Page:William Blake in his relation to Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1911).djvu/15

— 15 — 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." 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 "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