een
style and substance, between subject and treatment; it is something more
intimate and "metaphysical." To illustrate it, let me take a pair of
instances, not from letters, but from painting as produced by two dead
masters of our own, Rossetti and Albert Moore. I used to think the
last-named painter disgracefully undervalued both by the public and by
critics. One could look at those primrose-tinted ladies of his, with
their gossamer films of raiment and their flowerage always suggestive of
the asphodel mead, for hours: and if one's soul had had a substantial
Palace of Art of her own, there would have been a corridor wholly Albert
Moorish--a corridor, for his things never looked well with other
people's and they could not, by themselves, have filled a hall.

But their beauty, as has been untruly said of Gautier's representation
in the other art, _was_ "their sole duty." You never wanted to kiss even
the most beautiful of them, or to talk to her, or even to sit at her
feet, except for purposes of looking at her, for which that position has
its own special advantages. And although by no means mere pastiches or
replicas of each other, they had little of the qualities which
constitute personality. They were almost literally "dreams that waved
before the half-shut eye," and dreams which you knew to be dreams at the
time; less even than dreams--shadows, and less even than shadows, for
shadows imply substance, and these did not. If you loved them you loved
them always, and could not be divorced from them. But it was an entirely
contemplative love; and if divorce was unthinkable it was because there
was no _thorus_ and no _mensa_ at which they could possibly have
figured.[201] They were the Eves of a Paradise of _two_ dimensions only.

Now with Rossetti it was entirely different. His drawing may have been
as faulty as people said it was, and he may have been as fond as they
also said of bestowing upon all his subjects exaggerated and almost
ungainly features, which possibly belonged to the Blessed Damozel, but
were not the most indisputable part of her blessedness. But they were,
despite their similarity of type, all personal and individual, and all
suggestive to the mind and the emotions of real women, and of the things
which real women are and do and suffer. And they were all differently
suggestive. Proserpine and Beata Beatrix; the devotional figures in
their quietude or their ecstasy, and the forlorn leaguer-lasses of that