I
ROSSETTI in one of his letters numbers his favourite colours in the
order of his favour, and throughout his work one feels that he loved
form and colour for themselves and apart from what they represent. One
feels sometimes that he desired a world of essences, of unmixed powers,
of impossible purities. It is as though the last judgment had already
begun in his mind and that the essences and powers, which the divine
hand had mixed into one another to make the loam of life, fell asunder
at his touch. If he painted a flame or a blue distance, he painted as
though he had seen the flame out of whose heart all flames had been
taken, or the blue of the abyss that was before all life; and if he
painted a woman’s face he painted it in some moment of intensity when
the ecstasy of the lover and of the saint are alike, and desire becomes
wisdom without ceasing to be desire. He listens to the cry of the flesh
till it becomes proud and passes beyond the world where some immense
desire that the intellect cannot understand mixes with the desire of a
body’s warmth and softness. His genius like Shelley’s can hardly stir
but to the rejection of nature, whose delight is profusion, but never
intensity, and like Shelley’s it follows the Star of the Magi, the
Morning and Evening Star, the mother of impossible hope, although it
follows through deep woods, where the star glimmers among dew-drenched
boughs and not through ‘a windswept valley of the Apennine.’ Men like
him cannot be happy as we understand happiness, for to be happy one
must delight like nature in mere profusion, in mere abundance, in
making and doing things, and if one sets an image of the perfect before
one it must be the image that draws her perpetually, the image of a
perfect fulness of natural life, of an Earthly Paradise. One’s emotion
must never break the bonds of life, one’s hands must never labour to
loosen the silver cord, one’s ears must never strain to catch the sound
of Michael’s trumpet. That is to say, one must not be among those that
would have prayed in old times in some chapel of the Star, but among
those who would have prayed under the shadow of the Green Tree, and on
the wet stones of the Well, among the worshippers of natural abundance.