DOI Seite / Zitierlink:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.61290#0082
DANTE ROSSETTI
58
to pursue in permanent fellowship the goal at which
they aim. As George Eliot has said, “ If men are
to be welded together in the glow of a transient
feeling, they must be made of metal that will mix,
else they will inevitably fall asunder when the heat
dies out.”
But there was as yet a strong practical cohesion
between the grave and gentle Hunt, the brilliant,
warm-hearted, and impressionable Millais, and the
ardent, mercurial, and passionately imaginative
Rossetti, whose personal magnetism was the
immediate welding-force of the Pre-Raphaelite
movement. Rossetti’s proselytizing powers, and
his inexhaustible enthusiasm (at least in youth) for
dogmatic propaganda, were indeed a source of some
embarrassment and many disappointments in the
progress of artistic reform. The doctrine of Pre-
Raphaelitism, however, if we may so call it-
namely that in the age preceding Raphael would
be found the touchstone of art, grew up too imper-
ceptibly through mutual influences and interchange
of thought to be attributed as a special tenet to
Rossetti or any other of the student-band.
It was in the year 1847, before the formation of
the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, that the spell of
Keats had come with special power upon its future
leaders. Rossetti, an omnivorous reader of poetry,
had already perceived both in Keats and Coleridge
the essential elements of the highest romance. It
58
to pursue in permanent fellowship the goal at which
they aim. As George Eliot has said, “ If men are
to be welded together in the glow of a transient
feeling, they must be made of metal that will mix,
else they will inevitably fall asunder when the heat
dies out.”
But there was as yet a strong practical cohesion
between the grave and gentle Hunt, the brilliant,
warm-hearted, and impressionable Millais, and the
ardent, mercurial, and passionately imaginative
Rossetti, whose personal magnetism was the
immediate welding-force of the Pre-Raphaelite
movement. Rossetti’s proselytizing powers, and
his inexhaustible enthusiasm (at least in youth) for
dogmatic propaganda, were indeed a source of some
embarrassment and many disappointments in the
progress of artistic reform. The doctrine of Pre-
Raphaelitism, however, if we may so call it-
namely that in the age preceding Raphael would
be found the touchstone of art, grew up too imper-
ceptibly through mutual influences and interchange
of thought to be attributed as a special tenet to
Rossetti or any other of the student-band.
It was in the year 1847, before the formation of
the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, that the spell of
Keats had come with special power upon its future
leaders. Rossetti, an omnivorous reader of poetry,
had already perceived both in Keats and Coleridge
the essential elements of the highest romance. It