Swinburne himself told me of his amazement and amusement when he happened to turn to this page while he was looking through the copy he had sent her.
It was one of Gabriel Rossetti's glories to paint luxurious women, surrounded by every form of luxury. And some of them are set to pose in Eastern garments, with caskets in their hands and flames about them, looking out with unsearchable eyes. His colors, before they began to have, like his forms, an exaggeration, a blurred vision which gave him the need of repainting, of depriving his figures of life, were as if charmed into their own places; they took on at times some strange and stealthy and startling ardors of paint, with a subtle fury.
By his fiery imagination, his restless energy, he created a world: curious, astonishing, at first sight; strange, morbid, and subtly beautiful. Everything he made was chiefly for his own pleasure; he had a contempt for the outside world, and his life was so given up to beauty, in search for it and in finding of it, that one can but say not only that his life was passion consumed by passion, as his nerves became more and more his tyrants (tyrants, indeed, these were, more formidable and more alluring and more tempting than even the nerves confess), but also that, to put it in the words of Walter Pater: "To him life is a crisis at every moment."
There was in him, as in many artists, the lust of the eyes. And as others feasted their lust on elemental things, as in Turner's Rain, Steam and Speed, as in Whistler's Valparaiso, as in the Olympia of Manet, as in a Décors de Ballet of Degas, so did Rossetti upon other regions than theirs. He had neither the evasive and instinctive genius of Whistler, nor Turner's tremendous sweep of vision, nor the creative and fiercely imaginative genius of Manet. But he had his own way of feasting on forms and visions more sensuous, more nervously passionate, more occult, perhaps, than theirs.
Yet, as his intentions overpower him, as he becomes the slave and no longer the master of his dreams, his pictures become no longer symbolic. They become idols. Venus, growing more and more Asiatic as the moon's crescent begins to glitter above her head, and her name changes from Aphrodite into Astarte, loses all the freshness of the waves from which she was born, and her own sorcery hardens into a wooden image painted to be the object of savage worship.
Dreams are no longer content to be turned into waking realities, taking the color of the daylight, that they may be visible to our eyes, but they remain lunar, spectral, a dark and unintelligible menace.
[CONFESSIONS AND COMMENTS]
I
I met George Moore, during a feverish winter I spent in Paris in 1890, at the house of Doctor John Chapman, 46 Avenue Kleber; who at one time, before he settled there, had been the Proprietor and then Editor of The Westminster Review. In his review appeared in 1886 Pater's wonderful and fascinating essay on Coleridge; in 1887 his penetrating and revealing essay on Wincklemann. "He is the last fruit of the Renaissance, and explains in a striking way its motives and tendencies."