Still, I have never forgotten how passionately Eleanore Duse said to me, in 1900:
Rossetti's eyes desire some feverish thing, but the mouth and chin hesitate in pursuit. All Rossetti is in that story of his _MS._ buried in his wife's coffin. He could do it, he could repent of it; but he should have gone and taken it back himself: he sent his friends.
In one of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's invaluable notes on Poetry, he tells us that to him "the leading point about Coleridge's work is its human love." That Rossetti, whose face indicated voluptuousness brooding thoughtfully over destiny, was intensely sensitive, is true; and this made him a sort of medium to forces seen and unseen. Yet, I think, he wanted in life more than most men of such genius as he had wanted. For, as Watts-Dunton said: "He was the slave of his imagination--an imagination of a power and dominance such as I have never seen equalled. Of his vividness, no artistic expression of his can give any notion. He had not the smallest command over it." That is one of the reasons why, with all his affection for his brother Michael, the chasm between them was immense--a chasm no dragon-created bridge could ever span; Gabriel had in him, perhaps, too much of "chasm-fire": his genius was too flame-fledged for earth's eternity, to have ever had one wing of it broken by an enemy's shaft.
No modern poet ever had anything like the same grasp upon whatever is essential in poetry that Rossetti had; for all that he wrote or said about Art has in it an absolute rightness of judgment; and, with these, as absolutely, an intellectual sanity. Here is one principle of artistic creation stated with instantaneous certainty: "Conception, _fundamental brain work_, that is what makes the difference in all art. Work your metal as much as you like, but first take care that the gold was worth working." But it is, strangely enough, that at the beginning of a review of Hake's _Parables and Tales_ he says the final, the inevitable words on creation and on what lies in the artist's mind before the act of creation:
The first and highest is that where the work has been all mentally "cartooned," as it were, beforehand by a process intensely conscious, but patient and silent--an occult evolution of life: then follows the glory of wielding words, and we see the hand of Dante, as the hand of Michelangelo--or almost as that quickening hand which Michelangelo has dared to embody--sweep from left to right, fiery and final.