Pictorial Shakespeare, 1880-1890 - eTheses Repository - University ...

is of cource and obviously removed from every
adventitious literary interest, the power of
portraiture depending upon the impression.
'(The Art-Journal, n.s.II (1882)
61-2)
Not tir't the portrait painter was an entirely free agent:
N.Garstein, writing two years later in the same journal,
found among the work of the late Edouard Manet,
pictures that seom like portraits without the
raison d'etre of portraiture, and whose
personality is often ae unpleasant as its
colour.
By failing in his selection of sitters, and by various other
sins of omission and commission, wrote Garstein, Manet had
forfeited greatness: "it is hardly possible that posterity
will accept him as a great painter" (n.s. IV (1884) 109-111;
p.lll).
More comprehensive attempts to unfold the mysteries
governing the distinctions between the arts met with little
success. The appearance in 1882 of Bossetti's collection of
Ballads and Sonnets and of Pygmalion, a poem by the Pre-
Raphaelite sculptor Thomas Woolner, prompted Alice Meynell
to a sustained effort of aesthetic theorizing. "The Brush,
the Chisel and the Pen", in The .Art-Journal, considered the
painterly quality of Rossetti*s verse and the sculptoresque
preoccupations of Woolner. Her most pregnant remarks concern
the act of meditation:
Art gains by faithful and restrained respect
to its own methods, and thic is true of the
separate and distinct arts, and also of the
separate branches of one art; that is to say,
painting and letters g£iin in power by studying,
the former the irrnression, and the latter the
thought; and the art of sculpture gains by a
strict adherence not only to the possibilities,
but to the fine properties of its material, -
bronze, or marble, or stone.
(n.s. II (1882) 05-7; p.85)
This has an attractive air of plrunibility, but the distinction
between "impression" and "thought" is weak and uncle r: the
critic appears to be placing the forn:r in a lor/or position on
tiie intellectual scale than the latter, and surest ing that
oculptor^ are able to provide only representations of the
objects upon which the literary intellect might brood and form
impressions: In Vhe Portfolio William oliarp clainod in his
article "D.^. Rocsetti and Pictorialism in Verr.;e" th; t there