William Blake in his relation to Dante Gabriel Rossetti/Chapter 1
William Blake
in his Relation to
Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
In the memoir on Dante Gabriel Rossetti which precedes the family letters of this poet[1], William M. Rossetti tells us that his brother had procured a manuscript book with the poems of William Blake from an attendant in the British Museum in the month of April 1847. "He then proceeded", William Rossetti goes on, "to copy-out across a confused tangle of false starts, alternative forms and cancelling all the poetry in the book, and I did the same for the prose. His ownership of this truly precious volume[2] stimulated in some degree his disregard or scorn of some aspects of art held in reverence by dilettante and routine students and thus conduced to the Praeraphaelitic Movement; for he found here the most (and no doubt the most irrational) epigrams and jeers against such painters as Correggio, Titian, Rubens, Rembrandt, Reynolds, and Gainsborough. They were balsam to Dante Gabriel Rossetti's soul and grist to his mill". Thus far William M. Rossetti, and undoubtedly the finding of this little booklet has exercised a great influence on his brother and through him indeed conduced much to the Praeraphaelitic movement. However this influence was exercised not only on account of its sharp criticism on the Venetian and Flemish schools of painting, but more because of its simple and naive poems with their strange metres, through its weird pictures and the daring doctrines it put forth, and most of all through the spirit of mysticism which breathes through the whole and gives it such a wonderful charm. Like German Romanticism the Praeraphaelitic movement was a revolt against the prosaic acceptance, pseudo-classicism, and thoughtless imitation of the foregoing century, and as such, as it were an aftergrowth of the great romantic school in Germany, its distinguishing feature was its mysticism, which can be traced through all the works of the Praeraphaelites, be they literary or artistic. Already in some later works of the German Romantics, e. g. in the second part of Goethe's Faust and in Hoffmann's Erzählungen, mystic ideas are interwoven; but what I may perhaps term "modern mysticism", to distinguish it from the Catholic mysticism of the Middle Ages, found its true development in the literary and artistic productions of the Praeraphaelitic school; and the great fore-runner of this school was William Blake. In the following pages I will try to examine somewhat closer than has been done up to now wherein this influence existed and in how far Blake really conduced to the Praeraphaelitic movement.
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; Holman Hunt remained faithful in all his works to the rules laid down in their first assemblies; Dante Gabriel Rossetti, not even in the religious period of his art, stuck to the rules he himself had laid down with so much ardour. And I think it was J. E. Millais, who showed himself the greater painter with his "Lorenzo and Isabella", at the same time the most typical Praeraphaelitic picture. It has the hard outline and glowing colours of the quattrocento paintings, at the same time the dreadful spiritual love of Isabella hints, though it has an awful ascetic power, at the perversity of E. A. Poe, or perhaps O. Wilde's Salome. For it was that part of the Middle Ages which the Praeraphaelites have tried to render, in which souls were very pale but filled with hot desires, in which the lust of the senses mixed with the prayers of the mystics, and in which the anticipated joys of heaven were not so great as the earthly miseries. It was a dream of the Middle Ages full of melancholy, sensuousness, and glowing colours, and as I said above, it was not Dante Gabriel Rossetti in whose works more than in those of all representatives of this school its most typical qualities were united. Although not the greatest nor the most typical of the Praeraphaelites, yet his influence has been the greatest, because he was by far the strongest personality and the greatest intellectual force. On all the persons who came in contact with him he made a great impression; some of them remained under his influence for the rest of their careers, others were only spell-bound for a short while by the brilliancy of his talk and the power of his strong mind; on all these his influence has had a lasting effect.
William M. Rossetti tells us how already as a mere boy his brother was impetuous and vehement and essentially of a dominant turn in intellect, and a leader in temperament. Ruskin says of Dante Gabriel Rossetti: "I believe Rossetti's name should be placed first on the list of men within my own range of knowledge who have raised and changed the spirit of modern art; raised in absolute attainment, changed in direction of temper." And elsewhere: "Rossetti was the chief intellectual force in the modern romantic school of England".[5] Holman Hunt mentions his power of inspiring enthusiasm and making proselytes, a power which according to H. Hunt he seems to have exercised to an inconvenient extent and to which Hunt himself was compelled to yield in spite of himself. And of Burne-Jones a pretty little anecdote has been told which perhaps brings out more than anything else the fascinating power of Rossetti's genius. It is said that a critic looking at a picture of Burne-Jones remarked that it was merely an imitation of Rossetti. "And if so", the artist answered, "I am quite content to imitate Gabriel". It was this ascendency over others to which were added great capacity for criticism, so rare in artists, an unselfish delight in the work of others, a splendid memory for any poetry which had won his admiration, and "a voice rarely equalled for simple recitations" (Hunt) which made Dante Gabriel Rossetti the soul of the Praeraphaelitic movement and earned for him the name of Father of Praeraphaelitism, bestowed upon him by William Sharp in his "Life of Rossetti", 1883. And it could not be, but that the bend of Rossetti's genius was the dominating power of the Praeraphaelitic movement, and that the influence which exercised its power on Dante Gabriel Rossetti was the influence to which all other Praeraphaelites were subjected.
The influence which William Blake exercised on Dante Gabriel Rossetti was of a three-fold nature. He owes much to him:
- a) as a philosopher,
- b) as a poet,
- c) as a painter.
It was however, as I mentioned above, Blake's mysticism, by which Dante Gabriel Rossetti was mostly impressed, and therefore I shall speak of this influence in the first place. It should, however, be borne in mind that Blake's philosophic doctrines were laid down in a literary and in an artistic form, viz: in his poems and in his pictures, and that therefore it is often very difficult and sometimes impossible to separate Blake the philosopher from Blake the artist or the poet, so that when I make this division for the sake of clearness and discuss successively Blake's influence from a philosophical, literary, and artistic point of view, these influences must not be thought of as existing isolated, but as continually supporting and correcting each other.
- ↑ W. M. Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, his Family Letters. London 1895.
- ↑ At the sale of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's effects this little book fetched over one hundred guineas. Recollections of D. G. Rossetti and his Circle by Henry F. Dunn (Chapter III). London 1904.
- ↑ When I talk of Praeraphaelites I mean this school in its widest sense. Robert Browning belongs to it because of his great love for the Italian art as well as for the minute carefulness he displays in his descriptions, but most of all because of the great stress he lies on the study of soul. "Little else", he writes, "than the development of a soul is worth study" (Preface of Sordello). Others like G. F. Watts and Burne-Jones, though only for a time painting under the Praeraphaelitic banner, I include as well, as F. Madox Brown, Ch. Collins, A. Hughes, and many others of lesser note. It seems that the row closes with Byam Shaw's picture Love's Baubles and that he is the last of all those who painted or wrote under the influence of the Praeraphaelitic school.
- ↑ Even in his Praeraphaelitic period.
- ↑ See Benson, Life of Rossetti. London 1904. Chapter VII.