—“with re-assuring eyes most fair,
A presage and a promise stands; as ’twere
On Death’s dark storm the rainbow of the soul.”
But now the time was nigh when “Death’s dark storm” must break upon Rossetti. The last great and sane strength of his genius was spent upon poetry,—in the crowning of his romantic ballads with the masterpiece of their class, “The King’s Tragedy.” This was published, in a volume entitled “Ballads and Sonnets,” in 1881. The previous year had seen the completion of the last important picture that ever came fully finished from his hand,—an oil version of the almost full-length figure replicated several times, under the name of “The Day-dream,” and consisting of the most beautiful and perfect of his portraits of Mrs. William Morris.
Of the laborious conscientiousness of Rossetti’s practice in painting it may here be said that it has been greatly under-estimated by those who only saw the less serious side of his complex and self-contradictory nature. That “the capacity for taking infinite pains” developed with the genius which gave it scope is abundantly attested by those who witnessed not only his restless roving from one task to another, but also the ungrudging concentration of toil which he bestowed in turns upon them all. Mr. Shields, who for years was a constant companion in Rossetti’s studio, says in his too-brief record of that intimacy:—“One evening when the fine full-length figure, holding an open book and honeysuckle, called ‘The Day-dream,’ was nearly completed, I found him standing far off from it in the dusky light and searching it critically. ‘It seems to me, that the lower limbs are too short: what do you think?’ An examination compelled me to endorse his fears. It was enough. Condemnation to the effacement of half the picture was instantly passed. Long sprays of young sycamore, rich with the ruddy buds of early spring, crossed before the lady’s green skirt. That sacrificed, it was not possible to save the foliage, and the season was too far advanced for fresh reference to nature. The first necessary step therefore was to copy these on to a clean canvas; that done, he determinately scraped out the large erring surface, corrected the proportions of the figure, and then calmly re-painted all, striking lastly the sycamore boughs into their new places from the rescued studies.” An even more laborious re-painting, says the same authority, was effected in the final oil version of “Dante’s Dream,” completed in 1871. The figure of one of the ladies attendant at the bedside of the dead Beatrice failed to satisfy him in the disposition of her drapery. At the last moment he set to work to make entirely new studies for the robe in question, and almost wholly re-painted the figure that wore it.
In the autumn of 1881, which witnessed the publication of his second volume of original poetry, Rossetti went with his friend Mr. Hall Caine, the eminent novelist, to spend some weeks at a little farmhouse in the Vale of St. John, near Keswick, Cumberland. The surrounding scenery was of a wildly beautiful kind, well calculated to soothe and inspire the city-pent poets; but Rossetti was by this time too ill to find relief from nervous strain in the long walks which he had enjoyed at Bognor. He paced instead, for hours together, the quaint little sitting-room where, night after night, he would read aloud from the treasures of modern fiction. Of Rossetti’s acute critical faculty, and his sound literary judgment alike in poetry and prose romance, abundant testimony has been given by the many privileged to enjoy from year to year, especially in the period of his prime, the inestimable help and delight of his enthusiastic counsel and his frank, outspoken, but never ungenerous criticism. Such witness is fully endorsed by Mr. Caine’s records even of this last autumn of his life, when, through shattered health and failing hopes for his own future, he retained in a great measure the mental vision and acumen of happier days, as well as his own creative power in design and poetry. Rossetti never tired of these nightly discussions of the inexhaustible topics of literary art: he loved to prolong them far into the morning hours; and often, as his friend has told us, they saw the sunrise break over the great hills as they went at last to rest.
Nor was the year without fruit in painting. The pathetic picture of “La Pia,” a new design in oils, though with a title used for a sketch in 1867, ranks high among his later performances. The subject, briefly broached in Dante’s “Purgatorio,” deals with the imprisonment of the young wife of Nello dell’ Pietra of Siena in a fortress in the Maremma, in the midst of a noxious swamp. Rossetti was still at work, too, upon the great symbolic picture in which he was endeavouring to sum up all that he had implied in his maturer treatment of womanly beauty,—the mystic and solemn “Venus Astarte” or “Astarte Syriaca” (the Syrian Venus). The “Cassandra” proposed by him somewhile previously was never far advanced, but he had painted in 1880 a somewhat inferior oil version of a subject which had been the favourite of his youth, “The Salutation of Beatrice.”
One of the very few public triumphs which came to Rossetti in his lifetime stands in the annals of 1881. His great picture, “Dante’s Dream,” painted ten years earlier, was purchased by the Corporation of Liverpool for £1,500, and hung in the Walker Art Gallery, where it was at once hailed with general and almost unalloyed praise.
Early in February, 1882, prostrated by an attack of a semi-paralytic character, Rossetti was removed to Birchington-on-Sea, near Margate, where his old friend, Mr. John P. Seddon, had generously placed a house known as West Cliff Bungalow at his disposal. Mr. Hall Caine went with him, and they were soon joined by the artist’s mother, sister, and brother, and visited frequently by Mr. Watts, and by the young poet Mr. William Sharp, Mr. Shields, and Mr. Leyland, who brought with him Rossetti’s long-trusted medical adviser, Dr. John Marshall, to add his counsels to the unremitting care of the local physician, Dr. Harris.
Even within sight of the fast-approaching end, his earnest spirit did not falter in its aspirations, nor was the grasp of the busy hand upon its loved work relaxed altogether. He now executed a beautiful little oil sketch of a subject which he had attempted many years before—“Joan of Arc Kissing the Sword of Deliverance;” a striking and pathetic allegory of his own soul’s attitude, as he stood ready to greet with glad and fearless reverence the long-impending sword of the last Deliverer. He was one of those to whom, as George Eliot once said, early death takes the aspect of salvation.