Page:EB1911 - Volume 23.djvu/789

Rh similar technical qualities, poetry and pathos. The group comprises paintings by which Rossetti is best known, such as “ Proserpina in Hades, ” which is, on the whole, perhaps the most original, if not indeed the most poetical and powerful, of all his output; “Sibylla Palmifera, " “Venus Verticordia, ” “Lilith ” (the better of the two versions is now referred to), “Washing Hands, ” “ Monna Vanna, " “ Il Ramoscello, ” “Aurea Catena, ” “La Pia, ” “Rosa Triplex, ” “Veronica Veronese, ” “ La Ghirlandata, ” “ Pandora, ” “ The Blessed Damozel, ” and, last and largest, but not, perhaps, the greatest of his paintings (a distinction for which “The Bride ” and “ Proserpina ” must contend), the famous “ Dante's Dream, ” now in the Walker Art Gallery at Liverpool. Besides these, Rossetti produced a large number of fine things. Nearly the whole of them were exhibited by the Royal Academy and at the Burlington Fine Art Club in 1883, after their author's death. (F. G. S.)]

Meanwhile, the literary side of Rossetti had developed parl passu with his achievements as a painter. The goal before the young Rossetti's eyes was to reach through art the forgotten world of old romance-that world of wonder and mystery and spiritual beauty which the old masters knew and could have painted had not lack of science, combined with slavery to monkish traditions of asceticism, crippled their strength. In that great rebellion against the renascence of classicism which (after working much good and much harm) resulted in 18thcentury materialism-in that great movement of man's soul which may be appropriately named “the Renascence of the Spirit of Wonder in Poetry and Art ”-he had become the acknowledged protagonist before ever the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood was founded, and so he remained down to his last breath. It was by inevitable instinct that Rossetti turned to that mysterious side of nature and man's life which to other painters of his time had been a mere fancy-land, to be visited, if at all, on the wings of sport. For if there is any permanent vitality in the Renascence of Wonder in modern Europe, if it is really the inevitable expression of the soul of man in a certain stage of civilization (when the sanctions which have made and moulded society are found to be not absolute and eternal, but relative, mundane, ephemeral and subject to the higher sanctions of unseen powers that work behind “ the shows of things ”), then perhaps one of the first questions to ask in regard to any imaginative painter of the 19th century is, In what relation did he stand to the newly awakened spirit of romance? Had he a genuine and independent sympathy with that temper of wonder and mystery which all over Europe had preceded and now followed the temper of imitation, prosaic acceptance, pseudo-classicism and domestic materialism? or was his apparent sympathy with the temper of wonder, reverence and awe the result of artistic environment dictated to him by other and more powerful and original souls around him?

We do not say that the mere fact of a painter's or a poet's showing but an imperfect sympathy with the Renascence of-Wonder is sufficient to place him below a poet in whom that sympathy is more nearly complete, but we do say that, other things being equal or anything like equal, a painter or poet of this time is to be judged very much by his sympathy with that great movement, which we call the Renascence of Wonder because the word “romanticism” never did express it even before it had been vulgarized by French poets, dramatists, doctrinaires and literary harlequins. To struggle against the prim traditions of the 18th century, the unities of Aristotle, the delineation of types instead of characters, as Chateaubriand, Madame de Staél, Balzac and Hugo struggled, was well. But in studying Rossetti's works we reach the very key of those “high palaces of romance ” which the English mind had never, even in the 18th century, wholly forgotten, but whose mystic gates no Frenchman ever yet unlocked. Not all the romantic feeling to be found in all the French romanticists (with their theory that not earnestness but the grotesque is the life-blood of romance) could equal the romantic F1

I, D. G. 749

spirit expressed in a single picture or drawing of Rossetti's, such, for instance, as Beata Beatrix or Pandora. For, while the French romanticists-inspired by the theories (drawn from English exemplars) of Novalis, Tieck and Herdercleverly simulated the old romantic feeling, the “ beautifully devotional feeling ” which Holman Hunt speaks of, Rossetti was steeped in itz, he was so full of the old frank childlike wonder and awe which preceded the great renascence of materialism that he might have lived and worked amidst the old masters. Hence, in point of design, so original is he that to match such ideas as are expressed in “ Lilith, ” “ Hesterna Rosa, ” “ Michael Scott's Wooing, ” the “ Sea Spell, ” &c., we have to turn to the sister art of poetry, where only we can find an equally powerful artistic representation of the idea at the core of the old romanticism-the idea of the evil forces of nature assailing man through his sense of beauty. We must turn, we say, not to art-not even to the old masters themselves-but to the most perfect efiiorescence of the poetry of wonder and mystery-to such ballads as the “ Demon Lover, ” to Coleridge's “ Christabel ” and “ Kubla Khan, ” to Keats's “ La Belle Dame sans Merci, ” for parallels to Rossetti's most characteristic designs. Now, although the idea at the heart of the highest romantic poetry (allied perhaps to that apprehension of the warring of man's soul with the appetites of the flesh which is the basis of the Christian idea) may not belong exclusively to what we call the romantic temper (the Greeks, and also most Asiatic peoples, were more or less familiar with it, as we see in the Salamdn and Absal of Iami), yet it became peculiarly a romantic note, as is seen from the fact that in the old masters it resulted in that asceticism which is its logical expression and which was once an inseparable incident of all romantic art. But in order to express this stupendous idea as fully as the poets have expressed it, how is it possible to adopt the asceticism of the old masters? This is the' question that Rossetti asked himself, and answered by his own progress in art. In all of his pictures, the poorest and the best, is displayed that power which Blake calls vision-the power which, as he finely says, is “surrounded by the daughters of inspiration, ” the power, that is, of seeing imaginary objects and dramatic actions—physically seeing them as well as mentally and flashing them upon the imaginations (even upon the corporeal senses) of others.

Mr W. M. Rossetti (in the Preface to the Collected Works, 1886) has given an interesting account of his brother's literary nurturing. Shakespeare, Walter Scott, Byron, the Bible were the earliest influences: then Shelley, Mrs Browning, the older English and Scottish ballads, and Dante. Afterwards he preferred Keats to Shelley. By 1847 he was “ deep in Robert Browning.” Malory's Marte d'Arlhur, about 1856, engrossed him; Victor Hugo and De Musset, among French poets, were his delight. In his last years he had an enthusiasm for Chatterton. From childhood's days he had loved to compose, but The Germ (1850) contained Rossetti's first published prose or verse. In it appeared “ The Blessed Damozel, ” the prose poem “ Hand and Soul, ” six sonnets and four lyrics. “The Blessed Damozel ” was written so early as 1847 or 1848. “ Sister Helen ” was produced in its original form in 1850 or 1851. His translations from the early Italian poets also began as far back as 1845 or 1846, and may have been mainly completed by 1849. He published a volume of The Early Italian Poets (Dante and his Circle) in 1861. In 1856 he contributed to the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, in which among other things the “ Burden of Nineveh ” appeared. Materials for a volume of original poetry accumulated slowly, and these having been somewhat widely read in manuscript had a very great influence upon contemporary poetic literature long before their appearance in print. He had intended to publish a volume in 1862, but the death of his wife (see below) caused its postponement till 1870. In poetry no less than in art what makes Rossetti so important a figure is the position he took up with regard to the modern revival of the “ romantic ” spirit. The Renascence of Wonder culminates