“For Rossetti, then, the great affections of persons to each other, swayed and determined, in the case of his highly pictorial genius, mainly by that so-called material loveliness, formed the great undeniable reality in things, the solid resisting substance, in a world where all beside might be but shadow. The fortunes of those affections—of the great love so determined; its casuistries, its languor sometimes; above all, its sorrows; its fortunate or unfortunate collisions with those other great matters; how it looks, as the long day of life goes round, in the light and shadow of them: all this, conceived with an abundant imagination, and a deep, a philosophic, reflectiveness, is the matter of his verse.” This is ingenious enough, though it is hard to see exactly what Pater meant by the “casuistry,” the “philosophical” vein of Rossetti. Rossetti rather seems to feel, to state the problem, with the solution of which philosophical minds might concern themselves. Thus he affords plentiful matter for philosophical speculation, but without philosophical intention; and indeed the deep-seated impatience of Rossetti’s nature had very little that was akin to the philosophical spirit. He felt the mystery, which is the basis of all philosophy, deeply; but it was to him a baffling, a despairing mystery; not an attractive mystery, supremely worth disentangling. And thus it is that Pater chooses as the typical instance of Rossetti’s work the single composition which he says he would select if he had to name one to a reader desiring to make acquaintance with him for the first time—_The King’s Tragedy_, a ballad which is hardly typical of Rossetti at all, a piece of somewhat languid unemotional workmanship; with an excellence of its own indeed, but not even touched with the inner spirit of Rossetti’s work. The reason of this is that Pater, admiring with a deep respect and regard the attitude of Rossetti to art, but yet not entering into his inner mood, found the restraint, the directness, the absence of exotic suggestiveness displayed in this poem more congenial to him; and thus the essay remains rather a _tour de force_ than a sympathetic appreciation; he was surveying Rossetti from the outside, not, as in the writers whom he himself selected to deal with, from the inside. Pater in his critical work bears always, like the angel of the Revelation, a golden reed to measure the city; but in this particular essay it is a piece of measuring and no more; and nothing could more clearly show the impersonal, the intellectual trend of Pater’s temperament than his comparative failure to accompany Rossetti into the penetralia of his beauty-haunted and beauty-tortured spirit. CHAPTER IV MARIUS THE EPICUREAN