A History of English Literature

Brotherhood, in which Rossetti, whose disposition throughout his life was
extremely self-assertive, or even domineering, took the lead. The purpose
of the Brotherhood was to restore to painting and literature the qualities
which the three enthusiasts found in the fifteenth century Italian
painters, those who just preceded Raphael. Rossetti and his friends did not
decry the noble idealism of Raphael himself, but they felt that in trying
to follow his grand style the art of their own time had become too abstract
and conventional. They wished to renew emphasis on serious emotion,
imagination, individuality, and fidelity to truth; and in doing so they
gave special attention to elaboration of details in a fashion distinctly
reminiscent of medievalism. Their work had much, also, of medieval
mysticism and symbolism. Besides painting pictures they published a very
short-lived periodical, 'The Germ,' containing both literary material and
drawings. Ruskin, now arriving at fame and influence, wrote vigorously in
their favor, and though the Brotherhood did not last long as an
organization, it has exerted a great influence on subsequent painting.
Rossetti's impulses were generous, but his habits were eccentric and
selfish, and his life unfortunate. His engagement with Miss Eleanor Siddal,
a milliner's apprentice (whose face appears in many of his pictures), was
prolonged by his lack of means for nine years; further, he was an agnostic,
while she held a simple religious faith, and she was carrying on a losing
struggle with tuberculosis. Sixteen months after their marriage she died,
and on a morbid impulse of remorse for inconsiderateness in his treatment
of her Rossetti buried his poems, still unpublished, in her coffin. After
some years, however, he was persuaded to disinter and publish them.
Meanwhile he had formed friendships with the slightly younger artists
William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones, and they established a company for
the manufacture of furniture and other articles, to be made beautiful as
well as useful, and thus to aid in spreading the esthetic sense among the
English people. After some years Rossetti and Burne-Jones withdrew from the
enterprise, leaving it to Morris. Rossetti continued all his life to
produce both poetry and paintings. His pictures are among the best and most
gorgeous products of recent romantic art--'Dante's Dream,' 'Beata Beatrix,'
'The Blessed Damosel,' and many others. During his later years he earned a
large income, and he lived in a large house in Cheyne Row, Chelsea (near
Carlyle), where for a while, as long as his irregular habits permitted, the
novelist George Meredith and the poet Swinburne were also inmates. He
gradually grew more morbid, and became a rather pitiful victim of insomnia,
the drug chloral, and spiritualistic delusions about his wife. He died in
1882.
Rossetti's poetry is absolutely unlike that of any other English poet, and
the difference is clearly due in large part to his Italian race and his
painter's instinct. He has, in the didactic sense, absolutely no religious,
moral, or social interests; he is an artist almost purely for art's sake,
writing to give beautiful embodiment to moods, experiences, and striking
moments. If it is true of Tennyson, however, that he stands aloof from
actual life, this is far truer of Rossetti. His world is a vague and
languid region of enchantment, full of whispering winds, indistinct forms
of personified abstractions, and the murmur of hidden streams; its
landscape sometimes bright, sometimes shadowy, but always delicate,
exquisitely arranged for luxurious decorative effect. In his
ballad-romances, to be sure, such as, 'The King's Tragedy,' there is much
dramatic vigor; yet there is still more of medieval weirdness. Rossetti,
like Dante, has much of spiritual mysticism, and his interest centers in
the inner rather than the outer life; but his method, that of a painter and
a southern Italian, is always highly sensuous. His melody is superb and
depends partly on a highly Latinized vocabulary, archaic pronunciations,