Dante Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelite movement

by Esther Wood

In the spring of 1848, Rossetti, deeply impressed by the originality and power of Madox Brown’s designs, wrote to the artist and begged permission to enter his studio as a pupil. Mr. Brown did not receive pupils professionally, but, with a generosity which he showed to many an eager votary at that period, he welcomed Rossetti to his studio as a friend, and from that time became one of his kindest and most valued counsellors.

At the date of Rossetti’s self-introduction to Madox Brown, the latter was engaged upon a somewhat elaborate picture, “Chaucer reading the Legend of Custance before the Court of Edward III.”; and Rossetti was invited to sit to him for the head of the poet. Hunt and Rossetti were now working together in a studio which they shared in Cleveland Street, Fitzroy Square; whither soon came Madox Brown to encourage their tentative efforts, and to aid them both with practical and friendly instruction.

And now a new influence from the world of literature came upon the little student-band. It was the inspiration and stimulus of Ruskin’s “Modern Painters.” For Ruskin also was at war with the old conventions that lay chill and heavy upon English art; he too was weary of the dead level of triviality and scholasticism to which painting had sunk, and saw with prophetic eyes, through the murk of present life and the shadowy vistas of history, a higher and attainable ideal.

“Modern Painters” struck the keynote of the coming change. A fellow-student lent the volumes to Holman Hunt, who in his turn shared them with his friends; and reading together, they found therein, not only a sympathy for their own revolt, but a definite guidance for their aspirations. With the authority of the trained draughtsman and connoisseur as well as with the force and fascination of the literary artist, Ruskin declared for originality and truth in design, as against the imitations and artifices of degenerate schools, in a voice that would brook no compromise. Like Carlyle, his whole being was possest with that passionate scorn of pretensions and shams, that hatred of formalism and of every species of cant, which swept like a cleansing wind over Europe after the French Revolution, and which, if its immediate results were iconoclastic and disruptive, was so much the better preparation for the reconstruction to follow.

Ruskin bade men turn, from the Art of the past, to Nature, and seek fresh inspiration at its primal source. Through Nature alone, he said, they would reach truth, and finding it, gain also the power to interpret and reveal. And Nature was a jealous mistress; only to a faithful lover would she unveil the exquisite mysteries of her beauty; unto his ear alone would she whisper the high secrets of her soul; she would endure no translator, no partial and distorted reflection of her face: the man himself must worship at her inmost shrine, and learn her lesson there direct and clear.

—A truism, it seems to us, who have seen the swinging of the pendulum still further in the naturalistic direction, since the reaction in divers quarters against convention and precedent has carried many to the opposite extreme. Yet, in the history of the world, the demand for precedent and conformity, the love of imitation, the morbid hatred of novelty and the dread of original experiment, which appear in almost every crisis of man’s development, exhibit one of the most curious phases of the human mind. Psychologists might argue at length as to the relation between indolence and cowardice in the strange game of “follow-my-leader” played by humanity from age to age,—and might attribute both to a vague and deep sense of the bitter cost of all knowledge, and a consequent and not wholly vain tenacity towards things apparently knowable and known.

Ruskin, with a vision large enough to retain all that was eternally precious in the past, began by recognizing the elements of real vitality even in the outworn classicism which was the occasion of his readers’ revolt; and led them thence to the higher places of refreshment and advance. “We must be careful,” said he, “not to lose sight of the real use of what has been left us by antiquity, nor to take that for a model of perfection which is, in many cases, only a guide to it. The young artist, while he should shrink with horror from the iconoclast who would tear from him every landmark and light which has been bequeathed him by the ancients, and leave him in a liberated childhood, may be equally certain of being betrayed by those who would give him the power and the knowledge of past time, and then fetter his strength from all advance, and bend his eyes backward on a beaten path; who would thrust canvas between him and the sky, and tradition between him and God.”

Again, Ruskin insisted continually upon the essential and supreme moral purpose of art as a “criticism of life”—as a later authority has called it. He made clear the relation between thought and language in painting, wherein lies for ever the crux of art; and pointed to examples of the contrast and the conflict between those two principles whereof the right adjustment is art’s final aim. “Most pictures,” said Ruskin, “of the Dutch school, for instance, excepting always those of Rubens, Vandyke, and Rembrandt, are ostentatious exhibitions of the artist’s power of speech, the clear and vigorous elocution of useless and senseless words; while the early efforts of Cimabue and Giotto are the burning messages of prophecy, delivered by the stammering lips of infants. It must be the part of the judicious critic carefully to distinguish what is language and what is thought, and to rank and praise pictures chiefly for the latter, considering the former as a totally inferior excellence, and one which cannot be compared with, nor weighed against thought in any way or in any degree whatsoever. The picture which has the nobler and more numerous ideas, however awkwardly expressed, is a greater and a better picture than that which has the less noble and less numerous ideas, however beautifully expressed.”

Thus the author of “Modern Painters” did for his readers what was more helpful than all precept,—he showed them the high paths trodden aforetime by men of like aspirations after a similar revolt. He led them back to an age which had seen the same struggle between the old art and the new; an age in which the difficulty of presenting human life and its environment in faithful colours and in natural images had already been met, and in some measure overcome. That age was the mother of modern art in Europe. The fourteenth century, waking from mediævalism, felt the first quickenings of the Renaissance in Italy.

To that momentous impulse of new life wherein lay, deep-rooted in the laws of reaction and development, the destinies of modern Europe, the historian of the Pre-Raphaelite movement must turn if he would read aright the motive and the message of to-day. For the impulse sought in the records of the past by the reformers of a later age was of a spirit kindred with their own, though grappling with its problems under a somewhat different guise. It was a revolt, not from materialism as we commonly understand it, namely, the acceptance of matter as the sole and ultimate reality, and a tacit or open disavowal of the spiritual life; but rather from that more subtle and insidious form of materialism so often mistaken for its opposite—the asceticism of mediæval Christianity. To deny the dignity and sanctity of the physical as the garment of the spiritual world is surely as blank a materialism as that which makes the physical sufficient and supreme. To see no spirit in the flesh is to be no less blind than they who see no spirit beyond the flesh. The innate cynicism of the monastic idea—its radical faithlessness, its utter distrust of the Spirit’s power to transfigure and ennoble the noble life of man—is sufficiently evidenced by the fact that the results of that idea upon the art of the nation were almost identical with the results wrought upon England by the materialism of the eighteenth century. Art became a fashion instead of a mission, a cult instead of a worship; it became the prerogative of a ruling class which conventionalized—as such must ever do—the spontaneous utterance of the many into the vain repetitions of the few. That class in modern England was the bourgeoisie: in mediæval Italy it was the priesthood. Herein arose the narrow religiosity of the early Italian painters, no less than the ascetic barrenness of the dark ages which preceded them. Art had been subsidized by a ruling class, however beneficent, for its own purposes, however sincere and high. The gradual establishment of Christianity as the state religion of the later Roman period involved the repudiation—or at least the effort to repudiate—the whole intellectual or æsthetic heritage of the Græco-Roman world.