William Blake in his relation to Dante Gabriel Rossetti/Chapter 2

by Johanna Christina Emerentia Bassalik-de Vries

Influence of W. Blake's Philosophy.

As a philosopher William Blake is a pupil of Emanuel Swedenborg, the Swedish mystic whose many religious books appeared between the years 1745 and 1771. Already as a child William Blake had adopted many of the doctrines of Swedenborg on mere hearsay. His father, an Irish dissenter, as Alexander Gilchrist (1828—61, Blake's biographer) calls him, and his eldest brother James were both ardent followers of Swedenborg. The principal doctrine which Blake never abandoned, which was more and more approved of by his imagination, which was constantly affirmed by his visions, changed every idea that he otherwise would have found in religion, and affected the standard of his poetry, was Swedenborg's doctrine of universal correspondence. This theory teaches that bodies are the generation and expression of souls; it makes all things into signs as well as powers, and the smallest things as well as the greatest are omens, warnings, and instructions. In his book the "Doctrine of the Sacred Scripture" Swedenborg gives the following explanation about the meaning of correspondences. From the Lord proceed three degrees: the Celestial, the Spiritual, and the Natural, one after another. What proceeds from the divine love is called celestial, what proceeds from the divine wisdom is called spiritual; the natural is from both and is their complex in the ultimate. The divine which comes down from the Lord to men descends through these degrees and contains these three degrees in it; these degrees are entirely distinct from one another like end, cause, and effect and yet make one by correspondence; for the natural corresponds to the spiritual and also to the celestial. The "Word" is written in the style of the Prophets and the Evangelists, which, though it appear common, yet conceals within it all divine and angelic wisdom "Each and all things in nature correspond to spiritual things."

The idea that the Bible was a sacred code written by inspiration which only men who were inspired by visions from Heaven like Swedenborg (Arcana Coelestia) and himself^[1]) could interpret, was taken up and adopted by Blake also in regard to the highest utterances of poetry; the only way in which the different degrees of correspondence could be expressed was by means of allegory and symbols, in which every word, or in drawing every design, had a second or perhaps a third hidden meaning. "Allegory addressed to the intellectual powers while it is altogether hidden from the corporeal understanding is my definition of the most sublime poetry", Blake writes in a letter to Thomas Butts, 1803. Such allegory is found in all Blake's poems and fills the Prophetic Books; it forms the greatest attraction of Blake's engravings, though no longer "hidden from all corporeal understanding", since in 1893 a complete edition of Blake's works appeared, edited by E. G. Ellis and W. B. Yeats, who show us in an elaborate treatise that a consistent system underlies Blake's writings, that his message, though very complex, claims to be only a personal statement of universal truth; a system to deliver men from systems. Much has been made clear by their ingenious explanation, but for all that the Prophetic Books remain dim and chaotic as dreams, their imaginative and coherent thought-structure fails in carrying conviction with it.

From Swedenborg^[2]) Blake also took the belief in the angels; the angelic wisdom, the occupations of the angels, their being the exact counterpart of men, and many interesting particulars of the angelic world; here Blake goes beyond Swedenborg in accepting the existence of evil spirits; he says: "Swedenborg received his teaching from angels only, while he ought to have consulted devils also", therefore his teaching shall be "as the linen clothes folded up". For, and here we touch another keynote of Blake's teaching, "without contraries there is no progression". Blake is a passionate preacher of moral and political freedom and repels all the coërcive devices of the formalist as well as the regulative distinction between right and wrong of the moralist. Man is law to himself. "Nor is it possible to thought a greater than itself to know". The divine human body may not be divided into two parts, body and soul, labelling the one as evil the other as good (The voices of the devil. Marriage of Heaven and Hell). In his Books of America and Europe he expands on the triumph of free love and throughout all Blake's works we find, that he preaches free indulgence in all bodily desires, though always with a sub-idea that only in this way the spirit can be made free.

"Abstinence sows sand all over
The ruddy limbs and flowing hair;
But desire gratified
Plants fruits of life and beauty there."
(Couplets and Fragments.)

"He who desires but acts not breeds pestilence."
(Marriage of Heaven and Hell.)

"Does not the worm erect a pillar in the mouldering churchyard
And a palace of Eternity in the jaws of the hungry grave?
Over his porch these words are written
Take thy bliss, Oh Man!"
(Daughters of Albion.)

These can serve as examples for the fore-going and I could find ever so many more, for Blake likes to repeat his favourite doctrines again and again under different forms. Swedenborg does not preach these extreme views, but Blake was not the first mystic, who held the opinion that the desires of the body had a right to be indulged in. There existed a religious sect, who called themselves "Brethren of the free spirit", they were adherents to the principle that unless the lusts of the body be satisfied, the spirit cannot be raised to the heights of its true development. And it is not impossible that Blake in his vast reading had come across this theory and adopted it as his own.

Like Swedenborg, Blake believed in the "Grand Man". Swedenborg says in "Arcana Coelestia", his most famous book (1749-56), "the whole Heaven is a Grand Man (Maximus Homo) and it is called a Grand Man, because it corresponds to the Lord's divine Human; and by so much as an angel or spirit or a man on earth has from the Lord, they also are men. . . . All things in the human body, in general and particular, correspond most exactly to the Grand Man and as it were to so many societies there." The same idea of a composite individual Blake puts forth in the prophetic Book Jerusalem:

"We live as one man, for, contracting our infinite senses
We behold multitudes, or expanding we behold as one,
As one Man all the universal family and that one man
We call Jesus the Christ."

Besides this one Man, the Divine Saviour, there were lesser "composites", called "states", these come into existence when imagination in the person of some imaginative man perceives them, as sound comes into existence when we hear it and light when we see it.

"We are not individuals but states,
Combinations of individuals."

(Milton, Book II.)

"Man passes on, but states remain for ever, he passes
through them like the traveller who may as well suppose
that the places he has passed through exist no more, as
a man may suppose that the states he has passed through
exist no more."

(Last Judgment.)

In his youth Blake racked his mind over the riddle of human existence. In the Book of Thel, which forms a transition between his lyrical poems and his prophetic books, he laments the limitations of the flesh. All other animate and inanimate things seem happy in the conscious discharge of their earthly duties; why does man alone suffer from a perversion of the senses by some tyrannical law? Why should he put a restraint upon his natural enjoyments?

"Why cannot the ear be closed to its own destruction?
Or the glistening eye to the passion of a smile —
Why a tongue impressed with honey from every wind;
Why a nostril wide inhaling terror trembling and affright?
Why a tender curb upon the youthful burning boy?" etc.

Soon however this spirit of doubt is taken from Blake. The immemorial struggle between the body and the soul, the man principle and the woman principle, Satan and the redeeming powers, the cause of all human suffering is the result of the fall of mankind; a fall from a hermaphroditic state into generative life, from the kingdom of Imagination, the celestial, into the natural world, the vegetative. This division of mankind into sexual life tended to a closing up of men into separate selfhoods; each selfhood was guilty of error, and gradually the inlets through which communication with the universal spirit, the eternal imagination, were maintained, were dried up; the senses were mostly used for the natural world only.

"One day the world was a Paradise
And Imagination was its principal Goddess."

"If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything
would appear to men as it is: infinite. For man has
closed himself up until he sees all things through
the narrow chinks in his cavern".

(A memorable Fancy.)

It is now his, Blake's mission in life, to lead man back to the golden age in which imagination reigned supreme and the reasoning powers of man were kept in proper subjection. In his prophetic Book "Jerusalem", he calls it his great task "to open the eternal worlds, to open the eternal eyes of Man inwards, into the worlds of thought, into eternity, ever expanding in the bosom of God, the human Imagination." The redeeming powers of mankind are love and imaginative art.

"No one knows what the life of man is, unless he
knows that it is love."

(Margical notes to Swedenborg's "Angelic Wisdom".)

In nearly all his poems he sings of love in one of its many aspects; in the "Songs of Innocence" the divine love is dwelled upon in The Lamb, The Divine Image, On Another's Sorrow. In the Songs of Experience Love appears in its earthly garb, the temptations and struggles of love are put forth.

"For the strife of Love is the abysmal strife,
And the word of Love is the word of life."

He likes to dwell on the contrast of divine and human love. In his poem the Clod and the Pebble, or in William Bond, a very mystical poem interpreted in a different way by Edwin J. Ellis, Charles A. Swinburne, and other Blake commentators, the last two stanzas are:

"I thought Love lived in the hot sunshine,
But oh, he lives in the moony light!
I thought Love lived in the heat of day,
But sweet Love is the comforter of night.

Seek Love in the pity of others' woe.
In the gentle relief of another's care,
In the darkness of night and the winter's snow,
In the naked and outcast, seek Love there!

And in his Prophetic Books, he, to use his own words, does nothing but

"Weaves into dreams the sexual strife
And mourns over the web of life."

At Blake's death many unpublished, or rather unknown Mss. were found, but Frederick Tatham, considering these to lessen the fame of his friend by the heretical opinions they expressed, destroyed them,^[3] and thus we find Blake's philosophic system incomplete. I think, however, that we know enough of it such as we find it, that in his turbulent evangile, doctrines of the most opposed abstract systems confront each other, and that his beliefs, however positive to himself for the time he entertained them, were fluctuating and shifting, and that the only ideas which pretty constantly show forth in strong relief are the few I singled out in the foregoing pages.

Of these ideas Blake has taken most, as I have shown, from Swedenborg, who had written them in his many books with great care and lucidity earlier in the century. But Blake's thoroughly artistic temperament conceived the notion, that the old truths wanted to be said in a new form to bring them home to mankind, and that the mystic truths should be expressed through the medium of the fine Arts. Up to now, mysticism had laid down her principles dogmatically in the language of the Church. From being theological the language became literary and poetical, and where words could not express the abstractions of the heavenly visions, Blake, in whose mind the most abstract notions crystallised into shapes, made sketches and drawings of these visions, such as he had them before his "mental eyes." That the result of these proceedings was startlingly original can be easily conceived; already by this sole reason Blake's works must have had great attraction for Dante Gabriel Rossetti. For he loved everything out of the Common and had a natural inclination for the supernatural and marvellous. As early as 1843 he wrote a ballad Sir Hugh the Heron, an imitation of W. Scott which, though very unripe and of no value, shows Dante Gabriel Rossetti's love for the mysterious. And in the following pages we will consider in detail the influence in which this attraction resulted. For as Blake was a man of genius both as a poet and as a painter, it could not be but that his works won the lifelong admiration of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and influenced nearly everything he produced. There is, however, a great difference between the mysticism of Blake and Rossetti. This difference lies in the fact, that the religious side of mysticism never affected Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

Always the artistic side of Blake's mysticism appealed to him; in later life he accepted some of its moral-philosophical doctrines; as a religious system it never was of the slightest value to him.

William Blake was a fervent Christian and a man of great faith throughout his life. Never once he despaired of his mission, never he doubted of the heavenly origin of his visions, or of his writings. "I may praise them, since I dare not pretend to be other than the secretary, the authors are in Eternity", Blake writes in a letter to Thomas Butts 1802 about the Prophetic books. And though poverty and want are at his door, he never makes concessions in order to see his books printed and earn a little money. With infinite patience and care he continues writing down his weird fancies and illuminating them with his fantastic drawings. Quite pathetic is the way in which he gives himself some poor bits of consolation for his worldly failure. "I am more famed in Heaven" he writes to Flaxman^[4] from his cottage in Felpham, "for my works than I could well conceive. In my brain are studies and chambers filled with books and pictures of old which I wrote and painted in ages of eternity before my mortal life; these are the delight of the archangels. Why then should I be anxious about the riches and fame of mortality?" Valiantly Blake fought on until the end of his life full of faith:

"I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand.
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land."
(Milton. Preface.)

In the midst of his mental fight death comes to him, and he dies singing in a loud clear voice some mystic snatches of song to a tune of his own; even on his deathbed still receiving evidence of the spiritual world.

Altogether different is the position which Dante Gabriel Rossetti takes up in religious matters. He has been called a sceptic (Benson, Life of Rossetti), but I do not think this term describes in any way his attitude towards religion, which rather has been one of vain longing. His mind dwelt much on the mystery of death, the horror of pain and decay, and he tried, and during some years of his life tried very hard, to believe in a divine power to harmonize the miseries of mankind.

In his youth he writes the mystical story "St Agnes of Intercession."^[5] In this story, which had the sub-title "an auto-psychology", Rossetti tells how a painter is struck by the likeness of the portrait of his bride to a portrait of St. Agnes by a painter of the middle-ages. He goes to Italy to see the original picture and discovers that this is a portrait of a lady "deeply attached" to the painter. At the same time he sees his own face in the portrait the painter made of himself. A violent illness is the result of the mental shock of this discovery, and all the weird possibilities which he draws from it. Slowly he recovers, but cannot forget the strange adventure he, or rather his soul, had had. At this point the story is broken off. Dante Gabriel Rossetti tries to believe in it in the pre-existence of the soul, but he cannot, and thus disillusioned breaks the story off in the middle. It is true that we have a poem written in his earlier years in which he adopts the Catholic dogma and reminds us of Dante's Vergine Madre, figlia del tuo Figlio (Divina Commedia, Par., Cant. 33). The poem is called^[6] "Ave", but it was undoubtedly the artistic side of Catholicism which had won Rossetti's sympathies, and has nothing or very little to do with his inmost conviction. The same holds good for his two religious pictures "Girlhood of the Virgin Mary" and "Ecce ancilla Domini". And I think, that in the other poems of Rossetti where he expresses religious ideas we must see them in the same light as the foregoing.

"Would God I knew there were a God to thank,
When thanks rise in me"

seems to be the true attitude of Rossetti towards religion. However, after the death of his beloved wife, he seems in the yearning after spiritual "consolation to find what he seeks for a while in the doctrines of spiritualism.^[7]

Very interesting is his correspondence about this subject, falling in the years 1865—67, and especially the letters of Baron Kirkup who tells of his experiences with different spirits as: Dante, Garibaldi etc., are highly remarkable. They show us that Dante Gabriel Rossetti's "disposition towards believing in the spiritualism was too much rather than too little" (William M. Rossetti) But though we hear of regular spiritual "seances" where Mrs. Marshall and her husband, she a wellknown medium of those days, gave evidence of their connection with the world of spirits, the influence of spiritualism on Rossetti's mind was not of a lasting character. In 1871 he writes:

"The Past is over and fled;
Named new, we name it the old,
Thereof some tale hath been told.
But no word comes from the dead ;
Whether at all they be,
Or whether as bond or free,
Or whether they too were we.
Or by what spell they have sped."

(The Cloud Confines.)^[8]

Clearly this poem indicates that the consolation Rossetti had found in spiritualism had been temporary, and that he had fallen back into the old disbelief. Still more clearly the same thoughts are expressed in a poem^[9] "Soothsay", written a year before his death:

'To God at best, to Chance at worst,
Give thanks for good things, last as first"^[10]

With Flaubert, Rossetti might have said of himself: "Je suis mystique et je ne crois à rien". This lack of faith which is highly characteristic for the modern mystic in general of course, makes an essential difference between the mysticism of William Blake and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and changes all the doctrines which Rossetti took from the latter. From childhood naturally prone to the marvellous and supernatural, the mysteries of life and death were continually present to the mind of Rossetti, and it could not be but that Blake's theory of "correspondences" made a deep impression upon him. The phenomena in this world are only vague shadows of another, deeper world behind, and what we behold here are tokens and warnings, we are always surrounded by an atmosphere of mystery, but whereas Blake's faith easily solves the problems which lie at the bottom of existence, Rossetti's mind cannot get at the bottom of this mystery, the feelings of tension are present, the feelings of relaxation are wanting. The problems of life and death are not enticing to him, he tries to escape the burthen of their sadness, but he never succeeds in this completely, and the result of this is a subdued sadness which lies overall his works. In this all-pervading sense of sadness and mystery, we have to see Blake's belief in the spiritual cause of natural events. The elements of joy, serenity and happiness are wanting in this belief and in the collection of Rossetti's poems we find none to match Blake's splendid lyrics: Nurse's Song, Spring, the Echoing Green, and so many others display an innocent joy and gladness, which qualities though toned down in Blake's later works, never wholly disappear from them. Also among Blake's drawings we find many that show these qualities e.g. his engravings "Infant Joy", "The Reunion of the Soul and the Body", "Morning or Glad Day". In the drawing "Infant Joy" the innocent light-heartedness of youth has been expressed; in the "Reunion of the Soul and the Body" we see the rapture with which after a long separation a longed-for meeting can fill the heart. But especially expressive of joy in an abstract sense is the drawing "Morning or Glad Day". A male, naked figure descends from above; just alighted, he with one foot touches the earth; a flood of radiance still encircles his head; his arms are outspread, exultingly he brings joy and solace to this lower world, announcing the birth of a new day, full of glory. As said above Dante Gabriel Rossetti has neither poems nor pictures to match these in joyfulness and lightheartedness. We always move in an atmosphere of mystery, the inscrutability of which is never lost sight of, and the melancholy and thoughts without hope which are the result of this mysterious sadness, are apparent in all his poems and pictures. This sense of sadness and mystery is not always very pronounced. Sometimes hardly definable, we merely feel that it is there; sometimes it reveals itself in a weird description of nature as in "The Portrait:"

"In painting her I shrined her face
Mid mystic trees, where light falls in
Hardly at all; a covert place
When you might think to find a din
Of doubtful talk, and a live flame
Wandering, and many a shape whose name
Not itself knoweth, and old dew,
And your own footsteps meeting you,
And all things going as they came."

And further on:

"And as I wrought, while all above
And all around was fragrant air,
In the sick burthen of my love
It seemed each sun-thrilled blossom there
Beat like a heart among the leaves."^[11]

In other poems the sense of sadness becomes oppressive in its very intensity, as in the opening stanzas of "The Bride's Prelude". I believe that here Rossetti goes further than Blake in painting the influence of surroundings. The years full of sorrow, the woeful waiting, the secret sin of the bride make the air of her chamber so very close. A kind of dim horror seems to be exhaled by the heavy hangings and curtains, as if the thoughts full of sin and remorse had passed over in them.

"And even in shade was gleam enough
To shut out full repose
From the bride's 'tiring chamber, which
Was like the inner altar-niche
Whose dimness worship had made rich"^[12]

(and the next two stanzas).

The same feelings we find expressed in the ballad "the Staff and Scrip" where the room of the queen is described:

"The queen sat idle by her loom:
She heard the arras stir.
And looked up sadly: through the room
The sweetness sickened her
Of musk and myrrh."^[13]

Though Dante Gabriel Rossetti in the last two examples works out a special idea of Blake in detail, he nearly always adopts his theories in a general sense, especially in the works of his youth. In his later sonnets and pictures he penetrates deeper into them. Probably the part which he took in the editing of Blake's works by the widow of Alexander Gilchrist, for which edition Rossetti wrote a considerable critical part, now joined to his works under the title of "A literary paper on William Blake", had enlivened his interest in Blake again. Perhaps also the great sorrow of Rossetti's life had inclined him towards philosophical speculation. Howewer it be, it is certain that only after 1863 we find occasionally a special mystical doctrine expressed in Rossetti's works. So that we can assume that the influence of Blake's philosophy made itself felt most distinctly in two periods of Dante G. Rossetti's career. The first time this influence asserts itself most is the Praeraphaelitic period of Rossetti's art, the time of his youth. Here we find Blake's mysticism expressed in a general sense, pervading poems and pictures alike, as will be apparent from the foregoing pages and those that follow.

The second period of Blake's influence in a more marked sense is the time of Rossetti's riper years, when his faculties had reached their highest development. Now Rossetti, as mentioned above, is more inclined towards philosophical speculations; the generalities, the ideas which lie on the surface of Blake's philosophy do not suffice him any longer. He penetrates deeper into the meaning of the doctrines put before him and many special teachings of Blake find utterance in his verse. Especially in his Sonnets' Sequel^[14] "The House of Love" we find these doctrines expressed. But I shall speak of the general influence first.

The more general sense of mysticism, which, however, I believe finds its origin in Blake's theory of correspondences, is often expressed in the choice of the subject for his poems, as in the ballads "Rose Mary"^[15] and "Sister Helen".^[16] In his pictures we observe it in the subjects chosen, as in his drawings "The Gates of Memory", "How they met themselves", or in his crayon drawing "Pandora". It relieves his early artistic productions from the harshness and exaggerated naivete we find in the pictures of the other Praeraphaelites; this holds good in particular for his picture „Ecce Ancilla Domini". The eyes of the madonna seem full of kept-back tears, they plead for a deeper, warmer humanity than is conceivable with the pure Praeraphaelitic conception. This mysticism finds utterance, and this is very Blakean, in allegory and symbolism. From his early years we possess e.g. a very dark symbolical sonnet "The Vase of Life"^[17]. Human life is figured as a vase, sculptured with a bas-relief, representing a young man running a race, which he wins. A certain man of genius does not like others to crowd round the vase, he masters its imaged significance. He fills it with the rapid and ardent experiences of his career and at last it will hold its ashes. (William M. Rossetti).

In many of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's later sonnets we find again Blake's theory of "states". However, while Blake in personifying his states gave them names and even a feminine part, their weaker or better self, called "emanation", and with these imaginative beings created new myths, Dante Gabriel Rossetti does not go so far in the personification of his moods (Stimmungen). But though individual names do not occur for "states" yet we find that in many sonnets of Rossetti Blake's "states" or their "emanations" are put before our eyes. All of his sonnets are written, as Rossetti testifies in a letter to Mr. Sharp, "on some basis of special momentary emotion". For instance in the sonnet "He and I"^[18] we have to see a personified mood. It exhibits the surprise when a man finds out that he is no longer himself, no longer youthful and buoyant; how it is that he is old and dejected

"Lo! this new Self now wanders round my field.
With plaints for every flower, and for each tree
A moan,"

and he weeps

". . . o'er sweet waters of my life, that yield
Unto his lips no draught, but tears unseal'd.
Even in my place he weeps. Even I, not he".

Still more distinctly the personification of an abtract idea is seen in "Vain Virtues".^[19]

"What is the sorriest thing that enters Hell?
None of the sins, but this and that fair deed
Which a soul's sin at length could supersede.
These yet are virgins, whom death's timely knell
Might once have sainted; whom the fiends compel
Together now, in snake-bound shuddering sheaves
Of anguish, while the pit's pollution leaves
Their refuse maidenhood abominable.

Night sucks them down, the tribute of the pit,
Whose names, half entered in the book of Life,
Where God's desire at noon. And as their hair
And eyes sink last, the Torturer deigns no whit
To gaze, but, yearning, waits his destined wife,
The Sin still blithe on earth that sent them there."

Here Rossetti follows Blake in representing the good part of the emotion as a female (In one more instance we find this in his works, viz. in the mystic story "Hand and Soul", where the "emanation" of the human body, the soul, visits a young painter in the form of a woman). The sonnet has a double meaning (William M. Rossetti),

I. an ethical meditation.
II. a spiritual impersonation.

The first means that the condemnation of sin is not so dreadful a thing to reflect upon, as the fact that a sinful soul may have started as a virtuous one and that when the soul is condemned, its virtue as well as its sins are so.

The second meaning indicates, that a virtuous deed, the offspring of a human soul, is a fair virgin, who, were the soul to pass from earthly life, would become a saint in Heaven. But the soul commits a dreadful sin and is married to the devil, but even while sin is still blithe on earth, the fair virgin forfeits her sainthood and is drowned in the pit of doom.

In another Sonnet, "Heart's Compass"^[20], we find Blake's idea of a composite individual (the Grand Man). Dante Gabriel Rossetti identifies this supreme being with Love "the evident heart of all life sown and mown". He is awed and impressed when this inner relation of things to each other show him his beloved not as herself alone, but "as the meaning of all things that are." "What," does he ask of himself, "is this power?" and the answer comes: "it is love, love in its best form, with all sensuousness fallen off from it."

In the sonnet "Lost Days" Dante Gabriel Rossetti sees innumerable "states" pass before his eyes, they are those in which, when he passed through them, he did not use the opportunities they brought; he mourns over them and wonders whether they are but "golden coins squandered and still to pay" or "drops of blood dabbling the guilty feet." God knows how after death he will find them back "each one a murdered self", and eternal, while everything on earth is eternal.

In Dante Gabriel Rossetti's pictures he even more than in his poems expresses his mystical feelings by symbolism. Sometimes symbolical figures are heaped in paintings and drawings and charge these with a wealth of feelings not always easily understood. As a typical example of this a small drawing can serve, which Rossetti made as a headpiece for his sonnets in 1880. The drawing represents the floating figure of an angel with an hourglass in one hand and a harp in the other, her hair crowned with laurels, near her a rose tree, at her side a serpent, a butterfly, and medals with the alpha and omega. Over the angel the word "Anima" is written. Dante G. Rossetti gives an explanation that the soul is instituting a memorial of one dead deathless hour by putting a winged hourglass in a rosebush and at the same time touching the 14-stringed harp. To me however this explanation does not make the drawing more clear.

There are also pictures in which we find too much symbolism, for instance "Sibylla Palmifera", an oil painting; here the butterflies (emblems of the soul) are symbolical, the palm in her hand, the vessel of incense, the smoke of which rises before a blinded Cupid. Gradually Rossetti expresses the mystic feeling no longer through the medium of allegory or symbolism. He begins to paint "emotions", "states", and whereas Blake found as representatives for his "states" the male and female figures, Rossetti took the figure of woman alone. In a world where everything else might be a shadow, the physical beauty of woman formed a solid basis of reality, and was accepted by Rossetti as the centre from which all emotions proceed. And gradually there appear the long row of three-quarter length portraits in water-colours and oil paint, or in crayon which all of them represent as many "Stimmungen", all of them are as many personified "states". There is an unmistakable likeness between them, (do not all "emotions" resemble each other more or less?) which consists therein, that all of them represent the "state" and its "emanation" or the emotion in its sensuous and spiritual meaning, those parts of the mood which belong to the body and those which belong to the soul. The nether part of the face is the seat of that side of the emotion which influences the senses and constitutes the baser part of it; here we always find the full red lips with a sensuous curve; the eyes Dante Gabriel Rossetti takes for the spiritual part, the "emanation" of the "state", they possess the depth and glimmer of eternity and the brilliancy of heavenly stars. Rossetti passes through the long scale of emotions and feelings which exist in the human heart and for each of them he has a picture as representative. On one end of this row we may put "Beata Beatrix"^[21]) as expressing the summit of human bliss, on the opposite end "Astarte Syriaca" as the emblem of the most cruel lust; between these, forming the neutral element we have the picture of "Fiametta", the ordinary healthy type of woman, not troubled by any feelings at all, representing a "negative emotion", if such a thing does exist. And between these three all kinds of painted emotions are grouped: their difference often very subtle, their meaning not always easy to understand, notwithstanding, or perhaps because of the allegorical figures which accompany them. Generally they express some phase of love; there is the vague feeling of love which hardly can be expressed in the "Day-Dream"; the feeling of reluctance when sacrificing peace and tranquillity of heart to Love, in "Venus Verticordia";^[22] the passionate yearning for lost Love in the "Blessed Damozel", and the perverse feelings Love can inspire in its modern phase, in "Lilith".

I think these examples suffice to prove that Rossetti in the painting of his principal pictures, his woman portraits, was a painter of imagination and that the basis on which he founded his theory was born in him under the influence of William Blake.

 

—————

1. Blake had visions from the time of his youth when he was once set screaming by the appearance of our Lord; and these visions never left him unto the time of his death.
2. Swedenborg, Divine Love and Wisdom; Heaven and Hell.
3. According to Mrs. Gilchrist, to whom Tatham himself orally communicated this fact. Helen Richter (William Blake, 1906, page 393) does not believe in the loss of many Mss.
4. John Flaxman, the well-known sculptor and draughtsman who made a great reputation by his illustrations for Homer, Aeschylus and Dante.
5. Collected works of D. G. Rossetti. London 1906, vol. I, p. 399.
6. ibid. p. 244.
7. The father of Rossetti was, though a Roman Catholic, a free-thinker; the children were educated in the religion of the mother who belonged to the Church of England.
8. ibid. 317.
9. ibid. 334.
10. In all Dante G. Rossetti's biographies the story has been told how in his last illness he expressed a wish to receive absolution for his sins. "I can make nothing of Christianity, but I only want a confessor to give me absolution for my sins!" Adding: "I believe in a future life. Have I not had evidence of that often enough? Have I not heard and seen those that died long years ago?" I think that no importance whatever must be attached to these words, but that they must be considered as a passing fancy of a sick brain, the more so as he never insisted on seeing the priest at his bedside.
11. Rossetti D. G., The collected works. ed. by W. M. Rossetti. London 1906, Vol. I, 240.
12. ibid. I, 35.
13. ibid. I, 75.
14. ibid. p. 176-227
15. ibid. p. 103.
16. ibid. p. 66.
17. ibid. 224.
18. ibid. I, 226.
19. ibid. I, 219.
20. ibid. I, 190
21. In "Beata Beatrix", and not only here, Rossetti uses colour in a symbolical sense. The red bird means passion. The same he does in his picture „Paolo and Francesca“ where the floor is strown with red roses. Blake did this very often. He uses red as the symbol of passion, green stands for the instinctive life, pink and white for the highest imagination. Hence we find in the illustrations of the "Marriage of Heaven and Hell" (British Museum Copy) the eagle and the serpent painted in streaks of red and green; the same colours are given to the "Tiger", illustrating the poem of that name. Also the angel in the "Marriage of Heaven and Hell", when hearing of Blake's thoughts "grew pink". Throughout all Blake's works examples like the foregoing can be found abundantly, cf. Helen Richter, Blake pg 111.
22. cf. The sonnet, Collected Works 1,360.