Chapter 5 “Devious symbols”: ’s Unorthodox Emblematics

Give honour unto Luke Evangelist; For he it was (the aged legends say) Who first taught Art to fold her hands and pray. Scarcely at once she dared to rend the mist Of devious symbols: but soon having wist How sky-breadth and field-silence and this day Are symbols also in some deeper way, She looked through these to God and was God’s priest. And if, past noon, her toil began to irk, And she sought talismans, and turned in vain To soulless self-reflections of man’s skill – Yet now, in this the twilight, she might still Kneel in the latter grass to pray again, Ere the night cometh and she may not . ‘St. Luke the Painter’

So far, this project has traced the relatively straightforward use made of em- blematic structures in The Germ, a mouthpiece that exemplified the early moral-didactic work of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and in the devotional works of and Gerard Manley Hopkins, both of whom, though they belonged to different sects, were highly orthodox Christians. Hopkins, Christina, and the early prb shared a belief that the world is a text authored by God; English devotional emblematics therefore offered an ideal hermeneu- tic structure for their poetry, which seeks, above all, to call attention to the sacramental nature of objects and events, and to instill similarly sacramental habits of reading and observation in the minds of its readers. Consequently, while Hopkins, Christina and the prb deploy the devotional emblem in vary- ing and mainly non-normative ways, their use of its representational strategies is remarkable for its consistent, almost unwavering logocentrism. For these poets, the meaning of objects and events – and, by extension, the meaning of the signs that represent those things – is stable because it is grounded in and guaranteed by God, who is the source of all meaning. Because it springs from precisely this kind of incarnational ontology, the devotional emblem serves both to reflect and to confirm these writers’ logocentric views.

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176 chapter 5

In the early days of his career as a painter and writer and as a member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Dante Gabriel Rossetti espoused these beliefs and participated in these emblematic practices; by many accounts,1 he was a driving force behind the Brotherhood’s adoption of them. As his early sonnet, “St. Luke the Painter” illustrates, in his prb phase Dante Gabriel sought to re- vive the devotional impulse that characterizes the art of the middle ages. Just as “Art” in the poem learns she can look through ordinary physical objects, “sky- breadth and field-silence and this day” (6), to God, so Dante Gabriel sought, in his own work as well as in the collective work of the movement, to call atten- tion to the natural world as a set of signs authored by and signifying the divine. For these reasons (and at some points, to an even greater degree than Christina or his Pre-Raphaelite brethren), Dante Gabriel adopted emblematic strategies as a means of framing the imagery of the natural world in ways that render its spiritual meaning legible. However, as he drifted away from the High-Church habits of his adolescence – indeed, from orthodox Christian belief altogether – following the Brotherhood’s collapse in the 1850s, he became less sure of the sacramental premises underlying his earlier aesthetics and art practices. As a result, where his early work is confident, didactic and steeped in sacramental- ism, his later work is marked by uncertainty: as Jerome McGann has noted, “it is a commonplace of Rossetti studies that his work divides into two clear phases or periods” along these lines (Game xvi). Yet, contrary to what might be expected, Dante Gabriel’s crisis of faith did not lead him to renounce the emblem as a representational strategy. Rather, as this chapter will show, he continued to employ emblematics as a way of

1 In Some Reminiscences, William Michael casts founding prb members Hunt and Millais as the first to “moot some desire for a new movement,” but insists that Dante Gabriel shaped that movement by “add[ing] to the impetus and… giving it a name” (1: 62). Further, William Michael’s introduction to The Germ names Dante Gabriel as “the author of the [magazine] project” (8). Turn-of-the-century critic James Ashcroft Noble also sees Dante Gabriel as the “prime mover” of both the prb and The Germ (“A Pre-Raphaelite Magazine” 568), and Joseph Knight’s 1887 biography of Dante Gabriel argues that “it may fairly be supposed” that Dante Gabriel “was, from the poetic side at least, the dominant influence in the establishment of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood” (29). William Fredeman’s introduction to his 2002 edition of Dante Gabriel’s Correspondence, meanwhile, characterizes the painter-poet as “a born leader” who “spearheaded the movement – although he always denied it” (xxvii). Finally, McGann’s Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Game that Must be Lost suggests a lead role for Dante Gabriel in the prb, describing his key project of 1847–48 as the development of “an intellec- tual and programmatic basis for practices of the imagination” (xvi), and his Rossetti Archive article on Holman Hunt’s Pre-Raphaelitism is even more explicit in identifying Dante Gabriel as the prb member who most fully inhabits the Pre-Raphaelites’ moral-aesthetic aims and goals.