William Michael Rossetti

“ Of this last painter, although on the whole he did not get much from him, Guido was a particular admirer; he used to say that he would rather have been Paul Veronese than any other master—Paul was more nature than art. The “Aurora” is beyond doubt a work of pre-eminent beauty and attainment; it is stamped with pleasurable dignity, and, without being effeminate, has a more uniform aim after graceful selectness than can readily be traced in previous painters, greatly superior though some of them had been in impulse and personal fervour of genius. ”

“ While Perugino, though by no means stationary or unprogressive as an executive artist, was working contentedly upon the old lines and carrying out the ancient conceptions, a mighty wave of new art flooded Florence with its rush and Italy with its rumour. Michelangelo, twenty-five years of age in 1500, following after and distancing Leonardo da Vinci, was opening men’s eyes and minds to possibilities of achievement as yet unsurmised. Vannucci in Perugia heard Buonarroti bruited abroad, and was impatient to see with his own eyes what the stir was all about. ”

“ Handled with marked fulness and breadth, and with a very painter-like choice of the tints of colour, the picture proves once again that Mr. Prinsep is well qualified to work on a large scale; having at command a fund of really pictorial material, on which he may draw with full stress of faculty, secure that it will not fail him at his need. As a matter of sentiment, the picture leaves a certain feeling of discontent; the impassivity of the woman is so extreme as to provoke one first with her and next with her impassioned adorer. But no doubt this is only what the artist intended. ”

“ Haydon began his first lecture on painting and design in 1835, and afterwards visited all the principal towns in England and Scotland. His delivery was energetic and imposing, his language powerful, flowing and apt, and replete with wit and humour; and to look at the lecturer, excited by his subject, one could scarcely fancy him a man overwhelmed with difficulties and anxieties. The height of Haydon’s ambition was to behold the chief buildings of his country adorned with historical representations of her glory. ”

“ The friends among us of constitutional liberty and of legality, the enemies of anarchy, the unseduced execrators of slavery, the upholders of the tie of brotherhood across the Atlantic, may well look back with shame to the time—and it was no matter of days or weeks, but a period of about four years together—when the loudest and most accepted voices in England exulted over the now ludicrously delusive proposition that the United States were a burst bubble, and slavery the irremovable corner-stone of an empire. ”

“ Keats arraigns philosophy, and its power of stripping things bare of their illusions. No doubt a poet has a right to treat a legend of this sort from such point of view as he likes; it is for him, and not for his reader, to take the bull by the horns. But it does look rather like taking the bull by the weaker horn to contend that the philosopher who saves a youthful disciple from the wiles of a serpent is condemnably prosaic—a grovelling spirit that denudes life of its poetry. ”

“ Something that one could see—that is his ideal, not something that one could narrate, still less that one could deduce and demonstrate. In his treatment of action or gesture the most constant peculiarity is the sway and swerve of his figures: they bend like saplings or rock like forest-boughs in a gale; stiffness or immobility was entirely foreign to his style, which has therefore little of the monumental or severe character. Perhaps he felt that there was no other way for combining “the colour of Titian with the design of Michelangelo.” ”

“ Pre-eminent inventive power or sublimity of intellect he never evinced. Even in energy of action and more especially in majesty or affluence of composition the palm is not his; it is (so far as concerns the Venetian school) assignable to Tintoretto. Titian is a painter who by wondrous magic of genius and of art satisfies the eye, and through the eye the feelings—sometimes the mind.
Titian’s pictures abound with memories of his home-country and of the region which led from the hill-summits of Cadore to the queen-city of the Adriatic. ”

“ Disease was sapping his vitals, pain wrung him, Death beckoned him with finger more and more imperative. Poetic fame became the vision of Tantalus, and love the clasp of Ixion.
Such was the life, or such the incipient death, of Keats, in the last twelvemonth of his brief existence.
For half a year prior to February 1820 he had been unrestful and cheerless. “Either that gloom overspread me,” so he wrote to James Rice, “or I was suffering under some passionate feeling, or, if I turned to versify, that exacerbated the poison of either sensation.” ”

“ Shelley was its prophet. As an iconoclast and an idealist he took the only position in which a poet could advantageously work as a reformer. To outrage his contemporaries was the condition of leading his successors to triumph and of personally triumphing in their victories. Shelley had the temper of an innovator and a martyr; and in an intellect wondrously poetical he united speculative keenness and humanitarian zeal in a degree for which we might vainly seek his precursor. We have already named ideality as one of his leading excellences. ”

“ Gainsborough was tall, fair and handsome, generous, impulsive to the point of capriciousness, easily irritated, not of bookish likings, a lively talker, good at repartee. He was a most thorough embodiment of the artistic temperament; delighting in nature and “the look of things,” insatiable in working, fond of music and the theatre hardly less than of painting—a warm, rich personality, to whom severe principle was perhaps as foreign as deliberate wrong-doing. ”

“ In his works the first quality which strikes one is their palatial splendour. The pictorial inspiration is entirely that of the piercing and comprehensive eye and the magical hand— not of the mind. The human form and face are given with decorous comeliness, often with beauty; but of individual apposite expression there is next to none. In fact, Paolo Veronese is pre-eminently a painter working pictorially, and in no wise amenable to a literary or rationalizing standard. ”

“ We see a manned boat and a wrecking ship upon the immense ocean, with its swirling drift blown across like a tongue of tormented flame; and huge volumes of grey cloud over the horizon, walling out from the sea the gorgeous dawn of a new day, on fire with the blaze of sunlight. The painting of the vast sea-surface is a very great effort of knowledge and mastery, and a very successful one. ”

“ Crivelli is a painter of marked individuality,—hard in form, crudely definite in contour; stern, forced, energetic, almost grotesque and repellent, in feature and expression, and yet well capable of a prim sort of prettiness; simply vigorous in his effect of detachment and relief, and sometimes admitting into his pictures objects actually raised in surface; distinct and warm in colour, with an effect at once harsh and harmonious. His pictures gain by being seen in half-light, and at some little distance; under favouring conditions they grip the spectator with uncommon power. ”

“ As a painter, Sir Charles Eastlake was gentle, harmonious, diligent and correct; lacking fire of invention or of execution; eclectic, without being exactly imitative; influenced rather by a love of ideal grace and beauty than by any marked bent of individual power or vigorous originality. ”

“ Another motive for siding against the North was the abstract hatred of war, which has grown to be a very widespread and genuine feeling in England—and, in my humble opinion, a most befitting and praiseworthy one,—active whenever we are in the position of outsiders, and overborne only when our own passions and real or supposed interests are involved. The great majority of the nation plunged headlong into the Russian War, and the grip of the British bull-dog's teeth upon his opponent was not easily loosed, even when good cause for loosing it appeared. ”

“ The eyes are large, dark and round; the grizzled hair close and compact. The face has been held to bear some resemblance to that of Michelangelo, but this does not go very far. Robusti appears also as one of the figures in the two vast pictures by Paul Veronese—the “Marriage in Cana” and the “Feast in the House of Levi.”
Audacious and intrepid, though not constantly correct, as a draughtsman, majestically great as a colourist, prodigious as an executant, Tintoret was as absolute a type of the born painter as the history of art registers or enables us to conceive. ”

“ From this point forwards nothing but misery remains to be recorded of John Keats. The narrative becomes depressing to write and depressing to read. The sensation is like that of being confined in a dark vault at noonday. One knows, indeed, that the sun of the poet’s genius is blazing outside, and that, on emerging from the vault, we shall be restored to light and warmth; but the atmosphere within is not the less dark and laden, nor the shades the less murky. ”

“ The upshot, to some critics, is, in the present Academy exhibition, a sense of no little dissatisfaction, mingled with unstinted recognition of telling and well-diffused ability. One perceives that many artists can now do a good deal, if they choose; but the more sound one sees the attainments of the painter himself to be, the less one is disposed to accept with implicit faith the rather cheap outcome of those attainments. Sketches may be excellent things, and they testify to the ready availability of the artist's gifts: but sketches magnified into pictures cloy upon one. ”

“ It is said that in painting one of the executioners the artist actually wrought himself into a passion, using threatening words and actions, and that Annibale Caracci, surprising him at that moment, embraced him, exclaiming with joy, ‘To-day, my dear Domenichino, thou art teaching me.’ So novel, and at the same time so natural, it appeared to him that the artist, like the orator, should feel within himself all that he is representing to others. ”

“ Still, this “new light" upon slavery was received more or less fully by only a very few minds, as compared with the general mass of British conviction,—a few thorough-going believers in Carlyle, a few hardy and open-minded speculators, hardly more, perhaps, in all, than those who would join Mr. John Stuart Mill in saying that the right form of Parliamentary suffrage is universal suffrage, open to women as well as men. No ordinary English newspaper would have thought of professing at that time, nor any ordinary English reader of tolerating, the theory that slavery is right. ”

“ I have now gone through the principal points which appear to me to identify Keats as a man, and to throw light upon his character and habits. He entered on life high-spirited, ardent, impulsive, vehement; with plenty of self-confidence, ballasted with a large capacity (though he did not always exercise it to a practical result) for self-criticism; longing to be a poet, and firmly believing that he could and would be one; resolute to be a man—unselfish, kindly, and generous. ”

“ On the other hand, his paintings are never either languid or cold. His figures are full of life and earnestness, and seem to have an object in view which they follow with rigid intensity. Like Rubens he excelled in the art of setting his figures in motion. Though the lofty and terrible was his proper sphere, Fuseli had a fine perception of the ludicrous. The grotesque humour of his fairy scenes, especially those taken from A Midsummer-Night’s Dream, is in its way not less remarkable than the poetic power of his more ambitious works. As a colourist Fuseli has but small claims to distinction. ”

“ I am in a state at present in which woman, merely as woman, can have no more power over me than stocks and stones; and yet the difference of my sensations with respect to Miss Brawne and my sister is amazing. The one seems to absorb the other to a degree incredible. I seldom think of my brother and sister in America. The thought of leaving Miss Brawne is beyond everything horrible—the sense of darkness coming over me—I eternally see her figure eternally vanishing. Some of the phrases she was in the habit of using during my last nursing at Wentworth Place ring in my ears. Is there another life? ”

“ The artist has a certain streaky or gauzy touch which amounts to mannerism: here the handling and colour have almost a soupçon of Gainsborough. The bright face, the quiet lighting of the dusky-boarded room, and the untumbled white muslin dress, make up a picture in which elegant and artist-like taste verges upon quaintness. ”

“ His best works have beauty, great amenity, artistic feeling and high accomplishment of manner, all alloyed by a certain core of commonplace; in the worst pictures the commonplace swamps everything, and Guido has flooded European galleries with trashy and empty pretentiousness, all the more noxious in that its apparent grace of sentiment and form misleads the unwary into approval, and the dilettante dabbler into cheap raptures. Both in Rome and wherever else he worked he introduced increased softness of style, which was then designated as the modern method. ”

“ Rosa was a man of facile and versatile genius, and had by this time several strings to his bow. It is said that, still keeping painting steadily in view as his real objective, he resolved to secure attention first as a musician, poet, improvisatory and actor—his mother-wit and broad Neapolitan dialect (which appears to have stuck to him through life) standing him powerfully in stead. In the carnival he masqued as Formica and Capitan Coviello, and bustled about Rome distributing satirical prescriptions for diseases of the body and more particularly of the mind. ”

“ The worst of men are those whose self-interests are their passions; the next, those whose passions are their self-interest. Upon the whole, I dislike mankind. Whatever people on the other side of the question may advance, they cannot deny that we are always surprised at hearing of a good action, and never of a bad one.... If you were in England, I dare say you would be able to pick out more amusement from society than I am able to do. To me it is as dull as Louisville is to you. [Then follow several remarks on Hunt, Haydon, the Misses Reynolds, and Dilke.] ”

“ No great master is more dangerous than Correggio to his enthusiasts; round him the misdeeds of conventionalists and the follies of connoisseurs cluster with peculiar virulence, and almost tend to blind to his real and astonishing excellences those practitioners or lovers of painting who, while they can acknowledge the value of technique, are still more devoted to greatness of soul, and grave or elevated invention, as expressed in the form of art.
Correggio was the head of the school of painting of Parma, which forms one main division of the Lombardic school. ”

“ The emotion throughout is the emotion of beauty: beauty intensely perceived, [195] intensely loved, questioned of its secret like the sphinx, imperishable and eternal, yet haunted (as it were) by its own ghost, the mortal throes of the human soul. As no poet had more capacity for enjoyment than Keats, so none exceeded him in the luxury of sorrow. Few also exceeded him in the sense of the one moment irretrievable; but this conception in its fulness belongs to the region of morals yet more than of sensation, and the spirit of Keats was almost an alien in the region of morals. ”

“ As a painter, Fuseli had a daring invention, was original, fertile in resource, and ever aspiring after the highest forms of excellence. His mind was capable of grasping and realizing the loftiest conceptions, which, however, he often spoiled on the canvas by exaggerating the due proportions of the parts, and throwing his figures into attitudes of fantastic and over-strained contortion. ”

“ True, the Bacchante is in fact Diana herself; but of this Endymion knows nothing at all, and he deliberately—or rather with fatuous precipitancy—gives up the glorious goddess for the sentimental and beguiling wine-bibber. Diana, when she re-assumes her proper person, has not a word of reproach to level at him. This may possibly be true to the nature of a goddess—it is certainly not so to that of a woman; and it is the only crisis at which she shows herself different from womanhood—shall we say superior to it? ”

“ It lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated—it has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the virtuous philosopher delights the chameleon poet. It does no harm from its relish of the dark side of things, any more than from its taste for the bright one, because they both end in speculation. A poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence, because he has no identity: he is continually in for, and filling, some other body. ”

“ We see lovely or lovable souls clothed in bodies or corresponding loveliness, which are not only physically charming, but are so informed with the spirit within as to become one with that in movement and gesture. In these qualities of graceful naturalness, not heightened into the sacred or severe, and of joyous animation, in momentary smiles and casual living turns of head or limb, Correggio undoubtedly carried the art some steps beyond anything it had previously attained, and he remains to this day the unsurpassed or unequalled model of pre-eminence. ”

“ Leigh Hunt (born in 1784, and therefore Keats’s senior by some eleven years) is known to us all as a fresh and airy essayist, a fresh and airy poet, a liberal thinker in the morals both of society and of politics (hardly a politician in the stricter sense of the term) , a charming companion, a too-constant cracker of genial jocosities and of puns. He understood good literature both instinctively and critically; but was too full of tricksy mannerisms, and of petted byways in thought and style, to be an altogether safe associate for a youthful literary aspirant, whether as model or as Mentor. ”

“ Gainsborough and Reynolds rank side by side as the greatest portrait-painters of the English school. They were at variance; but Gainsborough on his death-bed sought and obtained a reconciliation. It is difficult to say which stands the higher of the two, although Reynolds may claim to have worked with a nearer approach to even and demonstrable excellence. In grace, spirit, and lightness of insight and of touch, Gainsborough is peculiarly eminent. ”

“ When I was a schoolboy I thought a fair woman a pure goddess; my mind was a soft nest in which some one of them slept, though she knew it not. I have no right to expect more than their reality. I thought them ethereal—above men; I find them perhaps equal—great by comparison is very small. Insult may be inflicted in more ways than by word or action. One who is tender of being insulted does not like to think an insult against another. I do not like to think insults in a lady’s company ”

“ What island do your friends propose retiring to? I should be happy to go with you there alone, but in company I should object to it: the backbitings and jealousies of new colonists, who have nothing else to amuse themselves, is unbearable. Mr. Dilke came to see me yesterday, and gave me a very great deal more pain than pleasure. I shall never be able any more to endure the society of any of those who used to meet at [52] Elm Cottage [8] and Wentworth Place. The last two years taste like brass upon my palate. If I cannot live with you, I will live alone. ”

“ It cannot be matured by law and precept, but by sensation and watchfulness in itself. That which is creative must create itself. In ‘Endymion’ I leaped headlong into the sea, and thereby have become better acquainted with the soundings, the quicksands, and the rocks, than if I had stayed upon the green shore and piped a silly pipe, and took tea and comfortable advice. I was never afraid of failure, for I would sooner fail than not be among the greatest. But I am nigh getting into a rant; so, with remembrances to Taylor and Woodhouse, &c., I am yours very sincerely,
“John Keats.” ”