Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 20.djvu/893

Rh ROSSETTI 859 universal recognition through the magnificent frescos at Manchester. Though not one of the pre-Eaphaelite brotherhood, he had been a contributor to The Germ. Eossetti was deeply impressed with the power and fecun- dity of design displayed by Mr Brown's cartoons exhibited in Westminster Hall, and when he himself began serious work as a painter he thought of Brown as the one man from whom he would willingly receive practical guidance, and wrote to him at random. He became Brown's pupil ; but only once or twice, as in Found and Dr Johnson at the Mitre, did Rossetti try his hand at such realistic subjects as Brown loved, and then with a success that is very surprising if we consider how entirely his artistic energy had worked in very different lines. Found, begun in 1853, still remains unfinished. A countryman entering London in the early morning is accidentally or fatally encountered at the foot of the bridge by his rustic sweetheart, who, having gone to London, has been, in the most pathetic and terrible sense of the word, " lost." At sight of her lover the girl falls fainting at his feet. The expression of shame and horror on her still beautiful face as she cowers against the wall, and the expression of pity and grief on the man's as he clasps her hands and tries to raise her are unsurpassed and perhaps for sheer power unequalled in modern dramatic art. Many circumstances for instance, the beginning of such grand designs as Magdalene at the Door of Simon the Pharisee, " Aspectfl Medusa," the Boat of Love, &c., inter- fered with the completion of Found. With the exception of the Boat of Love, Dante's Dream (1870) was perhaps Eossetti's most ambitious design in purely imaginative art. From the painting of this picture to his death Eossetti never satisfactorily completed a large and elaborate design not because his faculty of invention was ever exhausted ; in the very year of his death his brain was teeming with ideas as restlessly as when he designed Found and the Boat of Love. But the truth is that he wanted to write more poetry ; and those wonderful half-lengths of women for which, late in life, he became so famous were not only beautiful and satisfying but comparatively easy of achieve- ment; moreover purchasers were keen to commission them. Among those half-lengths, however, will be found some of his greatest works. Chief among them (if it is not Proserpine) is the marvellous crayon design Pandora in the possession of the present writer. In it is seen at its highest Eossetti's unique faculty of treating classical legend in the true romantic spirit. The grand and sombre beauty of Pandora's face, the mysterious haunting sadness in her deep blue-grey eyes as she tries in vain to reclose the fatal box from which are still escaping the smoke and flames that shape themselves as they curl over her head into shadowy spirit faces, grey with agony, between tortured wings of sullen fire, are in the highest romantic mood. And if the Proserpine does not equal this design in elaborate allegorical richness it has perhaps the still higher merit of suggesting lofty tragedy by the simplest means. By sheer force of facial expression, a woman clasping a pomegranate renders a tragic situation as fully as though the canvas had been crowded with figures. But we must turn to his poetry. " The Blessed Damozel " was written so early as 1848. " Sister Helen " was produced in its original form in 1850 or 1851. The translations from the early Italian poets also began as far back as 1845 or 184G, and may have been mainly com- pleted by 1849, Materials for the volume of original poetry (1870) accumulated slowly, and these having been somewhat widely read in manuscript had a very great influence upon our poetic literature long before their appearance in print ; but this is not the place for criticiz- ing them in detail. All that we can here say is that in poetry no less than in art what makes Eossetti so import- ant a figure is the position he took up with regard to the Eenascence of Wonder to that modern revival of what is called the "romantic" spirit, that spirit without which English poetry, as the present writer has on a former occasion said when discussing the romantic movement, can scarcely hold an original place at all when challenged in a court of universal criticism. The Eenascence of Wonder culminates in Eossetti's poetry as it culminates in his paint- ing. The poet who should go beyond Eossetti would pass out of the realm of poetry into pure mysticism, as certain of his sonnets show. Fine as are these sonnets, it is in his romantic ballads that Eossetti (notwithstanding a certain ruggedness of movement) shows his greatest strength. In this opinion (which is not the general one) we agree with Dr Hueffer. " Sister Helen," " The Blessed Damozel," "Staff and Scrip," "Eden Bower," "Troy Town," " Eose Mary," as representing the modern revival of the true romantic spirit, take a place quite apart from the other poetry of our time. By the modern revival of the romantic spirit in English poetry we mean something much more than the revival, at the close of the last century, of natural language, the change discussed by Wordsworth in his famous Pre- face, and by Coleridge in his comments thereon that change of diction and of poetic methods which is com- monly supposed to have arisen with Cowper, or, if not with Cowper, with Burns. The truth is that Wordsworth and Coleridge were too near the great changes in question, and they themselves took too active a part in those changes, to hold the historical view of what the changes really were. Important as was the change in poetic methods which they so admirably practised and discussed, important as was the revival of natural language, which then set in, it was not nearly so important as that other revival which had begun earlier and of which it was the outcome the revival of the romantic spirit, the Eenas- cence of Wonder, even beneath the weight of 18th- century diction, the first movement of which no one has yet been able clearly and decisively to point out, but which is certainly English, and neither German nor French in its origin, and can be traced through Chatterton, Macpherson, and the Percy Ballads. As a mere question of methods, a reaction against the poetic diction of Pope and his followers was inevitable. But, in discussing the romantic temper in relation to the overthrow of the bastard classicism and didactic materialism of the 18th century, we must, as we have just seen in discussing Eossetti's pictures, go deeper than mere artistic methods in poetry. When closely examined it is in method only that the poetry of Cowper is different from the ratiociuative and unromantic poetry of Dryden and Pope and their followers. Pope treated prose subjects in the ratiocinative that is to say, the prose temper, but in a highly artificial diction which people agreed to call poetic. Cowper treated prose subjects too treated them in the same prose temper, but used natural language, a noble thing to do, no doubt but this was orrly a part (and by no means the chief part) of the great work achieved by English poetry at the close of last century. That period, to be sure, freed us from the poetic diction of Pope ; but it gave us something more precious still it gave us entire freedom, from the hard rhetorical materialism imported from France ; it gave a new seeing to our eyes, which were opened once more to the mystery and the wonder of the universe and the romance of man's destiny ; it revived in short the romantic spirit, but the romantic spirit enriched by all the clarity and sanity that the renascence of classicism was able to lend.