By ANTHONY BURGESS
WHEN the time came round in our suburb for repapering the front room, when I was a child, it was customary to send out for new second-hand pictures, since everybody was supposed to be sick of looking at the old ones. The new ones were bought with rather less selec- tivity than if they had been cabbages. If they - were better than the old ones, it was because they were less flyblown and the hooks were firmer. Nobody liked them, but you had to have pictures on the walls. The pictures were all the same—scrupulously exact transcriptions of the external world, a scene from a costume melo- drama, a literary anecdote or a trite moral point.
In other words, they were all in the tradition of Millais—debased Pre-Raphaelitism. A young man's revolution had at last yielded to the Academicians, which meant to the sabbatarian piety and mechanistic mysticism of the bour- geoisie. The true horror of the Victorian age lies in the yoking of the well-made machine with the sick soul, the breeding of the chimera of an engine animated by stock moral responses. The Pre-Raphaelites began by revolting against the mechanical postures of an artistic establishment that misunderstood Reynolds and misread Raphael. Like Rousseau and Wordsworth, they wished to get back to live nature, not to nature withered and turned brown by poetic diction. But fidelity to nature meant, eventually, turning into a copying machine, and the need to hold nature on the canvas meant the imposition of the extrinsic—postures derived from literature first, later from moral tracts.
For the exact transcription of nature, with not a leaf out of place, involves the rejection of con- trived visual patterns, and it is by these that the artist justifies his existence. In the very brief phase of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, before the Brothers went their own ways, it seemed possible to achieve such patterns—so long as the literary theme was regarded as a mere pretext for continuing to paint. Millais's Isabella, a remarkable and altogether satisfying picture, does not need to be referred back to Keats's poem about the pot of basil: indeed, we are less interested in Lorenzo's sheep's eyes as he offers a lith of orange to Isabella than in purely pictorial elements which seem, from the point of view of the literary subject, to be quite centripetal. In the foreground, a brother of Isabella thrusts out a leg to kick her dog, pre- sumably in protest against the budding affair. But the meaning is lost in the purely aesthetic pleasure we derive from the way in which this leg seems to hold up a whole table-load of curiously flattened eaters. The canvas is a small formal miracle, full of conflict, distortion and ironic humour. If this is Pre-Raphaelitism, one thanks God for it.
But it is not altogether Pre-Raphaelitism : it is close to Rossettianism, which is not quite the same thing. Rossetti, one of the founder- members of the Brotherhood and, since he was also a poet, its most articulate propagandist, could not—like Ford Madox Brown and Holman Hunt and Millais—go back all that easily to the nature that prevailed before, allegedly, Raphael browned everything up. He was fired by a vision and somewhat weak on perspective, drawn more to the ardour of art than the arduousness of craft. There is nothing amateur about his Brothers' works, but his own—especially the early Marian ones—look like a literary man's hobby.
Yet, because Rossetti had the poet's intensity of vision, The Girlhood of Mary Virgin and Ecce Ancilla Domini are superior in art, though inferior in craftsmanship, to Holman Hunt's Early Britons Sheltering a Missionary from the Druids and Millais's Christ in the House of His Parents. The Hunt and Millais are not really more than the sum of their parts. Hunt has to tell us that the Britons are Christian converts; untitled, his picture could just as well be of a divinity student in drag who has had a heart attack on a paper chase. In the Millais, the infant Christ has hurt his hand on a nail, but how imposed and slick the prolepsis is. The Rossettis, however, breathe a devotional quality which is no mere formality, despite the symbolic props, the archaic quaintness.
Rossetti is, of course, literally a Pre-Raphaelite in that he looks back (his weakness in perspec- tive was an asset here) to Giotto, but the move- ment was not intended to jettison everything painters had learned since thirteenth-century Florence. Yet when we think of Pre-Raphaelit- ism we are assailed by Blessed Damozel visions,, the non-odour of heraldic lilies, the daring' return to modality in Berlioz's L'Enfance du Christ, Rossetti the poet looking up 'stunning 'words' in glossaries of mediaeval literature. Men like Ford Madox Brown and Charles Collins succumbed in odd pictures to the allure of archaism—Brown's Wickliffe Reading His Trans- lation of the Bible, for instance (very Floren- tine), and Collins's Convent Thoughts, in which the caned nun (with, lest we miss the message, sicur =DA in ornamental script above) is on the verge of Victorian sickliness as well as a lily-pond. But this was not what Millaisian Pre- Raphaelitism was really about. The lilies are not heraldic; they are real. Ruskin said of the Collins picture (referring to the alisma plantago as well as the lilies): 'as a mere botanical study . . . this picture would be invaluable to me, and I heartily wish it were mine.'
That comes from the defence of the Brother- hood that, urged by Coventry Patmore lest the whole movement be sneered out of the galleries, Ruskin wrote to The Times, replying to an attack so virulent that only an established critical reputation could counter it. It alleged that the Pre-Raphaelites had 'an aversion to beauty in every shape, and a singular devotion to the minute accidents of their subjects, includ- ing, or rather seeking out, every excess of sharpness and deformity.' This meant that St Joseph's feet should look fresh as from the chiropodist, not dirty as from a morning in, a workshop. Ruskin praised the PRB on the ground 'that, as far as in them lies, they will draw either what they see, or what they suppose might have been the actual facts of the scene tbisy desire to represent, irrespective of any con- ventional rules of picture-making.' It was not what we would call an aesthetic defence, merely a defence against the attack perennially revelled at all new art: 'This is a distortion: life which meant academic acceptance, was opened up-for these painters, and Christina Rossetti was able to write: . . . he at last the champion great Millais Attaining Academic opulence
Winds up his signature with ARA. So rivers merge in the perpetual sea: So luscious fruit must fall when over-ripe; And so the consummated PRB.
-G. H. Fleming's book* is a good plain study of Rossetti's relationship with the movement. Mary Lutyenst is concerned with the more painful personal themes that underlie Millais's progress to baronetcy, wealth and uxoriousness. He 'sold out,' we know; he painted Bubbles and The Boyhood of Raleigh. How much did marriage to Effie, who had been Ruskin's wife, have to do with it? Did she, plump mother of his many children, coax him to the retailing of highly saleable prettiness? It seems to me that, cut off from the sane and visionary Rossetti, Millais was destined, without external influences, to go the way he went. The non-artistic life of Millais is not interesting; that of Ruskin is— excruciatingly so. It is all here in the letters which, with Mary Lutyens's links, tell the sequel to the story of her Effie in Venice. The Ruskin marriage was never consummated, and eventu- ally Effie got an annulment. Ruskin was prepared to prove he was not impotent (one wonders how); presumably proof would entail the en- gaging of female pubic hair, and it was apparently the sight of this on Effie that shocked his innocent soul. We talk of art as the mirror of life, but here was one aspect of life that— thanks to a taboo still unbroken—art was unable to teach John Ruskin.
The whole business is acutely embarrassing. Ruskin had admired classical statues and closely examined the paintwork on nudes, but gross human reality horrified him. Little girls—who were innocent, made no sexual demands, and had no pubic hair—were later to help reconcile him to the female form worshipped by painters, but ultimately Ruskin stands, on his own ad- mission, as a man unmovable by anything except copies of life and abstract stone artefacts. Reading James S. Dearden's edition of Arthur Severn's memoir,t one tries again to call up some gobbets of affection for a man who loved animals, idolised art and hated Utilitarianism, but it is all very difficult. He wants to regenerate English life and spiritualise the lot of the arti- san; to do this, he writes the letters of Fors Clavigera from the Baedeker spots of Europe. One tries to imagine the artisan, slurping tea from his saucer, sympathising with Ruskin, who 'can't write this morning, because of the accursed whistling of the dirty steam -engine of the omnibus for the Lido, waiting at the quay of the Ducal Palace for the dirty population of Venice. . . .' Poor man, poor mother's boy.
It's not just that Ruskin is Victorian. Rossetti is Victorian, too, and very attractive—a man unshockable by pubic hair. And there's some- * Rossani AND THE PRE-RAPHAELTIE BROTHER- HOOD. By G. H. Fleming. (Hart-Davis, 50s.) t MHI.AIS AND THE RUSKINS. By Mary Lutyens. (Murray, 45s.) t THE PROFESSOR. Arthur Severn's Memoir of John Ruskin. Edited by James S. Dearden. (Allen and Unwin, 37s. 6d.) thing very compelling about all that brief Brotherhood—setting up their gear in a real car- penter's shop, painting a flock of sheep from a butcher's sheep's head, daring (as Holman Hunt did for The Light of World) pneumonia on winter's nights in order to make an accurate copy of lunar shadows. Ruskin may have been a lordly critic, but these men were professional craftsmen. One goes back to them with love whenever one of our art students starts whining that nobody will buy the canvases he's ridden over with a wet bicycle. The SPECTATOR is the right organ in which to praise the PRB. Between 1850 and 1852 it was the only paper to uphold the Pre-Raphaelite cause. The art critic was Rossetti's brother William.
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