In the diary of Ford Madox Brown, published by William Rossetti, there is an amusing story of Dante's keeping Brown's overcoat, and keeping the room needed for other occupants, with the unconscious oblivion of any other convenience than his own, which was quite characteristic of the man, and which was shown on a larger scale at Robertsbridge. He not only took possession of whatever part of the house pleased him best, but, without in the least consulting me, he invited his friends to come and occupy it. As the agreement was that we should pay share and share alike of the expense, and as I invited no one, the burden on me was out of all proportion to our respective means. Rossetti's income, according to his own statement, was, at that time, £3000 a year, but he was always in debt. He denied himself nothing that struck his fancy, and he had the most costly Oriental porcelain in London, and the most beautiful old furniture to be found, and the most princely disregard of expenditure. I had finally to refuse to continue the life in common. Dante invited Mr. and Mrs. Ford Madox Brown, and then Mr. and Mrs. Morris, and as they were all excellent friends of mine I could make no objection, though ill able to bear my share of the expense of the ménage incurred, and finally I broke away, leaving him in possession, with Madame Bodichon's consent. He was generous to the same degree of extravagance that he was indifferent to the claims of others; he made no more account of giving you a treasured curio than he did of taking it. His was a sublime and childlike egotism which simply ignored obligations until, by chance, they were made legal, at which, when it happened, he protested like a spoiled child. And he had been so spoiled by all his friends and exercised such a fascination on all around him, that no one rebelled at being treated in his princely way, for it was only with his friends that he used it. He dominated all who had the least sympathy with him or his genius.
Had Rossetti's knowledge of the technique of painting, its science, been equal to his feeling for it, he had certainly founded a school of the truest art; but, for schools, the grammar is the first requisite, and Rossetti had himself never been taught what he would have had to teach. His feeling for color was on a par with his power of composition, and it seems to me that since Tintoret no one has equaled him in the combination. Of modern men, I know only Baron Leys and Delacroix who possessed to the same degree the power of spontaneous, harmonious composition, except Turner in landscape; all other modern art has, to my mind, more or less of the pose plastique, the air of the tableau vivant. His death, at a time when he should have been at the height of his powers, a premature victim of his undisciplined temperament and the irregularities it led him into, coupled with the over-intense mental vivacity, equally undisciplined, is one of the most melancholy incidents in the chaotic artistic movement of our time.
Ford Madox Brown, who was his first master, and is commonly considered to have exercised a great influence on Rossetti, in my opinion had none that was permanent. He was Rossetti's antithesis, and in himself as inconsequent as Rossetti was logical. He was severely and uncompromisingly rationalistic; with the conscience of a Puritan he was an absolute skeptic, with a profound contempt for all religious matters, while Rossetti, with all his irregularities, never could escape from his religious feeling, which was the part of his constitution he possessed in common with his sisters. Brown had, of the purely artistic qualities, only the academic; he was neither a colorist nor a great draughtsman; his art was literary, didactic, and, except for occasional dramatic passages, unemotional and unpoetic. The predominance of the intellectual powers in him was so great that the purely artistic view of nature was impossible to him; and his artistic education, while curiously erratic and short-sighted in its elementary and technical stage, was intellectually large in academic and literary qualities, and comprehensive. It appears to me that the telling of the story was, in his estimation, the highest office of art, so that, while his drawing was bad in style, his execution scrappy and amateurish and deficient in breadth and subordination, his compositions were often masterly, fine in conception, and harmonious in line, in the pen-and-ink study; but the want of ensemble and the insubordination of the insistent detail generally made his work less imposing when it was on canvas than in the first study. His habit of finishing from corner to corner, without having the whole work broadly laid out before him to guide him in the proper subordination of the details to the general effect, made it impossible for him to make his pictures broad and effective. His most successful pictures were, therefore, the small ones, in which the impossibility of too much insistence on detail proved an advantage.
I shall always regard Brown as a man carried by a youthful enthusiasm for art out of his true occupation, which was history; for his literary and scientific tendencies and his vehement love of truth were the larger part of his mind, and these qualities are of secondary importance in art. He sympathized strongly with the early phase of the pre-Raphaelite movement, which was what he had attempted with less intensity himself; but when Rossetti entered upon his true artistic development, it was only the personal influence of the past that gave the elder painter any power of influencing the younger. It is possible that Rossetti owed something of his manner of painting—a fragmentary method of completion—to the teaching of Brown; if so, he was indebted to his friend for the weakest side of his art. But, for the rest, this system of working is very general amongst English painters, in whom the amateur is persistent—the building the picture up in detail, with minor reference to the mass of the structure; and this was the weakness of Brown's art, for what he did was done with such intensity that no after treatment could bring it into complete subordination to the general effect. Theodore Rousseau's maxim, "If you have not got your picture in the first five lines you will never get it," seems to me the true golden rule of the art of painting, as in all creation. A picture should grow pari passu in all its parts; otherwise there is no certainty of its keeping together when finished.
Rossetti's influence, though always partial and never leaving a genuine pupil, was very wide, in the end, it seems to me, much exceeding that of Millais and that of Holman Hunt; but it is a question in which of his two functions—poet or painter—it was most effective. I have heard Swinburne say that but for Rossetti's early poetry he would never have written verses, but this I think must be taken conditionally. Swinburne has the poetic temperament so decided and so individual, and his musical quality is so exalted, that it was impossible that he should not have shown it at some time; but it is possible that Rossetti furnished the spark that actually kindled the fire. Perhaps Swinburne himself cannot trace the vein to its hidden sources, and confounded the mastery of Rossetti's temperament and the personal magnetism he exercised on those who came into close relations with him with an intellectual stimulus which, strictly speaking, Rossetti did not exercise. He was too specialized, too exclusively artistic in all his developments, to carry much intellectual weight, and Swinburne was more fully developed in the purely intellectual man; but the warmest friendship existed between them. I often saw Swinburne at Cheyne Walk, and, when they were together, the painter's was certainly the dominant personality, to which Swinburne's attitude was that of an affectionate younger brother.
One day Rossetti had invited us all to dinner, and when we went down to the drawing-room there was great exhilaration, Swinburne leading the fun. Morris was, as usual, very serious, and, in discussing some subject of conversation, Swinburne began to chaff and tease him, and finally gave him a vigorous thrust in the stomach, which sent him backwards into a high wardrobe, on the outer corners of which stood Rossetti's two favorite blue and white hawthorn jars, a pair unrivaled in London, for which he had paid several hundred pounds each. The wardrobe yielded and down came the jars. I caught one, and Morris, I believe, the other, as it was falling on his head. Rossetti was naturally angry, and, for the first and only time in my experience of him, lost control of his temper, bursting out on the culprit with a torrent of abuse which cooled the hilarity of the poet instantly, and reduced him to decorum with the promptness of a wet bath. To hear Swinburne read his own poetry was a treat, and this I enjoyed several times at Rossetti's; the terrible sonnets on Napoleon III. after Sedan, amongst the readings, being the most memorable and effective.
The influence of Rossetti on Morris and Burne-Jones is unquestionable, and they probably both owed their embarking in an artistic career to the stimulus given by the advent of a purely artistic nature which set a new light in their firmament. The little we have of Morris's painting shows only that he had the gift, but his own appreciation of his work was too modest to encourage him to face the strain of going through the necessary education, made more difficult by his want of early training, even of the imperfect and incorrect kind against which Rossetti had so successfully had to make his way to a correct conception of his art. On the whole, I consider Morris to have been the largest all-round man of the group, not merely on account of the diversity of his faculties, for he had in his composition a measure, greater or less, of most of the gifts which go to make up the intellectual man and artist, but because he had, in addition to those, a largeness and nobility of nature, a magnanimity and generosity, which rarely enter into the character of the artist; and perhaps the reason why his gifts were not more highly developed was that his estimation of them was so modest. His facility in versification led him to diffuseness in his poems, and the modest estimation in which he held his work, when done, was a discouragement to the limae labor so necessary to perfection. He told me that he had written eight hundred lines of one of his tales in one night, but at the same time he regretted that he could not invent a plot, though the exquisite manner in which he carried out the old plots which have been the common property of poets since poetry existed in the form of tales is honor enough.
But in the feeling for pure decoration, which is the essential element in art, in the universality of his application of it, and the high excellence to which he brought it in each branch to which he devoted himself, I doubt if Morris has had a rival in our day; and I am inclined to think that in the default of an early education in art, such as the great Italian painters received, we lost one of the greatest artists who have ever lived. For with the high degree in which he possessed taste, technical abilities never fully developed in work, and exquisite feeling for color and invention in design, he had the large human mould which would have made his work majestic beyond that of any of his great contemporaries and co-workers. He remained, owing to the late discovery of himself and the poor opinion of his abilities, only a large sketch of what his completed self would have been. He had that full, sensuous vitality which Madox Brown so completely lacked to his great injury, without the excess of it which was so treacherous with Rossetti. Mr. Mackail's recent life of Morris does great injustice to Rossetti without in any way exalting his friend, for Rossetti always urged Morris to follow his artistic tendencies with the largest and most liberal encouragement and appreciation, and all the stimulus derivable from a most exalted opinion of his native abilities. Rossetti would have set everybody to painting, I think, for, in his opinion, it was the only occupation worth living for, and he was absolutely free from personal jealousy.
Of Burne-Jones I saw little in those days. He was still working out his artistic problem, and came now and then to the studio of Rossetti, who had the highest opinion of his abilities. And, taking art in its special function, that of the decorator, there can hardly be a dispute as to his rank amongst the greatest of romantic designers of the centuries following that of Giotto. His fertility of invention was very great; and, considering that his studies began at a period which for most artists would have been too late for the acquisition of technical excellence of a high degree, his attainment in that direction was most remarkable. Entirely original, if that quality could be predicated of any artist, he certainly was not, and he borrowed of his predecessors to an immense extent, not slavishly but adaptingly, and what he borrowed he proved a good right to, for he used it with a high intelligence and to admirable effect. It seems to me that though he added little or nothing to the resources of art, as Rossetti undoubtedly did, he employed the precedents of past art, and especially of the Italian renaissance, to better effect than any other artist of our epoch; and, in borrowing as he did, he only followed the example of most of the great old masters, who used material of any kind found in their predecessors' works, in perfectly good conscience. His industry was prodigious, and his devotion to art supreme.