In the autumn of 1874 Rossetti returned to Chelsea, and again made his headquarters at 16, Cheyne Walk, where he remained, save for two visits to the seaside, until 1880. Here he worked from time to time at the picture illustrative of his own early poem, “The Blessed Damozel,”—the sole instance, by the way, of Rossetti’s completion of a subject in verse before attempting it on canvas; and began what promised to be among the most profound of his mystical creations, “The Sphinx” or “The Question,” and also the last subject he ever took from the “Vita Nuova” of Dante, “La Donna della Finestra,” or “Our Lady of Pity.” These two, as well as “The Boat of Love,” remained unfinished in his studio. To this fruitful decade belong an excellent replica of an early water-colour, “The Damozel of the Sanct Grael” (1874); the exquisite crayon drawing “The Spirit of the Rainbow” (1877); and four splendid oils, “The Sea Spell” (1876), “A Vision of Fiametta” (1878), “The Day-dream” and “Mnemosyne” or “The Lamp of Memory” (1880). To 1875 is due “La Bello Mano” (“The Beautiful Hand”). In 1879 he made a crayon drawing, which he called “Sancta Lilias,” for an Annunciation; depicting a girl unfolding a white scarf from a tall lily which she carries in her hand; but the sketch was never finished, nor advanced beyond the crayon stage.
In 1875 Rossetti took for a time a pleasant and secluded house near Bognor,—Aldwick Lodge, standing in its own grounds, wellnigh buried in shrubbery, in a lane west of the town, and near (as Dr. Hake tells us in some delightful reminiscences of a visit there) “to the roughest bit of beach on the Sussex coast.” Here, gathering together his mother, sister, and aunts, and such intimate friends as Dr. Hake and Mr. Theodore Watts, he enjoyed at the close of this year a Christmas week to which he afterwards looked back as to one of the happiest he ever spent.
It was at Bognor that Rossetti, influenced, no doubt, by his companionship, woke for the first time to the magic of the sea. It is extraordinary that so passionately romantic a spirit as his should have remained, until the eve of his fiftieth year, absolutely unaffected by that profound and intimate sway which the sea holds over the poetic nature once brought, however distantly, within even the rumour and echo of its majestic voice. Now the spell he had so long eluded was cast upon him with irresistible force. He began to haunt the shore with a child’s eagerness for the grandeur and the urgent mystery of tides. Day after day he paced the beach for miles together, pursuing the new vision, the new rapture of the stimulated sense. The surf, tumultuous and loud on that wild coast, enthralled him like a charm; the waves drove his fancy to new spheres; his poetry was turned to fresh scenes and subjects; he began to write “The White Ship,” the first, though perhaps not the greatest, of his historic ballads. For the time, he was absorbed almost wholly in that revelation of splendour and power,—in the primal glories of sea and sky; “two symbols of the infinite,” as the captive Mazzini called them.
But when we wonder at the lateness of this æsthetic development on Rossetti’s part, we must remember that he was naturally without that love of terrestrial and cosmical Nature for her own sake that is the commonly-accepted attribute of poets. There was in his whole being no trace of Pantheism, no worship of external loveliness apart from conscious life. To him the sole joy of life was in the human; the supreme tragedy of life was in the sexual. The conception of the two elemental principles—the man-principle and the woman-principle—striving, uniting, prevailing, against all the forces of destiny, sufficed him for his conception of the universe. He was utterly alien to the Wordsworth spirit; its serene monism was abhorrent to him. Apart as he lived from intellectual speculation, he was, in his unformulated and unconscious philosophy, dualistic to the core; as all true Romance must ever be. For the essence of Romance is in its recognition of the conflict between matter and spirit, between Nature and Man. Even its joy and exultation in the physical life as the channel of the Higher Spirit takes its glory from the sense of conquest over the Lower Spirit which threatens it from the same unknown world behind all. Therefore there lies always beneath the awe and wonder of romance towards the natural and the supernatural world a deep instinct of rebellion, of antagonism, which debars it from the Wordsworth spirit, at peace with earth and heaven. Resignation there may be in romance; acquiescence, never. There may come, indeed, a passionate and whole-hearted love of natural scenery, a frank delight, as in the Celtic temper, in every external object that can minister to man’s æsthetic enjoyment of beauty as a revelation of the divine. But the limits of the divine grow more perceptible as man emerges from the childhood of the world. “There hath passed away a glory from the earth.” Rossetti knew this—“knew” it, not in the intellectual sense of the word; and therefore he could never turn to Nature for that regenerating rest and peace which in some moods—not quite the highest—she can give. He never gained that next stage of spiritual emancipation and enrichment at which the sense of conflict is its own reward; as when the soldier, with “his soul well-knit” and every nerve schooled and chastened on the eve of a great battle, feels a profound repose, a diviner calm than that of the acclaimed victor. “The man who, though his fights be all defeats, still fights”—as Coventry Patmore sang while Rossetti was yet young—has verily seen “the beginnings of peace.”
It was at Bognor, too, that he began work upon the most ambitious of all his great symbolic figures, the “Venus Astarte,” or “Astarte Syriaca,” in which he strove—vainly perhaps, but with a superb effort towards a superhuman task—to combine and express all the mystic sensuousness and occult magic of Orientalism with the clear and scientific wisdom of the Western world. The Syrian Venus stands “between the sun and moon a mystery,” attended by winged and torch-bearing choristers; eloquent of the painter’s long and last struggle to reconcile sense, emotion, and intellect in the highest consummation of pictorial art.
In the following summer (1876) Rossetti paid a pleasant visit, at the invitation of Lord and Lady Mount Temple, to their house at Broadlands, in Hampshire, where he made some progress with the best version of “The Blessed Damozel.” The predella to this work, in which the lover left on earth is seen waiting beside a river for the vision of the Beloved, was painted from the beechwoods of the neighbourhood.
In 1876 Rossetti went with Madox Brown, Mr. George Hake, Mr. Theodore Watts, and his mother and sister to Herne Bay. Ill health had now settled permanently upon him, and painting became more difficult and intermittent, yet his technical power remained for the most part singularly unimpaired. In 1878 he completed “A Vision of Fiametta,”—an admirable and wholly new version of the subject from Boccaccio which he had treated some years back. Fiametta is in the painter’s thought an angel of immortality:
“Gloom-girt ’mid Spring-flushed apple-growths she stands”
—his bright Easter-maiden, with the crimson bird on the bough beside her, the symbol of warm, full-blooded life, as is the soft red robe she wears,—of life so rich and sweet as to yield the guarantee of victory; the spirit that can defy death and be its own assurance of resurrection. The apple-blossoms fall in scattered petals to the ground as she pushes the boughs apart with her lifted hand. Behind her is a stormy April sky, but around her head there plays a light, as of hope beyond the grave. She is the covenant of eternal spring, for she