The evening was gone by the time the ballad was ended; and it was arranged that upon my return to London from the house of a friend at the sea-side I should again dine with Rossetti, and sleep the night at Cheyne Walk. I was invited to come early in order to see certain pictures by day-light, and it was then I saw the painter’s most important work,—the Dantés Dream, which finally (and before Rossetti was made aware of any steps being taken to that end) I had prevailed with Alderman Samuelson to purchase for the public gallery at Liverpool. At my request, though only after some importunity, Rossetti read again his White Ship, and afterwards Rose Mary, the latter of which he told me had been written in the country shortly after the appearance of the first volume of poems. He remarked that it had occupied three weeks in the writing, and that the physical prostration ensuing had been more than he would care to go through again. I observed on this head, that though highly finished in every stanza, the ballad had an impetuous rush of emotion, and swift current of diction, suggesting speed in its composition, as contrasted with the laboured deliberation which the sonnets, for example, appeared to denote. I asked if his work usually took much out of him in physical energy.
“Not my painting, certainly,” he replied, “though in early years it tormented me more than enough. Now I paint by a set of unwritten but clearly-defined rules, which I could teach to any man as systematically as you could teach arithmetic; indeed, quite recently I sat all day for that very purpose with Shields, who is not so great a colourist as he is a draughtsman: he is a great draughtsman—none better now living, unless it is Leighton or Sir Noel Paton.”
“Still,” I said, “there’s usually a good deal in a picture of yours beside what you can do by rule.”
“Fundamental conception, no doubt, but beyond that not much. In painting, after all, there is in the less important details something of the craft of a superior carpenter, and the part of a picture that is not mechanical is often trivial enough. I don’t wonder, now,” he added, with a suspicion of a twinkle in the eye, “if you imagine that one comes down here in a fine frenzy every morning to daub canvas?”
“I certainly imagine,” I replied, “that a superior carpenter would find it hard to paint another Dante’s Dream, which some people consider the best example yet seen of the English school.”
“That is friendly nonsense,” rejoined my frank host, “there is now no English school whatever.”
“Well,” I said, “if you deny the name to others who lay more claim to it, will you not at least allow it to the three or four painters who started with you in life?”
“Not at all, unless it is to Brown, and he’s more French than English; Hunt and Jones have no more claim to the name than I have. As for all the prattle about pre-Raphaelitism, I confess to you I am weary of it, and long have been. Why should we go on talking about the visionary vanities of half-a-dozen boys? We’ve all grown out of them, I hope, by now.”
I remarked that the pre-Raphaelite movement was no doubt a serious one at the beginning.
“What you call the movement was serious enough, but the banding together under that title was all a joke. We had at that time a phenomenal antipathy to the Academy, and in sheer love of being outlawed signed our pictures with the well-known initials.” I have preserved the substance of what Rossetti said on this point, and, as far as possible, the actual words have been given. On many subsequent occasions he expressed himself in the same way: assuredly with as much seeming depreciation of the painter’s “craft,” although certain examples of modern art called forth his warmest eulogies. In serious moods he would speak of pictures by Millais, Watts, Leighton, Burne Jones, and others, as works of the highest genius.