he has done and much of it is very beautiful and very noble work— has been done with an infinity of labour, often prolonged over years, upon each single picture. Mr. Millais was, as an artist, gifted with every faculty except that of caring what he painted or drew; he was as impartial as the sunlight that falls upon the just and the unjust. The quickening influence that fell upon both these men, and aroused their intelligence and stirred their feelings, was the passionately emotional genius of Rossetti, and looking back to early Miilais pictures, one can see as plainly as if it were written upon the canvas "Here I was painting what Rossetti felt: here his influence had passed away."

If any of my readers happen to have the early quarto edition of Tennyson's poems with the illustrations, and will take the trouble to compare the drawings therein by Millais, Hunt, and Rossetti; and then, with these designs in their mind, go and examine the Rossettis which are now being displayed at the Royal Academy, they will see beyond doubt whose was the guiding influence amongst the so-called pre-Raphaelites, and why it was that traces of medieval Italy kept cropping out in realistic pictures of English orchards, or illustrations of sacred history. Look, for instance, at the drawing by Mr. Holman Hunt in illustration of the Lady of Shalott. Why, it is a Rossetti in all its main points! Face and figure, and arrangement of drapery and pose, are all due to the influence of the last-mentioned painter. And any number of similar illustrations might be given. If the history of this strange artistic movement-strange alike in its inception, its fierce energy, and its brief, stormy life-ever comes to be told from the inside, as alone it can be adequately written, it will be found that in every sense of the word Rossetti was the head, the brain, of the Society, and that it was only his extraordinary personal influence which gave any coherence to the practices of the various members. It is easy enough to see now, though, perhaps, I may be blamed for saying it in so many words, that neither Mr. Millais nor Mr. Holman Hunt is of the reforming type of character. They were once, when they were square men in round holes; and, to this day, their art is better for the "Sturm und drang" period through which Rossetti hurled it. But the influence is gone,-had faded long before he died to whom it owed its origin; and many an admirer of "The Awakened Conscience" of Mr. Hunt, and the "Mariana" of Mr. Millais, must have found the want, in the same painters' later pictures, of the deep poetical feeling which has sprung from

"the touch of a vanished hand, And the sound of a voice that is still."

In speaking, therefore, of Rossetti's art, and trying to estimate its worth, we must always bear in mind that, as a set-off against many eccentricities and deficiencies of treatment, and many limitations of thought and feeling, we have this fact that it was powerful to trouble

the artistic Bethesda to the very depth of its sluggish waters, and to set artists upon new tracks of execution and new impulses of thought. It is no mean praise to a painter, that, under his awakening power, other painters did better and more vital work than they have done before or since; and that the forward impulse in art which he was mainly instrumental in creating bids fair to widen out into issues of which no one can at present predict the end.

But I am not concerned here to defend Mr. Rossetti as the leader of the pre-Raphaelites, nor to ask for fame for him on any secondary ground whatever. I am desirous to point out again what seem to me to be the actual achievements of this master in the two arts in which he laboured; and I am the more anxious to do this (if my readers. will pardon me a single word of personal explanation), because I have been accused of late by several persons of a desire to depreciate the work of the pre-Raphaelites, and to attribute to it demoralizing influences which it does not possess. The sentence which so afflicted Mr. Ruskin that he left off writing criticisms of contemporary painters "Damn the fellow, why doesn't he back his friends?"has been hurled at me directly or indirectly many times, and it seems hopeless to attempt to make painters understand that it is possible to admire great qualities without shutting the eyes to weak ones, or that one can honestly enjoy a picture, and yet be forced to consider it neither a Titian nor a Michael Angelo. The result is that because a writer is not a partisan upon one side, it is straightway concluded that he must be a partisan on the other, and if he ventures to find fault with a single pre-Raphaelite failing, he is told that he is not entitled to admire a single pre-Raphaelite greatness. Of course such reasoning is absurd, but even absurdity becomes worth demolishing when it gains universal acceptance; and in the art-world of London at the present day, it is excessively difficult to gain a hearing for any view of the matter which is not, either professedly or actually, a partisan one. Are you for Belt or Verheyden? That is the form of question nowadays in other artistic matters than the great libel case; and the man who murmurs "Arcades ambo" in reply is looked upon with contempt, or more probably still as a spy in the camp.

In the first place, then, as regards Mr. Rossetti's work, I must say at once that I propose to consider it as a whole, not confining one portion of my remarks to the poetry, another to the painting, but treating both manifestations of his intellect together. And this for the simple reason that it does not appear to me to be possible to separate them without doing both the painter and the poet gross injustice. Of the technical perfection of workmanship in each, a few words will have to be said separately; but for the discussion of the more emotional, imaginative, and purely intellectual qualities, the two divisions of art must here be considered as one. Now, throughout the whole of our subject's painting, and throughout the whole of his

poetry, there runs one dominant idea, and only one-" Love baffled by Death." It is on this that he rings the changes-very beautiful changes they are, touching it deftly now on this side and now on that, dressing it up in all kinds of strange and fantastically beautiful garments, hinting at it subtly through images of pleasure and pain, shadowing it forth in various allegorical ways, proclaiming it fiercely as in the voice of one just bereaved. But always, if we look long enough at poem or picture, we find the trace of this idea; speaking broadly, this is the beginning and the end of his philosophy. We say the end, for with the victory of death the master seems to close his story, though now and then he hints to us that he has heard of a heaven and a hell where all will be set right. Still, these are not part of his saying or his painting; they may be true, but they are not the facts that impress him, they are too faint, too far off, for his pencil or his verse. Or if he tells us of them at all, he does so in such glowing sensuous images, with so resolute an adherence to natural facts, that we recognize only another earth in his "Paradise" or his "Inferno." Mark, for instance, how the "Blessed Damozel leans out from the gold bar of heaven."

"And still she bowed herself and stooped
Out of the circling charm;

Until her bosom must have made

The bar she leaned on warm,
And the lilies lay as if asleep
Along her bended arm."

It was said once by a writer anxious to make out a case against the pre-Raphaelite school of modern poetry, that one of the chief characteristics of Rossetti's verse was its sensuality, and certain quotations* were given to prove this. Time has effectually disposed of that charge, and the misrepresentations on which it was founded have been adequately confuted; but it has hardly been sufficiently noticed, that the real ground of the accusation is due to the fact of the poetpainter being unable to dissever his pictorial from his poetic faculty. He habitually thought (if such an expression is allowable) in terms of painting. He could not dissever his most purely intellectual ideas from colour and form, and it is the intrusion of these physical facts into his poetry in places where they are unexpected and unnecessary that gives to hasty readers and superficial critics such a wrong impression. And in the same way as he charges a poem with more colour and form than it can well bear with reference to its special subject, so does he charge his pictures with a weight of idea which their form and colour scarcely realize, and in both he calls upon the spectator to be at once the witness and the interpreter of his work. From this there results in his poetry the following effect-that he is

*The above verse was, if I remember right, one of the number.

at his finest when he has to tell some plain story, or exemplify some comparatively simple thought, the insertion into which of physical facts will heighten the meaning rather than jar upon it; or in verses which treat intellectual ideas from a purely sensuous basis, such for instance as in those sonnets which are concerned with the passion of love. When, however, he seeks to treat either a purely intellectual or a purely spiritual subject, he fails almost inevitably, and that apparently in painting as well as in poetry. Like Antæus, if he is held off the earth too long his strength fails him. It is this painter-like quality which makes his verse so puzzling, for in idea it is almost without exception of a singularly pure and intellectual character. Turn from his verse to his painting, and the same curious contradiction is forced upon our attention. We find continually in his pictures, where the painter's individuality is most manifest, that the reproduction of the sensuous part of his subject is, so to speak, interfered with by the strange half refining, half abstract, quality of his intellect. This is especially evident in his treatment of the form of the human body, in which he has two methods, both adapted to the same end, or rather, perhaps, both unconsciously tending to the same end. One is to leave out as much as possible all detailed drawing, to suffuse the whole body in a mist of colour, in which no modelling of flesh or structure of bone is clearly visible. The other method is to accentuate those portions of the body or the features which best help to express emotion, and so to use and arrange them as to produce a definite emotional idea. The long necks in which so many of his female figures rejoice, the slender hands with fingers turning round one another, the heavy curved lips, and all the other physical peculiarities to be traced in his works, are all due to the passionately sensuous, but equally passionately intellectual, nature of Rossetti; they are the record of a man whose sense of beauty was always being disturbed by his sense of feeling.

It is, when all is said and done, this sense of beauty upon which his great praise must be founded. It is the ultimate test by which a painter must be judged. Artists may tell us that this detail is impossible, and that that is absurd; the moralist may preach that there is here too morbid an insistance upon one idea; the general public may deplore the lack of their much loved catchpenny subjects; and the Philistine may laugh at the eccentric form in which Mr. Rossetti's ideas are produced. But if the net result is beautiful, if the one idea is truly and finely expressed, the chief aim of the painter has been achieved; and the world, which is only unjust for a brief space-too often, alas! the space of a lifetime-will not let the work die. This is the rock upon which so many artists, especially so many English and French artists, split; their pictures are frequently possessed of every merit save that one which alone would justify their existence. And in this respect the subject of my article is entitled to be considered

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as a supreme artist. In some of his works, especially in his later ones, when the fatal influence of chloral was beginning to wither his powers, there are distortions and even uglinesses such as can scarcely be condoned, and it is impossible to help regretting that, throughout a great part of his life, the influence of one woman's face should have been so great as to appear in all his chief characters-now as Proserpine, now as the Virgin Mary, and so throughout the range of his poetical fancies and the old legends with which he occupied his pencil. But when all these deficiencies are subtracted or allowed for, there remains a series of pictures which have such marvellous glory of colouring, such intensely vivid feeling, and such beauty of detail, that I at least know not where to find their parallel. They are living, breathing poems, at once so delicate and so strong, so passionate and so pure, as to appear to be the last word possible upon their various subjects. Take as an example of this, the picture of the painter's wife, done after her death, and entitled "Beata Beatrix." The subject is . simple enough-a three-quarter length figure of a woman, whose head has fallen slightly backward upon her shoulders in sleep, which we feel will soon be that of death. Fluttering in front of her is a crimson bird, bearing a poppy in its mouth; behind her a sun-dial; while in the distance of the Florcutine streets stand Dante and the Angel of Love watching. "Descriptions of pictures," as some one says, are stupid things at the best;" but here they seem to me even more than usually inadequate. No amount of description could convey any hint of the intense and beautiful peace which marks this painting. It is like that of summer woods at early dawn, before the first bird has begun to sing and the last star faded. Nor is it only that the face and its expression arc perfect; the whole picture tells its story with an emphasis only the more clear because of its intense quietude. Like the whisper of a great actress, we hear and feel the weight of every syllable. And technically it is as fine as it is emotionally, for curiously enough in this, probably his finest picture, Rossetti shows little or none of that wilfulness which is so frequently present in his works. The drawing, if not very markedly good, is unobtrusive and unobjectionable; the disposition of the drapery (always a strong point with this artist) is simplicity and dignity itself, the position full both of grace and suggestion, and represented with the utmost ease; while of the colouring it is impossible to speak in terms of too high praise. The picture is suffused with a misty sunshine, and all the hues therein are somewhat low in tone; but into their transparent depths the eye looks down and down as through the still waters of a lake; and the effect of the whole is that of some very marvellous piece of quiet music played at a great distance. This picture, too, gives us a good opportunity of noticing the strange combination of realism and idealism in Rossetti's painting, a combi