Yet if we may risk a paradox, it is precisely in the reality that there lies the potentiality of the life within; behind the physical is abides the spiritual may be; the “everlasting no” of the uncompromising realist, sifting, limiting, and analyzing down the human unit into bare and rigid matter, often conceals the hidden hope and promise of the idealist’s “everlasting yea.” Hence a great portrait is charged to the full with latent possibilities of character and destiny. It suggests forces as well as phenomena, causes as well as effects, inherent tendencies as well as facts. Someone has said that a human face should be either a promise or a history. The definition is too narrow. Every face, save perhaps in childhood, and not always with that exception, contains both promise and history inextricably blended each with each. A great portrait must be passionately personal, intensely individual; presenting one single, complete, and separate identity to the eye and mind, and yet in a very real sense impersonal, having a certain universal, humanitarian significance. For the artist’s hand sets the human unit in its place in the great Family; lifts it on to the broad planes of the world’s common life. As his eye sees all things, like Spinoza, sub specie eternitatis—sees Time in the light of Eternity—so it sees one Man in the light of Humanity. He knows no isolations of being, conceives no man as “living to himself;” but is concerned ever with relationships and imperative sympathies between the subject of his portrait and the rest of mankind; so that the personality that looks forth from his canvas, faithfully and profoundly interpreted by his own, has in it the elements of appeal and challenge, and sends out a radiance of vitality to its spiritual kin.
In this ideal of portraiture the young Pre-Raphaelites had been confirmed by Ruskin long ago; and he had pointed them to the incomparable portraits of Dante by Giotto, of Petrarch by Simon Memmi, and of Savonarola by Fra Bartolomeo, as examples among the Italian Pre-Raphaelites of the attainment of such success. Rossetti and his comrades in their turn, more especially some of the younger and more independent spirits not actually or permanently connected with the Brotherhood, developed and perfected the ideal to a degree incalculably fruitful in contemporary art. It will hardly be disputed that in Mr. G.F. Watts, one of the truest Pre-Raphaelites in aspiration and temper, though utterly distinct from them in original genius and intellectual range, England has found at last her greatest portrait painter, while to Millais, one of the original members of the Brotherhood, the judgment of posterity will attribute a scarcely less exalted place. They found the art of portraiture degraded, almost without exception, to the lowest level of trivial prettiness as regards women, and vulgar affectation in dealing with men. “The system to be overthrown,” as Ruskin said, “was one of which the main characteristic was the pursuit of beauty at the expense of truth.” And such pursuit leads in all ages to the same inexorable fatality,—the beauty so gained is always of a false and spurious kind. The ancient allegory of Pandemos and Urania is for ever true in art. The seeker for ideal beauty seeks it only in visible forms, pursues it through the physical world alone, awaits it at the doors of sense merely, and is straightway ensnared by the earthly Pandemos, the Venus of the flesh. But let him steadfastly set his soul to the higher worship, let him seek reverently the moral and spiritual loveliness of human character in the great is and the greater may be of the throbbing, actual life around him, and surely he will be brought into the near presence of the heavenly Urania; surely he will pass, with Rossetti, through “Body’s Beauty” to “Soul’s Beauty,” and worship with him
—“that Lady Beauty in whose praise
Thy voice and hand shake still,—long known to thee
By flying hair and fluttering hem,—the beat
Following her daily of thy heart and feet,
How passionately and irretrievably,
In what fond flight, how many ways and days!”
The attention of Mr. Ruskin had meanwhile been diverted to some extent from the work of Millais and Hunt by his entrance in 1854 upon a close personal friendship with Rossetti, which lasted in cordial fidelity for some ten or twelve years. At the time of his first public championship of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Mr. Ruskin had known nothing of Rossetti’s work, inasmuch as it had never yet appeared on the walls of the Academy or in any of the popular exhibitions of the period. But, for such unintentional and unconscious neglect of the real leader of the movement which he so warmly endorsed, the great critic now made ample reparation. He became a constant and generous patron of Rossetti’s pictures until the painter passed, about the year 1865, into his third artistic period, and developed methods less in accordance with Ruskin’s especial tenets. That the gradual severance of intimacy between artist and buyer should have been brought about by the former’s independence of spirit and resolute adherence to his own inspirations and aims, in the face of some, perhaps, over-officious criticism and counsel from his patron, is certainly no discredit to Rossetti. At the same time, the art-world owes a debt of gratitude to Mr. Ruskin for having so long encouraged, by his support and sympathy, the production of those exquisite water-colours which Rossetti, unsettled as he then was in habits of painting, might not otherwise have accomplished in such splendour and cogency during his transition period.
And to these years of intimacy with Ruskin belong nearly all the finest drawings of his “Morte D’Arthur” series, such as “King Arthur’s Tomb” (called sometimes “The Last Meeting of Launcelot and Guinevere,” though the design by no means gives the impression of a meeting in the flesh), “The Damozel of the Sanct Grael,” “The Chapel before the Lists,” “The Meeting of Sir Tristram and Iseult,” “Sir Galahad in the Ruined Chapel,” “Sir Galahad and Sir Bors,” “Launcelot Escaping from Guinevere’s Chamber,” and “The Death of Breuse sans Pitié;” together with a fresh and important group of Biblical subjects treated in a more daringly romantic manner than before, including “The Passover in the Holy Family,” “Bethlehem Gate,” “Ruth and Boaz,” “The Crucifixion,” “Mary in the House of John,” and the first sketch for “Mary Magdalene at the Door of Simon the Pharisee;” also the “Triptych” for the altar-piece of Llandaff Cathedral, “The Infant Christ Adored by a Shepherd and a King.” The Dante subjects again appear in 1854–55, with “Francesca di Rimini,” “Paolo and Francesca,” “Matilda Gathering Flowers” (from the “Purgatorio”), “Dante’s Vision of Rachel and Leah,” “Dante at Verona,” and the first version of the picture afterwards among Rossetti’s masterpieces, “Dante’s Dream.” The little drawings of “The Tune of the Seven Towers” in 1850, “Carlisle Tower,” “Fra Angelico Painting,” and “Giorgione Painting” in 1853, “The Queen’s Page” (from Heine) in 1854, “Fra Pace” and “Monna Rosa” in 1856, “The Blue Closet,” “The Blue Bower,” “The Bower Garden,” and the first design for a favourite subject variously known as “Aurelia” and “Bonifazio’s” or “Fazio’s Mistress” in 1857; these, together with some further sketches for “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” a number of portraits of Miss Siddal, Browning, Tennyson, and Swinburne, whom he knew in 1857, are but a selection from the almost countless studies, in pencil, pen and ink, neutral tint, water-colour, and occasional oil, scattered over Rossetti’s transition period.