xt7qjq0stw34_3348 https://exploreuk.uky.edu/dips/xt7qjq0stw34/data/mets.xml https://exploreuk.uky.edu/dips/xt7qjq0stw34/data/1997ms474.dao.xml unknown archival material 1997ms474 English University of Kentucky The physical rights to the materials in this collection are held by the University of Kentucky Special Collections Research Center.  Contact the Special Collections Research Center for information regarding rights and use of this collection. W. Hugh Peal manuscript collection Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelites book chapter by Elisabeth Luther Cary text 43.94 Cubic Feet 86 boxes, 4 oversize boxes, 22 items Poor-Good Peal accession no. 11453. Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelites book chapter by Elisabeth Luther Cary 2017 https://exploreuk.uky.edu/dips/xt7qjq0stw34/data/1997ms474/Box_32/Folder_110/Multipage11555.pdf undated section false xt7qjq0stw34_3348 xt7qjq0stw34 The Friendship of the Storm 319

self, I should hope that the Sonnets might take precedence of these
plays in which Shakespeare has only a share, greater or less.

Dr. Furness, looking back on the lessening group of great Shake-
spearian editors, professes to feel that he has “ grown old”; but,
though the calendar would make him sixty-seven, he seems to me no
older than when I first had the privilege of becoming personally ac-
quainted with him, more than thirty years ago. Let us hope that the
measure of his years and of his powers may not fall short of that of his
saintly father, who at ninety-four was the able and eloquent preacher
he had been for threescore years and ten.

The Friendship of the Storm‘
BY EDITH M. THOMAS

BETWEEN a Trouble and a Grief I went
Dumb and outworn, and sought a sheltering spot
Beneath a rock, where the wild winds came not;
That there my soul, sore-tortured and clean-spent,
Might find such breathing-space, such dull content,
As chances in his all-indifferent lot,
Who hath the world forgot, and is forgot,
Within a self-drawn magic circle pent.

But ah, that place of peace supplied a foil
Whereon more dark the spirit’s strife did Show!
Henceforth I seek the friendly storm—to win
Such solace as may be in constant toil

With wind and wave that will not let me know
The fiercer tempest that endures within.

 

 Rossetti and the Pre=Raphaelites*
BY ELISABETH LUTHER CARY

PRE-RAPHAELITISM has suffered from the tendency of human nature
to define a thing, “ in order,” as some one has said, “ to save the
trouble of understanding it.” Through various and contradictory
definitions it has been held responsible for many artistic sins, and also
credited with an amount of virtue it hardly could claim. At once the
most discerning and least didactic statement of it is given by a painter
who appreciated its “ dramatic programme ” without falling under its
spell. “ Pre-Raphaelitism,” he says, “ is the Pre-Raphaelite Brother—
hood, of course.” And this Brotherhood was what? Little more in
reality than a band of a few enthusiastic young men—(“ Thank God
that they are young,” said Ruskin)—who had eager minds, interesting
ideas to express, and a great determination, not by any means upheld
by their technical skill, to express them. Their name, somewhat but
not altogether misleading, led to an uproar against them which their
pictures would never, perhaps, have raised; this uproar, amounting to
persecution, aroused the abounding sympathy of Ruskin, and his de-
fence produced a great reaction in their favor, with the curious result
that by the time the little organization had wearied of its own exist-
ence and dissolved, it was pretty well fixed in the public mind as a
revolutionary influence, a “ school.”

The part played by Rossetti in all this was a peculiar one. Be-
cause he had so little in common with most of his companions; because
his independent genius was so little dominated, or even guided, by
any hard-and—fast principles he might profess, or which might be pro-
fessed for him; because his contribution to the Brotherhood was not
chiefly the veracity in workmanship, the conscientiousness of detail,
the morality of motive, demanded by them, but a deep vein of im-
aginative romance inherited or derived from the great dreamers of
mediaeval Italy, and a lovely sense of color blooming with exotic bril-
liancy in the foggy atmosphere of London,—for these very reasons, by
which he is set apart from and above the Brotherhood, he has come to
be regarded as its chief exponent and representative, and, after fifty
years, is still spoken of as Rossetti, the leader of the Pre-Raphaelites.
His admirers can smile with perfect good-humor over the claims of
Millais’s filial biographer, who quotes his father’s assertion, made, it
must be said, with a tinge of superior virtue in the tone, that “ Ros—
setti’s art was not Pre-Raphaelite at all—highly imaginative and
original and not without elements of beauty,” but “ not Nature.”
Not nature indeed, but temperament and the supreme expression of a
sentiment quite unknown in England or in any other one spot where
brushes were at that time touching canvas; a sentiment belonging to
two ages and two countries united in one man, and that man singularly

* From advance sheets of “The Rossettis: Dante Gabriel and Christina.” By Elisabeth Luther
Cary. Permission of Messrs. G. P. Putnam’s Sons.

320

 

 Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelites 321

himself and unsubordinated to influences of either lower or higher
kind.

His interest in the little Brotherhood was ardent enough, however,
and is easily traced. The history of the brief interval between his

DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI
From a painting by G. F. Watts, R.A. By permission of Mr. Frederick Hollyer

connection with it and his previous study in the Academy shows him
beating about in unrestrained impatience to be free from the direction
of others, although he was not then or later indifferent to the opinions
of those about him, or disinclined to learn from them as much as he
could without interfering with his own pronounced tendencies and
predilections.

By the end of 1847, it was perfectly plain to him that his path in art
"I

 

 3 2 2 The Critic

lay in some other direction than through the successive gates of the
Royal Academy. Two more years at the Antique before he could

RUTH HERBERT
From an unpublished sketch by Rossetti in the collection of Mr. Samuel Bancroft, Jr..
Wilmington, Delaware

hope to enter the painting school was a prospect that appalled him.
He was eager to venture on color, but quite unequal to the hazard.
“ Every time I attempt to express my ideas in color,” he wrote to his

 

 Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelites 323

Aunt Charlotte Polidori, “ I find myself bafiied, not by want of ability
—I feel this and why should I not say it ?—but by ignorance of certain
apparently insignificant technicalities, which with the guidance of an
experienced artist might soon be acquired.” The means to this end
were provided by Miss Polidori, who, from her regular income as a

LADY LlLlTH, BY ROSSETTI
Photographed from the original by courtesy of Mr. Samuel Bancroft, Jr.

governess, was, alone of all the family, capable of producing “ comfort-
able extra sums ” to further the desires of her relatives. Rossetti had
two men in View who “by some unaccountable accident " had not
obtained public renown, but either of whom he would trust with his edu-
cation as a painter. Ford Madox Brown was one, and to him he wrote
the first of the series of extravagantly appreciative and sincere letters
which, like milestones, marked his admirations to the end of his life.

 

 324 The Critic

His advice to Rossetti was less radical than the latter had hoped it
would be. He had himself been well equipped in several art schools
for more than one branch of his profession, and rigid and long,
continued attention to those insignificant technicalities which Rossetti
had hoped soon to acquire seemed to him an essential of learning to
paint. He recommended his pupil to do some copying, and to paint
still-life (“ pickle-jars ”) with him during the day. and in the evening

 

 

“ FOUND ” BY ROSSETTI
Photographed from the original, with isochromatic plate, by courtesy of Mr. Samuel Bancroft, Jr.

to attend an academy where the students drew from the model. This
advice Rossetti received with respectful gratitude and followed for a
time. One of the bottle studies which he painted, obviously in a spirit
of dutiful acquiescence, is owned by Mr. Bancroft of Wilmington,
Delaware, and shows how closely his first steps in color followed the
path of his master.

In a few months, not having found what he sought, he was mapping
out a new course that shortly led him to the Pre-Raphaelite Brother--

 

 Rossetti and the Pre—Raphaelites 325

hood. He saw in the Spring Exhibition at the Royal Academy Hol—
man Hunt’s painting,'from “ The Eve of St. Agnes,” and, thinking it
the finest picture of the year, went up to Hunt and boisterously told him
as much. Later he called upon Hunt at his studio, and grumbled to
him about the pickle—jars, and by the 20th of August, 1848, the two

 

 

 

 

PENCIL DRAWING, BY FREDERICK SHIELDS, OF uTHE DEAD ROSSETTI“
Photographed from the original by courtesy of the owner, Mr. Samuel Bancroft, Jr.

young men were sharing a studio together at No. 7 Cleveland Street,
Rossetti at last in an atmosphere that suited him, combining still-life
with figure painting in a composition of his own, at Hunt’s suggestion
and under his criticism.

It is interesting to find Rossetti thus at the very beginning, with his
first exhibited picture, planning for it a frame that should be harmoni-

 

 326 The Critic

ous with it, and a sonnet that should explain it, as he did fifteen years
later for “ The Lady Lilith,” and “ Venus Verticordia,” and twenty
years later for “ Penelope,” and nearly thirty years later for “ Astarte
Syriaca.”

While painting “ The Girlhood of Mary Virgin,” Rossetti saw much
of Millais, whom he had met before at the Royal Academy and in the
little Cyclographic Society, and the triple friendship on which the
Brotherhood rested began. Millais was the type, well-known to art-
schools, of ” prize ” student. A year younger than Rossetti, he was
already hung with medals, and an exhibitor of some importance. He
was intimate with Hunt, who saw in him “a generous, quick en—
thusiasm ” and a spirit on fire with eagerness to seize whatever he saw
to be good. Although he liked Rossetti at first, the two were as fitted
to mingle as oil and water, and Millais records in later years that “ D.
G. Rossetti was a queer fellow, and impossible as a boon companion
—so dogmatic and so irritable when opposed.”

Millais and Hunt had already made a compact “ to adopt a style of
absolute independence as to art—dogma and convention.” When
Rossetti heard of it he became an easy and enthusiastic convert, and
suggested the idea of a Brotherhood. Thomas Woolner, the sculptor;
James Collinson, a painter, and pronounced by Rossetti “ a stunner,"
on the strength of one interesting picture; Frederic George Stephens,
an art critic, and apparently the only one of the number who had
much acquaintance with the actual pre-Raphaelite art, and William
Rossetti were enrolled as members. At Millais’s house in Gower
Street they were shown what Ruskin calls Lasinio’s ” execrable en-
gravings ” from the frescos of Gozzoli, Orcagna, and others in the
Campo Santo at Pisa, as examples of the sort of art-spirit with which
they should sympathize, and the crusade of the P.-R.B.’s began.

Their code, as Mr. William Rossetti records it, was simple and in-
offensive enough. They were: (I) to have genuine ideas to express;
(2) to study nature attentively, so as to know how to express them; (3)
to sympathize with what is direct and serious and heartfelt in previous
art, to the exclusion of what is conventional and self-parading and
learned by rote; (4) most indispensable of all, they were to produce
thoroughly good pictures and statues.

They held monthly meetings and daily meetings, for that matter,
to discuss questions of art and literature, and, as far as can be dis-
covered, bore themselves with self-respect. Their habits, together and
separately, were those of wholesome, well-bred, serious-minded young
men. Millais’s biographer calls attention to the fact that at a period
when, as Thackeray has shown us, “all Bohemia was saturated with
tobacco, spirits, and quaint oaths,” the Brotherhood neither smoked,
drank, nor swore. None of the prejudice with- which they were
presently to be regarded could be laid therefore to any waywardness
or wantonness of character.