This was his religion, to think of Divine things by the legends of a romantic Church.
In comparing the study for Christ at the House of Simon the Pharisee with the completed drawing, the question arises whether, with the elaboration that has come into the latter, some of the intensity of the study has escaped ; or whether, on the other hand, the subject has gained. The simplicity of the first undoubtedly possesses something which is subsequently lost in elaboration, and yet taking the completed picture and looking into it one finds a lesson in Rossetti's methods. We find that by dwelling upon his subject he has emphasised certain notes, has repeated as it were a refrain, and made more spirited and poetic in rendering the figure of the lover in the foreground. After-thoughts have given every touch that could possibly enrich, and, at the same time concentrate, dramatic motif in this figure. The embroidery on his coat, the flowers in his hair, the hair itself, and the face so mocking and fascinating and sure of itself, is more in the spirit of the subject than the gentler face as it appears in the sketch.
The figure of the Magdalene gains in many ways as completed, and though the distressed loving face and the flowing hair of the sketch are changed, the alteration of the expression on the face from one of intense distress to one of proud determination is very interesting as showing how his subjects grew and changed under his hand. It is wholly to the gain of the picture the different gesture which he has arrived at in the second drawing, where the Magdalene with both hands throws the flowers from her hair. The dramatic quality upon which we have insisted as part of Rossetti's art is nowhere better shown than in the deer quietly eating leaves from the wall, all unconscious that there is acted out beside it the most pathetically beautiful drama of the world. One misses in the finished picture some of the sensitive drawing given in the sketch to the Magdalene's dress. Here, instead, her clothes are as if she were perfectly still ; they give no indication of her movements and the stormy action round her. That is the fault of Pre-Raphaelitism—to fritter away the spirit for the sake of the embroidery upon the body's clothes ; to lose emphasis in elaboration, to sacrifice a greater beauty for a meaner one.
Certain characteristics that are strongest in Rossetti's art are the outcome of the intensely human course his imagination took. His drawings are of the kind that one can live with long ; looking into them often one is always rewarded by finding some new thing, and one's thoughts are ever being arrested by new appreciation of some