History, the Revival and the PRB
WESTMINSTER, IVANHOE, VISIONS AND REVISIONS
In the 1840s and 1850s, the Palace of Westminster rose ever higher on the banks of the Thames, an ‘argument in stone’ at the centre of the British empire, a public reminder of the long-standing arrangement whereby the country was governed by ‘The Crown in Parliament under God’; and a sign, also, that this arrangement should continue. The appearance chosen for the new Palace for those who governed Britain in the Queen’s name testified to a sense that English (and by extension British) government had a long history, and also that it was ‘Gothic’ in the sense that the governed were a party to their governing; Gothic, or as people had begun to say, ‘medieval’. Two of the three Estates of the realm, Lords and Commons, went back to the twelfth century, and a united England to the tenth. A historical case for this ‘Gothic’ understanding of the constitution can be made out. But at the time when Parliament was deciding on the proper style for a new Palace of Westminster, this understanding was an inherited assumption, persuasion or conviction, not a claim requiring justification. It is also worth mentioning that Barry’s building gives more space and splendour to Crown and Lords than to Commons.
It is in the 1840s that the Medieval Revival can be said to have arrived, at much the same time as the steam railway. Research and development had been done, and it was now time for application, and production. In one of the bays of the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park, the huge glasshouse built for the Great Exhibition of British manufactures in 1851, there was a ‘Mediæval Court’ also known as ‘Pugin’s Court’, devoted to the works of A.W. Pugin and of his manufacturers. It was visited and admired by the Queen and Prince Albert, and by many others, not all of them as well dressed as those who in top hats and bonnets inspect the exhibits in Joseph Nash’s lithograph of the Medieval Court (Plate 13). Pugin, who had once designed chairs for George III, had a conference lasting three-quarters of an hour in the Mediæval Court with the Prime Minister, who had personally led the political opposition to the restoration of the Catholic episcopal hierarchy. This was Lord John Russell, whose family, earls and dukes of Bedford, were beneficiaries of the Dissolution of the Monasteries, residing at Woburn Abbey and developing Russell Square, Bedford Square and Bloomsbury on their London estate. The Illustrated London News judged that the Mediæval Court was the best thing in the Exhibition: ‘To Mr Pugin, then, who furnished the design for this gorgeous combination, is the highest honour due; and he has marvellously fulfilled his own intention of demonstrating the applicability of Mediæval art in all its richness and variety to the uses of the present day.’1 Pugin died the following year.
England’s Church and state, and areas of her social, economic and artistic life, were either taking new bearings from medieval ideals, or being urged to do so. The medieval was variously seen as offering examples more inspiring or edifying than the rational self-interest of Enlightenment civilisation and the greed and squalor of what Dickens was soon to portray in the Coketown of his Hard Times. A hundred years earlier, after the days of the Non-Jurors and their scholarship, the idea that the English present had much to learn from the remote English past was not voiced by those with access to the public ear; certainly not within the Establishment, although some outside the Church of England valued ideals which had prevailed at times in the past. In the 1740s some marginal poets had wished that the roles and subjects of contemporary poetry were not confined to the polite world. They had dreamed of Bards and Druids, role-models not historically English but primitively Celtic. A hundred years later the Medieval Revival, which had already made a strong and varied contribution to literature, was becoming the style for public architecture, and its example was increasingly urged from pulpits and lecterns.
Yet a revival cannot establish itself quite in the way that the steam railway established itself, or pointed-arch church architecture had established itself in the twelfth century, or new institutions such as universities and hospitals had established themselves in Europe. For the conscious revival of a style presupposes a number of models to choose from, a choice of examples from history. Before about 1750, the subject-matter of history was highly selective. If one project of the Enlightenment was to let Observation ‘survey mankind from China to Peru’, another was to survey how humans had lived between classical antiquity and the present day. Such a survey could not exclude the life of Europe in the centuries between Marcus Aurelius and Petrarch. This vast interval had been authoritatively surveyed by Edward Gibbon on the eve of the French Revolution, and pronounced to be ‘the triumph of barbarism and religion’. But the history of twelve centuries can be told from more than one point of view. The decline and fall of the Roman empire can also be seen as the coming into being of a culture with a different hope. A notable recent account is entitled The Rise of Western Christendom.2
To the west of Westminster, early in the eighteenth century, a Chinese pagoda was added to the Gardens at Kew, not far from Lord Burlington’s Palladian villa; not far, either, from Alexander Pope’s villa, with its garden grotto. All over England, vistas punctuated by small pillared temples, and perhaps an obelisk, began to acquire other things to interest the eye: Gothic cottages, new-built ruined abbeys, a Turkish tent or minaret, the whole to be viewed from a belvedere or gazebo, or a hermitage on a bosky hill, by an owner taking a rational pleasure in his property and his picturesque improvements, rather than by a hermit renouncing the world and choosing poverty.3 Some estate owners even advertised for a hermit to reside in their hermitages. As Observation’s view extended, these eye-catching garden pavilions gradually evolved into a more fully imagined museum of history, and Walpole, Beckford and Scott chose to build the houses of their dreams and even to live in them. So, part of the time, did the Prince Regent at his Pavilion in Brighton. Queen Victoria spent much time at Windsor, but she preferred her more romantic modern castle at Balmoral.
The increase in historical awareness provided a range of possible models, and the embarrassment of choice.4 The Renaissance and Enlightenment had favoured classical models, and public buildings of the Victorian period often continued in this style; a classical revival coincided in time with the Medieval Revival. ‘Classical’ architects from Wren to Gibbs had turned their hands to Gothic, and, before his Palace of Westminster, Sir Charles Barry had designed the Renaissance palazzo of the Reform Club in Pall Mall. Victorian Oxford acquired the Ashmolean Museum (eclectic Graeco-Roman) in 1841–5, and in 1854–60 the neo-Gothic University Museum devoted to Natural History, which was later to house a dinosaur skeleton. The Enlightenment wish to understand all human history eventually led to the recovery of the ages between the conversion of the Emperor Constantine and the Reformation. Yet an increase in historical information did not cause the Medieval Revival. So major a change is brought about not by an improvement in knowledge, but by changes in what people think they need. A sense that something is missing comes first to people of imagination and vision, and is then recovered by scholars and recreated by artists. The order of these stages can vary. Materials and models were required, but historical imaginings do not live by authenticity alone. A lot of learning can be a dangerous thing. George Eliot’s Romola is a fine novel, but it is set in a Renaissance Florence which is too archaeologically recreated.
From the 1840s onwards, a historical sense came to be a normal part of the thinking of educated people, and academic history gradually became a profession. Anyone who reads English literature historically can see that Walter Scott jumbles Elizabethan material with medieval material, and that the style of his medieval romances mixes Chaucer, Spenser and Shakespeare with ballads and metrical romances. Scott’s fictions gleefully draw on an eclectic range of sources, some of which are themselves mixed in genre, notably Shakespeare’s history plays. As Shakespeare dramatised reign after reign for the stage, kneading and shaping each story from various chronicles, he evolved a new kind of English play, of which Henry IV, Parts I and II is the best example, mingling high and low, tragedy and comedy. This was the model of history which provided Scott with the essential form for his fiction: theatrically conceived, and mixed in genre (‘tragical-historical-comical-pastoral’, as Polonius puts it). Scott followed Shakespeare in adding realism to stories shaped by the currents of romance. He also took motifs and structures from Shakespeare, such as scenes in taverns and at court, the loyal daughter, the king in disguise, fools, witches and songs.
As audiences became better informed about historical fact, they began to read modern medieval English romances through spectacles which made Scott’s historical bravura seem hasty. In Ivanhoe, Robin Hood is described as speaking Norman English. Brian de Bois-Guilbert, a Knight of the Temple of Jerusalem, has black slaves and is a secret atheist. The twelfth-century fool, Wamba, bears the name of a seventh-century Spanish Visigothic king. His master, Cedric, bears the name of a sixth-century king of Wessex, properly spelt Cerdic and pronounced ‘Cherdtich’ (pronounced like ‘Ich’ in German). The swineherd, Gurth, has a Scandinavian name, and is clearly labelled as a ‘thrall’, a Norse term for a serf or slave: ‘“Gurth, the son of Beowolf, is the born thrall of Cedric of Rotherwood”.’ The witch Ulrica invokes various pagan Teutonic gods.
The names Wamba, Cedric, Gurth and Ulrica are early Germanic, or ‘Gothic’. None would have been common in the England of the 1190s. Scott, however, was not historically so uninformed as to confuse the twelfth century with the sixth. The anachronism of the names he gave his English characters is so uniform as to make a point. It tells us that Scott believed that the Germanic – or Gothic – settler tribes who formed the English people preserved ancestral attitudes about the way political things should be arranged. These social and political attitudes made them constitutionally different from their French rulers. Scott presents this cultural difference as essential, making it almost as strong in 1190 as it had been in 1066. So Scott’s most glaring historical ‘mistake’, his portrayal of Saxons and Normans as still at enmity after several generations of cohabitation, was deliberate. Scott was a lawyer and knew how to make a case seem natural and self-evident. Although Ivanhoe ends with the English accepting Richard as their rightful king, one of the book’s morals is that the ‘Gothic’ tradition of participatory democracy is fundamental to the English character. In 1819 this tradition was held to be the key difference between Georgian Britain and an imperious France, whose twenty-year attempt to dominate Europe had ended in 1815, in the most recent of many battles on the border between Latin-speaking and German-speaking Europe. In the year of Waterloo, or very shortly after it, the Author of Waverley ordered a copy of a new book, De Danorum rebus gestis secul. III & IV, poema danicum dialecto anglosaxonica (‘A Danish Poem in Anglo-Saxon Dialect on Exploits of the Danes of the Third and Fourth Centuries’), edited by G.J. Thorkelin, and published in Copenhagen. At this time, Scott also began to think about a new kind of book, which came to fruition in Ivanhoe.
The many implausibilities of Ivanhoe would not have bothered those contemporary readers who noticed them. They would not have taken implausibilities for historical mistakes, since they would not have mistaken Ivanhoe for history. Ivanhoe is subtitled A Romance, a classification which signals fiction and legend. Yet in the 1870s Edward Augustus Freeman, Regius Professor of History at Oxford, felt obliged, in the fifth volume of his History of the Norman Conquest in England, to take Scott to task for such inaccuracies. The reason for this seems to be that Ivanhoe had been mistaken for English history by the French historian Augustin Thierry. Ivanhoe was so popular in France that Cedric is today a first name more common across the Channel than it is in England. Popular history is a genre in which wishes can come true. Some French writers found it congenial to think of the Anglo-Saxons as beef-witted skin-wearing hut-dwellers who recognised the arrival of Guillaume le Conquérant as a civilising mission. The truth is that the romance Ivanhoe is not much more historical than one of its remote descendants, the film Braveheart, which has sometimes been taken for history, not only in Australia and the United States but even in Scotland.
A last word on Beowolf (or Beowulph, the more Gothic spelling adopted by Scott in the Magnum Opus edition), the father of Gurth in Ivanhoe. A man of this name in the 1190s could not be the Beowulf of the Old English epic, who, according to the edition owned by Scott, lived in fourth-century Scandinavia. Beowulf’s people, the Geats, were conquered after his death, and disappear from history. Some nineteenth-century scholars of Anglo-Saxon (not of Scott) identified the Geats as Goths. Others speculated that Geats may have fled to what is now Yorkshire.5 Is Gurth’s father the descendant of a Gothic immigrant who has taken the name Beowolf? As Ivanhoe is not history, the question should not arise. The name of the fictional Gurth’s fictional father evokes the Beowulf of the old epic, a literary not a real person. Beowolf was a name unfamiliar in any spelling in England in 1819. Thorkelin’s was the first edition of the full text of the poem about Beowulf.6 Vernacular works in early manuscripts normally have neither title nor author. Editors invented titles and tried to find authors. Thorkelin, an Icelander who saw the manuscript when studying in the British Museum, became Denmark’s National Archivist. The Danish court in 1815 would have been unsurprised to be told that a poem set at the court of King Hrothgar the Dane and concerning the deeds of Danes was a Danish poem, though written in Anglo-Saxon dialect. Had not England been part of the Danish empire, ruled by the Danish King Cnut? The manuscript is now dated c. 1000–10 – before the reign of the king whom English history books call Canute. The poem was first called Beowulf by John M. Kemble in 1833.7
Thorkelin made two transcripts of the unique manuscript in the British Museum: the first he commissioned from a scribe in 1787, the other he made himself in 1791. Back in Copenhagen, he worked on the text for years, his research being seriously interrupted in 1807 when his papers in the Royal Library were destroyed by the British bombardment of a French fleet in Copenhagen harbour. Thorkelin’s Latin translation, which faces the text in his edition, is described by the authoritative Klaeber as ‘practically useless’. In Britain in 1815 only a very few could have begun to understand the poem. Some of its diction is so archaic that it seems not to have been fully understood by the man who copied it into the manuscript at the beginning of the second millennium. Beowulf is the nephew of a historical king, Hygelac, who died in about 521, and the guest of another historical king, Hrothgar (Roger). Thorkelin put the action of the poem two centuries too early. Beowulf himself is thought to be an invented figure, though in 1815 no one was yet in a position to show why this might be so. Yet he lives in a stylised version of a real historical world, and his career embodies a secular ideal of heroic conduct modified by Christian attitudes. Scholarship interested the savant in Scott, but would not have worried the author of Ivanhoe, who was more taken up with ideal characters, the idea of ‘Gothic’ British democracy, and the colour, texture and feel of history – so long as it was picturesque history – than in the accuracy of individual components of his story.
Literary medievalism had begun to divide, before Scott’s death in 1832, along lines already visible in his work. On the one hand, Tennyson’s imaginative poetic treatments of legends, as in the poems of 1833 we have looked at, were no longer cast in the ‘medieval’ verse-forms favoured by Coleridge and Scott, and had none of the notes they supply. On the other hand, scholarly editions of medieval texts had begun to appear. Soon after Scott’s death appeared the first English editions both of Beowulf and of what is generally reckoned the finest Middle English verse romance, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The editor of Beowulf, J.M. Kemble, was friendly with Tennyson, who had himself tried his hand at translating a few lines of the poem in 1830. Gawain was edited by Sir Frederick Madden for the Bannatyne Club in 1839. Imagination and the scientific philology pioneered in Germany had begun to go their separate ways.
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In 1848, the year of revolutions in Europe and of Marx’s Communist Manifesto, three art students at the Royal Academy Schools, one of them a drop-out, disliking the Academy’s canons of taste and its teaching programme, enrolled four friends into a Brotherhood of seven, to be known as the PRB. The three letters were to appear on all of their paintings, under oath that they were never to be explained. In 1849 a PRB journal appeared, entitled The Germ. The PRB was the first in England of those revolutionary in-groups of artists whose controversial magazines capture a trend.8 The names given to these groups sometimes stick with journalists, chroniclers and historians. The PRB leader, the drop-out from the Academy Schools, was Dante Gabriel Rossetti, then twenty. His father, Gabriele, had long been a political exile from Italy, where he had been a member of a secret society. Dante’s English-born mother was also half Italian. The first three Brothers were Rossetti, William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais. The PR in their strange device stood for ‘Pre-Raphaelite’. Once the initials were spelled out in words, they needed no further explanation at the Academy Schools. The accepted academic model of Renaissance painting had for generations been Raphael (1483–1520), the painter of The School of Athens and of much else in the Vatican, as well as of many Madonnas painted for churches. Raphael is the most regular of the painters of the High Renaissance canonised in Georgio Vasari’s Lives of the Italian Painters and praised in the Discourses of Sir Joshua Reynolds. In Raphael’s balanced compositions the forms of the actual are purified towards the ideal, colours are harmonised, and parts subordinated to the whole. In the English eighteenth century this neo-classical tradition was personified in Reynolds, Founder and President of the Royal Academy: a figure attacked then by the obscure engraver William Blake, and in 1848, although Sir Joshua had died in 1792, by the PRB.
To the Brotherhood in 1848, the Royal Academy’s programme seemed stale. They proposed a different approach, painting from an observed nature rather than from its ideally conventionalised forms. Such a simple directness was ‘medieval’ only in that it did not imitate neo-classical norms. As a device, ‘Pre-Raphaelite’ has less effrontery than the ‘or’ in Pugin’s Pointed or Christian Architecture. Yet this hyphenated word neatly turns the academic canon on its head, putting medieval example above that of the Renaissance. A similar rearrangement of the ancestors was made early in the twentieth century by two highly educated Americans in London: Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot. They elevated the example of Dante above that of Milton. The avant-garde overturns the immediate past in the hope that the future may resemble a remoter past.
A liking for the Italian painters before Raphael was not new; it was found among Jacobites in Rome; and in Paris the prices fetched by Italian primitives rose in the late eighteenth century. Imitation of such paintings was pioneered by a group of German painters in Rome in the 1820s, the Lukasbrüder. They called themselves Brothers of St Luke since he is the patron saint of religious artists; tradition shows him painting an icon of the Virgin Mary. They are known also, because of their love of scenes from the life of Jesus of Nazareth, as the Nazarenes. The idea of a Brotherhood, and some of the early subjects of the PRB, may have come from these German artists. Timothy Hilton notes that ‘Prince Albert, Victoria’s German consort, made a collection of pictures which included works by Van Eyck, Roger van der Weyden, Duccio, Fra Angelico and Gentile da Fabriano.’9 British painting had previously seen nothing like this. Although Blake and Stodhard had engraved Chaucer’s pilgrimage, and Samuel Palmer’s Shoreham paintings have a visionary quality, there were no oil paintings corresponding to the medievalist verse romances of Coleridge and Scott. In 1844, Ford Madox Brown, an older and independent painter who had visited the Nazarenes, came to live in England, at a time when painting was perhaps the only visible form of medieval art not being produced by A.W. Pugin. In 1845 Brown began to paint his Chaucer at the Court of Edward III, which he describes as ‘a vision of Chaucer reading to knights and ladies fair, to king and court, amid air and sunshine’.10 The picture derives from a full-page illustration in a fifteenth-century manuscript of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, kept at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. D.G. Rossetti admired Brown’s work. In 1846, in Volume II of his Modern Painters, John Ruskin, in full cry against the classical pictures in Catholic churches, had referred to ‘the clear and tasteless poison of the art of Raphael’. Ruskin wrote to his tutor: ‘St Peter’s I had expected to be disappointed in. I was disgusted. The Italians think Gothic architecture barbarous. I think Greek heathenish.’11 Ruskin also thought St Peter’s would make a nice ballroom.
The Pre-Raphaelites were a Brotherhood for a few years only. But when The Times attacked them, John Ruskin defended them. The first artists to rally to what the Pre-Raphaelites stood for were Ford Madox Brown, then Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris, not yet Oxford undergraduates. The earliest PRB paintings, such as Rossetti’s Girlhood of Mary Virgin of 1848–9 and Millais’s related Christ in the House of his Parents of 1849 (Plate 14), treated traditional Christian subjects with an apparently artless simplicity and an unpolished naturalism which, though reverently intended, shocked those who expected a painting of the Holy Family to glow and provide ‘uplift’. Millais ‘first exhibited this work without a title, but with the Biblical quotation “And who shall say unto him, What are these wounds in thine hands? Then he shall answer, Those with which I was wounded in the house of my friends” (Zechariah, 13:6)’. Millais was inspired by a sermon heard in Oxford. These ‘Gothic revivalists’ in paint were ‘part of the Oxford Movement, and . . . enchanted by Oxford’s Catholic past.’12 The boy Jesus has hurt his hand; the wound, the tools behind his head and his mother’s compassion foreshadow the Crucifixion. The figure of St John the Baptist, on the right, bringing a bowl of water to his wounded cousin, prefigures his baptism of Christ, also symbolised by the dove perched in the background. Baptism itself, and the nature of its effects, were at the time of Millais’s painting the subject of violent public controversy, prompted by the Gorham Judgement. Archdeacon Robert Wilberforce had preached that ‘To deny the doctrine of the baptismal regeneration of infants is a “virtual denial that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh”.’13
The analogy between the physical and the metaphysical, basic to Catholic art, was a principle being revived in the Church of England by the Oxford Movement. The Tractarians admired The Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of Nature, written by Bishop Butler in 1736. Butler’s Analogy countered the Deist view of God as a distant artificer, who, having created Nature, took no close interest in its workings. Analogy is here given a fresh application by the twenty-year-old Millais, whose unusual and rather successful painting was inspired by the sermon he had heard, and by the example of Rossetti.
But if the symbolism is orthodox or (in England) neo-orthodox, the painting is naked of style, without vanishing point or perspective, techniques within the capacity of Millais if not of Rossetti. It shows the house of Mary and Joseph as a humble carpenter’s workshop, inhabited by an overworked family who seem pious and homely rather than holy. The painting was often referred to as ‘The Carpenter’s Shop’.14 A popular magazine described Millais’s Jesus as ‘a hideous, wry-necked, blubbering, red-haired boy in a night-gown’, and his mother as a woman ‘so horrible in her ugliness that . . . she would stand out from the rest of the company as a monster in the vilest cabaret in France or in the lowest gin-shop in England’. This infuriated attack on modern medieval art was written, not in an outraged Letter to the Editor, but by the Editor of this magazine, Charles Dickens, whose Christianity is usually described as Unitarian, undoctrinaire and liberal.15
The earliest PRB paintings are often of medieval subjects. When religious, they attempt to combine detailed naturalism with the symbolism of European Christian art. For example, Rossetti’s painting of the Annunciation (1849–50), now in the Tate Gallery, shows the Angel Gabriel offering the lily of perpetual virginity to Mary, who looks more ‘troubled’ (Luke, 1:29) than ready to accept with ‘Behold the handmaid of the Lord’ (Luke, 1:38), as in the painting’s title, Ecce Ancilla Domini. The dove on the windowsill represents the overshadowing of the Holy Spirit by whom Mary is to conceive. Analogy between natural and supernatural, traditional in Christian thought and in its artistic manifestation, does not blend easily with naturalism, and is opposed to mere materialism, then being posited by some natural scientists. There was also a more basic problem for Protestant middle-class people who now, for the first time, aspired to buy works of art – people such as the parents of Ruskin, Browning or William Morris. They had no first-hand familiarity with religious painting, and its traditions were alien to them.
The Reformation had channelled English energies into the culture of the word, removing the stained glass from the parish church and whitewashing its wall paintings, replacing them with the Tables of the Law, and words from the pulpit. The Catholic Ten Commandments were renumbered by Anglicans, who promoted the second part of the First Commandment into a separate prohibition. This forbids the making and reverencing of graven images, and likenesses of anything that is in heaven above or in the earth beneath. If Scripture is sufficient to salvation, a religious painting could be an invitation to idolatry. Those who wanted sacred art, King Charles I for example, imported it from Catholic countries. In 1850, English culture was literary. Artists were often foreigners. To English ears, the word ‘painting’ suggested a portrait. There were landscapes, too, and history paintings had academic approval, but the sacred was not a subject for art. Nor were there all the colour reproductions supplied by today’s visual supermarket. The art students of the PRB pored over black and white engravings of the frescoes in the Campo Santo in Pisa; their first paintings are flat and linear. Most English people would have had no idea of what Michelangelo’s frescoes in the Sistine Chapel looked like, and no mental image of Leonardo’s Last Supper. Even in the 1870s, it would not have occurred to an English admirer of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus that the painting might express ideas taken from Christian Neo-Platonism. In this respect, the assumptions of Pater, writing about Renaissance art, are as reductive and naturalistic as those of Browning in ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’.
These are among the reasons why John Ruskin, in his 1851 letter to The Times defending the PRB against the newspaper’s attacks, expressed reservations about what he saw as the ‘Romanist and Tractarian tendencies’ of PRB paintings. ‘My real introduction to the whole school’, Ruskin recalled in 1882, ‘was by Mr Dyce, R.A., who dragged me, literally up to the Millais picture of “The Carpenter’s Shop” which I had passed disdainfully, and forced me to look for its merits.’ Dyce, born in Aberdeen in 1806, was an accomplished painter, a High Churchman who had learned from the Nazarenes. The symbolic code employed in ‘The Carpenter’s Shop’ (more properly, Christ in the House of his Parents, Plate 14) was alien to the literal understanding of the Bible in which Ruskin had been brought up, although he had no difficulty with it in Italian painting. ‘In 1847 Holman Hunt had read to Millais Ruskin’s analysis of the iconography of Tintoretto’s Annunciation in Modern Painters, Volume II, where carpenters’ tools also have symbolic significance.’16 The biblical literalism of Ruskin’s upbringing conflicted with the metaphysical dimension of the Gothic vision to which the adult Ruskin later committed himself, and this led to a crisis of faith. But for John Ruskin in 1851, the symbolism used in Italian Gothic art rang ‘No Popery’ alarms when used by England’s modern painters. From this time onward the difficulty of marrying a literal modern naturalism to the symbolism traditional in visual art became a problem for Christian artists, notably William Holman Hunt. The strain shows in Holman Hunt’s The Scapegoat, painted from a live goat on the shores of the Dead Sea in 1854. Christian symbolism (and Tractarian influence) faded from most Pre-Raphaelite art. Millais moved on from medieval and religious to literary subjects, and then to modern ones. Rossetti mingled medieval motifs with an esoteric symbolism of his own, as can be seen in his verse. A similar tension, though dealt with differently, can be felt in the poetry of the Catholic poets Coventry Patmore and Gerard Hopkins.
Rossetti’s sensibility shows in ‘The Blessed Damozel’, written at seventeen, and the first poem he published, in The Germ in 1849:
The blessed Damozel leaned out
From the gold bar of Heaven;
Her eyes were deeper than the depth
Of waters stilled at even;
She had three lilies in her hand,
And the stars in her hair were seven.
Her robe, ungirt from clasp to hem,
No wrought flowers did adorn,
But a white rose of Mary’s gift
For service meetly worn;
Her hair that lay along her back
Was yellow like ripe corn.
The lilies and stars seem to be meaningful, and the numbers seem symbolic; but of what? These emblems are opaque rather than clear, as they would be in Dante or the Quattrocento art which the poem invokes. Commentators mention Swedenborg and Blake, yet the three lilies and the seven stars remain mysterious. The Damozel wears on her neck a white rose, given by the Blessed Virgin Mary ‘meetly’, we are told. Yet Rossetti tells us that he wrote the poem to reverse the situation in which an earthly man longs for a beloved woman dead and gone to heaven. ‘I determined to . . . give utterance to the yearning of the loved one in heaven’.17 The Damozel is unmeetly miserable in heaven and would rather be with her lover on earth. She leans and leans ‘until her bosom must have made / The bar of heaven warm’ – a lay Eloisa yearning for her Abelard.
Romantic poets often wrote of an unattainable lady in a tower. Rossetti’s Damozel leans warmly on the ‘bar of Heaven’, longing for an unattainable man. Seventeen-year-old males have often dreamed of beautiful women who yearn for them, and men have often painted them, but rarely as obsessively as Rossetti, or in such numbers as Burne-Jones. The ‘bar of Heaven’ makes Rossetti’s Damozel more unattainable than a lady in a tower. But if, as we are invited to do, we study the Damozel’s deep eyes, hair ‘like ripe corn’ and ‘robe, ungirt from clasp to hem’, the details place her within imaginable distance of a woman of a different kind, often painted by French Impressionists: a lady in a towel. The PRB sought out attainable young women in bars and theatres. Such behaviour is not confined to artists, but the PRB sought such ‘stunners’ (Rossetti’s term) as models, or as muses, and two of the most stunning of them agreed to become Mrs D.G. Rossetti and Mrs William Morris. ‘All beautiful women were “Stunners” with us,’ wrote Val Prinsep, one of the band of Pre-Raphaelites who frescoed the Oxford Union in the summer of 1857. ‘We copied his [Rossetti’s] very way of speaking. Wombats were the most beautiful of God’s creatures. Medievalism was our beau idéal.’18
Rossetti was fond of wombats and other Australian fauna, and later kept wombats, wallabies and kangaroos in the garden of his house in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea. Wombats, stunners and medievalism make an engaging combination, but in ‘The Blessed Damozel’ Rossetti does not combine the sensuous with the spiritual so much as confuse them. A lighter version of this youthful mixture appears in early Yeats. But Yeats eventually grew out of it, whereas Rossetti grew into it. Two years after their marriage, his wife, Elizabeth Siddal Rossetti, took a fatal drug overdose. He buried with her body the original manuscript of his poems, but later exhumed it from her coffin and published the poems. His life was in some respects a horrible version of the fantasy of ‘The Blessed Damozel’. An admirer of Poe’s ‘The Raven’, he painted a version of ‘The Blessed Damozel’ towards the end of his life, in 1875 to 1878. His sometimes unfinished paintings, like his uneven poems, have a striking but willed emotional intensity.
Rossetti’s paintings became increasingly preoccupied with images of women who are very unlike the shrinking and immature figure of the Annunciata in Ecce Ancilla Domini. He filled these commanding figures with an obscure symbolism and a brooding sensuality not seen in Italian painting before Raphael. In medieval terms, the goddesses who dominate Rossetti’s later paintings are icons who are well on the way to becoming idols. He typically links erotic love with death in a way which anticipates the art of the Æsthetes and the Decadents. Algernon Charles Swinburne and Simeon Solomon stayed at Rossetti’s house in Cheyne Walk, along with the wombats, and so did James McNeill Whistler. Whistler’s exhibition of Nocturne in Black and Gold, The Falling Rocket in the Grosvenor Gallery in 1877 led Ruskin, in his Fors Clavigera, a series of letters to the workmen of England, to accuse the American painter of imposture: ‘I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for throwing a pot of paint in the public’s face.’ Whistler sued Ruskin, was awarded derisory damages of a farthing, and went bankrupt.
Colour reproduction has familiarised us with the stunning, and stunned, images of Elizabeth Siddal, who became Mrs Rossetti, and of Jane Burden, who became Mrs Morris but was worshipped by Rossetti in his decline. The attractions and significance of these women, and of Rossetti’s ‘Blessed Damozel’, have little to do with medieval art, except in details of the way Rossetti sometimes envisaged them. Rather, they form part of the cult of the image of Woman, a cult which sometimes referred its origins and its authority back to an oft-invoked but ill-understood aspect of medieval culture, which was recovered in the nineteenth century and is usually known in English as Courtly Love. Medieval scholars today are not sure that there ever was a real-life Code of Courtly Love, and regard the work of Andreas Capellanus (who flourished in the 1180s), entitled De Arte Honeste Amandi, translated as The Code of Courtly Love and later taken as a serious treatise, as at least half a joke. The relationship between life and literature is rarely simple, and whether or how far life imitated art in various courts across Europe between 1100 and 1300 or 1400 will never be known. This love is first expressed in the lyric poetry of the troubadours at the courts of Provence in the twelfth century, creating a literary fashion which spread throughout European verse, and not only in the Romance languages. In German it is ‘Frauendienst’ – ‘the service of women’. It is no coincidence that the cult of the Blessed Virgin Mary rose to a new height at the same period. There were, indeed, courts at which questions of love were discussed, but these came much later than the poetry of the troubadours and were more of a parlour game than an alternative religion. Rossetti was steeped in the poetry of Dante and his circle, publishing his verse translations from them under that title in 1861; all his life, he identified with the Florentine after whom he had been named. Christened Gabriel Charles Dante, he renamed himself Dante Gabriel. It is clear from his painting, however, that despite his intimate knowledge of the earlier poetry of Dante Alighieri, he subscribed to the romantic image which held such appeal for his literary contemporaries. Gabriele, D.G. Rossetti’s father, identified with the obdurate advocate of civic virtue eating the bitter bread of exile. Gabriele’s son focused instead on what he saw as the poet’s tragic love-life. An exaltation of romantic love into an absolute ideal had been a feature of continental romantic fiction in the generations since Rousseau’s Emile and Goethe’s Werther. In some nineteenth-century novels and operas, if not in the midland counties of England, an adulterous passion was regarded with sympathy, approval and even admiration, especially if it ended in death.
Nineteenth-century readers of medieval romances were accordingly taken with Dante’s story, in La Vita Nuova, of how as a child he was smitten with love for Beatrice, who was to marry another and to die young, and also with the inspiring role which Beatrice plays in the Divine Comedy. Reading Dante’s verse literally and autobiographically, and turning his life-story into the legend recorded in several paintings by Rossetti and others, they seized upon the episode in Inferno V of the adulterous love of Paolo and Francesca, slain by the Lord of Rimini, Francesca’s husband and Paolo’s brother. The punishment of the lovers is to be blown around, locked in each other’s arms, kissing, and burning with desire, for all eternity. Such a fate did not seem to the young Rossetti an undesirable one. In his Paolo and Francesca da Rimini (1855) he painted ‘O lasso!’ between the figures of Dante and Virgil – Dante’s exclamation on seeing the embracing lovers: ‘Alas!’ Romantic readers read this scene in the opposite sense to that which it must chiefly bear, placed as it is in Hell, in the Circle of the Lustful. Leigh Hunt’s The Story of Rimini (1816) had proved lastingly popular, and in the next century the episode still held a romantic meaning for Gabriele D’Annunzio and Ezra Pound.
Women are first accorded an elevated place in Western European culture in the twelfth century: in the cult of the Blessed Virgin Mary in France and England, and in the poetry of the troubadours in Provence. But the role of fin amors, or Courtly Love, in medieval life, as distinct from medieval literature, was generally misunderstood by late nineteenth-century scholars such as Gaston Paris, and taken to imply an inherent approval of adultery. It is obvious that some medieval romances, notably that of Tristan and Iseut, lend colour to such a view, and the story of Lancelot and Guenevere, in some versions, can also be taken or mistaken as doing so. Under the Provençal title of lo gai saber – ‘the happy science’ – a special interpretation of this literary fashion became, in France and elsewhere, a late Romantic cult of love, involving troubadours, jongleurs, nightingales, lovely ladies, lords absent on crusade, and high-spirited adultery. Its more gnostic devotees idealised the Albigenses, adherents of a Cathar heresy popular in the Pays d’Oc, but crushed by the Church. The detail of Catharist belief is disputed, but they were dualists, believing in two creators: a good god, creator of the soul, and an evil god, creator of the body. They condemned procreation and marriage as bringing evil into the world. The forbidden nature of troubadour love, the death of Tristan, and the extirpation of this mysterious ‘pure’ Cathar cult (Greek ‘katharos’: pure), proved irresistible to some late Romantics and Decadents. The cult of a love made more special by being forbidden and also, by illogical association with the Cathars, persecuted, is a powerful motif in the work of Wagner, Wilde, Proust, D’Annunzio and Pound. Here it is worth recalling the dry account given by George Ellis of the love of Lancelot for Guenevere: ‘It is necessary to the dignity of his mistress, that she should still share the bed of Arthur, and that, protected in her reputation by the sword of her lover, she should lead a life of ceremonious and splendid adultery. This point is accomplished, and their intercourse continues as usual.’
The ‘code’ of Courtly Love, the cult of fin amors, the Provençal gai saber, seemed to some nineteenth-century adepts to sanctify extramarital love. The story of the fatal passion of Tristan and Iseut was still taken as typical of medieval attitudes to love by Denis de Rougemont in a work of haute vulgarisation translated in 1940 as Passion and Society. Scholars do not regard Tristanism as typical of attitudes to adultery in medieval literature, still less in medieval life. This was a nineteenth-century cult. Mr and Mrs D.G. Rossetti were perhaps its first British victims. The first two figures Rossetti asked Elizabeth Siddal to model for were Iseut and Queen Guenevere.
Christina Rossetti, the best of all English woman poets in the judgement of Virginia Woolf, understood her brother. Her poem ‘In An Artist’s Studio’ gives us his doomed world:
One face looks out from all his canvases,
One selfsame figure sits or walks or leans . . . .
Not as she is, but was when hope shone bright;
Not as she is, but as she fills his dream.19
Christina kept a Pre-Raphaelite truth to nature in her verse, which, when pictorial, has bright colours and clear edges. She was twice engaged to be married – first to a member of the PRB, James Collinson – but renounced both engagements on religious grounds. Collinson had re-joined the Catholic Church. Christina, a devout Anglo-Catholic, cared for her family and wrote fine lyrics, often religious, in a purified ballad style, whose models derive ultimately from Percy’s Reliques. For ten years she undertook voluntary work to help ex-prostitutes. Delicacy and fancy are features of her verse, and she wrote well for children, but she is much more than girlish. Her secular masterpiece, ‘Goblin Market’, is a charged fairy story of forbidden fruit, of two sisters, and of innocence lost and redeemed. It is an early poem, but its adult themes, close to her brother’s, are managed with a tact and discipline beyond him, and a sensuous verbal and rhythmic energy. This remarkable poem, though itself of high artistic achievement and moral seriousness, indicates one of the trajectories which the Medieval Revival was to take: legend to fairy story to illustrated books for children.
This chapter began by remarking on the arrival of the Medieval Revival in the 1840s, and spoke of the stage of research and development as complete. The stage of application has already been sketched in Chapter 5, on Carlyle, Ruskin and Disraeli. That the stage of production had also been reached is shown by the verdict on the Great Exhibition: that Mr Pugin had demonstrated ‘the applicability of Mediæval art in all its richness and variety to the uses of the present day’. But in Pugin: A Gothic Passion, the closing tribute to Pugin in Alexandra Wedgwood’s chapter on ‘The Mediæval Court’ is ominous for the future: ‘As the Illustrated London News had noted, he [Pugin] was the originator of all the ideas; without him there was no development.’20