Part 12

Leaving out of view the few pictures he painted illustrating passages in Napoleon's career, it may be said that Gérôme's taste led him away from scenes of modern life; for even his many oriental subjects so relate to forms of life belonging in reality to the past, that they make no exception to the statement. He did not therefore follow up "The Duel" with other comments on the follies of modern society--for in the temper of that time this picture, like Couture's "Roman Orgie" and Millet's "Man with the Hoe," was looked upon as a satire and a warning, and owed its popularity as much to this conviction on the part of the public as to its pictorial merits--but returned to antique times, and showed in his treatment of themes from that source an equal, if not a greater power to interest the public.

Gérôme's two pictures, the "Ave Cæsar! Morituri te Salutant," "Hail, Cæsar! Those about to die, salute Thee," and "The Gladiators," are so universally known as to need no description. Whatever criticism may be made upon them, they will always remain interesting to the world at large; from their subject, from the way in which the discoveries of archæology are made familiar, and, not least, from the impression they make of the artist's own strong interest in what he had to say. In both pictures he succeeded in showing the Colosseum as no longer a ruin, but as, so to speak, a living place peopled by the swarm of the Roman populace, with the emperor and his court, and the College of the Vestal Virgins, and, for chief actors, the hapless wretches who are "butchered to make a Roman holiday." Another picture that greatly increased Gérôme's reputation, was his "Death of Julius Cæsar," though it must be confessed there was a touch of the stage in the arrangement of the scene, and in the action of the body of senators and conspirators leaving the hall with brandished swords and as if singing in chorus, that was absent from the pictures of the amphitheatre. There was also less material for the curiosity of the lovers of archæology; no such striking point, for instance, as the reproduction of the gladiators' helmets and armor recently discovered in Herculaneum; but the body of the dead Cæsar lying "even at the base of Pompey's statue" with his face muffled in his toga, was a masterly performance; some critic, moved by the grandeur of the lines, said it was not a mere piece of foreshortening, it was "a perspective." Gérôme made a life-size painting of the Cæsar in this picture. It is in the Corcoran Gallery at Washington.

Gérôme painted several other pictures from classic subjects, but none of them had the interest for the general public of those we have described. In 1854 he exhibited a huge canvas, called "The Age of Augustus," a picture suggested, perhaps, by the "Hemicycle" of his master Delaroche, on which he himself had painted. It represented heroes, poets, sages, of the Augustan age, grouped about the cradle of the infant Christ; it procured for Gérôme the red ribbon of the Legion of Honor, and is now, as the artist himself jestingly says, "the 'greatest' picture in the Museum of Amiens." In the same year Gérôme went to Egypt for the first time; since then he has more than once visited it, but it is doubtful if he could renew the pleasure of his youthful experience. "I set out," he says, "with my friends, I the fifth, all of us lightly furnished with money, but full of youthful enthusiasm. Life was then easy in Egypt; we lived at a very moderate rate; we hired a boat and lived four months upon the Nile, hunting, painting, fishing by turns, from Damietta to Philæ. We returned to Cairo and remained there four months longer in a house in the older part of the town, belonging to Soleman Pasha. As Frenchmen, he treated us with cordial hospitality. Happy period of youth, of freedom from care! Hope and the future opened bright before us; the sky was blue!"

Gérôme's pictures of Eastern life make a gallery by themselves. A few of them are historic, such as his "Cleopatra visiting Cæsar," but the most of them are simply scenes and incidents drawn from the daily life of the modern inhabitants of Cairo and the desert, illustrating their manners and customs. The mere titles would fill up a large part of our space. Many of the best of them are owned in this country, and all have been reproduced by engraving or by photography.

In another field Gérôme won great distinction, painting scenes from the history of France in the reign of Louis XIV.; subjects drawn from what may be called the high comedy of court-life, and treated by Gérôme with remarkable refinement and distinction. Among these pictures the best known are: "Molière Breakfasting with Louis XIV.," illustrating the story of the king's rebuke to his courtiers who affected to despise the man of genius; "Père Joseph," the priest who under the guise of humility and self-abnegation reduces the greatest nobles to the state of lackeys; "Louis XIV. Receiving the Great Condé," and "Collaboration," two poets of Louis XIV.'s time working together over a play. Among his accomplishments as an artist we must not forget the talent that Gérôme has shown as a sculptor. He has modelled several figures from his own pictures, with such admirable skill as to prove that he might easily have made sculpture a profession had he not chosen to devote himself to painting.

[Signature of the author.]

DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI[10]

[Footnote 10: Copyright, 1894, by Selmar Hess.]

By EDMUND GOSSE

(1828-1882)

Those whose privilege it was to meet the late Mr. Gabriel Rossetti, at once in the plenitude of his powers and in the freshness of their own impressions, will not expect to be moved again through life by so magnetic a presence. In his dealings with those much younger than himself, his tact and influence were unequalled; he received a shy but ardent youth with such a noble courtesy, with so much sympathy yet with no condescension, with so grand an air and yet so warm a welcome, that his new acquaintance was enslaved at the first sentence. This seems to me to have been in a certain sense the key-note of the man. He was essentially a point of fire; not a peripatetic in any sense, not a person of wide circumference, but a nucleus of pure imagination that never stirred or shifted, but scintillated in all directions. The function of Gabriel Rossetti, or at least his most obvious function, was to sit in isolation, and to have vaguely glimmering spirits presented to him for complete illumination. He was the most prompt in suggestion, the most regal in giving, the most sympathetic in response, of the men I have known or seen; and this without a single touch of the prophetic manner, the air of such professional seers as Coleridge or Carlyle. What he had to give was not mystical or abstract; it was purely concrete. His mind was full of practical artistic schemes, only a few of which were suited to his own practice in painting or poetry; the rest were at the service of whoever would come in a friendly spirit and take them. I find among his letters to me, which I have just been reading once again, a paper of delightful suggestions about the cover of a book of verse; the next youth who waited upon him would perhaps be a painter, and would find that the great genius and master did not disdain the discussion of picture-frames. This was but the undercurrent of his influence; as we shall see more and more every year as the central decades of this century become history, its main stream directed the two great arts of painting and poetry into new channels, and set a score of diverse talents in motion.

But, as far as anything can be seen plainly about Rossetti at present, to me the fact of his immovability, his self-support, his curious reserve, seems to be the most interesting. He held in all things to the essential and not to the accidental; he preferred the dry grain of musk to a diluted flood of perfume. An Italian by birth and deeply moved by all things Italian, he never visited Italy; a lover of ritual and a sympathizer with all the mysteries of the Roman creed, he never joined the Catholic Church; a poet whose form and substance alike influenced almost all the men of his generation, he was more than forty years of age before he gave his verse to the public; a painter who considered the attitude of the past with more ardor and faith than almost any artist of his time, he never chose to visit the churches or galleries of Europe. It has been said, among the many absurd things which his death has provoked, that he shrank from publicity from timidity, or spurned it from ill-temper. One brilliant journalist has described him as sulking like Hector in his tent. It used to be Achilles who sulked when I was at school; but it certainly never was Gabriel Rossetti. Those who only knew him, after his constitution had passed under the yoke of the drug which killed him, cannot judge of his natural reserve from that artificial and morbid reserve which embittered the last years of his life. The former was not connected with any objection to new faces or dislike of cordial society, but with the indomitable characteristic of the man, which made him give out the treasures of the spirit, and never need to receive them. So far from disliking society, it is my impression that he craved it as a necessity, although he chose to select its constituents and narrow its range.

He was born in 1828. The story of his parentage is well known, and has been told in full detail since his death. He was born in London and christened Gabriel Charles Rossetti; it was not, I am told, until he was of age to appreciate the value of the name that he took upon himself the cognomen which his father had borne, the Dante by which the world, though not his friends, have known him. Living with his father in Charlotte street, with two sisters and a brother no less ardently trained in letters than himself, he seems to have been turned to poetry, as he was afterward sustained in it, by the interior flame. The household has been described to me by one who saw it in 1847: the father, titular professor of Italian literature, but with no professional duties, seated the livelong day, with a shade over his eyes, writing devotional or patriotic poetry in his native tongue; the girls reading Dante aloud with their rich maiden voices; Gabriel buried here in his writing, or darting round the corner of the street to the studio where he painted. From this seclusion he wrote to the friend who has kindly helped me in preparing these notes, and whose memories of the poet extend over a longer period than those of any survivor not related to him.

Mr. W. B. Scott, now so well known in more arts than one, had then but just published his first book, his mystical and transcendental poem of "The Year of the World." This seems to have fallen under Rossetti's notice, for on November 25, 1847, he wrote to the author, a perfect stranger to himself, a letter of warm sympathy and acknowledgment. Mr. Scott was living in Newcastle, and, instead of meeting, the young poets at first made acquaintance with each other by correspondence. Rossetti soon mentioned, of course, his own schemes and ambitions, and he sent, as a sample of his powers, his poems of "The Blessed Damozel," and "My Sister's Sleep," which he had written about eighteen months before.

Mr. Scott tells me that his first feeling on receiving these poems, written in English by an Italian boy of eighteen, was one of amazement. I cannot wonder at it. If the "Blessed Damozel," when it was published a quarter of a century later, seemed a masterpiece to those who had, in the meanwhile, read so much that was vaguely inspired by it, what must it have been in 1846? Certain pieces in Tennyson's "Poems," of 1842, and a few fragments of Browning's "Bells and Pomegranates" were the only English poems which can be supposed to have given it birth, even indirectly. In its interpretation of mystical thoughts by concrete images, in its mediæval fervor and consistence of fancy, in its peculiar metrical facility, it was distinctly new--original as few poems except those by the acknowledged masters of the craft can ever be.

"The sun was gone now; the curled moon Was like a little feather Fluttering far down the gulf; and now She spoke through the clear weather. Her voice was like the voice the stars Had when they sang together."

This was a strange accent in 1846. Miss Barrett and Mr. Tennyson were then the most accepted poets. Mr. Browning spoke fluently and persistently, but only to a very little circle; Mr. Horne's "Orion" and Mr. Bailey's "Festus" were the recent outcomes of Keats and Goethe; the Spasmodic School, to be presently born of much unwise study of "Festus," was still unknown; Mr. Clough, Mr. Matthew Arnold, and Mr. Patmore were quite unapparent, taking form and voice in solitude; and here was a new singer, utterly unlike them all, pouring out his first notes with the precision and independence of the new-fledged thrush in the woodland chorus.

In painting, the process was somewhat different. In this art, no less than in poetry, Rossetti understood at once what it was that he wished to do himself, and what he desired to see others doing; but the difficulties of technique were in his way. He had begun to write in childhood, but he had taken up design late in his youth, and he had undergone no discipline in it. At the present day, when every student has to pass a somewhat stringent examination in design, Rossetti, at eighteen, could not have entered the schools of the Royal Academy. He did so, however, yet without ever advancing to the Life School. The soul of art, at this early period, interested him far more than the body, especially such a substance as he found under the presidency of Sir Martin Shee and the keepership of George Jones. Let us not forget, meanwhile, that it is easy to sneer at the incompetence of mannered old artists, and yet hard to over-estimate the value of discipline in a school, however conventional. Rossetti was too impatient to learn to draw, and this he lived to regret. His immediate associates, the young men whom he began to lead and impress, were better draughtsmen than he. His first oil picture, I believe, was a portrait of his father, now in possession of the family. But, as far as can be now made out, he did not begin to paint seriously till about January, 1848, when he persuaded another Royal Academy student, W. Holman Hunt, to take a large room close to the paternal house in Charlotte street, and make it their studio. Here Mr. Scott visited them in the early spring of that year; he describes to me the large pictures they were struggling upon, Hunt, on his "Oath of Rienzi," and Rossetti, on his "Girlhood of Mary Virgin." The latter was evidently at present but poorly equipped; the painting was timid and boyish, pale in tone, and with no hint or promise of that radiant color which afterward became Rossetti's main characteristic. But the feeling was identical with that in his far more accomplished early poems. The very pulse and throb of mediæval adoration pervaded the whole conception of the picture, and Mr. Scott's first impression was that, in this marvellous poet and possible painter, the new Tractarian movement had found its expositor in art. Yet this surely was no such feeble or sentimental echo as had inspired the declared Tractarian poets of eight or nine years earlier; there was nothing here that recalled such a book as the "Cherwell Water Lily" of Father Faber. This contained the genuine fleshly mysticism, bodily presentment of a spiritual idea, and intimate knowledge of mediæval sentiment without which the new religious fervor had no intellectual basis. This strong instinct for the forms of the Catholic religion, combined with no attendance on the rites of that church, fostered by no study of ecclesiastical literature or association with teachers or proselytes, but original to himself and self-supported, was at that time without doubt the feature in Rossetti's intellectual character which demands our closest attention. Nor do I believe that this passion for the physical presentation of a mystical idea was ever entirely supplanted by those other views of life and art which came to occupy his maturer mind. In his latest poems--in "Rose Mary," for instance--I see this first impulse returning upon him with more than its early fascination. In his youth, however, the mysticism was very naïve and straightforward. It was fostered by one of the very few excursions which Rossetti ever took--a tour in Belgium in October, 1849. I am told that he and the painter-friend who accompanied him were so purely devoted to the mediæval aspect of all they saw, that, in walking through the galleries, they turned away their heads in approaching modern pictures, and carefully closed their eyes while they were passing Rubens's "Descent from the Cross." In Belgium, or as the result of his tour there, Rossetti wrote several curious poems, which were so harsh and forced that he omitted them from his collection when he first published his "Poems," in 1870.

The effort in these early pieces is too marked. I remember once hearing Rossetti say that he did not mind what people called him, if only they would not call him "quaint." But the fact was that, if quaintness be defined as the inability to conceal the labor of an art, there is no doubt that both his poems and his designs occasionally deserved this epithet. He was so excessively sincere an artist, so determined not to permit anything like trickiness of effect or meaningless smoothness to conceal the direct statement of an idea, that his lack of initial discipline sometimes made itself felt in a curious angular hardness.

And now it would be necessary, if I were attempting a complete study of Gabriel Rossetti's intellectual career, to diverge into a description of what has so much exercised popular curiosity, the pre-Raphaelite movement of 1848. But there is no reason why, in a few notes on character, I should repeat from hearsay what several of the seven brothers have reported from authoritative memory. It is admitted, by them and by all who have understood the movement, that Gabriel Rossetti was the founder and, in the Shakespearian sense, "begetter" of all that was done by this earnest band of young artists. One of them, Mr. Millais, was already distinguished; two others, Mr. Holman Hunt and Mr. Woolner, had at that time more training and technical power than he; but he was, nevertheless, the brain and soul of the enterprise. What these young men proposed was excellently propounded in the sonnet by "W. M. R.," which they prefixed to their little literary venture, the "Germ," in 1850. Plainly to think even a little thought, to express it in natural words which are native to the speaker, to paint even an insignificant object as it is, and not as the old masters or the new masters have said it should be painted, to persevere in looking at truth and at nature without the smallest prejudice for tradition, this was the whole mystery and cabal of the P. R. B. They called themselves "preraphaelite," because they found in the wings of Lippi's angels, and the columbines of Perugino's gardens that loving and exact study of minute things which gave to them a sense of sincerity, and which they missed in the breadth and ease of later work. They had no ambition to "splash as no one splashed before since great Caldasi Polidore;" but they did wish to draw a flower or a cloud so that it should be a portrait of that cloud or flower. In this ambition it would be curious to know, and I do not think that I have ever heard it stated, how far they were influenced by Mr. Ruskin and his "Modern Painters." I should not expect to find Rossetti influenced by any outside force in this any more than in other instances, but at all events Mr. Ruskin eagerly accepted the brotherhood as practical exponents of the theories he had pronounced. None of them, I think, knew him personally when he wrote the famous letter to the _Times_ in 1851, defending Mr. Millais and Mr. Holman Hunt from the abuse of ignorant critics, who, he said, had failed to perceive the very principles on which these "two young men" were proceeding. Somebody wrote to him to explain that there were "three young men," and Mr. Ruskin wrote a note to Gabriel Rossetti, desiring to see his work, and thus the acquaintance of these two remarkable men commenced.

Meanwhile, although the more vigorous members of the brotherhood had shown no special sympathy for Rossetti's religious mysticism, a feebler artist, himself one of the original seven, had taken it up with embarrassing effusion. This was the late James Collinson, whose principal picture, "St. Elizabeth of Hungary," finished in 1851, produced a sort of crisis in Rossetti's career. This painting out-mystified the mystic himself; it was simply maudlin and hysterical, though drawn with some feeling for grace, and in a very earnest spirit. Rossetti, with his strong good sense, recognized that it would be impossible ever to reach the public with art of this unmanly character, and from this time forth he began to abandon the practice of directly sacred art.