Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 20.djvu/892

858 ROSSETTI in the 18th could banish from the dreams of man, as we see in even such juvenile work as the pen and ink drawings of Gretchen in the Chapel, and Genevieve. In that great rebellion against the renascence of classicism which (after working much good and much harm) resulted in 18th-century materialism, in that great movement of man's soul which may be appropriately named " the Kenascence of the Spirit of Wonder in Poetry and Art " he became the acknowledged protagonist before ever the pre-Eaphaelite brotherhood was founded and down to his last breath at Birchington. And 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. It is not only in such masterpieces of his maturity as Dante's Dream, La Pia, &c., but in such early designs as How they Met Themselves, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, Cassandra, &c., that Rossetti shows how important a figure he is in the history of modern art, if modern art claims to be anything more than a mechanical imitation of the facts of nature. For if there is any permanent vitality in the Renascence of Wonder in modern Europe if it is not a mere passing mood if it is really the inevitable expression of the soul of man in a certain stage of civilization (when the sanc- tions 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 does 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 imi- tation, prosaic acceptance, pseudo-classicism, and domestic materialism 1 or was his apparent sympathy with the temper of wonder, reverence, and awe the result of artistic en- vironment dictated to him by other and more powerful and original souls around him 1 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, because we should then be driven to place some of the disciples of Rossetti above our great realistic painters, and we should be driven to place a poet like the author of The Excursion and The Prelude beneath a poet like the author of The Queen's Wake- but we do say that, other things being equal or anything like equal, a painter or poet of our time is to be judged very much by his sym- pathy with that great movement which we call the Renas- cence of Wonder call it so because the word romanticism never did express it even before it had been vulgarized by French poets, dramatists, doctrinaires, and literary harle- quins. 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 Stael, 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 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 Herder cleverly simulated the old romantic feeling, the "beautifully devotional feeling" which Holinan Hunt speaks of, Rossetti was steeped in it : he was so full of the old frank childlike wonder and awe which pre- ceded 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, <fec., we have to turn to the sister art of t 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 efflorescence of the poetry of wonder and mystery to such ballads as the " Demon Lover," to Coleridge's " Christa- bel" 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 apprehen- sion 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 Scddmdn and Absal of Jami), 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. Not that it is possible here to give a chronological catalogue of Rossetti's pictures. Moreover this has been already done in great measure by Mr William Sharp, Mr W. M. Rossetti, and others. We shall only dwell upon a few of those which most strongly indicate the course his genius took. In all of them, however, 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 imagina- tions (even upon the corporeal senses) of others. It was as early as 1849 that Rossetti exhibited in the so-called Free Exhibition the Girlhood of the Virgin, one of the most beautiful and characteristic of all his works. He scarcely ever exhibited again in London, though just before his death his largest and most ambitious picture, Dante's Dream, was exhibited at Liverpool. Then came, in 1850, The Germ, that short-lived maga- zine of four numbers upon which so much has of late been written. If The Germ was really " an official manifesto- or apologia of pre-Raphaelitism," all that it had to preach was the noble doctrine of the sacredness, the saving grace, of conscience in art. In it appeared Rossetti's poem the "Blessed Damozel," the prose poem "Hand and Soul" (written as early as 1848), six sonnets, and four lyrics, but none of his designs, though two illustrations had been prepared and discarded on account of their unsatisfactory condition when reproduced. Like the other contributors to The Germ Rossetti had a belief that can only be called passionate in the value of subject in art. For some years his fecundity as a designer was called into astonishing activity, but not always in the field of wonder and poetic mystery. The artist who had had the strongest influence upon Rossetti's early tastes was Madox Brown, whose genius, dramatic and historic, has at length obtained