Mr. Henry Wallis is justly remembered by his one great picture, “The Death of Chatterton,” which touched popular feeling as its true pathos and dignity deserved to do, and won universal praise.

Mark Anthony is rightly regarded by the Pre-Raphaelites as the most poetic of their landscape painters. His grandly simple and reposeful “Old Churchyard” will compare even with Millais’s “Vale of Rest,” and his “Nature’s Mirror” with Mr. Burne-Jones’s “Mirror of Venus” in later years. Mr. John Brett, now famous in seascape, was for some time intimate with the Brotherhood; and among friends and sympathizers on a similar footing may be mentioned Val Prinsep, Thomas Seddon, J.D. Watson, J.F. Lewes, W.S. Burton, Spencer Stanhope, M.F. Halliday, James Campbell, J.M. Carrick, Thomas Morten, Edward Lear, William Davis, W.P. Boyce, J.W. Inchbold, and, by no means least, John Hancock, a young sculptor who won an Art Union prize in 1848 with a bas-relief of “Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem.” He was a friend and fellow-worker with Woolner, and fell so far (with Rossetti) under the fascination of the Dante legends as to accomplish a very fine statue of “Beatrice” in or about 1852. One other artist of the first rank in his generation remains to be named,—Frederick Shields, an intimate and warmly-loved friend of Rossetti, cherished by him in close and unbroken companionship even to the hour of death; and in point of critical estimate pronounced by him to be one of the greatest of living draughtsmen, taking rank with Sir Frederick Leighton, Sir Noel Paton, and Mr. Sandys.

Such were a few of the personalities that gathered between 1848 and 1858 around the three prime movers in the Pre-Raphaelite revolt. To claim them as merely, or chiefly, satellites drawn into the orbit of genius, or as forming a distinct and coherent school, would be both foolish and unjust. To attempt an estimate of their relative merit independent of, or in proportion to, the artistic work of the Brotherhood, would be no less invidious than unprofitable. The glory of Pre-Raphaelitism was that it gave the utmost play to individual methods, and even idiosyncrasies,—nay, that its very first principle was “each for himself”—painting his own impressions, his own ideals—and no imitation of one artist by another. Its primary insistence lay on the watchword of all Protestantism—the authority of the individual conscience as against that of a class or a system, and the immediate access for every soul to the source of its highest inspiration. Therefore the “diversities of gifts” which flourished and increased under the sway of the Pre-Raphaelite spirit were the best evidence of that spirit’s quickening power. “A man will always emphasize,” says Mr. P.G. Hamerton, writing on the ultimate effects of the movement, “those truths about art which most strongly recommend themselves to his own peculiar personal temperament. This comes from the vastness of art and the variety of human organizations. For art is so immense a study that no one man ever knew the whole truth about it.” In other words, all the Pre-Raphaelite painters in any sense worthy of the name are intensely individual in quality, and cannot be classed, arranged, or compared together in the order of a system or a school. Each artist must make his original and distinctive contribution to the sum-total of artistic truth; must paint the single aspect, or the most familiar aspect, of the life around him which presents itself to his mind. The more honest he is, and the more true to his own observations and convictions, the more inevitably will he see the world through his own spectacles—well for his superficial happiness, at all events, if they be rose-coloured, and not of a more sombre hue. “We all,” says another art-critic,[[5]] “have a sense of some particular colour, and because we can paint this colour best we do so at all times and in all places. This may be unconscious on our part—this predilection for a particular colour; but we all unconsciously blab the fact to others; we talk in our dream of art, and tell all our secrets. Old David Cox, when out sketching with his pupils, would go behind them while at work and say to one, ‘Ah, you see green;’ to another, ‘You see purple,’ ‘You see red,’ ‘You see yellow.’ So it is with the colour vision of many who are called Masters. We can identify almost any landscape of our more prominent painters by their special idiosyncrasy of colouring, such as Cuyp with his evening yellows, Linnell with his autumnal browns, or Danby with his sanguinary sunsets. These colours, which are exceptional with external nature, are the rule with them. Not only is this so with regard to colour, but, more or less, we put ourselves, form and feature, into our work, and paint our own character, physical as well as mental, in all we do. Raphael, on being asked where he obtained the type of his Madonna, replied, ‘out of his own head,’ which really meant that he had unconsciously painted his own fair features: and this ideal was what he eternally repeated. So was it with Michaelangelo, Leonardo, Murillo, Rubens, Vandyke—they all portrayed themselves recognizably. There is a picture of Jesus and the twelve Apostles in which the whole thirteen faces are all alike, and every one an identifiable copy of the painter’s own. Of course where the face and form are noble we have the less to object to.”

This indeed is the crux of the whole matter. As the man is, so will his work be. To portray one’s very self—and first to have such a self as can dignify the portrayal; to paint faithfully what one sees—and first to see the true and the beautiful in the familiar and the commonplace; to depict the world in which one lives—living in a world apart, noble and fair, full of opportunities, if also of mysteries, with bright horizons, however low the sun; and yet to be ever conscious of wider worlds than the imagination can compass though the heart may yearn over them like the heart of him who said Homo sum; nihil humana mihi alienum puto: this is fine art; this is “the vision and the faculty divine.” “Produce great Persons!” cries Browning,—“the rest follows.” Therefore it is safe for those who in any real sense know Rossetti to prophesy, with Mr. Harry Quilter, that “the day will surely come when it will be seen that the essence of what is now known as Pre-Raphaelitism was not the influence of a school or a principle, but simply the influence of one man, and that man Dante Gabriel Rossetti.” Personal ascendency, says Emerson, is the only force much worth reckoning with. And if that ascendency, over many who never saw Rossetti on earth, has become an intimate and precious inspiration, a motive-impulse abidingly sacred and high, what must it have been to those who knew him in the flesh?

Mr. W.M. Rossetti thus succinctly sums up the immediate issue of the movement which his brother inspired:—“As it turned out, the early phases of the movement did not repeat themselves on a more extended scale. Partly, no doubt, through the modification of style of the most popular Pre-Raphaelite, Mr. Millais, and partly through the influx of new determining conditions, especially the effect of foreign schools and of Mr. Leighton’s style (this was written in 1865), Pre-Raphaelitism flagged in its influence towards the production of what are distinctively termed Pre-Raphaelite pictures just at the time when it had virtually won the day. But the movement had broken up the pre-existing state of things, and the principles and practices which it introduced took strong root, and germinated in forms not altogether expected. Pre-Raphaelitism aimed at suppressing such styles of painting as were exemplified by Messrs. Elmore, Goodall, and Stone at the time of its starting; and it did suppress them.”[[6]]

The relation of Pre-Raphaelitism to the “foreign schools” here referred to is as much a matter of historical controversy as the relation of Rossetti to Italy is of biographical criticism; nor is it easy to determine how far the Pre-Raphaelite movement in England was the effect or the cause of similar waves of experiment in France and Germany, and how far all such impulses were but the symptoms of a great social and ethical development in European life. But while the Barbizon School must be seriously recognized as working side by side with the Pre-Raphaelites upon kindred ideals, and even surpassing them at some points in a certain largeness of outlook on humanitarian themes, the influence of Cornelius and Overbeck in Germany, with the very crude and sickly mediævalism which they affected, has no doubt been greatly overrated, and may be dismissed as having very little to do with the main current of the romantic revival. In France, Corot and Millet, Daubigny and Rousseau, had taken their stand against the old Heroic School in art, just as Théophile Gautier and Victor Hugo had taken it against the Academies of literature. In England, it was the task of Rossetti and his comrades “to force,” as it has been aptly expressed, “an artificial art backed upon nature’s reality; and they did it amid neglect, misunderstanding, and even coarse vituperation.”

CHAPTER V.
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.”