Rossetti’s outlining is said to have been very beautiful in effect, though produced in a highly unconventional manner. Mr. Cary forbade charcoal outlines altogether, but Rossetti, who obeyed no rules, invariably made a thick, solid charcoal line which he gradually pared away on either side with pellets of bread till he had reduced it to the desired minimum. It is noticeable that one at least of Rossetti’s friends of this period, and intimately associated with him in the movement which he subsequently led, has always retained the hardness of outline which Rossetti afterwards outgrew.
Yet it must be admitted that with all his ardour, his real though very fitful diligence, and his sincere delight in his chosen profession, Rossetti never fully conquered that imperfection of technique in draughtsmanship which has been the stronghold of hostile criticism throughout the Pre-Raphaelite movement, but which in fact arose from the inevitable deficiency of a mind too impatient for ideas, too eager for subject-matter, to be steadfastly concerned with the science of expression.
That neither Rossetti nor any other of the Pre-Raphaelites as such have attained to technical greatness, still less to technical perfection, is a charge weightily preferred, and not without reason, but hardly of so fatal an import as at first appears. It must be remembered that no new message comes to the world ready-clothed in the full grace of accurate and harmonious speech. The voice crying in the wilderness is apt to be harsh and unmusical. The visions of the seer are at first too vivid, too bewildering in the fresh glory of revelation, to be told (if he would set them forth on canvas) in any but broken lights and shadowy images. In every art, the gospel of a new epoch has been proclaimed with faltering speech and stammering tongue. The torrent of denunciation outpoured on Wagner’s transgressions of strict form, yet powerless, as it has proved, to drown his music, was not more sweeping than the judgment of authority against the metrical solecisms of Walt Whitman’s poetry; nor has the storm still raging round the modern Scandinavian drama been less fierce than that which overtook the leaders of the Pre-Raphaelite van.
Obviously a certain measure of the faculty of expression is necessary if the meaning is to be intelligible at all. Our judgment of an artist, though determined primarily by the nature of his message, must ultimately rest on his ability to deliver it. In Rossetti’s case it must depend upon the degree in which the greatness of his material can create a technique of its own, and take the imagination by storm, as Rossetti does, with those exquisite surprises of design, those marvellous tours-de-force among his earlier pen and ink drawings, or those southern, almost tropical colour-triumphs of his maturity, which were perhaps rather the divine accidents of genius than its habit, either natural or acquired. They were, in truth, inspirations of utterance, wielding the imperfect instrument to their own high purposes. The verdict given upon such achievements by the thoughtful world outside the charmed circle of the initiate—by that unlearned but not unworthy “outer circle,” as it were, who, approaching art with intelligence and sympathy, are yet without the knowledge to assess its technical worth—will always, as we have already suggested, be decided by the temperament of the spectator—whether he be as peculiarly sensitive to beauty of idea as his neighbour is to beauty of expression. And after all, the supreme mission of art is to the great world of the uninitiate. By the authority of its priests and prophets must its form and practice be directed and controlled; but the final test of its greatness is not satisfied until the exquisite consolations of beauty, the moral significances of artistic truth, the proclamation of noble ideals, are “understanded of the people.”
But the new gospel, when Rossetti entered the Academy Schools, had only reached the initial stage of a “gospel of discontent.” It was still negative, indefinite, unpromising. Yet even in that early phase, the old, simple instincts of the missionary spirit are often potent, and fruitful in the development of ideas. “Andrew ... first findeth his own brother Simon,” and “Philip findeth Nathaniel,”—not designedly, perhaps, but rather by the spontaneous attraction of kindred souls; not necessarily with the deliberate aim of a propagandist, for it would be pretentious to credit a group of nineteenth-century young Britons in their teens with a very exalted conception of their artistic mission. There is every evidence that they were as unaffectedly boyish, and even school-boyish, as the most orthodox Englishman could wish them. It was well that they should not yet know the meaning of their own rebellion, or guess the effect to be wrought upon English art by Rossetti’s meeting with the first fellow-student who can in any sense be called his disciple. Probably it was an impulse of purely personal affection, or that magnetic charm of character which Rossetti exercised over almost all impressionable natures around him, rather than any deep affinity of purpose and ideal, that won to his side a younger and in many respects more brilliant aspirant, John Everett Millais, who had passed through his two years’ elementary training at Cary’s at a very early age, and in technical proficiency was already far ahead of his new friend. Born on the 8th of June, 1829, in Portland Place, Southampton, the first five years of his life were chiefly spent in Jersey (his father’s ancestral home), and the succeeding four at Dinan, in Brittany. In 1838, at the age of nine, he was entered at Cary’s Academy, then under the direction of Mr. Sass, where his drawing from the antique soon won a silver medal from the Society of Arts. In 1840, at the age of eleven, he entered the Royal Academy Schools; the youngest pupil ever admitted within their walls. Here he won a silver medal in 1843, and four years later a gold medal for historical painting with “The Benjamites Seizing their Brides,” shown at the British Institution in 1848. In 1846 his first exhibited picture, “Pizarro before the Inca of Peru,” appeared at the Royal Academy, where “Elgiva Seized by Odo” was shown in 1847.
Millais himself, meanwhile, had made acquaintance with an older and still more earnest student not yet pursuing the Academy curriculum, but for whom the future had in store a place second only to Rossetti’s in the movement which united and inspired them in their youth. William Holman Hunt, indeed, may claim to have been earlier than any of his Pre-Raphaelite brethren upon the field of reform; for in the hard solitude of mercantile life, under the stress of poverty and amid the most uncongenial surroundings, he had already thought out and pursued those methods of direct and veracious artistic expression which were afterwards enforced by Pre-Raphaelite rule. Born in London on the 27th of April, 1828, and destined by his father for commercial life, the lad secured from chance companions some occasional help in the artistic studies which he loved. He took a few lessons from a city portrait-painter, and at last gave up his business career, and threw himself upon his own artistic resources for a livelihood.
Admission to the schools of the Royal Academy at that time was by a test as arbitrary and inadequate as the teaching to which it led. Each student was required to produce a drawing from the antique, in chalk or charcoal, laboriously stippled in the conventional style; and in this task the half-trained and inexperienced Hunt very pardonably failed on two successive occasions. It was not until the year 1846 that he was at last admitted as a student, and at almost the same time secured a place on the Academy Exhibition walls, where he was represented by a small picture entitled “Hark!”—a little child holding a watch to her ear. It was in the antique galleries at the British Museum, while toiling forlornly at his trial-drawing among a host of similar candidates, that he came across the more successful but sympathetic and genial Millais. The story of Millais’s friendship with the poor and struggling student somewhat older than himself, and of the generous pecuniary help afforded from his own private resources to Hunt at a moment when the magic portals of Art seemed closed for ever against him, has already been told by Mr. Harry Quilter in his history of those early years.
In the autumn of 1845 Mr. Cary sent up five students, including Rossetti and J.A. Vinter, for admission to the Academy Schools. His classes were held in high esteem as a means of introduction to that orthodox fold, already regarded by many neophytes with impatience and distrust, but offering at that time the only possible entrance to professional life. Both the competitors just mentioned were successful, and the admission of Holman Hunt was independently gained soon afterwards. Mr. Vinter has a characteristic reminiscence of the opening day of the ensuing term, when the freshmen were assembled in a class-room, and required to give their names to the keeper, Mr. Jones. When it came to his turn, Rossetti, who was rather proud of his mellifluous designation, greatly amused his companions and impressed the venerable official by slowly rolling out, in his rich, sonorous tones, “Gabriel—Charles—Dante—Rossetti!” “Dear me, sir,” stammered Mr. Jones, in confused amazement, “Dear me, sir, you have a fine name!”
A probation of three months was necessary, however, before the candidates were finally accepted as students in the Royal Academy Schools. It is doubtful whether Rossetti ever finished his probationary drawings: at all events he never entered the Life School, and does not appear to have passed beyond the elementary stages of the Antique. But whatever may have been the deficiencies of their early training in art, a result of ample significance was now realized by the intercourse which united in close friendship the illustrious trio—Rossetti, Millais, and Holman Hunt—who were shortly to be recognized as the prime movers in the Pre-Raphaelite revolt.
There was yet, however, another reformer at work, unknown to them, upon the same problems as perplexed themselves, stirred with the same restless discontent with the vain canons of conventional art, and pursuing, in his own obscure studio, methods which came upon the younger trio as the revelation that they needed. Ford Madox Brown, with whom they now became acquainted, was seven years older than Dante Rossetti, having been born at Calais, of English parents, on the 16th of April, 1821. He studied first under Van Hanselaer at Ghent, and afterwards spent two years under Baron Wappers at the Antwerp Academy (1837–1839), three in Paris, (1841–1844), and one in Rome (1845). In his twentieth year he married his cousin, Miss Elizabeth Bromley, who died in 1846. His experiences of the foreign schools seem to have kindled in him the same dissatisfaction with current standards of perfection as was gaining ground among his contemporaries at home. At all events, when Rossetti was vaguely casting about for kindred spirits aflame with revolutionary fire, Madox Brown was the poor and unknown painter of a few decorative cartoons exhibited during the eighteen-forties in Westminster Hall, for a competition organized by the government with a view to selecting the best available fresco-work for the ornamentation of the new House of Lords. The competition was carried over several years, and served in a great measure to define and organize the growing revolt against the tyranny of the Academy, under which, as early as the year 1840, the younger generation of painters was already beginning to writhe. The leading Academicians of that time were men whose names, as far as the outer world is concerned, have scarcely outlived their owners. Etty, Mulready, Maclise, Leslie, Herbert, Chalon, Cooper, Collins, Eastlake, Howard, Hart, Jones, Unwins, Patten, Charles Landseer, Redgrave, Shee,—who knows them now beyond the student and the connoisseur? Webster, indeed, has earned a more enduring fame, and gained a secure if unpretentious rank in the portrayal of village life, fairly comparable to that of Mrs. Gaskell in fiction. But for the rest, even the few gifted and sincere aspirants outside the Academy, but still in the thrall of conventional methods, such as Cope, Dyce, Ward, Egg, Elmore, Goodall, Pickersgill, Hook, Poole, Stone, Martin, Haydon, and David Scott, were but a heterogeneous group, without clear aims or common aspirations. The Westminster competition attracted and developed new talent from independent quarters. It was the first deliberate effort of English art to shake itself free from academic control. Its effect was to revive, for the time being, a decorative method noble in itself, but still more valuable as a training in breadth and dignity of expression, especially for the young artist to whom the fresco was practically a foreign language, full of latent possibility and charm. Practice in fresco-work had a directly good effect on the technique of new and unknown men at the precise stage of their studies at which it was afforded them. Madox Brown’s style in particular was strongly and permanently influenced by such exercise, and the competitions evoked from him a series of historical and dramatic genre paintings which won Rossetti’s special admiration. Chief among them were “The Body of Harold brought before William the Conqueror,” which still ranks with the artist’s finest productions of its kind, “Justice,” a widow pleading before a Norman baron, “Adam and Eve after the Fall,” “Wiclif reading his Translation of the Bible to John of Gaunt,” “Our Lady of Good Children,” and “The Infant’s Repast.” One fine cartoon from the hand of another artist also drew Rossetti’s delighted attention, “Caractacus led Captive in Triumph through the Streets of Rome,” by G.F. Watts, a painter worthily representative of the noblest phase of Pre-Raphaelite work, though never openly associated with the movement. He too had vainly traversed the desert of academic studentship, as we may gather from his own naïve record: “Finding there was no teaching, I very soon ceased to attend.” His picture of “Caractacus,” however, was now rewarded with a first-class prize of £300. Millais also competed in the exhibition of 1847; taking for his subject “The Widow bestowing her Mite.”