Page:William Blake in his relation to Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1911).djvu/53

— 53 — become hot and jarring. Though both painters show the same brilliant and glowing qualities in colouring, yet it is not necessarily to Blake that Rossetti had to go for the studying of this brilliancy and transparency of colouring, as many other artists, for instance the Venetians, also possess these qualities in a high degree. However Ruskin in his "Art of England" tells us that Rossetti as to his colouring was much affected by studying illuminated Mss. and we may conclude from this that it was highly probable that Blake's illuminated Mss., splendid as they are, were consulted for this purpose.

I believe that it has been made clear in the foregoing pages that the epithet of "great artistic forerunner of Dante Gabriel Rossetti" so often bestowed upon Blake in the several biographies of Rossetti, is indeed fully deserved by this poet. When we consider the influence of Blake as a philosopher, as a poet, and as a painter, we see that it is above all Blake's mysticism which penetrates all Rossetti's work and lends it such a peculiar, indefinable charm; a charm which will cause his pictures and poems to be remembered when the works of far greater authors and painters will have been forgotten. The influence of Blake's mysticism has also been the only philosophical influence which I could trace in Rossetti's works, the very few cases excepted, which of course cannot be traced, in which Rossetti was influenced directly by Swedenborg. At least one example of this exists in the Sonnet "Her Heaven" where the lines occur:

In an explanatory note to this sonnet W. M. Rossetti informs us that in those lines with "the Seer" Swedenborg is meant. Though of course the possibility is not excluded that in more cases Swedenborg directly influenced Rossetti, yet compared to Blake's, this influence is so small, and moreover tends in the same direction, that we need not take it into consideration.