all that was abidingly precious in the Platonic world. For in this -wondrous cycle of sonnets is re-coined the whole language of ideal love. -From the last echo of the “Vita Nuova” it takes up the same pure strain, -and sings again the song of Dante for the Blessed Beatrice; hymning the -very apotheosis of spiritual passion, and harmonizing once more in -English poetry the intellectual with the sensuous world. Never, in the -superb visions of “The House of Life”—in which the soul of man is -pictured sojourning awhile during its solemn and fateful passage through -eternity—never does the physical love become the stumbling-block to the -spiritual, but always the key to it. The “body’s beauty” is only -precious as the witness of the “soul’s beauty;” the physical bond is -nothing if not the symbol of a spiritual affinity, a sacred kinship, -fore-ordained, if not eternal, sealed in Heaven and consecrated to the -divinest purposes; the sensuous rapture is but a symbolic worship,—“the -outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace” which to -reject or betray is to profane the inmost sanctuary of the God of Love: - - “Even so, when first I saw you, seemed it, love, - That among souls allied to mine was yet - One nearer kindred than life hinted of. - O born with me somewhere that men forget, - And though in years of sight and sound unmet, - Known for my soul’s birth-partner well enough!” - -Love the revealer of unseen verities, the binder of invisible bonds; -Love the deliverer from material trammels, the opener of the gate of -life; these are to him the gracious manifestations of the same deity: - - “O what from thee the grace, to me the prize, - And what to Love the glory,—when the whole - Of the deep stair thou tread’st to the dim shoal - And weary water of the place of sighs, - And there dost work deliverance, as thine eyes - Draw up my prisoned spirit to thy soul!” - -In the large atmosphere of such a worship, seeing all things, as we have -said, _sub specie eternitatis_, the poet portrays the sweetest -intimacies of communion, soul with soul; questioning, recording, -comparing from time to time the recurring phases of joy and hope, memory -and regret. “When do I see thee most?” he asks in the exquisite sonnet -called “Lovesight”: - - “When do I see thee most, beloved one? - When in the light the spirits of mine eyes - Before thy face, their altar, solemnize - The worship of that love through thee made known? - Or when in the dusk hours, (we two alone,) - Close-kissed and eloquent of still replies - Thy twilight-hidden glimmering visage lies, - And my soul only sees thy soul its own?” - -“What of her glass without her?” he cries again after the great -bereavement which has removed the visible presence of the beloved: - - “What of her glass without her? The blank grey - There where the pool is blind of the moon’s face. - Her dress without her? The tossed empty space - Of cloud-rack whence the moon has passed away. - Her paths without her? Day’s appointed sway - Usurped by desolate night. Her pillowed place - Without her? Tears, ah me! for love’s good grace, - And cold forgetfulness of night or day.” - -And with what fine insight does Rossetti pierce the tender subtleties of -the woman’s responsive heart! Has any other English poet discerned so -well that retrospective instinct which clings to the early semblances of -pure and non-sexual love? - - —“She loves him, for her infinite soul is love. - * * * * * * - With wifely breast to breast - And circling arms, she welcomes all command - Of love,—her soul to answering ardours fanned: - Yet as morn springs or twilight sinks to rest, - _Ah! who shall say she deems not loveliest - The hour of sisterly sweet hand-in-hand?_” - -In that hint lies the acknowledgment of the Platonic ideal,—that -whatever dignifies and ennobles the affections must lie not in the -outward conditions but within; that the senses are but the accessories -of Love; the temporary channels, not the eternal stream. And this -insistence on the spiritual aspects of passion affects the whole tone -and temper of Rossetti’s poetry; raising it, in moments of intense -feeling, almost to the mystic exaltation of a Pascal, and transfiguring -all the world of consciousness by the knowledge and memory of an -overmastering love. From the first to the last of the hundred sonnets we -are shown steadfastly the outlook upon life of one to whom all life has -been sanctified by that supreme experience. “Who can read ‘The House of -Life’” (says Mr. F.W.H. Myers in his essay on “Rossetti and the Religion -of Beauty”[15]) “and not feel that this poet has known love as love can -be, not an enjoyment only or a triumph, but a worship and a -regeneration?” - -In such a spirit does the poet take account of time and opportunity, and -recognize the solemnities of passing hour. Life has become more sacred, -the man more responsible, the imperative forces of character and destiny -more urgent than before. The sense of personal possibilities and -shortcomings weighs upon him. “Lost days” and wasted chances oppress his -mind. The actualities of evil in his own sphere of being look darker in -the face of the recognized good: - - “The lost days of my life until to-day, - What were they, could I see them on the street - Lie as they fell? Would they be ears of wheat - Sown once for food but trodden into clay? - - Or golden coins squandered and still to pay? - Or drops of blood dabbling the guilty feet? - Or such spilt water as in dreams must cheat - The throats of men in Hell, athirst alway? - - I do not see them here, but after death - God knows I know the faces I shall see, - Each one a murdered self, with low last breath. - ‘I am thyself,—what hast thou done to me?’ - ‘And I—and I—thyself,’ (lo! each one saith,) - ‘And thou thyself to all eternity!’” - -And in a similar strain the poet prays: - - “O Lord of work and peace! O Lord of life! - O Lord, the awful Lord of will! though late, - Even yet renew this soul with duteous breath: - That when the peace is garnered in from strife, - The work retrieved, the will regenerate, - This soul may see thy face, O Lord of death!” - -This sense of destiny it is, this keen perception—characteristic of all -true romance—of the reality of the spiritual world, the transiency of -earthly joys and the insufficiency of external things, that gives the -persistent undertone of melancholy to Rossetti’s love-sonnets, and more -or less, indeed, to all his poetry. He does not, perhaps, sustain the -peculiar minor key which the resigned and pensive fatalism of William -Morris imparts. His grasp of fate is firmer, and with all his despair -and doubt and grief he keeps a greater dignity of front than any of his -surviving brother-poets. But his pessimism, if it must be called so, had -its source in a hyper-sensitive and self-conscious personality, and was -drawn, as one has said of Michaelangelo, from “the struggle of a strong -nature to attune itself.” It is an absorbing struggle, on which to look -with reverent reserve; carried on within the sorely-shaken spaces of a -spirit too proud to vent itself, as Swinburne’s, in a broad and vigorous -iconoclasm; too isolated to find relief, as the poet of “The Earthly -Paradise” was presently to do, in the vanguard of a social revolution -promising the heaven of his dreams. Nor could Rossetti’s wayward heart -find permanent rest in the fervid religious faith which sustained the -poetess of the Pre-Raphaelite movement—his sister, Miss Christina -Rossetti. - -Yet the sadness that tinges Rossetti’s verse is nearly always of a kind -that chastens without enervating, and strengthens while it subdues. -Intimately personal and subtly introspective as it is, it lifts us on to -the highest planes of living poetry. We feel that the writer has learnt -that first great lesson which indeed Rossetti himself has urged in these -sonnets,— - - “By thine own tears thy song must tears beget, - O Singer!” - -And by that baptism of tears he rises to the rank of those whose -individual loss and grief have blessed the world, as the death of Edward -King blessed it in Milton’s “Lycidas,” and in far greater measure the -death of Arthur Hallam blessed it in Tennyson’s “In Memoriam.” For while -sometimes the expression of personal pain may be put into such perfect -art as to afford in its very poignancy of feeling a sort of æsthetic -consolation, the test of the highest poetic grief is that it shall lose -the smart of personal injury in a strong sense of brotherhood with -fellow-sufferers, and shall translate the revolt against individual pain -into a wide compassion with the sorrows of a nation or of all humanity. - -Nor can we avoid comparison of “The House of Life” with the two great -kindred cycles of love-sonnets in the English language,—the sonnets of -Shakespeare, and Mrs. Browning’s “Sonnets from the Portuguese;” the one -celebrating a hopeless and desolating passion, the other a fortunate and -consummated love. Rossetti touches both these precedents, in that he -knew alike the depths and heights, the hell and heaven, of that passion -of which the poets say,— - - “All other pleasures are not worth its pain.” - -He enjoyed happiness, and suffered despair, not merely in the outward -circumstances of his love, but in a more subtle and irretrievable way. -The fallacy dies hard, that leads us to imagine that the unvaryingly sad -and gloomy natures are the supreme sufferers of the world. On the -contrary, the acuteness of pain is measured by its victim’s capacity for -mirth. And there are some natures so finely organized, so highly-strung, -that even joy is almost painful to them. They cannot lose themselves in -a moment’s rapture, but are beset with contrasts behind and before; are -haunted with the cost of every ecstasy, and rarely learn that calm and -self-possessing wisdom which is the fruit of the knowledge of good and -evil, and through which may come at last, in many channels of -temperament, in many forms of faith and duty, the power to subdue the -evil to the good. Such were Shelley and Keats, Leopardi and Heine, James -Thomson and Philip Bourke Marston: such also was Dante Gabriel Rossetti. - -It would be superfluous to dwell at length on the extraordinary richness -of Rossetti’s metaphor and simile. The imagery in the “House of Life” is -for the most part sensuous, fervid, and almost tropical in colour and -atmosphere. Here are a crowd of variously portentous spirits,— - - ... “Fame, whose loud wings fan the ashen Past - To signal fires;” - - ... “Song, whose hair - Blew like a flame and blossomed like a wreath;” - - ... “Love, smiling to receive - Along his eddying plumes the auroral wind;” - -And— - - ... “Life herself, the spirit’s friend and love, - Even still as Spring’s authentic harbinger - Glows with fresh hours for hope to glorify; - Though pale she lay when in the winter grove - Her funeral flowers were snowflakes shed on her - And the red wings of frost-fire rent the sky.” - -We follow the soul of the lover— - - ... “where wan water trembles in the grove, - And the wan moon is all the light thereof,” - - ... “o’er the sea of love’s tumultuous trance,” - - “Upon the devious coverts of dismay” - -across “death’s haggard hills”; among - - “Shadows and shoals that edge eternity,” - -and through - - ... “that last - Wild pageant of the accumulated past - That clangs and flashes for a drowning man.” - -The superb climax just quoted terminates one of the most vivid and -haunting of the “House of Life” series,—“The Soul’s Sphere,”— -illustrative of the vast range of consciousness known to one - - “Who, sleepless, hath ... anguished to appease - Tragical shadow’s realm of sound and sight - Conjectured in the lamentable night,” - -and probes the memory for images whose calm splendour may bring -forgetfulness of self. The subject is that of Wordsworth’s well-known -sonnet, “A flock of sheep that leisurely pass by;” and the contrast -between the visions conjured up by the two very diverse poets exactly -illustrates the difference of temperament which set them at opposite -poetic poles. The mind of Wordsworth rests in the contemplation of -familiar things, gains peace in the common incidents of pastoral life, -loves Nature best in her ordinary moods, and seeks always the homeliest -of consolations, the most universal joys. The mind of Rossetti craves -ever for the superlative, the exceptional, the intense, and can find no -ease in anything very simple and quiet. - -The value of a poet’s verdict on his own poems is not always to be -measured by his critical faculty when applied to general literature. The -friends of Rossetti have been unanimous in his praise as a critic both -of prose and of poetry, though his desultory reading and vehemence of -judgment led him sometimes into extravagances of worship or -condemnation, and blunted his discrimination of relative merits in -divergent schools. Hence his persistent and quite explicable antipathy -to Wordsworth, and his exaggerated estimate of Chatterton in later life. -But in his criticism of his own work it is inevitable that a poet should -be somewhat biassed by associations and memories bearing upon its -production. It is difficult to take seriously Rossetti’s admission to -the indiscreet admirer of one of his shorter poems,—“You are right: ‘The -Cloud Confines’ _is_ my very best thing.” Lyrically unimpeachable indeed -it is, though not more so than the exquisite “Autumn Song,” “A New -Year’s Burden,” “Insomnia,” “Three Shadows,” or “Sunset Wings;” and -therefore are we fain to take Rossetti’s judgment as based largely on -technical considerations when, in selecting his own favourites from -among the “House of Life” series, he adds to the noble sonnet “Lost -Days” (already quoted) the less impassioned but more coherent and -melodious “Still-born Love,” “The One Hope,” and “Known in Vain.” These -certainly excel in some of the highest qualities of the sonnet form— -unity of idea, and the steady set of the rhythmic flow and ebb in motive -and application; though in none of these does the sestet conform to the -pure Guittonian model on three-rhyme-sounds, blending the first and -fourth, second and fifth, and third and sixth lines in a double tercet, -as it does with signal success in “Lost on Both Sides,” “The Portrait,” -and “Hope Overtaken;” and in only one out of his chosen four (“The One -Hope”) does Rossetti attain what he personally preferred as the most -perfect order of sestet rhymes, based upon two terminal sounds, and -rhyming the first, fourth, and fifth lines against the second, third, -and sixth; thus opening the sestet with a quatrain harmonizing in -structure with the octet above, and yet avoiding the rhymed couplet at -the close which would remove the whole poem from the Italian mould in -which, despite many irregularities, nearly all Rossetti’s sonnets are -cast. The sestet of “Lost Days” (like several others in the series) -exemplifies what is generally held to be the best arrangement of the -two-rhymed sestet in the Guittonian form,—that in which the first, -third, and fifth terminals chime against the second, fourth, and sixth. -Admirable as these four sonnets are, however, in clarity of thought and -cumulative power, it is doubtful whether they should rank higher, from -the broadest standards of poetry, than “Lost on Both Sides,” -“Lovesight,” “Mid-rapture,” or “Supreme Surrender;” in all of which the -gathering force of the motive sweeps in a fine torrent—mournful, -searching, tender, or triumphant—to its eddying close, and the best -tribute to the metrical art of each is that it conveys so perfectly the -inmost fulness of the thought. Frequently, indeed, Rossetti ends a -sonnet with a rhymed couplet on a new terminal sound, following a -Guittonian quatrain, as in “Mid-Rapture,” “True Woman,” “Her Heaven,” -and “The Song-Throe;” or in some cases following a Shakespearean -quatrain after a Guittonian octet, as, for instance, in “Venus Victrix” -and “The Love-Moon.” Very rarely does he compose a whole sonnet in the -Shakespearean measure, namely, that in which the two rhyme-sounds of the -doubled-quatrained octave occur in alternate lines, and the former of -them is carried forward with a new rhyme for the similarly alternated -quatrain of a sestet clenched with a rhyming couplet on another note, as -in “Willow-Wood” (No. III.). The question of the legitimacy of a rhymed -couplet at the close of anything but a wholly Shakespearean sonnet has -been much debated by conflicting authorities on poetic form. The sonnet -is at once the most elastic and the most arbitrary of vehicles for the -concise embodiment of a single thought and its accessory similes. From -the scholar’s point of view, no indiscriminate grafting of one -essentially national and historic growth of form upon another is -theoretically defensible. But, since no European language is of -exclusive stock, the fusion of Latin and Saxon speech in the varied -beauty of modern English seems hardly less anachronistic than the -adaptation of traditional metres to the new requirements of the poetic -faculties of the age. - -Akin to the “House of Life” in spirit and substance is “The Portrait;” a -reminiscence, after the death of the loved model, of hours which saw the -painting of the picture on a stormy summer day. Here the sonnet’s long- -drawn strain gives place to a quicker measure: - - “But when that hour my soul won strength - For words whose silence wastes and kills, - Dull raindrops smote us, and at length - Thundered the heat within the hills. - That eve I spoke those words again - Beside the pelted window-pane; - And there she hearkened what I said, - With under-glances that surveyed - The empty pastures blind with rain. - - * * * * * * - - “Last night at last I could have slept, - And yet delayed my sleep till dawn, - Still wandering. Then it was I wept: - For unawares I came upon - Those glades where once she walked with me. - And as I stood there suddenly, - All wan with traversing the night, - Upon the desolate verge of light - Yearned loud the iron-bosomed sea.” - -In “The Stream’s Secret” the verse assumes a still more lyrical rhythm, -as the poet communes with the familiar waters concerning his lost love, -and desires— - - “The wind-stirred robe of roseate grey - And rose-crown of the hour that leads the day - When we shall meet once more,” - - . . . . . . - - “As on the unmeasured height of Love’s control - The lustral fires are lit.” - -The flow of the monologue gleams with such images as these: - - “And on the waste uncoloured wold - The visible burthen of the sun grown cold, - And the moon’s labouring gaze;” - -or— - - “The soul hears the night’s disconsolate cry, - And feels the branches, wringing wet, - Cast on its brow, that may not once forget, - Blind tears from the blind sky.” - -In “Dante at Verona” Rossetti portrays in a somewhat diffuse and -irregular string of descriptive stanzas, some incidents, historic and -imaginary, but always congruous with our best ideals of Dante,—of his -exile from Florence and his sojourn at the Court of Verona after the -death of Beatrice. The poem lacks balance and unity of plan, but abounds -in passages of exquisite feeling, wrought through the keen vision of -those significant accessories that make a great, if fragmentary picture -of the commanding personality so near akin in many aspects to his modern -namesake and disciple, yet strangely removed from him in temperament and -character. How far in either case the lover’s worship was fulfilled and -consummated in a single earthly embodiment of the ideal, or whether such -a brief apparent gain served but to feed the fires of the insatiable -idealism behind it, is hardly for the historian to estimate. But -whatever the actual channels found by the dominant passion of their -poetry, however diverse the conditions under which it sought its outlet -towards the infinite sea, both Dante and Rossetti may be counted with -the isolated band of dreamers, who, as Shelley once said aptly of -himself, “are always in love with something or other; their error -consists in seeking in a mortal image the likeness of what is, perhaps, -eternal.” They “have loved Antigone before they visited this earth, and -are ever demanding of life more than it can give.” - -On such a pilgrimage the sombre figure of “Dante at Verona” passes -before us, through the palaces and gardens of Can Grande della Scala, -ever remote, self-absorbed, austere; “with set brows lordlier than a -frown;” and we are shown his vigils, his spiritual isolation among the -gross luxuries and corruptions of the table, the chamber, and the hall; -and how his presence half won, half awed the women of the court; - - “And when the music had its sign - To breathe upon them for more ease - Sometimes he turned and bade it cease.” - -And he who followed steadfastly the inward vision of the lost Beatrice, -to be regained in Paradise, cherished with the more integrity his love -for the city of Beatrice,—Florence, that “sat solitary” when Beatrice -died, and now seemed lost also. And he answered them that would win back -the exiled patriot-poet,— - - “That since no gate led, by God’s will, - To Florence, but the one whereat - The priests and money-changers sat, - He still would wander; for that still, - Even through the body’s prison-bars - His soul possessed the sun and stars.” - -Here again is struck the keynote of romance, “the note of resistance and -defiance” of external trammels and material bonds; the note of spiritual -courage which can pierce through the finite to the infinite life, and -“possess” what this world cannot remove or bestow. And in this high -strain the personal accent, the autobiographic undertone, loses itself -in a loftier music, and “Dante at Verona” is brought within measurable -distance of Rossetti’s finest work—his great romantic ballads, “Rose -Mary,” “The White Ship,” “The King’s Tragedy,” “Sister Helen,” “The -Bride’s Prelude,” “The Staff and Scrip,” and “The Blessed Damozel.” - -“The Staff and Scrip,” perhaps, ranks next above “Dante at Verona,” to -which it links itself as a kind of companion poem; celebrating the life- -long faithfulness of a lady to her knight-errant, perished in defence of -her cause. Coming as a pilgrim through her wasted lands, the hero seeks -the queen in her dim palace, where,— - - “The sweetness sickened her - Of musk and myrrh,” - -and dedicates himself to the redemption of the country from her foe. - - “She sent him a sharp sword, whose belt - About his body there - As sweet as her own arms he felt. - He kissed its blade, all bare, - Instead of her.” - -The knight wins in the battle, but dies in the victory, and his body is -brought to the queen. - - “‘Uncover ye his face,’ she said. - ‘O changed in little space!’ - She cried; ‘O pale that was so red! - O God, O God of grace! - Cover his face.’ - - “His sword was broken in his hand - Where he had kissed the blade. - ‘O soft steel that could not withstand! - O my hard heart unstayed, - That prayed and prayed!’” - -The exaltation of spirit is more sustained, the diction more finely -distilled, the air clearer, the whole balance and setting of the -narrative more perfect than in “Dante at Verona.” The passion of -chivalric love, worship, heroism, loyalty, burns at a white-heat from -the first line to the last. Every phrase is purged, chastened, and full- -charged; and flies swiftly with its portentous burden of meaning -straight to the mark. It breathes the very soul of that romantic -chivalry to which the modern world is turning with a shaken conscience -and a regenerate will; impelled to a larger application of its -principles than the golden ages knew. The glory of true knighthood in -its championship of the weak, its resistance of tyranny, its heroic -self-sacrifice, its contempt of ease, its defiance of pain, its devotion -to principle, is as yet a tardy sunrise brokenly discerned through the -long reaches of historic years; an unsteady dawn of world-light clouded -by men’s lust of private power; a scant and partial gleam of what it -must involve for the social life to be. - -“The White Ship” and “The King’s Tragedy” stand together as Rossetti’s -sole and supreme achievements in the realm of historical romance. They -stand, in fact, alone in conception and treatment among modern English -ballads: unequalled even by Tennyson’s “Revenge,” and crowning the lyric -with something almost of the epic quality. The theme of “The White Ship” -is found in the familiar story of Henry I. of England, who is said to -have “never smiled again” after the loss of the “white ship” in which -his son and heir—not mentioned by name in the poem—perished in crossing -the channel from Normandy. “The King’s Tragedy” relates, through the -mouth of Catherine Douglas (“Kate Barlass”), the assassination of James -I. of Scotland by Sir Robert Graeme. In neither ballad is the action -lifted to an unfamiliar or phantasmal world; in both it is transfused, -as it passes across the stage of actual history, with a glow and glamour -of supernatural light; brought near to us with a direct realism of -incident and detail as convincing as it is transparent, and yet shrouded -in an atmosphere of mysticism and reserve, pervaded with a sense of doom -and fatality, that holds us in a mingled awe and exaltation such as we -feel in the purest Greek tragedy, amid the strivings of the gods with -men. The narrative of “The White Ship” is told bluntly, vividly, -incoherently, by the humblest of the king’s retinue and the sole -survivor of the royal train, “the butcher of Rouen, poor Berold;” and -the movement seems to gather the more power and sincerity from his -untutored lips. Its dominant motives, its finer touches,—the withholding -of the hero’s name and the allusions to him merely as “the Prince,” the -emphasis on the manner of the death of the “lawless, shameless youth” -who died, after all, for his sister’s sake—the emphasis throughout on -character rather than on incident—these are true marks of romantic -poetry. - -But “The King’s Tragedy” far surpasses the earlier ballad in sustained -and unfaltering dignity of passion, in the tender humanness of the -narrative setting, the grandly simple presentation of the climax, and -the weird portent of the earlier scenes. None but the two or three who -saw the writer in the course of his task can know what the poem cost -Rossetti in his dying year,—the last great product of a literary genius -still ascendant when obscured by death, and if not the finest of all his -ballads, sharing at least the rank of “Sister Helen,” “Rose Mary,” and -“The Blessed Damozel.” Never does he use the supernatural machinery with -a more masterly restraint or yet with a more powerful effect of dread -and presage, than when he brings the aged woman of the sea, like one of -the witches of “Macbeth,” to confront the King with her fourfold vision -of his doom: - - “Four years it is since first I met, - ’Twixt the Duchray and the Dhu, - A shape whose feet clung close in a shroud, - And that shape for thine I knew. - - “A year again, and on Inchkeith Isle - I saw thee pass in the breeze, - With the cerecloth risen above thy feet - And wound about thy knees. - - “And yet a year, in the Links of Forth, - As a wanderer without rest, - Thou cam’st with both thine arms i’ the shroud - That clung high up thy breast. - - * * * * * * - - “And when I met thee again, O King, - That of death hast such sore drouth,— - Except thou turn again on this shore,— - The winding-sheet shall have moved once more, - And covered thine eyes and mouth. - - “For every man on God’s ground, O King, - His death grows up from his birth - In a shadow-plant perpetually; - And thine towers high, a black yew-tree, - O’er the Charterhouse of Perth!” - -Then, in strange contrast to the wild scenery of the “black beach-side” -in winter, we are shown the king and queen at home and keeping festival -in the ill-fated house. The revelry of the halls, and the quiet joy of -the hearthside, seem to avert for a time the coming woe. The king takes -his harp, and sings to the queen an old love-song which he had written -to her from prison long ago. But soon the boded fate falls on them -unaware: - - “’Twas a wind-wild eve in February, - And against the casement pane - The branches smote like summoning hands, - And muttered the driving rain.” - -The entrance of the traitors, with “three hundred armèd men,” urges on -the climax of the tragedy, until at last the king, discovered in the -vault where he had hastily hidden: - - “Half-naked stood, but stood as one - Who yet could do and dare. - With the crown, the King was stript away,— - The Knight was ’reft of his battle array,— - But still the man was there!” - -The poem ends on a stern note of revenge and retribution, for, when the -shameful deed is done, the queen keeps watch for a whole month beside -the royal body; refusing to permit the burial till every one of the -“murderous league” is put to a more terrible death than his lord. - - “And then she said,—‘My King, they are dead!’ - And she knelt on the chapel floor, - And whispered low with a strange proud smile,— - ‘James, James, they suffered more!’” - -There is, perhaps, a higher aspect to this passion of revenge, this -fierce, imperative, triumphant sense of moral justice and supernatural -retribution, than the somewhat partial and personal form which it -assumes in mediæval poetry. Beneath the crude worship of arbitrary rule, -behind the primitive conception of a Power that for ever vindicates the -brave and puts the coward to confusion, lies the germ of that larger -sense of divine vengeance which inspires and dominates all great -tragedy. Something of this higher strain of feeling, this perception of -the futility of merely human punishments and personal judgments, yet -mingled with an instinctive acceptance of the human measures as the -instruments of the divine, finds expression in the ballad of “Sister -Helen.” The theme is based upon an ancient superstition to the effect -that the death of a wrong-doer could be supernaturally procured by the -injured person, by making a waxen image in his semblance and melting it -for three days and nights before a fire. Sister Helen’s lover has been -unfaithful to her, and in her anger against him she melts his image and -keeps her dreadful watch relentlessly through the appointed hours, till -the spell is completed, and her vengeance achieves its purpose in the -death of her enemy. The poem is cast in the form of a dialogue between -Sister Helen and her little brother, whose childish wonder at the -mysterious process distracts him from his play; and he looks by turns at -the fatal fire and at the wintry landscape without. - - “‘Why did you melt your waxen man, - Sister Helen? - To-day is the third since you began.’ - ‘The time was long, yet the time ran, - Little brother.’ - (O Mother, Mary Mother, - Three days to-day, between Hell and Heaven!)” - -She bids the child watch from the balcony while she, within, proceeds -with her incantation. Presently messengers ride hastily up the road, -calling upon Helen, and pleading with her for mercy upon the dying man: - - “‘But he calls for ever on your name, - Sister Helen, - And says that he melts before a flame.’ - ‘My heart for his pleasure fared the same, - Little brother.’ - (O Mother, Mary Mother, - Fire at the heart, between Hell and Heaven!)” - -The contrast between the boy’s innocent, eager reports and observations, -and Helen’s bitter, mocking answers, carries with it all the solemn -terror of the Greek, and all the mystic naïveté of the mediæval world. -At last the unfaithful lover’s aged father, and finally his three days’ -bride, arrive to add their entreaties for his life, and the lady falls -fainting at Helen’s inhospitable door. - - “‘They’ve caught her to Westholm’s saddle-bow, - Sister Helen, - And her moonlit hair gleams white in its flow.’ - ‘Let it turn whiter than winter snow, - Little brother!’ - (O Mother, Mary Mother, - Woe-withered gold, between Hell and Heaven!)” - -It is not until too late that Helen learns that by seeking revenge for -her own sorrow she has only doubled the sin. Absorbed in her own heart’s -bitterness, she cannot know that the only anger worthy to play a part in -the divine retribution is that which burns not so much for the sin -against self as for the sin against love; which draws from the smart of -personal injury a righteous indignation for others’ wrongs, a profound -and passionate pity for fellow-victims of a too common evil, a too -familiar grief. But in Helen’s vengeance lies her own despair: - - “‘Ah! what white thing at the door has crossed, - Sister Helen? - Ah! what is this that sighs in the frost?’ - ‘A soul that’s lost as mine is lost, - Little brother!’ - (O Mother, Mary Mother, - Lost, lost, all lost, between Hell and Heaven!)” - -The same thought of reciprocal sin, if we may so express it,—of the -mutual responsibility of soul to soul,—that subtle action of the law of -vicarious suffering by which every soul that falls short of its own -highest and best inevitably drags down some other soul with it,—and the -converse thought of individual redemption through mutual love: these -afford the motive of “Rose Mary.” - - “Shame for shame, yea, and sin for sin: - Yet peace at length may our poor souls win - If love for love be found therein.” - -The story turns upon the magic properties attributed to the Beryl-stone, -into which the pure in heart might look and read the future, and be -forewarned against all danger or calamity. Rose Mary’s mother bids her -read the mysterious crystal on the eve of her lover’s journey to a -distant shrine, whither he rides to seek shrift for his soul before the -wedding-day. The mother fears some ambush of foes by the way, and trusts -the Beryl to reveal where the danger lies. Unknown to her, however, Rose -Mary and her lover have joined in sin; and their sin dispossesses the -good spirits from the stone, and yields their place to evil spirits, so -that the spell works by contraries, and the oracle speaks falsely; the -lover is betrayed and killed on the road at night. But, unknown to Rose -Mary, her lover has been faithless, even to her own love. The sin is -threefold,—his with her, hers with him, and his with another; and Rose -Mary learns that only by an heroic forgiveness and self-sacrifice which -shall cost her very life can she atone for her own and his greater sin, -win pardon for both, and cast out the evil tenants from the Beryl stone. -The ballad moves throughout at Rossetti’s highest poetic level; its -majestic rhythm sweeps from verse to verse in a torrent of swift, -strong, lyric narrative, almost too cohesive for quotation, save in such -descriptive stanzas as these: - - “Even as she spoke, they two were ’ware - Of music-notes that fell through the air; - A chiming shower of strange device, - Drop echoing drop, once, twice, and thrice, - As rain may fall in Paradise. - * * * * * * - As the globe slid to its silken gloom, - Once more a music rained through the room; - Low it splashed like a sweet star-spray, - And sobbed like tears at the heart of May, - And died as laughter dies away.” - -But the imagery from first to last is of extraordinary tenderness and -power; as, for instance, in describing the first lightning-flash before -a storm,— - - “Ere labouring thunders heave the chain - From the flood-gates of the drowning rain,” - -or when,— - - “The dawn broke dim on Rose Mary’s soul,— - No hill-crown’s heavenly aureole, - But a wild gleam on a shaken shoal,” - -and in the past night,— - - “She knew she had waded bosom-deep - Along death’s bank in the sedge of sleep.” - -It is impossible to adequately criticise “Rose Mary” without reference -to the question already raised by Mr. Theodore Watts, as to whether in -future editions of Rossetti’s poems the “Beryl Songs” should not be -removed from their present places in the interludes of the poem and -relegated to a note at the end. Writing on this point in the “Athenæum,” -Mr. Watts said:—“The only case in which Rossetti’s changes were not -improvements was the case of the changes in ‘Rose Mary,’ made, not -after, but before, it appeared in type,—changes which can only be called -lamentable. It had lain in its perfect form for years, and although it -had been read in manuscript to scores of friends, no line in it had been -altered. But when passing ‘Ballads and Sonnets’ through the press in -1881, at a time when he was out of health, Rossetti called to mind -certain remarks upon a supposed lack of clarity in his work which had -fallen not only from some critics but from certain friends; and in an -evil moment it occurred to him that it would be a gain to ‘Rose Mary’ if -the three parts were knit together by lyrics, and he set to work to -write the ‘Beryl Songs’ which now appear in the ballad. The lyrics -themselves are not good, for his endowment of metre was not equal to his -other poetical gifts; but had they been as good as the lyrics in ‘Maud’ -the disaster to the poem would have been none the less grievous. A -friend whom at that time he consulted upon everything strongly fought -against the introduction of these incongruities, but Rossetti was too -ill to be persistently opposed, and only became conscious of the mistake -when it was too late, the book being then before the public.” - -It is obvious that the friend here alluded to is Mr. Watts himself, and -it must be remembered that inasmuch as every line of the ballad -_without_ the lyrics had been familiar to him for years, his verdict can -hardly be accepted as that of an unbiassed judge. It is, at all events, -dubious whether any editor would now presume to disturb the sequence of -the poem. - -In one other ballad of kindred structure does Rossetti sustain a similar -flow of exquisite imagination, in verbal beauty and subtlety of idiom -hard to surpass in modern English verse. “The Bride’s Prelude” is indeed -but a lovely fragment, a delicate vignette, a little character-sketch -bathed in the warmest and finest of mediæval colouring; a prelude only, -as it modestly claims to be; but, like Chopin’s preludes in music, so -perfect in its limited range that the ear craves no further melody for a -long while after its brief passion has sung itself to rest. It is a -bride’s confession to her younger sister on her wedding morn; and, -taking the form of a broken monologue interspersed with descriptive -passages of the highest poetic order, its movement is more deliberate, -its ornament more richly wrought, perhaps, than that of the more -dramatic ballads. It might almost be said that nowhere else does -Rossetti so oppress the reader with the actual feeling of the atmosphere -in which the tale is told. The intense and sultry stillness of the -chamber at mid-noon, where the two women sit together probing for the -first and only time the one dire secret of the past, weighs upon us like -veritable glare and burning silence, save for the bride’s difficult -speech, and the shocked sister’s faint answers, and the keen, far-off -sounds in the courtyard below, till the last word is said. Every minute -detail of sight and sound heightens the effect of warmth and colour in -contrast to the bare simplicity and hard tragedy of the narrative. - - “The room lay still in dusty glare, - Having no sound through it - Except the chirp of a caged bird - That came and ceased: and if she stirred, - Amelotte’s raiment could be heard. - - “Although the lattice had dropped loose, - There was no wind; the heat - Being so at rest that Amelotte - Heard far beneath the plunge and float - Of a hound swimming in the moat. - - “Some minutes since, two rooks had toiled - Home to the nests that crowned - Ancestral ash-trees. Through the glare - Beating again, they seemed to tear - With that thick caw the woof o’ the air.” - -Such fragments afford the merest glimpses of the background, the pure, -delicate, ultra-refined, and yet intensely naturalistic setting of the -poem. - -And indeed it is this highest refinement of naturalism, this perfect -idealization of realities, this raising of the simplest and commonest -accessories of life into universal beauty and significance, that remains -Rossetti’s inmost, utmost charm. This it is that sends us back, again -and again, from all the splendours of his maturity, from the vivid -glories of the ballads and the long-drawn passion of the sonnets, to the -primal sweetness and utter simplicity of “The Blessed Damozel;” the -easiest to love, the hardest to place in a just order, amid all that -came from the hand and heart of Rossetti. - -Written in his nineteenth year (though re-touched with important -improvements afterwards), while the ballads above referred to were the -work of his maturity,—and as remote from them in spirit as in date, the -poem is unique among unique poetry. “The Blessed Damozel” is no product -of precocity. It has not the laboured archaism, the studied originality, -which mark most of the travel-poems of 1849 (“Paris and Belgium,” -“Antwerp and Bruges,” etc.). Superb as are the sonnets of that early -period—such noble utterances as “The Staircase of Notre Dame,” “Place de -la Bastille,” and “The Refusal of Aid between Nations” remaining -unsurpassed by anything in the “House of Life” series—the irregular -lyrics and blank-verse chronicles of those journeys are apt to keep us -in mind of those etymological researches at the British Museum by which -Rossetti is said to have stored his vocabulary with the purest Saxon, -preparatory to ballad-work. “The Blessed Damozel,” on the contrary, is -the most spontaneous and convincing of all his shorter poems. It seems -to have sprung straight from the heart of the boy-poet in a sort of -prophetic rapture, ere he knew the sorrow which he sang, and which his -song should ease, as the most perfect art can sometimes ease, in other -souls, for generations to come. Its strength lies in the very acme of -tenderness; its source in the purest strain of common human feeling—the -passionate, insatiable craving of the faithful heart for the continuity -of life and love beyond the tomb, and the deep sense of the poverty of -celestial compromises to satisfy the mourner on either side of the gulf -that Death has set between. Here again is the true romantic note—the -insistence on the joy and glory of the physical world, the delight in -the earthly manifestations of affection, and the awed, plaintive -conflict of impatience with resignation under the mystery of parting and -transition to an unknown state. It is the same thought which an American -poet has expressed in “Homesick in Heaven,”—the thought that the beloved -departed must in some way share the sorrow of separation, and await the -last reunion with scarcely less longing than theirs whom they have left -behind. “The Blessed Damozel” is one whom Death has thus removed from -her lover’s side, and she is pictured leaning out of Heaven, watching -with tears and prayers for some sign of his coming. It is the lover -himself who sees her thus, as in a dream, and tells us how,— - - “She bowed herself, and stooped - Out of the circling charm, - Until her bosom must have made - The bar she leaned on warm,” - -and how, on the mystic borderland between earth and heaven,— - - “The souls mounting up to God - Went by her like thin flames.” - -The glories of the upper air have no charm for her until he shares them. -Still gazing downward from “the ramparts of God’s house,” she sees— - - “The tides of day and night - With flame and darkness ridge - The void, as low as where this earth - Spins like a fretful midge;” - -she knows the angels who “sit circlewise”— - - “To fashion the birth-robes for them - Who are just born, being dead!” - -Her one prayer is for the old companionship, the old, simple, earthly -happiness,— - - “Only to live as once on earth - With Love,—only to be, - As then awhile, for ever now, - Together, I and he.” - -It was not until many years later that “The Blessed Damozel” afforded -the subject of the picture by which Rossetti is most popularly and -superficially known to the outer world. It was his habit to inscribe his -pictures with some original verse, generally in sonnet form; and some of -his best descriptive sonnets, such as “Pandora,” “Fiametta,” “Found,” -“Astarte Syriaca,” and “Mary Magdalene,” had such an origin. “The -Blessed Damozel” is said to be only instance of a picture executed after -instead of before the correlative poem. - -Two important works stand yet apart, alike from what we have classed as -introspective and personal poetry, and from the splendid ballads in -which consists Rossetti’s most immortal contribution to English -literature. “Jenny” and “A Last Confession” exemplify his use of the -dramatic monologue, and alone among his compositions bear in a marked -degree the influence of Browning. Especially is this influence notable -in “A Last Confession.” The Italy of this wonderful fragment—placed by -critics of authority in the front rank of Rossetti’s work—is, _par -excellence_, Browning’s Italy, with all the intense humanness and -distinction of character which dominates its furies and its loves, with -all the Saxon intellect and reason stamped into and burning through the -irresponsible passion of the South. Just as in his ballads and sonnets -Rossetti grafted the clean-cut Saxon diction on to the long and -languorous habit of the Latin tongue, so in “A Last Confession” does he -graft vivid thought and piercing argument upon the deep pathos and -terror of the theme. It is a death-bed story told in a priest’s ear; a -story of passion and crime, and of a girl’s shallow laugh that drove her -lover to kill her in a frenzy of despair. For he remembered how, awhile -before,— - - ... “A brown-shouldered harlot leaned - Half through a tavern window thick with wine. - Some man had come behind her in the room - And caught her by the arms, and she had turned - With that coarse empty laugh on him.... - ... And three hours afterwards, - When she that I had run all risks to meet - Laughed as I told you, my life burned to death - Within me, for I thought it like the laugh - Heard at the fair.... - And all she might have changed to, or might change to, - Seemed in that laugh.” - -Somewhat akin in spirit (though less dramatic in treatment), in that it -deals with the problem of sexual love in its darkest form, is the rhymed -monologue entitled “Jenny;” and put into the mouth of one who has -followed, half in pity, half in curiosity, a beautiful courtesan to her -home, and sits with her in the luxurious chamber which is the purchase -of her shame. The poem is to some extent in obvious relation to -Rossetti’s long contemplated but never completed picture, “Found;” but -the latter shows the end of poor Jenny in after years,— - - “When, wealth and health slipped past, you stare - Along the streets alone, and there, - Round the long park, across the bridge, - The cold lamps at the pavement’s edge, - Wind on together and apart, - A fiery serpent for your heart,”— - -whereas her visitor in the poem finds her in all her prime and pride, -and asks,— - - “What has man done here? How atone - Great God, for this which man has done? - . . . . . . - But if, as blindfold fates are tossed - Through some one man this life be lost, - Shall soul not somehow pay for soul?” - -“Jenny,” perhaps, being cast in a more meditative form, lacks the -poignancy and fervour of the utterance which comes, in “A Last -Confession,” from the lips of the sinner himself instead of from the -spectator merely, but it surpasses all contemporary studies of its kind -in its bold and masterly handling of a difficult theme. Both, however, -are distinct from the lyric poems in that their abruptness of movement -and irregularity of structure are the abruptness and irregularity of -quick dramatic thought, impatient of metrical elaboration, surcharging -the poetic vehicle with subject matter; an effect which must not be -confused with the ruggedness of the true ballad-form, whose broken music -haunts the ear by its very waywardness and variety of rhythm, and gains -its end by a studied artlessness the more exquisite for its apparent -unconstraint. Nor is the effect of Rossetti’s universal preference for -assonance over rhyme—a special characteristic of romantic poetry— -identical in the ballads, sonnets and monologues just quoted. In the -sonnets it relieves the rigid tension of the rhyme-system with an -overtone of delicate caprice. In “Jenny” and “A Last Confession” it -heightens the suggestion of impulse, and even haste of thought and -emotion outrunning the metrical order which it chose. In the ballads, it -is the result of the finest workmanship, not of accident or pressure of -thought upon speech; it is the rich inlaying of the most highly-wrought -woof of imaginative language with the brilliance of a perpetual -surprise. - -Rossetti is too near to us for a final estimate of his place among the -century’s poets. Enough has been said to illustrate the range and -consistency of his art, as a whole, and the intimate relation of his -poetry to his painting. The dominant æsthetic motives are the same in -“Dante’s Dream” and “The House of Life,” in “Dis Manibus” and “The -King’s Tragedy,” in “Beata Beatrix” and “The Blessed Damozel.” He was -the prophet of a natural idealism, based upon the frank acceptance and -pursuit of the highest earthly good, subject only and absolutely to -moral and spiritual law. He stood apart, as we have seen, from the -intellectual struggles of his day. Philosophical controversies seldom -troubled him. To theological speculation and historical discovery he was -alike indifferent. But his isolation, his specialism even, are but -evidences of the intensity of the new life to which he was awakened, and -the reality of the visions which he saw. He sets before us in all its -significance the problem of the dual possibilities of womanhood, by the -simple, irresistible, pictorial statement of the contrast between the -shameful actuality of “Found” and the noble ideal of “Sibylla Palmifera” -and “Monna Vanna.” His lamentation for the manhood of his age is that,— - - ... “Man is parcelled out in men - To-day; because, for any wrongful blow, - No man not stricken asks, ‘I would be told - Why thou dost strike’; but his heart whispers then, - ‘_He is he, I am I._’” - -Such words are but the reiteration of that moral collectivism, that -principle that “soul must somehow pay for soul,” which Rossetti -maintains unbrokenly as an assumption needing neither emphasis nor -reserve. The problem which his work leaves to the next generation lies -in the application of that principle to social and national ideals. The -task of the twentieth century will be to do for society what Rossetti -has done for art,—to restore to it the dignity and glory of a free life, -embracing all that nature has to give, under the dominion of associated -reason, and conscience, and will. And when Rossetti’s genius shall have -fulfilled its share in that unification of all knowledge to which the -paths of science and poetry, art and scholarship, tend alike in the -progress of time, England and Italy may join in worthier recognition of -his life-work, whose face was set towards the final triumph of humanity— -the reconciliation of the physical with the spiritual world. - ------ - -Footnote 15: - - F.W.H. Myers, “Essays: Modern.” - - - THE END. - - - - - INDEX. - - Academy, The Royal, 33, 74-75, 80-81, 108, 122, 126-128, 161. - Academy Schools, 23, 27-31. - Academicians of last generation, 33. - “Adam and Eve,” 34. - “Alastor,” 108. - Albert Gallery, Edinburgh, 118. - Allingham, William, 136. - “Anniversary of the Death of Beatrice,” 118, 255. - “Annunciation, The,” 204-205. - Anthony, Mark, 87, 128-129. - “April Love,” 125. - “Art and Poetry,” 72. - “Arthur conveyed to Avalon,” 143. - Art Union, The, 129. - Arundel Club, The, 117. - “Astarte Syriaca,” or “Venus Astarte,” 59, 184-185, 189. - “Aurelia, or Fazio’s Mistress,” 117, 157. - Australia, 108. - “Autumn Leaves,” 121, 127, 229. - “Awakening Conscience, The,” 149, 224, 236, 239. - - - “Ballads and Sonnets,” 186, 298. - Banks, Mrs., 168. - Barbizon School, 134. - Baring, Miss, 168. - Bateman, E.L., 109. - “Beata Beatrix,” 4, 91, 121, 157, 159, 161-162, 224, 252-253. - “Beatrice,” 129. - Behnes, 108. - “Bello Mano, La,” 181. - “Beloved, The,” or “The Bride,” 91, 157. - “Benedick and Beatrice,” 106. - Beryl Songs, 298. - “Bethlehem Gate,” 116, 160, 217. - Birchington, 190-192. - Birmingham Art Gallery, 153, 162. - “Black Brunswicker, The,” 127, 148, 243-244. - Blake, 2, 137, 267. - “Blessed Damozel, The,” 4, 162, 175-176, 180, 185, 217, 257, 263, 287, - 290, 301-304. - “Blind Girl, The,” 121-122, 228-229. - “Blue Bower, The,” 91, 117, 157. - “Blue Closet, The,” 117-118. - “Boat of Love, The,” 180, 251. - “Bocca Baciata,” 104, 117, 157. - “Body of Harold, The,” 34. - Bognor, 181-182. - Botticelli, 48, 50. - “Bower Garden, The,” 117. - “Bower Maiden, The,” 172, 179. - Boyce, W.P., 129. - Boyd, Miss Alice, 168, 171. - Brett, Mr. John, 118, 129. - “Briar Rose, The,” 232. - “Bride’s Prelude, The,” 263, 286, 299-301. - British Institution, 108. - Brotherhood, The Pre-Raphaelite, formed, 62-69; - dispersed, 107, 119. - Brown, Ford Madox, 32-35, 64, 71, 73, 87, 118, 138, 151-155, 161-162, - 175, 178, 193, 219; - some characteristics of, 34, 64, 107, 151-155, 219, 226; - portrait of, 110. - Browning, Robert, 85, 94-96, 104, 165-166, 199; - portraits of, 109, 117. - “Burd, Helen,” 127. - Burlington Club, 204. - Burne-Jones, E., 4, 140-143, 214; - some characteristics of, 205, 219-221, 224, 232, 246-248. - Burne-Jones, Mrs., 168. - Burton, W.S., 129, 248. - Byron, 268. - - - Caine, Mr. Hall, 188-189, 190, 192. - Campbell, James, 129. - “Caractacus,” 35. - “Carlisle Tower,” 116. - Carlyle, Thomas, 85, 154; - portrait of, 108. - Carrick, J.M., 129. - Cary’s Academy, 23, 30. - “Cassandra,” 189. - Cassavetti, the Misses, 168. - “Chapel before the Lists, The,” 116. - “Charity Boy’s Début, The,” 63. - Chatham Place, 94, 159, 163. - Chatterton, 3, 267, 280. - “Chaucer at the Court of Edward III.,” 35, 153. - Chelsea, 163, 172, 180, 193. - Christchurch, Albany Street, 169. - Christianity in English Art, 5, 76-77, 196-221. - Christianity in Italian Art, 40-43, 46-48, 50-52. - “Christian Priests Escaping,” or, “The Christian Missionary,” 76, 146. - “Christ in the House of His Parents,” 75-78, 126, 205-208. - “Christ in the Temple,” 4, 150, 218. - “Christmas Carol, A,” 118. - “Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem,” 129. - Cimabue, 39, 47, 57. - Classicism, characteristics of, 9-12, 45, 49-50. - Classicism of the Eighteenth Century, 9-10. - Classicism under the Puritans, 11. - “Claudio and Isabella,” 149, 224, 244, 246. - Clifton, J.T., 61. - - Coleridge, 267. - Collins, Charles, 118, 126. - Collins, William, 126. - Collinson, James, 4, 63, 74, 93, 99, 126. - Combe, Mr. Thomas, and Mrs., 146. - Constable, 2, 3. - “Convent Thoughts,” 126. - “Cordelia’s Portion,” 153. - Cornelius, 134. - Coronio, Mrs., 168. - “Cottager’s Return, The,” 125. - Cox, David, 131. - “Cromwell Dictating,” 155. - “Cromwell on his Farm,” 155. - “Crucifixion, The,” 116, 215. - Cumberland, 188-189. - Cuyp, 132. - Cyclographic Society, 60-61. - “Cymon and Iphigenia,” 62. - - - Dalrymple, Mrs., 168. - “Damozel, The Blessed,” 4, 162, 175-176, 180, 185, 217, 257, 263, 287, - 290, 301-304. - “Damozel of the Sanct Grael, The,” 116, 181. - Danby, 132. - “Dante at Verona,” 215, 262, 284-285. - Dante, influence of, 22, 98; - illustrations of, 99, 104-105, 116-118, 129, 180, 190, 249-258, 269. - “Dante’s Dream,” 4, 116, 118, 138, 162, 168, 173, 188, 190, 253-255. - “Day and Night Songs,” 136. - “Day-dream, The,” 139, 180-181, 186-187. - Davis, William, 118, 129. - “Death of Boadicea,” 108. - “Death of Breuse sans Pitié, The,” 116. - “Death of Chatterton, The,” 128. - “Death of Lady Macbeth, The,” 236. - “Death of Sir Tristram, The,” 154. - Dennis, William, 61. - Deverell, Walter, 5, 61, 99, 119. - “Devout Childhood of St. Elizabeth, The,” 126. - “Dis Manibus,” or “The Roman Widow,” 167, 175, 180. - “Donna della Finestra, La,” or “Our Lady of Pity,” 181, 224, 256-258. - Döpplegänger Legends, The, 106, 225. - “Down Stream,” 172. - “Dream of Sardanapalus, The,” 154. - Dunn, Mr. H.T., 170. - Dürer, Albrecht, 51, 82. - Dutch School, 39. - - - “Ecce Ancilla Domini,” 4, 64, 78-79, 92, 203. - “Edward Grey,” 139. - “Eleanor Sucking the Poison,” 108. - “Elijah and the Widow’s Son,” 155. - Eliot, George, 196-199. - Elnore, 134. - “Enemy Sowing Tares, The,” 122, 147. - English Art in 1850, 2, 3. - “Entombment, The,” 4, 155, 219. - “Eros and Euphrosyne,” 108. - “Eve of St. Agnes, The,” 4, 121-122, 125, 147, 248-249. - Exhibitions, Pre-Raphaelite, 67, 118. - Expression in Art, 25-26. - - - “Fair Rosamund,” 118. - “Farmer’s Daughter, The,” 118. - “Fazio’s Mistress,” 117, 157. - “Feeding the Hungry,” 108. - “Ferdinand Lured by Ariel,” 75-78, 91. - “Fiametta,” 168. - “Fiametta, A Vision of,” 119, 181, 185. - Fine Art Society, The, 118. - “Fleshly School of Poetry, The,” 176. - “Flight of Madeline and Porphyro,” 62, 248. - Foreign Schools, 134. - Forsyth, Rev. P.F., 199, 216, 241. - “Found,” 4, 107, 236-237, 306. - Frescoes at Manchester, 155; - at Oxford, 142-146; - at Westminster Hall, 33-35, 108, 128, 151. - Fra Angelico, 5, 48. - “Fra Angelico Painting,” 117. - Fra Bartolomeo, 113. - Fra Lippo Lippi, 48. - “Fra Pace,” 117. - “Francesca da Rimini,” 215, 234-235. - - - “Galahad, Sir,” 116, 138, 143, 232. - “Gate of Memory, The,” 107, 236-238. - “George, St., A Wedding of,” 118. - “George, St., and Princess Sabra,” 160, 245. - “Germ, The,” 69-74, 95. - Ghiberti, 57. - “Ghirlandata, La,” 91, 158, 167, 180. - Giorgione, 49. - “Giorgione Painting,” 117. - Giotto, 39, 48, 57, 113. - “Giotto Painting,” 251. - “Girlhood of Mary Virgin, The,” 1, 4, 55, 66-67, 92, 202, 225. - Glasgow Institute of Fine Arts, 118. - “Goblin Market,” 139. - Goodall, 134. - Gosse, Mr. Edmund, 166. - Graham, Mr. William, 175. - Gray, Miss Euphemia Chalmers, 148. - Green, N.E., 61. - Guildhall Loan Exhibition, 162. - - - Hake, Dr. Gordon, 175, 178-179, 181; - portrait of, 109. - Hake, Mr. George, 175, 178; - portrait of, 110. - Halliday, M.F., 129. - Hancock, John, 61, 129. - “Hand and Soul,” 71-72. - Hannay, James Lennox, 79. - “Hark!” 30. - Harris, Dr., 190, 192. - Haydon, 90. - “Heart of the Night, The,” 160, 231. - Heaton, Mrs. Aldham, 167. - Heaton, Miss, 168. - Heine, 11, 14, 117, 277. - Hellenism in Italy, 42-49. - Herbert, Miss, 103, 167. - “Hesterna Rosa,” 107, 118, 236-238. - “Hireling Shepherd, The,” 149. - Hogarth Club, 117. - “House of Life, The,” 161, 262-282. - Howell, Mrs., 168. - “How They Met Themselves,” 106, 224-226. - “Hugenot, A,” 4, 121, 127, 147, 243, 246. - Hughes, Arthur, 4, 118, 125, 136-137, 142-143, 204-205, 249. - Hunt, William Holman, 29-31, 35-36, 63-67, 86-87, 92, 95, 100, 101, - 109, 118-119, 122, 137, 146, 148-150; - characteristics of, 6, 15, 86, 107, 138, 208-213, 215-217, 224, 230, - 236, 239, 244, 246, 248; - portrait of, 109. - - - “Il Ramoscello,” 157. - Inchbold, 118. - “Infant Christ Adored, The,” 116, 156, 218. - “Infants’ Repast, The,” 34. - “Isabella,” 55, 60, 65, 67, 229. - “Isabella and the Pot of Basil,” 150. - “Isumbras at the Ford, Sir,” 148, 245-246. - Italian Pre-Raphaelites, The, 39-57, 113. - - - “Jenny,” 304-307. - “Jesus Washes Peter’s Feet,” 155. - “Joan of Arc,” 191, 245. - Johnson, Dr., and the Methodist Ladies, 159. - “Joli Cœur,” 119. - “Justice,” 34. - - - “Kate the Queen,” 95. - Keats, influence of, 58, 267, 277; - subjects from, 60-62, 65, 117, 229, 248-249. - Keene, J.B., 61. - Kelmscott, 172, 178. - Kernahan, Mr. Coulson, 174. - “King Arthur Receiving Excalibur,” 143. - “King Arthur’s Tomb,” 116, 233. - Kingdon, Miss, 168. - “King René’s Honeymoon,” 154. - Kingsley, Charles, 141. - “King’s Tragedy, The,” 8, 186, 263, 286, 289-292. - Knewstub, Mr., 170. - - - “Laboratory, The,” 105, 238. - “Lady Lilith,” 157, 214. - “Lady of Good Children, Our,” 34, 155. - “Lady of Pity, Our,” 181, 224, 256-258. - “Lady of Shalott, The,” 138. - “La Pia,” 157, 159. - “La Ricordanza” (“Mnemosyne, or the Lamp of Memory”), 91, 175, 180. - “Last Confession, A,” 304-307. - “Last Day in the Old Home, The,” 127. - “Last of England, The,” 4, 153. - “Launcelot Escaping,” 116. - “Launcelot, Sir, before the Shrine,” 143, 233. - Lawrence, 2, 122. - Lear, Edward, 129. - Leathart, Mrs., 168. - Leighton, Sir F., 134. - Leonardo, 49, 51, 121, 132. - Leopardi, 277. - Leyland, Mr. F.R., 163, 175, 190; - portrait of, 109. - Lewes, J.F., 129. - “Light of the World, The,” 4, 146, 211-213. - Linnell, 132. - Liverpool Academy, The, 87-88, 118. - Liverpool, Walker Art Gallery, 150, 154, 174, 190. - Llandaff Cathedral, Triptych for, 104, 116, 156, 218. - “Loving Cup, The,” 157. - “Lucretia Borgia,” 106, 117-118, 159. - “Luke the Painter, St.,” 117. - Lushington, Mr. Godfrey, 140. - Lushington, Mr. Vernon, 141. - Lushington, Mrs., 168. - Lyell, Mr. Charles, 109. - “Lyra Innocentium,” 126. - - - “Maids of Elfinmere,” 137. - Manchester, Frescoes at, 155. - “Mariana,” 137. - “Mariana in the South,” 137. - “Mariana of the Moated Grange,” 80-82, 124, 231. - “Mariana” (Shakespeare’s), 157. - Marshall, Dr. John, 162, 190. - Marston, Philip Bourke, 166, 192, 269, 277. - Martineau, R.B., 127. - Martin’s, St., Scarborough, 169. - “Mary in the House of John,” 215. - “Mary Magdalene at the Door,” 118, 213-215. - Masaccio, 57. - Massey, Mr. Gerald, 131. - “Matilda Gathering Herbs,” 215. - Maurice, Frederick Denison, 141, 199; - portrait of, 154. - “May in the Regent’s Park,” 126. - “May Morning on Magdalen Tower,” 150. - “Melancholia,” 51. - Memmi, Simon, 113. - “Merciful Knight, The,” 246. - Meredith, Mr. George, 164-166. - “Merlin Lured into the Pit,” 143. - Michaelangelo, 45, 49, 121, 132, 165, 261, 275. - “Michael Scott’s Wooing,” 106, 180, 224-226. - Millais, Sir John Everett, 28-31, 61, 63, 65, 74-78, 86-87, 92, 100, - 109, 118-120, 136-139, 146-148; - change of style, 122-124, 133; - some characteristics of, 6, 15, 17, 65, 86, 106, 113, 120, 137, 201, - 206-208; - on colour, 88-89; - portrait of, 109. - “Mirror of Venus, The,” 129. - “Mnemosyne, or the Lamp of Memory,” 91, 175, 180. - Models, 64-67, 79-80, 100-103, 105, 110, 126-127, 145, 154, 167, 186, - 214. - “Modern Painters,” 36-39, 83. - “Monna Pomona,” 160. - “Monna Rosa,” 117-163. - “Monna Vanna,” 157. - Monro, Alexander, 105, 142-143. - “Morning Music,” 105. - Morris, William, 140-145, 165, 168, 172, 178, 274-275. - Morris, Mrs. William, 145, 168, 186. - Morris, Miss May, 168. - Morten, Thomas, 129. - Mount Temple, Lord and Lady, 161, 168, 175, 185. - Moxon’s “Tennyson,” 137. - Murillo, 132. - Museum, South Kensington, 102. - Myers, Mr. T.W.H., 7, 273. - - - National Gallery, The, 79, 159. - “Nativity, The,” 205. - Nature as a Background, 15-16. - “Nature’s Mirror,” 129. - “New Day, The,” 179. - Nicholson, P.W., 200. - “Nimuë Brings Sir Peleus,” 143. - “Nineveh,” 140. - - - “Old Churchyard, The,” 129. - “Ophelia,” 4, 121-122, 147, 227, 229. - Orchard, John, 73. - “Order of Release, The,” 121, 147. - “Oriana,” 138. - “Orlando and Adam,” 106. - “Our Lady of Good Children,” 34, 155. - “Our Lady of Pity,” 181, 224, 256-258. - Outlines, Rossetti’s, 24. - Overbeck, 134. - Oxford, 77, 140-141, 145; - frescoes at, 142-146. - “Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, The,” 140. - - - Painters of the Last Generation, 33. - “Palace of Art, The,” 138. - “Palomides’s Jealousy, Sir,” 143. - “Pandora,” 59, 118, 157, 162, 241-242. - “Paolo and Francesca,” 215, 234-235. - “Parable of Love, A,” 105. - “Parable of the Vineyard, The,” 169. - “Parisina and Manfred,” 154. - “Passover in the Holy Family, The,” 116, 192, 205-206. - Patmore, Mr. Coventry, 71, 73, 80. - Paton, Sir Noel, 129, 174. - Payne, John, 166. - Penkill, 171. - Pessimism in Art, 13-16. - Poetry, Rossetti’s, 23, 68, 71-73, 140, 161, 176-177, 179, 259-309. - “Poetry, Art and,” 72. - Polidori, Gaetano, 20. - Polidori, Miss Margaret, 169. - Pollen, J. Hungerford, 142-143. - Portraits, Pre-Raphaelite, 66, 102, 108-114, 117, 145-146, 148, 154, - 161, 168, 186, 214. - “Portrait, The,” 263, 283. - Pre-Raphaelite Exhibitions, 67, 118. - Pre-Raphaelitism, Characteristics of, 5-6, 9, 12-17, 58, 63-64, 69, 80, - 84-86, 122, 124, 130, 133-135, 198-201. - “Pretty Baa-Lambs,” 152. - Prices of Pictures, 67, 150, 190. - “Prince’s Progress, The,” 140. - Prinsep, Mr. Val, 129, 142-143, 173. - “Proscribed Royalist, The,” 126, 147, 247. - “Proserpine,” 118-119, 157, 180, 191, 241. - “Protestant Lady, The,” 127. - “Psyche,” 236, 239-40. - “Puck,” 108. - - - “Queen’s Page, The,” 117. - “Question, The,” or “The Sphinx,” 181, 191. - - - “Rachel and Leah,” 116. - “Rainbow, The,” 108. - “Rainbow, The Spirit of The,” 181. - “Ramoscello, Il,” 157. - “Random Shot, The,” or “L’Enfant du Regiment,” 148. - Raphael, 6, 49, 52-54, 83, 132. - “Reaper and the Flowers, The,” 125. - Redgrave, 24. - “Regina Cordium,” 160, 167. - Renaissance in Italy, The, 40-55, 121. - “Renunciation of St. Elizabeth, The,” 93. - Replicas, 162. - “Rescue, The,” 148, 245. - “Retro me, Sathana,” 66. - “Return of the Dove, The,” 80. - Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 89-90. - “Rienzi swearing Revenge,” 66-67. - Roehampton, 178. - “Roman Widow, The” (“Dis Manibus”), 167, 175, 180. - Romance, Characteristics of, 12-16, 45-46, 49-50, 183-184. - “Romeo and Juliet,” 4, 154, 226. - “Rosa Triplex,” 168. - “Rose Garden, The,” 160. - “Rose Mary,” 179, 263, 286, 290, 296-299. - Rossetti, Christina, 22, 71, 139, 275. - Rossetti, Gabriel Charles Dante, commonly called Dante Gabriel, - Rossetti, 7, 19-28, 30-31, 35, 58-68, 90, 92-107, 109, 115, 136-140, - 141-143, 156-196; - some characteristics of, 3, 5-8, 15, 24, 28, 58, 86, 96-98, 106-107, - 121, 176, 194-195, 201-206, 213-218, 223-226, 230-238, 241-242, - 245, 250-258, 259-309; - portraits of, 109, 192-193; - Rossetti’s Outlines, 24; - Colour, 91, 99. - Rossetti, Gabriele, 20. - Rossetti, William Michael, 63, 71, 73, 109, 120, 164; - portrait of, 109. - Royal Academy, 33, 74-75, 80-81, 108, 122, 126-128, 161. - Royal Scottish Academy, 118. - Rubens, 132. - Ruskin, John, 4, 36-39, 56-57, 85-87, 99, 113-115, 127, 141, 150, 200, - 229; - portraits of, 109, 147; - letters to the “Times,” 80-84. - Russell Place Exhibition, 118. - - - “Sancta Lilias,” 181. - “Saint Agnes of Intercession,” 72. - “Saint George, A Wedding of,” 118. - “Saint George and Princess Sabra,” 160, 245. - “Saint Luke the Painter,” 117. - “Salutation of Beatrice, The,” 189-190, 250-251. - Sandys, Mr. Frederick, 128-129, 175. - Sarrazin, M. Gabrièl, 233. - Sass’s Academy, 28. - “Scapegoat, The,” 4, 150, 210-211. - Scott, Mr. W. Bell, 178. - “Sea-Spell, The,” 167, 175, 181. - Seddon, Mr. J.P., 118, 129, 190, 193. - “Sermon on the Plain, The,” 169. - Sevenoaks, 95. - “Seward, John,” 73. - “Shadow of Death, The,” 150, 205, 208-211. - Sharp, Mr. William, 190, 192. - Shelley, 267-268, 277. - Shields, Mr. Frederick, 129, 175, 187, 190, 192-193. - “Sibylla Palmifera,” 157, 167, 214. - Siddal, Miss (Mrs. D.G. Rossetti), 99-103, 159-161; - portraits of, 102, 117, 159-161. - “Sir Galahad,” 116, 138, 143, 232. - “Sir Isumbras at the Ford,” 148, 245-246. - “Sir Palomides’s Jealousy,” 143. - “Sir Patrick Spens,” 101. - “Sister Helen,” 263, 286, 290, 293-295. - Smith, Bernhard, 108. - Sonnets, Rossetti’s, 23, 161, 170, 179, 214, 237, 242, 269-282, 304. - South Kensington Museum, 102. - Spartali, Miss (Mrs. Stillman), 167. - Specialism in Art, 6-8. - “Sphinx, The,” or “The Question,” 181, 191. - “Spirit of the Rainbow, The,” 181. - “Spring,” 118. - “Staff and Scrip, The,” 140, 287. - Stained Glass, Designs for, 168-169. - Stanhope, Mr. Spencer, 129, 142. - “Stealthy School of Criticism, The,” 177. - Stephens, Mr. F.G., 61, 63, 73, 75, 88, 95, 109, 120; - portrait of, 109. - Stillman, Mr. W.J., 110. - Stillman, Mrs. (Miss Spartali), 167. - Stobhall, 162, 178. - Stone, 134. - “Strayed Sheep, The, or Our English Coasts,” 149. - “Stream’s Secret, The,” 263, 283. - Strudwick, Mr. J.M., 5, 230. - Sumner, Mrs., 175. - “Sun may Shine, The,” 105. - “Surgeon’s Daughter, The,” 127. - Swinburne, A.C., 145, 164, 166, 177, 242, 266, 275; - portraits of, 109, 117. - - - “Taurello’s First Sight of Fortune,” 105. - Tebbs, Mrs. Virtue, 168. - Technique, Imperfect, 25, 39. - Tennyson, 85, 94-95, 104, 165-166, 199; - illustrations of, 116, 137-139, 142-143, 154, 160, 230-234; - portraits of, 108-109, 117, 137. - Thomas, Mr. Cave, 69, 128. - Thomson, James, 269, 277. - “Tibullus’s Return to Delia,” 118. - “Times,” Ruskin’s letters to the, 80-84. - Tirebuck, William, 223. - “Titania,” 108. - Titian, 2, 5, 49. - “Too Late,” 127. - “Transfiguration, The,” 155. - “Tree of Life, The,” 220. - “Tristram and Iseult,” 116, 160. - “Triumph of the Innocents, The,” 150, 217. - “Tune of the Seven Towers, The,” 116. - Tupper, Mr. J.L., 71-72. - Turner, 2, 16. - “Two Mothers,” 119. - - - “Under the Microscope,” 177. - - - “Vale of Rest, The,” 16, 129, 148, 228-229. - “Valentine and Sylvia,” 79-80, 87-101. - Venables, 146. - “Venetian Pastoral, A,” 68. - Venetian School, 49-50. - “Venus Astarte,” or “Astarte Syriaca,” 59, 184-185, 189. - “Venus Verticordia,” 157. - “Veronica Veronese,” 91, 167, 180. - Vinter, Mr. J.A., 23-24, 31, 61. - “Viola,” 100-101. - “Vision of Fiametta, A,” 119. - - - “Waiting,” 154. - Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, The, 150, 154, 174, 190. - Walker, Frederick, 16. - Walker, Sir A.B., 88. - Wallis, Henry, 4, 128. - “Washing Hands,” 118, 160. - “Water Willow,” 119. - Watkins, F., 61. - Watson, J.D., 129. - Watts, Mr. G.F., 4, 34, 113, 151, 227, 235-236, 239-240. - Watts, Mr. Theodore, 101, 174, 181, 185, 190, 192, 195; - portrait of, 109. - “Wedding of St. George, A,” 118. - Wells, Mrs. W.T., 168. - “White Ship, The,” 182, 263, 286, 288-290. - “Wicked Husbandmen, The,” 169. - “Wiclif Reading,” 34, 152. - “Widow’s Mite, The,” 35. - Wilding, Miss, 167. - Wilkie, 90. - Williams, Miss, 168. - Windus, W.L., 118, 127, 248. - “Woodman’s Daughter, The,” 80, 228-229. - Woodward, Mr., 142. - Woolner, Thomas, 63, 71, 105, 108-109, 129, 137, 153. - Wordsworth, 279, 183. - “Work,” 154. - Working Men’s College, The, 141. - Wyatt, Mr. James, 145. - -[Illustration] - - CHISWICK PRESS:—C. WHITTINGHAM AND CO., TOOKS COURT, - CHANCERY LANE. - - Footnotes - ------------------------------------------------------------------------- - - Transcriber’s Note - -Errors in the text have been corrected where they can be reasonably -attributed to the printer or editor, or where the same word appears as -expected elsewhere. Inconsistencies in punctuation, particularly in the -Index, have been resolved. - -The details of each correction are noted below. - - p. xi “Bethlehem Gate”[—] Added. - - p. 4 Ruskin: “I believe [Rosetti’s] _Sic._ - - p. 22 its poet[r]y, its self-devotion Added. - - p. 30 Mill[ia/ai]s’s Transposed. - - p. 67 duly signed and [monogramed] _Sic._ - - p. 71 a poem called “The Seasons,” Mr[.] Added. - Tupper - - p. 73 [“]Ruggiero and Angelica” Added. - - p. 74 _apologia_ for the Pre-Rapha[e]lite Added. - Brotherhood - - p. 74 heaped upon the Pre-R[e/a]phaelites Corrected. - - p. 79 seen only in the o[b]scure little Added. - Portland Gallery - - p. 84 is to [to] have a principal Removed. - - p. 131 ‘You see purple,’ ‘You see red,’ [‘]You Added. - see yellow.’ - - p. 224 marked degree perhaps tha[t/n] any other Corrected. - drawings - - p. 239 ever-significant story of “Psyche” Added. - suggest[s] the same - - - - - -End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Dante Rossetti and the pre-Raphaelite -movement, by Esther Wood - -*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DANTE ROSSETTI--PRE-RAPHAELITE MOVEMENT *** - -***** This file should be named 52008-0.txt or 52008-0.zip ***** -This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: - http://www.gutenberg.org/5/2/0/0/52008/ - -Produced by KD Weeks, Clarity, HathiTrust and the Online -Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This -file was produced from images generously made available -by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.) - -Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions will -be renamed. - -Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright -law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, -so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United -States without permission and without paying copyright -royalties. 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