The Danger of Dreamers
For the first time in my life, the biography of an artist has made me question the art I have loved for so long.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti — the golden boy of the Pre-Raphaelite artist movement was, in fact, a charming danger to himself and more especially to others. He was the shining son of the Rossetti family. Dark haired, exotic, and… utterly narcissistic.
He had this unexplainable, magical hold on people — especially women. We have all met this type at one time or other in our lives and marveled at it. I find it so odd that a person can be so self centered and infatuated with his own aura, a person used to ‘helping himself’ to whatever he desires even if he breaks it, and yet still having this irresistible charm like a lodestone or a romantic super hero. A charm that makes it almost impossible to break away from his orbit once caught in it.
Many had that misfortune.
Two things strike me about him, observed by the author, Marya Zaturenska, and stated quite matter-of-factly by her. He was impatient and he was consummately lazy. This is what made me wonder about his art. If you are of an artistic temperament, and you have experienced his paintings, you will perhaps find an overwhelming feeling of dreaminess. The colors are rich, the people are gorgeous and exotic. It is hard to look away. You start feeling a kind of Medieval Camelot circle round you in a misty pleasure. The paintings are mesmerizing. But they don’t stay with you long as perhaps a Millet would stay with you for expressing real, solid truths of life — both beautiful and true in the imagination and in reality. Dante Rossetti, on the other hand, specialized in candy. Sweet, rich, and pleasurable while it lasted. The kind of thing adolescents would find ‘deep’. Adolescent is a key word here. Dante Rossetti never grew up. He viewed life like a spoiled boy who has been told one too many times that he was special. He insisted his world was the real world. It was not.
It is telling that he was the ring leader of the movement of young men who styled themselves Pre-Raphaelites. They traveled about together and did much talking and preening about art, poetry, romance, and life. All Oxford boys in some way — with lots of time on their hands. Intellectuals and dilletantes. Gentlemen’s sons many of them. But for all that, they seemed to revel in surface images. Everything seemed for them a tableau. Something beautiful, yet completely insupportable by the real world. They lived in a dreamland. And they all wanted to be part of Dante’s dream. They followed him around, wanted to be seen with him, were devastated when he ignored them and over the moon when he let be his adoring shadow for a few weeks.
His impatience showed when he came up with the cheeky idea to collect all his friends and paint the ceiling of a library at Oxford. Being lazy, however, and only in it for the experiential ‘feels’, he failed to prepare the surface of the walls (one of the more necessary but tedious and unexciting aspects of frescoes) and he started painting impatiently. Later, the really quite lovely paintings they created on that day all crumbled off the walls — a fitting metaphor to his naïve, romantic and lazy view of the world.
He chose his future wife in this same way. A friend of his “found” her in a shop window putting together a display. Elizabeth Siddal was her name. She was tall, stately, with long flowing red hair, green eyes, and a languid, dreamy look. She was from a poor, uncultured, uneducated family and yet had a flair for fashion and also for sewing odd and exotic dresses for herself that of course captivated the dreamy boys of Dante. His friend .brought. her to Dante as a prize, a gift. And he found in her not a companion, not a soul mate, not an equal — but a goddess. A goddess who would reign over his Pre-Raphaelite movement. She became his muse. He painted her over and over again — mesmerized by her outward beauty. He cared nothing for what was inside. She was the face of his dream, so to speak.
She, however, was over the moon that he even looked at her. She tried to play the goddess. She learned how to paint the way he wanted her to. She learned to write poetry the way he did. She mimicked his every move.
She would sit for hours and hours unto exhaustion and sickness, while he painted her. Everyone wondered at her. Most of the wives and sisters and mothers of these dreamy boys saw the oddness of it. She never spoke at parties. She just sailed about in her dresses and captivated. She didn’t speak because she was afraid she would embarrass Dante by her common speech. She wanted to please him. She orbited him, yet never was she to be loved as the flesh and blood woman she was. It took its toll. She drifted into depression, sickness, uncertainty all the time about his love for her. His worship of her as a goddess was not enough, as some women might think. She withered to nothingness because he hollowed out her real nature and she collapsed. She was nothing more than a human chimera of Dante’s dream of himself.
She had a sad, tragic death. He had plucked her from her surroundings, her family, her real life — with no intention of actually loving her. But only an image of her — and in the end an image of himself in her. Lizzie is the reason I cannot look at his paintings anymore. She is there in them all with her sad, goddess face that thinly veiled a simple woman who wanted to be loved and cared for. He destroyed her by his charming ways and no one said a thing among his circle of friends. She walked among them a loner, a beautiful ornament, an odd little distraction at parties but nothing more. Did they all think these lower classed women were only there to toy with, to use for their own little games and play pretend? I was so saddened by Lizzie’s life. It was hard for me to ever want to look at anything again that Dante painted.
The silver lining to this sad tale, however, is that Christina, his sister was everything Dante was not. It was Christina who worked hard at the craft of her poetry, who made time between her duties at home to write from the solid realities in her heart. She would write poetry over the wash basin, the laundry, the meals she prepared. Her soul flowed with the wonder of Christina. On the outside she wore drab black and her face was showing the signs of growing older. Next to Lizzie she was like a little black crow. But on the inside she flowed with the most romantic gorgeous feelings. The opposite of Lizzie. And it is Christina we remember most. It is Christina who was able to bear sorrows, write powerful poetry, and stay true to her faith and who she was as a daughter and a sister and a friend.
A woman is not a romantic boy’s dream. A woman is a human being with thoughts, and fire, and feeling, and a tremendous power of beauty within if she is treated like a human being and not a goddess. It is only a real man unafraid of the true nature that can see this and look beyond the outer surface that explains not at all the mystery or lack of mystery that lies beneath. A man must be patient. A man must not be lazy and prefer to just love the surface. He must wait for the fires to catch him. He must learn to wonder at the true beauty within.
I can’t help but think Lizzie might have found great happiness with a laborer or a shop keeper who loved her for who she was on the inside and did not expect a goddess but a woman of joys, sorrows, wit, and creativity of her own.
Dante and his dreamy boys faded out. It was a movement of feelings that could not be sustained. But they left a lot of misery in their little storybook wake. It is something to be pondered.
It will take me a long time to look at their paintings again. But I will always have Christina. The true Romantic. The true muse. The true poet. The full blown, mature reality that Dante never managed to become.