Drawings of Rossetti

by T. Martin Wood

'Tis she: though of herself, alas! Less than her shadow on the grass Or than her image in the stream.

One might hazard the question whether it were possible for a painter such as Rossetti, seeking expression in his art for this intensity of feeling, to vie in the rendering of the external aspects with those painters who have approached life with that cold acuteness to the appearance of things and aloofness from their meaning characteristic of work that has contributed largely to the actual science of painting. To Rossetti life came over-crowded, over-coloured. There was too much for him to realise in his working moments. The very richness of his nature embarrassed his output. His gifts gave him so many ways of self-expression from which to choose. The phases through which his genius passed, the result of an inherited and rare temperament and its adventures, made the science of painting prosaic for him. He himself felt latterly that this impatience had left his ideas pathetically at the mercy of his materials. Apart from the quality in colour to which he attained, one is conscious always in his paintings of the tragedy of genius striving for expression through an ineffectual technique. Rossetti's individuality, however, was so strong that it stamped itself everywhere; in spite of every limitation his art explains his attitude towards life. In his ability to make it show this his greatness lies, and in the fact that the point of view that it suggested was his alone. His art created for itself its own atmosphere—an unfamiliar one at first to Englishmen, with its subserviency of everything to a romantic emotionalism. The histories of the world for Rossetti were its stories of emotion, and in every place that his memory knew Love's image had been set to reign, Love who had wandered down through the ages decked with the flowers of art, offerings of bygone lovers, dead lovers to never dying Love. As a strange spirit Rossetti entered modern London. A heart rich from many forgotten experiences seemed to have lodged itself in him and he painted with eyes filled with the colours of old things. For him the tapestries could never fade in a room that had known love's history, nor the colours leave the missal which told the story of a soul.

How far his drawings were intended to foreshadow large paintings which he desired to make as windows for us to look with him into his romantic country we cannot say. As it is they show that it was in Rossetti's power to be the greatest imaginative illustrator of his century; that he was not so seems to prove that in this way, as in some others, he failed to attain to much that at first had seemed included in his destiny. In his paintings, in his poetry, in these drawings something there is that was new, and that brought a fresh phase into art and literature in England. It is something which has influenced permanently the nation's thought and has been even admitted into the procession of its fashions. For a time women tried to look as the women in his paintings, so much had the type he chose, which was his own creation, imposed itself upon their imagination.

The Rossetti woman, if she did not supersede the early Victorian type, at least helped to change it, and to mark a change which was taking place in the ideals of the nation. Fresh tendencies in national thought are always correspondingly represented by a change in the type of women idealised in its art and poetry. When the Victorian type went, the time had passed when homage was given to women for a surrender of their claims on life. The new type spoke of the ardent way in which another generation of women was creating for itself wide interests in the world.

Rossetti displayed in his art the dramatic sense; we find him in his earlier drawings always illustrating dramatic subjects, rendering action in his figures in a way that proclaims him at once as one of those to whom the actions of men, the faces of women, come tragically or otherwise into every dream. One is enabled to write more clearly on this point by comparing him with his friend Burne-Jones. Burne-Jones' figures live in a dream in which the world has little part, whilst Rossetti's dream is of the world itself. His work is rich with the human experience that is absent in the art of his friend. He is accredited with being the leader of a phase of decadence, while, as a matter of fact, no one could have been further removed from anything like a "decadent" pose. Rossetti had an unconscious and unexplained sympathy for life that tragically pursued, and found itself shipwrecked upon, its own illusions. It was part of his art's vitality. There was little defiance in his attitude, it was altogether one of pity. Indiscriminate publication has familiarised the public only with the last sad phase of Rossetti's art, and unhappily this is esteemed characteristic. The intimate patrons of the painter possessed themselves of his early work; now it is inaccessible, and it is not at his best that he is seen in any public collection.

It is possible to like the art of Rossetti very deeply, and also to love the changing colours of the sea and the shadows of the sun clouds moving swiftly on the hills. But often to pagan lovers of such things the art of Rossetti, shuttered close in its mediaeval darkened rooms, has seemed as an almost poisonous flower, with its forgetfulness of the world without.

It can never be sufficiently emphasised how necessary it is in judging any art first of all to share some of the mood in which it was created. Those who would enter into the atmosphere of Rossetti's art must find their way to it in the darkened light of dreams. It stands in no relation whatever to the workaday world.

A poet whose writings realised an opposite temperament to Rossetti's own would have had the test of poetry that it could be taken to the fields in the early morning and read. To attempt to bring a painting of Rossetti's into relationship with nature out of doors would to all intents put an end to the reason for its artistic existence. It would be to demand of it that it should strike a note in tune with a mood the direct opposite to that which it was its intention to create. Though art should always be examined in its own atmosphere, much of the criticism applied to Rossetti is but the bringing of his art out into the fields. It is not valuable criticism that approaches work in a spirit of this kind.

A great deal too much has been made in writing of Rossetti's Pre-Raphaelitism. To a nature like Rossetti's any school, any methods he may have taken up with, or inspired, would be largely accidental to his environment. Arrived at a time of reaction, of revolution in English painting, with his qualities of leadership he threw himself into Pre-Raphaelitism as a new movement, but it is more than probable his genius would have found methods of expression as personal to itself in the refinements that entered English painting in the wake of Pre-Raphaelitism,—only the Pre-Raphaelite movement could not have been but for the ardent genius of Rossetti which poured inspiration into all those who gathered about him. He departed from Pre-Raphaelite tenets just when it suited him; its hold over him lay chiefly in that he liked to realise very definitely the shapes of objects in his art, because they made his dreams real and gave pleasure to those eyes of his that so hungered after every sign of beauty. The secrets of art lie, after all, more within the vision than in expression. That Rossetti could have directed his genius into another manner from Pre-Raphaelitism seems possible from the fact that in his poetry so many styles meet and show his variegated temperament expressing itself in opposing forms. What was of literary significance in Rossetti's art perhaps gained from Pre-Raphaelitism, for Pre-Raphaelitism made things symbolical. To nearly every object that they brought into their pictures the Pre-Raphaelites gave meaning other than its own, other than that which was simply artistic. Now Rossetti, looking on his art and its relationship to life from a literary more than from an artistic standpoint, striving to attain in art not an imitation of life but an expression of his ideas about it, found, as we have said, painters' problems a difficulty. He was irritated by difficulties which to a whole-hearted painter present pleasures of conquest in proportion to their resistance to his craftsmanship and skill. In other ways Rossetti lacked the characteristics of really great painters as such; he had not the seeing eye that gives to every outward thing a shape and colour already formed within the mind. From such a cult of the eyes as this comes the true painter. By taking thought art does not become a metaphor for ideas, though the whole aim of its subject may be to make it so. Art is always metaphorical, whatever its subject and however unconsciously, to itself. The presence of genius only is needed. Yet because in actual pigment red can never be anything other than red, ideas are clothed more easily in the colour of words, for in themselves words have no colour and they have no existence other than the existence which they have in thought, and the colour which any language lends them.

Rossetti could not learn painting instinctively as he learnt writing; for him the materials were not so simple, they remained during a long apprenticeship an obstacle rather than an aid to impassioned expression, and from his apprenticeship he never emerged into anything approaching freedom. Upon the vivacity of the imagination in them, and not upon subtlety of line or of observation, the claims of Rossetti's drawings rest, though it is wonderful how often he lifts his art up to the level of all that he has to say and imposes upon us a forgetfulness of its shortcomings. His studies do not reveal a master who looked upon objects and beautiful forms for their own sake and for the sake of the tender drawing he could find in them. Rossetti, indeed, loved a visible world, and liked to interpret the beauty of natural objects, but he was always in haste to get the scene set where such objects were, after all, for him only as accessories to the thing enacted, or as notes in an orchestration; of value but not existing by themselves. He gave to every object the import of the drama in his mind; in his art things seem to have about them the meaning lent them by an imagination that spiritualised objective things so that they seem there in essence only and rendered with a sympathy that shows how alive to the significance of outward beauty Rossetti was, and how his own time and every-day surroundings were fused and blent with his most far-reaching imaginings. To turn to outward things, and to study them as merely offering various surfaces to the light, holding depths of shadow, possessing lines of delicate shape, was, however, impossible to his temperament. The characteristic story of [Madox Brown] setting in early days the young Rossetti down to paint such still life as jam jars, and of the young painter's impatience, shows that to paint or draw the objects for their own sake only was not congenial to him. There was very likely sufficient of the true painter in Rossetti to make such study a delight, had his mind ever been still enough for his hand to playfully carry out such problems; but always at the back of his mind, at the back of the world for him, a strange drama of love and beauty went on. How then could time be spent in studying what, after all, were merely objects, how could time be spent in deliberating over the study of them? And so the drawings which Rossetti left us are seldom studies of poses and draperies, such elaborate scaffolding as that upon which the art of Burne-Jones was built. They are little pictures in most cases, in which the pencil or the pen afforded a readier and less laboured means of realising quickly the life dramatic of imagination.