Dante Gabriel Rossetti Author:William Sharp Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. EOSSETTI THE ARTIST BOOK ILLUSTRATIONS DESIGNS PAINTINGS. In the preceding chapter I spoke of the constant union of poetic emotion with the... more » artistic-v idea; in everything that came from the pencil or the brush of Dante Eossetti; and it is this union that raises the work of the great artist in question so much above the level of English art in general. It may or may not be true, as M. Henri Delaborde says in his essay Les PreraphaAlites, that an inability to understand the chef-d'ceuvres of the Italian school is a vice of the national temperament of the English; for mere traditional, what may be called Tourist admiration is no criterion of the impression high art makes upon our countrymen at large; but it is undoubtedly the case that poetic art, until very recently at any rate, has never obtained more than a grudging public recognition in England. Landscape art, poetically, that is ideally, treated, has achieved a decided eminence indeed, but even there the bugbear of " Fancii'ulness," " Unreality," haunts the average spectator. The aesthetic movement in England, so much parodied and ridiculed, has been no mere vagary of fashion, but the stirring of a really awakening love of art in the upper or cultivated classes, and the artistic spirit may at lastbe said to have come down upon a section of our countrymen. Once the seed has been well sown it is sure in due time to fructify, and the direct and indirect instruction and exemplification now given so widely to both art-student and the ever-widening art- public must soon or late result in a widespread appreciation of the beautiful in art in its universal sense, and in an intolerance of the prosaical surroundings so general both in private dwellings and public buildings that go so far to make average middle-class l...« less