It is a pleasant picture which rises in the memory, of the diverse trio, destined in after years for widely different paths of effort and success, yet welded at first in the glow of a common enthusiasm of revolt. It was impossible that they should perceive, at this early age, that the reaction in which they were united was but a preparing of the way for an artistic reconstruction which would demand from its leaders congruity of ideal as well as community of protest. The principle of non-conformity may embrace almost opposite poles of doctrine and practice, but the positive elements of a faith must possess alike the minds of its prophets if they are to pursue in permanent fellowship the goal at which they aim. As George Eliot has said, “If men are to be welded together in the glow of a transient feeling, they must be made of metal that will mix, else they will inevitably fall asunder when the heat dies out.”
But there was as yet a strong practical cohesion between the grave and gentle Hunt, the brilliant, warm-hearted, and impressionable Millais, and the ardent, mercurial, and passionately imaginative Rossetti, whose personal magnetism was the immediate welding-force of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. Rossetti’s proselytizing powers, and his inexhaustible enthusiasm (at least in youth) for dogmatic propaganda, were indeed a source of some embarrassment and many disappointments in the progress of artistic reform. The doctrine of Pre-Raphaelitism, however, if we may so call it—namely that in the age preceding Raphael would be found the touchstone of art, grew up too imperceptibly through mutual influences and interchange of thought to be attributed as a special tenet to Rossetti or any other of the student-band.
It was in the year 1847, before the formation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, that the spell of Keats had come with special power upon its future leaders. Rossetti, an omnivorous reader of poetry, had already perceived both in Keats and Coleridge the essential elements of the highest romance. It is the more remarkable that Chatterton, now acclaimed as the herald of the romantic revival in poetry, as was Blake in art, had no such charm for Rossetti until quite late in life, when the tardy discovery led to an exaggerated worship. But in Keats, whose life (by Lord Houghton) Rossetti, Holman Hunt, and Millais had been reading together about this time, they found the supreme example in English poetry of that attainment of harmony between the classic and the romantic temper which was their aim in art. Eager as they now were for subject-matter whereon to exercise the artistic principles as yet but crudely formulated in their minds, they turned with new delight to the wonder-world revealed to them by the spirit of Keats, and looked with him through
—“magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas in faëry lands forlorn.”
They saw that the reconciliation of the flesh to the spirit, which is the task of the second Renaissance as of the first, had already been achieved in poetry, and was waiting its translation into pictorial art. Keats had attained that perfect blending of the Greek spirit with the temper of romance which Rossetti was to reach in “Venus Astarte” and “Pandora.”
The first organized union of workers imbued with the Pre-Raphaelite ideal, and further knit together by a common enthusiasm for the poetry of Keats, appears to have taken the form of a cyclographic society, in which the dominant spirits—Rossetti, Millais, and Holman Hunt—were soon surrounded by a group of more or less gifted companions and friends. The members were pledged to contribute original drawings in regular succession to a portfolio which was passed round for criticism by their fellows. Rossetti, who liked to rule his little kingdom with an absolute sway, seldom disputed by those who deemed submission to his imperious ways but a small price to pay for his friendship, selected from Keats’s “Isabella” the following series of subjects to exercise the talents of the society:—1. “The Lovers;” 2. “The Brothers” (of Isabella); 3.“Good-bye,” (the parting of Isabella and Lorenzo); 4. “The Vision” (Isabella sees in a dream the murder of her lover by her brother); 5. “The Wood” (Isabella visits the scene of the crime and secretly bears away the head of her lover); 6. “The Pot of Basil” (she buries the head in her flower-pot); 7. “The Brothers discover the Pot;” 8. “Madness of Isabella.”
It does not appear that any member executed this exhaustive series of proposed sketches in its entirety. The suggestion of subjects from Shelley’s “Prometheus Unbound” seems to have been no less barren of results. The only drawings from Rossetti’s hand that remain to us from that portfolio are an illustration of Keats’s “Belle Dame sans Merci;” a study from Coleridge’s “Genevieve,” over which he sat up a whole night, completing it at daybreak, and a sketch of “Gretchen in the Chapel” from Goethe’s “Faust.” The society included Walter Howell Deverell, an artist of rare delicacy and grace, and a man of singular personal charm, destined to play a memorable part in the life-history of Rossetti; F.G. Stephens, an intimate friend of Holman Hunt; Thomas Woolner, a young sculptor whose acquaintance Rossetti had made at the Academy Schools; J.A. Vinter, now well known as a portrait painter; and such lesser though by no means insignificant lights as J.B. Keene, F. Watkins, William Dennis, John Hancock, J.T. Clifton, and N.E. Green. It was evident that among the rising generation of painters, long before the formation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood,—even before Hunt or Rossetti had entered definitely upon such art training as they ever had—the revolt against the tyranny of the Academy was already begun, and even those least in sympathy with the Pre-Raphaelite idea found themselves drawn towards Rossetti and his friends in a common disaffection with the existing régime. Moreover, the success of Millais, who at the age of seventeen had gained the highest academic prize for historical painting, and was already earning well with his book-illustrations in black and white, afforded a valuable connecting-link with a larger circle of critics and sympathizers from whom were drawn some of the most faithful aides-de-camp of the Pre-Raphaelite campaign.
The poetry of Keats afforded at all events an inexhaustable treasure-house of subject-matter for the young painters, not only in their first efforts towards the romantic revival, but for many years then to come. “The Eve of St. Agnes,” for example, afterwards yielded the theme of the picture regarded by some critics as Millais’s greatest work, as well as of the first important painting by Holman Hunt, “The Flight of Madeline and Porphyro.” This was completed at Millais’s studio, at his home in Gower Street, early in 1848, and exhibited in the Royal Academy of that year; Millais having been at work meanwhile upon his “Cymon and Iphigenia.”
It was not until the autumn of 1848 that a definite attempt was made to band together, in a common purpose and under a distinctive name, those of the little company of students and friends who were prepared to accept and follow openly the principle of fidelity to Nature in general and to the romantic conception of Nature in particular,—the conception, namely, of the physical world as the veil and vehicle of an immanent spirit, fateful, mysterious, and occult. An informal meeting was held at Rossetti’s studio, then at 83, Newman Street, and seven members enrolled themselves under the name of “The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.” The union consisted of Rossetti, Millais, Holman Hunt, William Michael Rossetti, the younger brother of the painter, Thomas Woolner, F.G. Stephens, and James Collinson—the least stable of the Brotherhood and the first seceder from its ranks. In the Academy of that year a picture by Collinson had already been exhibited, entitled “The Charity Boy’s Début.” He was a painter of uncertain artistic calibre, and of a lethargic and mystical temperament; converted to Pre-Raphaelitism by the ardour of Rossetti, but shortly forsaking his art studies and joining the Roman Catholic communion with a view of qualifying for the priesthood. This ambition also was subsequently given up, and, thus vacillating between the church and the studio, his probation ended in no particular career. The remaining members of the Brotherhood—apart from the leading painters—may be said to represent the minor literature of the movement. F.G. Stephens and W.M. Rossetti have attained permanent distinction as art-critics, while Thomas Woolner, before winning his later fame as a sculptor, gave in the form of poetry his chief contribution to the early propaganda of the Brotherhood.