Rossetti displayed in his art the dramatic sense ; we find him in his earlier drawings always illustrating dramatic subjects, rendering action in his figures in a way that proclaims him at once as one of those to whom the actions of men, the faces of women, come tragically or otherwise into every dream. One is enabled to write more clearly on this point by comparing him with his friend Burne-Jones. Burne-Jones' figures live in a dream in which the world has little part, whilst Rossetti's dream is of the world itself. His work is rich with the human experience that is absent in the art of his friend. He is accredited with being the leader of a phase of decadence, while, as a matter of fact, no one could have been further removed from anything like a " decadent " pose. Rossetti had an unconscious and unexplained sympathy for life that tragically pursued, and found itself shipwrecked upon, its own illusions. It was part of his art's vitality. There was little defiance in his attitude, it was altogether one of pity. Indiscriminate publication has familiarised the public only with the last sad phase of Rossetti's art, and unhappily this is esteemed characteristic. The intimate patrons of the painter possessed themselves of his early work ; now it is inaccessible, and it is not at his best that he is seen in any public collection.
It is possible to like the art of Rossetti very deeply, and also to love the changing colours of the sea and the shadows of the sun clouds moving swiftly on the hills. But often to pagan lovers of such things the art of Rossetti, shuttered close in its mediaeval darkened rooms, has seemed as an almost poisonous flower, with its forgetfulness of the world without.
It can never be sufficiently emphasised how necessary it is in judging any art first of all to share some of the mood in which it was created. Those who would enter into the atmosphere of Rossetti's art must find their way to it in the darkened light of dreams. It stands in no relation whatever to the workaday world.
A poet whose writings realised an opposite temperament to Rossetti's own would have had the test of poetry that it could be taken to the fields in the early morning and read. To attempt to bring a painting of Rossetti's into relationship with nature out of doors would to all intents put an end to the reason for its artistic existence. It would be to demand of it that it should strike a note in tune with a mood the direct opposite to that which it was its intention to create. Though art should always be examined in its own atmosphere, much of the criticism applied to Rossetti is but the bringing of his art out into the fields. It