Later on, in the same volume, we find an extract from a letter dated February 1857, which Dante Gabriel Rossetti wrote to W. Bell Scott:—
'I have designed five blocks for Tennyson, save seven which are still cutting and maiming. It is a thankless task. After a fortnight's work my block goes to the engraver, like Agag delicately, and is hewn in pieces before the Lord Harry.
'ADDRESS TO DALZIEL BROTHERS
'O woodman spare that block,
O gash not anyhow!
It took ten days by clock,
I'd fain protect it now.Chorus—Wild laughter from Dalziels' Workshop.'
Several versions of this incident are current, but Mr. Arthur Hughes's account has not, I think, been published. It chanced that one day, during the time he was working in Rossetti's studio, the engraver called, and finding Rossetti was out, poured forth his trouble and stated his own view of the matter with spirit. For his defence, as he put it, much sympathy may be awarded to him. The curious drawings executed in pencil, ink, and red chalk, crammed with highly-wrought detail, that were to be translated into clean black and white, were, he declared, beyond the power of any engraver to translate successfully. How Mr. Hughes pacified him is a matter of no importance; but it is but fair to recollect that, even had the elaborate designs been executed with perfection of technique, any engraver must have needs encountered a task of no ordinary difficulty. When, however, the white coating had been rubbed away in parts, and all sorts of strokes in pen, pencil, and pigment added, it is not surprising that the paraphrase failed to please the designer. Although the drawings naturally perished in the cutting, and cannot be brought forward as decisive evidence, we may believe that the engraver spoilt them, and yet also believe that no craftsman who ever lived would have been absolutely successful.
The number of Rossetti's book-illustrations is but ten in all, according to the list given in Mr. William Sharp's admirable monograph. To these one might perhaps add the frontispiece to that volume; as although the pen-drawing, A sonnet is a moment's monument, was never intended for reproduction, it forms a most decorative page. There is also a design for a frontispiece to the Early Italian Poets, which was first reproduced in the English Illustrated Magazine, No. 1. The actual frontispiece was etched but never used, and the exquisitely dainty version survives only in two impressions from the plate, both owned by Mr. Fairfax Murray. Another frontispiece, to The Risen Life,[10] a poem by R. C. Jackson, in a cover designed by D. G. R. (R. Elkins and Co., 10 Castle St., East Oxford St., W., 1884), belongs to the same category, in which may be placed The Queen's Page, drawn in 1854, and reproduced in Flower Pieces by Allingham (Reeves & Turner, 1888). The ten which were all (I believe) drawn upon the wood include: Elfen-mere, published first in William Allingham's The Music-master, 1855, and afterwards reprinted in a later volume, Life and Phantasy, and again in Flower Pieces (1888), by the same author. This design 'revealed to young Burne-Jones' (so his biographer, Mr. Malcolm Bell, has recorded) that there existed a strange enchanting world beyond the hum-drum of this daily life—a world of radiant, many-coloured lights, of dim mysterious shadows, of harmonies of form and line, wherein to enter is to walk among the blest—that far-off world of Art into which many a time since he has made his way and brought back visions of delight to show his fellow-men. The first suspicion of that land of faëry came to him when, in a small volume of poems by William Allingham, he found a little wood-cut, 'Elfen-mere,' signed with a curious entwinement of the initials D. G. R. The slumbering spirit of fancy awoke to life within him and cast her spells upon him never to be shaken off.'
In the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, 1856, Mr. Burne-Jones wrote of this very design: 'There is one more I cannot help noticing, a drawing of higher finish and pretension than the last, from the pencil of Rossetti, in Allingham's Day and Night Songs, just published. It is, I think, the most beautiful drawing for an illustration I have ever seen: the weird faces of the maids of Elfen-mere, the musical, timed movement of their arms together as they sing, the face of the man, above all, are such as only a great artist could conceive.'
This picture, 'three damsels clothed in white,' who came
'With their spindles every night;
Two and one, and three fair maidens,
Spinning to a pulsing cadence,
Singing songs of Elfen-mere,'
reproduced here, is still issued in William Allingham's volume of poems entitled Flower Pieces (Reeves and Turner, 1888).
Five illustrations to Moxon's edition of Tennyson's Poems, 1857, two in Christina Rossetti's The Goblin Market and other Poems, 1862, and two in The Princes Progress and other Poems, 1866, by the same author, complete the ten in question. As the Tennyson has been republished lately, and a monograph, Tennyson and his pre-Raphaelite Illustrators, by G. Somes Layard (Elliot Stock, 1894), has brought together every available scrap of material connected with the famous quintette of designs, it would be superfluous to describe them here in detail. Any distinctly recognised 'movement' is very rarely a crescendo, but nearly always a waning force that owes what energy it retains to the original impetus of its founder. Should this statement be true of any fashion in art, it might be most easily supported, if applied to Rossetti's ten drawings on wood, set side by side with the whole mass of modern 'decorative' illustration. Even a great artist like Howard Pyle has hardly added a new motive to those crowded into these wood-engravings. The lady by the casement, 'The long hours come and go,' upon the title-page of The Princes Progress, is an epitome of a thousand later attempts. Mr. Fairfax Murray has collected over a dozen studies and preliminary drawings for this little block, that would appal some of the younger men as evidence of the intense care with which a masterpiece was wrought of old. Highly-finished drawings were done over and over again until their author was satisfied. The frontispieces to Goblin Market and to The Prince's Progress, no less than the Tennyson designs, form, obviously enough, the treasure-trove whence later men have borrowed; too often exchanging the gold for very inferior currency. Without attempting to give undue credit to Rossetti, or denying that collateral influences—notably that of Walter Crane—had their share in the revival of the nineties, there can be no doubt that the strongest of the younger 'decorative' artists to-day are still fascinated by Rossetti—no less irresistibly than 'the young Burne-Jones' was influenced in 1855.
Therefore the importance of these ten designs cannot be exaggerated. Whether you regard their influence as unwholesome, and regret the morbidity of the school that founded itself on them, or prefer to see in them the germ of a style entirely English in its renaissance, which has already spread over that Continent which one had deemed inoculated against any British epidemic, the fact remains that Rossetti is the golden milestone wherefrom all later work must needs be measured. No doubt the superb work of Frederick Sandys, had it been more accessible to the younger artists when the new impetus to decorative black-and-white began to attract a popular audience, would have found hardly as ardent disciples.