The Stormy Brotherhood
Ma. BICKLEY'S very interesting book, full of facts set into a well-ordered story, narrates the history of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood from its inception by Holman Hunt in 1848, until a few years later when it burst asunder, scattering ideas and new methods all over the firmament of Victorian art and literature. People who are sceptical of the force and influence of youth would do well to consider this tale of an uneasy 'friendship between Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, Ford Madox Brown and Dante Gabriel Rossetti We should include also W. M. Rossetti, their " secretary " and nurse who frequently fed them with the income derived 'from his drudgery in the Civil Service. Millais was a boy, and the others little more than boys; when they banded together to revolutionize English art, and in so doing to overthrow the tottering traditions of the Royal Academy. To the contem- porary mind such conspiracies of enthusiastic youth do not appear to be serious or worth consideration. We have an example to-day in the small group of Cambridge zealots who have started a quarterly magazine that is to purge English literary and educational criticism, and to set our poetry upon a new aesthetic basis. They have begun their campaign by denying the merit of almost all the living established authorS, and by making themselves slightly ridiculous. The I're- Raphaelite Brotherhood did the same. The difference is, that when such disorderly conduct belongs to the past, it is called courageous; when it belongs to the present, it is called impudent.
Mr. Bickley portrays, with delightful wit and sympathy— though with syntax sometimes tortuousthat impudence of the four young iconoclasts. He makes us see both the impu- dence and the courage of their attack ; how tentative and chancy it was, how frequently inclined to bluff and to change accident into intention. He shows us the conflicting natures of this band of brothers, their suspicions of each other ; the somewhat shady trickiness of Rossetti, the dogged obstinacy of Holman Hunt, the too suave virtuosity of Millais, and the elder-brother grumpiness of Madox Brown. He shows us how, in Spite of these idiosyncrasies, the youndmen were held in one eager purpose by the strong, puritanical character of Hunt, who founded the movement, and by the rich, indulgent personality of Rossetti. It was Rossetti who gave a name to the Brotherhood, and started the ill-fated periodical called The Germ. Hunt laid down the principles of work, and was the only member who kept rigidly to them.
Those principles of rigid fidelity to nature, and scrupulous attention to detail throughout the composition of a picture, are laughed-at to-day by a world of artists and writers fed on Impressionism, and all the technical tricks caught from a " jars " interpretation of the contemporary scene and fantasy. People who still have a liking for presentation as well as re- presentation in art are treated either as fogies or imbeciles. But no doubt the wheel of fashion will continue to turn, and perhaps we shall see the craze for pattern replaced by a craze for a recognizable object : meanwhile, there will be many readers to welcome Mr. Biekley's book as a history of quaint and hardly conceivable enthusiasms.
There is a slight link with the Pre-Raphaelites in Robert Bridges' book, for one of the three friends whom he writes about was Richard, Watson Dixon, more familiarly known as Canon Dixon, a good and neglected poet directly inspired by the Brotherhood, just as William Morris was. Bridges claims that he' was the better poet of the two. He certainly had a greater faculty for plunging into the.siMid-and setting forth, in Wordsworthian verse, his discoveries amongst the sources of religious mood and fervour. 'But Morris was incomparably richer in his emotional gamut, and therefore of a more far- reaching curiosity of mind and love of earth. But the following example will show how beautiful Dixon could be in his verse, and how closely he was related to the muse of Rossetti and the early pictures of Millais : " But day by day about the merge Of this slow-brooding dreaminess, The shadow of the past lay large, And brooded low and lustreless ; Then vanished as I looked on it. Yet back returned with wider sweep, And broad upon my soul would sit, Like. a storm-cloud above the deep."
Another one of the " three friends " was a poet, but he died young—drowned while bathing during the vacation before what should have been his first term at Oxford. Digby Mask- worth Dolben was at Eton with Bridges, and was distinguished even at so early an age by his physical and mental beauty, and what was obviously a religious genius. He expressed himself in verse that does not succeed in conveying his character or his ecstasy : how could it, at so immature a stage ? Bridges, in reacting to it, betrays his own approach to poetry, and shows the direction of all- his later life-work. He says : " our instinctive attitudes towards poetry were very dissimilar, he regarded it from the emotional, and I from the artistic side." That may explain why Bridges' poetry, even his last work in " The Testament of Beauty," had the quality of plastic art rather than the fuller life of poetry as Wordsworth and Shelley conceived it.
The third of the three friends is Henry Bradley, the philolo- gist, and last pilot of the great Oxford Dictionary. Heis the most interesting and stimulating of the three, and Bridges' portrait of his magnificent personality is a masterpiece of subtle presentation. But all three of the portraits are beautiful, made in a medium of prose satisfying to senses and mind. They remind me not a little of Isaac Walton's Lives, and
Previous page
