He
did so, however, yet without ever advancing to the Life School. The
soul of art, at this early period, interested him far more than the
body, especially such a substance as he found under the presidency of
Sir Martin Shee and the keepership of George Jones. Let us not forget,
meanwhile, that it is easy to sneer at the incompetence of mannered
old artists, and yet hard to over-estimate the value of discipline in
a school, however conventional. Rossetti was too impatient to learn to
draw, and this he lived to regret. His immediate associates, the young
men whom he began to lead and impress, were better draughtsmen than
he. His first oil picture, I believe, was a portrait of his father,
now in possession of the family. But, as far as can be now made out,
he did not begin to paint seriously till about January, 1848, when he
persuaded another Royal Academy student, W. Holman Hunt, to take a
large room close to the paternal house in Charlotte street, and make
it their studio. Here Mr. Scott visited them in the early spring of
that year; he describes to me the large pictures they were struggling
upon, Hunt, on his "Oath of Rienzi," and Rossetti, on his "Girlhood of
Mary Virgin." The latter was evidently at present but poorly equipped;
the painting was timid and boyish, pale in tone, and with no hint or
promise of that radiant color which afterward became Rossetti's main
characteristic. But the feeling was identical with that in his far
more accomplished early poems. The very pulse and throb of mediaeval
adoration pervaded the whole conception of the picture, and Mr.
Scott's first impression was that, in this marvellous poet and
possible painter, the new Tractarian movement had found its expositor
in art. Yet this surely was no such feeble or sentimental echo as had
inspired the declared Tractarian poets of eight or nine years earlier;
there was nothing here that recalled such a book as the "Cherwell
Water Lily" of Father Faber. This contained the genuine fleshly
mysticism, bodily presentment of a spiritual idea, and intimate
knowledge of mediaeval sentiment without which the new religious fervor
had no intellectual basis. This strong instinct for the forms of the
Catholic religion, combined with no attendance on the rites of that
church, fostered by no study of ecclesiastical literature or
association with teachers or proselytes, but original to himself and
self-supported, was at that time without doubt the feature in
Rosse