But the temper of Pre-Raphaelitism differs both from that of Greek tragedy (in being essentially romantic and ascetic), and from the mediæval mysticism of which it is to some extent a revival. However sincerely Rossetti and his comrades may have found their inspiration in the early and purest period of the Italian Renaissance (as we shall have to consider in examining the name “Pre-Raphaelite”), it was impossible, in the middle of the nineteenth century, to return absolutely to the mediæval habit of mind. All that was best in the romance of the middle ages, the passionate idealism, the abiding sense of the reality of the unseen, the self-abandonment of devotion to the transcendental and the super-sensuous life, the exquisite childlikeness of spirit which comes of the highest maturity—all these indeed were regained, but with a difference. For the enigma of the universe, regarded by the mediæval world as a mystery of faith, has come upon our own age rather as a mystery of doubt. The silence of the natural world towards man’s eagerest questionings of the Power behind it, was to those pious souls only the holy reticence of an all-wise and all-sufficient God. They accepted with a brave resignation what the modern world endures with a no less courageous but far less trustful mind. Therefore the much-debated mysticism of the Pre-Raphaelite School carries with it a deeper sombreness than that of a purely mediæval type, and makes the relations between man and external Nature more problematic and obscure. The sense of the impassive irony of Nature behind the little drama of man’s life on earth comes again and again into the dim vistas of landscape behind Rossetti’s loveliest women, and into the mingling of scenic grandeur with an atmosphere of desolation in some of the backgrounds of Holman Hunt. Even Millais, the least subjective of the Brotherhood, achieves, in “The Vale of Rest,” something of that subtle contrast, half discord and half harmony, between the glory and absolute peace of sunset and the dumb unquestionable night of death foreshadowed in the open grave. The classic method of rendering natural background to human tragedy is rather to adjust the mood of Nature to the subject in hand; to depict natural forces either as warring (as in Turner) in the blind anger and fury of the elements against man, or assuming an aspect in harmony with his own pain. But the romantic method finds more tragedy in the ironic beauty and indifference of Nature in the face of human vicissitude, and comes nearer to tears than the affectation of dramatic sympathy; just as, in great crises of suffering and doubt, no anger wounds us so deeply as a smile.