Part 13

For some little time after abandoning the directly sacred field in painting, Rossetti seems to have passed through a disconsolate and dubious period. I am told that he worked for many months over a large picture called "Kate the Queen," from some well-known words by Browning. He made no progress with this, seemed dissatisfied with his own media, felt the weight of his lack of training, and passed, in short, through one of those downcast moods, which Shakespeare has so marvellously described in "Tired with all these," and which are incident, sooner or later, to every man of genius. While his touch in poetry grew constantly more sure and masterly, his power as a draughtsman threatened to leave him altogether. He was to have drawn one of the frontispieces in the "Germ," but, although he toiled with a design, he could not make it "come right." At last a happy accident put him on the true track, and revealed his proper genius to himself. He began to make small drawings of poetical subjects in water-colors--most of those which I have seen are not more than twenty inches by twelve--over which he labored, and into which he poured his exquisite sense of color, inspired without doubt by the glass of mediæval church windows. He travelled so very little, that I do not know whether he ever saw the treasures of radiant jewel-work which fret the gloom of Chartres or of Bourges; but if he never saw them, he divined them, and these are the only pieces of color which in the least degree suggest the drawings of this, Rossetti's second period. As far as one can gather, his method was, first, to become interpenetrated with the sentiment of some ballad or passage of emotional poetry, then to meditate on the scene till he saw it clearly before him; then--and this seems to have always been the difficult and tedious part--to draw in the design, and then with triumphant ease to fill in the outlines with radiant color. He had an almost insuperable difficulty in keeping his composition within the confines of the paper upon which he worked, and at last was content to have a purely accidental limit to the design, no matter what limbs of the _dramatis personæ_ were sheered away by the frame. It would not be the act of a true friend to Rossetti's memory to pretend that these drawings, of which for the next ten or fifteen years he continued to produce a great number, were without faults of a nature which any coxcomb could perceive, or without eccentricities which an untrained eye might easily mistake for faults; but this does not in the least militate against the fact that in two great departments of the painter's faculty, in imaginative sentiment and in wealth of color, they have never been surpassed. They have rarely, indeed, been equalled in the history of painting. A Rossetti drawing of this class hung with specimens of other art, ancient or modern, simply destroys them. I do not mean that it is better or worse than they are, but that it kills them as the electric light puts out a glow-worm. No other man's color will bear these points of ruby-crimson, these expanses of deep turquoise-blue, these flagrant scarlets and thunderous purples. He paints the sleeve of a trumpeter; it is such an orange as the eye can scarce endure to look at. He paints the tiles of a chimney-corner; they are as green as the peacock's eyes in the sunshine.

The world is seldom ready to receive any new thing. These drawings of Rossetti's were scarcely noticed even by those who are habitually on the watch for fresh developments in art. But when the painter next emerges into something like publicity we find him attended by a brilliant company of younger men, all more or less influenced by his teaching and attracted by his gifts. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood had been a very ephemeral institution; in three years, or four at the most, it had ceased to exist; but its principles and the energy of its founder had left their mark on the whole world of art. In 1849 Rossetti had exhibited his picture, "The Girlhood of Mary Virgin," at the Portland Gallery, an exhibition in rivalry of the Royal Academy, which existed but a very short time. As far as I can discover, he did not exhibit again in London until 1856, when he and his friends opened a collection of their pictures at 4 Russell Place, Fitzroy Square. We would rather have seen that little gallery than see most of the show-exhibitions of Europe. In it the fine art of the Anglo-Saxon race was seen dawning again after its long and dark night. Rossetti himself was the principal exhibitor, but his two earliest colleagues, now famous painters, Mr. Millais and Mr. Holman Hunt, also contributed. And here were all the new talents whom Rossetti had attracted around him during the last seven years: Mr. Madox Brown, with his fine genius for history; Mr. J. D. Watson, with his strong mediæval affinities; Mr. Boyce, with his delicate portraiture of rustic scenes; Mr. Brett, the finest of our students of the sea; Mr. W. B. Scott himself; besides one or two others, Mr. Charles Collins, Mr. Campbell, Mr. Halliday, Mr. Martineau, whom death or adverse fortune removed before they had quite fulfilled their promise. Gabriel Rossetti contributed to this interesting and historic exhibition five or six of those marvellous drawings of which mention has just been made. "Dante's Dream," the famous vision of June 9, 1290, with its counterpart, "The Anniversary of the Dream," in 1291, were the most prominent of these. A "Mary Magdalene" was perhaps the most moving and exciting. This extremely original design showed the Magdalene pursued by her lovers, but turning away from them all to seek Jesus in the house of Simon the Pharisee. The architecture in this drawing was almost childish; the wall of Simon's house is not three inches thick, and there is not room for a grown-up person on the stairs that lead to it; but the tender imagination of the whole, the sweet persuasiveness of Christ, who looks out of a window, the passion of the awakened sinner, who tears the roses out of her hair, the curious novelty of treatment in the heads and draperies, all these combine to make it one of those works, the moral force and directness of which appeal to the heart at once. Perhaps the most brilliant piece of color at the Russell Place Gallery may have been Rossetti's "Blue Closet," a picture which either illustrated or, as I should rather suppose, suggested Mr. Morris's wonderful poem published two years later.

The same year that displayed him to the public already surrounded by a brilliant phalanx of painter-friends, discovered him also, to the judicious, as a centre of poetic light and heat. The circumstances connected with Rossetti's visit to Oxford a little earlier than this are too recent, are fresh in the memories of too many living persons of distinction, to be discussed with propriety by one who was not present. But certain facts are public, and may be mentioned. The Oxford Union still shows around the interior of its cupola strange, shadowy frescoes, melting into nothingness, which are the work of six men, of whom Rossetti was the leader. These youths had enjoyed no practical training in that particularly artificial branch of art, mural painting, and yet it seems strange that Rossetti himself, at least, should not have understood that a vehicle, such as yolk of egg mixed with vinegar, was absolutely necessary to tempera, or that it was proper, in fresco-painting, to prepare the walls, and paint in the fresh wet mortar. They used no vehicle, they fixed their colors in no coat of plaster, but they threw their ineffectual dry paint on the naked brick. The result has been that their interesting boyish efforts are now decayed beyond any chance of restoration. It is impossible, however, to ascend the gallery of the Oxford Union and examine the ghostly frescoes that are fading there, without great interest and even emotion. Of the young men who painted there under Gabriel Rossetti's eye, all have become greatly distinguished. Mr. Edward Burne-Jones, Mr. William Morris, and Mr. Spencer Stanhope were undergraduates at Oxford. Mr. Valentine Prinsep and Mr. Arthur Hughes, I believe, were Royal Academy students who were invited down by Rossetti. Their work was naïve and queer to the last degree. It is perhaps not fair to say which one of them found so much difficulty in painting the legs of his figures that he drew an impenetrable covert of sunflowers right across his picture, and only showed the faces of his heroes and heroines between the golden disks.

The _Oxford and Cambridge Magazine_, which also dates from the year 1856, is a still more notable expression of budding genius than the dome of the Oxford Union. It was edited by Mr. Godfrey Lushington, all its articles were anonymous, and it contrived to exist through twelve consecutive monthly numbers. A complete set is now rare, and the periodical itself is much less known than befits such a receptacle of pure literature. It contains three or four of Rossetti's finest poems; a great many of those extraordinary pieces, steeped in mediæval coloring, which Mr. William Morris was to collect in 1858 into his bewitching volume, called "The Defence of Guenevere;" several delightful prose stories of life in the Middle Ages, also by Mr. Morris, which, like certain prose romances by Mr. Burne-Jones, have never been publicly claimed or reprinted by their author; and not a little else that was as new as it was notable. A little later Mr. William Morris's first book was dedicated "To my Friend Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Painter," and in 1860 Mr. Swinburne followed with a like inscription of his first-fruits, his tragic drama of "The Queen-Mother." Thus in the course of a little more than ten years, Rossetti had become the centre and sun of a galaxy of talent in poetry and painting, more brilliant perhaps than any which has ever acknowledged the beneficent sway of any one Englishman of genius.

But all this while the world outside knew nothing of the matter. One by one the younger men stepped forward on the public stage and secured the plaudits of the discerning, and ascended the slow incline of general reputation. But Rossetti remained obstinately recluse, far preferring to be the priest and confessor of genius to acting himself a public part. To this determination several outward things engaged him still further. He married quite early in life; and his wife, who was herself an artist of rare, if somewhat wild and untrained talent, bore him a son who died at birth, and then shortly after died herself. During his brief married months Rossetti had collected the MSS. of his poems, and thought to publish them; but when he lost his wife, in a paroxysm of grief he placed the sheets of his poems in her coffin, and would hear no more a suggestion of publication. In 1861 he presented the world with a very learned and beautiful anthology of early Italian poetry, and proposed as early as that year to print his original poems. It was his scheme to name the little volume "Dante in Verona, and other Poems;" but it came to nothing. About 1867 the scheme of publication again took possession of him. I have been told that a sudden sentiment of middle age, the fact that he found himself in his fortieth year, led him to conquer his scruples, and finally arrange his pieces. But he was singularly fastidious; the arrangement would never please him; the cover must be cut in brass, the paper at the sides must bear a special design. These niceties were rarer twelve years ago than they are now, and the printers fatigued him with their persistent obstinacy. It was not till early in 1870 that the "Poems" in stately form first appeared, and were hailed with a shout of admiration which was practically universal.

It was about Christmas in that same year, 1870, that he who writes these lines was first presented to Gabriel Rossetti. The impression on my mental eye is as fresh as if it had been made yesterday, instead of twelve years ago. He was a man of average height, commonly loosely clad in black, so as to give one something of the notion of an abbé; the head very full, and domed like that of Shakespeare, as it was then usual to say--to my thinking more like that of Chaucer--in any case a head surcharged with imagination and power, strongly Italian in color and cast. The eyes were exceedingly deep set, in cavernous sockets; they were large, and black, and full of a restless brilliance, a piercing quality which consoled the shy novice by not being stationary. Lastly, a voice of bell-like tone and sonority, a voice capable of expressing without effort every shade of emotion from rage and terror to the most sublime tenderness. I have never heard a voice so fitted for poetical effect, so purely imaginative, and yet, in its absence of rhetoric, so clear and various, as that of Gabriel Rossetti. I retain one special memory of his reading in his own studio the unfinished MS. of "Rose Mary," in 1873, which surpassed in this direction any pleasure which it has been my lot to enjoy; and on various occasions I have listened to his reading of sonnets, his own and those of others, with a sense that his intonation revealed a beauty in the form of that species of verse which it had never been seen to possess before. I have already spoken of his wonderful courtliness to a new acquaintance, his bewitching air of sympathy; on a closer intimacy this stately manner would break up into wild fits of mirth, and any sketch of Rossetti would be incomplete that did not describe his loud and infectious laughter. He lived very much apart from the every-day life of mankind, not ostentatiously, but from a genuine lack of interest in passing events. An old friend tells me that during the French Revolution he burst into Rossetti's studio with the incredible news, "Louis-Philippe has landed in England!" "Has he?" said Rossetti, calmly. "What has he come for?" That certain political events, in which he saw a great symbolic significance, could move him deeply, is easily proved by such sonnets as the noble "On the Refusal of Aid between Nations," and "Czar Alexander II." But such glances out of window into the living street were rare, and formed no characteristic part of his scheme of life.

As a poet in these great years he possessed rare gifts of passionate utterance, and harmony of vision and expression. Mr. Swinburne has characterized these qualities in words which leave no later commentator the chance of distinguishing himself. But it would be totally unjust, even in so cursory and personal a sketch as this, to allow the impression to go undisputed that Rossetti preferred the external form to the inward substance of poetry. This charge was brought against him, as it has always been brought against earnest students of poetic art. I will rather quote a few words from a letter of Rossetti to me, written in 1873, when he was composing his own _magnum opus_ of "Rose Mary." I have always felt them to be very salutary, none the less because it is obvious that the writer did not at all times contrive, or perhaps desire, to make them true in his own work:

"It seems to me that all poetry, to be really enduring, is bound to be as _amusing_ (however trivial the word may sound) as any other class of literature; and I do not think that enough amusement to keep it alive can ever be got out of incidents not amounting to events, or out of travelling experiences of an ordinary kind however agreeably, observantly, or even thoughtfully treated. I would eschew in writing all themes that are not so trenchantly individualized as to leave no margin for discursiveness."

During the last eight years of his life, Rossetti's whole being was clouded by the terrible curse of an excitable temperament--sleeplessness. To overcome this enemy, which interfered with his powers of work and concentration of thought, he accepted the treacherous aid of the new drug, chloral, which was then vaunted as perfectly harmless in its effect upon the health. The doses of chloral became more and more necessary to him, and I am told that at last they became so frequent and excessive that no case has been recorded in the annals of medicine in which one patient has taken so much, or even half so much, chloral as Rossetti took. Under this unwholesome drug his constitution, originally a magnificent one, slipped unconsciously into decay, the more stealthily that the poison seemed to have no effect whatever on the powers of the victim's intellect. He painted until physical force failed him; he wrote brilliantly to the very last, and two sonnets dictated by him on his death-bed are described to me as being entirely worthy of his mature powers. There is something almost melancholy in such a proof of the superior vitality of the brain. If the mind had shared the weakness of the body, the insidious enemy might perhaps have been routed in time to secure the elastic rebound of both. But when the chloral was stoutly met at last, it was too late.

So at the age of fifty-four we have lost a man whom we should have retained, in the nature of things, for twenty years longer in the plentitude of his powers, but for a mistake in hygiene--a medical experiment. His work of inspiring the young, of projecting his fiery originality along the veins of others, was perhaps completed; it is doubtful whether this can ever be continued with advantage through more than two generations. The prophet is apt at last to become a tyrant, and from this ill apotheosis Rossetti was spared. But there was no reason why he should not, for at least a score of years, have produced noble pictures and have written gorgeous poems, emphasizing a personal success which he would have extended, though he hardly could have raised it. Yet he was always a melancholy man; of late years he had become almost a solitary man. Like Charles of Austria, he had disbanded his body-guard, and had retired to the cloister. Perhaps a longer life would not have brought much enjoyment with it. But these are idle speculations, and we have rather to call to our remembrance the fact that one of the brightest and most distinguished of our race, a man whose very existence was a protest against narrowness of aim and feebleness of purpose, one of the great torch-bearers in the procession of English art, has been called from us in the prime of life, before the full significance of his genius had been properly felt. He was the contemporary of some mighty names older than his, yet there scarcely was to be found among them all a spirit more thoroughly original; and surely, when the paltry conflicts of passing taste are laid to rest forever, it will be found that this man has written his signature indelibly on one of the principal pages of the register of our intellectual history.

[Signature of the author.]

GUSTAVE DORÉ[11]

[Footnote 11: Reprinted by permission, from the "Nation."]

By KENYON COX

(1832-1883)

It is now eleven years since Gustave Doré died. He was an officer of the Legion of Honor, had attained considerable wealth, and was probably more widely known than any other artist of his day. His name was a household word in two continents. Yet he died a disappointed and embittered man, and is proclaimed by his friends as a neglected and misunderstood genius. He was known the world over as the most astonishingly prolific illustrator of books that has ever lived; he wished to be known in France as a great painter and a great sculptor, and because the artists and critics of France never seriously recognized his claims to this glory, he seems to have become a victim of the mania of persecution, and his naturally sunny nature was over-clouded with moroseness and suspicion. Hailed by some as the emulator and equal of the great names of the Italian Renaissance, and considered a great moral force--a "preacher painter"--by others he has been denounced as "designer in chief to the devil," and described as a man wallowing in all foulness and horror, a sort of demon of frightful power. Both these extreme judgments are English. The late Blanchard Jerrold, an intimate friend and collaborator of the artist, takes the first view. Mr. Ruskin and Mr. Hamerton have taken the second. Doré's own countrymen have never accepted either. Just where, between them, the truth lies, as we see it, we shall endeavor to show in this article.

The main facts of Doré's life may be dismissed very briefly. He was born with a caul on January 6, 1832, in the Rue Bleue at Strasbourg, near the Cathedral. About 1841 his father removed to Bourg, in the Department of Ain, where he was chief government engineer of the department. These two residences of the young artist are supposed to account for the mastery of Gothic architecture and of mountain scenery which his admirers find in his mature work. He showed very early in life a passion for drawing, and, as a small child, had always a pencil in his hand, which he begged to have "sharpened at both ends," that he might work longer without interruption. His father intended him for an engineer, but he was determined from the first to be an artist. He was of a gay and jovial disposition, given to pranks and practical jokes, and of an athletic temperament. Théophile Gautier afterward called him a "gamin de génie." In 1847, when he was fifteen years old, being in Paris with his parents, he called upon Phillippon, the publisher, and showed him some of his sketches. M. Phillippon looked at them, and sent a letter to Doré's parents, persuading them to allow the boy to remain in Paris, and promising them to begin using his work at once and to pay for it. Thus, without any study of art whatever, he began his career, and in a few years had produced a prodigious quantity of work, and was a celebrated man before he was twenty. No one knows how many drawings he made. He "lived like an Arab," worked early and late, and with astonishing rapidity made thousands of drawings for the comic papers, besides early beginning the publication of independent books. One estimate, which Mr. Jerrold thinks excessive, credits him with having published forty thousand drawings before he was forty! Mr. Jerrold himself reckons two hundred and sixty-six drawings done in one year. His "Labors of Hercules" was brought out in 1848, when he was sixteen, and before he was twenty-seven he had published his "Holy Russia," his "Wandering Jew," his illustrations to Balzac's "Contes Drôlatiques," to Rabelais, and many other authors. His best work was done at an age when most artists are painfully acquiring the rudiments of their art. We all know the books that followed.

Meanwhile he was determined to be known as a great painter, and, while flooding the market with his countless illustrations, was working at great canvases of Biblical subjects, which, though the French would not accept them, were hugely admired in the Doré Gallery of London. Later he tried sculpture also, and his last work was a monument to Alexandre Dumas, which he made at his own expense, and presented to the city of Paris. He died in the beginning of the year 1883, worn out with excessive production--a great name, but an unsatisfied man.

Mr. Jerrold has divided his book into two parts, dealing first with Doré the illustrator, and then with Doré the painter and sculptor. It is an eminently natural arrangement, and, in our effort to arrive at Doré's true position in art, we cannot do better than to follow it.