to me the fact of his immovability, his self-support, his curious
reserve, seems to be the most interesting. He held in all things to
the essential and not to the accidental; he preferred the dry grain of
musk to a diluted flood of perfume. An Italian by birth and deeply
moved by all things Italian, he never visited Italy; a lover of ritual
and a sympathizer with all the mysteries of the Roman creed, he never
joined the Catholic Church; a poet whose form and substance alike
influenced almost all the men of his generation, he was more than
forty years of age before he gave his verse to the public; a painter
who considered the attitude of the past with more ardor and faith than
almost any artist of his time, he never chose to visit the churches or
galleries of Europe. It has been said, among the many absurd things
which his death has provoked, that he shrank from publicity from
timidity, or spurned it from ill-temper. One brilliant journalist has
described him as sulking like Hector in his tent. It used to be
Achilles who sulked when I was at school; but it certainly never was
Gabriel Rossetti. Those who only knew him, after his constitution had
passed under the yoke of the drug which killed him, cannot judge of
his natural reserve from that artificial and morbid reserve which
embittered the last years of his life. The former was not connected
with any objection to new faces or dislike of cordial society, but
with the indomitable characteristic of the man, which made him give
out the treasures of the spirit, and never need to receive them. So
far from disliking society, it is my impression that he craved it as a
necessity, although he chose to select its constituents and narrow its
range.
He was born in 1828. The story of his parentage is well known, and has
been told in full detail since his death. He was born in London and
christened Gabriel Charles Rossetti; it was not, I am told, until he
was of age to appreciate the value of the name that he took upon
himself the cognomen which his father had borne, the Dante by which
the world, though not his friends, have known him. Living with his
father in Charlotte street, with two sisters and a brother no less
ardently trained in letters than himself, he seems to have been turned
to poetry, as he was afterward sustained in it, by the interior flame.
The household has been described to me by one who saw it in 1847: the
father, titular professor of Italian literature, but with no
professional duties, seated the livelong day, with a shade over his
eyes, writing devotional or patriotic poetry in his native tongue; the
girls reading Dante aloud with their rich maiden voices; Gabriel
buried here in his writing, or darting round the corner of the street
to the studio where he painted. From this seclusion he wrote to the
friend who has kindly helped me in preparing these notes, and whose
memories of the poet extend over a longer period than those of any
survivor not related to him.
Mr. W. B. Scott, now so well known in more arts than one, had then
but just published his first book, his mystical and transcendental
poem of "The Year of the World." This seems to have fallen under
Rossetti's notice, for on November 25, 1847, he wrote to the author, a
perfect stranger to himself, a letter of warm sympathy and
acknowledgment. Mr. Scott was living in Newcastle, and, instead of
meeting, the young poets at first made acquaintance with each other by
correspondence. Rossetti soon mentioned, of course, his own schemes
and ambitions, and he sent, as a sample of his powers, his poems of
"The Blessed Damozel," and "My Sister's Sleep," which he had written
about eighteen months before.
Mr. Scott tells me that his first feeling on receiving these poems,
written in English by an Italian boy of eighteen, was one of
amazement. I cannot wonder at it. If the "Blessed Damozel," when it
was published a quarter of a century later, seemed a masterpiece to
those who had, in the meanwhile, read so much that was vaguely
inspired by it, what must it have been in 1846? Certain pieces in
Tennyson's "Poems," of 1842, and a few fragments of Browning's "Bells
and Pomegranates" were the only English poems which can be supposed to
have given it birth, even indirectly. In its interpretation of
mystical thoughts by concrete images, in its mediaeval fervor and
consistence of fancy, in its peculiar metrical facility, it was
distinctly new--original as few poems except those by the acknowledged
masters of the craft can ever be.
"The sun was gone now; the curled moon
Was like a little feather
Fluttering far down the gulf; and now
She spoke through the clear weather.
Her voice was like the voice the stars
Had when they sang together."
This was a strange accent in 1846. Miss Barrett and Mr. Tennyson were
then the most accepted poets. Mr. Browning spoke fluently and
persistently, but only to a very little circle; Mr. Horne's "Orion"
and Mr. Bailey's "Festus" were the recent outcomes of Keats and
Goethe; the Spasmodic School, to be presently born of much unwise
study of "Festus," was still unknown; Mr. Clough, Mr. Matthew Arnold,
and Mr. Patmore were quite unapparent, taking form and voice in
solitude; and here was a new singer, utterly unlike them all, pouring
out his first notes with the precision and independence of the
new-fledged thrush in the woodland chorus.
In painting, the process was somewhat different. In this art, no less
than in poetry, Rossetti understood at once what it was that he wished
to do himself, and what he desired to see others doing; but the
difficulties of technique were in his way. He had begun to write in
childhood, but he had taken up design late in his youth, and he had
undergone no discipline in it. At the present day, when every student
has to pass a somewhat stringent examination in design, Rossetti, at
eighteen, could not have entered the schools of the Royal Academy. He
did so, however, yet without ever advancing to the Life School. The
soul of art, at this early period, interested him far more than the
body, especially such a substance as he found under the presidency of
Sir Martin Shee and the keepership of George Jones. Let us not forget,
meanwhile, that it is easy to sneer at the incompetence of mannered
old artists, and yet hard to over-estimate the value of discipline in
a school, however conventional. Rossetti was too impatient to learn to
draw, and this he lived to regret. His immediate associates, the young
men whom he began to lead and impress, were better draughtsmen than
he. His first oil picture, I believe, was a portrait of his father,
now in possession of the family. But, as far as can be now made out,
he did not begin to paint seriously till about January, 1848, when he
persuaded another Royal Academy student, W. Holman Hunt, to take a
large room close to the paternal house in Charlotte street, and make
it their studio. Here Mr. Scott visited them in the early spring of
that year; he describes to me the large pictures they were struggling
upon, Hunt, on his "Oath of Rienzi," and Rossetti, on his "Girlhood of
Mary Virgin." The latter was evidently at present but poorly equipped;
the painting was timid and boyish, pale in tone, and with no hint or
promise of that radiant color which afterward became Rossetti's main
characteristic. But the feeling was identical with that in his far
more accomplished early poems. The very pulse and throb of mediaeval
adoration pervaded the whole conception of the picture, and Mr.
Scott's first impression was that, in this marvellous poet and
possible painter, the new Tractarian movement had found its expositor
in art. Yet this surely was no such feeble or sentimental echo as had
inspired the declared Tractarian poets of eight or nine years earlier;
there was nothing here that recalled such a book as the "Cherwell
Water Lily" of Father Faber. This contained the genuine fleshly
mysticism, bodily presentment of a spiritual idea, and intimate
knowledge of mediaeval sentiment without which the new religious fervor
had no intellectual basis. This strong instinct for the forms of the
Catholic religion, combined with no attendance on the rites of that
church, fostered by no study of ecclesiastical literature or
association with teachers or proselytes, but original to himself and
self-supported, was at that time without doubt the feature in
Rossetti's intellectual character which demands our closest attention.
Nor do I believe that this passion for the physical presentation of a
mystical idea was ever entirely supplanted by those other views of
life and art which came to occupy his maturer mind. In his latest
poems--in "Rose Mary," for instance--I see this first impulse
returning upon him with more than its early fascination. In his youth,
however, the mysticism was very naive and straightforward. It was
fostered by one of the very few excursions which Rossetti ever took--a
tour in Belgium in October, 1849. I am told that he and the
painter-friend who accompanied him were so purely devoted to the
mediaeval aspect of all they saw, that, in walking through the
galleries, they turned away their heads in approaching modern
pictures, and carefully closed their eyes while they were passing
Rubens's "Descent from the Cross." In Belgium, or as the result of his
tour there, Rossetti wrote several curious poems, which were so harsh
and forced that he omitted them from his collection when he first
published his "Poems," in 1870.
The effort in these early pieces is too marked. I remember once
hearing Rossetti say that he did not mind what people called him, if
only they would not call him "quaint." But the fact was that, if
quaintness be defined as the inability to conceal the labor of an art,
there is no doubt that both his poems and his designs occasionally
deserved this epithet. He was so excessively sincere an artist, so
determined not to permit anything like trickiness of effect or
meaningless smoothness to conceal the direct statement of an idea,
that his lack of initial discipline sometimes made itself felt in a
curious angular hardness.
And now it would be necessary, if I were attempting a complete study
of Gabriel Rossetti's intellectual career, to diverge into a
description of what has so much exercised popular curiosity, the
pre-Raphaelite movement of 1848. But there is no reason why, in a few
notes on character, I should repeat from hearsay what several of the
seven brothers have reported from authoritative memory. It is
admitted, by them and by all who have understood the movement, that
Gabriel Rossetti was the founder and, in the Shakespearian sense,
"begetter" of all that was done by this earnest band of young artists.
One of them, Mr. Millais, was already distinguished; two others, Mr.
Holman Hunt and Mr. Woolner, had at that time more training and
technical power than he; but he was, nevertheless, the brain and soul
of the enterprise. What these young men proposed was excellently
propounded in the sonnet by "W. M. R.," which they prefixed to their
little literary venture, the "Germ," in 1850. Plainly to think even a
little thought, to express it in natural words which are native to the
speaker, to paint even an insignificant object as it is, and not as
the old masters or the new masters have said it should be painted, to
persevere in looking at truth and at nature without the smallest
prejudice for tradition, this was the whole mystery and cabal of the
P. R. B. They called themselves "preraphaelite," because they found in
the wings of Lippi's angels, and the columbines of Perugino's gardens
that loving and exact study of minute things which gave to them a
sense of sincerity, and which they missed in the breadth and ease of
later work. They had no ambition to "splash as no one splashed before
since great Caldasi Polidore;" but they did wish to draw a flower or a
cloud so that it should be a portrait of that cloud or flower. In this
ambition it would be curious to know, and I do not think that I have
ever heard it stated, how far they were influenced by Mr. Ruskin and
his "Modern Painters." I should not expect to find Rossetti influenced
by any outside force in this any more than in other instances, but at
all events Mr. Ruskin eagerly accepted the brotherhood as practical
exponents of the theories he had pronounced. None of them, I think,
knew him personally when he wrote the famous letter to the _Times_ in
1851, defending Mr. Millais and Mr. Holman Hunt from the abuse of
ignorant critics, who, he said, had failed to perceive the very
principles on which these "two young men" were proceeding. Somebody
wrote to him to explain that there were "three young men," and Mr.
Ruskin wrote a note to Gabriel Rossetti, desiring to see his work, and
thus the acquaintance of these two remarkable men commenced.
Meanwhile, although the more vigorous members of the brotherhood had
shown no special sympathy for Rossetti's religious mysticism, a
feebler artist, himself one of the original seven, had taken it up
with embarrassing effusion. This was the late James Collinson, whose
principal picture, "St. Elizabeth of Hungary," finished in 1851,
produced a sort of crisis in Rossetti's career. This painting
out-mystified the mystic himself; it was simply maudlin and
hysterical, though drawn with some feeling for grace, and in a very
earnest spirit. Rossetti, with his strong good sense, recognized that
it would be impossible ever to reach the public with art of this
unmanly character, and from this time forth he began to abandon the
practice of directly sacred art.
For some little time after abandoning the directly sacred field in
painting, Rossetti seems to have passed through a disconsolate and
dubious period. I am told that he worked for many months over a large
picture called "Kate the Queen," from some well-known words by
Browning. He made no progress with this, seemed dissatisfied with his
own media, felt the weight of his lack of training, and passed, in
short, through one of those downcast moods, which Shakespeare has so
marvellously described in "Tired with all these," and which are
incident, sooner or later, to every man of genius. While his touch in
poetry grew constantly more sure and masterly, his power as a
draughtsman threatened to leave him altogether. He was to have drawn
one of the frontispieces in the "Germ," but, although he toiled with a
design, he could not make it "come right." At last a happy accident
put him on the true track, and revealed his proper genius to himself.
He began to make small drawings of poetical subjects in
water-colors--most of those which I have seen are not more than twenty
inches by twelve--over which he labored, and into which he poured his
exquisite sense of color, inspired without doubt by the glass of
mediaeval church windows. He travelled so very little, that I do not
know whether he ever saw the treasures of radiant jewel-work which
fret the gloom of Chartres or of Bourges; but if he never saw them, he
divined them, and these are the only pieces of color which in the
least degree suggest the drawings of this, Rossetti's second period.
As far as one can gather, his method was, first, to become
interpenetrated with the sentiment of some ballad or passage of
emotional poetry, then to meditate on the scene till he saw it clearly
before him; then--and this seems to have always been the difficult and
tedious part--to draw in the design, and then with triumphant ease to
fill in the outlines with radiant color. He had an almost insuperable
difficulty in keeping his composition within the confines of the paper
upon which he worked, and at last was content to have a purely
accidental limit to the design, no matter what limbs of the _dramatis
personae_ were sheered away by the frame. It would not be the act of a
true friend to Rossetti's memory to pretend that these drawings, of
which for the next ten or fifteen years he continued to produce a
great number, were without faults of a nature which any coxcomb could
perceive, or without eccentricities which an untrained eye might
easily mistake for faults; but this does not in the least militate
against the fact that in two great departments of the painter's
faculty, in imaginative sentiment and in wealth of color, they have
never been surpassed. They have rarely, indeed, been equalled in the
history of painting. A Rossetti drawing of this class hung with
specimens of other art, ancient or modern, simply destroys them. I do
not mean that it is better or worse than they are, but that it kills
them as the electric light puts out a glow-worm. No other man's color
will bear these points of ruby-crimson, these expanses of deep
turquoise-blue, these flagrant scarlets and thunderous purples. He
paints the sleeve of a trumpeter; it is such an orange as the eye can
scarce endure to look at. He paints the tiles of a chimney-corner;
they are as green as the peacock's eyes in the sunshine.
The world is seldom ready to receive any new thing. These drawings of
Rossetti's were scarcely noticed even by those who are habitually on
the watch for fresh developments in art. But when the painter next
emerges into something like publicity we find him attended by a
brilliant company of younger men, all more or less influenced by his
teaching and attracted by his gifts. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
had been a very ephemeral institution; in three years, or four at the
most, it had ceased to exist; but its principles and the energy of its
founder had left their mark on the whole world of art. In 1849
Rossetti had exhibited his picture, "The Girlhood of Mary Virgin," at
the Portland Gallery, an exhibition in rivalry of the Royal Academy,
which existed but a very short time. As far as I can discover, he did
not exhibit again in London until 1856, when he and his friends opened
a collection of their pictures at 4 Russell Place, Fitzroy Square. We
would rather have seen that little gallery than see most of the
show-exhibitions of Europe. In it the fine art of the Anglo-Saxon race
was seen dawning again after its long and dark night. Rossetti himself
was the principal exhibitor, but his two earliest colleagues, now
famous painters, Mr. Millais and Mr. Holman Hunt, also contributed.
And here were all the new talents whom Rossetti had attracted around
him during the last seven years: Mr. Madox Brown, with his fine genius
for history; Mr. J. D. Watson, with his strong mediaeval affinities;
Mr. Boyce, with his delicate portraiture of rustic scenes; Mr. Brett,
the finest of our students of the sea; Mr. W. B. Scott himself;
besides one or two others, Mr. Charles Collins, Mr. Campbell, Mr.
Halliday, Mr. Martineau, whom death or adverse fortune removed before
they had quite fulfilled their promise. Gabriel Rossetti contributed
to this interesting and historic exhibition five or six of those
marvellous drawings of which mention has just been made. "Dante's
Dream," the famous vision of June 9, 1290, with its counterpart, "The
Anniversary of the Dream," in 1291, were the most prominent of these.
A "Mary Magdalene" was perhaps the most moving and exciting. This
extremely original design showed the Magdalene pursued by her lovers,
but turning away from them all to seek Jesus in the house of Simon the
Pharisee. The architecture in this drawing was almost childish; the
wall of Simon's house is not three inches thick, and there is not room
for a grown-up person on the stairs that lead to it; but the tender
imagination of the whole, the sweet persuasiveness of Christ, who
looks out of a window, the passion of the awakened sinner, who tears
the roses out of her hair, the curious novelty of treatment in the
heads and draperies, all these combine to make it one of those works,
the moral force and directness of which appeal to the heart at once.
Perhaps the most brilliant piece of color at the Russell Place Gallery
may have been Rossetti's "Blue Closet," a picture which either
illustrated or, as I should rather suppose, suggested Mr. Morris's
wonderful poem published two years later.
The same year that displayed him to the public already surrounded by a
brilliant phalanx of painter-friends, discovered him also, to the
judicious, as a centre of poetic light and heat. The circumstances
connected with Rossetti's visit to Oxford a little earlier than this
are too recent, are fresh in the memories of too many living persons
of distinction, to be discussed with propriety by one who was not
present. But certain facts are public, and may be mentioned. The
Oxford Union still shows around the interior of its cupola strange,
shadowy frescoes, melting into nothingness, which are the work of six
men, of whom Rossetti was the leader. These youths had enjoyed no
practical training in that particularly artificial branch of art,
mural painting, and yet it seems strange that Rossetti himself, at
least, should not have understood that a vehicle, such as yolk of egg
mixed with vinegar, was absolutely necessary to tempera, or that it
was proper, in fresco-painting, to prepare the walls, and paint in the
fresh wet mortar. They used no vehicle, they fixed their colors in no
coat of plaster, but they threw their ineffectual dry paint on the
naked brick. The result has been that their interesting boyish efforts
are now decayed beyond any chance of restoration. It is impossible,
however, to ascend the gallery of the Oxford Union and examine the
ghostly frescoes that are fading there, without great interest and
even emotion. Of the young men who painted there under Gabriel
Rossetti's eye, all have become greatly distinguished. Mr. Edward
Burne-Jones, Mr. William Morris, and Mr. Spencer Stanhope were
undergraduates at Oxford. Mr. Valentine Prinsep and Mr. Arthur Hughes,
I believe, were Royal Academy students who were invited down by
Rossetti. Their work was naive and queer to the last degree. It is
perhaps not fair to say which one of them found so much difficulty in
painting the legs of his figures that he drew an impenetrable covert
of sunflowers right across his picture, and only showed the faces of
his heroes and heroines between the golden disks.
The _Oxford and Cambridge Magazine_, which also dates from the year
1856, is a still more notable expression of budding genius than the
dome of the Oxford Union. It was edited by Mr. Godfrey Lushington, all
its articles were anonymous, and it contrived to exist through twelve
consecutive monthly numbers. A complete set is now rare, and the
periodical itself is much less known than befits such a receptacle of
pure literature. It contains three or four of Rossetti's finest poems;
a great many of those extraordinary pieces, steeped in mediaeval
coloring, which Mr. William Morris was to collect in 1858 into his
bewitching volume, called "The Defence of Guenevere;" several
delightful prose stories of life in the Middle Ages, also by Mr.
Morris, which, like certain prose romances by Mr. Burne-Jones, have
never been publicly claimed or reprinted by their author; and not a
little else that was as new as it was notable. A little later Mr.
William Morris's first book was dedicated "To my Friend Dante Gabriel
Rossetti, Painter," and in 1860 Mr. Swinburne followed with a like
inscription of his first-fruits, his tragic drama of "The
Queen-Mother." Thus in the course of a little more than ten years,
Rossetti had become the centre and sun of a galaxy of talent in poetry
and painting, more brilliant perhaps than any which has ever
acknowledged the beneficent sway of any one Englishman of genius.