Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 841
In the imagination of the speaker, the barn and even the cows existed hazily, but not more hazily than did the now cleared field; the field was there, cleared, but not more real than the barns of some years ago. This detritus of the dead, this dust left, as it were, in a film, is like the “patina” that gives value to old bronzes, like the age and yellowness that give tone to old ivories. We see our country-sides through this veil, and the trees, the hillocks, and the smithies seem to speak to us with human voices. In other lands, in lands to which we can attach no associations, a hill is just a hill, a river a river. Without at least a fictitious crop of historic facts no scenery would hold us. The plains of France to us may be fair; but if we cannot at least invent for ourselves some sort of scheme of all the dead who have ploughed them up, fertilised them with their blood, or ridden over them towards love or death, without some cloud of human ghosts to people them, we shall not settle down amidst the hedges of Brittany. California has its brilliant hues, its great gorges, its vast prospects, but they will not really hold us; neither will the lakes, the swards, the green trees of those most beautiful of islands, New Zealand. Work might keep us there, the chance of profit, or even the hope of healing a damaged lung; but no spirit of the place calls us. Many of us may love solitude; we may hate the sight of living man; but few can dispense with the invisible presence of the dead — of the dead that the auctioneer with his croaking jokes long has since doomed to oblivion.
Changes may worry us dreadfully — the cutting down of familiar avenues, the setting up of wire fences in place of old hedgerows; but as long as the changes are real in the sense of being called for by the spirit of the age we shall at last accept them and make them a part of our spirit of the place. It is only when, as in the case of that most odious of all things, the restoration of old churches and old buildings — it is only when the changes are out of touch with modernity — when, in fact, the changes are “fakes,” that they will remain for ever eye-sores, that they will for ever strike false notes. A landowner that I knew has erected some brick pigsties in a lovely old orchard. At first I hated them; but little by little I have grown accustomed to the sight of the buildings and the “feeling” of the pigs. I have grown to feel that the pigs were more or less necessary, and that the sties, because they are suited for their purpose, are neither distasteful nor vulgar. But every time that I pass our old church, now, alas! picked clean and white as dry bones are clean and white, I shudder a little, and every time I enter our fine old Hall that has been spoiled by the addition of a new wing in a style limply aping the mediæval.
These latter changes are imitative and are meaningless; but the others we accept. If it be the fate of the country to be turned into one vast territory of pleasure parks eventually, we shall accept the pleasure park as the standard, just as now, upon the whole, we accept the small farm; if it be the fate of the country to be cut up into squares for small holders, sooner or later we or our children will accept the fact that every view over dales and valleys will appear like a never-ending draught-board. The eye will accept its freedom to travel over miles and miles, just as nowadays it welcomes its imprisonment by hedgerow after hedgerow, and the flat sweep of cultivated territory will be as much the country as is to-day the closed-in maze that we love. In the region of change that is the country, change is, in short, the very breath of life, the sole thing that we have to comment on, the sole basis of the news that keeps us all going.
And it all goes so very slowly. Last year I took a late October walk down a long valley. It had been one of those days that one loves and lingers through, as if they must be our last on a pleasant earth. The valley was broad, the grass covered with a bluish haze, the sunshine was very red, the river ran sluggishly between high banks. The year was dying away, so that each minute of sunlight seemed a precious gift, and the day died so fast that hardly could one resist the attempt to hold it, physically, by some gesture of the hands, by some effort of the will. It was one of those days that, one is acutely aware, can never return. Other days pass, and are no doubt reckoned; this will live for ever in the memory. Winter was coming, night, sleep — and who knows whether not death itself?
But suddenly, on changing the direction at the turn of the river, there before us, close at hand in the absolutely still air, all warmed with the wash of light from the low sun, was the little range of hills that bound the valley. And everything on them had a quaint distinctness. Below was the golden roof of a farm that might have been a roof in Caxton’s day; just before it was a rush-thatched hut, its background small, green, foreshortened fields like squares in a pattern, and all flat. And appearing so exactly above the hut that it seemed as if they must fall down the smoking brick chimneys were a ploughman and his 216 team moving swiftly — two black horses and two white, a boy with a harrow following, and to one side a man with a seed-trough slung round him, sowing with both hands. Even at that distance one could see the light haze of the flying seeds. It might have been a coloured picture in a child’s book of to-day; it might, without the change of a visible detail, have been a picture in a missal. Just over the bank was the great high-road along which the motor-cars screamed; just beyond that, over the hill and out of sight, was a great, broad, hedgeless “scientific” farm. But, standing there that afternoon, and walking back in the dying day for miles along that bank, we might, for all the eye could see, have been there this afternoon or half a millennium ago, so slowly does always moving Change move in the heart of the country. If there we do not find the Fountain of Youth, there at least we may learn to grow old without perceiving it, to fuse into the tide of humanity that individually matters so little — the tide of humanity that in its course across the earth has smoothed and rounded so many hill-tops, has altered the lines of so many fields, has bound down so many rivers to their courses, has held back the sea from so many wildernesses of marsh and fen, has fought so bravely, with so little glory, so long a fight against the irresistible forces of Nature.
Nature is, indeed, at once the auctioneer and the trustee of us men who walk the turrows in the heart of the country — the trustee rather than the auctioneer, 217 since the price of labour that we pay goes into no pocket other than ours. Men, so long ago, scraped and furrowed the ridges that terrace the dun faces of the great slopes, and Nature hands them down to us who have forgotten even what those old householders looked like. We have forgotten them, just as we have forgotten how that dead man looked who sat, years ago, in the arm-chair that we bought off the grass — in the arm-chair in which now one of us thrones it, the king of a tiny clan, the leader of a little caravan-load of mortals — the leader for a short moment across the small holding of time that shall still be ours.
THE END
ROSSETTI: A CRITICAL ESSAY ON HIS ART
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
The original frontispiece
CHAPTER I
We may call Rossetti a genius; we cannot call him a master. A great master’s art is the art of a man who knows, who has found out for himself — after pains more or less acute, after many wasted essays more or less definite in aim, after many failures felt and learned from — how to produce consummately the impression that he aims at. Rossetti never mastered his instrument. He had a great gift of sympathy, and great talents of expression; but for mastery he substituted an erratic handling of his material. His one settled habit as a painter was to attempt impulsively, ardently, or pertinaciously, to render whatever pleased him, without the supreme instinct for what his technique could accomplish. The master pays beforehand the price of hard study, of disillusionment, of “training,” of long barren hours. He receives the power to render things dispassionately, unswervingly and authentically. The genius enjoys his work; proceeds along the lines of least resistance, and pays the price afterwards. The price is the failure to be universally convincing — the being, in fact, convincing only to those that are of goodwill, and the being never technically consummate.
What however is essential in all works of art is the one thing—” charm”; the one quality that will atone for all technical failures; the one thing, lacking which, no picture, technically perfect, can for a moment hold, seize upon and overwhelm. And charm is the one quality that Rossetti’s work, considered as a body, can definitely and unflinchingly have claimed for it.
It is along the lines here indicated rather than definitely laid down that the present writer intends to proceed. It is of course impossible to get at the nature of this thing, charm. In the case of Rossetti, however, one can trace what it was that charmed him in the world.
Again, the most profitable method of criticism is that of paying attention to a man’s work. For the intrusion of a certain amount of biographical matter and of personal facts (which in ordinary cases can only lead to that most bastard of all forms of criticism — that based on a priori knowledge) the present-writer must apologise. The artist should be allowed to live out his life in peace. If he is not, if the censor of manners must for the public good be called in to say: “This man was a good citizen and saved money; this a Bohemian who worked after supper,” our view of his art becomes generally less clear.
But, precisely, because Rossetti’s work is almost always a matter of re-reflected personal influences; because, that is, the people with whom Rossetti had to do very much influenced Rossetti’s work; because Rossetti painted what he liked rather than what he knew to be, it becomes necessary to indicate what Rossetti the man liked. Bearing this well in mind the present writer will attempt to state as clearly as is practicable what he thinks are the true bearings on Rossetti of the various movements that Rossetti came in contact with; of the men by whom he was influenced; of the things, in short, that created his various states of mind. The task is not the easiest of the easy. One is acquainted with so much of gossip; of unmeasured eulogy, and of sober chronicling of Rossetti’s deeds that it becomes almost daily more difficult not to be led into thinking that on the one hand his work is a sort of stew of the drugs of gossip, bric-a-brac and improvidences; and on the other that Rossetti was a megalomaniac figure of the boards with a growing and interested claque all round him. Neither is the case. Rossetti, personally, was a great, magnetic and prodigal figure; he attracted many men of all kinds. But the facts of that kind are the province of the psychologist. The present writer will attempt to neglect as far as is possible all those not bearing directly upon Rossetti’s work. *
* The present writer has relied, for his remarks on pictures, mainly upon his own knowledge, which may be said to be fairly intimate and commenced in very early childhood. Dates he has verified principally by Mr Marillier’s monumental volume; by Mr Rossetti’s numerous publications; by Mr F. G. Stephen’s writings in the “ Rossetti Portfolio” and the Athenæum; by his own “Madox Brown,” etc. The few quotations from letters come mostly from Mr W. Rossetti’s publications or from letters in the possession of the writer. With most of the vast number of memoirs, treatises and essays on Rossetti and his friends, he may be taken to be familiar.
CHAPTER II
Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti was born on 12th May 1828.
The story of his ancestry, by its nature singularly suggestive, makes at the same time suggestions so obvious as to call for but the barest statement. Three quarters of his blood was pure Italian: — one half Neapolitan, one quarter Central Italian. His father was, and still is, esteemed in Italy as the revolutionary poet of early Italian nationalism, and is somewhat, but in a kindly way, laughed at as a mystical, but very profound, very laborious and very “obstinate” student of the Divinia Commedia and of the earlier Italian poets. He elucidated their works by the light of a Freemasonic, Anti-Papal system. He had besides considerable skill as a minute sepia-vignette draughtsman. His father was a blacksmith of Vasto in the Kingdom of Naples; a man of some eminence in his village; a good talker and a man of strong character. Gabriele Rossetti’s circumstances made him tolerate the Napoleonic regime in Naples. Under Joseph Buonaparte and Murat he was conservator of a museum of art. When, after the fall of Napoleon, Ferdinand was restored, Gabriele Rossetti was one of the Liberals who were literally proscribed. He was a strong supporter of the Carbonari, whose aim was the forcing a constitution on the Bourbon kings. To escape from the king’s gallows — in which he was aided and abetted by the officers of a British man-of-war — he went to Malta in 1821. Later, the intrigues of the agents of Ferdinand of Naples made his position in Malta so unpleasant that in 1824 he came to England where he became Professor of Italian at King’s College. There, in 1826, he married Maria Francesca Polidori, a lady whose mother’s maiden name was Pearce. The Polidori and Pearce families were both pedagogic by profession.
Gabriele Rossetti had four children: Maria Francesca, Dante Gabriel, William Michael and Christina Georgina. Polidori, the maternal grandfather, was by descent on his father’s side a Central Italian. He was a man of some wealth, of respectable position, and very rigid propriety; he had acquired a competency by teaching, and during the childhood of the young Rossettis he was the owner of a private printing press.
The books that he produced were as a rule semi-educational collections of Moral Tales intended to be used in the upbringing of middle-class English pupils, who in that day nearly all learnt Italian. Polidori’s daughters, the mother and aunt of Rossetti, were trusted governesses and companions in great families. The Polidori influence — the mother’s — on the Rossetti children was to a great extent English, with a more or less strong tendency towards the Anglicanism that afterwards led to the Tractarian movement.
Rossetti, the father, was a practically sceptic — and strongly Anti-Papal — Catholic. His face strikingly resembled that of the late Mr Gladstone: very vigorous, very determined, and as if dominated by an idée fixe, which, in the days of the young Rossettis, had caused him to become a very old, rather awfully reverend scholar. He was indeed much reverenced by his compatriots in England — old exiles and young conspirators. To his children his abstruse studies made him, his system, and Dante Alighieri along with them, take a somewhat remote position in the household. Early letters show that he received perhaps more reverence than affection from his children. Their affection and reverence for their mother exhibit, on the other hand, a touching and typical instance of the kind.
The necessity for living within convenient distance of King’s College settled the family within the bounds of that part of London that we now call the West Central district — (Rossetti was born and lived during his childhood in Charlotte Street, Portland Place). Mediaevalism, however, had already overwhelmed the world with the work of Scott, and the household of the Rossettis was definitely Italian. They had practically no English friends.
The boys for a time went to King’s College School; they may be said to have brought little back. It was the home-life that really mattered. During their later childhood they became enthusiasts for the purchase of Knight’s publications — a number of works for the popularising of all the sciences; works which preceded and went side by side with the founding of Mechanics’ Institutes.
Another work that greatly “influenced” the young Rossetti was “Retsch’s Outlines” — various series of designs illustrating Shakespeare’s plays. These appeared at intervals during twenty years or so, a Hamlet in 1828; a Macbeth in 1833; a Lear in 1838; a Merry Wives in 1844.
One should also not forget Melmoth the Wanderer — Mathurin’s version of the Juif Errant legend — and, for the girls, at least, devotional verse like that of Lord Herbert. One of Christina’s earliest poems takes its subject, and its last line entire, from the former vigorous and supernaturally blood-curdling romance; another is directly modelled upon a poem of Herbert’s.
One gets a sufficient idea of the essential facts of Rossetti’s childhood from these details. They undoubtedly suggest the main ideas of his later intellectual story. One must consider all these things, Italian, romantic, literary and ethical, as operating on the inflammable minds of a family of young people, a family intensely united; intensely emulous; the members spurring one another on; competing in several of the arts of expression.
CHAPTER III
Rossetti’s Art Instruction began in an Academy of the Fine Arts, kept by a Mr Cary, and generally known as Sass’s. Rossetti went there in 1842 and remained until 1846. How much he actually learnt is scarcely ascertainable. One may call it a vanishing quantity. One may call what he learnt at the Academy Schools the same.
After he had left Cary’s he did not know that the human leg contains more than one bone, although he had there, according to Mr Stephens, an actual opportunity of drawing from skeletons; he never had a scientific knowledge of perspective. At this stage he commenced a large oil-painting of an old monk, a young girl, and the devil as tempter. He had no knowledge of oil-painting, and Sir Charles Eastlake discouraged the idea of the picture’s completion. It was to have been called: Retro me Satanas. During 1844-6 Rossetti was much impressed by the powers of Gavarni, a French draughtsman, whose work approaches caricature of much vigour and coarseness of penwork. Some of Rossetti’s drawings in the style of that master — Gavarni really was a master — are still extant, and may be called his earliest appreciable work. They are interesting as showing that Rossetti became a comparatively skilled draughtsman quite early. He also came across Madox Brown’s Parisina and his cartoons exhibited in Westminster Hall. During the same years he began translating — firstly Bürger’s “Lenore”; then the “Nibelungenlied,” of which he made versions of a considerable quantity; and then of Dante. It was in 1845 that he commenced his translations from the Early Italian Poets. He fell under the influence of Shelley, of Keats, and of Browning. In May of 1847 he wrote the first draft of the Blessed Damosel, and a little later that of Jenny.
