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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?
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Footnote 1:
F.W.H. Myers, “Rossetti and the Religion of Beauty.”