TREATMENT OF RELIGIOUS SUBJECTS.
The Re-birth of Religious Art—“God, Immortality, Duty”—The Pre-
Raphaelites and the Reconstruction of Christianity—The Halo in
Painting—The Responsibility of Womanhood—The “Girlhood of Mary
Virgin” and “Ecce Ancilla Domini”—The Problem of Suffering—“Christ
in the House of His Parents,” “The Passover in the Holy Family,”
“The Shadow of Death,” “The Scapegoat”—Hunt’s Symbolism—“The Light
of the World”—Rossetti’s Symbolism—“Mary Magdalene at the Door,” and
“Mary in the House of John”—The Idea of Victory Through Suffering—
“Bethlehem Gate”—“The Triumph of the Innocents”—The Spirit of
Inquiry—“Christ in the Temple”—The Atonement—“The Infant Christ
Adored”—Comparison with Madox Brown and Burne-Jones—“The
Entombment”—“The Tree of Life.”
“God—Immortality—Duty;” such were the weighty words chosen by one of the
greatest women of our century as the text of a now historic conversation
in the shadow of St. John’s College, Cambridge. The student to whom she
spoke has told us with what a tender solemnity she approached the great
postulations which those words conveyed, and challenged them in her
inflexible judgment one by one;—to her, how inconceivable the first, how
unbelievable the second, but yet how imperative and irresistible the
third.
The attitude of George Eliot, even in the phase of intellectual
scepticism from which she then spoke, was deeply significant of that
fundamental change in the constitution of religion, that entire
transference of Christian or non-Christian “evidences,” from the
intellectual to the moral sphere, from the argument to the instinct,
which is now largely accepted as the supreme result of modern thought in
Europe. For the repudiation of prior conceptions of “God” and
“Immortality,” so far from precluding a reconstructive faith, rather
prepared the way for it; making the belief in unseen goodness a
deduction from instead of a premise to the recognition of visible
goodness in the present world, and leaving the more scope for that
growing reverence for the physical nature of man which,—having its
origins in Paganism and its highest sanction in the Gospel of Galilee,
and revealing itself in a passionate exaltation of bodily beauty as a
symbol of the divine, a resolute acceptance of the laws of nature and
destiny, and a strenuous blending of resignation to those laws with
conquest of them by spiritual powers,—has inspired the great
humanitarian movement of to-day, wherein the faith of the future finds
the witness and the justification of its ideal.
To what degree, then, has the Pre-Raphaelite movement in English art
affected, or reflected, that momentous revolution? The pictures of
Rossetti, Millais, and Holman Hunt have been by turns exalted and
condemned by the apologists of contending theological schools, and the
painters stigmatized, now as followers of Tractarianism and instruments
of Popery, now as leaders of the coarsest rationalism in sacred art, now
as apostles of a sensual neo-Paganism brought over from the Renaissance,
and credited to hold mystic and sceptic in equal defiance. One clerical
critic, indeed, in 1857, sought in an ineffectual volume to prove the
essential atheism of all Pre-Raphaelite work. His protest was but
typical of that still extant species of mind to which the worship of the
body implies the profanation of the soul. It remains to be decided
whether such paintings touched the deepest religious principles which
underlie all change of creed or ritual, and if so, in what way the art
of the Pre-Raphaelites has joined or swayed the general current of
humanitarian feeling which is slowly absorbing all forms of religion
into a universal spirit and will.
These questions bring us to the great group of pictures in which English
artists for the first time have aspired to deal in all simplicity and
earnestness with the bases and principles of the Christian religion. It
should not be difficult to discern the dominant idea, the moral keynote,
so to speak, of the highest utterances of art in an age of such
religious revolution as has been suggested by the proposition of George
Eliot. The philosophy of “Duty,” presented by her in its sternest
aspect, but brought more into line with the common heritage of religious
thought by Browning, Tennyson, F.D. Maurice, and other contemporaries of
the Pre-Raphaelite band, has in fact led in art, as it has led in
religion, directly, if unconsciously, to that reverent re-discovery of
“God,” that transfiguration of the ideal of “Immortality,” which the
revival of the spirit of romance has made possible to modern England. It
has been said that “the romantic temper is the essentially Christian
element in art.”[7] Let us rather say that it is the medium through
which Christianity itself has been renewed and quickened into a richer
and fuller life. The romantic temper, in Pre-Raphaelite art, takes hold
of the eternal verities of the Christian faith, and humanizes its whole
cycle of history and legend in the atmosphere of the real and present
world. It ignores any sort of dividing line between sacred tragedy and
the great problems of modern time. It abjures for ever the “glass-case
reverence” of relic-worship, the superstition which isolates Christian
history as a record of exceptional events, instead of an interpretation
of universal experiences. Ruskin justly says that “imagination will find
its holiest work in the lighting-up of the Gospels;” but the
illumination must have a reconstructive as well as an analytic
consequence; must be, as the late Peter Walker Nicholson expresses it in
his fine critique on Rossetti,[8] _instinctively synthetic_—which is the
quality of genius: and all true art is synthetic in its essence and its
end. The tendency of modern religious science to discredit the
exceptional and the unique, and set the basis of morals in universal and
familiar things,—in other words to deduce “God” and “Immortality” from
the instinct of “Duty” and not “Duty” from the arguments for
“Immortality” and “God,”—finds its correlative in the tendency of
romantic art to subject the remote specialities of classicism to the
test of known conditions and actual character.
Therefore the four gospels, to the Pre-Raphaelite painters, do not stand
alone as “religious” history, distinct from the world-wide record of
human aspiration and struggle from age to age. They merely afford the
supreme examples of man’s apprehension of “God, Immortality, Duty,” and
of his capability of heroic labour and self-sacrifice in the pursuit of
an ideal. The Pre-Raphaelites draw their first principle of religion
from the beauty and glory of the natural world, and the intrinsic
dignity and sacredness of human life. Their Christ is re-incarnate in
the noblest manhood of all time; their Virgin Mary lives again in every
pure girl that wakes to the solemn charm, the mysterious power and
responsibility of womanhood. In humanity itself, with all its
possibilities, in its triumphs and in its degradations, its labours and
its sufferings, they re-discover “God,”—an “unknown God,” it may be;
“inconceivable,” if we will; but evident in the quickened conscience of
a growing world, and in the invincible instincts of human pity and love.
Millais sees a young Christ in the delicate boy with the wounded hand in
the dreary and comfortless carpenter’s shop. Hunt sees a crucified
Christ in the tired workman, over-tasked and despairing amid the calm
sunlight of eventide. Rossetti sees a risen Christ in the noble poet
whose great love could conquer death and enter upon the New Life in the
present hour. The true Pre-Raphaelitism does not take the halo from the
head of the Christ of history; but it puts the halo on the head of every
suffering child, of every faithful man and woman since the world began.
It is not that the historic Christ is less divine; but that all humanity
is diviner because He lived and died.
In such a spirit does Rossetti conceive “The Girlhood of Mary Virgin,”—
not as a miraculous but an exquisitely natural thing; miraculous, at
least, in Walt Whitman’s sense of the word,—the sense in which all
beauty and all goodness are miracles to man. He shows us the up-growing
of a simple country girl, in a home full of the sweetness of family
love; remote and quiet, yet with no artificial superiority or isolation
from the average world. The maiden in the picture, with an innocent
austerity of face, sits at an embroidery-frame by her mother’s side. In
front of her is a growing lily, whose white blossoms, the symbol of her
purity, she is copying with her needle on the cloth of red, beneath St.
Anna’s watchful eye. The flower-pot rests on a pile of books, inscribed
with the names of the choicest virtues, uppermost of which is Charity.
Near to these lie a seven-thorned briar and a seven-leaved palm-branch,
with a scroll inscribed “Tot dolores tot gaudia,” typical of “her great
sorrow and her great reward.” The lily is tended by a beautiful child-
angel, the guardian both of the flower and the girl who is herself, in
Rossetti’s words,
“An angel-watered lily, that near God
Grows and is quiet.”
Around the balcony trails a vine, which St. Joiachim is pruning above;
significant of the True Vine which must hereafter suffer “the
chastisement of our peace.” The dove that broods among its branches
promises the Comforter that is to come. The realism of the picture is a
realism of the mediæval kind, that takes possession of, instead of
ignoring, the spiritual world, and overleaps the boundaries of visible
things; depicting the invisible with the daring confidence of
imaginative faith. The child-angel with her crimson pinions is as
substantial on the canvas as the soberly-clad virgin at her symbolic
task.
In the companion-picture, “Ecce Ancilla Domini” (“Behold the handmaid of
the Lord!”) Rossetti repeats and develops much of the same symbolism in
the accessories of the painting, but the universal meaning of the
Virgin’s call is far more clearly brought out. The design differs from
all familiar versions of the Annunciation in that the message is
delivered to Mary as she wakes out of sleep, and that she is depicted,
not among beautiful and well-ordered surroundings, but in a poor and
bare chamber, rising, half-awake, in a humble pallet-bed, and sitting
awed before the angel whose presence, perhaps, is but the visualized
memory of her dream. The rapt stillness of her look recalls the pregnant
line in which Byron speaks of a troubled waking,—“to know the sense of
pain without the cause.” In Mary’s mind there should rather be a sense
of joy without the cause; but even in her joy there lies a mystery, a
burden of responsibility and foreboded sorrow, that makes it heavy to
bear. It is as if some simple girl, waking to the golden glories of a
summer morn, should wake at the same time to the thought of the world’s
pain, and realize, in a sudden exaltation of pity and love, that
somehow, by whatever path of grief and loss, her purity, her goodness,
must help humanity and bless the race to be. The angel at her side is a
girl-child no longer, but a youth, full of strength and graciousness, as
if to suggest that the sanctities of manhood are now to be revealed to
the maid. In his hand the radiant Gabriel holds the full-grown and
gathered lily, whose image is now completed on the embroidered cloth,
which hangs near the bed. The dove, the symbol of the Holy Spirit, flies
in at the window, and the light is soft and warm from the sun-bathed
landscape without.
Once again did Rossetti attempt the subject of “The Annunciation,” but
only in a water-colour sketch, which found a place, however, in the
small but choice collection in the Burlington Club. Here also the lily
affords the symbolic keynote of the design,—the Virgin is seen bathing
among the water-lilies in a stream; but the singularly fine conception
of the angel’s salutation gives a special value and interest to the
work. The figure that appears before her on the bank assumes for the
moment the aspect of a cross; being so enfolded with his golden wings
that the Virgin sees not only the glory of her visitant but the dire
portent of the message which he brings. “The Annunciation” of Mr. Arthur
Hughes is more conventional in spirit, with its veiled Virgin and its
stiffly self-conscious Gabriel, and lacks the note of prescience which
gives solemnity to Rossetti’s designs. Mr. Burne-Jones, on the other
hand, gives us a more mature and stately maid. His Mary, nobly simple
though she is, seems better prepared for the sacred honour of her
destiny, and does not touch us so deeply as the shrinking girl in “Ecce
Ancilla Domini,” or even as the poor beggar-maiden (for so she appears)
in Mr. Hughes’s “Nativity,” bending timid and reverent on her knees in
the straw before the Holy Child.
But the note of prescience, as we have seen,—the prophetic symbolism
which brings to mind in every incident of the Saviour’s life the whole
scheme of sacrifice and redemption, dominates all the greatest Pre-
Raphaelite work. The suggestions of the inevitable Cross recur in
Rossetti’s early picture, “The Passover in the Holy Family,” in
Millais’s “Christ in the House of His Parents,” and in Holman Hunt’s
“Shadow of Death,” with a force and urgency that points at once to the
universal significance of the history. “The Passover in the Holy Family”
shows us the boy Christ carrying a bowl filled with the blood of the
newly-slain Paschal lamb, and gazing at it with a mysterious foreboding
in his eyes. In the dim background St. Joseph and St. Anna (or,
according to Mr. William Rossetti, and as seems more probable, St.
Elizabeth), are seen kindling a fire for the ritual. Mary is gathering
bitter herbs, and Zacharias is sprinkling the door-posts and lintel with
the lamb’s blood. The youthful John Baptist is kneeling at the feet of
Christ, binding His shoe.
Rossetti, however, does not attempt quite so bold a translation of the
Biblical narrative into modern form as does Millais when, depicting
“Christ in the House of His Parents,” he sets the poor and mean-looking
child in the midst of almost wholly English surroundings, in a
carpenter’s workshop, looking out upon a landscape of thoroughly English
meadow-land;—a literalism of method since adopted with more daring
fidelity to local colour in their respective fields by such later
realists as Fritz von Uhde and Vassili Verestchagin, and others of the
German and neo-French schools, but never pursued to the same length in
any later experiment from the studios of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
Critics probably will long be divided as to the legitimacy of such a
process, and its success must be judged largely by the intention of the
painter,—whether he seeks merely to present an historical incident with
vividness and force, and employs familiar scenery to emphasize the hard
reality of his narrative, and whether he rather aspires to interpret the
universal truth beneath the incident, and to illustrate its bearing upon
present life; in other words, whether he desires to impress us (for
example) with the reality of the sufferings of Christ, or with the
problem of human suffering in all ages, of which the sacred story is at
once the type and the key. It can scarcely be argued that the latter
object does not come within the scope of art. The point at issue,
however, seems to be that the sense of anachronism aroused by the
presentation of great historical or legendary figures in present-day
garb, amid the surroundings of contemporary life, is apt to endanger the
solemnity of the theme, and to some extent defeat the object of the
painter,—in which case it may be urged that the failure is quite as
likely to lie upon the spectator’s side.
But the literalism of Millais’s picture is eclipsed by the exhaustive
symbolism which he uses in common with his colleagues of the
Brotherhood, though never carrying it into the elaborate detail
cultivated by Mr. Holman Hunt. The “house” of Christ’s Parents is a
wooden shed, strewn with shavings and hung with tools. The young Christ
has torn his hand on a nail, and St. Joseph, turning from his bench,
holds up the wounded palm, which Mary hastens to bind with a linen
cloth. John the Baptist brings water to bathe the hurt before she covers
it, and the elder woman bends forward to remove the tools with which the
boy, perhaps, has carelessly played.
The nail-mark in the palm is an obvious presage of the coming Cross. The
rough planks and the half-woven basket convey the idea of unfinished
work; and on a ladder overhead broods the ever-present dove. The picture
is inscribed from the verse in Zechariah,—“And one shall say unto him,
‘What are these wounds in thine hands?’ Then shall he answer, ‘Those
with which I was wounded in the house of my friends.’”
To recover the actual conditions of the early life of Christ—to
reproduce the aspect of a Nazarene cottage eighteen centuries ago—and
yet to charge the historic figure with a vitality and emotion that
brings it home with irresistible significance to the heart of the
spectator of to-day, is perhaps a higher triumph of art than could be
achieved by Millais’s neo-realistic method. Rare as is success in this
dual effort—the union of archæological accuracy with profound insight
into the eternal meanings of the ancient tragedy—it has been attained
beyond question by Holman Hunt in his greatest picture, “The Shadow of
Death.” Sojourning for four years at Nazareth and Bethlehem (the latter
on account of the alleged resemblance of its people to the ancient House
of David), the painter equipped himself with knowledge of every detail
of domestic life, furniture, custom, and dress that could heighten the
literal truthfulness of his work. To that scientific fidelity he added
the elaborate symbolism of which he made a studious art, and through
that symbolism he poured a wealth of imagination, a dignity of thought
and an intensity of feeling which steeped the subject in a moral glow
hitherto unknown to English painting. The scene is laid at sunset in the
carpenter’s shop. The Christ, whose face and form, now grown to manhood,
speak utter weariness of body and soul, seems to stand there for all
humanity, confronting the whole problem of labour and suffering and
death. There is something more than physical exhaustion, though that is
paramount, in the drooping figure of the tired workman as He lifts His
arms from the tools and stretches them out in the evening sunlight, all
unconscious that as He does so, the slant rays cast His shadow, in the
semblance of a crucifix, upon the cottage wall behind, where a wooden
tool-rack forms as it were the arms of the cross on which the shadow of
His arms is cast; and near it a little window, open to the east, makes
an aureole of light around His head. His mother, kneeling on the floor,
examining the casket in which she keeps the long-treasured gifts of the
Magi—gold, and frankincense, and myrrh, glances up and sees the terrible
image on the wall. It is the cross of a daily crucifixion, rather than
of the final death, that weighs upon the soul of Christ;—the crucifixion
of unhonoured labour in obscurity; the hard, despised routine of toil
endured by the uncomplaining workers of all time. He knows both the
dignity of labour and its shame;—the dignity, that is, of all honest,
healthy, and profitable toil; the shame of that industrial slavery which
in any land can make a man too weary to enjoy the sunset glories or to
revel in the calm delights of eventide.
In turning to Hunt’s earlier picture, “The Scapegoat,” we pass from the
problem of the slavery of labour to the deeper question of vicarious
sacrifice. The solitary figure of the dumb and helpless animal, dying in
the utter desolation of the wilderness, the unconscious and involuntary
victim of human sin, speaks more eloquently than any words of the
reality and pathos of the suffering of innocence for guilt. Seldom if
ever has the problem been so directly urged upon us in pictorial art,—
Can the law of vicarious sacrifice be reconciled with our highest ideals
of moral justice? Can a beneficent and omnipotent God permit one
innocent being, without choice or knowledge, to pay another’s penalty?
Or, on the other hand, can we formulate any other method by which
humanity could be taught its own solemn power, and its absolute
community and interdependence of soul with soul? The painter’s business
is to state that problem, not to solve it; and this Hunt does with the
utmost simplicity, sincerity, and earnestness. Pitching his tent in the
most inhospitable region on the shores of the Dead Sea, the artist
painted the actual landscape upon which the ancient victim was cast
adrift, to perish slowly in the desert without the camp; and from that
strange, wild studio his picture came full-charged with the loneliness
and terror of the scene, and the momentous meaning of the scapegoat’s
sacrifice.
“The Light of the World,” frequently regarded as Holman Hunt’s greatest
work, though more mystical and appealing less directly to common
sentiment than “The Shadow of Death,” is purely symbolic in design and
character; and indeed may be taken to represent the high-water mark of
abstract symbolism, as distinct from Biblical history, in the paintings
of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The circumstances of its execution,
partly at Oxford, and partly in his studio at Chelsea by moonlight, have
already been referred to. The picture tells no story; deals with no
incident or condition of the human life of Christ, but presents the
ideal figure in the threefold aspect of prophet, priest, and king. The
Saviour appears in the guise of a pilgrim, carrying a lantern, and
knocking in the night at a fast-closed door. He wears the white robe of
inspiration, typical of prophecy; the jewelled robe and breastplate of a
priest; and a crown of gold interwoven with one of thorns. The legend
from Revelation, iii. 20, gives the keynote of the work: “Behold I stand
at the door and knock. If any man hear my voice and open the door, I
will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with Me.” The fast-
barred door, with its rusty nails and bolts overgrown with ivy, and its
threshold blocked up with brambles and weeds, is the door of the human
soul. The light from the lantern in Christ’s hand is the light of
conscience (according to Mr. Ruskin’s well-known description of the
picture), and the light which suffuses the head of the Saviour, issuing
from the crown of thorns, is the hope of salvation. The lamp-light rests
on the doorway and the weeds, and on a fallen apple which gives the
suggestion of hereditary sin. The thorns in the crown are now bearing
fresh leaves, “for the healing of the nations.”
It has been charged against many Pre-Raphaelite paintings that their
elaborate symbolism, and the highly subjective development of the
designs, require not merely titles and texts, but footnotes also, for
their explanation. In the pictures of Holman Hunt especially, this
charge may have some weight; but it may be fairly met by the
consideration of the close and deep thought, the prolonged spiritual
fervour—unexampled since the Italian Pre-Raphaelites—in which each
masterpiece is steeped, and which surely brings a claim upon such
intelligent study as would enable all but those wholly ignorant of
Christian symbology to interpret the details for themselves. Rossetti
said of one of Hunt’s pictures that “the solemn human soul seems to
vibrate through it like a bell in a forest.” That sound, once caught,
yields the keynote to the pictorial scheme, and attunes all the latent
music to its perfect end.
Rossetti, however, in no case employed the symbolic-figure method, so
triumphantly used in “The Light of the World,” for his Biblical
subjects; but reserved it for the realm of romantic allegory and classic
myth. His illustration of the eternal truths of penitence and
aspiration, of “the awakening conscience” and the resurrection of the
soul, is given us in his beautiful drawing of “Mary Magdalene at the
door of Simon the Pharisee.” The scene is laid amid the revelry of a
village street at a time of festival. Mary, passing with a throng of gay
companions, sees, through the window of a house, the face of Christ; and
with a sudden impulse leaves the procession and tears the flowers
passionately from her hair, seeking to enter where He sits; the while
her lover, following, strives to dissuade her, and to lead her back to
the mirthful company. The appeal of passion and the answer of the
repentant woman, beautiful in her mingled shame and triumph, are best
recounted in Rossetti’s own words, from the most successful of his
sonnets on his own designs:
“Why wilt thou cast the roses from thine hair?
Nay, be thou all a rose,—wreath, lips, and cheek.
Nay, not this house,—that banquet-house we seek;
See how they kiss and enter; come thou there.
This delicate day of love we too will share
Till at our ear love’s whispering night shall speak.
What, sweet one,—hold’st thou still the foolish freak?
Nay, when I kiss thy feet they’ll leave the stair.”
“Oh loose me! Seest thou not my Bridegroom’s face
That draws me to Him? For His feet my kiss,
My hair, my tears, He craves to-day:—and oh!
What words can tell what other day and place
Shall see me clasp those blood-stained feet of His?
He needs me, calls me, loves me, let me go!”
“HEAD OF CHRIST.”
Finished study for “Mary Magdalene.”
_By permission of Mr. Moncure D. Conway._
[Illustration]
The face of the Magdalene has been said to present Rossetti’s ideal of
spiritual beauty, in contrast with the physical beauty of “Lilith” and
the intellectual beauty of “Sibylla Palmifera;” but as Rossetti himself
afterwards applied the title of “Soul’s Beauty” to “Sibylla Palmifera,”
the distinction can hardly be pursued very far. The head of Christ (for
which Mr. Burne-Jones is said to have sat as a model) is of a more
peculiar interest and value; being the only serious attempt at the
portrayal of the central figure in Christian art which remains to us
from Rossetti’s hand. Some highly-finished studies were made by him for
this head, from one of which the present illustration is taken.
Rossetti’s Christ differs markedly in conception from that of Holman
Hunt. The Christ of the older painter is pre-eminently the “Man of
Sorrows,” the martyr whose whole life was a crucifixion. Rossetti shows
us rather the Galilean dreamer, the peasant poet, the gentle idealist
whom women and children loved. The realism of suffering, though
delicately suggested by the slightly-drawn brow, the quiet tension of
the features, and the bright, glowing depths of the eye, is here in
abeyance. Christ is for the time an honoured guest, receiving the
hospitality of the Pharisee with a gracious self-possession and an
exquisite simplicity of mien. The sole suggestion, in the surrounding
objects, of the tragedy that is to come, is given in the vine that
trails on the walls of the house, symbolic of the great Sacrifice.
The shadow of the Cross—no longer cast into the future, but abiding on
the mourners after the death of Christ—is figured by a device of
singular beauty in Rossetti’s sketch of “Mary in the House of John.” In
a small drawing of “The Crucifixion” he had depicted St. John leading
the Madonna from the foot of Calvary. Now he shows us the new home, so
strangely ignored by painters of the sacred tale, wherein the Mother and
the adopted son are together at eventide. Through the window is seen a
distant view of Jerusalem, and in the uncertain light the window-bars
assume the form of a cross, which thus appears to rest upon the Holy
City, and to stand between that quiet household and the outer world. St.
John has been writing a portion of his Gospel, and pauses to strike a
light, with which the Mother of Jesus kindles a lamp, hanging at the
intersection of the bars; so that the light shines from the centre-point
of the Cross, where the Head of Christ should be. This delicate emblem
gives the touch of hope, the promise of glory through sacrifice, which
lightens the darkness of the hour. So fine a use of simple imagery, so
perfect an adjustment of the hope to the penalty, admirably illustrates
the highest triumph of Pre-Raphaelite art,—the reconciliation of the
“crucifixion principle,” the essentially Catholic element in religion,
with the “resurrection principle,” peculiar to Protestantism. Mr.
Forsyth, whose essays on the Pre-Raphaelites have already been quoted,
makes the suggestive remark, that “In Hunt’s technique shadow always
means colour as well as darkness: to see colour in shadow is the last
triumph of a great painter,” and adds that “Rossetti’s colour is not
merely luminous matter; it is transfigured matter.” This conception of
the dual truth of Christianity—the necessity of suffering and the
assurance of victory—is consistently presented both by Rossetti and
Hunt; and it is not merely victory _over_ suffering, as Protestantism
insists on, which they teach; but rather victory _through_ suffering;
which is the fusion of Catholic ethics with Protestant faith.
And it is remarkable that the Pre-Raphaelites find as much inspiration
for the thought of victory through suffering in the incidents of
Christ’s childhood as in the story of His martyrdom. Rossetti, in his
early picture of “Bethlehem Gate,” in which the Holy Family are seen in
flight from the massacre of the Innocents, depicts at the side of the
Virgin Mother an angel bearing a palm-branch,—the symbol of deliverance
and reward. Holman Hunt begins the Resurrection with “The Triumph of the
Innocents,” applies, that is, the principle of Immortality to universal
life; and by the ruddy, healthy faces of his angel-children watching
from Heaven over the child-Christ, he insists, as Rossetti insisted in
“The Blessed Damozel,” that the unknown world must be something
intimately related to the one we know, and that immortal life must be
something more than the continuance of spiritual being in an immaterial
sphere,—must, in short, afford real and eternal activities beyond the
grave.
This recognition of the relation of sacrifice to victory leads the
painters beyond the reconciliation of the individual man with God to the
reconciliation of the social man with man. Something of this idea of
“peace on earth” is suggested by Rossetti’s picture, “The Infant Christ
Adored by a Shepherd and a King,” which now forms a triptych in Llandaff
Cathedral,—the only picture directly from his hand which occupies a
permanent position in an English church. In the left compartment is seen
the young David as a shepherd before Goliath; in the right, the psalmist
is depicted in old age, crowned as a king before God. In the centre, the
Infant Christ appears as the mediator between the high and the lowly,
the rich and the poor; the messenger of the “at-one-ment” of all ranks
of men, united in a common worship of the Divine Child, and a common
love of that Humanity of which He is the type.
A similar interpretation of the childhood of Jesus, as typical of the
growth of all humanity, may fairly be drawn from Holman Hunt’s picture
of “Christ in the Temple,”—a work now thoroughly familiar to English
eyes, and perhaps the most popular because the least mystical of his
masterpieces. The bright, bold, ingenuous face and figure of the boy,
confronting with his eager questions the venerable Rabbis of the
congregation, seems instinct with the life of the present age, charged
with the very essence of the spirit of inquiry—of sceptical inquiry
even—before which the apologists of tradition and legalism are
dumfounded, and through which, from the dogma of the old world, is
wrested the faith of the new.
It would be impracticable here to follow in detail the influence of the
Pre-Raphaelites upon the religious paintings of their contemporaries and
successors, or to estimate the exact relation of their work to that of
their nearest precursor, Madox Brown. But a single example from the
last-named artist, and another from the youngest of the Pre-Raphaelite
group, but never numbered with the Brotherhood—Mr. Burne-Jones—may serve
to illustrate still further the great religious principles of which
these painters steadfastly took hold. “The Entombment” remains among the
finest works of Madox Brown, and embodies, in its simple austerity, its
direct pathos, a spiritual fervour akin to the highest inspirations of
Holman Hunt. The dignity of the human body, the solemnity and awfulness
of physical death, the tender charm of child life and child innocence,
the mystery of immortality, and the apprehension of a “risen” life,—all
these things are brought within the range of thought opened up by that
sombre and majestic design. Seldom in modern art has the intense realism
of death been so delicately handled, and yet with such uncompromising
force. The faces of the women bending over the loved corpse are full of
grief and perplexity, yet even in the atmosphere of death there is a
subtle breath of triumph and of hope, a sense that the body is not all,
that what is left is but the shell, the “house of Life;” the true Life
is not dead, but gone—whither? The tender light that plays around the
mourners, and the contrast of the vigorous little body of the young
child with the aged and shattered frame of the dead martyr, seem to
voice the eternal protest of the heart against annihilation, the
irrepressible demand of the soul for a future life.
Thirty years apart from “The Light of the World” and “Mary in the House
of John,” but akin to both in motive and spirit, is “The Tree of Life,”
one of the latest and noblest of Mr. Burne-Jones’s paintings. This
sombre monochrome, so absolutely original in design, so chastened and
restrained in execution, ranks with the highest symbolic work of the
Pre-Raphaelites in its grasp of the idea of victory through suffering.
For “The Tree of Life” is the Cross. Its roots are in the very
foundations of the earth; its branches are fed with the heart’s blood of
humanity, and its fruit reaches unto Heaven. The Figure that hangs upon
it is brooding in benediction over the whole world; the supreme type of
that immortal love which fulfils the divine law of sacrifice; embodying
in one great symbol the lesson of all history,—
“Knowledge by suffering entereth,
And Life is perfected by Death.”
Man, woman and children are gathered beneath the shadow of the Tree. On
the one side is a garden of flowers, and on the other a harvest of corn.
Along the margin of the earth is the inscription:—“In Mundo pressuram
habebitis; sed confidite; ego vici mundum.” (“In the world ye shall have
tribulation; but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.”) The
painting is carried out in a very low key of colour, and a kind of
austere and grave conventionalism restrains the sweeping outlines and
the sober light. The accessories of the landscape are of the simplest
character; no extraneous detail intrudes upon the perfect harmony of the
at-one-ment; no over-elaboration mars the calm of that absolute
resignation, that unquenchable hope. The Christ upon the Cross is at
once the interpretation of the mystery of pain, and the covenant of a
complete redemption wherein man at last “shall see of the travail of his
soul and shall be satisfied.”
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Footnote 7:
Rev. P.F. Forsyth: “Religion in Recent Art.”
Footnote 8:
The Round Table Series: “Rossetti,” by P.W. Nicholson.