J. Comyns Carr

“ But it remains, nevertheless, unquestionably true that during that brief season of close comradeship, the supremacy of Rossetti’s genius is very clearly reflected in the work of both. The aftergrowth of talents as great as—and in some respects greater than—his, led each of these men into ways of Art that owned, it may be freely confessed, no obligation to Rossetti; and of the rich gifts of Millais as a painter, extraordinary in their precocity and developed in increasing power almost to the end of his career, no one could exhibit keener or truer appreciation than Rossetti himself. ”

“ Very often on these occasions our talk was not directly concerned with painting at all, but strayed away into many worlds of the present or the past. As a painter every artist must stand or fall by his command of the particular aspect of beauty which can be rendered by that art, and by no other. If a picture fails, it is no excuse that its author is a poet. If a poet fails, it is idle to plead in his defence that he is an accomplished musician. What added burdens of the spirit the worker in any art chooses to carry, concerns himself alone ”

“ The embodiment of all those fiercer passions that are deemed to be most repugnant to the ideal of womanhood, and moved by a will that is deaf to the pleadings of humanity and inaccessible to the voice of eternal law, she is regarded as the evil genius of her husband, crushing by the weight of her stronger individuality the constant promptings of his better nature, and sweeping him with irresistible force into a bottomless abyss of crime. ”

“ And it was, indeed, a fitting tribute to the dead artist; for Tadema, while he lived, had an absolute passion for flowers. As a painter he would linger with untiring devotion over each separate petal of every separate bloom, and yet with such a sustained sense of mastery in the rendering of their beauty that when the result was complete the infinite mass of perfected detail was found to be firmly bound together by the controlling force of a single effect of light and shade. ”

“ And yet to us, who view the whole picture with the poet’s larger vision, the process of development moves in obedience to inevitable law. For at such a crisis it is natural in a man to anticipate: in a woman to remember; on the eve of action he looks forward with apprehension: on the morrow she looks back with regret; and while his nature is stronger in restraint, hers, on the contrary, surrenders itself more completely to the passion of remorse. [183] The finer moral feelings of a woman are retrospective, for her imagination feeds and broods upon the past. ”

“ It was therefore a delight to find in Rome in the spring of two years ago how enthusiastic was the welcome accorded to a man who, while he ranks so high among English painters, owned in his veins the blood of Italy and from whose painters, at that bewitching season when the spirit of the Renaissance was in its youth, he had drawn the inspiration which was destined to kindle his own genius. ”

“ They forgot that: forgot that something of a feminine, not an effeminate spirit enters into the re-creation of all forms of beauty; that an artist, by the very nature of his task, cannot always be in the mood to pose as an athlete. And, even if they had desired to define the special direction of Burne-Jones’s art, or to mark the limits of its exercise—limits that no admirer, however ardent, would seek to deny—they need not surely have been so angry. ”

“ There is hardly a remembered day on a Scotch loch, or beside a southern stream, which has not stamped upon it some unfading image of landscape beauty. It was not for that we set forth in the morning, for then the changing lights in a dappled sky counted for no more than a promise of good sport; during those earlier hours there is no feeling but a feeling of impatience to be at work; and the splash of a rising trout, before the rod is joined and ready and the line run through its rings, is heard with a sense of half-resentment lest we should have missed the favourable moment of the day. ”

“ And yet we see in them how strenuously, how resolutely, he set himself to wring from nature the vindication of his own design. There is no realist of them all who looked more persistently at life, who spared himself so little where patient labour might serve to perfect what he had in his mind to do; and if the treasure he bore away still left a rich store for others, it is because the house of beauty holds many mansions, and no man can hope to inhabit them all.
“A picture is a painted poem.” Like all definitions that pass the limits of barren negation it contains only half a truth. ”

“ His instinct was so sure, his sympathy so finely tuned, that he never missed his footing: his sense of harmony in friendship, as in art, so absolutely irreproachable, that he never struck a jarring note.
A great simplicity and generosity of nature lay, I think, at the root of the rare social charm he possessed. In all my recollections of our companionship I cannot recall a single ill-natured word towards friend or acquaintance, or any bitter criticism of a comrade in art. In another man such restraint might have seemed insipid: in his case it was instinctive and obviously sincere. ”

“ His imagination is thus both the source of inaction and the spur that urges him to morbid activity: it is at once the friend of conscience and its bitterest foe: at one moment the lamp that reveals to him his hideous design and all its attendant train of evil, in the next a lurid flame that lights up a thousand avenues of danger, only to be guarded by the exercise of a relentless cruelty and an unflinching courage. In nearly every utterance of Macbeth after the murder we are allowed to see how clearly he himself apprehends the danger of his position, and the sinister policy which it demands. ”

“ EDWARD BURNE-JONES
“I think Morris’s friendship began everything for me; everything that I afterwards cared for; we were freshmen together at Exeter. When I left Oxford I got to know Rossetti, whose friendship I sought and obtained. He is, you know, the most generous of men to the young. I couldn’t bear with a young man’s dreadful sensitiveness and conceit as he bore with mine. He taught me practically all I ever learnt; afterwards I made a method for myself to suit my nature. He gave me courage to commit myself to imagination without shame—a thing both bad and good for me. ”

“ The more violent forms of sport, which exact the devotion of a day, or of a series of days, require the enforced cessation of all forms of literary toil; but if the angler is fortunately located, work and play are by no means inconsistent and—granted that he is strong enough to resist during the earlier hours of the day the alluring call of the gentle south-west breeze with its alternating changes of sun and cloud—the morning may still hold him chained to his desk, sure of the reward of his industry in the evening ramble by the stream. ”

“ He, whose imagination had foreseen all the consequences of this initial step in crime, braces himself without hesitation to the completion of his fatal task; she, who had foreseen nothing, is thrown back upon the past, her dormant imagination now terribly alert, and picturing to her broken spirit all the horrors she had previously ignored. As the penalty of his crime is unresting action, her heavier doom is isolated despair; and it is significant to observe that it is she who suffers most acutely all the moral torments he had only anticipated for himself. ”

“ And yet, even here, the research for the recondite, either in the fact observed or in the phrase that fixed it, peeped out characteristically in the most careless fashion of his talk. He loved to signalise an old and abiding love of the outward world by some new token that found expression at once in language newly coined; and he would break away on a sudden from some long-drawn legend of a half-imaginary character that was often set in the frame of burlesque, to note, with a swift change to a graver tone, some passing aspect of the scene that challenged his admiration afresh. ”

“ But with this revolution is born a new kind of enjoyment, that carries richer recollections. The limitless world of illusion shrinks to a narrower kingdom, but its triumphs are more vivid and more enduring: the sense of assumption and disguise is no longer so complete or so convincing, but the message of revelation, when it comes, brings with it a higher pleasure.
Nothing lives longer in remembrance, or pictures itself more vividly, than the first impression of the performance of a great actor. ”

“ How far the youthful histrion believes himself to be a lion when he crawls across the drawing-room carpet on all fours, and roars from behind the sofa, is perhaps open to argument. My own belief is that he is already so much of an artist as to be in no way deceived, but of his desire to impose upon the credulity of others there can, I think, [228] be no question. But the limits of histrionic enjoyment are even here sometimes overstepped, as, for example, when a maturer rival in the art, boasting a louder roar, approaches too closely to the confines of absolute illusion. ”

“ Here we have praise indeed; but there is at least one painter, he whose long life still kept the stainless record of unswerving loyalty to a noble ideal, to whom also Burne-Jones has here owned his indebtedness, who would, I believe, have accepted and endorsed even such a judgment as this. And if an artist’s fame lives most sweetly, most securely, in the regard of his fellows, who could ask aught higher of the living or the dead of our times, than that the award of Rossetti should be confirmed and enforced by the painter of “Love and Death”? ”

“ Out of his art, which contained them both, came those twin currents of portraiture and landscape that were destined to supply all that was vital in the after development of painting in Europe. All that was vital; for though Religion and Allegory, History and Symbol, still played their formal part in many a grandiose and rhetorical design, these things were no longer of the essence of the achievement. To the painters who employed them, nature itself was already all-absorbing. The true poetry of their work, whatever other claims it may seem to advance, resides in the mastery of the craftsman ”

“ Such a confession came well from a man who, from the earliest time of his precocious and marvellous boyhood, had in the native gifts of a painter clearly outpaced and outdistanced the most accomplished of his contemporaries, and yet it was made in no spirit of mock modesty, but out of a clear conviction that an artist’s conflict with nature is ceaseless and unending, no matter what degree of mastery the world may choose to accord him. ”