And erected by his brother William and sister Christina Rossetti.

Another interesting memorial has since been established in the form of a drinking fountain, designed by Mr. Seddon, with a bronze bust modelled by Mr. Madox Brown, erected by subscription in 1887 in front of the old house, 16, Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, which was Rossetti’s home for twenty years.

An estimate of the disposition and character of such a man as Rossetti will not be lightly attempted by those who can only honour his memory from afar; having never added to the deep enjoyment of his art the privilege of personal intercourse with the artist. His tender and passionate affection, his chivalrous loyalty, his gracious bonhomie, his winning dignity, are matters so familiar to all who really knew him, as to render eulogy alike superfluous and impertinent. Of the other side of that magnetic personality,—of his hyper-sensitive pride, his morbid isolation of his suffering self from those healthy breezes of broad intellectual life which it is so easy to prescribe, so bitterly hard for a nature such as his to stand against,—of these things it may be said with all sympathy and reverence that they were the price of his greatness. There are some temperaments so finely organized, so delicately strung, that even joy is painful to them. They cannot lose in the sense of delight the consciousness of what that delight has cost them. They perceive so acutely the realities, the conditions, of life, that an hour of rapture makes them more quick to the pain behind and before. Such was Shelley, such were Keats and Byron; such was Dante Gabriel Rossetti. It is the curse of the artistic temperament: it is the blessing of Art.

“There are some of us,” said Shelley, “who have loved an Antigone before we visited this earth, and must pursue through life that unregainable ideal.” “I think,” he added, in words that might well be applied to Rossetti, “one is always in love with something or other; the error consists in seeking in a mortal image the likeness of what is, perhaps, eternal.” In other words, Rossetti was an idealist, and for the idealist there is no primrose path to heaven. His soul was too open to the ideal to be proof against the actual. His whole nature was like an Æolian harp, responsive through the whole gamut of thought and sense to every breath of circumstance or destiny that played about the world around it. For him there was no life without emotion. He craved sensation, as one craves a narcotic, to destroy its own results. Ennui was his bane. Nothing in his history is more pathetic than his need, in later years, of the perpetual ministry of close friends. The delicate instrument that could never be silent was hard to keep in tune. It demanded a firm and tender hand laid upon all those quivering strings of being to merge the discords into some sort of harmony, even if it were always in a minor key. Such a hand he found more than once among those that knew and loved him, but he found it supremely in the friendship of Mr. Theodore Watts, to whom his last poems were dedicated.

CHAPTER VI.
TREATMENT OF RELIGIOUS SUBJECTS.

The Re-birth of Religious Art—“God, Immortality, Duty”—The Pre-Raphaelites and the Reconstruction of Christianity—The Halo in Painting—The Responsibility of Womanhood—The “Girlhood of Mary Virgin” and “Ecce Ancilla Domini”—The Problem of Suffering—“Christ in the House of His Parents,” “The Passover in the Holy Family,” “The Shadow of Death,” “The Scapegoat”—Hunt’s Symbolism—“The Light of the World”—Rossetti’s Symbolism—“Mary Magdalene at the Door,” and “Mary in the House of John”—The Idea of Victory Through Suffering—“Bethlehem Gate”—“The Triumph of the Innocents”—The Spirit of Inquiry—“Christ in the Temple”—The Atonement—“The Infant Christ Adored”—Comparison with Madox Brown and Burne-Jones—“The Entombment”—“The Tree of Life.”

“God—Immortality—Duty;” such were the weighty words chosen by one of the greatest women of our century as the text of a now historic conversation in the shadow of St. John’s College, Cambridge. The student to whom she spoke has told us with what a tender solemnity she approached the great postulations which those words conveyed, and challenged them in her inflexible judgment one by one;—to her, how inconceivable the first, how unbelievable the second, but yet how imperative and irresistible the third.

The attitude of George Eliot, even in the phase of intellectual scepticism from which she then spoke, was deeply significant of that fundamental change in the constitution of religion, that entire transference of Christian or non-Christian “evidences,” from the intellectual to the moral sphere, from the argument to the instinct, which is now largely accepted as the supreme result of modern thought in Europe. For the repudiation of prior conceptions of “God” and “Immortality,” so far from precluding a reconstructive faith, rather prepared the way for it; making the belief in unseen goodness a deduction from instead of a premise to the recognition of visible goodness in the present world, and leaving the more scope for that growing reverence for the physical nature of man which,—having its origins in Paganism and its highest sanction in the Gospel of Galilee, and revealing itself in a passionate exaltation of bodily beauty as a symbol of the divine, a resolute acceptance of the laws of nature and destiny, and a strenuous blending of resignation to those laws with conquest of them by spiritual powers,—has inspired the great humanitarian movement of to-day, wherein the faith of the future finds the witness and the justification of its ideal.

To what degree, then, has the Pre-Raphaelite movement in English art affected, or reflected, that momentous revolution? The pictures of Rossetti, Millais, and Holman Hunt have been by turns exalted and condemned by the apologists of contending theological schools, and the painters stigmatized, now as followers of Tractarianism and instruments of Popery, now as leaders of the coarsest rationalism in sacred art, now as apostles of a sensual neo-Paganism brought over from the Renaissance, and credited to hold mystic and sceptic in equal defiance. One clerical critic, indeed, in 1857, sought in an ineffectual volume to prove the essential atheism of all Pre-Raphaelite work. His protest was but typical of that still extant species of mind to which the worship of the body implies the profanation of the soul. It remains to be decided whether such paintings touched the deepest religious principles which underlie all change of creed or ritual, and if so, in what way the art of the Pre-Raphaelites has joined or swayed the general current of humanitarian feeling which is slowly absorbing all forms of religion into a universal spirit and will.

These questions bring us to the great group of pictures in which English artists for the first time have aspired to deal in all simplicity and earnestness with the bases and principles of the Christian religion. It should not be difficult to discern the dominant idea, the moral keynote, so to speak, of the highest utterances of art in an age of such religious revolution as has been suggested by the proposition of George Eliot. The philosophy of “Duty,” presented by her in its sternest aspect, but brought more into line with the common heritage of religious thought by Browning, Tennyson, F.D. Maurice, and other contemporaries of the Pre-Raphaelite band, has in fact led in art, as it has led in religion, directly, if unconsciously, to that reverent re-discovery of “God,” that transfiguration of the ideal of “Immortality,” which the revival of the spirit of romance has made possible to modern England. It has been said that “the romantic temper is the essentially Christian element in art.”[[7]] Let us rather say that it is the medium through which Christianity itself has been renewed and quickened into a richer and fuller life. The romantic temper, in Pre-Raphaelite art, takes hold of the eternal verities of the Christian faith, and humanizes its whole cycle of history and legend in the atmosphere of the real and present world. It ignores any sort of dividing line between sacred tragedy and the great problems of modern time. It abjures for ever the “glass-case reverence” of relic-worship, the superstition which isolates Christian history as a record of exceptional events, instead of an interpretation of universal experiences. Ruskin justly says that “imagination will find its holiest work in the lighting-up of the Gospels;” but the illumination must have a reconstructive as well as an analytic consequence; must be, as the late Peter Walker Nicholson expresses it in his fine critique on Rossetti,[[8]] instinctively synthetic—which is the quality of genius: and all true art is synthetic in its essence and its end. The tendency of modern religious science to discredit the exceptional and the unique, and set the basis of morals in universal and familiar things,—in other words to deduce “God” and “Immortality” from the instinct of “Duty” and not “Duty” from the arguments for “Immortality” and “God,”—finds its correlative in the tendency of romantic art to subject the remote specialities of classicism to the test of known conditions and actual character.