290 ARTISTS AND AUTHORS art, at this early period, interested him far more than the body, especially such a substance as he found under the presidency of Sir Martin Shee and the keeper- ship of George Jones. Let us not forget, meanwhile, that it is easy to sneer at the incompetence of mannered old artists, and yet hard to over-estimate the value of discipline in a school, however conventional. Rossetti was too impatient to learn to draw, and this he lived to regret. His immediate associates, the young men whom he began to lead and impress, were better draughtsmen than he. His first oil picture, I believe, was a portrait of his father, now in possession of the family. But, as far as can be now made out, he did not begin to paint seri- ously till about January, 1848, when he persuaded another Royal Academy stu- dent, W. Holman Hunt, to take a large room close to the paternal house in Charlotte street, and make it their studio. Here Mr. Scott visited them in the- early spring of that year ; he describes to me the large pictures they were strug- gling upon, Hunt, on his "Oath of Rienzi," and Rossetti, on his "Girlhood of Mary Virgin." The latter was evidently at present but poorly equipped ; the painting was timid and boyish, pale in tone, and with no hint or promise of that radiant color which afterward became Rossetti's main characteristic. But the feeling was identical with that in his far more accomplished early poems. The very pulse and throb of mediaeval adoration pervaded the whole conception of the picture, and Mr. Scott's first impression was that, in this marvellous poet and possible painter, the new Tractarian movement had found its expositor in art. Yet this surely was no such feeble or sentimental echo as had inspired the de- clared Tractarian poets of eight or nine years earlier ; there was nothing here that recalled such a book as the " Cherwell Water Lily " of Father Faber. This contained the genuine fleshly mysticism, bodily presentment of a spiritual idea, and intimate knowledge of mediaeval sentiment without which the new religious fervor had no intellectual basis. This strong instinct for the forms of the Catho- lic religion, combined with no attendance on the rites of that church, fostered by no study of ecclesiastical literature or association with teachers or proselytes, but original to himself and self-supported, was at that time without doubt the feature in Rossetti's intellectual character which demands our closest attention. Nor do I believe that this passion for the physical presentation of a mystical idea was ever entirely supplanted by those other views of life and art which came to oc- cupy his maturer mind. In his latest poems — in " Rose Mary," for instance — I see this first impulse returning upon him with more than its early fascination. In his youth, however, the mysticism was very naive and straightforward. It was fostered by one of the very few excursions which Rossetti ever took — a tour in Belgium in October, 1849. I am tc "ld that he and the painter-friend who ac- companied him were so purely devoted to the mediaeval aspect of all they saw, that, in walking through the galleries, they turned away their heads in approach- ing modern pictures, and carefully closed their eyes while they were passing Rubens's " Descent from the Cross." In Belgium, or as the result of his tour there, Rossetti wrote several curious poems, which were so harsh and forced that he omitted them from his collection when he first published his " Poems," in 1870.
