Page:William Blake in his relation to Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1911).djvu/25

— 25 — 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"; 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.

The poetic influence of W. Blake on Rossetti made itself mainly felt in the first period of Rossetti's literary career. It mostly concerns Blake's lyrical poems and more especially Blake's "Songs of Innocence" and "Songs of Experience". Before these poems Blake had written the lyrics known under the name of "Poetical Sketches". These early poems are all of them written in an Elizabethan strain and show us that Blake must have been an ardent student of Shakespeare and the other poets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Hewlett laboriously informs us of the sources from which these songs have been taken. And indeed it is easy to perceive that lines like: