Page:William Blake in his relation to Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1911).djvu/51

— 51 — After having left the early Italian style Rossetti tries the genre-picture painted from modern life. From all kinds of paintings this kind of picture is perhaps suited worst of all to express real emotion and represent a true phase of the intellect, hence Rossetti's greatest genre-picture "Found" was never finished, though in 1882, more than twenty-five years after the original painting was begun, Rossetti made a fruitless attempt to finish it. It would carry me too far to talk in particular of all the different phases Rossetti's genius passes through, phases which were often taken up again after some intervening years and are crossing and recrossing each other.

From all his different efforts to find expression for the same thing I will speak only of that one more in detail which was directly influenced by Blake. We find paintings by Rossetti full of movement, crowded with figures, all of which have a symbolical meaning. The best example of this is his pencil drawing "The Question". It symbolizes the cruel fate of men in dying. In a solitary wood far from the haunts of men a Sphinx is sitting, the three ages have found their way to her, wanting her to solve the riddle of life. The boy has put his question and the answer has made him fall down; the man inquires after his fate, the old man painfully strives to reach the Sphinx. Blake deals with the same subject in the illustration of Blair's Grave (Plate 5) "T is here all meet", viz. in the valley of death, which Blake depicts as a mountain cave. Here old age creeps about, here come the father and his daughter, the mother and her children, the lonely virgin and the hardy peasant, all those whom death reaps.

Besides this drawing many others of Rossetti use Blake's way of expressing emotions or ideas. In a water colour "The Gate of Memory" a woman half hidden behind a pillar sees the past years of her life before her in the figures of ever so many maidens. The same allegorical image Blake uses in one of his {{left|{{rule|6em|align=left}} {{smallrefs}}