Dante Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelite movement

by Esther Wood

The wind, and the birds came to perch

Far under, where the gables wound.”

Van Eyck and Memmeling at Bruges, Leonardo, Fra Angelico, Giorgione, and Titian in Paris, lacked no due meed of homage from Rossetti and Hunt.

It is remarkable that Rossetti never visited Italy, nor even retained, in later years, the patriotic sentiment which had so strongly pervaded the home life of his boyhood.

On the return of the travellers to London, a new development was proposed and accomplished in the public propaganda of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. It was decided to issue a monthly magazine for the promulgation of Pre-Raphaelite principles in painting and poetry. Members and sympathizers met at Rossetti’s studio in Newman Street to discuss the project, and decide upon the title and contents of the manifesto. The suggestion of Mr. Cave Thomas was ultimately adopted, that it should be called “The Germ.” The first number, extending to forty-eight large octavo pages, illustrated with etchings, appeared in January, 1850, published by Messrs. Aylott and Jones, of 8, Paternoster Row. The primary tenet with regard to art was thus enunciated in the preface: “The endeavour held in view throughout the writings on Art will be to encourage and enforce an entire adherence to the simplicity of nature.” It would be captious, perhaps, to argue, in the face of so ingenuous an implication, that nature is not simple, but, alas! infinitely and fatefully complex without and within; presenting to the seer’s eye a tangled web of visible phenomena no less intricate than the secret woof of destiny whose threads are the lives of men. To young minds, as to a young world, the vision of nature broadly outlined in generalities and clear with purpose is one of the fairest of illusions. The sternest discipline of life is to discover chaos where we imagined order and lucidity: to find interminable mazes and cross-roads for our bewilderment where in the morning mirage we had seen a plain path, an open road to the Ideal. Then we cry that Nature, and not ourself, is altered: that “there hath passed away a glory from the earth.”

Happily, this disillusionment was yet far off in the future of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. In the preface to “The Germ,” a special claim was made for poetry in its relation to the principles of simplicity of expression already enforced in painting; and with better reason, since painting must perforce speak exclusively by the representation of visible things, while poetry reaches directly to their inner significance. For while the painter strives so to order and depict the phenomena around him as to arrive at some sort of moral simplicity in the effect of his picture, the poet—if he be a seer—penetrates at once to the spirit of his theme, and clothes it at his own will with symbolic or dramatic expression. Hence the application of the Pre-Raphaelite principle to the writing of poetry was even more fruitful than in painting; and produced in modern English ballad and lyric verse, and even in the best prose of our own generation, a swift and incisive directness of touch, a broad and vivid clarity of impression, never so fully effected in the pictorial medium.

The first literary débutant in “The Germ” was Mr. Woolner, who occupied the opening pages of the January number with two short poems admirably illustrative, within their unpretentious scope and modest aim, of that naïve simplicity in the handling of complexities—the eternal childlikeness of pure romance—which is inherent in almost all great art. “My Beautiful Lady” and “Of my Lady in Death” were accompanied by an etching in two parts by Holman Hunt. Then followed an unsigned sonnet by Ford Madox Brown, and a paper by Mr. J.L. Tupper on “The Subject in Art.” Mr. Coventry Patmore contributed anonymously a poem called “The Seasons,” and Mr. Tupper was also represented in verse. Criticism of contemporary poetry was afforded by W.M. Rossetti’s paper on Arthur Hugh Clough. The remaining pages were worthily filled by the two greatest poets of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, Dante Gabriel and Christina Rossetti: the latter with “Dreamlands” and another short lyric, signed “Ellen Alleyn,” the former with “My Sister’s Sleep,” a characteristic example of his earliest manner, written in the then uncommon metre since naturalized in our language by Tennyson’s “In Memoriam,” and the wonderful prose allegory “Hand and Soul.” This poem—as verily it should be called, with its rich and haunting diction and its magical rhythm of imagery—is almost the sole example of Rossetti’s strength in prose, only paralleled by a similar composition, entitled “St. Agnes of Intercession,” of a later date. “Hand and Soul” is largely autobiographical in its narrative, being the story of a young art student of Arezzo, named Chiaro dell’Erma, possessed by new and high ideals of the painters mission, and stimulated to the better application of his own talents by the success of a younger comrade,—as we may well believe Rossetti to have been stirred and impelled by the progress of the more studious and at the same time more fortunate Millais. The speech of Chiaro in “Hand and Soul” may be taken as a declaration of Rossetti’s artistic faith and principles at that period.

The second number of “The Germ,” though no less interesting and significant in subject-matter, did not increase the scant support accorded to the venture by the public at large; and since the expense of such an issue was too heavy to be borne by the little band of young and struggling aspirants responsible for its existence, the future of the magazine had to be seriously reconsidered by the Brotherhood. Mr. Tupper, however, to whose hands the printing had been entrusted, came to the rescue, and gave “The Germ” a new lease of life under the title of “Art and Poetry.” The change did not serve to commend the somewhat crude propaganda to the mind of the British Philistine, and after the April number the issue was reluctantly given up; but not until its pages had glowed with the first fires, at least, of Rossetti’s noblest poetic inspiration. Here first appeared “The Blessed Damozel,” for which we might surely paraphrase the words of Holman Hunt on Millais, and call it “the most wonderful poem that any youth still under twenty years of age ever did in the world.” Here, too, were the lyric first-fruits of his continental tour (if sonnets may, by elasticity of definition, be included in lyric poetry), “The Carillon,” “From the Cliffs—Noon,” afterwards called “Sea-Limits,” “Pax Vobis,” largely rewritten later and entitled “World’s Worth,” and the sonnets on “A Virgin and Child,” “A Marriage of St. Katherine,” “A Dance of Nymphs” (from Andrea Mantegna, in the Louvre), “A Venetian Pastoral” (from Giorgione, in the Louvre), and “Ruggiero and Angelica” (from the picture by Ingres).

Among other contents of “The Germ” and “Art and Poetry” may be mentioned Ford Madox Brown’s paper on “The Structure of an Historical Picture,” John Orchard’s “Dialogue on Art,” and Coventry Patmore’s “Criticism of Macbeth.” Mr. F.G. Stephens wrote under the pseudonym of “John Seward,” and the publication was edited by W.M. Rossetti, then twenty years of age. Yet one more poet remains in the list of contributors, James Collinson, whose somewhat desultory but genuinely imaginative lines, “The Child Jesus: a record typical of the five sorrowful mysteries,” together with an etching by the same hand, illustrate very markedly the peculiar phase of religious symbolism, combined with half-ascetic, half-æsthetic melancholy, upon which the Pre-Raphaelites were entering at this period, and which remained with one, at least, of their leaders, as a permanent and dominating element in the artistic work of a lifetime.

But while “The Germ” was speeding through its brief career, and achieving at all events some sort of apologia for the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the leading band of painters were further expressing and developing their principles on canvas. For the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1850, Millais had prepared two pictures destined to draw down upon himself the concentrated fury of that storm of vituperative criticism from the public press which raged unabated for five years around the work of the Brethren, and ultimately spent itself on their more or less worthy disciples and successors. It is remarkable that the chief burden of the abuse heaped upon the Pre-Raphaelites by the art censors of the period should have been borne in the first instance by one, in some respects the most brilliant of the band, who in after years departed more entirely from his early principles in painting than any other member of the Brotherhood, and gained thereby a far greater measure of general popularity than has been won, or is likely to be won at present, by any of his former comrades. Upon no example of Pre-Raphaelite work were the diatribes of the press more scathing than upon Millais’s two pictures of 1850, “Christ in the House of His Parents,” (often called “The Carpenter’s Shop”), and “Ferdinand Lured by Ariel.” “Men who knew nothing of art,” says a fellow-member of the Brotherhood, Mr. F.G. Stephens, “reviled Millais because he was not of the art, artistic. Dilettanti, who could not draw a fingertip, scolded one of the most accomplished draughtsmen of the age because he delineated what he saw. Cognoscenti, who could not paint, rebuked the most brilliant Gold Medal student of the Royal Academy on account of his technical proceedings. Critics of the most rigid views belaboured and shrieked at an original genius, whose struggles and whose efforts they could not understand. Intolerant and tyrannical commentators condemned the youth of twenty because he dared to think for himself.... Intense and unflinching fidelity to nature, ardent love for colour, and a rigid resolution to paint the light of day as brightly as pigments could allow him, were among the aims of Millais, who, following the principles he championed with all his heart, found his models among his friends of English birth, and failing Eastern types, employed all his skill on British materials, relying on the really devout spirit in which he worked, and the poetic quality of his design, to produce the effect desired. He was sorely disappointed in this reliance.” No less sane a journal than Charles Dickens’s “Household Words,” thus wrote on June 15:—“In coming before this Holy Family you must discharge from your mind all religious aspirations, all elevating thoughts, all tender, awful, sorrowful, ennobling, sacred, graceful, or beautiful associations, and prepare yourself for the lowest depth of what is mean, odious, repulsive, and revolting. You behold the interior of a carpenter’s shop. In the foreground is a hideous, wry-necked, blubbering, red-headed boy in a bed-gown, and at his side a kneeling woman so horrible in her ugliness that she would stand out from the rest of the company as a monster in the vilest cabaret in France, or the lowest gin-shop in England. The two almost naked carpenters might be undressed in any hospital where dirty drunkards in a high state of varicose veins are received. Their very toes have walked out of St. Giles’s.” Another writer likened the figure of the boy Christ, whose hand, in the picture, has been wounded at his task, to “a miserable child scratching itself against a rusty nail in Seven Dials.” To such criticism it might easily be retorted that the world is more deeply concerned to-day with the dark problems of Seven Dials and St. Giles’s than with the life of any child in history, save in so far as the latter may illumine and interpret the mysteries of the importunate hour; and that the painter who so translates into present-day life the eternal tragedy of toil and pain as to press home to the conscience of a nation the daily re-crucifixion of the Christ in its own vast labour-houses,—whose modern reading of the ancient tale suggests the divine potentialities of all childhood and the universal pathos of human love “wounded in the house of friends,”—has given us a greater picture, and a more religious picture, than if he had painted for us all the angels in Heaven.