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

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in the earliest dawn of literature, they attempt
to grin the public ear by something strange and
startling.
Aspirants to fame who ignore this counsel are likely to end
up writing like Zola, or - a strange example of morbidity -
Feydeau.
The critics quoted in the preceding paragraph are symptomatic
of a tendency described by J.Comyns Carr, prominent as
an art-journalist and as an "adviser" to Henry Irving* In an
intelligent and perceptive appraisal of Rossetti's oeuvre,
published in Carr's English Illustrated Magazine soon after
the painter's death, he compared English attitudes to literature
with opinions on art:
Men who can read Keats without any violent
shock to their commonsense, and who v/ill
follow the genius of Shelley in its most aerial
flights, have scarce any faith left for the
artist who seeks to arouse a kindred emotion
by the means proper to painting. They will even
doubt tlipt he himself has any true belief in
Iiis own creation, so strange to the temper
of our time is all art that does not found itself
on direct portraiture, or on the little drama of
everyday life.
(I (1883) 38).
Garr claims th vfc Rossetti*s earlier work began from the desire
to present ideal and abstract values of composition and line,
and accomodated "nature" to suit these values: a process he
identifies as "poetic". Against this he sets the later work,
taking as an example Lady Lilith (1864) which "starts from
the conception of portraiture, and the ideal suggestion...
only follows, and does not directly inspire, the reality",
i-iossetti "was a poet to the end of his days", but cane to
terms, in the course of his career, v;ith nature:
Some of the noblest painting that rem-ins to us
is frankly founded upon the direct and sin-le
observation of human character, or the beauty of
the outride world, and it therefore implies no
reproach against a painter that he should elect
in later life to put aside the fpnciful ideas
the t had tempt e;- the vision of a boy.
In attempting to adjust "noetic" (in a sense, literary) vclues
again?: t "Painterly" ones, Carr Arrives at a definition of terms
that has mor* sophistication than Prinsep or Calderon or The
Illustrated iioadon : OWE could offer. He also attenrots a