The best that art has given to us has often come from artists in a
quite sub-conscious way. Because Rossetti's genius was so many-sided it
is probable that he could explain most of what he did to himself, and
if in the picture of which we have been speaking we take such a thing
as the alterations between the figures in the background, and as they
are shown in the sketch, it will seem apparent that he gave reasons
to himself for everything in his compositions, and did not drift into
anything by accident in aiming at design. In the sketch the nearest
figure pursues the Magdalene beckoning, in the finished drawing her
movements are arrested, she and the other figures pause before the
door, speechless with cynical amusement and surprise as the Magdalene
enters.
_You should have wept her yesterday_ was done as an illustration to
one of his sister's poems. It represents the return of the Prince
after many delays to find his lady has died, believing him unfaithful.
The ugly drawing of the Prince spoils an otherwise beautiful design.
This ugliness is only compensated for by the six girls who turn their
pitiful eyes so naturally from their prayer to look towards the Prince.
The grace of girlhood in their faces must come as a revelation to some
of Rossetti's critics.
The illustration to Tennyson's "Palace of Art" should excite us as
curious and beautiful. We have in it one great poet's illustration for
another's poem, made with perfect art. We have in this drawing the echo
of the one's imagination in the other. Rossetti has brought the drawing
on to the paper as a dream. An immense courage is demanded of the
artist, when he shall forget his reason for a dream, and when he has
the courage not to reconcile his dream with the demands of the prosaic
mind, demanding only what is prosaic. The lines illustrated are--
in a clear-wall'd city on the sea,
Near gilded organ-pipes, her hair
Wound with white roses, slept St. Cecily
An angel look'd at her.
The drawing interprets, and it is wonderful that it should do so, the
imaginative mood in which we feel these lines were written. Like music
they bring their message in mystical sound. One accepts their beauty
feverishly. In such a mood as they invite reason greets imagination.
The words do not represent things or a place, but a mood and an
emotion. In them is just such a strange and beautiful medley as music
brings to us, as great art always makes reasonable to us.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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