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.