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DANTE ROSSETTI AND
THE PRE-RAPHAELITE
MOVEMENT

“The Day-dream.”

From the chalk.

By permission of Mr. Theodore Watts.

Dante Rossetti

AND THE PRE-RAPHAELITE

MOVEMENT

BY ESTHER WOOD

LONDON: SAMPSON LOW, MARSTON

AND COMPANY, LIMITED, SAINT

DUNSTAN’S HOUSE, FETTER LANE

FLEET STREET, E.C. MDCCCXCIIIJ

CHISWICK PRESS:—C. WHITTINGHAM AND CO.,

TOOKS COURT, CHANCERY LANE, LONDON, E.C.

PREFACE.

The following pages do not afford any material additions to what is already known of Dante Rossetti, or of the history and purpose of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The authoritative biography of Rossetti has yet to be written; and while availing myself fully of such new details as may cast fresh side-lights upon the dominant personalities of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, my aim has rather been to present the main features of that movement in their relation to the larger intellectual tendencies of the age, and to the moral principles which have determined the growth of taste and feeling in the nineteenth century. To this end I have avoided as far as possible the proper domain of the art critic, and endeavoured to deal with the Pre-Raphaelite movement more as an ethical than an æsthetic revolution.

“It was always known to be Rossetti’s wish,” says Mr. Hall Caine in his interesting and graphic “Recollections of Rossetti,” “that if at any moment after his death it should appear that the story of his life required to be written, the one friend who during many of his later years knew him most intimately, and to whom he unlocked the most sacred secrets of his heart, Mr. Theodore Watts, should write it; unless indeed it were undertaken by his brother William. But though I know that whenever Mr. Watts sets pen to paper in pursuance of such a purpose and in fulfilment of such charge, he will afford us a recognizable portrait of the man, vivified by picturesque illustration, the like of which few other writers could compass, I also know from what Rossetti often told me of his friend’s immersion in all kinds and varieties of life, that years (perhaps many years) may elapse before such a biography is given to the world.”

In the meantime, the present writer is indebted to Mr. J.A. Vinter, Rossetti’s fellow-student at the Royal Academy Schools, for some interesting reminiscences of class-room and studio life, and to the Rev. Walter Tuckwell, rector of Stockton, Rugby, for personal recollections of the Pre-Raphaelites at Oxford. Mr. Gerald Massey has also assisted with suggestions and notes.

Through the courtesy of present owners of Rossetti’s pictures, several important drawings and studies are here engraved for the first time. Lord Battersea and Overstrand has kindly permitted a photograph to be made from the sketch in his possession, “Mary Magdalene at the Door of Simon the Pharisee.” A similar privilege has been granted by the Corporation of Birmingham in regard to their monochrome, “The Boat of Love,” and the beautiful unfinished study of “Our Lady of Pity.” I have also to acknowledge the kindness of Mr. Moncure D. Conway, in giving access to the fine study of the “Head of Christ” in his collection, and, by no means least, of Mr. Theodore Watts, in the matter of his two superb crayons, “The Day-dream” and “Pandora.” The “Beata Beatrix” and “Ecce Ancilla Domini” are from the now familiar paintings in the National Gallery.

Esther Wood.

Hampstead,

February, 1894.

CONTENTS.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

DANTE ROSSETTI AND THE

PRE-RAPHAELITE

MOVEMENT.

CHAPTER I.
THE PREPARATION FOR REFORM IN ART.

Constable prophesies the Decay of English Art—The new Impulse from Italy—The English Renaissance of 1850—Rossetti and the Specialistic Temperament—Classicism of the Eighteenth Century—Influence of the French Revolution—Revival of Romance—Distinction between Mediæval and Modern Romance—Pessimism in Pre-Raphaelite Painting—Nature as a Background—Moral Significance of the Change.

A study of the Pre-Raphaelite movement in England at the zenith of the nineteenth century opens up perhaps a wider field for controversy in the ethics of art than is afforded by any other phase of modern painting. Between the ridicule which, for the most part, greeted Rossetti’s first picture, “The Girlhood of Mary Virgin,” in 1849, and the enthusiastic homage which exalted him, thirty years later, to the dominance not merely of a school, but almost of a religion, lies a ground of infinite question and dispute, still awaiting the historian who shall adjust the issues of the strife to the main thought-current of the period.

“In thirty years,” said Constable in 1821, “English art will have ceased to exist.”

The words were significant of that first stirring of weariness and discontent which precedes either a collapse or a revolution. It was impossible that the conventions of the eighteenth century, persisting in pictorial art long after they had been cast off by literature, should suffice for an age which had wholly outgrown the conceptions of life on which they were founded. Landscape and portraiture, however enriched by the last gleams of a flickering classicism in the genius of a Turner, a Lawrence, or a Constable, were still in the “bondage of corruption” to traditional schools. Turner, indeed, is too great to be bracketed with his contemporaries, or with the pioneers of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. He stands as much alone as Titian. But the thrall of the conventional, of the accepted canons of what should be perceived and conceived, and how things ought to look in pictures, lay yet upon English art. One other painter, a solitary and uncouth herald of the new day, holds a unique position in that transition period. Blake alone, working his fantastic will like a sanctified Rabelais run riot in all supernal things, discerned weird glimpses of the coming light; such glimpses as Chatterton, in the world of poetry, caught brokenly before the neo-romantic dawn.

Posterity may decide that the catastrophe thus prophesied by Constable was only averted by the grafting of an Italian genius upon English stock, and that to the country of the Great Renaissance England owes—at least in the field of painting—her own Renaissance of the nineteenth century. Spontaneous as was the impulse of revolt in kindred minds, and worthily as it issued in the hands of others, the supreme achievement of the Pre-Raphaelite movement abides with Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Without him there might have been—and indeed was already begun—a breaking up of the old pictorial conventions; an experiment both significant and fruitful in contemporary art. Failing this ready soil, the genius brought over by Rossetti from a Latin race could hardly have been naturalized as it was in early life by interchange of thought and method with fellow-schismatics from the English schools. But whether that vital change of spirit which found its fullest expression in the Pre-Raphaelite movement would have produced anything like its present results independently of Rossetti, is a question still entangled in that injudicial partisanship of opinion from which no contemporary judgment can quite shake itself free. A final estimate of Rossetti’s debt to his comrades, and of the original and intrinsic merit both of their own work and of his, is beyond the reach of the present century. Meanwhile, a verdict of no inconsiderable weight is available in the words of Ruskin: “I believe Rosetti’s name should be placed first on the list of men who have raised and changed the spirit of modern art; raised in absolute attainment, changed in the direction of temper.”

Probably, if one were called upon to name a score of typical pictures of the Pre-Raphaelite School, the first rough catalogue rising to the lips would be strangely inadequate to the question. Rossetti’s “Girlhood of Mary Virgin,” “Ecce Ancilla Domini,” “Found,” “Beata Beatrix,” “Dante’s Dream,” and “The Blessed Damozel;” Madox Brown’s “The Last of England,” “The Entombment,” and “Romeo and Juliet;” Holman Hunt’s “Christ in the Temple,” “The Scapegoat,” and “The Light of the World;” Millais’s “Eve of St. Agnes,” “A Huguenot,” and “Ophelia;”—these, if among the most familiar to English eyes, are but a small fraction of the product of that fruitful thirty years, leaving altogether out of count the later and important work of G.F. Watts and E. Burne-Jones, to say nothing of such worthy adherents as Arthur Hughes, James Collinson, Henry Wallis, Walter Deverell, J.M. Strudwick, and others who fairly claim the shadow of the Pre-Raphaelite wing. Yet even in so imperfect a group the student may read at least the dominant features of the painting, and especially in the work of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Here for the first time in English art is colour supreme, triumphant, as in Titian; form ethereal and chastened, like the visions of a Fra Angelico; subjects, rather than objects, set forth in so direct and often crude an imagery; not figures merely, but symbols; fragments of human history, actual and urgent, full of problems and wonders, weighty with meanings and desires. The draped and ordered models of the past—the Ladies Sophia, Elizabeth, and Lavinia as the three Graces, and the Countess Agatha as a species of Muse—have given place to a new “dream of fair women,” not posing or self-conscious, but as if caught and painted unaware; knights like young monks, sad-eyed but alert in a rapt sobriety; Madonnas more human than angelic, with the sweet cares of womanhood upon them all; Christs neither new-born nor dying, but seen in full child-life and manhood, artless and simple and strong. Here, certainly, is the utterance of men who if they have not looked broadly over life have at least seen deeply into it, and concerned themselves not so much with its rare crises as with the permanent conditions and problems of human experience.

It is easily argued that all criticism, all appreciation even, resolves itself ultimately into a question of temperament. To some minds, and these not the least discriminate, the very limitations and extravagances of Pre-Raphaelitism appeal with a peculiar force. There are whole aspects of life which Romance, if it touch, can never transfigure. The passionate, brooding loveliness of Rossetti’s women, the remote and subtle pathos of Holman Hunt, the dreamy and yet vivid tenderness of Millais’s earlier style,—these are not qualities of universal charm: they are the outcome of special moods and conditions which find neither voice nor answer save in the channels they themselves create. It is only given to a rarely catholic genius—a Shakespeare, a Handel, or a Raphael—to move, as it were, the broad currents of common feeling, and to command the general sympathies of the educated world. Artists of more distinctive and personal quality—a Shelley in poetry, a Chopin in music, or a Rossetti in painting—will rather gain each an elect circle of interpreters through whom to sway less immediately the thought of their generation; the more so since in the realm of the fine arts is felt most potently the growing tendency to specialize both thought and utterance in the tension of modern life. “Our age,” it has been aptly said, “has seen a specialization of emotions as well as of studies and industries. Let us not then expect all things from any man. Let us welcome the best representative of every mood of the mind.”[^[1]]

The private life of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, though leaving to those who loved him an inexhaustible harvest of tender and pathetic memories, was outwardly uneventful enough, save for the one romance and tragedy of his early manhood by which he is vaguely known to the outer world. But behind the veil of recordable history, few artists have suffered greater mental vicissitudes in a lifetime of half a century, or have lived at such high spiritual pressure and imaginative strain. London-born and London-bred though he was, the force of his Italian parentage and temperament isolated him—save for a very few congenial spirits—in an alien world; and though his work in painting and poetry was largely Saxonized by training and environment, the man himself was oppressed with the burden of an imagination steeped in the very soul of mediæval Florentine romance. His whole nature was overstrung and at the mercy of physical and social “weather.” Memory, daily experience, his own conceptions and creations in design and poetry, small incidents of life woven by his own feverish brain into actual calamity, possessed him with a power simply incomprehensible to the average mind. Like Sir Bedevere, striding from ridge to ridge in Lyonness,—

“His own thought drove him like a goad.”

At the last, his death, it has been affirmed by Mr. Theodore Watts, was due but indirectly to physical disease; primarily to the prolonged and terrible fervour of writing “The King’s Tragedy.” Out of such conditions of artistic expression came a depth and intensity of feeling incompatible with wide versatility or range of vision. Such a temperament must either specialize or achieve nothing.

But it is the business of the historian to look behind temperament towards the deep and primal impulses of a nation and a century. To him the sum of temperaments becomes the spirit of an age; or rather, the nation itself, in the grasp of the age, is conceived as a living, thinking, struggling personality; complex, problematic, self-contradictory, but strong to inspire the same loyalties, the same aspirations, as the old world found in Rome, or mediæval Europe in the great mother-cities which were at once her burden and her pride. To study a temperament like Rossetti’s in its relation to the intellectual life of the age, and to ask how such a temperament was in its turn brought to bear upon some of the problems of that life, is to be confronted with much more than a personality or a career; is to deal with a wide and crucial phase in the history of a people.

For the Pre-Raphaelite movement was much more than a revolution in the ideals and methods of painting. It was a single wave in a great reactionary tide—the ever rising protest and rebellion of our century against artificial authority, against tradition and convention in every department of life. It broke out, socially, with the French Revolution; it found voice in the poetic impulse which followed it in Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats; it spread from ethics to politics, it touched all morality and all knowledge, and it affected the whole literature of Europe from philosophy to fiction and from the drama to the lyric poem. Schumann and Chopin breathed it into music; Darwin, re-forming the world of science, laid in the doctrine of evolution the foundations of the new cosmogony. It remained for painting, the youngest of the arts, to enter last into the van of progress and take its stand against the classic and orthodox scholasticism now discredited and void.

Not that the classicism of eighteenth century art was without a beauty and a meaning of its own. It was at least the relic of a noble ideal, the outworn garment of a spirit once vigorous and sincere. The true classic temper—the mental ordering of the visible world into types and models according to academic rule—is the natural outgrowth of man’s effort to select and classify those objects around him which it gives him pleasure to contemplate. The “choosing-spirit” of an age—its preference for certain aspects of life and indifference to other aspects—embodies itself in set forms and modes of artistic expression which are accepted by that age as sufficient and final, and stereotyped by common usage into conventions from which, in the progress of a growing people, all vitality gradually ebbs away. Just as in science or philosophy the theories and methods of authoritative men are established as “classic” till fresh facts and fresh problems come to light, so in literature, in music, and in painting, certain types and modes are adopted by general consent as the fit vehicles for the thought to be expressed, and these persist, by force of authority and usage, into a new age bringing new ideas into play and seeing the subject-matter of all art—namely life itself—in a new light. Thus the accepted canons of art, which were at first the natural reflection of the highest culture of the period, become at last the barren dogmas of an outgrown habit of mind. The thought of the people has outrun the language of the schools. The strife of the new thought with the old language is begun.

Such a strife it was that came upon the western world under the outward turmoil of the French Revolution. Europe was in the mood for great reactions. The vast and sordid materialism of the eighteenth century, with its prodigious hypocrisies and its flippant sensuality,—its sentimentality even, which, as Heine reminds us, is always a product of materialism—was rudely broken up. The disruption of the settled order of worldly things awoke men’s dormant questions as to the divine order of things, the moral government of the universe. Or rather, the rejection of external authority was but the evidence of the rejection of authority within—the rejection of traditional standards of right and wrong, beauty and happiness, wisdom and truth; and the demand for new standards for the criticism of life, for new ethics, new ideals, new gods.

Now the pure and lofty classicism of the seventeenth century, as exemplified supremely in the poetry of Milton, was saved from materialism by the robust piety of a Puritan world. It was not until the beginning of the eighteenth century, when the accession of imperial and commercial power brought with it a certain coarsening of the moral fibre of the nation, that the “grand” style became petrified, as it always tends to do, into the grandiose. A people nurtured in the somewhat tawdry luxury of the Hanoverian period was not likely to take very serious views of life, but was well content with superficial philosophies. In the blaze of outward prosperity the inward vision grew dim. Art became the slave of tradition instead of the handmaid of a living will.

Then the great wave of rebellion, surging through the life of Europe, swept into the deep backwaters of imaginative and creative thought. Men born into the storm and stress of revolution, and confronted with the great problems of practical life, were driven back to question ultimate things; were thrown once more upon the spiritual world. And as the outward struggle spent itself, its full significance weighed more upon the peoples. The deep charm of the contemplative, the reflective, the critical, fell once more upon the European mind.

So the “classic” temper—the love of order and authority (degraded at last into mere acceptance of tradition and rule)—gave place to the “romantic” temper,—the temper of enquiry and experiment, the sense of the mystery and the reality of life, the openness of the mind towards spiritual things. And with this new consciousness of the invisible world and all its significance upon the life of man, comes the utter discarding of self-consciousness; the repudiation of “pose.” Life has become too real for attitudinizing.

The first result of this change of spirit upon the art of a nation appears in the choice of subject for artistic treatment. The painter begins to portray not merely things and persons but incidents and conditions; to picture men and women as they are in actual life; in short, to state the problems fairly; to see facts and examine circumstances, in order to reach the solutions and the meanings, vaguely guessed and earnestly desired by the soul awakened to the perception of the supernatural and the divine. This was the initial task of the neo-romantic revival; in this lay the primary significance of the new school of painting which appeared soon after the year 1845 on English exhibition walls.

And to do this it became necessary to set out, as it were, the terms on which life is lived; to deal not merely with the beauty which man loves and the joy which he desires, but also with the stern conditions of their attainment. The struggle between the present evil and the recognized good, the conflict of the soul with earthly bonds, Love baffled in dire cross-currents of fate and duty, or wasted and despoiled in sin, Faith shaken by the storms of circumstance, Hope bowed down before the closing doors of death; and, on the other hand, the glory of consummated joys (though never without the under-thought of their transiency), or the strength of human fidelity and endurance—these are the themes of the second renaissance.

It is hardly surprising that the considerable class of critics (more numerous in the eighteen-forties than to-day) to whom all seriousness is melancholy and all mystery painful, should have dismissed much of the Pre-Raphaelite work under the inaccurate label of “pessimism.” To bring the mood of awe, of sadness, of perplexity, into art at all, and more especially to present serious themes with the directness of familiar life, and without the stage-craft glamour of the heroic and the exceptional, is, in the judgment of such persons, to be indisputably a pessimist. Yet from this standpoint we should have to exclude no small part of the greatest art the world has ever seen. If we accept Heine’s dictum that no man is truly a man until he suffers, we shall call no nation great in art until it is great in tragedy. There comes with every awakening of an age (whether in ancient Greece, Elizabethan England, or mediæval Italy) to problems new to the world at large, or which the preceding age had lost sight of, a straining of the vision towards ultimate meanings and purposes. And the cry for light is answered often by a lurid dawn.

But the temper of Pre-Raphaelitism differs both from that of Greek tragedy (in being essentially romantic and ascetic), and from the mediæval mysticism of which it is to some extent a revival. However sincerely Rossetti and his comrades may have found their inspiration in the early and purest period of the Italian Renaissance (as we shall have to consider in examining the name “Pre-Raphaelite”), it was impossible, in the middle of the nineteenth century, to return absolutely to the mediæval habit of mind. All that was best in the romance of the middle ages, the passionate idealism, the abiding sense of the reality of the unseen, the self-abandonment of devotion to the transcendental and the super-sensuous life, the exquisite childlikeness of spirit which comes of the highest maturity—all these indeed were regained, but with a difference. For the enigma of the universe, regarded by the mediæval world as a mystery of faith, has come upon our own age rather as a mystery of doubt. The silence of the natural world towards man’s eagerest questionings of the Power behind it, was to those pious souls only the holy reticence of an all-wise and all-sufficient God. They accepted with a brave resignation what the modern world endures with a no less courageous but far less trustful mind.

Therefore the much-debated mysticism of the Pre-Raphaelite School carries with it a deeper sombreness than that of a purely mediæval type, and makes the relations between man and external Nature more problematic and obscure. The sense of the impassive irony of Nature behind the little drama of man’s life on earth comes again and again into the dim vistas of landscape behind Rossetti’s loveliest women, and into the mingling of scenic grandeur with an atmosphere of desolation in some of the backgrounds of Holman Hunt. Even Millais, the least subjective of the Brotherhood, achieves, in “The Vale of Rest,” something of that subtle contrast, half discord and half harmony, between the glory and absolute peace of sunset and the dumb unquestionable night of death foreshadowed in the open grave. The classic method of rendering natural background to human tragedy is rather to adjust the mood of Nature to the subject in hand; to depict natural forces either as warring (as in Turner) in the blind anger and fury of the elements against man, or assuming an aspect in harmony with his own pain. But the romantic method finds more tragedy in the ironic beauty and indifference of Nature in the face of human vicissitude, and comes nearer to tears than the affectation of dramatic sympathy; just as, in great crises of suffering and doubt, no anger wounds us so deeply as a smile.

Of this special phase of nature-feeling, a later artist, of strong affinity of spirit with certain undercurrents of Pre-Raphaelite thought—Frederick Walker—is perhaps a greater exponent. But the old-world Nature-worship, independent of human interest and moral significance, is as dead in art as it is in science. Unconsciously perhaps, but surely, art in all its forms has cast off the yoke of the old cosmogony which the implacable Time-Spirit has overthrown. The criticism of life has passed from the self-satisfied, the confident, the epicurean, to the reflective, the questioning, and the experimental stage.

Where, then, is the secret of the changed attitude of English culture towards the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood? What was it that was actually accomplished by this little band of young reformers with their visions of a world of beauty and meaning undreamed of in Royal Academy philosophy? The controversy that raged for years round the work of the leaders—least of all round that of Millais, more round that of Holman Hunt, and most bitterly round the work of Rossetti—was it primarily over a technical question, a matter of pigments and perspective, of anatomy and composition? If so, the house was divided against itself and should have fallen, for Millais soon forsook (if indeed he ever adopted) the path of his early comrades, and a total divergence in method and manner finally separated Rossetti from Holman Hunt. Or was it concerned with underlying principles and purposes with which English culture had not for three hundred years been troubled? Was it essentially an ethical revolt; the first impulse towards that fusion of ethics with æsthetics which will be the task of the twentieth century; the inmost stirring, at the nation’s heart, of a new life which the intellect still fails to lay hold of, and the laggard will, for the most part, yet resists?

CHAPTER II.
THE RENAISSANCE OF THE NINETEENTH
CENTURY.

Childhood of Rossetti—Religious and Literary Influences—Art Training—Conflict between Imagination and Technique—Friendship with Millais and Holman Hunt—The Westminster Competitions—Ford Madox Brown—Influence of Ruskin’s “Modern Painters”—The Early Italian Masters—The Renaissance in Mediæval Europe—Relation of Paganism to Christianity—Revival of Hellenism, and blending of Classic with Romantic Art—Growth of Technique and Return to Convention—The Rule of the Raphaelesque.

Into this atmosphere of revolt and aspiration, charged as with electric forces of long-gathering change, a little band of young painters and poets came, when the time was ripe, to play their part in the great Aufklärung of the century. Students they were in more than the conventional significance of the word; men of widely different endowments, and of the most diverse mental quality, but sensitive at all points to the drift of thought beneath the surface of the life around them. Their task it was to translate into art the message already proclaimed in poetry, and to make, even of the poetic vehicle, a finer and more exquisite setting for the new evangel.

The greatest poet of their company, if not in a literal sense the greatest painter also, was born within a year of Blake’s death,—on the 12th of May, 1828, at 38, Charlotte Street, Portland Place, London: the successor of Blake in English romance, yet an alien in the land of his birth. Rossetti suffered, as M. Gabrièl Sarrazin has aptly expressed it, a double banishment; remote alike from his country and his age. Essentially Italian by heritage and temperament, he belonged no less to the fifteenth century than to Tuscany, and bore about with him, though perhaps unconsciously, the burden of the exile as well as of the reformer and the pioneer. He was as one born out of due time; or rather, let us say, reborn; a spirit anew-incarnate from the golden age; brought back, indeed, from a still earlier re-birth, so that men almost deemed, as they saw his work and dimly understood its purport, that one of the prophets was risen from the dead.

Beyond his inheritance from the far-off past, from the dormant but undying influences of the Italian Renaissance, Rossetti held from his immediate ancestry no mean estate of talent and of character. His mother, half Tuscan and half English (on her mother’s side), was sister to the “Dr. Polidori” known to history as Byron’s travelling companion and friend. These were the children of Gaetano Polidori, an accomplished and successful littérateur. Gabriele Rossetti, the father of Dante Gabriel, was wholly Italian, of Neapolitan family. He also was a man of high literary tastes and achievements; a poet of genuine quality, and a patriot exiled for his political faith. His popular lays, as well as his personal activities, fanned the flame of democratic insurrection under Ferdinand of Naples in 1820, and three years later he found himself compelled to flee in disguise. He left Italy, never to return; but, happily, not without honour in his own country, for, a quarter of a century later, a medal was struck in recognition of his services, and a statue subsequently erected to his memory in the chief piazza of Vasto, Naples, which also bears his name. In 1824 Gabriele Rossetti settled in England. He married in 1826, and was shortly appointed professor of Italian at King’s College, London; in which adopted city—the great foster-mother of so much of the world’s best genius—his four children, Dante Gabriel and his brother and sisters, were brought up.

Trained from the first in the Protestant faith, though inheriting on both sides the mental bias of Roman tradition, the children entered early into the age-long conflict between the tender mysticism and spiritual glamour of catholic piety and the robuster spirit of intellectual truth. Herein lay the key to that strange mingling of rationalism and superstition which, both in his poetry and in his painting, has perplexed many critics of Dante Rossetti’s philosophy. Hence came his insatiable symbolism, and his acutely realistic detail; his remoteness of vision, and his keen alertness to present and actual things. His own perpetual struggle between the real and the ideal, his ceaseless strivings to reconcile the inward spirit with the outward sense,—or rather, to set them in their right relations to each other, the sense as the instrument and vehicle of the soul,—these were but the epitome, in his own many-sided nature, of the larger strife that ceases not from age to age; only the battle-ground and the weapons of the fight are altered.

To the simple Christian creed which they professed, was added in the Rossettis’ household the religion of an ardent and unwavering patriotism. From their earliest childhood the little ones were accustomed to hear around their own fireside high talks of national liberty and the popular cause. Their home, unpretentious but hospitable as it always was, became the resort of many a political refugee; a gathering-place for kindred souls oppressed with the same misfortunes, or fired with the supreme enthusiasm of a common ideal. Hither came Mazzini, the greatest patriot of the century, and one of her truest seers. All that was best in the young democracy of the mid-century, its eager idealism, its narrow but profound hero-worship, its poetry, its self-devotion, was here brought before the children’s eyes; its coarser elements eliminated by the personal distinction of such men as Gabriele Rossetti loved to gather to his side. The little circle was thus open, in those crucial years, to influences more potent upon art than was then apparent, since the humanitarian impulse first manifested in political and social life had not yet adjusted itself to pictorial expression.

Nor was the literary side of Dante Rossetti’s genius less sympathetically nurtured in the home atmosphere. His father was an enthusiastic student and commentator of Dante, after whom he named his eldest son,—a baptism strangely prophetic of his destiny; of that fortuity of fate by which, in after years, bereft of love, maligned by criticism, robbed of health and power, he was made partaker in the sufferings as well as in the glory of the great Florentine poet. Thus was fostered in the young Dante of a later day that love of old romance and noble allegory which remained both with him and with his younger sister—perhaps the choicest of our women-poets—as an abiding passion and an inspiration to the highest artistic service.

At the age of fifteen Rossetti passed from King’s College School to Cary’s Art Academy in Queen Street, Bloomsbury, and thence to the Antique School of the Royal Academy; there to pursue the artistic training to which a strong inclination and evident talent had long called him. Rossetti, however, was a very wayward pupil, and extremely irregular in his attendance. A fellow-student with him at that time, Mr. J.A. Vinter, well recalls one morning when the truant was taken to task for his absence on the previous day. “Why,” said Mr. Cary, “were you not here yesterday?” Rossetti answered coolly, “I had a fit of idleness.” But when the master’s back was turned, an interesting explanation of the avowed idleness was soon forthcoming. Rossetti pulled from his pocket a bundle of manuscript sonnets, which he proceeded, with impartial generosity, to paste inside all his friends’ hats! Fortunately for the subsequent peace of the hyper-sensitive and fastidious author, none of these early effusions seem to have been preserved. Mr. Vinter’s impression of Rossetti was—like that of many who knew him in youth—that beneath a certain brusquerie and unapproachableness of bearing there lay an unbounded warmth of affection and a ready generosity and kindliness of heart. But his delight in practical jokes, his high spirits and his boisterous hilarity in the classroom sometimes put Mr. Cary (the son, by the way, of the eminent translator of Dante) to considerable embarrassment. There was one song in particular which Rossetti was never tired of singing; and he sang it with all the vigour of his strong young voice, almost to the nauseation of his classmates,—in praise of a certain “Alice Gray.” One morning Mr. Cary, entering the room, besought him to abate his tune awhile, for a clergyman had called with his son to see the school, with a view to enrolling the lad as a pupil. Rossetti lowered his voice, but only for a moment. When the visitors appeared on the threshold, his thrilling notes were heard again in passionate protestation of his willingness to die for “Alice Gray.”

The school was visited on Saturdays by Mr. Redgrave, R.A., who speedily observed Rossetti’s favourite amusement of drawing grotesque caricatures of antique figures round the margin of his board, and protested that “such liberties were hardly consistent with the dignity of the antique.”

Rossetti’s outlining is said to have been very beautiful in effect, though produced in a highly unconventional manner. Mr. Cary forbade charcoal outlines altogether, but Rossetti, who obeyed no rules, invariably made a thick, solid charcoal line which he gradually pared away on either side with pellets of bread till he had reduced it to the desired minimum. It is noticeable that one at least of Rossetti’s friends of this period, and intimately associated with him in the movement which he subsequently led, has always retained the hardness of outline which Rossetti afterwards outgrew.

Yet it must be admitted that with all his ardour, his real though very fitful diligence, and his sincere delight in his chosen profession, Rossetti never fully conquered that imperfection of technique in draughtsmanship which has been the stronghold of hostile criticism throughout the Pre-Raphaelite movement, but which in fact arose from the inevitable deficiency of a mind too impatient for ideas, too eager for subject-matter, to be steadfastly concerned with the science of expression.

That neither Rossetti nor any other of the Pre-Raphaelites as such have attained to technical greatness, still less to technical perfection, is a charge weightily preferred, and not without reason, but hardly of so fatal an import as at first appears. It must be remembered that no new message comes to the world ready-clothed in the full grace of accurate and harmonious speech. The voice crying in the wilderness is apt to be harsh and unmusical. The visions of the seer are at first too vivid, too bewildering in the fresh glory of revelation, to be told (if he would set them forth on canvas) in any but broken lights and shadowy images. In every art, the gospel of a new epoch has been proclaimed with faltering speech and stammering tongue. The torrent of denunciation outpoured on Wagner’s transgressions of strict form, yet powerless, as it has proved, to drown his music, was not more sweeping than the judgment of authority against the metrical solecisms of Walt Whitman’s poetry; nor has the storm still raging round the modern Scandinavian drama been less fierce than that which overtook the leaders of the Pre-Raphaelite van.

Obviously a certain measure of the faculty of expression is necessary if the meaning is to be intelligible at all. Our judgment of an artist, though determined primarily by the nature of his message, must ultimately rest on his ability to deliver it. In Rossetti’s case it must depend upon the degree in which the greatness of his material can create a technique of its own, and take the imagination by storm, as Rossetti does, with those exquisite surprises of design, those marvellous tours-de-force among his earlier pen and ink drawings, or those southern, almost tropical colour-triumphs of his maturity, which were perhaps rather the divine accidents of genius than its habit, either natural or acquired. They were, in truth, inspirations of utterance, wielding the imperfect instrument to their own high purposes. The verdict given upon such achievements by the thoughtful world outside the charmed circle of the initiate—by that unlearned but not unworthy “outer circle,” as it were, who, approaching art with intelligence and sympathy, are yet without the knowledge to assess its technical worth—will always, as we have already suggested, be decided by the temperament of the spectator—whether he be as peculiarly sensitive to beauty of idea as his neighbour is to beauty of expression. And after all, the supreme mission of art is to the great world of the uninitiate. By the authority of its priests and prophets must its form and practice be directed and controlled; but the final test of its greatness is not satisfied until the exquisite consolations of beauty, the moral significances of artistic truth, the proclamation of noble ideals, are “understanded of the people.”

But the new gospel, when Rossetti entered the Academy Schools, had only reached the initial stage of a “gospel of discontent.” It was still negative, indefinite, unpromising. Yet even in that early phase, the old, simple instincts of the missionary spirit are often potent, and fruitful in the development of ideas. “Andrew ... first findeth his own brother Simon,” and “Philip findeth Nathaniel,”—not designedly, perhaps, but rather by the spontaneous attraction of kindred souls; not necessarily with the deliberate aim of a propagandist, for it would be pretentious to credit a group of nineteenth-century young Britons in their teens with a very exalted conception of their artistic mission. There is every evidence that they were as unaffectedly boyish, and even school-boyish, as the most orthodox Englishman could wish them. It was well that they should not yet know the meaning of their own rebellion, or guess the effect to be wrought upon English art by Rossetti’s meeting with the first fellow-student who can in any sense be called his disciple. Probably it was an impulse of purely personal affection, or that magnetic charm of character which Rossetti exercised over almost all impressionable natures around him, rather than any deep affinity of purpose and ideal, that won to his side a younger and in many respects more brilliant aspirant, John Everett Millais, who had passed through his two years’ elementary training at Cary’s at a very early age, and in technical proficiency was already far ahead of his new friend. Born on the 8th of June, 1829, in Portland Place, Southampton, the first five years of his life were chiefly spent in Jersey (his father’s ancestral home), and the succeeding four at Dinan, in Brittany. In 1838, at the age of nine, he was entered at Cary’s Academy, then under the direction of Mr. Sass, where his drawing from the antique soon won a silver medal from the Society of Arts. In 1840, at the age of eleven, he entered the Royal Academy Schools; the youngest pupil ever admitted within their walls. Here he won a silver medal in 1843, and four years later a gold medal for historical painting with “The Benjamites Seizing their Brides,” shown at the British Institution in 1848. In 1846 his first exhibited picture, “Pizarro before the Inca of Peru,” appeared at the Royal Academy, where “Elgiva Seized by Odo” was shown in 1847.

Millais himself, meanwhile, had made acquaintance with an older and still more earnest student not yet pursuing the Academy curriculum, but for whom the future had in store a place second only to Rossetti’s in the movement which united and inspired them in their youth. William Holman Hunt, indeed, may claim to have been earlier than any of his Pre-Raphaelite brethren upon the field of reform; for in the hard solitude of mercantile life, under the stress of poverty and amid the most uncongenial surroundings, he had already thought out and pursued those methods of direct and veracious artistic expression which were afterwards enforced by Pre-Raphaelite rule. Born in London on the 27th of April, 1828, and destined by his father for commercial life, the lad secured from chance companions some occasional help in the artistic studies which he loved. He took a few lessons from a city portrait-painter, and at last gave up his business career, and threw himself upon his own artistic resources for a livelihood.

Admission to the schools of the Royal Academy at that time was by a test as arbitrary and inadequate as the teaching to which it led. Each student was required to produce a drawing from the antique, in chalk or charcoal, laboriously stippled in the conventional style; and in this task the half-trained and inexperienced Hunt very pardonably failed on two successive occasions. It was not until the year 1846 that he was at last admitted as a student, and at almost the same time secured a place on the Academy Exhibition walls, where he was represented by a small picture entitled “Hark!”—a little child holding a watch to her ear. It was in the antique galleries at the British Museum, while toiling forlornly at his trial-drawing among a host of similar candidates, that he came across the more successful but sympathetic and genial Millais. The story of Millais’s friendship with the poor and struggling student somewhat older than himself, and of the generous pecuniary help afforded from his own private resources to Hunt at a moment when the magic portals of Art seemed closed for ever against him, has already been told by Mr. Harry Quilter in his history of those early years.

In the autumn of 1845 Mr. Cary sent up five students, including Rossetti and J.A. Vinter, for admission to the Academy Schools. His classes were held in high esteem as a means of introduction to that orthodox fold, already regarded by many neophytes with impatience and distrust, but offering at that time the only possible entrance to professional life. Both the competitors just mentioned were successful, and the admission of Holman Hunt was independently gained soon afterwards. Mr. Vinter has a characteristic reminiscence of the opening day of the ensuing term, when the freshmen were assembled in a class-room, and required to give their names to the keeper, Mr. Jones. When it came to his turn, Rossetti, who was rather proud of his mellifluous designation, greatly amused his companions and impressed the venerable official by slowly rolling out, in his rich, sonorous tones, “Gabriel—Charles—Dante—Rossetti!” “Dear me, sir,” stammered Mr. Jones, in confused amazement, “Dear me, sir, you have a fine name!”

A probation of three months was necessary, however, before the candidates were finally accepted as students in the Royal Academy Schools. It is doubtful whether Rossetti ever finished his probationary drawings: at all events he never entered the Life School, and does not appear to have passed beyond the elementary stages of the Antique. But whatever may have been the deficiencies of their early training in art, a result of ample significance was now realized by the intercourse which united in close friendship the illustrious trio—Rossetti, Millais, and Holman Hunt—who were shortly to be recognized as the prime movers in the Pre-Raphaelite revolt.

There was yet, however, another reformer at work, unknown to them, upon the same problems as perplexed themselves, stirred with the same restless discontent with the vain canons of conventional art, and pursuing, in his own obscure studio, methods which came upon the younger trio as the revelation that they needed. Ford Madox Brown, with whom they now became acquainted, was seven years older than Dante Rossetti, having been born at Calais, of English parents, on the 16th of April, 1821. He studied first under Van Hanselaer at Ghent, and afterwards spent two years under Baron Wappers at the Antwerp Academy (1837–1839), three in Paris, (1841–1844), and one in Rome (1845). In his twentieth year he married his cousin, Miss Elizabeth Bromley, who died in 1846. His experiences of the foreign schools seem to have kindled in him the same dissatisfaction with current standards of perfection as was gaining ground among his contemporaries at home. At all events, when Rossetti was vaguely casting about for kindred spirits aflame with revolutionary fire, Madox Brown was the poor and unknown painter of a few decorative cartoons exhibited during the eighteen-forties in Westminster Hall, for a competition organized by the government with a view to selecting the best available fresco-work for the ornamentation of the new House of Lords. The competition was carried over several years, and served in a great measure to define and organize the growing revolt against the tyranny of the Academy, under which, as early as the year 1840, the younger generation of painters was already beginning to writhe. The leading Academicians of that time were men whose names, as far as the outer world is concerned, have scarcely outlived their owners. Etty, Mulready, Maclise, Leslie, Herbert, Chalon, Cooper, Collins, Eastlake, Howard, Hart, Jones, Unwins, Patten, Charles Landseer, Redgrave, Shee,—who knows them now beyond the student and the connoisseur? Webster, indeed, has earned a more enduring fame, and gained a secure if unpretentious rank in the portrayal of village life, fairly comparable to that of Mrs. Gaskell in fiction. But for the rest, even the few gifted and sincere aspirants outside the Academy, but still in the thrall of conventional methods, such as Cope, Dyce, Ward, Egg, Elmore, Goodall, Pickersgill, Hook, Poole, Stone, Martin, Haydon, and David Scott, were but a heterogeneous group, without clear aims or common aspirations. The Westminster competition attracted and developed new talent from independent quarters. It was the first deliberate effort of English art to shake itself free from academic control. Its effect was to revive, for the time being, a decorative method noble in itself, but still more valuable as a training in breadth and dignity of expression, especially for the young artist to whom the fresco was practically a foreign language, full of latent possibility and charm. Practice in fresco-work had a directly good effect on the technique of new and unknown men at the precise stage of their studies at which it was afforded them. Madox Brown’s style in particular was strongly and permanently influenced by such exercise, and the competitions evoked from him a series of historical and dramatic genre paintings which won Rossetti’s special admiration. Chief among them were “The Body of Harold brought before William the Conqueror,” which still ranks with the artist’s finest productions of its kind, “Justice,” a widow pleading before a Norman baron, “Adam and Eve after the Fall,” “Wiclif reading his Translation of the Bible to John of Gaunt,” “Our Lady of Good Children,” and “The Infant’s Repast.” One fine cartoon from the hand of another artist also drew Rossetti’s delighted attention, “Caractacus led Captive in Triumph through the Streets of Rome,” by G.F. Watts, a painter worthily representative of the noblest phase of Pre-Raphaelite work, though never openly associated with the movement. He too had vainly traversed the desert of academic studentship, as we may gather from his own naïve record: “Finding there was no teaching, I very soon ceased to attend.” His picture of “Caractacus,” however, was now rewarded with a first-class prize of £300. Millais also competed in the exhibition of 1847; taking for his subject “The Widow bestowing her Mite.”

In the spring of 1848, Rossetti, deeply impressed by the originality and power of Madox Brown’s designs, wrote to the artist and begged permission to enter his studio as a pupil. Mr. Brown did not receive pupils professionally, but, with a generosity which he showed to many an eager votary at that period, he welcomed Rossetti to his studio as a friend, and from that time became one of his kindest and most valued counsellors.

At the date of Rossetti’s self-introduction to Madox Brown, the latter was engaged upon a somewhat elaborate picture, “Chaucer reading the Legend of Custance before the Court of Edward III.”; and Rossetti was invited to sit to him for the head of the poet. Hunt and Rossetti were now working together in a studio which they shared in Cleveland Street, Fitzroy Square; whither soon came Madox Brown to encourage their tentative efforts, and to aid them both with practical and friendly instruction.

And now a new influence from the world of literature came upon the little student-band. It was the inspiration and stimulus of Ruskin’s “Modern Painters.” For Ruskin also was at war with the old conventions that lay chill and heavy upon English art; he too was weary of the dead level of triviality and scholasticism to which painting had sunk, and saw with prophetic eyes, through the murk of present life and the shadowy vistas of history, a higher and attainable ideal.

“Modern Painters” struck the keynote of the coming change. A fellow-student lent the volumes to Holman Hunt, who in his turn shared them with his friends; and reading together, they found therein, not only a sympathy for their own revolt, but a definite guidance for their aspirations. With the authority of the trained draughtsman and connoisseur as well as with the force and fascination of the literary artist, Ruskin declared for originality and truth in design, as against the imitations and artifices of degenerate schools, in a voice that would brook no compromise. Like Carlyle, his whole being was possest with that passionate scorn of pretensions and shams, that hatred of formalism and of every species of cant, which swept like a cleansing wind over Europe after the French Revolution, and which, if its immediate results were iconoclastic and disruptive, was so much the better preparation for the reconstruction to follow.

Ruskin bade men turn, from the Art of the past, to Nature, and seek fresh inspiration at its primal source. Through Nature alone, he said, they would reach truth, and finding it, gain also the power to interpret and reveal. And Nature was a jealous mistress; only to a faithful lover would she unveil the exquisite mysteries of her beauty; unto his ear alone would she whisper the high secrets of her soul; she would endure no translator, no partial and distorted reflection of her face: the man himself must worship at her inmost shrine, and learn her lesson there direct and clear.

—A truism, it seems to us, who have seen the swinging of the pendulum still further in the naturalistic direction, since the reaction in divers quarters against convention and precedent has carried many to the opposite extreme. Yet, in the history of the world, the demand for precedent and conformity, the love of imitation, the morbid hatred of novelty and the dread of original experiment, which appear in almost every crisis of man’s development, exhibit one of the most curious phases of the human mind. Psychologists might argue at length as to the relation between indolence and cowardice in the strange game of “follow-my-leader” played by humanity from age to age,—and might attribute both to a vague and deep sense of the bitter cost of all knowledge, and a consequent and not wholly vain tenacity towards things apparently knowable and known.

Ruskin, with a vision large enough to retain all that was eternally precious in the past, began by recognizing the elements of real vitality even in the outworn classicism which was the occasion of his readers’ revolt; and led them thence to the higher places of refreshment and advance. “We must be careful,” said he, “not to lose sight of the real use of what has been left us by antiquity, nor to take that for a model of perfection which is, in many cases, only a guide to it. The young artist, while he should shrink with horror from the iconoclast who would tear from him every landmark and light which has been bequeathed him by the ancients, and leave him in a liberated childhood, may be equally certain of being betrayed by those who would give him the power and the knowledge of past time, and then fetter his strength from all advance, and bend his eyes backward on a beaten path; who would thrust canvas between him and the sky, and tradition between him and God.”

Again, Ruskin insisted continually upon the essential and supreme moral purpose of art as a “criticism of life”—as a later authority has called it. He made clear the relation between thought and language in painting, wherein lies for ever the crux of art; and pointed to examples of the contrast and the conflict between those two principles whereof the right adjustment is art’s final aim. “Most pictures,” said Ruskin, “of the Dutch school, for instance, excepting always those of Rubens, Vandyke, and Rembrandt, are ostentatious exhibitions of the artist’s power of speech, the clear and vigorous elocution of useless and senseless words; while the early efforts of Cimabue and Giotto are the burning messages of prophecy, delivered by the stammering lips of infants. It must be the part of the judicious critic carefully to distinguish what is language and what is thought, and to rank and praise pictures chiefly for the latter, considering the former as a totally inferior excellence, and one which cannot be compared with, nor weighed against thought in any way or in any degree whatsoever. The picture which has the nobler and more numerous ideas, however awkwardly expressed, is a greater and a better picture than that which has the less noble and less numerous ideas, however beautifully expressed.”

Thus the author of “Modern Painters” did for his readers what was more helpful than all precept,—he showed them the high paths trodden aforetime by men of like aspirations after a similar revolt. He led them back to an age which had seen the same struggle between the old art and the new; an age in which the difficulty of presenting human life and its environment in faithful colours and in natural images had already been met, and in some measure overcome. That age was the mother of modern art in Europe. The fourteenth century, waking from mediævalism, felt the first quickenings of the Renaissance in Italy.

To that momentous impulse of new life wherein lay, deep-rooted in the laws of reaction and development, the destinies of modern Europe, the historian of the Pre-Raphaelite movement must turn if he would read aright the motive and the message of to-day. For the impulse sought in the records of the past by the reformers of a later age was of a spirit kindred with their own, though grappling with its problems under a somewhat different guise. It was a revolt, not from materialism as we commonly understand it, namely, the acceptance of matter as the sole and ultimate reality, and a tacit or open disavowal of the spiritual life; but rather from that more subtle and insidious form of materialism so often mistaken for its opposite—the asceticism of mediæval Christianity. To deny the dignity and sanctity of the physical as the garment of the spiritual world is surely as blank a materialism as that which makes the physical sufficient and supreme. To see no spirit in the flesh is to be no less blind than they who see no spirit beyond the flesh. The innate cynicism of the monastic idea—its radical faithlessness, its utter distrust of the Spirit’s power to transfigure and ennoble the noble life of man—is sufficiently evidenced by the fact that the results of that idea upon the art of the nation were almost identical with the results wrought upon England by the materialism of the eighteenth century. Art became a fashion instead of a mission, a cult instead of a worship; it became the prerogative of a ruling class which conventionalized—as such must ever do—the spontaneous utterance of the many into the vain repetitions of the few. That class in modern England was the bourgeoisie: in mediæval Italy it was the priesthood. Herein arose the narrow religiosity of the early Italian painters, no less than the ascetic barrenness of the dark ages which preceded them. Art had been subsidized by a ruling class, however beneficent, for its own purposes, however sincere and high. The gradual establishment of Christianity as the state religion of the later Roman period involved the repudiation—or at least the effort to repudiate—the whole intellectual or æsthetic heritage of the Græco-Roman world.

There is a curious pathos in the attempt of every vigorous outgrowth of human endeavour to disown the prior activity which gave it birth. The ancient fable of the chick and the egg-shell is of perennial meaning and pertinence. Militant Christianity marched forward wholly unconscious of its own vast debt to the very paganism upon which it thrust itself in holy war. The novel fervour of asceticism had extinguished science before the end of the third century, art in the sixth and seventh, and the Greek language by the ninth. But the transition of Italy from paganism to Christianity was not a substitution of wholly new ideals for old. It was the gradual absorption of all the permanent elements in pagan culture into a religion of which the germ only was brought from the Hebrew world, and which owed most of its strength and much of its weakness to the rich and heterogeneous soil in which it was planted. The extravagances of mediæval Christianity—its austere intolerance and contempt of the natural and obvious, its demand, in the first strenuous tension of novelty and triumph, for the subjective and the transcendental life—breaking up, when the strain was relaxed, into a hard formalism of thought and practice—these were but the inevitable reaction from the grossness of a degenerate paganism whose vital force was spent. The immense lapse of time occupied by the transition from paganism to Christianity, as Mr. Bernard Bosanquet ably points out in dealing with the issues of that change, gave room for as many secondary waves of action and reaction within itself as did the movement of the Renaissance which succeeded it. “From the first distinct breach in naïve or natural paganism to the assumption of a definitely doctrinal and orthodox form of Christianity, there is an interval which cannot be reckoned at less than seven hundred years, from the death of Socrates to the triumph of Christianity under Constantine. So far from being a new thing, contrasting with the degradation of the pagan world, the establishment of Christianity was the issue of the advance of that world during four centuries, and it was not thoroughly completed until, in a further development of five centuries, it had adopted from paganism the germs of almost all permanently valuable elements that the latter contained.... The Dark Ages are not a proof that the great classical culture had lost its power for human welfare; they prove only how long a discipline was needed by the mass of humanity before it could appreciate more than the first stammering misapprehension of its great inheritance.”[^[2]]

The dawn, then, of the Renaissance in Italy, was the waking of the mediæval world to the sense of this lost inheritance, yet to be regained; this hidden dower of beauty and gladness, and of strong and abundant life. The old message of the Galilean Christ had to be re-translated, as it has to-day: “I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly,”—not a one-sided life, not a spiritual life at the cost of the body, any more than a bodily life at the cost of the soul, but a life robust, many-sided, catholic; harmonized at all points with what is good and sweet and fair in the physical world as well as what is high and pure and noble in the life within. And that message led men back to the great first principles of conduct and consciousness, till they were confronted afresh with the want of equipoise between physical instinct and moral law which is the root-problem of human history. The struggle for existence in the animal world rises in humanity from a physical to a moral sphere, and passes into a struggle for life.

“History,” says Buckle, “is a record of tendencies, not of events.” The first tendency of the people thus waking, as we have said, to the sense of their own birthright and heritage, partook rather of the first of these two impulses. It was a revolt against the spiritual exclusiveness of the monastic ideal, and a recoil upon Nature,—especially upon the apotheosis and worship of Nature already achieved for them in the Hellenic world. The imperious demands of the physical life, so long starved and neglected, drove men back upon external things; slowly to re-discover, through outward and visible realities, the deeper meanings of which they were in search. The end of the twelfth and the beginning of the thirteenth century saw a new turn of the current of feeling towards liberty and expansion of the whole life of man. The painters set themselves to humanize religion; to bring it into relation with the vital interests of the so-called secular sphere. And as the fine arts became emancipated from sacerdotal control, the spirit of free culture spread into other departments of intellectual activity. In the next century, the revival of learning followed upon the emancipation of art. Literature, religion, painting and sculpture, were infused with the same spirit of experiment and research. Art was brought into touch with scholarship, and scholarship in its turn graced and dignified by art. The essence of romance lies in its utter fidelity to immediate and present life. Its concern is with particular instances, not with abstractions and generalities. Romance is primarily analytic and experimental; classicism, synthetic and positive. Romance is inductive, classicism deductive in its reasoning. Herein romance—deemed for the most part antagonistic to reason and science, approaches more nearly to the scientific spirit than any canons of classic art. Its root and base is in that patient observation of actual things, that sure simplicity and directness of vision, which is the narrow way to knowledge. Hence comes the realism of romance,—the realism both of the early Renaissance and of its later maturity. A dominant characteristic (for instance) of Michaelangelo—the greatest and most fascinating personality of the whole Renaissance period—was, as his latest biographer, Mr. John Addington Symonds, has pointed out, that “he invariably preferred the particular to the universal, the critical moment of an action to suggestions of the possibilities of action.” This feature of the highest Renaissance work, though it seem at first sight to disprove the general theory of romance as the meditative, contrasted with the classic or dramatic form of art, is really consonant with it, since one example of one action is more analytic and reflective in quality than the suggestion of action generally. Our assertion, then, that the first manifestation of the break-up of the monastic system was a return to Nature as revealed and worshipped in the Hellenic ideal, must be qualified by a recognition of another tendency modifying and chastening the first.

The second tendency was towards the reconciliation of the superb naturalism of Grecian art with the Christian spirit of self-discipline and heroic denial. It was an effort after that ultimate balance and harmony prophesied (to bring a modern instance) in Ibsen’s “Third Kingdom;” the kingdom in which the realism of the flesh and the idealism of the spirit shall be blended into one perfect humanity. “It was a movement,” to quote again from Mr. J.A. Symonds, “towards that further point outside both Paganism and mediæval Christianity, at which the classical ideal of a temperate and joyous natural life shall be restored to the conscience educated by the gospel.” The vision of this union was the inspiration of Pre-Raphaelite art. It quickened the hands of the painters to great tasks; it stirred the scholars to a new energy of labour and of hope. The poets, interpreting its meaning for the life of a future Italy, began to speak one to another across the mediæval gloom, as waking birds call and answer, while it is yet dark, with a sure instinct prophetic of the dawn.

Thus the unruffled calm and dignity of Hellenism was troubled, in its re-birth, with a sense of moral conflict and perplexity unknown to the ancient world. A peculiar mysticism resulted upon literature from that revival of the Platonic spirit which was initiated by Pico della Mirandola and his successors in metaphysical thought. Throughout the Pre-Raphaelite epoch, from Cimabue (124O) to Perugino, the master of Raphael (1446), the impulse of naturalism is seen adjusting itself, through much crudeness of expression, through many blunders, solecisms of taste, errors of selection, to the great spiritual passion of Christianity which was still warm at the heart of the thinking world. There is, especially in early Renaissance work, an effect as of divided aims, or of methods long habituated to the old ideal and brought suddenly into the service of the new,—like Heine’s “decayed gods, who, to maintain themselves after the fall of paganism, took employment under the new religion.” The physical loveliness of the saints and angels of Botticelli and Fra Angelico—the last of the purely “religious” painters, in the common acceptance of the word—is hardly congruous with the loftiness of their themes, and almost belies the spiritual intensity and rapture of thought which Botticelli, in later life, drew largely from the influence of Savonarola, and infused increasingly into his own work. Giotto, the pride of the Florentine school and the dominant genius of the fourteenth century, was no less profoundly religious than these; but in the final roll of art he ranks rather as the first great Nature-painter than as one of a distinctly Christian lineage. Taken, like David, from the sheepfold, he brought into art a breezy, pastoral air, and painted before a wide horizon under an open sky. Fra Lippo Lippi added to that wholesome strength and sanity of sight an even clearer perception of natural beauty and grace. The glories of the physical realm, in landscape, in the power of men and in the loveliness of women, were handled now with a growing boldness which outran the delicate timidity that had restrained it in the shadow of the Church. And with the enlargement of intellectual range there came a steady increase of technical power. The skill of choice, of selectiveness in art, of composition, draughtsmanship, colouring,—in a word, the science of expression, was brought to bear upon the ready message waiting for the perfecting of its vehicles. The adaptation of language to thought, which was the task of the fifteenth century, was achieved by the immediate predecessors of Raphael in a measure unequalled in the history of the modern world. And that such an adjustment should resolve itself, as it did, into a fresh conflict between the forces momentarily reconciled, proves, not that the success of the effort was spurious, but rather that the struggle between thought and language in art is but one manifestation of the eternal striving of the Spirit with the imperfect medium of the flesh.

But this rare consummation of harmony between the erstwhile conflicting principles of classicism and romance, though reaching its highest point in Leonardo and Michaelangelo, achieved in the Venetian school a technical effect which appealed even more strongly to the æsthetic passion re-born in Rossetti and his friends, as they looked back across the ages in their search for example and light. In Giorgione, the creator of idyllic genre painting in the fourteenth century, and in Titian, of whom Rossetti himself was in due course the natural successor, they found all the mystic sensuousness of the new Paganism in a setting which, to adapt a well-worn phrase, revealed instead of concealing the soul within. Here, at least, was the apotheosis of colour, which is itself a characteristic quality of all romantic revivals: wherefore painting has always been specifically the romantic medium in art, while the classic temper finds in sculpture its most congenial sphere. Classicism invariably compromises with the tints of nature; it resolves the ever-varying hues of earth and sky into the formula of the spectroscope; it tends, in its purest and noblest phases, towards marble and the statuesque. Here was the perfection of artistic language, as Ruskin would call it; the delight in strong and full utterance for its own sake, wherein lurks the perennial danger of greatness in technique. With all its glow and glory of natural life, the Venetian school was primarily decorative in character, and therefore merged the more readily into the gradual substitution of form for matter, the general deterioration of naturalism into sensuality, which overtook Italian art after the decadence of Raphael.

Together with the more robust conception of the physical life which supervened in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, there came a change, partial indeed, but progressive, in the ideals of womanhood. The Madonnas of Botticelli were instinct with a warmth and sensitiveness unknown before in Christian art. If they were immaculate, their perfectness was that of a God-possest humanity rather than of a humanized Godhead. Their faces shine with natural pity and awe and tenderness and love,—the love of the true Mater Dolorosa, sad with

“The burden of the mystery,

... the heavy and the weary weight

Of all this unintelligible world.”

They see the shadow of the Cross upon the holy Child, and their passionate life quivers before the Death to be. The same brooding sense of mystery, the same large and intense compassion for the “world-sorrow,” yet mingled with a certain austerity of outlook upon its strife, is the dominant note of Leonardo’s masterpiece of a later date, “La Gioconda” (“Our Lady of the Rocks”); often compared with that triumph of a more modern Renaissance, Albrecht Dürer’s “Melancholia,” with which it shares in the attainment of perfect harmony between classic and romantic art.

Yet the return of art in the fourteenth century from the angelic to the human world did not go far enough to affect the ideals of womanhood beyond this single aspect—the aspect of maternity. The early Renaissance painters did indeed humanize, in conception and presentment, the virgins and the venerable mother-saints of Christendom; but their imagination never concerned itself with what may be termed the independent humanity of womanhood. They painted always under the sway of that central and dominant motif of the Christian mythology,—the idea of woman as the receptive and passive vehicle of the God-man; and never presented woman as daughter, sister, lover, or wife, apart from the concurrent idea of potential motherhood. This limitation—unfortunately for art—instead of being removed by a further broadening of thought and vision as the Renaissance proceeded, was emphasized in the fifteenth century by the influence of Raphael, who cultivated and stereotyped his own ideal of the “for-ever-motherly” until—so subtle is the influence of fixed types in pictorial art upon the current standards of truth and beauty—the maternal function came to be regarded as the sole and sufficient object of a woman’s existence; and the conventional Madonna-face of Raphael became a bondage from which Christianity has taken more than three centuries to set itself free.

For the advent of Raphael into Italian art marked the beginning of the degradation of the pure and wholesome naturalism achieved in the Renaissance into a coarse materialism which in its turn degenerated into a false and shallow conventionality, and had an effect infinitely mischievous upon Italy, still more so upon France, and through France upon the England of the Stuart and Hanoverian periods. It might almost be said that the greatness of Raphael was the weakness of modern art. The immediate result of a triumph in technique—of a great success in the wedding of perfect utterance to noble thought—is sometimes to produce, in the moral atmosphere around it, a sense of finality, a relaxing of tension, in which the soul is overpowered by its own conquest of the medium, and loses itself in the facile freedom thus attained. The disciples of Raphael, counting him to have achieved the highest perfection, modelled themselves upon his manner, and thence upon his mannerisms, without question or reserve; just as, in metaphysics and philosophy, the schoolmen argued from Aristotle without any reference to the external world, and, bound in the thrall of his genius, followed implicitly the narrow trend of his reasoning, until, entangled in theoretical cobwebs of their own spinning, they lost altogether the use of the inductive method, founded upon observation and experiment, which is the only true basis of knowledge. Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but it is sometimes a fatal hindrance to progress. Its maleficence in the world of mental science is not greater than the mischief wrought in art by a spirit which does as much harm to the work of the copyist as to the reputation of the model. As Ruskin says, “All that is highest in art, all that is creative and imaginative, is formed and created by every great master for himself, and cannot be repeated or imitated by others.” Raphael at first-hand was always great, often sublime. Raphael second-hand,—stereotyped, formalized, degraded by three centuries of imitations, each more laboured than the last,—became vapid, artificial, meaningless. The original inspiration was destroyed. Art lost its hold on Nature; and, severed from that sole source of power, fell into inevitable decay.

History repeats itself, but with a difference. Man’s struggle, as we have said, for balance, for self-adjustment to the forces around him, and to the greater forces within, recurs in every age of the world’s life, but under conditions ever new. The nineteenth century supplied such new conditions for the old task. The ground that had long lain fallow was not wasted in its time of barrenness, but made ready in unfruitful autumns for fresh seed; prepared by silent and secret forces for a new harvest. Shaken by social revolution, roused by the pressure of intellectual problems on every side, Art was confronted once more with the great realities of life and death, good and evil, and turned for guidance to the witness of the past: as a soul, once quick to action but long sunk in apathy, awakes again to the mystery of the ideal, and gathering itself together for fresh strife, calls urgently upon the old wisdom and the remembered strength of yore.

In such a spirit did Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his comrades turn from the dull abstractions of academic tradition, and lift their eyes towards that golden age whose dawning answered their own cry for light. Not to the material and redundant splendours of Raphaelesque art did they look for the inspiration of the hour; not to the pseudoclassicism of the later Renaissance, but to the pristine freshness and purity of its youth: just as we now look for the true significance of the romantic revival, not to the Postlethwaite of fashionable society, or to the weak sensuality of a drawing-room æstheticism; not to the latter-day apotheosis of lust which is but a gross travesty of the vigorous naturalism of Hellenic and early Renaissance art, but to the gracious innocence and seriousness of Rossetti’s “Virgin,” the noble beauty and pathos of his dying “Beatrice,” and the austere tenderness of Hunt’s sore-tempted “Isabella,” confronting Claudio’s painful face with the set resolve of her impregnable womanhood. So, seeking and following all that was best in the past, and facing, with vision clarified by that high discipline, the intellectual, social, and moral strife of the nineteenth century, the young painters set themselves “to disengage,” as Sainte-Beuve says, “the elements of beauty,” and to put them forth in some sort of order and lucidity, even if it were but in a tentative formula, yet to be subjected to the tests of time.

CHAPTER III.
THE PRE-RAPHAELITE BROTHERHOOD.

The Revolt from the Raphaelesque—Influence of Keats and the Romantic Poets—The Pre-Raphaelite Brothers and their Early Work—Travels of Rossetti with Hunt—Publication of “The Germ”—Hunt and Millais in the Royal Academy—Ruskin’s Letters to the “Times”—Pre-Raphaelitism at Liverpool—The Pre-Raphaelites as Colourists.

The impulse thus given by Ruskin, in the minds of the young painters, towards the larger spiritual life and vision of the Pre-Raphaelite period, was strengthened, as Mr. Holman Hunt has told us, by the almost accidental sight of a book of engravings from the frescoes in the Campo Santo at Pisa, which fell into the hands of Rossetti and his friends while spending an evening together at Millais’s house. To such aspirants as they, “crying bitterly unto the gods for a kingdom wherein to rule and create,” the work of the early Italian masters here set forth, though already partially known to them in the National Gallery, opened up a new world to be conquered and explored. In the suggestive rather than successful achievements of Cimabue, Giotto, Ghiberti, and Masaccio, they discerned the wealth of thought to which Ruskin had directed them, though the language was still in the course of adjustment to the meaning within. One cannot but think with a half-amused tenderness of the eager experimentalism of the young schismatics, shaking off from their feet the dust of academic propriety, and wandering back, half in jest, half in earnest, in the buoyant prowess of their youth, to the free fields wherefrom

—“the harvest long ago

Was reaped and garnered in the ancient barns.”

It is a pleasant picture which rises in the memory, of the diverse trio, destined in after years for widely different paths of effort and success, yet welded at first in the glow of a common enthusiasm of revolt. It was impossible that they should perceive, at this early age, that the reaction in which they were united was but a preparing of the way for an artistic reconstruction which would demand from its leaders congruity of ideal as well as community of protest. The principle of non-conformity may embrace almost opposite poles of doctrine and practice, but the positive elements of a faith must possess alike the minds of its prophets if they are to pursue in permanent fellowship the goal at which they aim. As George Eliot has said, “If men are to be welded together in the glow of a transient feeling, they must be made of metal that will mix, else they will inevitably fall asunder when the heat dies out.”

But there was as yet a strong practical cohesion between the grave and gentle Hunt, the brilliant, warm-hearted, and impressionable Millais, and the ardent, mercurial, and passionately imaginative Rossetti, whose personal magnetism was the immediate welding-force of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. Rossetti’s proselytizing powers, and his inexhaustible enthusiasm (at least in youth) for dogmatic propaganda, were indeed a source of some embarrassment and many disappointments in the progress of artistic reform. The doctrine of Pre-Raphaelitism, however, if we may so call it—namely that in the age preceding Raphael would be found the touchstone of art, grew up too imperceptibly through mutual influences and interchange of thought to be attributed as a special tenet to Rossetti or any other of the student-band.

It was in the year 1847, before the formation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, that the spell of Keats had come with special power upon its future leaders. Rossetti, an omnivorous reader of poetry, had already perceived both in Keats and Coleridge the essential elements of the highest romance. It is the more remarkable that Chatterton, now acclaimed as the herald of the romantic revival in poetry, as was Blake in art, had no such charm for Rossetti until quite late in life, when the tardy discovery led to an exaggerated worship. But in Keats, whose life (by Lord Houghton) Rossetti, Holman Hunt, and Millais had been reading together about this time, they found the supreme example in English poetry of that attainment of harmony between the classic and the romantic temper which was their aim in art. Eager as they now were for subject-matter whereon to exercise the artistic principles as yet but crudely formulated in their minds, they turned with new delight to the wonder-world revealed to them by the spirit of Keats, and looked with him through

—“magic casements, opening on the foam

Of perilous seas in faëry lands forlorn.”

They saw that the reconciliation of the flesh to the spirit, which is the task of the second Renaissance as of the first, had already been achieved in poetry, and was waiting its translation into pictorial art. Keats had attained that perfect blending of the Greek spirit with the temper of romance which Rossetti was to reach in “Venus Astarte” and “Pandora.”

The first organized union of workers imbued with the Pre-Raphaelite ideal, and further knit together by a common enthusiasm for the poetry of Keats, appears to have taken the form of a cyclographic society, in which the dominant spirits—Rossetti, Millais, and Holman Hunt—were soon surrounded by a group of more or less gifted companions and friends. The members were pledged to contribute original drawings in regular succession to a portfolio which was passed round for criticism by their fellows. Rossetti, who liked to rule his little kingdom with an absolute sway, seldom disputed by those who deemed submission to his imperious ways but a small price to pay for his friendship, selected from Keats’s “Isabella” the following series of subjects to exercise the talents of the society:—1. “The Lovers;” 2. “The Brothers” (of Isabella); 3.“Good-bye,” (the parting of Isabella and Lorenzo); 4. “The Vision” (Isabella sees in a dream the murder of her lover by her brother); 5. “The Wood” (Isabella visits the scene of the crime and secretly bears away the head of her lover); 6. “The Pot of Basil” (she buries the head in her flower-pot); 7. “The Brothers discover the Pot;” 8. “Madness of Isabella.”

It does not appear that any member executed this exhaustive series of proposed sketches in its entirety. The suggestion of subjects from Shelley’s “Prometheus Unbound” seems to have been no less barren of results. The only drawings from Rossetti’s hand that remain to us from that portfolio are an illustration of Keats’s “Belle Dame sans Merci;” a study from Coleridge’s “Genevieve,” over which he sat up a whole night, completing it at daybreak, and a sketch of “Gretchen in the Chapel” from Goethe’s “Faust.” The society included Walter Howell Deverell, an artist of rare delicacy and grace, and a man of singular personal charm, destined to play a memorable part in the life-history of Rossetti; F.G. Stephens, an intimate friend of Holman Hunt; Thomas Woolner, a young sculptor whose acquaintance Rossetti had made at the Academy Schools; J.A. Vinter, now well known as a portrait painter; and such lesser though by no means insignificant lights as J.B. Keene, F. Watkins, William Dennis, John Hancock, J.T. Clifton, and N.E. Green. It was evident that among the rising generation of painters, long before the formation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood,—even before Hunt or Rossetti had entered definitely upon such art training as they ever had—the revolt against the tyranny of the Academy was already begun, and even those least in sympathy with the Pre-Raphaelite idea found themselves drawn towards Rossetti and his friends in a common disaffection with the existing régime. Moreover, the success of Millais, who at the age of seventeen had gained the highest academic prize for historical painting, and was already earning well with his book-illustrations in black and white, afforded a valuable connecting-link with a larger circle of critics and sympathizers from whom were drawn some of the most faithful aides-de-camp of the Pre-Raphaelite campaign.

The poetry of Keats afforded at all events an inexhaustable treasure-house of subject-matter for the young painters, not only in their first efforts towards the romantic revival, but for many years then to come. “The Eve of St. Agnes,” for example, afterwards yielded the theme of the picture regarded by some critics as Millais’s greatest work, as well as of the first important painting by Holman Hunt, “The Flight of Madeline and Porphyro.” This was completed at Millais’s studio, at his home in Gower Street, early in 1848, and exhibited in the Royal Academy of that year; Millais having been at work meanwhile upon his “Cymon and Iphigenia.”

It was not until the autumn of 1848 that a definite attempt was made to band together, in a common purpose and under a distinctive name, those of the little company of students and friends who were prepared to accept and follow openly the principle of fidelity to Nature in general and to the romantic conception of Nature in particular,—the conception, namely, of the physical world as the veil and vehicle of an immanent spirit, fateful, mysterious, and occult. An informal meeting was held at Rossetti’s studio, then at 83, Newman Street, and seven members enrolled themselves under the name of “The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.” The union consisted of Rossetti, Millais, Holman Hunt, William Michael Rossetti, the younger brother of the painter, Thomas Woolner, F.G. Stephens, and James Collinson—the least stable of the Brotherhood and the first seceder from its ranks. In the Academy of that year a picture by Collinson had already been exhibited, entitled “The Charity Boy’s Début.” He was a painter of uncertain artistic calibre, and of a lethargic and mystical temperament; converted to Pre-Raphaelitism by the ardour of Rossetti, but shortly forsaking his art studies and joining the Roman Catholic communion with a view of qualifying for the priesthood. This ambition also was subsequently given up, and, thus vacillating between the church and the studio, his probation ended in no particular career. The remaining members of the Brotherhood—apart from the leading painters—may be said to represent the minor literature of the movement. F.G. Stephens and W.M. Rossetti have attained permanent distinction as art-critics, while Thomas Woolner, before winning his later fame as a sculptor, gave in the form of poetry his chief contribution to the early propaganda of the Brotherhood.

The rules laid down as to method in painting,—such as, that every subject and accessory should be studied direct from nature, and from one model—do not seem to have been stringently enforced: indeed in one of Rossetti’s most rigidly Pre-Raphaelite pictures, “Ecce Ancilla Domini,” the face of the Virgin was avowedly painted from several models, while in that of the Angel the artist has produced a curious blending of his brother’s features with those of another sitter.

It is improbable that an aversion to the one-model rule, which has been attributed to Ford Madox Brown as a reason for holding aloof from the Brotherhood, had very much to do with his decision to remain independent of it. Mr. Madox Brown was from the first in cordial sympathy with the movement, and on terms of intimate friendship with its leaders, but he foresaw the dangers of an artistic clique, and, perhaps, the impossibility of permanent consonance of method between temperaments so diverse as those of the seven members enlisted. Nor was his own strong and individualistic style of painting quite in harmony with the manner of his younger friends. He was pre-eminently an historical painter; and the critical and romantic treatment of history, though bordering very closely on Pre-Raphaelite ground, hardly came within the immediate scope of the Brotherhood. Though frequently acknowledged by his later critics as the father—or sometimes the grandfather—of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, Mr. Madox Brown consistently disclaimed any such title, and did so with no less justice than modesty. At the same time, his work was so intimately connected with that of the men whom he powerfully influenced and inspired that it may fairly be studied side by side with theirs in illustration of the dominant principles common to all.

In the autumn of 1848 it was agreed that the three chief painters should select their next subjects from Keats’s “Isabella.” Millais, at that time under the influence of Hunt rather than of Rossetti (who indeed was still far from adopting any definite line of technique), decided upon a scene depicting Lorenzo at supper with Isabella and her brothers. The pensive and earnest face of Lorenzo was painted from W.M. Rossetti. Mrs. Hodgkinson, the wife of Millais’s half-brother, sat for Isabella. It would not be easy to disprove Holman Hunt’s generous but weighty verdict on the finished picture, as “the most wonderful painting that any youth still under twenty years of age ever did in the world.”

Hunt and Rossetti, however, were not so steadfast in their adhesion to the agreement as to the choice of subjects from Keats. Hunt indeed planned, and probably commenced about this time, his afterwards notable picture, “Isabella and the Pot of Basil;” but this, though taking rank among the best examples of his earlier style, was not finally painted until 1867. He decided to finish, for the next Academy, a picture already in hand, “Rienzi swearing revenge over the body of his brother.” In this design the figure of Colonna, who endeavours to pacify the would-be avenger, was painted from W.M. Rossetti, while Dante Rossetti sat for the head of Rienzi,—and neglected, in spite of much urging from his comrades, to fulfil his own share in the “Isabella” project; but pursued work upon the most original and remarkable of his early pictures, “The Girlhood of Mary Virgin.” Prior to this, he had proposed, and partly sketched, a design entitled, “Retro me, Sathana,” representing a young girl walking, and earnestly reading, in a cloister, in the company of a venerable priest, while the retreating figure of Satan threatens her from the shade. This conception was never carried out; but it is probable that the now familiar sonnet bearing the same title was written about this time. The only painting of any note hitherto accomplished by Rossetti was a life-size and nearly half-length portrait of his father, finished in this same year 1848, and commissioned and bought by his godfather, Mr. Charles Lyell, of Kinnordy, Forfar, the father of the eminent geologist. This was the only male portrait Rossetti ever did in oils. In his new picture, “The Girlhood of Mary Virgin,” (called at first “The Education of the Virgin”) the face of the lovely child-angel was painted from a young half-sister of Woolner (though greatly modified, if not wholly re-painted, afterwards); while St. Joiachim was taken from an old family servant, and Saint Anna and St. Mary from Mrs. Rossetti and Miss Christina Rossetti respectively.

In the spring of 1849 the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood held their first “private view” with three important pictures, Rossetti’s “Girlhood,” Hunt’s “Rienzi,” and Millais’s “Lorenzo and Isabella,” duly signed and monogramed with the initials P.R.B. after the painters’ names, ready for exhibition; the first appearing at the Free Gallery (formerly known as the Chinese Gallery), Hyde Park Corner, then under the management of the Association for Promoting the Free Exhibition of Modern Art, the other two at the Royal Academy, where they were favourably hung. Rossetti’s picture was sold to the Marchioness of Bath on “private view” day for £80, and Hunt’s “Rienzi” found a purchaser soon afterwards. “Lorenzo and Isabella,” sold for £100 in 1849, was bought in 1883 by the Corporation of Liverpool for £1,120.

A tour on the Continent with Holman Hunt in September, 1849, gave Rossetti fresh inspiration from the early Italian masters and the best representatives of the Dutch school. The impressions made upon him in his twenty-first year by travel in France and Belgium are recorded for us in the wonderfully vivid and sharply-cut vignette-poems of this period. Eager as ever for emotional experience, and with the divine passion of hero-worship strong upon him, his holiday among the great painters was a delightsome pilgrimage, full of suggestion and stimulus for future work. In Paris, the sight of Giorgione’s great idyll in the Louvre, “A Venetian Pastoral,” drew from the young tourist a sonnet unsurpassed for sheer verbal colour and atmosphere by any of his later poems. Here, too, were written the great memorial sonnets, “Place de la Bastille,” and “The Staircase of Notre Dame.” On the cliffs at Boulogne Rossetti wrote “Sea-Limits.” He

—“climbed the stair in Antwerp church,

What time the circling thews of sound

At sunset seem to heave it round.

Far up, the carillon did search

The wind, and the birds came to perch

Far under, where the gables wound.”

Van Eyck and Memmeling at Bruges, Leonardo, Fra Angelico, Giorgione, and Titian in Paris, lacked no due meed of homage from Rossetti and Hunt.

It is remarkable that Rossetti never visited Italy, nor even retained, in later years, the patriotic sentiment which had so strongly pervaded the home life of his boyhood.

On the return of the travellers to London, a new development was proposed and accomplished in the public propaganda of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. It was decided to issue a monthly magazine for the promulgation of Pre-Raphaelite principles in painting and poetry. Members and sympathizers met at Rossetti’s studio in Newman Street to discuss the project, and decide upon the title and contents of the manifesto. The suggestion of Mr. Cave Thomas was ultimately adopted, that it should be called “The Germ.” The first number, extending to forty-eight large octavo pages, illustrated with etchings, appeared in January, 1850, published by Messrs. Aylott and Jones, of 8, Paternoster Row. The primary tenet with regard to art was thus enunciated in the preface: “The endeavour held in view throughout the writings on Art will be to encourage and enforce an entire adherence to the simplicity of nature.” It would be captious, perhaps, to argue, in the face of so ingenuous an implication, that nature is not simple, but, alas! infinitely and fatefully complex without and within; presenting to the seer’s eye a tangled web of visible phenomena no less intricate than the secret woof of destiny whose threads are the lives of men. To young minds, as to a young world, the vision of nature broadly outlined in generalities and clear with purpose is one of the fairest of illusions. The sternest discipline of life is to discover chaos where we imagined order and lucidity: to find interminable mazes and cross-roads for our bewilderment where in the morning mirage we had seen a plain path, an open road to the Ideal. Then we cry that Nature, and not ourself, is altered: that “there hath passed away a glory from the earth.”

Happily, this disillusionment was yet far off in the future of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. In the preface to “The Germ,” a special claim was made for poetry in its relation to the principles of simplicity of expression already enforced in painting; and with better reason, since painting must perforce speak exclusively by the representation of visible things, while poetry reaches directly to their inner significance. For while the painter strives so to order and depict the phenomena around him as to arrive at some sort of moral simplicity in the effect of his picture, the poet—if he be a seer—penetrates at once to the spirit of his theme, and clothes it at his own will with symbolic or dramatic expression. Hence the application of the Pre-Raphaelite principle to the writing of poetry was even more fruitful than in painting; and produced in modern English ballad and lyric verse, and even in the best prose of our own generation, a swift and incisive directness of touch, a broad and vivid clarity of impression, never so fully effected in the pictorial medium.

The first literary débutant in “The Germ” was Mr. Woolner, who occupied the opening pages of the January number with two short poems admirably illustrative, within their unpretentious scope and modest aim, of that naïve simplicity in the handling of complexities—the eternal childlikeness of pure romance—which is inherent in almost all great art. “My Beautiful Lady” and “Of my Lady in Death” were accompanied by an etching in two parts by Holman Hunt. Then followed an unsigned sonnet by Ford Madox Brown, and a paper by Mr. J.L. Tupper on “The Subject in Art.” Mr. Coventry Patmore contributed anonymously a poem called “The Seasons,” and Mr. Tupper was also represented in verse. Criticism of contemporary poetry was afforded by W.M. Rossetti’s paper on Arthur Hugh Clough. The remaining pages were worthily filled by the two greatest poets of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, Dante Gabriel and Christina Rossetti: the latter with “Dreamlands” and another short lyric, signed “Ellen Alleyn,” the former with “My Sister’s Sleep,” a characteristic example of his earliest manner, written in the then uncommon metre since naturalized in our language by Tennyson’s “In Memoriam,” and the wonderful prose allegory “Hand and Soul.” This poem—as verily it should be called, with its rich and haunting diction and its magical rhythm of imagery—is almost the sole example of Rossetti’s strength in prose, only paralleled by a similar composition, entitled “St. Agnes of Intercession,” of a later date. “Hand and Soul” is largely autobiographical in its narrative, being the story of a young art student of Arezzo, named Chiaro dell’Erma, possessed by new and high ideals of the painters mission, and stimulated to the better application of his own talents by the success of a younger comrade,—as we may well believe Rossetti to have been stirred and impelled by the progress of the more studious and at the same time more fortunate Millais. The speech of Chiaro in “Hand and Soul” may be taken as a declaration of Rossetti’s artistic faith and principles at that period.

The second number of “The Germ,” though no less interesting and significant in subject-matter, did not increase the scant support accorded to the venture by the public at large; and since the expense of such an issue was too heavy to be borne by the little band of young and struggling aspirants responsible for its existence, the future of the magazine had to be seriously reconsidered by the Brotherhood. Mr. Tupper, however, to whose hands the printing had been entrusted, came to the rescue, and gave “The Germ” a new lease of life under the title of “Art and Poetry.” The change did not serve to commend the somewhat crude propaganda to the mind of the British Philistine, and after the April number the issue was reluctantly given up; but not until its pages had glowed with the first fires, at least, of Rossetti’s noblest poetic inspiration. Here first appeared “The Blessed Damozel,” for which we might surely paraphrase the words of Holman Hunt on Millais, and call it “the most wonderful poem that any youth still under twenty years of age ever did in the world.” Here, too, were the lyric first-fruits of his continental tour (if sonnets may, by elasticity of definition, be included in lyric poetry), “The Carillon,” “From the Cliffs—Noon,” afterwards called “Sea-Limits,” “Pax Vobis,” largely rewritten later and entitled “World’s Worth,” and the sonnets on “A Virgin and Child,” “A Marriage of St. Katherine,” “A Dance of Nymphs” (from Andrea Mantegna, in the Louvre), “A Venetian Pastoral” (from Giorgione, in the Louvre), and “Ruggiero and Angelica” (from the picture by Ingres).

Among other contents of “The Germ” and “Art and Poetry” may be mentioned Ford Madox Brown’s paper on “The Structure of an Historical Picture,” John Orchard’s “Dialogue on Art,” and Coventry Patmore’s “Criticism of Macbeth.” Mr. F.G. Stephens wrote under the pseudonym of “John Seward,” and the publication was edited by W.M. Rossetti, then twenty years of age. Yet one more poet remains in the list of contributors, James Collinson, whose somewhat desultory but genuinely imaginative lines, “The Child Jesus: a record typical of the five sorrowful mysteries,” together with an etching by the same hand, illustrate very markedly the peculiar phase of religious symbolism, combined with half-ascetic, half-æsthetic melancholy, upon which the Pre-Raphaelites were entering at this period, and which remained with one, at least, of their leaders, as a permanent and dominating element in the artistic work of a lifetime.

But while “The Germ” was speeding through its brief career, and achieving at all events some sort of apologia for the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the leading band of painters were further expressing and developing their principles on canvas. For the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1850, Millais had prepared two pictures destined to draw down upon himself the concentrated fury of that storm of vituperative criticism from the public press which raged unabated for five years around the work of the Brethren, and ultimately spent itself on their more or less worthy disciples and successors. It is remarkable that the chief burden of the abuse heaped upon the Pre-Raphaelites by the art censors of the period should have been borne in the first instance by one, in some respects the most brilliant of the band, who in after years departed more entirely from his early principles in painting than any other member of the Brotherhood, and gained thereby a far greater measure of general popularity than has been won, or is likely to be won at present, by any of his former comrades. Upon no example of Pre-Raphaelite work were the diatribes of the press more scathing than upon Millais’s two pictures of 1850, “Christ in the House of His Parents,” (often called “The Carpenter’s Shop”), and “Ferdinand Lured by Ariel.” “Men who knew nothing of art,” says a fellow-member of the Brotherhood, Mr. F.G. Stephens, “reviled Millais because he was not of the art, artistic. Dilettanti, who could not draw a fingertip, scolded one of the most accomplished draughtsmen of the age because he delineated what he saw. Cognoscenti, who could not paint, rebuked the most brilliant Gold Medal student of the Royal Academy on account of his technical proceedings. Critics of the most rigid views belaboured and shrieked at an original genius, whose struggles and whose efforts they could not understand. Intolerant and tyrannical commentators condemned the youth of twenty because he dared to think for himself.... Intense and unflinching fidelity to nature, ardent love for colour, and a rigid resolution to paint the light of day as brightly as pigments could allow him, were among the aims of Millais, who, following the principles he championed with all his heart, found his models among his friends of English birth, and failing Eastern types, employed all his skill on British materials, relying on the really devout spirit in which he worked, and the poetic quality of his design, to produce the effect desired. He was sorely disappointed in this reliance.” No less sane a journal than Charles Dickens’s “Household Words,” thus wrote on June 15:—“In coming before this Holy Family you must discharge from your mind all religious aspirations, all elevating thoughts, all tender, awful, sorrowful, ennobling, sacred, graceful, or beautiful associations, and prepare yourself for the lowest depth of what is mean, odious, repulsive, and revolting. You behold the interior of a carpenter’s shop. In the foreground is a hideous, wry-necked, blubbering, red-headed boy in a bed-gown, and at his side a kneeling woman so horrible in her ugliness that she would stand out from the rest of the company as a monster in the vilest cabaret in France, or the lowest gin-shop in England. The two almost naked carpenters might be undressed in any hospital where dirty drunkards in a high state of varicose veins are received. Their very toes have walked out of St. Giles’s.” Another writer likened the figure of the boy Christ, whose hand, in the picture, has been wounded at his task, to “a miserable child scratching itself against a rusty nail in Seven Dials.” To such criticism it might easily be retorted that the world is more deeply concerned to-day with the dark problems of Seven Dials and St. Giles’s than with the life of any child in history, save in so far as the latter may illumine and interpret the mysteries of the importunate hour; and that the painter who so translates into present-day life the eternal tragedy of toil and pain as to press home to the conscience of a nation the daily re-crucifixion of the Christ in its own vast labour-houses,—whose modern reading of the ancient tale suggests the divine potentialities of all childhood and the universal pathos of human love “wounded in the house of friends,”—has given us a greater picture, and a more religious picture, than if he had painted for us all the angels in Heaven.

“Ferdinand Lured by Ariel” may be taken as the first landscape produced by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. It was painted—according to the rule—directly from nature. The background was taken from a spot in a park attached to Shotover House, near Oxford, where Millais was staying as the guest of Mr. Drury. A lady who saw the young artist at work upon this subject distinctly recalls his application of a magnifying-glass to the branch of a tree he was painting, in order to study closely the veins of the leaves. This was a literal following of that patient analysis of minutiæ in nature which characterized the Italian Pre-Raphaelites, and is especially noticeable in the early landscapes of Leonardo da Vinci; though he departed in his maturity from his former love of detail, and began to conventionalize items into generalities. Even the lizards in the foreground of “Ferdinand and Ariel” were faithful portraits of certain small favourites brought by Millais from Jersey to serve their turn among his sitters. The friend who sat for Ferdinand relates that the painting of the face, though a marvel of finish, and perfect in technique, was accomplished in a single sitting. A detailed pencil drawing was already on the canvas, and the laying on of the colour occupied only five hours. The vivid colouring of the whole picture, and the use of metal instead of pigment for the gold-cloth worn by Ferdinand (after the method of the early Italian masters, followed also by Rossetti in “Ecce Ancilla Domini”), were the subject of scarcely less vehement denunciation by the critics than the painter’s treatment of the Holy Family. “We do not want,” they said, “to see Ariel and the Spirits of the enchanted isle in the attitudes and shapes of green goblins, or the gallant Ferdinand twisted like a posture-master by Albrecht Dürer.... A Ferdinand of most ignoble physiognomy is being lured by a pea-green monster, intended for Ariel, whilst a row of sprites, such as it takes a Millais to devise, watch the operation with turquoise eyes. It would occupy more room than the thing is worth to expose all the absurdity and impertinence of this work.”

“Ecce Ancilla Domini!”
From the National Gallery.

From such extravagance of hostility the efforts of Holman Hunt were spared for the present; and his contribution to the Academy of 1850, “Christian Priests Escaping from Druid Persecution” (better known as “The Christian Missionary,”) though sharing in the general condemnation of the Pre-Raphaelite “heresy and schism,” was not singled out for special objurgation. Rossetti’s great achievement of the year was the most beautiful, and at the same time the most dramatic, of his strictly Pre-Raphaelite work, the “Ecce Ancilla Domini” (“The Annunciation,”) now in the National Gallery. The first rough sketch for this picture—a small water-colour not more than six inches by four—was painted as early as 1847 in the Cleveland Street studio shared with Hunt. The completed work was rejected by the Academy, and seen only in the obscure little Portland Gallery in Regent Street.

But the following season brought a larger measure of opprobrium to Holman Hunt. In the autumn of 1850 he had spent some weeks with Rossetti at Sevenoaks, Kent, and there painted the greater portion of his picture for the next year’s Academy, “Valentine rescuing Sylvia from Proteus;” a scene from Shakespeare’s “Two Gentlemen of Verona.” The beech-tree forest background was painted in Lord Amherst’s park at Knowle, and Mr. James Lennox Hannay (who died in 1873) was the model for Valentine. The whole work was characterized by the same bold colouring and exuberance of highly wrought detail, the same rugged unconventionality of pose and gesture in the composition of the figures, that had so incensed the organs of Academic tradition in the previous year. Its appearance in the Academy of 1851 evoked a fresh outburst of official contumely, in which the painter of “Valentine and Sylvia” (as it was ultimately called), was no less severely dealt with than his comrade Millais, who exhibited at the same time “The Return of the Dove to the Ark,” “Mariana of the Moated Grange,” and “The Woodman’s Daughter”—one of the finest combinations of Pre-Raphaelite landscape with the peculiar intensity of figure-drawing and character-study which was a dominant motive with the Brotherhood at this period. The assailant critics again sought to cover insinuations of gracelessness and deformity of conception beneath the looser charge of defective technique.

It was at this juncture that Mr. Ruskin, then personally unknown to the Pre-Raphaelites, and hearing privately of their aims and endeavours through Mr. Coventry Patmore, took upon himself to espouse their cause, perhaps with more ardour than discrimination, and wrote, in the spring of 1851, the now famous Letters to the “Times” which constituted the first public and authoritative vindication of the Pre-Raphaelite movement.

That Mr. Ruskin may have taken the early achievement and promise of the young painters a little too seriously, and attributed to them a more exalted conception of their mission as prophets and reformers than they actually cherished, and that he did undoubtedly misinterpret certain aspects of their religious paintings, is now widely acknowledged; nor need we hesitate to say that his influence upon the movement from first to last has been considerably exaggerated. Yet it is unquestionable that the first inspiration of Pre-Raphaelitism was largely due to his writings, and that his open championship of Hunt and Millais at a crisis of popular feeling rendered immense service to their crusade against the blind Philistinism of the British bourgeoisie. Replying at once to the technical indictments, Mr. Ruskin said:—“There was not a single error in perspective in three out of the four pictures in question [‘The Woodman’s Daughter,’ ‘Mariana of the Moated Grange,’ ‘The Return of the Dove to the Ark,’ and ‘Valentine and Sylvia’].... I doubt if, with the exception of the pictures of David Roberts, there were one architectural drawing in perspective on the walls of the Academy; I never met with but two men in my life who knew enough of perspective to draw a Gothic arch in a retiring plane, so that its lateral dimensions and curvatures might be calculated to scale from the drawing. Our architects certainly do not, and it was but the other day that, talking to one of the most distinguished among them, I found he actually did not know how to draw a circle in perspective.... There is not a single study of drapery in the whole Academy, be it in large works or small, which for perfect truth, power, and finish, could be compared with the black sleeve of Julia, or with the velvet on the breast and the chain mail of Valentine, of Mr. Hunt’s picture; or with the white draperies on the table of Mr. Millais’s ‘Mariana.’ And further: that as studies both of drapery and of every minor detail, there has been nothing in art so earnest or so complete as these pictures since the days of Albrecht Dürer. This I assert generally and fearlessly.” “Let us only look around at our exhibitions,”—continued the writer, proceeding to compare the work of the Pre-Raphaelites with the current standard of academic art—“and behold the cattle-pieces, and sea-pieces, and fruit-pieces, and family-pieces, the eternal brown cows in ditches, and white sails in squalls, and sliced lemons in saucers, and foolish faces in simpers, and try and feel what we are, and what we might have been.”

Mr. Ruskin’s letters to the “Times” were revised and republished a few years later in pamphlet form, introduced by the following statement in the preface:—“Eight years ago, in the close of the first volume of ‘Modern Painters,’ I ventured to give this advice to the young artists of England: That they should go to Nature in all singleness of heart, and walk with her, laboriously and trustingly, having no other thought but how best to penetrate her meaning; rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and scorning nothing: advice which, whether bad or good, involved infinite labour and humiliation in the following it; and was therefore, for the most part, rejected. It has, however, at last been carried out, to the very letter, by a group of men who, for their reward, have been assailed with the most scurrilous abuse which I ever recollect seeing issue from the public press.”

Upon this endorsement of the Pre-Raphaelite aim there followed an indictment of the Raphaelesque tradition still surviving in the training-schools of British art, in a passage which, through much quotation, has now become a familiar example of the controversial literature of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. “We begin,” said Mr. Ruskin, “in all probability, by telling the youth of fifteen or sixteen that Nature is full of faults, and that he is to improve her; but that Raphael is perfection, and that the more he copies Raphael the better; that after much copying of Raphael he is to try what he can do himself in a Raphaelesque but yet original manner; that is to say, he is to try to do something very clever, all out of his own head, but yet this clever something is to be properly subjected to Raphaelesque rules, is to have a principal light, occupying one-seventh of its space, and a principal shadow, occupying one-third of the same; that no two people’s heads in the picture are to be turned the same way, and that all the personages represented are to possess ideal beauty of the highest order, which ideal beauty consists partly in a Greek outline of nose, partly in proportions expressible in decimal fractions between the lips and the chin; but partly also in that degree of improvement which the youth of sixteen is to bestow upon God’s work in general.”

It is not difficult to trace, in the light of those utterances, the point of departure between Mr. Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites in their conception of that universe of Nature which they had studied with the like faithful care. Revolting from the quasi-perfection of Raphaelesque art, Ruskin had thrown himself upon Nature with the confidence of finding in her the absolute perfection vainly sought in the work of man. He had embraced without question the monistic theory of Nature as essentially beneficent and beautiful, and had never faced the principal of dualism which has been and must yet remain the crux of modern philosophy. Hence he failed to grasp the more romantic and subtle conception of the physical world as the scene, and not the drama, of life, which was immanent in the beginnings and revealed with the maturity of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. It has been remarked by an astute critic that three of the greatest writers of the Victorian age—Ruskin, Carlyle, and Browning—have been ruined as thinkers by their ignorance of the law of Evolution, with all that it implies of waste and suffering, of sacrifice and conflict and loss. Ruskin’s philosophy of nature was founded upon an old and discredited cosmogony; and however remote may have been the thought of the Pre-Raphaelite painters from the purely intellectual conclusions of physical and mental science in the nineteenth century, however apart they may have lived from theological and ethical controversy, it can safely be said that no contemporary artist save Tennyson, in poetry or painting, has imbibed more completely that spirit of mystical and irresponsible conflict with Nature which they drew from the atmosphere of mediæval romance. They understood that he who returns to Nature, returns, as another writer has bluntly expressed it, to a great many ugly things. “We need,” says Mr. Frederic Harrison, “as little think the natural world all beauty as think it all horror. It is made up of loveliness and ghastliness, of harmony and chaos, of agony, joy, life, death. The nature-worshippers are blind and deaf to the waste and the shrieks which meet the seeker after truth. What a mass there is in Nature which is appalling—almost maddening to man, if we coolly resolve to look at all the facts, as facts!”[^[3]] It was well that the Pre-Raphaelite painters should return, as they did, to the reverent and unbiassed portrayal of the natural world as it presented itself to their eyes. That they should follow with absolute fidelity the phenomena around them, “rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and scorning nothing,” was the essential preparation for artistic reform. But that they should advance from such a discipline to something of the selectiveness of fine art, was a step from the analytic method to a constructive effort based on that analysis and not—as in the Raphaelesque convention—independent of it. In all the highest Pre-Raphaelite work we feel instinctively that Nature is not the subject, but only the accessory, of the painting. Undoubtedly the new note struck in 1849 was, as Ruskin says, a note of resistance and defiance. But the revolutionary impulse had yet to be developed on reconstructive lines; and this development, though powerfully stimulated by the independent genius of Millais in the first four years of the Brotherhood, passed ultimately into the hands of Rossetti and Holman Hunt.

But Ruskin’s championship of Hunt and Millais when the powers of orthodoxy were against them and their friends were few, and his no less generous patronage of Rossetti in the succeeding years, did much to turn the current of critical favour in the direction of the Pre-Raphaelite ideal. Hunt’s picture, “Valentine and Sylvia,” after its merciless ordeal of ridicule and abuse in London, was rewarded by a £50 prize at the Academy of Liverpool,—the first English city to give public recognition and support to the rising school. The story of the steadfast encouragement accorded to the Pre-Raphaelites by the Liverpool Academy during the next six years, in which the annual prize of £50 was granted in every instance to pictures either by Millais, Holman Hunt, Ford Madox Brown, or a painter of kindred aims—Mark Anthony,—and of the dissensions which arose in and round the Academic Council when in 1857 the prize was once more won by Millais, affords an interesting side light upon the artistic controversy of the period. A leading literary newspaper attacked the Liverpool Academy in the bitterest terms for what it called “the Pre-Raphaelite heresy,” and Mr. Ruskin again came forward in the press to the defence of the painters. In the following year another nomination of Madox Brown by the Council for the award in question brought the strife to a crisis; the Town Council withdrew its financial support from the Academy, and rival exhibitions were opened, resulting in failure on both sides. Time, however, worked a significant revenge. Not long after the press attack upon the Academy Council, one of the original members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Mr. F.G. Stephens, was appointed art-critic of the very journal that had so violently forsworn “the Pre-Raphaelite heresy.” Twenty years later, the finest English art gallery outside London was erected in Liverpool through the munificence of Mr. (afterwards Sir) A.B. Walker, recently deceased; and yielded some of the most important spaces on its walls to pictures of the highest level of the English Pre-Raphaelite school.

The history of the last two decades has indeed wrought a sufficient vindication of the general methods of these young painters, and supremely of their practice as colourists; and it is in the sphere of the colourist that their influence upon contemporary art has made itself felt more deeply, perhaps, than in any other branch of technique. But to the vindication of history has been added in recent years, by the painter most bitterly attacked at the time for his innovations in colour—Sir John Millais—a defence which has now become almost an aphorism in English studios. “Time and Varnish are two of the greatest Old Masters,” says the artist, writing in 1888 under the title “Some Thoughts on our Art of To-day”; “and their merits are too often attributed by critics to the painters of the pictures they have toned and mellowed. The great artists all painted in bright colours, such as it is the fashion now-a-days for men to decry as crude and vulgar, never suspecting that what they applaud in those works is merely the result of what they condemn in their contemporaries. The only way to judge of the treasures which the old masters of whatever age have left us, is to look at the work and ask oneself ‘What was that like when it was new?’ Take the ‘Bacchus and Ariadne’ in the National Gallery, with its splendid red robe and its rich brown grass. You may rest assured that the painter of that red robe never painted the grass brown. He saw the colour as it was and painted it as it was—distinctly green; only it has faded with time to its present beautiful mellow colour. Yet many men now-a-days will not have a picture with green in it; some even going so far, in giving a commission, as to stipulate that the canvas shall contain none of it. But God Almighty has given us green, and you may depend upon it, it’s a fine colour.”[^[4]]

The writer then describes the gradual fall of Sir Joshua Reynolds before the short-sighted demand for “subdued colour” which had become current among the art connoisseurs of his day, and which at last induced him, against his better judgment, to create immediate “tone,” at the sacrifice of durability, by the use of that pernicious medium, asphaltum; with the result that all his extant work so accomplished is now in a deplorable state of decomposition and ruin.

With such examples before them of the evil of yielding to the demands of ignorance, and lowering in any way one’s standard of practice before a popular cry, the Pre-Raphaelite Brothers, whose first word in art sounded, as Ruskin said, the note of resistance and defiance, did not scruple to make merry over the weaknesses of a school of painting founded on Sir Joshua Reynold’s “Discourses.” Mr. Madox Brown tells us how Rossetti loved to quote from the diary of B.R. Haydon:—“Locked my door and dashed at my picture with a brush dripping with asphaltum.” But of Rossetti’s cordial admiration for Haydon’s genius a contrasting anecdote is evidence:—A friend, discussing with him the relative merits of Haydon and Wilkie, contended that the head of Lazarus was the only fine thing Haydon ever produced. “Ah!” burst out Rossetti, “but that one head is worth all the puny Wilkie ever produced in his life!”

Rossetti’s practice, it may here be said, differed from that of his Pre-Raphaelite comrades in the matter of varnish. The strong impulse towards the fresco-method, which was initiated in him, in his student days, by Madox Brown and the Westminster Cartoon competitions, resulted in his avoidance, throughout the best years of his work, of glaze and sheen in painting. From the first, Rossetti hated varnish: hence were developed the fresco-like, pure, and lustreless depths of colour which mark his finest technical level. But his entire confidence in the “Old Master,” Time, to enhance and vindicate his rich green glories in drapery and background is sufficiently attested by his unhesitating and masterly use of green in nearly all his greatest pictures. Not even the verdant gorgeousness of “Ferdinand and Ariel” can compare with the deep, chastened splendour of the green in “Beata Beatrix” and “Mnemosyne,” or in “The Beloved,” “Veronica Veronese,” “La Ghirlandata,” “The Blue Bower,” or, more daring still, in the wonderful series of water-colours which occupy the transition period of Rossetti’s Pre-Raphaelite work.

CHAPTER IV.
PERIOD OF TRANSITION.

Influence of Browning and Tennyson—Comparison of Rossetti and Browning—Influence of Dante—Introduction to Miss Siddal—Rossetti’s Water-colours—Madox Brown and Romantic Realism—The Dispersal of the Brotherhood—Departure of Woolner—Ideals of Portraiture—Rossetti and Public Exhibitions—Death of Deverell—Rossetti’s Friendship with Ruskin—Apostasy of Millais—The Rank and File of the Movement—Relation to Foreign Schools.

While Millais and Holman Hunt were outwardly dominant in the region of reform, and, in the exhibitions of 1850–51, were leading the Brotherhood Militant boldly into the enemy’s camp, Rossetti was entering upon a phase of doubt and perplexity, of self-distrust and hesitation, which resolved itself into an important crisis in his artistic development. A variety of circumstances diverted him in 1850 from the special line of religious painting, exemplified in “The Girlhood of Mary Virgin” and “Ecce Ancilla Domini,” which had been the chief outlet of his early enthusiasms in art,—if indeed so inadequate a phrase be permissible in regard to pictures which must rank with the purest products of his genius in its pristine robustness and simplicity. An incident in the studio-annals of the Brotherhood now turned him aside from the mediævo-religious manner adopted directly and literally from the early Italian masters. Rossetti’s convert and disciple, James Collinson, striving to imitate afar off the sincere habit of his leader, set to work upon a congruous subject, “The Renunciation of St. Elizabeth,” and produced a picture so mystical in conception and so hysterical in sentiment, albeit not without a certain grace and beauty of its own, that the sound and practical good sense which tempered the mysticism of Rossetti revolted at once from the extravagance of such a style. He now perceived the danger of pursuing too exclusively a path bordering on the metaphysical and occult, and quickly sought to brace and strengthen both his own imagination and that of his comrade, by departing for a time from the field of what is commonly called “sacred” art, and seeking fresh inspirations in a less rarefied air.

Other influences, chiefly of a personal kind, began to play around Rossetti at this time. He had moved, early in the year 1850, to a suite of rooms at 14, Chatham Place, Blackfriars; a block of houses since demolished, but then hospitable enough in a sober charm of environment; within view of the river and the historic horizon of its shores, and of certain grim but not wholly unromantic vistas of the great metropolis. In this home was spent the happiest decade of Rossetti’s life. Here began, soon after his settlement in the new abode, his friendship with the greatest poet of the Victorian age, and with another conspicuous in the second rank of its singers,—Tennyson and Browning,—both destined to exercise a strong influence on Rossetti’s art, though (singularly as it happened) not on his poetry; which remained, through years of intellectual intercourse and the reading together of each other’s verse, absolutely unaffected by either of the widely different poetic styles of the then Laureate and his great contemporary.

It is not easy for a succeeding generation to understand with what enthusiasm, with what delight and invigoration, the little company of painter-poets plunged into the writings of Browning when, following Rossetti, who was first on the track of the new fount of refreshment, they discovered therein the tonic which they needed. No better antidote to the sensuous mysticism into which some of the Pre-Raphaelites were threatening to lapse could have been found than the wholesome modernity and salutary brusquerie of the author of “Pauline” and “Bells and Pomegranates.” It was probably because they stood most in need of his gospel that the influence of Browning was at first more strong upon the readers than that of Tennyson, who affected them in the direction of pure romance, and distilled for them all that was sanest and noblest in the mediæval world.

In the autumn of 1850 Rossetti began, during his stay with Hunt and F.G. Stephens at Sevenoaks, a number of sketches with a view to a large and elaborate picture of “Kate the Queen,” from Browning’s well-known lyric. But he could never satisfy himself with the design, and after much toil, disheartenment, and perplexity, the subject was abandoned, like many more promising themes which from time to time inspired Rossetti. The entire year, save for the success of “Ecce Ancilla Domini,” had been one of disappointment to him, and of disconsolate struggles for a new departure. He had made many futile attempts at designs for “The Germ,” but none pleased him, and now he was casting about for new matter and media. For, as his standard of excellence rose higher, he began to feel more acutely his technical shortcomings,—the results partly of his incomplete training and desultory study in youth, partly of singular ill-luck in his figure-models, and partly also of a curious constitutional deficiency—not of industry per se, but of the faculty to direct and apply his industry along right lines. No modern artist has disproved more completely than Rossetti the barren platitude which defines genius as “the capacity for taking infinite pains.” Comparison between Rossetti and Browning in their struggle with mental tendencies unfavourable to lucid and well-ordered art is too obvious to demand pursuit in detail. Both took the prescribed “infinite pains,” but neither in the most profitable directions. Browning was over-charged with thought; Rossetti with imagination; and both were cumbered with the difficulties of artistic speech. The art of Browning has frequently been pronounced crude, raw, and “undigested.” One would hesitate to apply such terms to any work of Rossetti’s; for his, even at its most elemental stages, generally erred in the direction of strained and laboured purism, being over-wrought rather than unripe in conception or performance. In both artists, an exuberant activity of output was combined with a curious inability to undergo the full discipline of just and coherent expression. Browning’s prolific and incorrigible chaos of diction and metre, and Rossetti’s want of balance and sobriety in draughtsmanship, are but instances of the too frequent impediments of genius in the process of transmission. Rossetti, when he attained perfection in technique—and that he did so absolutely and repeatedly can no longer be questioned—seemed to stumble on it, as we have already suggested, by a sort of exquisite chance, a divine surprise, rather than a logical issue. And, manfully as he strove to recover in technical science, and did indeed recover to a marvellous degree, the lost ground of early days in a splendid maturity, his sense of perfect drawing was too fine for him not to suffer keenly—so long as that sense remained unimpaired—from that inability to realize at will his own ideals of perfection, which to every true worker is the only thing to be called failure.

Distracted as Rossetti was throughout his life by the very richness and fertility of his own genius, torn ever between divided aims and conflicting purposes, the more mutually obstructive because of the restless and hyper-sensitive nature which was the field and victim of their strife, the difficulty of concentrating that genius upon the highest aim and purpose within its proper sphere was never more stubborn than at this period. So largely did the poetic impulse, in his youth, predominate over the pictorial method, that, as he himself declares in a letter written in retrospect, it was not until 1853, when he was twenty-five years of age, that he definitely adopted painting as his life-study and profession, and relegated his literary efforts to a subordinate place. Subordinate they were in name and for a time only: to be put forth with fresh ardour and greater mastery at intervals of his painting, and to surpass it in some respects in the essentials of fine art. Rossetti had yet to learn that he, even more than Hunt and Millais, was primarily and supremely a colourist in the broadest sense of the word.

But a still deeper and more abiding influence from the literature of the past was by this time ascendant in Rossetti’s mind. The love of Dante, already inherent in him, was nurtured by many tender associations of youth: it now increased and swayed him as a direct and urgent spiritual power. In 1845 the vague spell of the old name upon the young namesake had changed, for the latter, into an eager study of his great poetic inheritance. The magic and majestic visions of the “Purgatorio” and “Paradiso,” and still more, the unforgettable life-tragedy of their seer, had sunk deeply into Rossetti’s thought, until, from his own recreative alembic of fantasy, he began, about 1850, to bring them forth again on paper and canvas, in a rich and profuse miscellany of rough sketches and brilliant vignettes and colour-studies, too often left unfinished at a point of high promise and alluring suggestions of success.

It is not difficult to trace, through the strange parallels of circumstance and destiny, the sombre charm that bound the exiled poet of the fourteenth to him of the nineteenth century. It has been said that no ascendancy of a great poetic personality over one born in a later age has been more potent and fruitful in art than that of Dante Alighieri over Dante Gabriel Rossetti. In 1849–50 we find the latter sketching, first in ink and then in colours, the historic or legendary meeting of Dante and Beatrice Portinari at a marriage feast, when Beatrice is said to have laughed with her companions at the shyness and confusion of the young patriot-guest. The second of these sketches was severely criticised when exhibited in 1851–52, on account of a daring juxtaposition of bright light green and bright light blue in the colour scheme. This bold experiment was afterwards defended by Ruskin by analogy with the natural disposition of green grass, etc., against a summer sky.

It was at this time also that another new and important personal influence came upon Rossetti’s life. James Collinson had now separated from the Brotherhood, and was succeeded, at all events probationally, by Walter Howell Deverell, through whom, by one of those strange chances which sometimes modify in a moment the destinies of a lifetime, Rossetti made the acquaintance of Miss Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal; a young girl of such remarkable beauty that Deverell at once asked her to sit to him as a model, and introduced her to Rossetti for the same purpose. The story runs to the effect that Deverell, who was himself of singularly handsome and winning presence, accidentally caught sight of Miss Siddal’s face, with its regular, delicate features and profusion of rich, dark auburn hair, in the background of a shop-window where she—the daughter of a Sheffield cutler—was engaged as a milliner’s assistant. To Deverell, being at that time in search of a model for his new picture, “Viola,” from Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night,” the sight of such a face was doubly welcome. He quickly made such frank and honourable advances as his graces of person and character facilitated, and Miss Siddal’s début in the studios of the Brotherhood brought not only to Deverell a perfect Viola, but to Rossetti an ideal and actual Beatrice. For the young artists soon found their model to be—in the old fairy-tale phrase—“as good as she was beautiful.” Of that goodness and beauty, that incomparable charm of talent and of character, of manner and temperament, which soon made her the centre of the warmest admiration and affection, enough has long since been written, by those who knew her, to render the tardy praise of less qualified historians alike needless and impertinent. The members of the Brotherhood vied with each other in the endeavour to immortalize her in their paintings. Rossetti, Hunt, and Millais did so with unqualified success. Rossetti, in his turn, discovered that she herself possessed extraordinary aptitude for art. He gave her lessons in drawing and painting, and the two worked together upon kindred ideals. Her presence in the studios was soon upon the footing of equal friendship and pleasant cameraderie. The vigour of her imagination is best seen in a water-colour drawing, “Sir Patrick Spens,” in Mr. Theodore Watts’s collection. It represents the wives of the men on the doomed ship waiting in agonized expectancy upon the shore.

Soon a different and deeper attachment sprang up between teacher and pupil. Her exquisite spirit, her gracious ways, appealed as deeply to Rossetti’s sensitive and passionate nature as did her beauty to his æsthetic judgment. His love for her was as the gathering up of all the scattered forces of his being into one consecrated worship. It may well be that the progress of courtship was not invariably favourable to the progress of art, but several rough portraits by Rossetti of himself and Miss Siddal, and of Rossetti by his fair companion, remain as pleasant witnesses of idle hours, and are at the same time drawn with singular vividness and force.

Early in 1851, or perhaps at the close of the previous year, Miss Siddal appears to have given sittings to Holman Hunt for the face of Sylvia in his picture of “Valentine and Sylvia,” already referred to. Rossetti sat with her as the Jester in Walter Deverell’s “Viola”—his most successful picture; taken from the scene in which the Duke asks the Jester to “sing again that antique song he sang last night.” The artist served as his own model for the Duke.

It appears probable that Rossetti and Miss Siddal were engaged as early as 1853, though the relationship was not openly avowed for a considerable period, and did not terminate in marriage until 1860. Rossetti’s pecuniary position, at the outset of his career, was naturally uncertain; nor did it materially improve with subsequent prosperity and fame; for his tastes and habits, according to the traditions of artistic Bohemia, were as luxurious and improvident as his earnings were precarious. Miss Siddal, too, was delicate in health. An early sketch of her, from Rossetti’s hand, and now in the South Kensington Museum, representing her as she stands by a window, in a gown of quaint simplicity and soberness, gives perhaps the truest impression of her personality that could be selected from the portraits of that period. The artless and yet somewhat austere pose, the fragile grace and slightly languid sweetness of aspect, afford a key to the criticism once passed to the effect that “she would have been a Puritan if she had not been an invalid.” The latter she never was in the sense of chronic inactivity, but of such delicacy as to give a peculiar tenderness to her service as a model, and unhappily both to delay and abbreviate the short period of married life.

To some critics it has been a source of regret that Rossetti should have come in youth so unreservedly under the spell of a type of beauty as exclusive as that of this well-beloved model. The rare blending of spiritual with sensuous charm which she presented in feature and expression so fully satisfied his own ideal of that harmony as to make him dwell upon, and perhaps specialize it, in a way which constituted a danger to his art; inducing him to read into other feminine types the individual characteristics of the one. Fortunate as he was in after life in obtaining for his models some of the most beautiful and cultured women in the artistic and literary circles of London, his tendency was almost always to look at them, as it were, in the light of that established ideal, and to conceive them as versions merely of that elemental loveliness which so dominated his thought. But it was inevitable that a temperament like Rossetti’s should specialize, through their very intensity, the dominant characteristics most familiar to his pencil and his brush. The case of Miss Herbert, an accomplished actress who gave him a number of sittings in the next decade, is perhaps the most striking exception to the rule; but her style of beauty was in too complete a contrast to that of Miss Siddal (being of a severe, robust, and Hellenic type) to allow of any compromise between the features of the two.

The combined influence of Browning and Tennyson among contemporary poets, and the increasing sway of Dante over the young painter, inclining him the more strongly in the direction of historic romance, produced, as we have seen, a somewhat desultory course of pen-and-ink sketches and water-colour studies during the next few years. The interval from 1850 to 1858 may be reckoned as Rossetti’s second period. After the completion of “Ecce Ancilla Domini,” he painted no important oil picture until the Llandaff “Triptych” of 1859, and the contemporary “Bocca Baciata,” which stands first in point of time, and high in point of merit, among the masterpieces of his maturity.

Yet the water-colours of the second period, capricious and experimental in treatment as many of them are, include some of the most valuable, because the most characteristic and significant, of Rossetti’s work in the realm of pure romance. In these rough and often hasty sketches, sometimes less than twelve by twenty inches in size, his imagination seems to have been exercising itself upon the poetic subjects that haunted him by turns with the vividness of actual life, more vital and urgent than the realities of every day. Several, indeed, of the finest of these water-colours are now dated, on good authority, as early as 1848–49; such as the lovely little sepia sketch, “The Sun may Shine and we be cold,” given to his friend, Alexander Monro, a young Scottish sculptor of high promise, whose early death from consumption removed an artist who could ill be spared from the small and never very strong sculpture-branch of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. To this period also belong some of the most important of the Dante subjects. From 1849 is dated “A Parable of Love,” one of the best of Rossetti’s early drawings in pen and ink. The lady is seated at an easel on which she has been painting her own portrait from a mirror at her side. Her lover, bending over her from behind, lays his hand upon hers to guide the brush anew. Mr. Woolner served as the model for the lover. A pen-drawing from Browning’s “Sordello,” entitled “Taurello’s First Sight of Fortune,” also belongs to 1849, together with the powerful little sketch, “The Laboratory,” from the same poet, showing a strange, brilliant, witch-like or almost serpent-like woman in an alchemist’s shop, procuring from him some fateful elixir wherewith to play upon her rival and avenge herself upon the lover, once her own.

One of the most beautiful water-colours of 1850 is the “Morning Music;” a dainty little half-length figure of a white-clad girl seated at her toilet, another maiden brushing her long bright hair, while her lover stands, making music from some archaic instrument, at her side. At this time also Rossetti made the first sketch of a subject which fascinated him with peculiar force almost throughout his artistic career, and to which he returned again and again in several media, even within a short time of his death, but without ever achieving a finished picture—“Michael Scott’s Wooing.”

In 1851 were made the best of several water-colour drawings from the subject of “Lucretia Borgia,” and the first pen and pencil sketches of a subject suggested by the famous Döppelgänger legends of northern Europe. The design for “How they met themselves” remains among the very highest of Rossetti’s conceptions in pure romance. The final pen-and-ink version was not done till 1860, nor the water-colour till 1864. The subject demands further study in a separate chapter, together with the principal Dante sketches in this group. Several drawings from Shakespearean subjects, including “Benedick and Beatrice” (“Much Ado about Nothing”) and “Orlando and Adam in the Forest” (“As You Like It”), were also executed about this time.

Mr. F.G. Stephens traces some interesting modifications of Rossetti’s technique between the years 1850 and 1853 to the influence of his comrades in the course of associated work. From Millais he seems to have gained something of the easy grace and suavity of style which was lacking in his first too strenuous work; from Holman Hunt, the scrupulous and laboured detail which readily became as exhaustively (and sometimes exhaustingly) symbolic as Hunt’s own; and from Ford Madox Brown a certain robust breadth and dramatic mastery which was needed to lift his subjective creations into a large and quickening atmosphere. Probably it was the influence of Madox Brown that led him to the field of stern and practical social problems, of everyday romance; to deal with the eternally crucial relationship of frail womanhood to passionate manhood, and all its sweet and bitter and profound significance upon the life of humanity, as he dealt with it in the wonderful “Hesterna Rosa” (“Yesterday’s Rose”) of 1851, in “The Gate of Memory” six years later, and in the great realistic picture, “Found,” which was begun in 1852, but which, after many vicissitudes of neglect, spasmodic effort, and frequent despair, remained still unfinished at the painter’s death. It may be wished that Rossetti had pursued more thoroughly the motif which thus yielded some of the most remarkable and suggestive of his designs. This group, however, again affords a subject for consideration on a future page.

But the year 1853 saw also the first outward signs of the breaking-up of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Thomas Woolner, the oldest member of the Brotherhood, at this time twenty-eight years of age, being still unable to earn a living in London by his art, now determined to emigrate to Australia, where some friends of his family were already established at Melbourne, and to try his luck at the gold-diggings, which were at that time a source of much excitement and speculation in English circles. Woolner had already achieved some unpretentious but exceedingly thoughtful and conscientious work in sculpture, but he had not met with much academic recognition, nor with any substantial favour from the art-patronising public. For many years a pupil of Behnes, he entered the Academy Schools in 1842, and contributed a large composition of life-size figures representing “The Death of Boadicea” to the Westminster Cartoon Competition of 1844. His contributions to the Royal Academy exhibitions in Trafalgar Square had included “Eleanor Sucking the Poison from the Wound of Prince Edward” (1843), “Alastor” (from Shelley, 1846), “Feeding the Hungry” (bas-relief, 1847), “Eros and Euphrosyne” and “The Rainbow” (1848), and portraits of Carlyle and Tennyson. At the British Institution he had also exhibited a statuette of “Puck” (1847) and “Titania Caressing the Indian Boy” (1848). He sailed for Australia in the spring of 1853, accompanied by a promising young sculptor named Bernhard Smith (who died somewhat prematurely in 1885), and followed shortly afterwards by E.L. Bateman, another close sympathizer with Pre-Raphaelite aims. Woolner returned to England early in 1857, and then executed the fine bust of Tennyson recently placed in Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey. His later work, however, can hardly be classed with that of the Pre-Raphaelite band. He died on the 7th of October, 1892.

In the summer of the same year the Brethren agreed to paint together a group of their own portraits, in order to send them over as a gift to their distant comrade on the gold-fields of the Antipodes. Accordingly, they met one day at Millais’s studio in Gower Street. There were present Dante and W.M. Rossetti, F.G. Stephens, Millais, and Holman Hunt. Mr. W.M. Rossetti, ranks the results in the following order of merit:—The portrait of Stephens by Millais, of Millais by Hunt, of W.M. Rossetti by Millais, of Dante Rossetti by Hunt, and of Hunt by Dante Rossetti.

Rossetti himself, as we have already seen, produced but very few male portraits. The large oil-painting of his godfather, Mr. Charles Lyell, and the pencil drawings of his father and grandfather; the water-colour sketches of Browning and Swinburne, and the admirable life-size chalks of Mr. Ruskin, Mr. Theodore Watts (said by Mr. Swinburne to be his masterpiece in portraiture), Mr. F.R. Leyland, Dr. Gordon Hake, Mr. George Hake, and Mr. W.J. Stillman, two or three pencil drawings of Madox Brown, and the painting of Holman Hunt, as above recorded, seem to exhaust the list of his efforts in that field, if we exclude the consideration of many excellent likenesses which occur among his genre-pictures. W.M. Rossetti, for instance, sat more than once to his brother for the head of Dante, and many other important figures; in fact, there was a general practice of mutual accommodation among the Brothers in serving as models one to another.

Yet the immense influence of the Pre-Raphaelite movement upon English portraiture in the latter half of the nineteenth century would be difficult to over-estimate. It must be remembered that the first principle of Pre-Raphaelitism—namely, that nature, including human nature, is to be painted truthfully and unflinchingly as it presents itself to the painter’s eye—strikes directly at the root of the conventional habit, which aimed at “idealizing” the subject into something far superior to the present reality. Still, as “the eye sees what it brings the power to see,” so the rightly-trained artist sees infinitely more than the casual observer, and his purest realism becomes the highest ideality. For in order to represent nature truly, something more is demanded than imitation. Diderot tells a story of a painter well known to him and to fame, who, on beginning work upon a new subject, always went down upon his knees and prayed to be delivered from the model. There was a grain of truth in his notion. To be delivered from the letter in order to apprehend the spirit, yet to follow faithfully the visible in order to attain the invisible, is the task of the portrait-painter. The mistake of the pseudo-classic idealists, as of the impractical folk in other walks of life, is to suppose that by aiming at the spirit they are absolved from the letter altogether; not perceiving that to gain the spirit they must reach through the letter, and beyond it. Every true portrait-painter is an idealist in this highest sense, that he perceives and reproduces the inmost and essential Self of his sitter, and in supreme moments resolves, as Spinoza would have it, the “potential human” into the “actual divine.” He portrays scrupulously the outward aspect, but interprets the whole by that pervading spirit from within to which the outward aspect has given him—as a seer—the key. The face he paints is not transfigured by his own imagination, his own conceit, however fair, of what that face might or ought to be; but it is revealed in its own distinct and actual being by a witness which, if truthful, must be as generous as stern. It is the immortal and inevitable “Thou Thyself” of which Rossetti sings:

“I am Thyself—what hast thou done to me?

—And Thou Thyself to all eternity!”

Yet if we may risk a paradox, it is precisely in the reality that there lies the potentiality of the life within; behind the physical is abides the spiritual may be; the “everlasting no” of the uncompromising realist, sifting, limiting, and analyzing down the human unit into bare and rigid matter, often conceals the hidden hope and promise of the idealist’s “everlasting yea.” Hence a great portrait is charged to the full with latent possibilities of character and destiny. It suggests forces as well as phenomena, causes as well as effects, inherent tendencies as well as facts. Someone has said that a human face should be either a promise or a history. The definition is too narrow. Every face, save perhaps in childhood, and not always with that exception, contains both promise and history inextricably blended each with each. A great portrait must be passionately personal, intensely individual; presenting one single, complete, and separate identity to the eye and mind, and yet in a very real sense impersonal, having a certain universal, humanitarian significance. For the artist’s hand sets the human unit in its place in the great Family; lifts it on to the broad planes of the world’s common life. As his eye sees all things, like Spinoza, sub specie eternitatis—sees Time in the light of Eternity—so it sees one Man in the light of Humanity. He knows no isolations of being, conceives no man as “living to himself;” but is concerned ever with relationships and imperative sympathies between the subject of his portrait and the rest of mankind; so that the personality that looks forth from his canvas, faithfully and profoundly interpreted by his own, has in it the elements of appeal and challenge, and sends out a radiance of vitality to its spiritual kin.

In this ideal of portraiture the young Pre-Raphaelites had been confirmed by Ruskin long ago; and he had pointed them to the incomparable portraits of Dante by Giotto, of Petrarch by Simon Memmi, and of Savonarola by Fra Bartolomeo, as examples among the Italian Pre-Raphaelites of the attainment of such success. Rossetti and his comrades in their turn, more especially some of the younger and more independent spirits not actually or permanently connected with the Brotherhood, developed and perfected the ideal to a degree incalculably fruitful in contemporary art. It will hardly be disputed that in Mr. G.F. Watts, one of the truest Pre-Raphaelites in aspiration and temper, though utterly distinct from them in original genius and intellectual range, England has found at last her greatest portrait painter, while to Millais, one of the original members of the Brotherhood, the judgment of posterity will attribute a scarcely less exalted place. They found the art of portraiture degraded, almost without exception, to the lowest level of trivial prettiness as regards women, and vulgar affectation in dealing with men. “The system to be overthrown,” as Ruskin said, “was one of which the main characteristic was the pursuit of beauty at the expense of truth.” And such pursuit leads in all ages to the same inexorable fatality,—the beauty so gained is always of a false and spurious kind. The ancient allegory of Pandemos and Urania is for ever true in art. The seeker for ideal beauty seeks it only in visible forms, pursues it through the physical world alone, awaits it at the doors of sense merely, and is straightway ensnared by the earthly Pandemos, the Venus of the flesh. But let him steadfastly set his soul to the higher worship, let him seek reverently the moral and spiritual loveliness of human character in the great is and the greater may be of the throbbing, actual life around him, and surely he will be brought into the near presence of the heavenly Urania; surely he will pass, with Rossetti, through “Body’s Beauty” to “Soul’s Beauty,” and worship with him

—“that Lady Beauty in whose praise

Thy voice and hand shake still,—long known to thee

By flying hair and fluttering hem,—the beat

Following her daily of thy heart and feet,

How passionately and irretrievably,

In what fond flight, how many ways and days!”

The attention of Mr. Ruskin had meanwhile been diverted to some extent from the work of Millais and Hunt by his entrance in 1854 upon a close personal friendship with Rossetti, which lasted in cordial fidelity for some ten or twelve years. At the time of his first public championship of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Mr. Ruskin had known nothing of Rossetti’s work, inasmuch as it had never yet appeared on the walls of the Academy or in any of the popular exhibitions of the period. But, for such unintentional and unconscious neglect of the real leader of the movement which he so warmly endorsed, the great critic now made ample reparation. He became a constant and generous patron of Rossetti’s pictures until the painter passed, about the year 1865, into his third artistic period, and developed methods less in accordance with Ruskin’s especial tenets. That the gradual severance of intimacy between artist and buyer should have been brought about by the former’s independence of spirit and resolute adherence to his own inspirations and aims, in the face of some, perhaps, over-officious criticism and counsel from his patron, is certainly no discredit to Rossetti. At the same time, the art-world owes a debt of gratitude to Mr. Ruskin for having so long encouraged, by his support and sympathy, the production of those exquisite water-colours which Rossetti, unsettled as he then was in habits of painting, might not otherwise have accomplished in such splendour and cogency during his transition period.

And to these years of intimacy with Ruskin belong nearly all the finest drawings of his “Morte D’Arthur” series, such as “King Arthur’s Tomb” (called sometimes “The Last Meeting of Launcelot and Guinevere,” though the design by no means gives the impression of a meeting in the flesh), “The Damozel of the Sanct Grael,” “The Chapel before the Lists,” “The Meeting of Sir Tristram and Iseult,” “Sir Galahad in the Ruined Chapel,” “Sir Galahad and Sir Bors,” “Launcelot Escaping from Guinevere’s Chamber,” and “The Death of Breuse sans Pitié;” together with a fresh and important group of Biblical subjects treated in a more daringly romantic manner than before, including “The Passover in the Holy Family,” “Bethlehem Gate,” “Ruth and Boaz,” “The Crucifixion,” “Mary in the House of John,” and the first sketch for “Mary Magdalene at the Door of Simon the Pharisee;” also the “Triptych” for the altar-piece of Llandaff Cathedral, “The Infant Christ Adored by a Shepherd and a King.” The Dante subjects again appear in 1854–55, with “Francesca di Rimini,” “Paolo and Francesca,” “Matilda Gathering Flowers” (from the “Purgatorio”), “Dante’s Vision of Rachel and Leah,” “Dante at Verona,” and the first version of the picture afterwards among Rossetti’s masterpieces, “Dante’s Dream.” The little drawings of “The Tune of the Seven Towers” in 1850, “Carlisle Tower,” “Fra Angelico Painting,” and “Giorgione Painting” in 1853, “The Queen’s Page” (from Heine) in 1854, “Fra Pace” and “Monna Rosa” in 1856, “The Blue Closet,” “The Blue Bower,” “The Bower Garden,” and the first design for a favourite subject variously known as “Aurelia” and “Bonifazio’s” or “Fazio’s Mistress” in 1857; these, together with some further sketches for “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” a number of portraits of Miss Siddal, Browning, Tennyson, and Swinburne, whom he knew in 1857, are but a selection from the almost countless studies, in pencil, pen and ink, neutral tint, water-colour, and occasional oil, scattered over Rossetti’s transition period.

“Mary Magdalene at the Door of Simon the Pharisee.”

From a drawing.

By permission of Lord Battersea and Overstrand.

Mary Magdalene

“St. Luke the Painter,” in 1857, is notable as being Rossetti’s first success in coloured chalk; a medium which he affected more freely in after years, and with extraordinary power and felicity; the medium, in fact, in which some of the noblest of his later half-length symbolic figures were executed.

After the year 1850 Rossetti almost ceased to exhibit in picture galleries. A very few of his pictures, including the “Bocca Baciata” and a version of “Lucretia Borgia,” were thenceforth seen in the Hogarth Club, a small society of artists and amateurs to which he belonged, and others afterwards in the Arundel Club, which he joined in 1865. An important exception, however, was made to this rule of seclusion in 1856, when a small but highly representative Pre-Raphaelite Exhibition was opened at 4, Russell Place, Fitzroy Square. Among Rossetti’s contributions were the first water-colour draft of “Dante’s Dream,” already alluded to, and its pendant, “The Anniversary of the Death of Beatrice,” “Hesterna Rosa,” “The Blue Closet,” and “Mary Magdalene.” The other exhibitors were Millais, Holman Hunt, Madox Brown, Arthur Hughes, Charles Collins, William Davis, W.L. Windus, Inchbold, Seddon and Brett. The “Dante’s Dream” re-appeared at the Liverpool Academy in 1858, together with “A Christmas Carol,” and “The Wedding of St. George”; “Fair Rosamund,” and “The Farmer’s Daughter” (study for “Found”) went to the Royal Scottish Academy in 1862; and “Mary in the House of John” appeared at the Fine Art Society’s Galleries in 1879. A version of “Pandora,” in 1877 or 1878, and a lovely little water-colour, “Spring,” in 1879, were lent by their purchasers to the Glasgow Institute of Fine Arts; “Tibullus’s Return to Delia” was similarly lent to the Albert Gallery Exhibition at Edinburgh in 1877; and in 1881 the Loan Exhibition at the Royal Manchester Institution included four important water-colours—“Proserpine,” a “Lucretia Borgia,” “Hesterna Rosa,” and “Washing Hands;” and five oils—“Proserpine,” “Two Mothers,” “Joli Cœur,” “A Vision of Fiametta,” and “Water-Willow.” These instances complete the brief list of Rossetti’s pictures exhibited in public galleries during the lifetime of the artist.

In the year 1854, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, already practically broken up by divergence of method in the leading painters, and changes of aim and sphere among the lesser lights of the revolutionary dawn, may be said to have been finally dispersed by the lamented death of Walter Deverell, and the departure of Holman Hunt for a lengthy sojourn in the East, there to paint directly from nature—according to the much boasted but oft-broken rule—the backgrounds and appurtenances of those Biblical subjects to which he was now strongly drawn. The death of Deverell at an early age was a heavy personal bereavement to Rossetti, and an occasion of genuine grief to all the Brotherhood, with whom he was exceedingly popular. Nor was the loss to art easily reparable, or the work of his surviving comrades unaffected by the removal of a painter of such singular purity and grace. He was a son of the Secretary of the Schools of Design, which were the precursor of the South Kensington Science and Art Department.

Rossetti and Millais were thus, in 1854, left alone as practical painters; W.M. Rossetti having been from the first exclusively a littérateur, while F.G. Stephens, after having produced in youth some work of high quality on strictly Pre-Raphaelite lines, had by this time adopted the same sphere of energy, especially in the realm of the art-critic.

But the phase of doubt and hesitation, of compromise (in no invidious sense) between the first inflexible attitude of revolt and the further impulse of re-construction, which had overtaken the Brotherhood in 1851, was by no means the special ordeal of Rossetti. It came soon afterwards upon Millais with an equal import and significance; as though each must pass, in individual experience, through the several stages of destructive and re-creative energy, first of protest, then of reform, and afterwards of reconciliation and progress, which they had recognized in the history of the past, and which their own work as a whole afforded to the history of the nineteenth century. They had to exemplify, each for himself, the resolute overthrow of partial and degenerate principles, and the pursuit, more or less successful, of a further and perhaps undefined ideal, or the reaction towards that very order against which their own strenuous protest had been set. And it is remarkable that, in the case both of Rossetti and of Millais, the painter should have reached his highest level of excellence in art precisely at the moment when his methods were the most unsettled and his principles the least assured. The most discerning critics now agree in placing the high-water mark of Rossetti’s genius in the midst of this transition period, ranging from 1850 to 1860, or, if the decade may be stretched by a license of etymology, covering the “Beata Beatrix” of 1863. And it is scarcely disputable that the supreme achievements of Millais lie within a narrower space, comprising chiefly the “Hugenot” and “Ophelia” of 1852, “The Order of Release” of 1853, “Autumn Leaves” and “The Blind Girl” of 1856, and “The Eve of St. Agnes” in 1863, which really belongs in conception and spirit to the Keats epoch, if we may so call it, which gave birth to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Just as in the dawn of the Italian Renaissance the point of absolute greatness in art was gained at the momentary coalition of the old forces with the new, when the classic spirit was conquered and absorbed by the spirit of romance, and the romantic spirit still beat tremulously about the new world’s doors, so in the struggle of the modern Pre-Raphaelites to reconcile the new impulse with the heritage of the past, the triumph came in the midst of the conflict rather than after the victory. Just as Leonardo and Michaelangelo gathered up and combined the discordant elements of the strife around them into a noble harmony of art, so did the Pre-Raphaelites attune and interpret the diverse forces of their own revolution when they felt its import most acutely, and least knew whither it would lead them. And to almost opposite poles of thought and sentiment were Millais and Rossetti led.

The extraordinary change which gradually came over the work of Millais after his election to the Associateship of the Royal Academy in 1854—the youngest painter, with the exception of Lawrence, ever admitted to that rank—has been the subject of much criticism and controversy. It has been contended by several writers that Millais lacked original imagination, and could not sustain his early level without the constant inspiration and stimulus of Rossetti and Hunt, both of whom were by this time absorbed in fresh developments of their own. More ardent apologists have claimed that his Pre-Raphaelite period was but a curious episode in Millais’s career; a mere incident in the growth of a genius too brilliant to submit for long to bias from without; and that his impressionable nature was only temporarily swayed by the proselytizing enthusiasm of his comrades. It is hard to attribute the qualities of his finest work—qualities of a high imaginative order, as in “The Eve of St. Agnes,” or “The Enemy Sowing Tares,” to any genius but his own, or to believe that the painter of “Ophelia” and the “Blind Girl” was not himself profoundly moved by the pathos and tragedy which he therein conceived. Nor can it be urged that the exigencies of ill-fortune, the stress of poverty, or any of those dire necessities of fate which have driven many a true artist on the downward road, drove Millais to paint as unblushingly for the Philistine market as he had formerly done for an obscure and despised coterie of artistic revolutionists. Free as he always was of pecuniary care, and favoured by destiny with all the pleasures of domestic and social prosperity, if he was spoilt, it was by success, not failure; if corrupted, it was by popularity, not neglect: though it must be remembered that none of the Pre-Raphaelites can justly pose as martyrs in the matter of a livelihood.

Nor is it permissible to urge that fame, at first well earned and richly justified, entitles any great painter to repudiate the convictions and ideals on which that fame was built, or to play with a reputation won at a heavy cost to himself and others. It can only be assumed that Millais, in forsaking the high and steep paths which he had once chosen, sincerely followed what he felt to be a more excellent way, and honestly believed his decadence to be an advance upon his maturity. To doubt this would be to pass the sternest moral condemnation on an artist of incomparable endowments, and to brand him as the wanton betrayer of a sacred trust, the deliberate concealer of a divine talent, for which, at the ultimate judgment-seat of art, the inevitable account must at last be given.

Speaking of this turning-point in Millais’s career, Mr. Ruskin said in 1857:—“The change in his manner from the years of ‘Ophelia’ and ‘Mariana’ to 1857 is not merely Fall; it is Catastrophe; not merely a loss of power, but a reversal of principle; his excellence has been effaced ‘as a man wipeth a dish—wiping it and turning it upside down.’”

But the Pre-Raphaelite movement, so far from being at an end, was now only emerging from the first tentative phase of its activity. It had yet to be absorbed in a larger reformation, and to act thereby even more potently than if it had remained the specific crusade of a clique or faction. The difficulty which the historian finds at this crisis in the artistic career of Rossetti and his friends, and still more so in their subsequent developments,—the difficulty of defining strictly Pre-Raphaelite work, and of deciding as to who of the now rapidly expanding circle of painters may justly be claimed as Pre-Raphaelites, is itself evidence of the permeating force of the initial movement, and of the ready soil which was prepared for the dissemination of its dominant ideas. For the circle of literary and artistic aspirants, patrons, students, amateurs, and connoisseurs of many grades and varied gifts who now surrounded Dante Rossetti, included men whose names afterwards became honoured in fields of art quite untouched by Pre-Raphaelitism in its distinctive form, but imbued through their influence with fresh and quickening impulses of revival.

One of the most poetic of the painters intimately associated with the Brotherhood was Arthur Hughes, who, though only eighteen at the time of its formation, took an active share in its practical work, and painted, according to its main tenets, with a rare facility and tender charm. He was born in London in 1832, passed through the Academy Schools without much recognition, but won cordial admiration among the limited company who could then appreciate his work, by his beautiful “April Love” in the Academy of 1854. He was also singularly successful at a later date in a subject from Keats’s “Eve of St. Agnes”—the source of inspiration for some of the finest work of the Pre-Raphaelite leaders at various times. Like Millais and several others of the band, he attained considerable popularity as an illustrator of books. His religious paintings, moreover, will demand attention among those of his more illustrious friends. “The Cottager’s Return” and “The Reaper and the Flowers” may be remembered, among others of his always graceful pictures, by those who recall the first decade of Pre-Raphaelite propaganda in public exhibitions. He sat as the model for the hero in Millais’s “Proscribed Royalist” of 1853.

Charles Allston Collins, a son of William Collins, R.A., and brother of Wilkie Collins, painted for some time in the manner of the Pre-Raphaelites, but subsequently devoted himself to literature. His first exhibited picture, “Convent Thoughts,” in the Academy of 1850, shared with Millais’s “Christ in the House of His Parents,” the torrent of opprobrium showered on the innovators in that eventful year. Yet three of his works were accepted by the Academy the following season,—“Lyra Innocentium,” on a verse from Keble; representing a young girl in a white gown against a background of blue; “May in the Regent’s Park,” a wonderfully minute study of foliage, as if seen through a window opening close upon the trees; and “The Devout Childhood of Saint Elizabeth of Hungary,” calling to mind the treatment by James Collinson of the familiar renunciation-legend anent the same much-maligned saint. The Elizabeth of the “Childhood” is depicted as a homely-looking little girl of thirteen, kneeling at the iron-barred oaken door of a chapel in the Palace grounds. Her missal is laid on the doorstep beside her, and she is imagined, according to the account of her early piety, to be at prayer on the inhospitable threshold of the shrine to which she cannot for the moment gain access. Charles Collins acted as Millais’s model for “The Hugenot” and “The Black Brunswicker.” He married a daughter of Charles Dickens, who posed with him as the lady in the “Hugenot.”

William L. Windus, a Liverpool artist and member of the Academy of that city, made his modest but genuine fame chiefly through his powerful romantic picture of “Burd Helen,” the “burd” or sweetheart of the Scottish border ballad, who swam the Clyde in order to avenge herself upon a faithless lover. The work was pronounced by Ruskin to rank second only in order of merit to Millais’s “Autumn Leaves” in the Royal Academy of 1856. He painted altogether some eight or ten pictures of a very earnest and imaginative kind, of which one of the finest was entitled “Too Late,” and represented a dying girl whose lover had forsaken her and returned too late for reparation. “The Surgeon’s Daughter” is also remembered as a composition of much chastened and subdued power. Windus ceased painting at an early age, and was lost sight of by the Brotherhood.

Robert B. Martineau was a pupil of Holman Hunt, but painted, among some three or four pictures which constitute the brief total of his achievements, only one of striking merit,—“The Last Day in the Old Home,” which for sincerity and depth of feeling won considerable appreciation in 1865. His career was cut short by untimely death soon afterwards.

Cave Thomas, who so infelicitously christened “The Germ,” had gained a prize in the Westminster Cartoon competition, and was the painter of one very beautiful picture, “The Protestant Lady,” exhibited in the Academy, and greatly admired by the Brotherhood. He published in 1860 a monograph entitled “Pre-Raphaelitism Tested by the Principles of Christianity;” and subsequently became art professor to the Princess of Wales.

Mr. Frederick Sandys was not personally known to the leading Pre-Raphaelites until 1857, and was by that time too original and accomplished an artist to be claimed by them as a disciple, but his work was for some time intimately associated with theirs. He was to the last a valued friend of Rossetti, who always affirmed that while in draughtsmanship he had no superior in English art, his imaginative endowment was of the richest and rarest kind.

Mr. Henry Wallis is justly remembered by his one great picture, “The Death of Chatterton,” which touched popular feeling as its true pathos and dignity deserved to do, and won universal praise.

Mark Anthony is rightly regarded by the Pre-Raphaelites as the most poetic of their landscape painters. His grandly simple and reposeful “Old Churchyard” will compare even with Millais’s “Vale of Rest,” and his “Nature’s Mirror” with Mr. Burne-Jones’s “Mirror of Venus” in later years. Mr. John Brett, now famous in seascape, was for some time intimate with the Brotherhood; and among friends and sympathizers on a similar footing may be mentioned Val Prinsep, Thomas Seddon, J.D. Watson, J.F. Lewes, W.S. Burton, Spencer Stanhope, M.F. Halliday, James Campbell, J.M. Carrick, Thomas Morten, Edward Lear, William Davis, W.P. Boyce, J.W. Inchbold, and, by no means least, John Hancock, a young sculptor who won an Art Union prize in 1848 with a bas-relief of “Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem.” He was a friend and fellow-worker with Woolner, and fell so far (with Rossetti) under the fascination of the Dante legends as to accomplish a very fine statue of “Beatrice” in or about 1852. One other artist of the first rank in his generation remains to be named,—Frederick Shields, an intimate and warmly-loved friend of Rossetti, cherished by him in close and unbroken companionship even to the hour of death; and in point of critical estimate pronounced by him to be one of the greatest of living draughtsmen, taking rank with Sir Frederick Leighton, Sir Noel Paton, and Mr. Sandys.

Such were a few of the personalities that gathered between 1848 and 1858 around the three prime movers in the Pre-Raphaelite revolt. To claim them as merely, or chiefly, satellites drawn into the orbit of genius, or as forming a distinct and coherent school, would be both foolish and unjust. To attempt an estimate of their relative merit independent of, or in proportion to, the artistic work of the Brotherhood, would be no less invidious than unprofitable. The glory of Pre-Raphaelitism was that it gave the utmost play to individual methods, and even idiosyncrasies,—nay, that its very first principle was “each for himself”—painting his own impressions, his own ideals—and no imitation of one artist by another. Its primary insistence lay on the watchword of all Protestantism—the authority of the individual conscience as against that of a class or a system, and the immediate access for every soul to the source of its highest inspiration. Therefore the “diversities of gifts” which flourished and increased under the sway of the Pre-Raphaelite spirit were the best evidence of that spirit’s quickening power. “A man will always emphasize,” says Mr. P.G. Hamerton, writing on the ultimate effects of the movement, “those truths about art which most strongly recommend themselves to his own peculiar personal temperament. This comes from the vastness of art and the variety of human organizations. For art is so immense a study that no one man ever knew the whole truth about it.” In other words, all the Pre-Raphaelite painters in any sense worthy of the name are intensely individual in quality, and cannot be classed, arranged, or compared together in the order of a system or a school. Each artist must make his original and distinctive contribution to the sum-total of artistic truth; must paint the single aspect, or the most familiar aspect, of the life around him which presents itself to his mind. The more honest he is, and the more true to his own observations and convictions, the more inevitably will he see the world through his own spectacles—well for his superficial happiness, at all events, if they be rose-coloured, and not of a more sombre hue. “We all,” says another art-critic,[^[5]] “have a sense of some particular colour, and because we can paint this colour best we do so at all times and in all places. This may be unconscious on our part—this predilection for a particular colour; but we all unconsciously blab the fact to others; we talk in our dream of art, and tell all our secrets. Old David Cox, when out sketching with his pupils, would go behind them while at work and say to one, ‘Ah, you see green;’ to another, ‘You see purple,’ ‘You see red,’ ‘You see yellow.’ So it is with the colour vision of many who are called Masters. We can identify almost any landscape of our more prominent painters by their special idiosyncrasy of colouring, such as Cuyp with his evening yellows, Linnell with his autumnal browns, or Danby with his sanguinary sunsets. These colours, which are exceptional with external nature, are the rule with them. Not only is this so with regard to colour, but, more or less, we put ourselves, form and feature, into our work, and paint our own character, physical as well as mental, in all we do. Raphael, on being asked where he obtained the type of his Madonna, replied, ‘out of his own head,’ which really meant that he had unconsciously painted his own fair features: and this ideal was what he eternally repeated. So was it with Michaelangelo, Leonardo, Murillo, Rubens, Vandyke—they all portrayed themselves recognizably. There is a picture of Jesus and the twelve Apostles in which the whole thirteen faces are all alike, and every one an identifiable copy of the painter’s own. Of course where the face and form are noble we have the less to object to.”

This indeed is the crux of the whole matter. As the man is, so will his work be. To portray one’s very self—and first to have such a self as can dignify the portrayal; to paint faithfully what one sees—and first to see the true and the beautiful in the familiar and the commonplace; to depict the world in which one lives—living in a world apart, noble and fair, full of opportunities, if also of mysteries, with bright horizons, however low the sun; and yet to be ever conscious of wider worlds than the imagination can compass though the heart may yearn over them like the heart of him who said Homo sum; nihil humana mihi alienum puto: this is fine art; this is “the vision and the faculty divine.” “Produce great Persons!” cries Browning,—“the rest follows.” Therefore it is safe for those who in any real sense know Rossetti to prophesy, with Mr. Harry Quilter, that “the day will surely come when it will be seen that the essence of what is now known as Pre-Raphaelitism was not the influence of a school or a principle, but simply the influence of one man, and that man Dante Gabriel Rossetti.” Personal ascendency, says Emerson, is the only force much worth reckoning with. And if that ascendency, over many who never saw Rossetti on earth, has become an intimate and precious inspiration, a motive-impulse abidingly sacred and high, what must it have been to those who knew him in the flesh?

Mr. W.M. Rossetti thus succinctly sums up the immediate issue of the movement which his brother inspired:—“As it turned out, the early phases of the movement did not repeat themselves on a more extended scale. Partly, no doubt, through the modification of style of the most popular Pre-Raphaelite, Mr. Millais, and partly through the influx of new determining conditions, especially the effect of foreign schools and of Mr. Leighton’s style (this was written in 1865), Pre-Raphaelitism flagged in its influence towards the production of what are distinctively termed Pre-Raphaelite pictures just at the time when it had virtually won the day. But the movement had broken up the pre-existing state of things, and the principles and practices which it introduced took strong root, and germinated in forms not altogether expected. Pre-Raphaelitism aimed at suppressing such styles of painting as were exemplified by Messrs. Elmore, Goodall, and Stone at the time of its starting; and it did suppress them.”[^[6]]

The relation of Pre-Raphaelitism to the “foreign schools” here referred to is as much a matter of historical controversy as the relation of Rossetti to Italy is of biographical criticism; nor is it easy to determine how far the Pre-Raphaelite movement in England was the effect or the cause of similar waves of experiment in France and Germany, and how far all such impulses were but the symptoms of a great social and ethical development in European life. But while the Barbizon School must be seriously recognized as working side by side with the Pre-Raphaelites upon kindred ideals, and even surpassing them at some points in a certain largeness of outlook on humanitarian themes, the influence of Cornelius and Overbeck in Germany, with the very crude and sickly mediævalism which they affected, has no doubt been greatly overrated, and may be dismissed as having very little to do with the main current of the romantic revival. In France, Corot and Millet, Daubigny and Rousseau, had taken their stand against the old Heroic School in art, just as Théophile Gautier and Victor Hugo had taken it against the Academies of literature. In England, it was the task of Rossetti and his comrades “to force,” as it has been aptly expressed, “an artificial art backed upon nature’s reality; and they did it amid neglect, misunderstanding, and even coarse vituperation.”

CHAPTER V.
LATER DEVELOPMENTS OF THE MOVEMENT.

The Pre-Raphaelites as Book-Illustrators—Moxon’s “Tennyson”—The “Oxford and Cambridge Magazine”—The Oxford Frescoes—Oxford Patrons of Millais and Hunt—Departure of Hunt for Palestine—The Pictures of Madox Brown—Further Developments of Rossetti’s Painting—Marriage and Bereavement—“Beata Beatrix”—Replicas—Life at Chelsea—Later Models—Designs for Stained Glass—Visit to Penkill—“Dante’s Dream”—Publication and Reception of the “Poems”—Paintings of Rossetti’s Last Decade—Death at Birchington.

The first and most fruitful decade of Pre-Raphaelitism in painting and poetry saw also the excursion of several of its leaders into the realm of book-illustration. In 1855 Rossetti, Millais, and Arthur Hughes combined to make a series of drawings for the second edition of a little volume of verse entitled “Day and Night Songs,” by William Allingham, a young poet well known to the Brotherhood since 1849. The efforts were not of an ambitious character. The weird little group of fairies dancing in the moonlight, by Arthur Hughes, reflected vividly the influence of Blake. Rossetti’s “Maids of Elfinmere” were of his most angelic-mediæval type, ascetically beautiful, and yet, if the phrase may be permitted, with a certain sensuous severity of look, a delicate and half-mystic passion, as of pure spirits newly wakened to the tenderness of the flesh.

A more important experiment in the same direction was made in 1857, when Rossetti, Millais, and Holman Hunt appeared among the illustrators of Moxon’s edition of “Tennyson.” Intimately charmed as they had all been with the “Idylls of the King,” and with such entirely “Pre-Raphaelite” poetry as “The Lady of Shalott,” the draughtsmen could hardly have found a more congenial sphere for design. The volume affords one of the most interesting records of the transitional work of the three painters. Woolner’s fine medallion of the young laureate formed the frontispiece. Then followed Millais’s “Mariana”—a composition wholly distinct from, and far inferior to, his “Mariana in the Moated Grange,” which had been shown in the Academy of 1851. The face of this Mariana is hidden in her hands as she turns with bowed head from the window, and from the sunset that mocks her grief with its imperturbable glory heedless and afar. Much less conventional in spirit is the passionate, strained figure of Rossetti’s “Mariana in the South,” crouching on her unrestful bed, and kissing the feet of the crucifix above her as she draws from her bosom the “old letters breathing of her worth.”

In the design for “The Lady of Shalott” Holman Hunt exhibits traces—very unusual for him—of the influence of Rossetti upon his own work. For pathetic dignity and sensuous grace, the entangled lady, girt about with the web of dreams, might well stand among Rossetti’s children, and not be detected as of other birth. Rossetti’s own “Lady of Shalott” is much less fair a type, and belongs to the earliest and most archaic manner of his Arthurian period. Much more characteristic of the painter’s individuality is Holman Hunt’s “Oriana,” a grave, strong woman like his later Madonnas, whose mien belies the conventional sex-theory which ascribes to man alone the “wisdom-principle,” and assigns to womanhood the principle of “love.”

Rossetti, again, seems to have been largely influenced by Madox Brown in his illustration to “The Palace of Art,” save for the highly characteristic drawing of the girl at the organ, whose pose is almost identical with that of the dead Beatrice in “Dante’s Dream,” of a much later date. “Sir Galahad” is, however, entirely original in manner, and represents the best level of Rossetti’s Arthurian designs. It shows the knight halting, weary but not dispirited, at a wayside shrine, and bending with worn and yet resolute face over the holy water that awaits the pilgrim-worshippers. His horse, bearing the white banner marked with the red cross of sacred chivalry, stands at the gate, and a group of nuns are seen within, ringing the chapel bell.

The facile simplicity and grace of Millais, who was more accustomed to the task of book-illustration than his collaborateurs, found favourable scope in “Edward Grey” and “The Day-dream,” in which the figure of the half-awakened girl in the Sleeping Palace is drawn with exquisitely tender charm.

The edition, on the whole, probably tended to increase the reputation of the Pre-Raphaelites as draughtsmen, and to dispel some hard-dying illusions as to their distinguishing qualities in design, though its independent merits were not of exceptional mark.

Only once again does Rossetti appear in the field of book illustration. In 1862 he executed two designs for the first volume of poems published by his sister, Miss Christina Rossetti, under the title of “Goblin Market.” These drawings (“Buy from us with a golden curl” and “Golden head by Golden head”) were followed in 1866 by two more of a similar character (“The long hours go and come and go,” and “You should have wept her yesterday”), to illustrate the second volume of poetry from the same pen, entitled, “The Prince’s Progress.”

But the fame of the Pre-Raphaelites as poets was already enhanced, within an increasing circle of appreciators, by the publication, in 1856, of a journal which may, to some extent, be regarded as a successor to the “The Germ.” “The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine,” edited by Mr. Godfrey Lushington, had the better fortune to survive for a year, in monthly numbers; though all its contents were anonymous, and its issue involved no less labour and anxiety on the part of its sponsors, if not so much pecuniary onus as in the case of the more luxuriously printed and illustrated “Germ.” The new publication contained several of Rossetti’s finest poems, such as “The Staff and Scrip,” and “Nineveh,” and a series of mediæval romances and poems by two young artists destined henceforth to be intimately associated with the Pre-Raphaelite movement, and to exert important influence on its later developments—William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones. Both were Oxford men, and had been close friends at Exeter College, whence in 1856 came Burne-Jones to London with the express desire of meeting and knowing Dante Rossetti, his senior by five years; he having been born in Birmingham on the 28th of August, 1833, and educated at King Edward’s School in that city, proceeding to Oxford in 1853.

It was at the Working Men’s College in Great Ormond Street that Burne-Jones first saw Rossetti, and, through the introduction of Mr. Vernon Lushington, entered upon the friendship which was to save him (as his friend William Morris was similarly saved) from adopting, as had been intended, the Church as his profession, and thus depriving, the world of a service no less religious in the highest sense, and no less potent a factor in the ethical awakening of to-day.

The Working Men’s College, now rich in annals of some of the most significant intellectual movements of the mid-century, was at that time a centre of enthusiastic work in art and literature. Rossetti and his friends took a considerable share in the lecturing and class-teaching of which Charles Kingsley and F.D. Maurice were the popular and indefatigable leaders. Hither also came Ruskin, of whom Rossetti records with loyal admiration how one night, being asked in an emergency to address the drawing-class, he made, without any preparation, “the finest speech I ever heard.”

Rossetti’s growing intimacy with Oxford collegians, and the ties of sympathy already formed in Oxford round the Pre-Raphaelite painters by the clientèle of Millais and Hunt, now led him into an enterprise which has been the subject of much Philistine mirth, and of some laboured apologetics on the part of the too-serious historian. There is no doubt that Rossetti and his collaborateurs made quite as merry as any of their critics over the ludicrous failure of their début as fresco-painters in 1857. But it was very natural that Rossetti, with his early enthusiasm for the fresco style yet awaiting an outlet, should have seized eagerly at the chance of trying his ’prentice hand on so engagingly favourable an area as the new hall of the Oxford Union Debating Society. Visiting the city in company with William Morris during the summer months, Rossetti was shown over the freshly completed building by his friend Mr. Woodward; and observing the blank spaces of the gallery window-bays, impulsively offered to paint on them a series of the “Morte D’Arthur” subjects which had so much engrossed his fancy during the past three years. The suggestion was readily agreed to, and Rossetti began to collect recruits for the campaign, which he perceived would afford ample scope for other labour than his own. Accordingly, at the commencement of the long vacation, a company of six young enthusiasts, embarrassingly ignorant of the first technical elements of mural painting, but unabashed by any such details in the path of success, fell confidently upon their fascinating task. The party consisted of Rossetti, Burne-Jones, William Morris, Arthur Hughes, Val Prinsep, Spencer Stanhope, Alexander Monro, and J. Hungerford Pollen, then Proctor at the University, who had already won some distinction by his painting of the beautiful roof in Merton College Chapel. The roof of the Debating Hall was now successfully painted, in a grotesque design, by William Morris, who also undertook one of the window-bays, and proposed as his subject “Sir Palomides’ Jealousy of Sir Tristram and Iseult.” Alexander Monro, the sculptor of the party, executed the stone shield over the porch. Burne-Jones selected for his fresco “Nimuë brings Sir Peleus to Ettarde after their Quarrel;” Arthur Hughes proposed “Arthur Conveyed by the Weeping Queens to Avalon after his Death;” Val Prinsep, “Merlin Lured into the Pit by the Lady of the Lake,” and J. Hungerford Pollen, “King Arthur Receiving the Sword Excalibur from the Lady of the Lake.” Rossetti’s subjects were “Sir Galahad Receiving the Sangrael” and “Sir Launcelot before the Shrine of the Sangrael.” The knight, in this last design, has just attained the sacred goal of his pilgrimage, and in his weariness has sunk down in sleep upon the threshold; but his sleep, even in that hour, is haunted by the face of Guinevere. So powerful was this composition in romantic force and imaginative fervour, especially in the haunting, passionate face of the Queen, as to make the speedy obliteration of this and its companion frescoes the more deplorable, in spite of the obvious crudities and incompetencies that blemish the whole series of designs. Obliterated they became, however, and hopelessly beyond restoration, within a very short time of their commencement;—finished they never were. Incredible as it seems, in these days of superior wisdom in the Young Person anent matters of Art, these brilliant young painters of 1857—three at least of them now in the first rank of fame in their several spheres—had not even attempted to prepare the raw brick surface for the reception of their pigments, but had cast their ordinary oil-colours direct upon the inhospitable wall. Time and the atmosphere made short work of such artless challenges of decay; and before any of the frescoes had attained completion the ardent little band were obliged to confess themselves defeated, and to retire somewhat ignominiously from the field. The enterprise had its pathetic, its humorous, and its entirely delightful side. The financial arrangement with the Oxford Union Council was that they should defray all necessary expenses incurred by the artists; and of this advantage the young Bohemians appear to have availed themselves to the full. Anecdotes abound to tell of the hilarious but very harmless festivities which mitigated the discouragements of their task. A contemporary undergraduate well recalls the mirth and chatter which he heard day by day as he sat in the adjacent library. Such a group of congenial spirits could not fail to enjoy the conditions of their companionship as much as the audacity of their task. They were favoured, further, with a new acquaintanceship of a very welcome kind; for it was here that another young poet, Algernon Charles Swinburne, was now introduced, as an undergraduate at the university, to the artists at their work, and added an important link to the chain of memorable friendships woven in these early years among the galaxy of genius which has illumined the England of to-day. It was in Oxford also, at the theatre one evening, that Rossetti saw, and succeeded in getting introduced to, the beautiful lady who afterwards became William Morris’s wife, and Rossetti’s most cherished friend through all his troubles. She was the model for his “Day-dream” and several others of the finest of his maturer works.

The hapless frescoes are now hardly recognizable upon the Oxford walls, but their dim ghosts linger, like the kindly witnesses of days fruitful, at least, in loves and friendships of sacred import on the lives of the young sojourners in that “home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties,” as Matthew Arnold called it.

Moreover, it was at Oxford that the Pre-Raphaelite movement, five or six years earlier, had found some of its first and most generous patrons; such as Mr. James Wyatt, the well-known picture-dealer, who was among Millais’s readiest buyers, but died in 1853, and Mr. Thomas Combe, the University printer, who, through Millais’s influence, purchased Holman Hunt’s youthful and little-known picture, “Christian Priests Escaping from Druid Persecution,” in 1850. About three years later, Holman Hunt was on a visit to Mr. and Mrs. Combe while his greater work, “The Light of the World,” was in process; and at their house he became acquainted with the young curate of St. Paul’s, Oxford; Venables by name. He was a man saintly in face and character; afterwards Bishop of the Bahamas, and long since dead. Whether he actually gave sittings to Hunt, or was avowedly the model for the Christ of the picture, does not appear, but those who knew Venables at the time insist upon the absolute faithfulness of the portraiture. This face it was which certain critics, unable to dissociate their conception of the Saviour from the conventional Raphaelesque type, condemned instantly as “the face of a Judas.” The picture was purchased by Mr. Combe, and subsequently presented by his widow to Keble College, Oxford, where it hangs to-day. Of the difficulties which attended the painting, and of the extraordinary labour bestowed upon it as it slowly grew beneath his hand in the little studio then at Chelsea, Mr. Hunt has given us his own significant record,—how, night after night, when the moon was in a favourable quarter, he would so dispose his curtains and draperies, easels and lamps, as to yield him the peculiar light for which he was striving, and at the same time to afford for curious observers an endless speculation as to the mysterious proceedings of the eccentric young artist within. “The Light of the World” is now perhaps the most familiar, to English eyes, of any Pre-Raphaelite pictures, unless we except the less esoteric “Hugenot” of Millais.

The “Hugenot,” indeed, would undoubtedly be taken by general estimate to point the high-water mark of Millais’s fame and genius, in spite of the splendour of the “ninth wave”—if one may push the metaphor so far—which issued ten years later in “The Eve of St. Agnes” and “The Enemy Sowing Tares.” The “Hugenot” appeared with “Ophelia” in 1852; Hunt’s “Light of the World” in 1854. And the “Hugenot” it was that first took unmistakable hold upon the public taste, and created a higher taste than it appealed to, carrying the emotion awakened with it on to higher planes than had yet been reached in English criticism. “The Order of Release,” in the following year, consummated the triumph of the young painter, and was enhanced in fame by Kingsley’s allusion to it in “Two Years Ago.” “The Proscribed Royalist” and the “Portrait of Ruskin” may be regarded as the last products of Millais’s rigidly Pre-Raphaelite period, which terminated, with Rossetti’s, about 1853. “The Rescue” and “The Random Shot,” or “L’Enfant du Regiment,” in 1855, “Sir Isumbras at the Ford: A Dream of the Past,” or “Knight Crossing a Ford,” in 1857, and “The Vale of Rest,” in 1858, are purely transitional works, while, with the notable exception of the two later masterpieces specified above, “The Black Brunswicker” of 1860, may be said to mark the final merging of the Pre-Raphaelite heretic into the popular Royal Academician. His formal election as R.A. took place in 1863. He was made, in 1883, a member of the Institute of France, and was, in 1885, the first English artist to be offered and to accept a baronetcy of the United Kingdom. He has also become a member of the Academies of Edinburgh, Antwerp, Rome and Madrid, and has been honoured at Oxford with the complimentary degree of D.C.L. His marriage in early life with Miss Euphemia Chalmers Gray was anticipated in one of the most pleasing of his female portraits in 1853.

Meanwhile the companion of his student days had entered upon a path of more obscure and arduous toil, in the pursuit of an ideal too exalted to endure compromise with any standards of the merely picturesque, or to lend itself readily to fluent and attractive expression. The work of Holman Hunt, among all the Pre-Raphaelite painters, has remained the most consistent and exclusive in its aims and methods, and the least affected by surrounding influences, either from his comrades or from the critical world. His artistic development has been the most faithful to its origins, and has presented the most unbroken continuity of thought and sentiment in its progress from the first “note of resistance and defiance” to the larger harmony of maturer years. The boundaries of his transition-period are more difficult to define than in the case of Millais and Rossetti; but, at the same time, the pictures that issued from his studio while Rossetti was dabbling in experimental water-colours, and Millais compromising brilliantly between original genius and the sweet laxities of fame, were of a passion and mastery which he never exceeded. Before the completion of “The Light of the World,” in 1854, Hunt had already painted “The Awakening Conscience” (1853), “Claudio and Isabella” (1851), “The Hireling Shepherd” (1852), and “The Strayed Sheep,” called also “Our English Coasts” (1853). He now departed to commence those long, solitary, and most fruitful sojourns in Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and less frequented parts of Palestine, which gave us, at the cost of years of intense and continuous labour, such great imaginative creations as “The Scapegoat” in 1855, “Christ in the Temple” in 1860, “The Shadow of Death” in 1874, and “The Triumph of the Innocents” in 1885. “The Shadow of Death” was purchased for £10,500; a price unparalleled for the work of any other living painter. The picture now hangs in the Manchester Corporation Gallery. Seven years were spent over “The Triumph of the Innocents,” pronounced by Ruskin to be “the greatest religious picture of the age.” The final version, completed in 1885, has recently been acquired by the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, where it completes, with Millais’s “Lorenzo and Isabella” and Rossetti’s “Dante’s Dream,” a noble trio of the best Pre-Raphaelite type. Reverting, as he did but once, to more purely romantic subjects, and to that haunting theme of Keats which first inspired the young Brotherhood, Mr. Holman Hunt produced in 1867 the finest of his work in that direction, in the brilliant “Isabella and the Pot of Basil,” which was the outcome of a visit to Florence in that year. His only important picture of later years has been the “May Morning on Magdalen Tower,” a fascinating reminiscence of Oxford life, exhibited in 1889.

Even more obscure and remote from the general routine of the modern studio, more independent of criticism or of patronage, was the earnest and thoughtful work of Madox Brown. In his case the early discipline of art study, and the isolation of unconventional ideals, had been courageously survived before he knew Rossetti, and his path already chosen on the heights of original thought. “He was,” says Mr. W.M. Rossetti, “distinctly an intellectual painter; intellectual on the side chiefly of human character. The predominant quality in all his works is a vigorous thinking out of the subject, especially as a matter of character, and of dramatic incident and expression thus resulting. This is the sort of intellect peculiarly demanded by pictorial art.”

It is noticeable also that the two senior members, if they may be so claimed, of the Pre-Raphaelite circle, though not of the actual Brotherhood—Ford Madox Brown and George Frederick Watts—were the only painters who brought into the movement any direct training from the continental schools. The latter, one year older than Madox Brown, was born in London in 1820, and succeeded in getting a picture into the Royal Academy as early as 1837. The prize of £300 gained in 1843 in the Westminster Hall Competitions enabled him to spend three years in Italy, after which, on his return, he won a prize of £500 in the same contest, with two more colossal frescoes of a similar kind.

Madox Brown, meanwhile, was entering upon the more uncompromising phase of reform. It was during his studies in Rome and Paris, when the Gothic traditions of Belgium had been strongly tempered by the Latin heritage of the south, that the Pre-Raphaelite idea began to shape itself in his mind, and to develop in him an original art which should create its own conditions and methods, yield a rich harvest of artistic if not of professional success, and exercise an immense power for good over the movement which his own single-handed battle with convention largely stimulated and inspired.

“Wicliff Reading his Translation of the Bible to John of Gaunt” was afterwards acknowledged by Madox Brown as his first distinctly Pre-Raphaelite picture; begun in 1845, and shortly followed by “Pretty Baa-Lambs”—the only other work which the artist claimed as being painted implicitly in the early Italian style. The latter was subjected to much derisive criticism in the press. Yet the later work of this unquestionably great painter, maintained as it was on his own rigidly independent lines, and never merging into the fervid neo-Romanticism of Rossetti, Millais, and Hunt, may justly be accepted, like theirs at its best, as a consistent and superb development, in a modern atmosphere and in the face of modern problems, of the principles followed by the Italian Pre-Raphaelites, and which as principles are adaptible in infinite variety to the fresh needs and new perplexities of successive generations of men.

In 1849 the work of Madox Brown appeared for the first time beside that of Rossetti. “Cordelia’s Portion,” a highly imaginative and nobly dramatic composition, was hung in the Free Exhibition at Hyde Park Corner, in company with Rossetti’s “Girlhood of Mary Virgin.” His next important picture, “Chaucer at the Court of Edward III.,” occupied the painter for several years, and was produced at the Royal Academy of 1851—the memorable season of Hunt’s “Valentine and Sylvia,” and Millais’s “Woodman’s Daughter.” The “Chaucer,” now in Australia, received the Liverpool Academy’s annual prize of £50 in 1852, and was selected by Government for the Paris Exhibition Loan Collection of English paintings in 1855.

The departure of his young friend Woolner for Australia in 1854 suggested to Madox Brown the subject of his most popular and in some respects his most successful picture, “The Last of England,” finished in 1855, and now exhibited in the Art Gallery of the Corporation of Birmingham. It was his visit to Gravesend, to bid farewell to Woolner as he embarked for the Antipodes, at the time when the emigration movement was at its height, that inspired the elder painter with that homely idyll of emigrant life—that masterpiece in the dramatic and emotional presentment of modern and familiar romance. In 1857 he painted his great symbolic picture “Work,” which has been pronounced “the finest Pre-Raphaelite picture in the world;” a verdict not without justification, but bordering on those facile abstractions of criticism wherein the sense of comparative excellence is apt to lose itself in the confusion of diverse methods in art. The picture now hangs with the masterpieces of Rossetti, Millais, and Holman Hunt, in the Walker Art Gallery at Liverpool. Among the many friends of that period who gave sittings to the artist for the principal figures were Frederick Denison Maurice and Thomas Carlyle.

Of the achievements of Madox Brown in the more obviously romantic and naturalistic fields, perhaps the best known is the intensely passionate and brilliant “Romeo and Juliet” parting at daybreak in the loggia to Juliet’s chamber. In the same category, though of various range and style, may be briefly mentioned “Waiting” (1855), a fine study of firelight and lamplight, which appeared in the Russell Place Pre-Raphaelite Exhibition of 1856, “The Death of Sir Tristram,” “King René’s Honeymoon,” the much earlier “Parisina and Manfred on Jungfrau,” and “The Dream of Sardanapalus,” a work of recent years. The romantic treatment of historical subjects is represented by the cartoons before mentioned, executed prior to 1848, and by such later compositions as “Cromwell Dictating to his Secretaries,” “Milton and Marvel,” and “Cromwell on his farm at St. Ives,” completed in 1873. Of his religious pictures perhaps the most familiar is the austerely beautiful “Entombment;” but it is not easy to excuse the discreditable oblivion permitted in this country to such paintings as “Jesus Washes Peter’s Feet,” “The Transfiguration,” “Our Lady of Good Children,” or “Elijah and the Widow’s Son;”—oblivion only too explicable by a single trait of national character: that the average Briton will accept any innovation of taste or doctrine that will allow him to take his pleasure with the least amount of intellectual disturbance, but he will never forgive the artist who calls upon him to think. Happily some worthier, though very far from adequate, recognition has been accorded to the almost colossal task of the painter’s later years—the great series of historical frescoes on the walls of the Town Hall, Manchester, commencing with the building of Manchester by the Romans, and bringing the history of the city pictorially down to the present day. Outliving many younger leaders of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, Madox Brown died on the 6th of October, 1893.

The artistic development of Madox Brown does not, then, offer any abrupt or marked transition from the first crude workings to the perfected application of the Pre-Raphaelite idea. This he pursued steadfastly, and with an unhasting diligence and quiet independence of spirit which indicates his kinship of temperament to Holman Hunt rather than to his impulsive and volatile pupil Rossetti, or to the impressionable Millais of early days. The complete outward divergence between the art of Madox Brown and that of Rossetti after, let us say, the “Triptych” for Llandaff Cathedral, painted by the latter in 1859–1860, illustrates not only the consistent progress of the former in his own distinctive line, but also the extraordinary fertility and cumulative splendour of Rossetti’s genius, which could create for itself during the next fifteen years so much more original and versatile a habit wherewith to clothe the noble and exquisite visions that thronged his imagination, each with the urgency of “a presence that is not to be put by.”

“Pandora.”
From the chalk.
By permission of Mr. Theodore Watts.

For the last twenty years of Rossetti’s artistic life he was known, and should be judged, supremely as a colourist; and from 1862 to 1874 his technical power reached its highest level. After completing in oils the “Triptych” for the Llandaff altar-piece, “The Infant Christ Adored by a Shepherd and a King,” Rossetti began to pursue more carefully, and with increasing success both from the æsthetic and the professional point of view, the system of half-length or three-quarter length female figure-studies, chiefly symbolic in motive, which he had already attempted brilliantly in the “Bocca Baciata” (“The Kissed Mouth”) of 1859, and which afterwards yielded such imaginative and technical triumphs as “Beata Beatrix” (1863), “The Blue Bower,” one of the most brilliant and sensuous of his paintings (1864); “Lady Lilith,” the type of purely physical loveliness, described in his sonnet “Body’s Beauty” (1864); “Il Ramoscello” (“The Branchlet”), or “Bellebuona” (“Fair and Good”), a gem of pearl-white colouring (1865); “Monna Vanna,” a superb study in white and gold (1866); “Venus Verticordia,” personifying again the earthly Pandemos, with the apple of temptation in her hand (1864–1877); “The Beloved, or the Bride of the Canticles;” and “Sibylla Palmifera” (“Beauty the Palm-giver”), both typifying intellectual and spiritual beauty (1866–1873); “The Loving Cup” (1867); “Aurelia,” or “Fazio’s Mistress” (Angiola of Verona, loved by Fazio degli Uberti, mentioned by Dante), another somewhat sensuous model (1863–1873); “La Pia,” the unhappy and captive wife of Nello della Pietra (from Dante’s “Purgatorio”), seen in her prison overlooking the Maremma (1868–1881); “Mariana,” from Shakespeare’s “Measure for Measure” (1869–1871); “Pandora opening her fatal casket” (1869–1875); “Proserpine,” empress of Hades, enchained to the nether world (1872); and “La Ghirlandata”—“The Garland Girl”—(1873). Into these splendid and highly finished studies of the mystic beauty of womanhood, Rossetti poured the full soul of his gospel of romantic love—the love of absolute Beauty absolutely worshipped to the utmost reaches of a consecrated sense,—“Soul’s Beauty” and “Body’s Beauty” now analyzed and set in contrast each with each, now reconciled and made at one in the last harmony of perfect life. And in these great creations—revelations rather, and perceptions of the inmost verities of things, Rossetti attains the consummation of imaginative art—the crowning of romanticism with the purged inheritance of the classic ideal. It has been claimed that romance treats of characters rather than types; prefers, as we have said, the particular to the universal; and that Rossetti’s women are but splendid models, lovely sitters brought by a happy chance into his path, and used by him as the illustrations of that individual beauty which appealed most strongly to his taste. But in these rich harvests of his technical maturity the very realism has discovered the ideal, and as in pure portraiture, the sincere essence of classicism is regained.

A peculiar pathos must for ever be associated with one of the first, and, in the judgment of many, the most beautiful, of these half-length oils, the exquisite “Beata Beatrix,” now in the National Gallery. It is the supreme pictorial record of that central tragedy of Rossetti’s life, even more intimately revealed to us in his verse, which set him at the side of Dante among mourning poets. On the 23rd of May, 1860, Rossetti married, at Hastings, the beautiful and gifted woman of whom his courtship had lasted nearly ten years. The wedding had been delayed again and again through the uncertain health of Miss Siddal and the precarious circumstances of the brilliant but wayward young painter’s life. It was now accomplished with every augury of long-anticipated joy. The honeymoon was spent in a brief tour through Belgium, concluding with a few days in Paris, where Rossetti made his little impromptu sketch—so entirely out of his wonted trend of themes—“Dr. Johnson and the Methodist Ladies at the Mitre;” a pen-and-ink drawing which he afterwards repeated in water-colours.

Thence to the old rooms in Chatham Place, Blackfriars, partially rebuilt and redecorated for the happy event, Rossetti brought home his bride. The face of the long-desired wife now haunts the painter’s easel more continually than before, and recurs with ever-varying charm in nearly all his sketches and the very few finished pictures of the next two years. To this period belong “Lucretia Borgia” (entirely distinct from the “Borgia” of 1851); “The Heart of the Night” (from Tennyson’s “Mariana in the South”); the beautiful “Regina Cordium”—“Queen of Hearts” (a title also used for other portraits at different dates); “Bethlehem Gate,” and the best of several subjects dealing with the legend of “St. George and the Princess Sabra,” together with “Monna Pomona” and “The Rose Garden” of 1864, “Sir Tristram and Iseult Drinking the Love Potion” (1867), “Washing Hands” (1865), and many replicas of the Dante pictures of the previous decade. And in the numerous rough and half-finished portrait sketches, nameless but unmistakable, of Rossetti’s “Queen of Hearts” during those two brief years, the shadow of the coming bereavement can be traced in the gradually sharpened features, the more and more fragile hands, the look of increasing pallor and weariness in the earnest face which rests, in one of the latest drawings, on the pillow all too suggestive of its habitual place. On the 2nd of May, 1861, Mrs. Rossetti gave birth to a still-born son. From the consequent illness she rallied considerably during the autumn of that year, and the immediate cause of her death in February, 1862, was, unhappily, an overdose of laudanum, self-administered after a day of fatigue, during the brief absence of her husband from the house. Of the circumstances of the fatal mischance, in so far as they can ever be gleaned from that calamitous hour, of the utterly unexpected shock awaiting Rossetti’s return, and of the grief-stricken apparition which aroused the household of Mr. Madox Brown on Highgate Hill at dead of night with incoherent news of the fatality, enough has already been written by those whose sad privilege it was to share in some measure with the overwhelmed sufferer the long pain of that supreme bereavement. The pathetic incident that added to the sadness of the burial, when the young widower hastily gathered up all his poetic manuscripts of the past ten years and laid them beside the fair face in the coffin, a symbol of that best part of himself which he felt must go also to that untimely grave, has become an oft-told tale; and may now be laid in the reverent silence of affection and regret. Nor can the agony and prostration of the succeeding months be fitly recorded save in his own chronicles of song—the great elegiac “Confessio Amantis” of the “House of Life” sonnets.

Recruiting at last in slow degrees his powers upon brush and canvas, he dedicated their first-fruits to the painting of that most beautiful and faithful memorial of the beloved dead—“Beata Beatrix,” the Blessed Beatrice—Dante’s Beatrice; for the immortal story loved in youth had now redoubled its hold upon his heart. The picture was commissioned by Lord Mount Temple, who was from this time one of Rossetti’s most generous patrons and intimate friends. It was begun at Mr. Madox Brown’s house, “The Hermitage,” on Highgate Hill, but finished at Stobhall, in Scotland, whither Mr. Brown and an equally devoted friend, Dr. John Marshall, had taken the painter in the hope of restoring his now shattered health and assuaging the sorrow that had occasioned its collapse. Rossetti afterwards said of the “Beata Beatrix” that no picture had ever cost him so much to paint, but that in no other task had he been conscious of so perfect a mastery of his instruments.

“Beata Beatrix.”

From the National Gallery.

It should be remembered that of this picture, and indeed of several of Rossetti’s finest and best-known works, certain indifferent replicas exist which have been frequently mistaken for their originals. The “Beata Beatrix” in the Birmingham Art Gallery was only half painted by Rossetti, and finished by Madox Brown. Again in the case of “The Blessed Damozel” of a much later date, the more familiar version is the inferior one. There was also a smaller replica of “Dante’s Dream,” shown in London at the Guildhall Loan Exhibition of 1892. Moreover, it was Rossetti’s habit to execute most of his pictures in more than one medium; thus many of his early pen-and-ink drawings were presently reproduced in water-colour; the water-colour designs of 1852–1862 were afterwards transferred to oils; and most of the important oil-paintings of his maturity were duplicated in coloured chalk; some even passing through the pencil, ink, and water-colour stages also. Not infrequently it happened that the chalk version surpassed all the others, as, for instance, in the grand “Pandora” of 1878–79, the most powerful of all his drawings in that medium, and perhaps the greatest of his symbolic figures. Very often, too, he would begin a picture on a very small scale, and gradually enlarge it through successive stages to its final size, as in the case of “Monna Rosa,” concerning which he writes on the 18th of June, 1867, to his patron, Mr. F.R. Leyland, one of the most constant and sympathetic of his buyers and friends,—“The picture is much advanced and in every way much altered, as I have again had it considerably enlarged! To begin a fresco as a pocket-miniature seems to be my rule in Art.”

The domestic calamity of 1862 rendered a change of residence imperative to the young widower, left desolate amid surroundings charged to the utmost with poignant memories of the past. The old rooms in Chatham Place became unbearable to Rossetti, full as they were of associations of courtship as well as of married life. He sojourned for a time in chambers in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and in the autumn of the same year he moved to No. 16, Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, where he lived intermittently up to the time of his death. It was a fine old house, well suited to be an artist’s abode; and especially fortunate in a large garden, which became a valuable resource to Rossetti in those sad days in store for him when any emergence from the seclusion of home grew more and more distasteful to his mind.

By the end of October Rossetti seems to have been established in his new dwelling, which thenceforth it was his pleasure to adorn with all the quaint old curios he could lay his hands on. In the natural revulsion of overwrought feeling, he threw himself upon decorative hobbies of many kinds; developed a passion for blue china and antique pottery; cultivated oriental textures and old oak; and haunted second-hand furniture warehouses with the pertinacious enthusiasm of the devout lover of a bargain. His shelves groaned under their picturesque load of reliquary wares and studio-properties gathered from every age and clime. Here, too, flourished a whole colony of curious animals, such as he delighted to indulge with unbridled license in his domains,—to the produce of countless anecdotes of their pranks, and of the embarrassment of their victims.

The house was shared for some time with three brother-poets,—Swinburne, George Meredith, and W.M. Rossetti. The last-named was for a considerable period a constant inmate; the others, less domesticated, and of strong peculiarities (as is the way of genius) of habit and of taste, presently departed, and their places knew them only as visitors to the brilliant haunt of many other literary celebrities of the day. It has been observed that the most intimate friends of Rossetti’s later years were drawn from the ranks of literature rather than art,—a circumstance which need not, however, be too closely paralleled with his own frequent and increasingly successful reversions to the poetic field. It must be remembered that the Pre-Raphaelite movement presents a combination of the highest poetry with the highest pictorial and decorative art incomparable with anything since the days of Michaelangelo. It was natural that the poetic wing of Pre-Raphaelitism, so to speak, should attach itself more and more firmly to the great group of independent and specialistic poets of the age, of whom no counterparts in original genius are to be found outside Pre-Raphaelitism in modern English art. As early as 1855 we find Rossetti well acquainted with Tennyson and in close friendship with Browning and Mrs. Browning; afterwards with William Morris, several of whose poems were inspired by Rossetti’s pictures; whose first volume, “The Defense of Guenevere,” was dedicated “To my Friend Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Painter,” in 1858; and whom Rossetti pronounced to be “the greatest literary identity of our time;” then with Swinburne, whom he placed “highest in inexhaustible splendour of execution,” and whose first-fruits in the tragic drama, “The Queen Mother,” in 1860, were similarly inscribed; and later still with Philip Bourke Marston, the blind poet; with George Meredith, Edmund Gosse, John Payne, and many others of the choicest if not the most popular qualities of song. From among the earliest of those memorable friendships there is preserved to us a fascinating record of one autumn evening, typical of many more, when the Rossettis and the Brownings assembled together to listen to Tennyson as he read from manuscript his latest poem;—it is the now familiar pen-and-ink sketch of “Tennyson Reading Maud;” one of those marvellously vigorous and convincing thumb-nail drawings which it was Rossetti’s wont to evolve, in his inimitable method, from the initial focus of a single blot.

In 1865 we find Rossetti writing to the “Athenæum” to correct a statement which seems to have been made to the effect that he, known chiefly as a water-colour painter, was now attempting a return to oils. The artist protested that he was then, and always had been, an oil-painter; and indeed, as we have seen, he was just now at his zenith of power in that medium, though the contrary impression made on the public is easily explicable in the light of his water-colour work of the previous decade, and of the Russell Place Exhibition of 1856.

By this time the irreparable loss of the one loved model of his early prime was in some degree mitigated, from the artistic side, by the good fortune which secured for him henceforward some of the most beautiful sitters known to the artistic world of the day; women of high culture and distinction, who added to their willing service in the studio the grace of personal friendship and, in several instances, of patronage of the most sympathetic kind. The austere and robust beauty of Miss Herbert, the accomplished actress to whom he was introduced in 1859, lay, as has been already said, entirely apart from his most cherished ideals, and seldom appears in his symbolic paintings. But Mrs. Aldham Heaton, a frequent and valued purchaser, and a lady of presence more congruous with his favourite type, sat for what appears to have been a second “Regina Cordium” in 1861; while in 1864 was commenced his long and most artistically fruitful acquaintance with Miss Wilding, the beautiful girl who served as the model for “Sybilla Palmifera,” “La Ghirlandata,” “Dis Manibus,” “Veronica Veronese,” “The Sea-Spell,” and several others of his most delicate and spiritual faces, including a third “Regina Cordium” in 1866. Miss Spartali, afterwards Mrs. Stillman, was also a favourite model for some years, and sat for “Fiametta” (distinct from “A Vision of Fiametta” in 1878), and for the lady on the right of the funeral couch in “Dante’s Dream,”—a work which remained on hand throughout this period.

Apart from the models of his principal pictures, Rossetti painted at different times a goodly number of female portraits, commencing the list of sitters with his mother and younger sister (the elder died at a somewhat early age), and including Lady Mount Temple, who became, with her husband, one of the few intimate friends of his seclusion in later years, Miss Alice Boyd, the kindly hostess of some of his happiest visits to Scotland, yet to be recorded, Mrs. William Morris and her daughters—among them Miss May Morris, now Mrs. Halliday Sparling, who also appears in the “Rosa Triplex” of 1869 and 1874, Mrs. Burne-Jones, Mrs. Dalrymple, Mrs. H.T. Wells, Mrs. Leathart, Mrs. Lushington, Mrs. Virtue Tebbs, Mrs. C. A. Howell, Mrs. Coronio, Miss Heaton, Miss Williams, Miss Kingdon, the Misses Cassavetti, Miss Baring, and Mrs. Banks.

Twice during these years of the gradual maturing of his technical power in oils did Rossetti make excursions into a distinctive branch of decorative art, the practice of designing for stained-glass. As early as 1860, William Morris, Burne-Jones, and a few others interested in this much-neglected craft established a firm which was known for some time under the name of Morris and Co., and for which in 1861 Rossetti executed a series of seven effective cartoons for church windows illustrating the “Parable of the Vineyard,” or the “Wicked Husbandmen.” Both designs are of extraordinary vigour and dramatic intensity; strongly mediæval in directness and simplicity, but with a large coherence and fulness of conception, and a harmonious richness of workmanship breathing a more modern spirit into the ancient tale. The dignity and earnestness of the drawing places it on a level with the best work of his purely romantic period, but its technical finish shows the more perfect balance between conception and execution which he was rapidly attaining in his maturity. The designs are now to be seen in the church of St. Martin on the Hill, Scarborough.

A similar work was undertaken by Rossetti six years later, when it was proposed to dedicate a memorial window to his aunt, Miss Margaret Polidori, in Christchurch, Albany Street, Regent’s Park, where she had long been a regular attendant until her death in 1867. Rossetti chose for his subject “The Sermon on the Plain.” This design also was executed in stained-glass by the firm of Morris and Co., and placed in the church in 1869.

By this time Rossetti’s commissions for pictures had happily become so numerous as to justify his seeking competent assistance in his studio. His friend Mr. Knewstub, at first a pupil, filled for some time the office of assistant. Then Mr. Henry Treffry Dunn was engaged in 1867, and remained with Rossetti almost up to the date of his death. It seems to have been in the years 1867–68 that his health, never fully re-established after the physical and mental prostration of 1862, began to give way beneath that most terrible and relentless of nervous maladies, the special curse of the artistic temperament—insomnia. To that slow and baffling torment, by which Nature sometimes seems to be avenging herself in a sort of frenzied jealousy upon her own handiwork, Rossetti’s highly wrought sensibilities and overwhelming imagination made him the more easy prey. His whole being was constitutionally endowed with that fatal faculty of visualizing the invisible, of suffering more acutely under imagined than under realized pains (though both were laid upon him) which, like an all-consuming fire, burns itself out only with the life that feeds it. Of such sleepless nights as thus become the terror of their victims, haunted with all memories and all fears, Rossetti has left us many a painfully vivid word-picture in his poetry; supremely, perhaps, in that most tragic sonnet, “Sleepless Dreams”—

“Girt in dark growths, yet glimmering with one star,”

ending with the despairing cry upon the deaf goddess of repose—

“O Night, Night, Night! art thou not known to me,

A thicket hung with masks of mockery,

And watered with the wasteful warmth of tears?”

Many such nights Rossetti bore, we may well believe, before he fled at last, when rational means seemed of no avail against his malady, to that most dangerous source of ease, the too free use of chloral. Several times he partially shook off the habit, and intervals of comparative comfort and cheerfulness were frequent until 1872, when other phases of illness, independent of it though still of nervous origin, further undermined the constitution already weakened by years of abnormal strain. A respite of a very pleasant kind was afforded him in the successive autumns of 1868–69 by his visits to Miss Boyd at Penkill, in Perthshire, where, in company with other congenial spirits, he spent some weeks of comparative happiness and ease. Here he was induced to resume his poetry, which, save for a few significant sonnets, had lain in abeyance since that sad day on which he had buried his manuscripts in the grave of his early love. Now, yielding with much reluctance and conflict of heart to the persuasion of friends who knew the value of the poems thus lost to literature, he gave permission for the coffin to be exhumed, and the manuscripts removed. The story of this delicate task, and of its judicious and successful fulfilment under the personal superintendence of two or three intimate friends of the widower, has already been related in detail by one of the eye-witnesses aforesaid. The poems, after seven years’ concealment in the quiet grave in Highgate Cemetery, were duly restored to their author’s hand. This having been done, he set to work arranging, re-writing, and adding some of the finest work of his poetic maturity to a collection of poems which should be an immortal record and perpetuation of his love.

Towards the close of 1869 Rossetti began to share with his friend William Morris the romantic and picturesque old manor house of Kelmscott, near Lechdale, in Gloucestershire; a district full of interesting landscape, and haunted by the inspiring shade of Shelley, who there wrote his characteristic fragment, “A Summer Evening in Lechdale Churchyard.” The scenery of the surrounding country is brought in vivid glimpses here and there into Rossetti’s poetry, as, for instance, in “Down Stream” (“Between Holmscote and Hurstcote”) and other lyrics of his later life. Here he painted “The Bower Maiden”—a pretty country lass with marigolds. But a great part of his time was still spent at home in Chelsea, where in 1871 he at last completed the finest oil version of “Dante’s Dream.” Save for the incomparable “Beata Beatrix,” it is the summing-up of all his highest interpretations of the Dante spirit; the consummation of his gospel of romantic love. His friend Mr. Val Prinsep quotes Rossetti as writing in a letter about this time:—“I should like of all things to show you my big picture ‘Dante’s Dream’ now, if you are ever in town. Indeed, I should probably have written to you before this of the picture being in a state to see, on the chance of its accelerating your movements townwards, but was deterred from doing so by the fact that every special appointment I have made to show it has been met by the clerk of the weather with such a careful provision of absolute darkness for that day and hour, that I tempt my fate no more in that way, as the picture cannot absolutely be seen except in a fair light, and one’s nerves do not hold out for ever under such onslaughts.... Everyone who has seen the ‘Dante’s Dream’ (not yet quite finished, but close upon), has seemed so thoroughly pleased with it that I think I may hope without vanity some progress has been made, and this I feel sure I shall carry on in my next work. Of course I have only shown the ‘Dante’ to a few, as otherwise I might spend my time in nothing else, the picture blocking up the whole studio when displayed.”

Ten years later, in 1881, the “Dante’s Dream” gained for the painter one of the very few popular triumphs of his lifetime. It was exhibited at Liverpool, bought by the Corporation of that city for £1,500, hung in the Walker Art Gallery, where it now remains; and instantly took rank among the greatest masterpieces of modern art. “Fifty years hence,” said Sir Noel Paton, “it will be counted among the half-dozen supreme pictures of the world.”

The story of the last ten years of Rossetti’s private life, clouded by frequent ill-health, and disturbed by that most intolerable of a poet’s trials, a literary controversy, remains yet to be told by him who shared most intimately the seclusion and the affliction of that troublous period, Mr. Theodore Watts; whose oft-quoted sonnet to his friend, as Mr. Coulson Kernahan has said, gives a fuller picture of Rossetti than volumes of prose could do, and therefore commands insertion here:

“I told thee of an island, far and lone,

Whose shores are as a harp, where billows break

In spray of music, and the breezes shake

O’er spicy seas a woof of colour and tone,

While that sweet music echoes like a moan

In the island’s heart, and sighs around the lake,

Where, watching fearfully a watchful snake,

A damsel weeps upon her emerald throne.

Life’s ocean, breaking round thy senses’ shore

Struck golden song, as from the strand of day:

For us the joy, for thee the fell foe lay—

Pain’s blinking snake around the fair isle’s core,

Turning to sighs the enchanted sounds that play

Around thy lonely island evermore.”

The mingled pain and privilege of Mr. Watts’s ministry was shared to a great degree by Lord and Lady Mount Temple, Mrs. Sumner, Dr. Gordon Hake and his son, Mr. George Hake, Mr. Madox Brown, Mr. Frederick Shields, and Mr. Sandys. Mr. Leyland also saw him frequently, and added generous and unremitting friendship to his patronage of the wayward painter’s work. He was the purchaser of some of the most important pictures of Rossetti’s last decade, including the beautiful “Dis Manibus,” or “The Roman Widow,” (1874), which remains unsurpassed for delicate purity and depth of colour by any of the masterpieces of his prime; “Mnemosyne,” or “La Ricordanza,” or “The Lamp of Memory” (1876–78), one of his most noble and impressive symbolic figures; “The Sea-Spell,” (1875–77), and a replica of “The Blessed Damozel” (1873–77), which he painted for Mr. William Graham in illustration of his own poem:

“The Blessed Damozel leaned out

From the gold bar of heaven;

Her eyes were deeper than the depths

Of water stilled at even:

She had three lilies in her hand

And the stars in her hair were seven.”

The publication, in 1870, of Rossetti’s volume of “Poems,” containing, together with some of his loveliest short lyrics, “The Blessed Damozel,” and the “House of Life” sonnets, led the way for that unfortunate attack upon him in the critical press which undoubtedly contributed to the shortening of his days, however regrettable may have been the hyper-sensitive manner in which the poet met his arraignment. In 1871 an article signed “Thomas Maitland” was published in the “Contemporary Review,” entitled “The Fleshly School of Poetry,” in which Rossetti’s poems were attacked, from an avowedly moral point of view, on the ground of sensuality. Ignoring the essential principles of all Rossetti’s work—the sacredness of the senses as the instruments of the soul—the meaning of all physical beauty as the witness of an immanent God—the writer deliberately charged him with pandering to the lowest instincts of his readers, and being, in short, the prophet of that later and grossly materialistic phase of European art of which the very name Pre-Raphaelite was a repudiation. It is not surprising that to a deeply (if undefinedly) religious nature like Rossetti’s this should have seemed the hardest blow that could have been dealt at his art and at him. The publication of the magazine article, however, seriously disconcerted him at the moment. It was not until the offensive and wholly unfair indictment was re-issued in the following year in pamphlet form that it began to assume a more serious aspect in the victim’s eyes. Criticism of his poetic methods he could have borne with equanimity. Indifference and neglect seldom troubled him. He cared little for popularity, and was no seeker after fame, although he naturally desired the appreciation of those whose judgment was of real account in literature. But he did care for his general reputation as a clean-lived and pure-minded man. This charge assailed the ethical foundations of all his work. He had seen in the loveliest things of earth the vessels and channels of the loveliness of heaven. And that this should be counted to him for sensuality—that the love which had been to him “a worship and a regeneration” should be held up to scorn as a gross and carnal passion—that was the intolerable thing!

Not that he lacked defenders. His own answer, under the title of “The Stealthy School of Criticism,” in the columns of the “Athenæum,” was more than supported by Mr. Swinburne’s indignant challenge, “Under the Microscope;” and other loyal friends contributed to a sufficient vindication. Save in the too morbid imagination of the poet, the attack soon lapsed, for the most part, into the oblivion it deserved; more especially since the writer, a few years later, had the manliness to retract his charge, and to make a candid apology, though a tardy one,for having uttered it. But not so easily could the pain given to Rossetti be overcome. He now began to shrink intensely from society, fearing at all points to encounter that suspicion of his artistic work. Suffering acutely from nervous prostration and insomnia, he yielded himself the more fully to the fatal chloral habit which only aggravated his condition. In the autumn of 1872 he spent some weeks at the house of Dr. Gordon Hake at Roehampton, and proceeded thence with Mr. Madox Brown, Mr. George Hake, and Mr. Bell Scott to Stobhall in Perthshire, on the Tay. Returning to the south in improved health, Rossetti and Mr. George Hake proceeded at once to Kelmscott Manor, where they settled for a considerable time. Rossetti indeed remained for nearly two years, gradually resuming his artistic work, and regaining at times something of his old vivacity and high spirits: only a few friends went to and fro in visits full of mutual delight and inspiration. The beautiful old house, and the quaint, romantic chamber that served for studio, became the resort of poets and artists, critics and connoisseurs, disciples and aspirants, in companies small indeed, but brilliant and memorable as any that gathered round the young Pre-Raphaelites in Newman Street or the maturer masters of art and song that assembled in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea. Mr. William Morris and his family were there frequently; Dr. Gordon Hake made a visit, and afterwards embodied his memories in his sequence of sonnets addressed to Mr.Theodore Watts, “The New Day,” one of which deserves quotation:

“O happy days with him who once so loved us!

We loved as brothers, with a single heart,

The man whose iris-woven pictures moved us

From Nature to her blazoned shadow—Art.

How often did we trace the nestling Thames

From humblest waters on his course of might,

Down where the weir the bursting current stems—

There sat till evening grew to balmy night,