T. Martin Wood

“ It is probably because the action of each figure is controlled only by the imaginative impulse that sways the whole composition, that gives to every part of it dramatic intensity as if executed all in one mood, bringing in one moment of creation the whole to life on paper. Those in sympathy with the nature of Rossetti's art do not count this piece of bad drawing a disastrous flaw. The rarity of genius makes them accept everything gratefully ”

“ It suited his genius also because it minimised the labour of creation, and with Rossetti it was always apparent that creation was a labour. He himself has said in that other art in which perhaps he always found his happiest expression—
Unto the man of yearning thought And aspiration, to do nought Is in itself almost an act,— Being chasm-fire and cataract Of the soul's utter depths unseal'd. ”

“ Rossetti is of the extreme few who have finished minutely without sacrificing the qualities of greater significance than finish. His art is great enough to make us forget the detail and to render us for the time oblivious of it. In our absorption in the subject it seems for a time not to exist, only the tense mood exists, the intense moment. In a picture in which the moments are aflame with tragedy Rossetti drew this figure moving slowly and with decorative convention. All the figures are controlled by such a convention; they are partaking in a high drama. ”

“ One misses in the finished picture some of the sensitive drawing given in the sketch to the Magdalene's dress. Here, instead, her clothes are as if she were perfectly still; they give no indication of her movements and the stormy action round her. That is the fault of Pre-Raphaelitism—to fritter away the spirit for the sake of the embroidery upon the body's clothes; to lose emphasis in elaboration, to sacrifice a greater beauty for a meaner one.
Certain characteristics that are strongest in Rossetti's art are the outcome of the intensely human course his imagination took. ”

“ Upon the vivacity of the imagination in them, and not upon subtlety of line or of observation, the claims of Rossetti's drawings rest, though it is wonderful how often he lifts his art up to the level of all that he has to say and imposes upon us a forgetfulness of its shortcomings. His studies do not reveal a master who looked upon objects and beautiful forms for their own sake and for the sake of the tender drawing he could find in them. ”

“ It is possible to like the art of Rossetti very deeply, and also to love the changing colours of the sea and the shadows of the sun clouds moving swiftly on the hills. But often to pagan lovers of such things the art of Rossetti, shuttered close in its mediaeval darkened rooms, has seemed as an almost poisonous flower, with its forgetfulness of the world without. ”

“ Art may clothe itself in some old style, as Rossetti's did, and what shape it takes, whether based on the old or growing out of the new, does not matter when it is the messenger of inward things. [Pg 18]
And since no beauty of bodily form greater than Grecian beauty is possible to art, that art will be great which betrays the spirit's flame. The future of life and of art are one. It is inevitable that art shall be great as the spirit of man grows rich. ”

“ For a time women tried to look as the women in his paintings, so much had the type he chose, which was his own creation, imposed itself upon their imagination.
The Rossetti woman, if she did not supersede the early Victorian type, at least helped to change it, and to mark a change which was taking place in the ideals of the nation. Fresh tendencies in national thought are always correspondingly represented by a change in the type of women idealised in its art and poetry. When the Victorian type went, the time had passed when homage was given to women for a surrender of their claims on life. ”

“ The best that art has given to us has often come from artists in a quite sub-conscious way. Because Rossetti's genius was so many-sided it is probable that he could explain most of what he did to himself, and if in the picture of which we have been speaking we take such a thing as the alterations between the figures in the background, and as they are shown in the sketch, it will seem apparent that he gave reasons to himself for everything in his compositions, and did not drift into anything by accident in aiming at design. ”

“ One accepts their beauty feverishly. In such a mood as they invite reason greets imagination. The words do not represent things or a place, but a mood and an emotion. In them is just such a strange and beautiful medley as music brings to us, as great art always makes reasonable to us. [Pg 17]
One thing we must not forget in criticising Rossetti, and that is that we are speaking of one who was among the first to enter into the inheritance of his age, that on these grounds his art is placed amongst the arts which in every age live by reason of their significance. ”

“ That which is concerned with character, with all that outwardly gives indication of the soul, has appeared and re-appeared triumphantly throughout the history of art—a spirit changing its raiment. The art of Rossetti fails just in so far as its craftsmanship is a failure, but its imperfections cannot take away its significance. Christianity made the spirit visible and took serenity from the face of art. To-day Art is spiritualising itself by its refinements. ”

“ He gave to every object the import of the drama in his mind; in his art things seem to have about them the meaning lent them by an imagination that spiritualised objective things so that they seem there in essence only and rendered with a sympathy that shows how alive to the significance of outward beauty Rossetti was, and how his own time and every-day surroundings were fused and blent with his most far-reaching imaginings. ”

“ One might hazard the question whether it were possible for a painter such as Rossetti, seeking expression in his art for this intensity of feeling, to vie in the rendering of the external aspects with those painters who have approached life with that cold acuteness to the appearance of things and aloofness from their meaning characteristic of work that has contributed largely to the actual science of painting. ”

“ To turn to outward things, and to study them as merely offering various surfaces to the light, holding depths of shadow, possessing lines of delicate shape, was, however, impossible to his temperament. The characteristic story of Madox Brown setting in early days the young Rossetti down to paint such still life as jam jars, and of the young painter's impatience, shows that to paint or draw the objects for their own sake only was not congenial to him. ”

“ And just as it was long before man so far awoke to a knowledge of the beauty which triumphs in him as to worship his own shape (placing before himself his own image as the standard to which the gods had led him, and from which he might not go back without fear of their displeasure) so not everywhere yet is the spirit of man learning its own beauty from the consciousness of itself to which it has attained. ”

“ Now Rossetti, looking on his art and its relationship to life from a literary more than from an artistic standpoint, striving to attain in art not an imitation of life but an expression of his ideas about it, found, as we have said, painters' problems a difficulty. He was irritated by difficulties which to a whole-hearted painter present pleasures of conquest in proportion to their resistance to his craftsmanship and skill. ”

“ Rossetti, indeed, loved a visible world, and liked to interpret the beauty of natural objects, but he was always in haste to get the scene set where such objects were, after all, for him only as accessories to the thing enacted, or as notes in an orchestration; of value but not existing by themselves. ”

“ The secrets of art lie, after all, more within the vision than in expression. That Rossetti could have directed his genius into another manner from Pre-Raphaelitism seems possible from the fact that in his poetry so many styles meet and show his variegated temperament expressing itself in opposing forms. What was of literary significance in Rossetti's art perhaps gained from Pre-Raphaelitism, for Pre-Raphaelitism made things symbolical. ”

“ Arrived at a time of reaction, of revolution in English painting, with his qualities of leadership he threw himself into Pre-Raphaelitism as a new movement, but it is more than probable his genius would have found methods of expression as personal to itself in the refinements that entered English painting in the wake of Pre-Raphaelitism,—only the Pre-Raphaelite movement could not have been but for the ardent genius of Rossetti which poured inspiration into all those who gathered about him. ”

“ Burne-Jones' figures live in a dream in which the world has little part, whilst Rossetti's dream is of the world itself. His work is rich with the human experience that is absent in the art of his friend. ”

“ Commemorated in Grecian art is the perfected form of man as the flower of animal evolution. With this perfection attained another day of creation was begun and is continued, in which the things of the spirit are being built up until the perfect spirit is made. ”

“ The phases through which his genius passed, the result of an inherited and rare temperament and its adventures, made the science of painting prosaic for him. He himself felt latterly [Pg 8] that this impatience had left his ideas pathetically at the mercy of his materials. Apart from the quality in colour to which he attained, one is conscious always in his paintings of the tragedy of genius striving for expression through an ineffectual technique. Rossetti's individuality, however, was so strong that it stamped itself everywhere ”

“ Such art as Rossetti's, with its subordination of everything to an emotional and spiritual motive, does certainly anticipate, as other modern work like the sculpture of Rodin anticipates, the direction in which the greatness of art in the future must tend. ”

“ We have in it one great poet's illustration for another's poem, made with perfect art. We have in this drawing the echo of the one's imagination in the other. Rossetti has brought the drawing on to the paper as a dream. An immense courage is demanded of the artist, when he shall forget his reason for a dream, and when he has the courage not to reconcile his dream with the demands of the prosaic mind, demanding only what is prosaic. The lines illustrated are ”