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Cornell University 
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•Ju>m^a0Mmt<^iA- ^^.t^ravi^fifg? 
 
Dante Gabriel Rossetti 
 
 His Work and Influence 
 
Dante Gabriel Rossetti 
 
 His Work and Influence 
 
 INCLUDING 
 
 a ISrtEf Surbeg o{ Eecmt ^tt CenHenciea 
 
 BY 
 
 WILLIAM TIREBUCK 
 
 WRITER OF ' WILLIAM DANIELS, ARTIST.' 
 
 LONDON: ELLIOT STOCK, Paternoster Row 
 1882 
 
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI. 
 
 r does not fall to the lot of 
 every epoch in art to bemoan 
 the loss while it boasts the 
 possession of a painter-poet. A painter 
 in the degree of his greatness is of course 
 somewhat the poet, but not with the 
 emphasis of metre and rhyme, not with 
 the local fervour that requires and finds 
 special speech in what would seem to 
 be poetry's special domain. In this dual 
 and yet separate sense was Dante Gabriel 
 Rossetti, the Painter and Poet. 
 
Dante Gabriel Rossetti 
 
 His beginnings take us back to the 
 many o£f-shoots from the revival of 
 Poetry indicated by Coleridge, Words- 
 worth, Shelley, Keats, and Byron. It is 
 not within the present purpose to indicate 
 all those off-shoots, each with its peculi- 
 arity of branch and leaf, but it is within 
 it to indicate some of the oif- shoots repre- 
 sented by Rossetti, But before consider- 
 ing his work, let us endeavour to conjure 
 a, so to speak, impersonal personality of 
 the man. Let us know the medium 
 through which influences were to pass 
 and be influenced. First and foremost, 
 then, Rossetti was not British. Whether 
 he was born in England, or whether he 
 visited or did not visit Italy, matters little. 
 His nature was a transplantation, not 
 
His Work and Influence. 
 
 merely from Italy, but from Mediaeval 
 Italy. He breathed time with the pulse 
 of perhaps the most cosmopolitan city in 
 the world, but he lived centuries away. 
 He was a surviving plenipotentiary of 
 early Italian feeling presenting credentials 
 to British Common Sense ; a pilgrim who 
 had got out of the region of shrines, but 
 who at every cross-like thing knelt down 
 by the force of his habit of thought and 
 muscle. He was with us, but not 
 of us. Without effort, almost without 
 consciousness, we associate him with 
 Madonnas, illumined manuscripts, altar- 
 pieces, and cloisters where work was 
 done not so much for earth as for heaven, 
 where there were no such drums and trum- 
 pets as newspapers and journals, where 
 
8 Dante Gabriel Rossetti 
 
 art was so much nature that it was praise 
 and prayer, uninfluenced by private opi- 
 nion made public, by the coins of a realm, 
 a ribbon of honour, or the initials of an 
 Academy however Royal — an example 
 surely in the fortified manner of his pur- 
 pose and work which many of us might 
 follow with personal and public advantage. 
 His devotion to his art, his abnegation, his 
 patient waiting for that tide which did not 
 seem to have a flood, and his endurance 
 of what after all was but a local reputation 
 — his whole work in short was a vitalised 
 reproach to much of the paragraph litera- 
 ture and art abroad, and he had, must 
 have had, a greatness of soul worthy the 
 grove which harboured the much-enduring 
 Carlyle and the faintless George Eliot. 
 
His Work and Influence. 
 
 Now the painter, by the very nature 
 of his work and its limitations, can only 
 give single aspects of thoughts and emo- 
 tions ; but he has the uncommon advan- 
 tage of complete grasp at a glance, one 
 sweep of the eye across his canvas bring- 
 ing the artist's emotion in full rounded 
 intensity upon our emotion. On the 
 other hand, the poet may start with the 
 disadvantage of slow, line-by-line growth, 
 but he has the advantage at the finish 
 of accumulated developments. He can 
 play pranks with the imagination, trick 
 it into activity, and at last complete its 
 peregrinations by a colon. Rossetti's 
 nature no doubt felt that, great though 
 his power of speech in colour and form 
 was, his very love of emotional detail 
 
lo Dante Gabriel Rossetti 
 
 made that speech seem to him at times 
 inadequate. Instead of trying, like 
 Hogarth and Frith, to portray on canvas 
 a plural aspect of life by a series of 
 single aspects, and thus make the painter 
 trespass on the territory of the novel- 
 ist, he went direct to the means used by 
 Dante and Shakspere, It would have 
 taken miles of canvas to have brought 
 home to us 
 
 ' Lazy, laughing, languid Jenny,' 
 
 as his vivid and pathetic poem does, and 
 many a line in his ballads and sonnets 
 would be subject enough for a year or so 
 of a painter's life. 
 
 To ask Which was Rossetti the greater 
 as — Poet or Painter ? seems about as 
 reasonable as asking if the world can 
 
His Work and Injluencc. 1 1 
 
 better afford to do without this poet or 
 that one, this great play or that great pic- 
 ture — especially when the world does not 
 make choice absolutely necessary by thrust- 
 ing its closed hands before us and repeat- 
 ing the nursery decree of ' Handy pandy,' 
 etc. To be without either of the great- 
 nesses, having once had both, would be 
 loss, and this loss or gain cannot be gauged 
 by secret or open voting, by the prepon- 
 derance of numerals for or against this 
 picture or that poem. In art the majority 
 cannot really overrule the minority, the 
 minority being able to foster their partial- 
 ities until they become impartial only in 
 death. In the morning we might decide 
 for Rossetti the Painter, and in the even- 
 ing meet a solitary soul to whom a 
 
12 Dante Gabriel Rossetti 
 
 sonnet, ballad, or even a couplet of 
 Rossetti the Poet is the open sesame to 
 that soul's heart. Each can go on his 
 way rejoicing in the kind of his posses- 
 sion, rejoicing the more if in his nature 
 he can find a place for the duality 
 of the remarkable man who has gone 
 and left us a record of his nights and 
 days. 
 
 The works of Rossetti, the Artist, are 
 like a pomegranate — a simile suggested by 
 his ' Prosperina,' who holds this ' drear 
 dire fruit ' in her hand. It is suggestive 
 of his colour, compactness, subtlety, his 
 rounded unity — it also, it must be owned, 
 suggests that sameness with a difference 
 which haunts his works. ' Prosperina,' 
 for example, is related to ' Fiammetta ' as 
 
His Work and Influence. 1 3 
 
 one pomegranate's pippin is related to 
 another. 
 
 A subdued southern warmth pervades 
 some of his pictures. They are like a 
 deep sunset seen afar through a lacery of 
 wood, or a sun-illumined glass window 
 caught in its highest warmth and trans- 
 fixed in a frame to give glory to a sun- 
 impervious wall. Others seem to have 
 an immortality of veiled glow around, 
 about, and through them, as though even 
 human vision must dim before they will. 
 There is an apparent reserve fund of 
 power that will keep pace with decay 
 itself, and stand warm when all else is 
 paling to invisibility. Rossetti's is not 
 the glow, say of Rubens. It has more 
 refinement, more subtlety. There is more 
 
14 Dante Gabriel Rossetti 
 
 economy in effect, more frugality of pur- 
 pose ; taste is provoked, and leaves desire 
 on the palate. The journey from our art- 
 cultured nature (and it requires to be this) 
 to Rossetti's art is one that never seems 
 complete, one that we would traverse time 
 after time and turn back to traverse again 
 and again. These journeys are like the 
 stolen peeps at a beautiful face — each peep 
 to be the last, and yet the preface to more. 
 They are like the central point of a Greek 
 frieze, with neither beginning nor end, and 
 leave us wondering. Though the richness 
 is full enough to be rich, it holds back just 
 where our own senses and imagination can 
 have opportunity to play, and between the 
 imagination of the artist and our own, we 
 are lured on and on to an infinity of some- 
 
His Work and Influence, 1 5 
 
 thing between pleasure and pain which 
 defies analysis. Rossetti, it has been said 
 time after time, was a supreme colourist, 
 and in this too we can discern the Italian 
 feeling probing its way through centuries 
 and countries to his exiled nature in 
 England. His colours are not exactly the 
 colours we see in these hardy Isles under 
 our fickle atmosphere and sky, but a cross 
 between Italian Tradition and English 
 Fact, in unity with his general sentiment, 
 manner, and treatment. This mingling of 
 the new and old, of the home and foreign 
 influence (with a partiality for the old and 
 foreign) would form no doubt for many 
 people an impeding mysticism ; and yet to 
 other and more kindred natures this very 
 mingling would be its indefinable charm — 
 
1 6 Dante Gabriel Rossetti 
 
 a charm all the more keen when they had 
 grown to understand it. Probably the 
 pleasure which many of his worshippers 
 experience in his work is only half of 
 something they actually know, the other 
 half being concealed, like the rose in its 
 bud, within the possibility of their natures, 
 and which they feel in a far-off mystic 
 way not definite enough to be worded. 
 
 This latter, the foreign, the Italian half 
 of the charm, is a touch of that cosmopoli- 
 tan spirit within us all, and which, in defiance 
 of localisms of nature, development and 
 culture, makes humanity one. The charm 
 of most of Rossetti's work indeed is some- 
 what akin to that beauty in the Greek 
 form, which even natures ignorant of the 
 source and the why and the wherefore, in 
 
His Work and Influence. 1 7 
 
 various ways acknowledge is beautiful. 
 As with colour, so with subject. His 
 creations are removed from us, but not so 
 far removed as to get outside humanity 
 altogether, for if Rossetti wanted to paint 
 a ' Blessed Damozel ' he had after all to 
 paint a woman, and that is a symbolism 
 humanity has a singular aptitude to under- 
 stand. On that simple basis of woman, 
 Maoris and Zulus would be able to com- 
 prehend the language of one who, on 
 higher grounds of interpretation in his 
 own country, has not yet been much or 
 widely understood. True it is Rossetti 
 did not give the people an opportunity 
 to even try to understand him. He 
 nursed his babe of remoteness until it 
 became a child which most people would 
 
1 8 Dante Gabriel Rossetti 
 
 now go to see for its peculiarity of iimb 
 or complexion ; and having been kept 
 from it so long, having had their fancies 
 kindled by imitators and falsifying satir- 
 ists, they would perhaps view the art- 
 phenomenon with disappointment, expect- 
 ing to see artistic compound fractures 
 and contortions. However, seeing that 
 Rossetti (like all other artists of whom 
 we have any record) if he wanted to 
 pictorially say ' woman ' or ' man ' had to 
 paint a woman or man, to that extent, 
 to the extent of a recognition of their own 
 species and of the beautiful in general, 
 the people would comprehend him ; but 
 hardly with an enthusiasm kindling 
 feelings approaching affection, because 
 his art is not of the realistic flesh- 
 
His Work a7td Influence. 19 
 
 and -blood -kitchen -utensil order. His 
 creations have little connection with the 
 mother's nipple, with the warm faithful 
 social love that keeps the planet together. 
 There is no sign of palpitation and pulse ; 
 no electricity flashes facts of life from 
 continent to continent in their spheres ; 
 no engined caravans skim the landscape 
 with a shriek, carrying souls from city to 
 city; no machine, with its whir of straps and 
 wheels, thuds the walls of their habitation 
 — the characters are abstractions, dreams, 
 musings, lethargic spirits coming to the 
 borderland of matter and keeping aloof 
 from it in spiritual pride ; they are not so 
 much what are, as what have been, with 
 the survival of their human natures con- 
 centrated in their ruddy flatly -fulsome 
 
20 Dante Gabriel Rossetti 
 
 lips — lips so specialised in the female 
 characters as to become an indication if 
 there were no other facial indications of 
 sex. But there is another barrier besides 
 mysticism between this artist and the 
 public. His ultimate sum-total of female 
 or indeed of male beauty is not, from 
 a public stand-point, very sympathetic. 
 Familiarity, they say, breeds contempt, 
 but contrary to this, Rossetti's resurrec- 
 tion beauty may require from many 
 people a familiarity ere they can behold 
 it without breeding contempt of a gentler 
 kind, for there are still many who cannot 
 view the work of the school in which 
 Rossetti was the first head-master, with- 
 out ill-temper culminating in that superior 
 ridicule of the half-ignorant, who use ' rot ' 
 
His Work and Influence. 1 1 
 
 and ' bosh ' as colons to their periods of 
 expletives. His type of beauty, his 
 source of thought and emotion, his mode 
 of expressing them are not their types, 
 their sources, and their modes ; and of 
 course the half-learned Daniels who come 
 to judgment think the traditions of their 
 own biased natures the only reliable ones. 
 There is this touch of bias even in the 
 daily-bread subject of print butter. We 
 find creatures who look with suspicion 
 upon a new pattern. They would not 
 relish the product of their own dairy, 
 even the product of their own favourite 
 cow, if the new grass butter had not 
 the mould of their own familiar 'pat' 
 Others cannot, or believe they cannot, 
 walk home except through certain custom^ 
 
2 2 Dante Gabriel Rossetti 
 
 prescribed streets, yea, and on a certain 
 side even of those streets. If we touch 
 a post or a rail with our swinging hand 
 this morning the sun of to-morrow will 
 probably see us touch it again. Such 
 is the tendency of each nature towards 
 itself — shutting out other natures until 
 either slow revealings or sudden Saul- 
 like conversions let in light. Many there 
 must be to whom Rossetti's light is some- 
 thing to exasperate their darkness, and 
 something can be urged on their side 
 of course. If an artist or poet lives in 
 a remote Italian period when he breathes 
 in the English nineteenth century ; if he 
 glances back whilst others are looking 
 about and before them ; if he poises 
 above dim memories trying to vivify 
 
His Work and Influence. 
 
 them whilst the people, his audience, 
 grapple hand and brain with tangible 
 and very realistic facts — the artist or 
 poet must not complain of neglect, or feel, 
 with too much pride, their ignorance. 
 His dreamings would not keep the life 
 in those who, by their necessary devotion 
 to the world, make his dreaming at all 
 possible, for even your divine poet and 
 painter would soon collapse without his 
 daily supply of wheat. 
 
 Rossetti's subjects and their treatment 
 then, it must be admitted, are foreign to 
 common sympathies, his .type of beauty 
 is rather eccentric, and his manner unde- 
 niably mannered. His is not so much 
 the beauty of Nature, or of Art in the 
 abstract, as the beauty of an art — a craft 
 
24 Dante Gabriel Rossetti 
 
 self-specialised by his conceptions and 
 executions. This artist always seems to 
 have been conscious of doing this special- 
 ised art. We see very little of the man 
 carried away by and in his subject, 
 bringing it to a fervent issue by any 
 means within reach, but we see the artist 
 coolly selecting his deliberations, painting 
 them in, painting them out, making one 
 conception the tomb of another, and 
 giving the world what infinite conscious- 
 ness gave him. So it comes about 
 that the delight in Rossetti's pictures is 
 more delicately aesthetic (to use a dis- 
 torted and burlesqued word) than vigor- 
 ously emotional ; more the result of an 
 affectation than an approach to nature, and 
 requiring a glossary of almost obsolete cul- 
 
His Work and Influence. 
 
 ture so as to surround it with comprehen- 
 sion before it can be presented with any 
 entirety to the heart. The artistic or 
 emotional appeal is thus not direct, but 
 through avenues of what the majority of 
 people regard as so much superfluous train- 
 ing, and that appeal to the extent of the in- 
 difference or ignorance of these people is 
 therefore impeded. To persons whose 
 lives are more practical than symbolical 
 his symbolism would be oppressive. A 
 flower (or rather the phantom of a flower, 
 for even this bit of nature with Rossetti is 
 dreamy) is sometimes introduced on his 
 canvas or even on the frame of his picture. 
 To the initiated this flower speaks 
 parables ; to the ignorant (the many) it is 
 an obtrusive enigma perpetually saying 
 
26 Dante Gabriel Rossetti 
 
 ' Guess !' With him a shell is not a shell 
 only, or a bird a bird; they are hieroglyphics 
 which even some of his admirers cannot 
 interpret. They accept the signs in faith, 
 and worship accordingly. His pictures 
 not only require titles but foot-notes, 
 and recognising this fact the artist has 
 more than once called upon himself as the 
 poet for an explanatory sonnet, which too 
 in its turn requires certain mental annota- 
 tion before it can be understood, and even 
 tben with a distant grey indefiniteness. 
 Is not this old-time symbolism a weakness 
 in the speech of the artist ? It may be 
 in unity with the period he affected, but 
 regarding his work as a communication 
 between man and man is not the symbol- 
 ism an outside aid which the weak rather 
 
His Work and Infltience. / 2 7 
 
 than the strong in speech would be likely 
 to employ ? While it has the aspect of 
 learning, it also hints at least a want of 
 expressional power. J His symbols are 
 really made to express what the character 
 in his picture by its simple existence 
 ought to express.) 
 
 By giving Love or Death or Memory a 
 separate expression in a plant, flower, or 
 a bird, he converts the character (the very 
 core of his subject) into a superior lay fig- 
 ure elaborately labelled with its attributes. 
 If the character representing an emotion 
 does not tell that emotion without the aid 
 of a symbol, which really becomes a 
 pictorial ticket, has not the artist failed in 
 the higher eloquence of art ? It would 
 seem so, and if one artist can fully depict 
 
28 Dante Gabriel Rossetti 
 
 an unmistakable emotion, and another only 
 half depict it, with the other half in a 
 symbolical accessory, which artist touches 
 the higher range of pictorial speech ? 
 Surely there can be little doubt. Ros- 
 setti's poems can speak without his 
 pictures, but very few of his pictures can 
 definitely speak without his or some- 
 body else's poems. In his poems he 
 may be as vividly imaginative as Cole- 
 ridge, but in his pictures he is as recon- 
 ditely fanciful as early tapestry. 
 
 Wonderful in colour and harmony, 
 beautiful in a peculiarly artificial or hot- 
 house beauty though the works be, they 
 lack readable expression. They do not so 
 much depict a feeling or a thought as 
 Feeling or Thought, and of course those 
 
His Work and Influence. 29 
 
 within his temple may say ' Lo ! an 
 achievement worthy our Priest. Your 
 painter gives us commonplace definite- 
 ness, but our Artist — ah, he is as vague 
 as feeling in music, allowing each heart 
 to interpret as it may.' 
 
 For whatever reason Rossetti did not 
 exhibit his pictures, the very fact that he 
 did not, and that he held himself aloof 
 from Society, provoked the interest of 
 wonderment. People most like to see 
 that from which they are most prohibited, 
 and mystery only intensifies the desire. 
 Rossetti was mysterious simply because 
 amid notoriety-hunting people, he who 
 could command more than mere noto- 
 riety declined it apparently not even 
 with thanks. It is said that the missing 
 
30 Dante Gabriel Rosseth 
 
 part of a newspaper will concern a woman 
 more than any other part, and so the unex- 
 hibited pictures of a (to them) mysteriously 
 retiring artist have come to concern those 
 who seek the paragraph chit-chat of 
 journals, and so help to blow that bubble of 
 people's lips called ' fame.' In the present 
 case the artist happened to be the most 
 influential of the much-talked-of Brother- 
 hood which in due course won the 
 enthusiasm of John Ruskin, who stood 
 by or for them because their keynote of 
 moral sincerity struck a chord in his easily 
 vibrated nature. The artist also happened 
 to be an actually scribing poetical poet, and 
 could suggest interest in the labours of his 
 brush through the point of his pen. He 
 also happened in time to have, as a result 
 
His Work and /nflucncc. 3 1 
 
 of his greatness, an inner circle of worship- 
 ping and influential friends who could at 
 odd moments whet the public appetite for 
 some unforthcoming work of their caged 
 genius. He likewise had an outer circle 
 of admirers who spoke of him and his 
 work in superlatives, or pantomimed in- 
 expressibles of admiration. He was a 
 character, passed a singular life, had a 
 house in Cheyne Walk, and so rubbed 
 brick-and-mortar shoulders with Carlyle 
 and George Eliot. Tales were told (as 
 tales are told) of him and his seclusive 
 personality, and even the name of royalty 
 was embroidered about the border of his 
 eccentricity. True or untrue, these wink- 
 ings and noddings, these outside sput- 
 terings sputtered by ungreat people to 
 
Dante Gabriel Rossetti 
 
 assume greatness ; these buzzings of flies 
 about the eyelashes of the basking cow, be- 
 came belief, and therefore became a hypo- 
 thetical Rossetti if not the real one. Thus 
 there grew about Rossetti's name the halo 
 of mystery. It came to be understood 
 by those near the outer circles, and then 
 by others outside these again, that he was 
 a retiring power in the world, influencing 
 (in what very few knew, though the many 
 believed) influencing more than those who 
 declared themselves in academies and gal- 
 leries. It is said he was a brilliant talker, 
 influential, his personality infusing, and 
 those about consciously or unconscious- 
 ly caught and conveyed it in things they 
 said and wrote. His pictures were not 
 only purchased and made household 
 
His Work and Influence. 33 
 
 specialities of, but ladies have wrought 
 his singular circular initials into the centre 
 of antimacassars, and other similar things. 
 Even the central ornamentation of a brass 
 fire-grate is a perforated ' D.G.R.', to bear 
 witness to the deep admiration of the man 
 whose pictures looked out from the walls 
 of almost every room of the same house. 
 A man who could excite this practical 
 kind of admiration was assuredly not of 
 the commonplace order, and this anti- 
 macassar ritual of worship indicates to those 
 who are outside either the inner or outer 
 circles, the actuality of his permeating 
 influence. Perhaps, like Coleridge, he in- 
 fluenced others to do far more in actual 
 bulk than he did himself, much though 
 that was. His cast-ofF hints were pro- 
 
34 Dante Gabriel Rossettt 
 
 bably taken up and made into apparently 
 new garments — canvases with new names, 
 books with new bindings and titles. 
 
 Probably none of the artists who formed 
 the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood were sur- 
 prised at its incoherence. It may have 
 been, indeed was, something more than the 
 love of a mere name, such as Coleridge's 
 love of the name Susquehanna, around 
 which he perhaps formed ideals that the 
 possibilities of life have not yet revealed. 
 The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was 
 something more than a name, but it was 
 certainly not more logical than the forma- 
 tion of Social Arcadias such as even Cole- 
 ridge, Emerson, and Hawthorne contem- 
 plated — social arcadias that would con- 
 tinue in everlasting righteous unity, and do 
 
His Work and Influence. 35 
 
 away with the moral necessity of a future 
 heaven to balance the immoral exigencies 
 of the present earth. The artistic varie- 
 ties that have since sprung from those 
 who formed the Brotherhood show the 
 heterogeneous materials they were trying 
 to work into the one pattern. If it be 
 said in extenuation of the desertions, ' But 
 see how this artist or that one deviated,' 
 the reply is that human nature has a trick 
 of deviating, and of leaving first principles 
 behind. Human nature during all the 
 bygone ages of mutation has perhaps 
 lost the power to be alphabetically faith- 
 ful to them, or men, being heteroptical, 
 see first principles differently, and as 
 each will think of each, falsely. The 
 Brotherhood, or rather the Cousinhood, 
 
36 Dante Gabriel Rossetti 
 
 for the relationship became somewhat 
 distant, has done wonderful, if in some 
 cases eccentric, things. It made artists 
 pause. They hesitated and considered. 
 Before committing themselves and the 
 world to any more variegated canvas, 
 they asked, with various degrees of per- 
 sonal seriousness, ' Have we anything 
 worth committing, and if so, in what 
 manner, on what principle ?' Instead of 
 spawning prematurely, they abided their 
 time, and nursed their offspring with 
 something like affection. Instead of paint- 
 ing yards of canvas, as though the whole 
 planet were to be converted into a dio- 
 rama for all the suns, moons, and stars 
 to gaze i:\pon, they practically remem- 
 bered that wall-space was limited, that 
 
His Work and Influence. 3 7 
 
 every obtainable pot of paint was not to 
 be picturised, and that art was something 
 more than a habit which became every 
 man, time, place, and thing. There was 
 an economical silence observed until they 
 had something to say, which something 
 they said with all the more learning 
 because of the silence. We are told that 
 the Brotherhood was formed, that the 
 pause was made to inculcate their funda- 
 mental principle of Direct Study from 
 Nature herself, unfettered by the conven- 
 tionalities of the antique and the aca- 
 demies. We are to understand from the 
 Germ that they also avowed a Moral 
 Purpose. These intentions contrasted 
 with actual results are difficult to under- 
 stand. Here are two statements, and 
 
38 Dante Gabriel Rossetti 
 
 there appear to be two contradictions, 
 (i) The men who are said to have most 
 obstinately clung to that fundamental 
 principle (of direct study from nature) 
 apparently discarded nature, and wove 
 themselves within a second-nature of Art. 
 Few men show the presence of Art more 
 emphatically than the men who have 
 followed in the track of the school. 
 They appear, at least, to work with the 
 belief that Art, as Art, should declare 
 itself, make itself manifest, and mark 
 a distinct line between itself and nature. 
 Instead of pursuing direct study from 
 nature, present nature, human and other- 
 wise, until the object pursued, caught, and 
 reproduced aggravates the beholder with 
 ecstatic recognition, they pursue a nature 
 
His Work and Influence 39 
 
 so far removed from most people that it 
 is not a nature but an artificial assumption 
 on the tip of the imagination, going far 
 away into a period, climate, and manner 
 which cannot be re-lived, though fol- 
 lowers do put on mockeries of its gar- 
 ments and read the alliterations of pet 
 poets. This is the general impression 
 of people who grip 1882 with their right 
 hand, and endeavour to reach back to the 
 (to them) indefinite asceticisms in the 
 (to them) undatable past (2) The men 
 who started out with moral motives have 
 nurtured Art, and have let the moralities 
 take care of themselves. The Brotherhood 
 Boat in fact swamped because the timbers 
 parted, each Brother clutching hold of 
 a floatable bit — Rossetti apparently taking 
 
40 Dante Gabriel Rossetti 
 
 possession of the rudder. These men in 
 fact had first to learn to talk before they 
 could preach. They were like a cater- 
 pillar that might conceive the idea of 
 being a butterfly without first undergoing 
 the natural imprisonment of a chrysalis. 
 
 But now that the Butterfly has come 
 there are many to whom it assumes some 
 of the beauties, but particularly some of 
 the grotesquenesses of the dragon-fly. 
 It is strange, out of the ken of their every- 
 day ordinary field-fly observation, and 
 all the more embarrassing because of its 
 transformations, for there are nice dis- 
 tinctions between Rossetti and Mr. 
 Burne-Jones. The latter will now pro- 
 bably lead where the former left oif, 
 bearing little or no allegiance to the 
 
His Work and Influence. 4 1 
 
 original codes, and following on that 
 course of his which has both confounded 
 and gratified. He, too, has been strange, 
 hieroglyphical to the majority. Gratified 
 though they have been with something, 
 they have only been taken into partial 
 confidence, and the artist, busy with his 
 fancy, has left them floundering with their 
 facts. What, may now be asked, is the 
 secret of the strangeness of the new head 
 Master ? That secret is concealed, it may 
 be suggested, in the casket of his motive. 
 Given the key to that and the mystery 
 seems plain even to ordinary eyes ; but 
 not given it, the blindfolded mind, biased 
 in other and more commonplace direc- 
 tions, may wander about within its won- 
 dering, and never find a loophole through 
 
42 Dante Gabriel Rossetti 
 
 which to leap and discern what to it 
 
 seemeth the chief thing — namely, common 
 
 sense. The motive would now seem to 
 
 be the old Greek one and that of the 
 
 German ascetics — the pursuit of the 
 
 beautiful; but the result of that motive, 
 
 the ridiculed eccentricity of the school, 
 
 is very much due to the source from 
 
 which that beauty has been got. There 
 
 is beauty and beauty (it needs no ghost, 
 
 etc.), and the wandering unapostolic 
 
 apostle of Pre-Raphaelite codes has fallen 
 
 upon a beauty so old that it is new to 
 
 the minds which look no farther than 
 
 a circumference of inches around them. 
 
 Paint a glass, or a kettle, or a flower, 
 
 or a cow, or a shell so vividly that a 
 
 child might think it could lift, smell 
 
His Work and Influence. 43 
 
 or drive ; paint an English landscape 
 or sea-scape so naturally that the 
 beholder could walk i' the sun there 
 or feel the breeze from the fresh waves, 
 and there is some sort of understood 
 satisfaction for that class of people who 
 buy catalogues to know the titles of 
 even these every-day things. These 
 creatures are not wholly satisfied to see 
 before them a nameless transcript from 
 the realm of nature. They want to 
 know the place, the spot, and all the 
 more satisfaction is there if they can say 
 ' See ! the very stile we sat on at 
 Hastings ; the very path near the chine 
 at Shanklin; the very, yes, the very 
 same cliff at Scarborough, as real as life. 
 And oh, see the donkeys !' 
 
44 Dante Gabriel Rosseth 
 
 Give, instead of these, an illustration 
 to a line from Morris or Swinburne (very 
 much talked of but very little read by 
 these people), in which some far-off, long- 
 since-buried, and for-evermore-impossible 
 creatures have pictorial resurrection ; clad 
 in really beautiful garbs ; standing, sitting, 
 or poising in dreamily graceful attitudes ; 
 playing instruments not heard by modern 
 ears ; awaiting the approach of imagined 
 knight or knights seen through the lacery 
 of a doorway or window ; maidens look- 
 ing listless and lethargic ; gazing, but 
 apparently seeing nothing, like a girl's 
 eyes open ere the brain is awake ; 
 breathing, but with the imperceptible 
 breath of a trance ; smiling (when — oh 
 epoch ! — they do) the smile of the 
 
His Work and Influence. 45 
 
 smileless ; and altogether living the life 
 one would expect to find in the heaven- 
 most region of purgatory — given an 
 illustration such as this to an unfamiliar 
 and naturally foreign subject, and your 
 home-kettle-recognising connoisseurs smile 
 and show their dog-tooth, sneer the 
 unwordable wisdom of their experience 
 of life and art, pass on to the next land- 
 scape, sea-scape, or sunset, and on the 
 following Wednesday learnedly enjoy 
 one of Mr. Du Maurier's cartoons ; make 
 a humorous observation about the next 
 imitation sunflower ; see ' Patience ' (or 
 rather half see it, for they cannot grasp 
 its double drift), and conclude that they 
 have conclusively solved the riddle — yea 
 though they cannot see that their own 
 
46 Dante Gabriel Rossetti 
 
 walls are the more beautiful, their 
 daughters more elegant for the move- 
 ment of which this pictorial mysticism 
 is only a part. They cannot see that 
 in this offshoot from the Pre-Raphaelite 
 body there is an earnest desire to seize 
 and nurture beauty. Not the robust yet 
 serene beauty of the Greeks or the 
 flesh-and-blood beauty of the English, 
 but beauty nevertheless, and the period 
 is gradually growing to see that it is so. 
 
 This beauty has its weakness and even 
 its eccentricities. It has these, because 
 ideal, poetical, abstract though it be, it 
 bears the impress of its ascetic source, 
 and the impress of the physical frailties 
 and the artistic childhood of the artists. 
 To speak without confounding modesty 
 
His Work and Influence. 47 
 
 (and after all a man's system — his brain, 
 heart, liver, nerves — is the artist), this 
 hew beauty, signalised in the first instance 
 perhaps by Rossetti, has the impress 
 of hypochondriacal natures expressing 
 themselves in paint-and-brush soliloquies. 
 There may be more healthy natures at 
 the same work, but they assume hypo- 
 chondriacy if they have it not. Much 
 in the same way, healthy holiday people 
 visit Matlock. They become so seasoned 
 to bath-chairs and crutches that they take 
 to vehicles and sticks, and think tenderly 
 of themselves. On the other hand, when 
 we walk behind a dragoon guard we 
 almost unconsciously fit our shoulders to 
 his back. 
 
 While the works of these imitated men 
 
48 Dante Gabriel Rossetti 
 
 are beautiful in a more subtle sense than 
 we have been accustomed to, they are to 
 those who can see beyond the brush and 
 paint, the expression of poetical, one- 
 sided, physically- tender natures. If these 
 natures had been turned to the world's 
 work to forge iron instead of painting 
 pictures, they would have been distin- 
 guished at intricate wrought-iron tracery 
 rather than at roof-supporting girders ; 
 if masonry, at the capitals rather than 
 the columns; if wood-work, rather at 
 pedestal and bracket carving than at 
 joists and beams ; and if there were no 
 severe masters about they would forge 
 the iron, cut the stone, and carve the wood, 
 not for any common utilitarian purpose 
 but for the beautiful result of the forging, 
 
His Work and Injluence. 49 
 
 cutting, and carving alone. Some ob- 
 servers have professed to see in Rossetti's 
 and Mr. Burne- Jones's pictures an embodi- 
 ment of the world-weariness, and an 
 expression of the fag-end of the lusts of 
 the flesh of this period ; but whatever 
 there may be in their work answering to 
 this theory, it is probably related only in 
 the resemblance. 
 
 These men then have stepped out of 
 the home demands, and have not even 
 gone to what has been regarded as the 
 head-centre of beauty — Greece — but they 
 have propelled their own pale cast of 
 thought into the asceticism of Italy, 
 mingled them both, and brought forth a 
 new variation. As the sonnet was (let it 
 be supposed) imported into England by 
 
 D 
 
50 Dante Gabriel Rossetti 
 
 Sir Thomas Wyatt, and naturalised by 
 Spenser and Shakspere with the result of 
 varied treatments of the same form, so 
 Rossetti and those who have followed and 
 are following with various degrees of 
 independence, are naturalising the medi- 
 aeval spirit of beauty, running the old 
 form through another variety of detail. 
 So it comes that even if these men give 
 us a Venus, a Psyche, a Hamlet, or an 
 Ophelia, they ignore the traditions of form 
 we have been accustomed to, and go to an- 
 other tradition of form and give us a Venus, 
 a Psyche, a Hamlet, and an Ophelia 
 with the shadows of the cloisters on their 
 pale faces. Mr. Burne-Jones may insist 
 that he has the same right to go to Italy 
 for his form and feeling as Sir Frederick 
 
His Work and Influence. 5 1 
 
 Leigh ton has to go to Greece for his. So 
 he has. He could go to the Boers, or 
 Zulus, or Esquimaux with perfect indisput- 
 able right if his sense of beauty dictated 
 it, but in the end it all resolves itself into 
 this — Which form expresses or reflexes 
 the ultimate majority of humanity ? With 
 art as with pigeons, monkeys, and flowers, 
 the fittest, the strongest, will survive, and 
 if in centuries hence the men and women 
 respond as faithfully to us as we feel that 
 we respond to the men and women of 
 Homer and Shakspere, there is evidently 
 a very precarious life for the shadowy 
 revivals of mediaeval beauty — unless, in- 
 deed, the physical decay of humanity sets 
 in, and men grow to express themselves 
 and to see themselves expressed in the 
 
52 Dante Gabriel Rossetti 
 
 pictorial language or delineation of that 
 decay. If this be so, if nervous, hypo- 
 chondriacal, moody natures in time be- 
 come the predominating type of creature 
 inhabiting the globe whose gradual dying 
 they portend, if there "are no arctic ex- 
 plorations, no steam hammers, no heroic 
 dealings with land and sea, no enthusiasm 
 in the world as it then is, but a dreamy 
 interest in what was and what is to be ; 
 if but frail progenies then come forth 
 from human love, and there are no re- 
 sources to keep men's shoulders square, 
 their lungs full, and their hearts firm 
 in beat — if this should come to pass, 
 art will bear the impress of it, and the 
 Anglo- Italian feeling will prevail over the 
 more vigorous Anglo-Greek. If this 
 
His Work and Influence. 53 
 
 should not be (and we will credit the 
 world with an American, Indian, African, 
 and Australian source or two yet). What, 
 may be asked, is likely to be the result 
 of this movement in art and literature 
 which has been growing for the past 
 twenty years, and has now almost become 
 of age ? The movement, ridiculed though 
 it has been, is undoubtedly one of those 
 zig-zag angular movements by which a 
 cart mounts a hill, or a vessel tricks 
 an unfavourable wind into its favour. 
 There is no avoiding this stage of 
 advance as though the advance had not 
 been attained by it. The movement has 
 become too much of our daily life even 
 to the extent of furnishing the stage, 
 papering our walls, carpeting our floors, 
 
54 Dante Gabriel Rossetti 
 
 shaping and colouring our dresses, chairs, 
 cups and saucers, and fire-irons. This aim 
 for an eccentric kind of beauty along with 
 the more ordinary aims of others, has 
 drawn attention to all beauty, so that 
 decorations from the Japanese and around 
 by India and Greece are now house- 
 hold influences. Let us concentrate, how- 
 ever, upon the current school of Art that 
 makes beauty and imagination its main 
 pursuit, and which seems to have had its 
 fountainhead in Rossetti. The advance 
 movement on the highroad of art taken by 
 this school is undoubtedly in colour and 
 detail. The Greeks nurtured form to the 
 neglect of colour, perhaps because, as it 
 is said, they had not a corresponding 
 perception of it. The new modern school 
 
His Work and Influence. 5 5 
 
 nurtures colour to the neglect of form, per- 
 haps because it has not a corresponding 
 grasp of it. More subtle, delicate, indeed 
 almost new harmonies have been woven 
 and interwoven by the Pre-Raphaelites. 
 Pictorial art has approached nearer music 
 than ever. We can see the relationship 
 between the harmony of the one and the 
 harmony of the other, see the discords, 
 and indeed discern in some of the ad- 
 vanced pictures points of colour corre- 
 sponding to tones and semi-tones. Mr. 
 Whistler with his Nocturnes, Symphonies, 
 and Studies has woiked upon a Truth 
 in art, but with too much emphasis. He 
 has made that which should be secondary, 
 primary. He has gathered the composi- 
 tion that should have been distributed 
 
56 Dante Gabriel Rossetti 
 
 over a picture into a point — ignoring 
 picture and specialising paint. Never- 
 theless there is truth in his experiments ; 
 and those experiments are an epitome of 
 the tendency of this age towards a higher 
 perception of colour. As the bee, the 
 highest of insects, selects for its honey 
 the most advanced colour in flowers 
 (blue) ; so we, the highest of animals, 
 have a like perception for the advance in 
 the beauty of colour in art and nature. 
 
 The Pre-Raphaelites and their follow- 
 ers have done much for the colour sense, 
 but certainly not all. The advance of 
 general pictorial art has contributed 
 its share of influence in the same way 
 as the general movement of the sea 
 helps to give impetus to the one breaker 
 
His Work and Influence. 5 7 
 
 which mounts and gives new glory to 
 the cliffs. This keener appreciation of 
 colour, however, is seen in other arts, 
 and it is difficult, if at all possible, 
 to strictly define where influence and 
 counter-influence begin and end. For 
 example, we have colour predominating 
 over form in the advanced school of 
 music. Wagner has imparted new 
 beauties of harmony and colour more 
 subtle than the old. He has caught 
 the abstract beauty of passion and the 
 universe, and depicted it in elaborate 
 musical colour and detail. Haydn and 
 Mozart painted us pastorals akin to 
 the landscape movement in the painter's 
 art, but first Beethoven and then Wagner 
 soared away from the localism of the 
 
58 Dante Gabriel Rossetti 
 
 pastoral, poised above the land, sea, and 
 humanity, and gave us the abstract of 
 a world's beauty and passion with such 
 subtle musico-colour as finds relationship 
 in the colour of the Pre-Raphaelites. 
 Like the Pre-Raphaelites, Wagner is also 
 deficient in grasp of form. The marked 
 tendency of the stage in recent years 
 has been and still is towards special 
 artistic effect, the Lyceum being another 
 Grosvenor gallery, and Mr. Henry Irving 
 another Mr, Burne-Jones. Mr. Irving is 
 in every respect a Pre-Raphaelite (using 
 this word in its ill-used sense), and it 
 is surprising how near Mr. Rossetti in 
 one of his pictures has approached in 
 outward form, manner, and feeling, the 
 great actor's picture of Hamlet. Mr. 
 
His Work and Influence. 59 
 
 Irving loves to detailise Shakspere's 
 text. He loves to have it archaeologically 
 illustrated on the stage — every garb 
 true, every scene as beautiful as advanced 
 upholstery can make it ; and yet (even 
 his warmest supporters will surely admit 
 it), like the artists of the Pre-Raphaelite 
 studios, like Wagner, like Whistler in 
 his colour studies, Mr. Irving is crude in 
 grasping the beauty of form. 
 
 To see the relationship still more 
 vividly we have only to note how 
 related Mr. Irving's detailed art is 
 to the old-style tragic actor's solid 
 and firm elocutionary form, and how 
 there is a parallel contrast between Mr. 
 Burne- Jones's work, and that of the 
 conventionally classic school. Even Mr. 
 
6o Dante Gabriel Rossetti 
 
 Swinburne, brilliant though he is in form, 
 is often overcome by his musical and 
 pictorial colour, and revels in it, apparently 
 for its own sake. Mr. William Morris 
 has too keen a sense of symmetry and 
 unity to neglect or encroach upon form 
 with colour or to be even weak in form 
 itself, and this is borne out by the beau- 
 tiful roundness, the clear gentle growth 
 and completeness of his stories ; still 
 Mr. Morris joins the general tendency 
 of this period, and is a colourist, but of an 
 exquisitely delicate and sensitive order, 
 as though to him colour is form ; or, to 
 use a simile, as though colour is the 
 conscience of form ; or yet another, 
 as though colour is emotion, and form 
 thought. 
 
His Work and Infiueuce. 6 1 
 
 The influences indicated may not 
 much increase at their source, but what 
 already exists will spread and infuse 
 imagination, fancy, ideality — in short, 
 poetry, where hitherto it has been absent, 
 and whilst the good results will prevail, 
 the affected fopperies of fraudulent imi- 
 tators must pass away, having, in their 
 negative fashion, drawn attention to the 
 reality which they themselves but cari- 
 catured. 
 
 Much could be said upon Rossetti's 
 poems, but the designed limit of this 
 survey will not admit of their considera- 
 tion here. 
 
 Rossetti's devotion (this of him is an 
 apt term) to art has probably been un- 
 exampled in modern times, and it almost 
 
62 Dante Gabriel Rossetti 
 
 amounted to a bigoted obstinacy of 
 secular faith. Living as he did a life 
 of pains and penalties, and dying with 
 the gathering music of praise about his 
 ears, there was surely pathos in that early 
 end which came irrevocably sure and 
 slow. We would have had him patri- 
 archal with the chants of continents to 
 sooth the inevitably waning days. Re- 
 membering his devotion and labour we 
 would have had — but it was not so and 
 could not be, for nature and death have 
 no etiquette conformable with fame's 
 vanity. Rossetti went to the sea to sub- 
 mit his deferred obedience to nature, but 
 it sufficed not. He went to the open to 
 breathe its air, but the air like a breath 
 inhaled his life away. 
 
His Work and Influence. 63 
 
 Born in London in May 1828, Dante 
 Gabriel Rossetti died at Birchington-on- 
 Sea, Kent, on the 9th of April 1882, 
 and was buried at the Parish Church, 
 Birchington. 
 
Cornell University Library 
 ND 497.R82T59 
 
 Dante Gabriel RossettI, his work and ln( 
 
 3 1924 008 750 022