Dante Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelite movement

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.