Rossetti his own name must ever be associated. He speaks in sympathy as well as with authority, and there is ground for the belief that the deliberate judgment to which he has committed himself is slowly gaining acceptance at the hands of the public. Slowly it must be, because a clear appreciation of the genius of the painter has only lately become possible to the world, and because even now it is still difficult to measure fairly the value of original experi

though it may hinder the due appreciation of his talent, was therefore ill-advised. If his life had been passed in the open market-place of criticism, perhaps he might not have found the courage to follow the ideals he had discovered for himself. These ideals, as we shall see, were strange to the temper of his time, and if the embodiment he was able to give to them has been the subject of exaggerated praise, the ideals themselves, however perfect the form in which they might have been

avoid.

Even painters of less pronounced individuality who have not, as he had, to reconquer the whole dialect and phraseology of their art need some time to win attention for the little that is original in them, and it is therefore no wonder that the public should not at once appreciate a body of work new in its essence, and always unfamiliar, if not faulty, in its form. But though Rossetti's fame may suffer for a while from the fact that the time has not yet arrived for a discriminating judgment of the several phases of his career, the historical conscience, which is touched by such a case as his, will ultimately re-assert itself; and in the meantime that which Mr. Ruskin has lately said remains indisputably true, and the cause he loved and which in his best moments we may be sure he valued more than fame, already owes more to him than to any other painter of our day. And if this is so there can be no reason to speak otherwise than frankly of Rossetti's work. The estimate of his career, which I have borrowed from Mr. Ruskin, can be made good without extravagant or indiscriminate praise, and his genius when it is rightly apprehended will be seen to be of too masculine a temper to need to be championed for its shortcomings and defects. Those who knew Rossetti personally can never be in doubt as to the original and surviving force that was in him. They will be in no fear lest the strength of his individuality should suffer by plain speaking, and although it is true that he shunned criticism while he lived, there can be no reason why his work should not now be temperately and dispassionately discussed, with a fair statement of its great merits and its obvious defects. Rossetti's strong personal feeling in regard to publicity has indeed given rise to some natural misconception as to the strength of his individuality. It is perhaps a plausible presumption that a man who so resolutely detaches himself from the ordinary social life of his time, and who prefers, even as regards his work, to avoid a constant reference to the public judgment of his contemporaries, is therefore secretly apprehensive lest the strength of his con victions should be shaken by attack. But such a conclusion fails to take into account a paradox of the artistic temperament by no means peculiar to Rossetti. The conditions which certain natures demand for the free exercise of their faculties are often wholly unconnected with the strength or weakness of intellectual character: the process of artistic production may be helped or hindered by influences that leave untouched the central faith in which an artist labours:

and so it will happen that a little outward discouragement finds sometimes too ready a response in that natural despondency with which every artist of fine temper and noble ambition views an uncompleted task. The disposition which dares not hazard these discouragements is perhaps to this extent sensitive and even morbid, but it is not therefore weak or faltering; for in apparent inconsistency and yet in combination with a character which chooses in this way to guard itself from contact with the outer world it is possible to encounter a clear and masculine judgment, and an intellect in quick and full sympathy with the varied intellectual movement of its time.

That this was so at least in Rossetti's case is known to all who knew him. In his presence it was impossible not to be impressed by the extraordinary range of his intellectual appreciation, by the certainty and strength of his judgments and by the unimpeachable security of his own personal convictions. If he chose to live apart and in seclusion it was assuredly from no inability to vindicate those principles in art which he had deliberately adopted, and for which he sought with steadfast persistence to find a worthy expression. His mind was of too robust a sort to cherish untried illusions or to indulge wilful caprice and affectation; and for what is strange in the direction of his genius or imperfect in the form of its embodiment we must therefore seek some better explanation than that which is suggested by the outward habit of his daily life. For in the man as he was known to his friends nothing was more noticeable than the freedom with which an alert and vigorous intelligence played around all those deeper problems of thought and imagination that can confirm or disturb the principles of action. To this distinguishing quality of his mind-its constant readiness to entertain serious speculation on matters of high spiritual import, and its youthful and generous appreciation of the ideas of youth-must be ascribed much of that peculiar charm and fascination now dearly remembered by all who enjoyed his society. In any earnest talk with Rossetti, even the youngest of the company might safely venture to declare his mind upon the matter. He was sometimes intolerant of indifference, but was always patient with real enthusiasm, and although he had ample store of irony and sarcasm at his command they were weapons he would never employ to discourage imagination. His, indeed, was the higher sort of strength that did not count the love of beauty as a

and destined to choose the most widely divergent paths in art. The force of his personality has been felt and admitted in the practice of men who could never have hoped to appropriate his finer sense of beauty, men who were realists born and bred, but who, nevertheless, found in the uncompromising certainty of expression which stamps his earlier design a means of securing a closer contact with nature. And, on the other hand, the earnest and high purpose with which he sought to enlarge the vision of English painting, and to open to it a nobler inheritance of poetical truth, no less attracted

That the strength of a chain lies in its weakest link is true in mechanics, but it is not true in art or literature; a painter or a poet can only be fairly tested out of the best that he has given to the world and yet we are so impatient to be rid of the responsibilities of judgment by the invention of a formula that will seem to simplify our thought, that we are tempted to seize with too eager haste upon those productions of an artist wherein the characteristic features of his style are carried to excess. And in Rossetti's case this natural perversity of criticism is specially favoured by the circumstances of his career.

to him the allegiance of others differently gifted, who came with no thought but for the beauty that is born of ideal invention, and who nevertheless equally gained from his example the encouragement and direction of which they stood most in need.

It is the task of criticism to seek to discover in the art of Rossetti the reflex of these high qualities by which he was known as a man. Nor is this altogether an easy task. To the things of the imagination we are too apt to apply a standard of criticism borrowed from the laws of the physical world.

The questionable and disputable elements in his art were developed at a time when he was justified by the encouragement of his admirers in attempting work of larger and more important scale, and it happens therefore that the paintings of his which make the most immediate appeal to the public eye are just those wherein the pronounced idiosyncrasies of his style are expressed with greatest extravagance. It was not the Rossetti of La Bella Mano or the Blessed Damozel who inspired the poetic realism of Millais and the patient labour of Holman Hunt, or who first stimulated and encouraged

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