Dante Gabriel Rossetti died on 9 April 1882, aged fifty-three, on the Kent coast at Birchington-on-Sea, where he was buried without pomp or fanfare, the ceremony attended only by family and close friends. This quiet event, out of London, was the very opposite of the grand funerals accorded to the Victorian literary and artistic giants – Tennyson’s of 1892 in Westminster Abbey, for example, or Leighton’s in St Paul’s Cathedral, early in 1896. Yet Rossetti’s can be seen as the first of the prominent deaths of the fin-de-siècle that spurred reflection on the century’s achievements in art and literature. He was the first of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood to die, and thus to close an era – or perhaps to open a new and different one, not only for his own legend but also for the literary and artistic histories in which he played a part. With a precision that does not detract from its poignancy, Pater captures the complexity of this moment of transition in the opening and closing paragraphs of his essay, first published in the aftermath of Rossetti’s death and later given a key position in Appreciations. ‘Mr. Rossetti’, the reclusive individual who avoided public art criticism by declining to exhibit and who took great pains to control the critical response to his poems, could now emerge as ‘Rossetti’, the historical figure and leader of a school.

Pater had made reference to Rossetti before, although not by name, and one is tempted to wonder whether he was avoiding the jarring sound – or sense – of the ‘Mr.’, required by Victorian critical decorum for living people, when he refers, in ‘The School of Giorgione’ of 1877, to ‘a delightful sonnet by a poet whose own painted work often comes to mind as one ponders over these precious things’ (Ren., 114).¹ Pater adheres strictly to the convention in his review-essay of 1868 on the living poet William Morris, but avoids Morris’s name by leaving it to the citation, at the head of the essay, of the three volumes under review; in something of a tour de force he manages to do without the name ‘Mr. Morris’ except on a single occasion late in the essay.² As many scholars have noted (sometimes censoriously), it was characteristic for Pater to omit the proper names of those with whose work or ideas he was engaging, particularly when they were still living; the reluctance to use the ugly word ‘Mr.’ does not fully explain that practice of Pater’s, but may have been a contributing factor.³

Rossetti’s death freed him from the ‘Mr.’, and also rendered him eligible for inclusion in Thomas Humphry Ward’s seminal anthology The English Poets: Selections, which had an explicit principle of excluding living poets.⁴ Thus the fourth and final volume of its first edition, published in 1880, had the subtitle ‘From Wordsworth to Dobell’, perhaps bathetic in its effect from the start. The addition of Rossetti at the end of the second edition of 1883 not only solved that problem, but also provided the occasion for an introductory essay by Pater, Ward’s Brasenose colleague, his long-time neighbour on Bradmore Road in Oxford, and the close friend also of Ward’s wife, Mary Augusta, niece of Matthew Arnold, known to the public as the novelist Mrs Humphry Ward.⁵ In the revised edition, then, Rossetti assumes the culminating final position, with Pater’s introduction and a generous selection of thirteen sonnets and longer poems. It is hard not to imagine Pater and the Wards planning this together. Two other poets who had died since the publication of the first edition were also added: James Thomson, whose City of Dreadful Night was much admired in Rossetti’s circle and whose introduction in the anthology is by Rossetti’s protégé Philip Bourke Marston, and Arthur O’Shaughnessy, another Rossetti disciple, introduced by the mutual friend of Rossetti and Pater, Edmund Gosse. The new arrangement gives Rossetti and his school a distinctive position in the history of English poetry at the end of a ‘romantic’ trajectory, ‘From Wordsworth to Rossetti’. This literary-historical position would become familiar to the many readers of Ward’s influential anthology, rooted in the University of Oxford, with its general introduction by Matthew Arnold, and reprinted fifteen times through to the end of the First World War.⁶ Pater’s essay marked the transition from ‘Mr. Rossetti’ of literary criticism to the Rossetti of literary history.

This was also a transition from art criticism to art history, something that Pater finds frequent occasion to remind the reader, beginning in the first paragraph: ‘For those poems were the work of a painter, understood to belong to, and to be indeed the leader, of a new school then rising into note’ (‘Dante Gabriel Rossetti’, App., 205). The phrasing seems to echo the earlier reference in ‘The School of Giorgione’ and perhaps to clarify Rossetti’s role in that essay. Rossetti is one of Giorgione’s ‘school’, collaborating across history with his Renaissance forebears, while his sonnet, ‘For a Venetian Pastoral by Giorgione’, provides the intellectual underpinning for the radical aesthetic theory of Pater’s essay.⁷

But which ‘school’ does Pater mean? Is he referring to Rossetti’s leadership of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, formed in 1848 just after the composition of ‘The Blessed Damozel’, the poem that initiates the selection in Ward’s anthology? The account of ‘sincerity’, in the next sentence, can be read as an exquisitely succinct summary of the aims of the Brotherhood:

That is Pre-Raphaelitism in a nutshell, and the word ‘painting’ could easily be substituted for ‘poetry’. But the precision of chronology, evident throughout the essay, suggests that Pater is referring – primarily or additionally – to a school that was just emerging around 1870, the publication date of Rossetti’s Poems, and Rossetti’s best recent critic, Jerome McGann, takes it for granted that Pater means that new school.⁸ Such an interpretation is consistent, too, with the original position of the essay in Ward’s English Poets, alongside Rossetti’s own younger followers, Marston, Gosse, O’Shaughnessy, and – as I shall argue – Pater himself. If that is the case, Pater’s claim is a striking one: Rossetti’s teenage production, ‘The Blessed Damozel’, prefigures, or indeed initiates, the aesthetic aims not merely of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, but also of the next avant-garde, the Aesthetic Movement in poetry and the visual arts. A blurred boundary between those two ‘movements’ has been characteristic of the historiographies of both art and literature of the later Victorian period, something often remarked and sometimes lamented.⁹ Perhaps, at this early point of reckoning, Pater is already adumbrating the possibility that the blurring might be productive. The history is not like a relay race, in which one movement passes the baton to the next in relentless – and competitive – progressivity, a pattern often attributed to the French avant-garde movements of the same decades. Rather it is one where later artworks may turn for inspiration to possibilities latent in earlier ones, whether of their own ‘school’ or of past ages (as with the ‘school of Giorgione’).

When Pater came to collect the essay with others in his volume of 1889, Appreciations, he placed it immediately after a version of the review-essay of 1868 on Morris, deprived of its final theoretical paragraphs (which in the meantime had become the ‘Conclusion’ to Pater’s previous collection, The Renaissance of 1873), and retitled ‘Aesthetic Poetry’ (see further Chapter 13 in this volume). That sequence predisposes the reader to suppose that the ‘school’ mentioned at the start of the Rossetti essay is the ‘aesthetic’ one, just coalescing around the time of the review-essay on Morris, and the supposition is reinforced by the transitional paragraph Pater provides at the end of ‘Aesthetic Poetry’:

That paragraph, however, had only the briefest existence: it disappeared, along with the entire essay on Morris, from the second edition of Appreciations, published just six months after the first and, in the event, the final version of Pater’s lifetime – taken, therefore, as definitive for the Library Edition of The Works of Walter Pater (1910) and still the copy-text for the new Oxford Collected Works (2019–). For the historian of nineteenth-century art or literature, it is difficult not to regret the loss of the first-edition sequence, with its clear progression from the rugged medievalism of Morris’s Defence of Guenevere (1858) to the ‘aesthetic’ (although still medievalising) poetry of his Life and Death of Jason (1867) and Earthly Paradise (first instalment, 1868), to be followed so closely by Rossetti’s Poems of 1870. In the second edition, moreover, Pater substitutes a different essay, ‘Feuillet’s “La Morte”’, not in the original position of ‘Aesthetic Poetry’ but after the essay on Rossetti. That eliminates one of the most magical moments of the first edition: the page-turn from the end of the Rossetti essay, where Pater has been emphasising the ways in which Rossetti’s poetry is new or novel, to the epigraph of the ‘Postscript’, from Pindar’s 9th Olympian Ode: ‘Praise old wine, but the flowers of new hymns’ (lines 48–9). With the Rossetti essay fresh in the memory, the quotation from Pindar seems also to recall Charles Dickens’s famous attack on the Pre-Raphaelite artists back in 1850, ‘Old Lamps for New’, and the covert reference to it in the preface to the volume of translations by Rossetti, The Early Italian Poets, which plays a conspicuous role in Pater’s essay.¹¹ The discussion of Rossetti’s originality, in this sequence, leads directly to the theoretical discussion of romanticism versus classicism in the ‘Postscript’.

The page-turn also makes vivid another set of connections. Rossetti, in the essay devoted to him, is ‘but the “Interpreter”’ of his own House of Life – his sonnet sequence, which Pater here extends to include ‘the whole of Rossetti’s work’ (214). Rossetti the painter-poet thus becomes an analogue for the ‘true aesthetic critic’ in the first paragraph of the ‘Postscript’, and his House of Life an analogue for a conception of Pater’s own, the ‘House Beautiful’ introduced earlier in Appreciations in the essay on ‘Wordsworth’ (60):¹²

The intertextuality between these passages is not, of course, lost in the second edition, but the intervention of ‘Feuillet’s “La Morte”’ between the Rossetti essay and the ‘Postscript’ makes it significantly less evident.

The change, then, not only disrupts the elegant transition from Morris to Rossetti in the first edition, but also deprives Rossetti of his penultimate position in the sequence – the position that enables his work to complete the set of critical essays and to herald the theoretical discussion about romanticism and classicism of the ‘Postscript’. For the literary or art historian this seems a lost opportunity to create a compelling narrative, although it is some consolation that the essay on the French novelist Octave Feuillet reinforces the cosmopolitan aspect of the collection – its refusal to conform to an exceptionalist history of English literature (or art). Many reasons have been suggested for the change, among them Pater’s putative timidity in the face of increasing moral and sexual regulation, as well as xenophobic attitudes among more conservative critics.¹³ This explanation, frequent in recent discussion of Pater’s work, seems far-fetched in this case (well over a decade after the scandals of the mid-1870s over supposed peccadilloes in Pater’s personal life and the apparent irreligion of The Renaissance), although it has a certain poetic resonance with the parallel charge against Rossetti, that he refused to exhibit for fear of hostile criticism. A more plausible explanation might be to see the change as a response to certain critics of the first edition, who had reproved the Morris essay for stylistic incongruity with the later writings in the collection.¹⁴ Pater included in Appreciations his very first published essay, ‘Coleridge’ of 1866, but this had been much more heavily revised (and amalgamated with the introduction to the selection from Coleridge in volume IV of Ward’s English Poets from its first edition of 1880).¹⁵ In a collection framed by ‘Style’ and the ‘Postscript’, Pater might reasonably have decided that the more emphatic or florid writing in the Morris essay made it seem dated. One is tempted to wonder whether Pater might have reinstated it, suitably revised, had he lived to design a third edition (as, indeed, he reinstated the ‘Conclusion’, originally the final paragraphs of the Morris essay, after its deletion from the second edition of The Renaissance).

Perhaps it is most likely that Pater weighed a variety of considerations when he changed the sequence for the second edition, and in our sorrow over the disappearance of the Morris essay we may have overlooked something important. The original sequence makes Rossetti follow Morris’s lead as an ‘aesthetic poet’, even though Pater is at great pains, from the start, to demonstrate the complexity of the chronology: ‘some of his poems had won a kind of exquisite fame before they were in the full sense published’, so that Poems of 1870 – Rossetti’s first volume of original poetry – ‘came at last to satisfy a long-standing curiosity as to the poet, whose pictures also had become an object of the same peculiar kind of interest’ (205). This can be read as an oblique acknowledgement of the occasion for the essay: Rossetti’s death had enabled his paintings at last to emerge into public view, in memorial exhibitions held in the winter of 1882–83, so that Pater’s essay was one of many, that winter, that attempted to size up Rossetti’s role in his generation.¹⁶ It also makes the case for Rossetti’s priority over Morris, despite the actual dates of their publications.

Pater deftly transforms these events – the belated public revelations of Rossetti’s poems (in the volume of 1870) and of his paintings (in the memorial exhibitions) – from mere historical facts to qualities or features of the works themselves: ‘archaic’ (216), indeed imitative, to an extreme degree, of the artists and poets of the past, Rossetti’s works are distinctive nonetheless for their originality. The words ‘originality’, ‘new’, and ‘novel’ appear ten times in the essay, and particularly at the beginning and end; at the same time, Pater dwells on the utter fidelity (or what he calls the ‘perfect sincerity’) with which Rossetti transcribes or imitates his poetic or visual matter, whether he has found it in nature, in himself, or in his literary and artistic precursors. As always with Pater, the choice of words is precise. In a review of 1887, Pater repeatedly uses the word ‘modern’ to characterise Browning’s poetic project (‘Browning’, Essays, 43–9), its ‘obscurity’ a necessary counterpart to the ‘difficulty of his matter’ (41). Rossetti is ‘new’, ‘novel’, or ‘original’ rather than ‘modern’, and for Pater that is not inconsistent (as it would become for some modernist critics) with a heightened reverence or faithfulness to artistic precedent.

This paradoxical combination of originality and imitation is the hallmark or leitmotif of Rossetti’s achievement, in Pater’s account, and he finds for it a striking image:

The sentence recalls a passage in the essay on ‘Style’, which uses precisely the same image apropos translation: ‘if the original be first-rate, one’s first care should be with its elementary particles, Plato, for instance, being often reproducible by an exact following, with no variation in structure, of word after word, as the pencil follows a drawing under tracing-paper’ (14–15) (as we shall shortly see, the reference to Plato is equally apropos). In the context of Appreciations, the sentence in the Rossetti essay appears to echo, or to provide a concrete illustration for, the theoretical point made earlier in ‘Style’. In point of chronology, however, it is the passage in ‘Style’ (1888) that imitates the one in the Rossetti essay (1883). The word ‘transparency’ draws on an even earlier text, ‘Diaphaneitè’ of 1864, where it describes a kind of ideal character: ‘It is just this sort of entire transparency of nature that lets through unconsciously all that is really lifegiving in the established order of things’ (‘Diaphaneitè’, MS, 251; in that context the image is a ‘clear crystal’ (253) rather than the later ‘tracing-paper’). In form as well as content, then, the sentence in the Rossetti essay shows how closely related may be those apparent opposites, imitation and originality – two sides of the same coin, or a dialectical pair.

The same sentence also argues implicitly for an equivalence between the verbal (‘language’) and the visual (‘drawing’) in Rossetti’s work. Translated poems, far from being inferior or subordinate to original creation, are another equivalent, and even come to seem exemplary in their special form of sincerity, fidelity to the source text. Pater here draws on ideas from Rossetti’s own preface to The Early Italian Poets, first published in 1861, which Pater rightly recognises as a significant artistic manifesto (one which also made its impact on Pound, Yeats, and the Modernist generation).¹⁸ Pater notes the ‘definiteness of sensible imagery’ in ‘The Blessed Damozel’ (207) and the ‘lovely little sceneries scattered up and down his poems, glimpses of a landscape, not indeed of broad open-air effects, but rather that of a painter concentrated upon the picturesque effect of one or two selected objects at a time’ (211); the phrasing recalls Pater’s comment on the ‘alert sense of outward things’ of Botticelli, the ‘naturalist’ painter of the early Renaissance so closely identified with Rossetti (Ren., 41).¹⁹ Here, however, Pater is not primarily concerned with identifying similarities in imagery or incident between poems and pictures. The equivalence between them is to do, instead, with the ‘fundamental brainwork’ that underpins their creation.²⁰ It is important that this is not a matter of establishing an intellectual content that can then be ‘translated’ into the different media of poetry or painting; the first paragraph of ‘The School of Giorgione’ is sufficient warning against that misconception (Ren., 102–3). Instead, it is a matter of the intellectual work the artist must do to ensure ‘perfect sincerity’, and here Pater (the Classics don who taught the philosophical elements in the Greats curriculum) is able to draw out the deep theoretical or philosophical consistency in Rossetti’s way of going about artmaking, in either visual or verbal form.

In part, Pater is arguing against the critics (of our day as well as his and Rossetti’s) who see only the sensuous and sensual in Rossetti’s work, those for whom the paintings of female figures are mere objects of male desire, and the poems immoral or indecent. It may be interesting that, while the latter charge no longer carries conviction in our sexually liberated days, the former remains persistent for current critics who cannot (or will not) see beyond the representational content of the paintings of female figures. McGann digs deeper when he notes that the female figure in Rossetti’s paintings ‘means more and other than we have grown to think’ and he attributes the insight to Pater: ‘This was Pater’s argument when he interpreted the Rossettian woman under her earlier incarnation as the Mona Lisa.’²¹

If McGann is right, this dates Rossetti’s influence on Pater’s critical project much earlier than his first explicit reference to the painter-poet (in ‘The School of Giorgione’ of 1877), and relates it to Pater’s crucial experiment, also the most enduringly famous passage in his writing: the ecphrasis on the Mona Lisa in Pater’s essay of 1869 on Leonardo da Vinci. Rossetti’s haunting sonnet on Leonardo’s Virgin of the Rocks was not ‘in the full sense published’ until the volume Poems of 1870 – that is, after the publication of Pater’s essay on Leonardo. However, it was circulating in privately printed form among Rossetti’s friends in the late summer and early autumn of 1869, when Pater was at work on the Leonardo essay;²² this was also the period of his closest association with the artistic circle around Rossetti, including Swinburne (who might have had the sonnet by heart) and Gosse (who records the intimacy between Pater and Swinburne at this date).²³ In his later essay on Rossetti, Pater evinces considerable familiarity with Rossetti’s personal life – his house with its many mirrors, his insomnia, his ‘great affections’ (213–15), and he also emphasises (as we have already seen) the circulation of his poems, among intimates, before publication (205). Even if he had not seen the Leonardo sonnet, he certainly knew Rossetti’s sonnet on his own painting, Lady Lilith, which Swinburne had printed in his section of the Royal Academy review he published in collaboration with Rossetti’s brother, William Michael Rossetti, in 1868, lines 5–7 from which read compellingly as intertexts for Pater’s ecphrasis on the Mona Lisa:

More generally, Rossetti’s sonnets for pictures (six of which had been published as early as 1850, in the Pre-Raphaelite ‘little magazine’, The Germ) set a kind of precedent for ‘aesthetic criticism’ in Pater’s sense – description not simply of the art object under review but of what it is ‘to me’ (Ren., xx).

Perhaps, then, Pater himself can be seen as one of Rossetti’s ‘school’, of those who learn to write (or paint) under his inspiration. If Pater writes in prose rather than verse, that too is theorised in the essay ‘Style’, and in developing his own critical practice partly by writing about visual art he is following the example of French critics, among them those favourites of Pater, Swinburne, and the Rossetti circle: Gautier and Baudelaire. At the same time, Pater is saying something important about Rossetti’s practice as a painter, when he likens his paintings of women to the Mona Lisa, even though he makes the point in imaginative rather than logical or discursive form.

To borrow McGann’s terms, Pater is prepared to see ‘more and other’ than a sensual woman, a mere object of heterosexual desire, in Rossetti’s paintings. Moreover, he is able to offer a cogent philosophical rationale for his view, one that draws together the disparate points of literary and artistic reference – the objects, one might say, of intellectual or aesthetic desire – that he shares with Rossetti. The reasoning is intricate, and Pater’s craftsmanship leaves it up to the reader whether to follow the argument closely or simply to enjoy the unfolding of the prose. Let us try, however, to follow the argument, beginning with Pater’s deconstruction of the opposition between ‘spirit’ and ‘matter’, so central to negative criticisms of Rossetti’s art as ‘fleshly’ or immoral.²⁵ Pater enlists Dante, Rossetti’s namesake and the focus of his early self-education as a translator, whose Thomist philosophy (or theology) rejected any Manichean division of body and soul: ‘To [Dante], in the vehement and impassioned heat of his conceptions, the material and the spiritual are fused and blent: if the spiritual attains the definite visibility of a crystal, what is material loses its earthiness and impurity’ (212). The image of the crystal harks back all the way to ‘Diaphaneitè’ of 1864 (MS, 253). Perhaps more surprisingly, the sentence recurs, almost verbatim, in the chapter on ‘The Genius of Plato’ in Plato and Platonism of 1893, Pater’s most extended meditation on basic problems of philosophy (PP, 135). There the comparison is between Plato and Dante, but this is just one of a sequence of correspondences between Plato and Platonism and Pater’s essay on Rossetti that set up a sustained comparison between the ancient philosopher and the modern painter-poet, with Dante, perhaps, as mediator. Poetry is a mania in Plato’s thought (‘The Doctrine of Plato’, PP, 172) and in Rossetti’s practice (209). The personifications in Rossetti’s sonnets (‘his hold upon them, or rather their hold upon him’, 208) are like the philosophical Ideas that Plato knows as intimately as one knows a person (his ‘hold on persons, that of persons on him’, ‘The Genius of Plato’, PP, 130). The images and objects in Rossetti’s ‘dwelling-place’ (his poems or paintings, as well as his literal house in Cheyne Walk) have been handed down, each with ‘its associations’ (214); thus they are like the ‘thoughts of Plato’, which ‘have had their earlier proprietors’ (‘The Doctrine of Motion’, PP, 7–8). The phrase ‘fundamental brainwork’ is Rossetti’s, but Pater quotes it not in his essay on Rossetti, but rather in chapter 3, ‘Plato and the Sophists’, of Plato and Platonism, where it is attributed to ‘an intensely personal, deeply stirred, poet and artist of our own generation’ (PP, 118–19).²⁶ In perhaps his boldest move, Pater associates Plato – and, by implication, Rossetti and Dante, since the phrasing in the Rossetti essay is so close to that in ‘The Genius of Plato’ – with Théophile Gautier, unnamed but clearly referenced (by way of an entry in the diary of the Goncourt brothers): ‘one, for whom, as was said of a very different French writer, “the visible world really existed”’ (PP, 126).²⁷

There is more, however, to the dialectic of spirit and matter: ‘In our actual concrete experience, the two trains of phenomena which the words matter and spirit do but roughly distinguish, play inextricably into each other’ (212). Rossetti (as interpreted by Pater) has fully grasped a basic point of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, which haunts the essay although (characteristically) it remains unnamed. Humans do not have knowledge of things as they are in themselves, but only of phenomena as we experience them; thus there is no fundamental difference (as there is, for example, in Descartes) between our knowledge of external nature and that of our inward feelings – both are things of our experience, not things-in-themselves.²⁸ Rossetti’s artistic project is devoted to the most sincere or faithful attention to things of either kind, and he makes no difference between them. Pater takes as examples poems by Rossetti that envision, respectively, external nature (‘The Stream’s Secret’) and inward experience (‘Love’s Nocturn’): ‘In the one, what a delight in all the natural beauty of water, all its details for the eye of a painter; in the other, how subtle and fine the imaginative hold upon all the secret ways of sleep and dreams!’ (210).²⁹

In the final paragraph of the essay, Pater generalises the point to describe ‘two distinct functions’ of poetry: one, to reveal ‘the ideal aspects of common things’ and the other, ‘the imaginative creation of things that are ideal from their very birth’ (218). The distinction recalls that between the phenomena of external nature and those of inward experience. It also seems uncannily to prefigure the French Symbolist manifestoes, not published until 1886. Pater’s first function corresponds to realism or impressionism – ‘nature seen through the eyes of a temperament’, or the subjective representation of the external object. The second function corresponds to the theoretical definition of Symbolism as objectifying the subjective, or giving concrete (artistic or poetic) form to the Idea.³⁰ Pater believes Rossetti to have been an originator in both functions, but above all in the second, and he concludes the essay: ‘Rossetti did something, something excellent, of the former kind; but his characteristic, his really revealing work, lay in the adding to poetry of fresh poetic material, of a new order of phenomena, in the creation of a new ideal’ (218). This final sentence also reads as a parallel to what Hegel says about Winckelmann, as Pater had translated it in the essay of 1867 that established his critical project in crucial respects:

If, as suggested above, the ecphrasis on the Mona Lisa is intellectually indebted to Rossetti’s sonnets on pictures, then the implied comparison to Winckelmann – whose ecphrases on ancient sculptures are surely another prime inspiration for Pater – is entirely appropriate.

Pater enrols Rossetti among his special pantheon – Winckelmann, Hegel, and Kant; Dante, Gautier, and Plato; Leonardo and Botticelli. As poet-painter, Rossetti is also comparable to other favourites, Michelangelo and Blake. Pater’s reference to Blake’s design from The Book of Job, ‘When the Morning Stars Sang Together’, also acknowledges Rossetti’s fascination with that image, and perhaps credits Rossetti for drawing his own attention to it (210).³¹ The intertextual network in this essay is particularly dense even for Pater; like Wagner’s Ring cycle from the third act of Siegfried onwards, it seems to multiply and overlap its characteristic leitmotifs with greater complexity than ever before. Thus the essay, although prompted by the specific occasion of Rossetti’s death in 1882, provides the clues by which the literary or art historian may trace the presence of Rossetti and his works throughout Pater’s criticism, at least from ‘The School of Giorgione’ (1877) through to Plato and Platonism (1893). Perhaps, as suggested above, it even reveals the importance of Rossetti in the formation of Pater’s aesthetic criticism from its beginnings in the seminal essays ‘Winckelmann’ (1867), ‘Notes on Lionardo da Vinci’ (1869), and ‘A Fragment on Sandro Botticelli’ (1870).³²

The web of allusions can therefore be seen as one way to acknowledge and document the place of Rossetti in Pater’s criticism – or, in the words of the ‘Preface’ to the Renaissance, what Rossetti is ‘to me’ (Ren., xx). But – pace those who find only solipsism in Pater (or Rossetti) – that is just the ‘first step’ in aesthetic criticism (xix), and the critic must proceed to account, rigorously and precisely, for how the artist or work of art has made its impression on her or him, ‘to distinguish, to analyse, and separate from its adjuncts, the virtue’ of the work or artist, ‘as a chemist notes some natural element, for himself and others’ (xx–xxi).³³ The analysis may be surprising to those who still cling to received ideas about Rossetti’s art as merely sensual or salacious, self-indulgent or autobiographical, but Pater is clear about the ‘reflective force, the dry reason, always at work behind his imaginative creations, which at no time dispensed with a genuine intellectual structure’ (215). The phraseology recalls, again, the surprising correspondence between Rossetti and Plato that can now be seen as a continuous thread in Pater’s writing, brought together in the final sentences of Plato and Platonism with other recurring points of theoretical, or philosophical, reference: ‘Heraclitus had preferred the “dry soul,” or the “dry light” in it, as Bacon after him the siccum lumen. And the dry beauty, — let Plato teach us, to love that also, duly’ (‘Plato’s Aesthetics’, PP, 283). However, the words also look forward to the famous phrase ‘all dry and hard’, used to describe ‘a properly classical poem’ of any age in T.E. Hulme’s essay, ‘Romanticism and Classicism’, written shortly before the First World War. Hulme’s essay, published after his death in action in a collection entitled Speculations, might be described as a modernist reworking of the essay by Pater, originally entitled ‘Romanticism’, that became the ‘Postscript’ to Appreciations.³⁴

Pater could not, of course, foresee the importance of Rossetti (or indeed of his own writing) to the next, Modernist generation, and in volume IV of Ward’s English Poets Rossetti takes his place among the more limited ‘school’ of his immediate followers: here he is the ‘last romantic’. Aesthetic criticism, as Pater had theorised it from the start, had always included an aspiration to locate its objects within a movement or a history, which is itself distinguished or analysed in the process, as in the case of the Renaissance in Pater’s early essays; such aspiration is also a conspicuous element in the Pre-Raphaelite movement, its insistent historical orientation implied in its very name. The range of allusion in the Rossetti essay expands, in both chronological and cosmopolitan scope, beyond the more limited, Hegelian historicism of the review-essay on Morris. That permits Pater not merely to situate Rossetti as an ‘aesthetic poet’ in his own, late Victorian generation, but also to link him to longer and wider histories, including those not yet written and still unknown, from the Pre-Socratic philosophers to the Modernist poets whose careers had not yet begun. Now that we are at some distance from the first Modernist generation, Pater’s essay can give us what we may call ‘the place of Rossetti’ for a twenty-first century readership.