been set to reign, Love who had wandered down through the ages decked
with the flowers of art, offerings of bygone lovers, dead lovers to
never dying Love. As a strange spirit Rossetti entered modern London. A
heart rich from many forgotten experiences seemed to have lodged itself
in him and he painted with eyes filled with the colours of old things.
For him the tapestries could never fade in a room that had known love's
history, nor the colours leave the missal which told the story of a
soul.
How far his drawings were intended to foreshadow large paintings which
he desired to make as windows for us to look with him into his romantic
country we cannot say. As it is they show that it was in Rossetti's
power to be the greatest imaginative illustrator of his century; that
he was not so seems to prove that in this way, as in some others, he
failed to attain to much that at first had seemed included in his
destiny. In his paintings, in his poetry, in these drawings something
there is that was new, and that brought a fresh phase into art and
literature in England. It is something which has influenced permanently
the nation's thought and has been even admitted into the procession
of its fashions. For a time women tried to look as the women in his
paintings, so much had the type he chose, which was his own creation,
imposed itself upon their imagination.
The Rossetti woman, if she did not supersede the early Victorian type,
at least helped to change it, and to mark a change which was taking
place in the ideals of the nation. Fresh tendencies in national thought
are always correspondingly represented by a change in the type of women
idealised in its art and poetry. When the Victorian type went, the time
had passed when homage was given to women for a surrender of their
claims on life. The new type spoke of the ardent way in which another
generation of women was creating for itself wide interests in the
world.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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