Drawings of Rossetti

by T. Martin Wood

Illustration essentially suited his genius in so far as in small dimensions it was easier to reflect easily, whilst the power of creation lasted, what was moving in a mind that was held by no one mood for long. It suited his genius also because it minimised the labour of creation, and with Rossetti it was always apparent that creation was a labour. He himself has said in that other art in which perhaps he always found his happiest expression—

Unto the man of yearning thought And aspiration, to do nought Is in itself almost an act,— Being chasm-fire and cataract Of the soul's utter depths unseal'd.

A body that grew faint under the strain of over-feverish genius undoubtedly imposed its indolence upon Rossetti's spirit, so that he shirked the difficulties of his earlier subjects until the downfall of his art set in with the constant production, for indiscriminating purchasers, of a face that grew more and more distant from the beautiful type of his earlier inspiration, which till the end he always pathetically imagined himself to be creating.

Turning to the illustrations, that called [A Drawing for a Ballad] with its free and loose handling, its qualities of selection and emphasis, show how great in many ways Rossetti was. What lines could be simpler than those in the girl's dress? In such a sketch as this, in the little things, Rossetti is masterly, and one cannot here separate what he has to say from the saying of it. This sketch shows an artist great enough to be unpretentious, and it shows that the happy qualities of mind, united with its craft, sprang from his habits of thought. We see in it with what natural tenderness he has sketched, how by one of the girl's hands her companion's face is lifted to the kiss. This naturalness holds the secret of Rossetti's power. His art was consciously set on decoration, but this is not a decoration; in all that he has read into the miniature faces and in the embracing of the hands, we get in this sketch more intimately than anywhere else evidence of his great heart. This dramatic sympathy would attract every one could it shine more often through the carelessness, the unhappiness, that at the end obscured it. In this way we must think of Rossetti as a failure, and a great man cannot fail once without blinding the world to his many successes. Had Rossetti possessed no sense of colour, and had he not completed many large pictures and elaborate illustrations, but only followed this one path as far as he could go, doing only such things as this, without being a poet and without being a painter, who knows to what extent we should have praised him for these slighter things alone? There is no doubt that we expect so much from him, and he has given us so much in other ways, that we forget the treasures hidden here. One could wish that he had always worked in his drawings with the freedom indicated in this sketch, but it was not the fashion then. Work in Rossetti's day had to come into the market elaborated to the point of its soul's extinction in order to be taken seriously. Now that we have taught ourselves always to value first any indication of the spirit, what would we not give to possess ourselves of work by this artist in impulsive drawings, and it must have been within Rossetti's power to do them down to the last.

The drawing of the death of [Lady Macbeth] is one of the most wonderful things Rossetti ever did, and it is characteristically marred by imperfect drawing. The drawing is of great quality throughout, except for the figure with head averted. Some wonder why the ability to make the rest of the picture perfect failed the artist here. It is probably because the action of each figure is controlled only by the imaginative impulse that sways the whole composition, that gives to every part of it dramatic intensity as if executed all in one mood, bringing in one moment of creation the whole to life on paper. Those in sympathy with the nature of Rossetti's art do not count this piece of bad drawing a disastrous flaw. The rarity of genius makes them accept everything gratefully; it disarms a cavilling attitude. The fault in their eyes even seems to add to the tense note struck as a changed note in an over sweet harmony. Its dissonance breaks the monotonous rhythmic decoration, and its harshness relieves the detail so delicately wrought. Rossetti is of the extreme few who have finished minutely without sacrificing the qualities of greater significance than finish. His art is great enough to make us forget the detail and to render us for the time oblivious of it. In our absorption in the subject it seems for a time not to exist, only the tense mood exists, the intense moment. In a picture in which the moments are aflame with tragedy Rossetti drew this figure moving slowly and with decorative convention. All the figures are controlled by such a convention; they are partaking in a high drama. Such a convention as Irving has in the art of acting gives something to the dignity of tragedy. The conventions of Rossetti too are so much in the spirit of high art, they conform so well to the claims of art, that they lend beauty to that power of his of giving to his drawings dramatic perfection. In regard to the particular figure of which we write it is better, faulty as it is, than if it had been redrawn in another mood and given again to the picture. It is to be regretted, of course, that it did not come rightly as it is, but it is less to be regretted than if he had substituted dead perfection for living imperfection, a studied and acquired idea of the pose in place of the instinctive one.

The first illustration for [Desdemona's Death Song] is simply a rough sketch, but even taken as such it shows how blind or how careless in the matter of form Rossetti at times could be. Here the lower part of the figure is so obviously lacking in proportion that it prevents us accepting an otherwise characteristic drawing as such. Still of Rossetti's best moments is the controlling grace of the bend in the maid's wrist, and the movement of her head as she combs Desdemona's hair. The curtain blown into the room by the wind is one of those touches Rossetti gives everywhere; by insistence on such an incident he makes us live the moments depicted in his pictures—just as we find ourselves in moments of extreme tension watching eagerly something absolutely trivial and making some accident portent with meaning.

In the second and completer [study for this picture] we find the proportions corrected; thought and after-thoughts have developed the artist's intentions. Desdemona, with her hand hanging thoughtfully, is an improvement on her attitude at first. The maid, however, has lost much of the spontaneity of her original gestures.

Like all those in whose art we find phases of an extraordinary beauty Rossetti could often draw in the most uninspired fashion, presumably where his interest flagged. In the drawing of [Hamlet and Ophelia], Ophelia is charming; but it is with difficulty that we are reconciled to the Hamlet; it is difficult even to understand in what position the figure is standing; not that this indefiniteness often matters in art, but here, where everything else is so precise, it provokes dissatisfaction. From Rossetti alone could have come the background with the winding ways parting and meeting rhythmically with steps up to the bridge. Such architecture as this, and all the quaint furniture in his pictures, were designed by himself. From his facile imagination anything might come. Certain objects that were full of associations of old things he returned to often in his drawings, such as old Books of Hours with all the sentiment that many hands had given to them. The niche in the picture containing the Crucifix and the Breviaries is significant of the Religion in Rossetti's art. This was his religion, to think of Divine things by the legends of a romantic Church.

In comparing the study for [Christ at the House of Simon the Pharisee] with the [completed drawing], the question arises whether, with the elaboration that has come into the latter, some of the intensity of the study has escaped; or whether, on the other hand, the subject has gained. The simplicity of the first undoubtedly possesses something which is subsequently lost in elaboration, and yet taking the completed picture and looking into it one finds a lesson in Rossetti's methods. We find that by dwelling upon his subject he has emphasised certain notes, has repeated as it were a refrain, and made more spirited and poetic in rendering the figure of the lover in the foreground. After-thoughts have given every touch that could possibly enrich, and, at the same time concentrate, dramatic motif in this figure. The embroidery on his coat, the flowers in his hair, the hair itself, and the face so mocking and fascinating and sure of itself, is more in the spirit of the subject than the gentler face as it appears in the sketch.

The figure of the Magdalene gains in many ways as completed, and though the distressed loving face and the flowing hair of the sketch are changed, the alteration of the expression on the face from one of intense distress to one of proud determination is very interesting as showing how his subjects grew and changed under his hand. It is wholly to the gain of the picture the different gesture which he has arrived at in the second drawing, where the Magdalene with both hands throws the flowers from her hair. The dramatic quality upon which we have insisted as part of Rossetti's art is nowhere better shown than in the deer quietly eating leaves from the wall, all unconscious that there is acted out beside it the most pathetically beautiful drama of the world. One misses in the finished picture some of the sensitive drawing given in the sketch to the Magdalene's dress. Here, instead, her clothes are as if she were perfectly still; they give no indication of her movements and the stormy action round her. That is the fault of Pre-Raphaelitism—to fritter away the spirit for the sake of the embroidery upon the body's clothes; to lose emphasis in elaboration, to sacrifice a greater beauty for a meaner one.