Dante Gabriel Rossetti

“ With measured tread Dante approaches the couch led by the winged and scarlet Love, but, as though fearful of so near and unaccustomed an approach, draws slowly backward on his half-raised foot, while the mystical emblem of his earthly passion stands droopingly between him the living, and his lady the dead, and takes the kiss that he himself might never have. In life they must needs be apart, but thus in death they are united, for the hand of the pilgrim, who is the embodiment of his love, holds his hand even as the master’s lips touch her lips. ”

“ In 1852 he sailed to Boston in the same ship that carried Thackeray and Lowell. Emerson, who had met him in England, welcomed him there. Travelling through Europe for his health, he died of paralysis in Florence in 1861. [6]
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The catalogue of great English poets of the period is completed with the names of Rossetti and Morris. Perhaps there is no more romantic figure in modern literature than Dante Gabriel Rossetti 1828-1882, although he has suffered cruelly from the biographer. His father, Gabriele, was an Italian exile, a critic of Dante, a teacher of Italian in London. ”

“ Indeed, beyond the mere acknowledgement that such an influence did exist I found nowhere a single effort for a somewhat thorough investigation. I think that it suffices for this purpose when I show the influence Blake has exercised on Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Not because he was the greatest of the Praeraphaelites, [3] for indeed G. F. Watts [4] far excelled him as a painter, creating new myths, whereas Rossetti's genius concentrated itself principally in the reproduction of single female figures; Robert Browning was a greater poet ”

“ Albeit English in its main external features, the environment of the Rossetti family in London remained essentially Italian during their father's lifetime. Gabriele Rossetti was a commentator on Dante, and himself a writer of verse, mainly in a politico-patriotic vein. To the ears of the young Gabriel, familiarized by habit with the sonorous metres of the "Inferno" and "Paradiso," the name of Dante for many years conjured up no very stimulating thoughts. ”

“ Dante, Garibaldi etc., are highly remarkable. They show us that Dante Gabriel Rossetti's "disposition towards believing in the spiritualism was too much rather than too little" (William M. Rossetti) But though we hear of regular spiritual "seances" where Mrs. Marshall and her husband, she a wellknown medium of those days, gave evidence of their connection with the world of spirits, the influence of spiritualism on Rossetti's mind was not of a lasting character. In 1871 he writes:
"The Past is over and fled ”

“ The mother was half English and half Italian, a sister of Byron's travelling companion, Dr. Polidori. Of the four children of the marriage, Dante Gabriel and Christina became poets of distinction. The eldest sister, Maria Francesca, a religious devotee who spent her last years as a member of a Protestant sisterhood, was the author of that unpretentious but helpful piece of Dante literature, "A Shadow of Dante." The younger brother, William Michael, is well known as a biographer, littérateur, and art critic, as an editor of Shelley and of the works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. ”

“ Of Beatrice, no such description is given either in the Vita Nuova or the Commedia as could afford an artist a definite suggestion. Dante’s love was an idealised passion; it concerned itself with spiritual beauty, whereof the emotions excited absorbed every merely physical consideration. The beauty of Beatrice in the Vita Nuova is like a ray of sunshine flooding a landscape—we see it only in the effect it produces. ”

“ And I said, Ah, me! what art should win the immortal prize, Whose want must make life cold and Heaven a hollow dream?" I looked and saw your love in the shadow of your heart, As a diver sees the pearl in the shadow of the sea; And I murmured, not above my breath, but all apart,— "Ah! you can love, true girl, and is your love for me?" Dante Gabriel Rossetti [1828-1882]
SINCE WE PARTED Since we parted yester eve, I do love thee, love, believe, Twelve times dearer, twelve hours longer,— One dream deeper, one night stronger, One sun surer,—thus much more Than I loved thee, love, before. ”

“ As said above Dante Gabriel Rossetti has neither poems nor pictures to match these in joyfulness and lightheartedness. We always move in an atmosphere of mystery, the inscrutability of which is never lost sight of, and the melancholy and thoughts without hope which are the result of this mysterious sadness, are apparent in all his poems and pictures. This sense of sadness and mystery is not always very pronounced. Sometimes hardly definable, we merely feel that it is there ”

“ The mask is as full as the portrait of intellect and feeling, of strength and character, but it lacks something of the early sweetness and sensibility. Rossetti’s portraiture retains the salient qualities of both portrait and mask. It represents Dante in his twenty-seventh year; the face gives hint of both poet and soldier, for behind clear-cut features capable of strengthening into resolve and rigour lie whole depths of tenderest sympathy. The abstracted air, the self-centred look, the eyes that seem to see only what the mind conceives and casts forward from itself ”

“ They rob life of much of its dignity and its wonder, add to death itself a new terror, and make one wish that all art were anonymous. Nor could there have been any more unfortunate choice of a subject for popular treatment than that to which we owe the memoir that now lies before us. A pillar of fire to the few who knew him, and of cloud to the many who knew him not, Dante Gabriel Rossetti lived apart from the gossip and tittle-tattle of a shallow age. He never trafficked with the merchants for his soul, nor brought his wares into the market-place for the idle to gape at. ”

“ The third member of our little company, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, poet and painter, died two years since, and after his death his pictures were exhibited at the Royal Academy. The public, therefore, has now before it all the results of our work, and it seems desirable it should also learn something of the manner in which that work came to be done ”

“ But as she considered it expedient to avail herself of Rossetti's assistance in certain defined portions of the work, he undertook all the editing of Blake's writings in prose and verse which form Vol. II. He is also credited with certain passages in Vol. I. In the Collected Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Mr. W. M. Rossetti gives the remarks of his brother upon the poems; preceded by the supplementary chapter which he made to the Life, and followed by his comments upon the designs to the Book of Job, and upon certain points connected with the designs to the Jerusalem. ”

“ As an influence in literature he is less considerable than in painting. In the latter art, a whole group of contemporary notables, intellectualists, and rhapsodists of greater or less individuality have to do with him, among whom Dante Gabriel Rossetti was in much his literary child, still more his child in art. ”

“ He has
been called "the greatest metrical inventor in English literature."
His works in French and Latin show him to be a poet in three
languages. His best-known works are "Poems and Ballads," "Songs
before Sunrise," and "Mary Stuart." He is the greatest living
English poet.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti was born in London, May 12, 1828. He
studied art in the antique school of the Royal Academy, and became
known as an artist before he won fame as a poet. ”

“ It is easier to speak of the virtuoso group who derived their first incitement to poetry from Chatterton, Keats and the early exotic ballads of Tennyson, far though these yet were from attaining the perfection in which they now appear after half a century of assiduous correction. The chief Rossetti. of them were Dante Gabriel Rossetti, his sister Christina, William Morris and Algernon Charles Swinburne. The founders of this school, which took and acquired the name Pre-Raphaelite, were profoundly impressed by the Dante revival and by the study of the early Florentine masters. ”

“ As yet I had earned nothing, and as my funds were beginning to run low, I bethought me of my Rhine friend's promise of assistance. I resolved to call upon him and acquaint him with my position, which I did without further loss of time. He received me very cordially, and before I left gave me an introduction to Charles Augustus Howell,6 an intimate, so my friend informed me, of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who he thought might be persuaded to do something for me in the way of employment. ”

“ Edited and translated in the original Metres by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Revised and rearranged edition, Boston: Roberts Bros.
Dante is so great a figure in Italian literature that he hides from sight the host of minor poets who preceded him, and throws his own contemporaries so into the shade that we are apt to think that Italian poetry began with him, and that its second exponent is Petrarch. Such a view is to be regretted, not only because it overlooks much that is in itself valuable, but because it attributes to a period of slow development a phenomenal character. ”

“ O lovely and beloved, O my love?
HEART'S COMPASS Sometimes thou seem'st not as thyself alone,
But as the meaning of all things that are;
A breathless wonder, shadowing forth afar
Some heavenly solstice hushed and halcyon;
Whose unstirred lips are music's visible tone;
Whose eyes the sun-gate of the soul unbar,
Being of its furthest fires oracular;—
The evident heart of all life sown and mown.
Even such Love is; and is not thy name Love?
Yea, by thy hand the Love-god rends apart
All gathering clouds of Night's ambiguous art;
Flings them far down, and sets thine eyes above ”

“ Has not one moment, one, belied itself.
I thank my God that, when he addressed my heart
To new affections, he made these be high:
And you, beloved children, thank you me
That such a mother I chose to give you breath.
CHRISTINA ROSSETTI
From a Pencil-Drawing by Dante Gabriel Rossetti
C. 1846
Others perhaps will say that every bird [89]
(An ancient saw) approves his proper nest.
Maria, Christina, William, Gabriel,
My children, you’ll reply, and that’s enough. ”

“ There, girt, one breathes alert for some great race;
Whose road runs far by sands and fruitful space;
Who laughs, yet through the jolly throng has pass'd;
Who weeps, nor stays for weeping; who at last,
A youth, stands somewhere crowned, with silent face.
And he has filled this vase with wine for blood,
With blood for tears, with spice for burning vow,
With watered flowers for buried love most fit ”

“ Now on my hands: one specimen forms our frontispiece. I have spoken of this matter in my Memoir of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, pp. 5 and 6, and I know that my father’s statement concerning it is not exaggerated. He executed also, towards 1804, a miniature of himself, of which, writing to his brother Domenico, he speaks in the following terms:—“A miniature portrait of myself, the work of my own hand when I exercised myself much in the fine art which imitates visible truths. ”

“ In this madness which Rossetti addicted to Blake we have to see the main reason of the comparatively small influence of the Prophetic Books on Rossetti. Moreover, unlike Blake, Rossetti never loses sight of the public he writes for, always the fancies of his imaginative brain are kept in proper check, remindful as he is of the limitations of the ordinary reader. "Above all ideal personalities", Rossetti writes in a letter probably to Mr. Sharp, "with which the poet must learn to identify himself, there is one supremely real . ”

“ This was often used, I may add, by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. It appears that in the Rossetti line, or else in the Della [8] Guardia line, there must have been some degree of literary eminence prior to the date of the blacksmith Nicola; as I find, in a letter addressed by Gabriele Rossetti, towards 1807, to his elder brother Domenico, the phrase: “You know that our stock has always abounded in great men of letters.” ”

“ The ground-whirl of the perished leaves of Hope,
The wind of Death's imperishable wing?
HEART'S HOPE By what word's power, the key of paths untrod,
Shall I the difficult deeps of Love explore,
Till parted waves of Song yield up the shore
Even as that sea which Israel crossed dry-shod?
For lo! in some poor rhythmic period,
Lady, I fain would tell how evermore
Thy soul I know not from thy body, nor
Thee from myself, neither our love from God.
Yea, in God's name, and Love's, and thine, would I
Draw from one loving heart such evidence
As to all hearts all things shall signify ”

“ Rossetti was a painter of imagination from the very first of his artistic career. The idea that the art of his day, in order to rise from its low ebb, ought to be brought into contact again with the world of intellectual and emotional ideals Rossetti found in Blake's doctrines on art and in his works. This idea he adopted enthusiastically from the very first, and never abandoned it throughout his life. Hence the relatively small attention he pays to technical shortcomings in his paintings. Always the idea predominates over the matter; actions are allowed to appear as strained ”

“ It is interesting to see how he tries all different styles of painting and of colouring and slowly through many phases finds the way of expressing his emotions and ideas best fitted to his exotic genius, and gives us that strange series of half and three-quarter length female figures which to most people are all that is meant in art by the name of Rossetti. ”