TREATMENT OF MEDIÆVAL AND MODERN
ROMANCE.
The Christian Element in Neo-Hellenism and Romance—“How They Met
Themselves” and “Michael Scott’s Wooing”—Mediævalism and Romantic
Love—“Romeo and Juliet” and “Ophelia”—Millais’s Romantic Landscapes—
“The Woodman’s Daughter,” “The Blind Girl,” “The Vale of Rest,”
“Autumn Leaves”—Keats’s “Isabella”—Tennyson’s “Mariana” and “Idylls
of the King”—The Idea of Retribution—“King Arthur’s Tomb,” “Paolo
and Francesca,” “Death of Lady Macbeth,” “The Awakening Conscience,”
“Hesterna Rosa,” “The Gate of Memory,” “Found,” “Psyche,”
“Proserpine,” “Pandora”—The Idea of Duty—“The Hugenot,” “The Black
Brunswicker,” “Claudio and Isabella”—Old and New Chivalry—“Sir
Isumbras” and “The Rescue”—“The Merciful Knight”—“St. Agnes’ Eve”—
Ideal and Platonic Love—“The Salutation of Beatrice,” “The Boat of
Love,” “Beata Beatrix,” “Dante’s Dream,” “Our Lady of Pity.”
It is but an arbitrary classification that divides the so-called
“religious” art of the Pre-Raphaelites from their portrayals of that
half historic, half legendary wonder-world we vaguely called “romance.”
Rossetti, it has been rightly said, “was a pilgrim who had got out of
the region of shrines, but who at every cross-like thing knelt down by
the force of thought and muscle.”[9] Above all other qualities of Pre-
Raphaelite painting, it is the instinctive perception of “cross-like
things” that gives nobility and tenderness to the work of Rossetti and
his colleagues. By the light of that inward vision do they choose and
transfigure every theme. The haunting sense of the mysteries of
existence, of the immanence of the supernatural in the natural sphere,
and of the divine possibilities of human nature; the apprehension of the
moral law, of sacrifice, reward and penalty, and of the consummation of
earth’s good and evil in an immortal realm;—these abide with the
painters when they pass from the holy ground of Judea and Galilee to the
Pagan splendours of the Hellenic age, the later glories of mediævalism,
and the hard prose conditions of modern life. The same great drama of
humanity is set before us, but on another stage, with other players. The
ideas which dominate the minds of the artists, the principles by which
they interpret alike the history of Jerusalem and the problems of
London, are of universal application. A classic myth to them is as rich
in meaning as a Christian parable; a legend of chivalrous manliness or
heroic womanhood as sacred as if written in a canonical gospel. Holman
Hunt’s “Awakening Conscience” and “Claudio and Isabella” are as
profoundly religious as “Mary Magdalene at the Door;” Rossetti’s “Lady
of Pity” and “Beata Beatrix” glow with a spiritual fervour as pure as
that of “Ecce Ancilla Domini;” the lessons of Burne-Jones’s “Merciful
Knight” and of Millais’s “Hugenot” are as clear as any that “The Light
of the World” can teach us;—and this, not that the painters have
secularized the highest things, but that they have sanctified the lower;
have pierced to the common sources of religious thought and feeling, and
have brought into the labour of the present hour the wide and eternal
meanings of the past.
In the most naïve phase of romantic mysticism, with its devout faith in
the presence of spiritual forces in play at all points upon the human
soul, and in the power of the imagination to visualize conjectured
things, Rossetti conceived the finest of his early dramatic sketches,—
“How They Met Themselves” and “Michael Scott’s Wooing;” the former
showing the influence of Blake in a more marked degree perhaps than any
other drawings of the same period. The lovers that “meet themselves” are
confronted, while walking in a wood, with the apparitions of their own
persons, reflected, as it were, in the air before them, in exact and
startling similitude,—a conception found in the well-known Döppelgänger
legends of German folk-lore, which credit a dual existence to every
human soul, endowing it with a sort of spectral “double” after the
manner of the Buddhistic “astral body,” save that the Döppelgänger
appear to be independent of the subject’s consciousness and will. The
sudden terror of the lovers,—the lady sinking to the ground, the knight
drawing his sword in her defence against the mysterious phenomenon, yet
hesitating, like Marcellus on the ramparts of Elsinore, to “offer it the
show of violence,” is shown with a force that emphasizes the reality of
the vision to those who see it. In this picture, as in Rossetti’s
treatment of a more exalted theme, “The Girlhood of Mary Virgin,” the
barrier is over-leaped that separates the visible from the unseen; the
outer and inner worlds are merged naturally and imperceptibly the one
into the other—an hypothesis in which the previsions of art may yet be
vindicated by scientific discovery; and the forms of the spectral lovers
are scarcely more shadowy than those who stand aghast before them in the
flesh. It has been suggested that the design may typify the meeting of
the human soul with its prototype in ages long gone by; the recognition
of unknown kinships (as if brought over from a prior existence) through
that strange sense of familiarity which sometimes surprises us when we
wander in spirit through the dim mazes of the historic past.
In the sketch for “Michael Scott’s Wooing,” the wizard-hero conjures up,
for the entertainment of his lady-love, a magical pageant of Life, Love,
and other symbolic figures, which appear before her in a glass. Here the
purely subjective nature of the vision is brought out; the lady alone
can see the pageant; her attendants are as blind to it as Hamlet’s
mother to the ghost of the murdered king.
From this initial belief in the potency of the unseen there comes the
apprehension of the mystery of fate, of the burden of impenetrable
destiny, of the evil powers that assail mankind from within. Something
even of the ancient fear of the jealousy of the gods against men’s
happiness returns in the mediæval awe of human joys or triumphs, and its
ascetic suspicion of prosperity, more especially in the field of
romantic love. A profound insight of the dualism of nature keeps the
romantic spirit in remembrance of the cost of all earthly pleasure, and
of the price set by the laws of being upon all aspiration and desire.
This it is that gives its subtlest charm to the “Romeo and Juliet” of
Madox Brown, with its embracing lovers on the balcony at break of day,
full of the passionate poetry of protest against the pitiless caprice,
as it seems, of the fate that tears them asunder; and to the “Ophelia”
of Rossetti,—now sitting troubled and half-frightened before Hamlet’s
earnest gaze, now offering him the treasured letters from the casket at
her side, now led away in her “first madness,” by the hand of Horatio,
from the presence of the king and queen; or of Hughes,—singing dreamily
to herself as she sits by the waterside on a fallen tree; or of Watts,—
gazing down with yearning eyes into the pool beneath the willow; or—best
of all—of Millais, floating downstream to her death, with her slackening
hands full of flowers, the very embodiment of the pathetic helplessness
of weak and isolated womanhood against the tide of the world’s strife,—
weak, indeed, through the isolation of ages, having never known, in life
or ancestry, the bracing discipline of a free and responsible existence.
No one of the Pre-Raphaelites has equalled Millais at his best in the
landscape setting of the struggle between the human soul and the
circumstance that hems it in; and the scenery of “Ophelia” is among the
most exquisite of his work. The beauty of the river and its richly
wooded banks, its overhanging branches, and its current-driven weeds,
gives the greater pathos to the dying girl’s face, on which the wraith
only of its past and lost beauty lingers to mock the sadness of her end.
“The Woodman’s Daughter” suggests even more finely the contrast of the
unimpassioned glory of nature and the tragedy of romantic love; for here
it is not death but life, the complexity of life and duty, that
separates the lovers each from each. Between the rough and uncomely
peasant girl and the shy young aristocrat who stands so awkwardly before
her with his proffered gift of hothouse fruit, there is a gulf fixed
which will take a higher civilization than ours to bridge over. And
again, in treating of the broader and more common loves and joys of
humanity, does Millais set before us the same contrast in “The Blind
Girl” and “The Vale of Rest.” The Blind Girl is a poor and uncomely
vagrant halting by the road-side, wrapping her shawl round her child-
guide, who nestles against her in the April weather. But around her is
the loveliness of an English village landscape after rain. The warmth of
the bursting sun consoles her as she turns her face to its light; the
rainbow which she cannot see gives radiance to the humble cottages; the
wet grass is cool to her hand, and the peace of resignation seems to
fill her maimed and darkened life. But the contrast of her sorrow with
nature’s joy is very real, though for the moment she forgets it in the
little comfort that may yet be hers. The same resignation in the face of
the unanswered problem transfigures the mourners in “The Vale of Rest,”—
the two calm, almost stoical nuns in a convent garden at sunset time.
The younger woman is digging a grave; the elder, who sits on a recumbent
tombstone hard by, is gazing at the burning gold and crimson of the
west, and sees in the midst of its splendour the darkness of the coffin-
shaped cloud which, by a widespread superstition, was long deemed the
omen of approaching death. The superb “Autumn Leaves,” which Mr. Ruskin
pronounces “among the world’s masterpieces,” may perhaps be added to
this great group of romantic landscapes, inasmuch as the pathos of its
poetry is no less deep, though more subtle, than that of “Ophelia,” “The
Woodman’s Daughter,” “The Blind Girl,” and “The Vale of Rest.” A group
of children are burning dead leaves in the twilight of a mellow autumn
day. Oblivious of the changing seasons, realizing nothing of the
solemnity of autumn, or the sad significance of the waning year, they
revel merely in the bonfire they have made, and are troubled by no fear
for the winter, or for the chance of spring.
In the several paintings from Keats’s “Isabella”—that favourite subject
of the early days of the Brotherhood—the contrast lies mainly in the
direction of individual character; the tragedy, in the power of such
character to work for evil against the good. Especially in Millais’s
masterpiece, “Lorenzo and Isabella,” are the beauty and graciousness of
Isabella and her lover set with a passionate intensity against the icy
cynicism and sensuous brutality of the brothers and their guests, and
the conflict is felt to be directly between malicious cruelty and
innocent love. On the other hand the devotion and self-abandonment of
Isabella’s thwarted passion find noble expression in the picture by
Holman Hunt. The figure of the weeping girl, who has risen from her bed
to worship at her strange and terrible shrine,—the Pot of Basil
containing her murdered lover’s head, is seen in the early light of
dawn, that almost quenches, in its pitiless coldness, the more tender
light of the lamp that burns in the little sanctuary of secret love. The
altar-cloth spread for the sacred relic is embroidered with a design of
passion-flowers, and every accessory is symbolic of Isabella’s grief and
despair. The same unique subject, it may here be noted, has inspired one
of the finest paintings of an artist worthily representative of the
younger generation of Pre-Raphaelites (if the name may be perpetuated
beyond its immediate and temporary significance)—Mr. J.M. Strudwick;
whose design, however, deals with the culmination of the tragedy, the
theft of the Pot of Basil by the guilty brothers, and the on-coming
madness of Isabella.
A stronger moral element is soon perceptible in the work of Rossetti and
Millais when they approach the poetry of Tennyson for subject matter,
and begin to draw upon the great cycle of Arthurian legends which he
restored in modern garb to English literature. Even outside the “Idylls
of the King,” in their paintings of Tennyson’s “Mariana,” the passion
and the mystery of romantic love are tempered with the growing
consciousness of moral responsibility, of Love’s heroic power to conquer
destiny—if only the appeals of the lower nature were not so urgent and
so sweet. In other words, the lower dualism has given place to the
higher; the conflict is not so much between the earthly joy and the
misfortune that threatens it in death or any calamity from the physical
sphere, but rather between the baser and the better life within. Of such
a spirit is the “Mariana” of Rossetti, kneeling and weeping in her
dimly-lit chamber in “The Heart of the Night,” or of Millais, wearily
casting away her unfinished work in the close prison of the “moated
grange”—that perfect allegory of modern love, pent in by the mire of
indolence and conventionality, and vainly dreaming of an unearned ideal;
waiting for the deliverance which, as Mariana scarcely comprehends, must
be a self-deliverance into nobler aims and higher standards of duty and
of intelligent sacrifice. The sense of a lofty spiritual destiny re-
enters at this point into Pre-Raphaelite art; the meaning of the search
for the Holy Grail is apparent still more clearly in Rossetti’s “Sir
Galahad in the Ruined Chapel,” and later, in Burne-Jones’s more severe
and chastened types of the pilgrim-knight. It has been charged against
both these painters that the physical beauty and glory of manhood was
almost wholly absent from their conception of life. Even in the nearest
approach to such a concession, in the latest romantic masterpiece of the
younger artist, “The Legend of the Briar Rose,” the asceticism learnt at
the Arthurian shrines persists, indeed, in the mellowness of his
maturity. The heroes of the Pre-Raphaelites are no muscular warriors, as
conventional art would portray them. They are concerned with inward
conflicts rather than with outward foes. They are the knights-errant of
a new chivalry,—to whom moral righteousness is a higher thing than
physical courage; self-conquest a nobler triumph than the routing of
armies. For they “wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against
principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of
this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” The whole
series of the Arthurian designs, from the illustrations to Moxon’s
“Tennyson” and the frescoes at Oxford, onward to the latest work of
Burne-Jones and his followers, are dominated by this idea of a spiritual
pilgrimage, as of beings exiled from a higher realm, which to regain
they must needs pass through the lower. “Their sojourn on earth,” says
M. Gabriel Sarrazin,[10] “oppresses these Pre-Raphaelites, lost among
our pre-occupations of business and of ease.”
And further, the sense of the supernatural world, of the struggle
between the spiritual and the physical in man, leads onward to the
conception of retribution and punishment, “not” (as Hegel puts it) “as
something arbitrary, but as _the other half of sin_.” The inexorableness
of the moral law could hardly be more finely suggested than in
Rossetti’s treatment of the guilty love of Lancelot and Guinevere. “King
Arthur’s Tomb,” despite its crudity and harshness of drawing, remains
among the most superb of his early drawings. The aged queen, now an
abbess honoured and revered, is visiting the tomb of the dead Arthur.
But not all her long atonement of remorse and piety can avail wholly to
blot out the sin of her youth. For even here, as she kneels to pray, the
dark and terrible ghost of Lancelot thrusts itself between her and the
pure effigy whose marble face she seeks in penitence and tears. The
converse of the picture was that of which Rossetti sought to make a
fresco on the ill-fated walls of the Oxford Debating Union. The design
represents “Sir Lancelot before the Shrine of the Sangrael.” He seems to
have almost attained the goal of his pilgrimage; the Holy Grail is just
within his grasp; but in the hour that might have brought victory, the
old sin brings mockery and defeat: the face that looks out at him from
the place of his hope is the sad, reproachful face of Guinevere.
With scarcely less of tragic force and direct solemnity does Rossetti
carry this thought of retribution into the world of mediæval Italy, into
the cycle of legend and romance that gathers round the name of Dante.
The love-story of “Paolo and Francesca da Rimini,” recorded by Dante in
the “Divina Comedia,” has been the theme of poets and painters for many
a year, and is the subject of one of the finest water-colour drawings
made in Rossetti’s transition period. Francesca, the wife of Lanciotto,
the deformed son of the lord of Rimini, fell in love with her husband’s
brother Paolo; and Lanciotto, discovering the two in guilty
companionship, put them both to death. In the fifth canto of the
“Inferno,” Dante describes the terrible sight permitted to him of the
condemned lovers in the second circle of Hell. Rossetti’s picture is in
triptych form, and in the centre are the figures of Dante and Virgil,
his guide. Above them is the brief inscription, “O Lasso!” In the left
compartment is depicted the fatal embrace of Paolo and Francesca at the
moment of the avowal of their love, when in reading together the story
of Lancelot, the book suddenly fell from their hands, and, as the
narrator simply confesses, “that day we read no more.” In the right-hand
space are seen the lovers, clasping each other wildly in the darkness
and among the furious storms of hell, unable to release themselves from
that fixed embrace. The characteristic idea of making the penalty
consist in the involuntary perpetuation of the sin,—the guilty love
becoming, as it were, its own sufficient punishment, belongs, of course,
to Dante, but is worked out with singular power in Rossetti’s design.
Not only is the stern and relentless fate portrayed with the utmost
sincerity in the sequel, but even in the first panel the thought of the
coming retribution is finely suggested by the introduction of one
sufficient touch at the background of the scene. Beneath the edge of a
curtain is seen the foot of the approaching husband, bringing his
vengeance and the lovers’ doom. The same subject has been more
elaborately and completely treated by Mr. G.F. Watts, whose picture
shows Francesca telling her sad tale to Dante and Virgil as they pass;
and the poet who is said to have known her on earth, and to have written
the record quoted from the “Inferno” in the house at Rimini in which she
was born, is depicted sinking in a swoon before her, overcome with pity
and with awe.
Again, and in a widely different field of dramatic narrative, does
Rossetti bring this passionate sense of retribution into play. His
drawing for the never-finished picture, “The Death of Lady Macbeth,” is
full of the same half-pitiful and half-triumphant spirit of righteous
vengeance, and the same perception of inexorable penalty. The aged and
dying woman crouching on her bed has once been comely and of commanding
countenance; and in her last hour the remembered beauty of her face, the
lingering majesty of her figure, seem to overawe her attendants, one of
whom presses a sponge to her head. In that changed face the conflict
between remorse and pride, ambition and terror, is still fierce and
strong; but she is dying utterly alone: there is no love, no tenderness,
in the ministry of those who gather round the murderess.
Still more clearly and resolutely is this perception of moral issues
sustained by the Pre-Raphaelites when they pass from history and legend
to classic mythology, to allegorical type, or to the dramatic
presentation of modern life. In the “Awakening Conscience” of Holman
Hunt, in the exquisitely pathetic “Psyche” of G.F. Watts, in the
“Hesterna Rosa,” “Gate of Memory,” and “Found” of Rossetti, the bitter
cost of sin is realized with unfaltering consistency. Rossetti’s long-
laboured and yet uncompleted “Found” may be taken as the companion, if
not the sequel, to his poem, “Jenny.” It shows us the last humiliation
of a ruined girl who is “found”—dying on the streets of London—by the
lover of her youth,—a countryman who has driven in with his milk-cart
through the chill light of a London dawn. All the pride and struggle of
the past is written on her once lovely face, and she shrinks in shame
and terror from his touch.
“Ah! gave not these two hearts their mutual pledge,
Under one mantle sheltered ’neath the hedge
In gloaming courtship? And, O God! to-day
He only knows he holds her;—but what part
Can life now take? She cries in her locked heart,—
‘Leave me—I do not know you—go away!’”[11]
It might almost be the same sad girl that stands at “The Gate of
Memory,” watching a group of young and innocent maidens at play beside a
well.
“She leaned herself against the wall
And longed for drink to slake her thirst
And memory at once.”
A more original and striking composition is “Hesterna Rosa”—“Yesterday’s
Rose.” All the weird realism of Rossetti’s most mediæval manner pervades
this painfully impressive design;—mediæval in spirit, and yet almost
Hogarthian in its bold handling of human degradation and debauchery. The
motive is taken from “Elena’s Song” in Sir Henry Taylor’s “Philip van
Artevelde,” Part II., Act v.:
“Quoth tongue of neither maid nor wife
To heart of neither wife nor maid,
‘Lead we not here a jolly life,
Betwixt the shrine and shade?’
“Quoth heart of neither maid nor wife
To tongue of neither wife nor maid,
‘Thou wag’st, but I am worn with strife,
And feel like flowers that fade.’”
The scene is in a tent at early daybreak, amid a group of gamblers and
depraved women throwing dice. But one of them is a girl still beautiful,
and not yet hardened by the coarseness of her new life. She shrinks from
the kiss of the player who bends over her hand. “Yesterday’s Rose” is
not wholly faded; only her first fresh bloom is gone; she has bartered
it irretrievably for her chance in the desperate game of passion, like
the vengeful woman in “The Laboratory,” offering her pearls to buy
poison for her enemy. The contrast between the shamed “rose” and her
brutalized companions is emphasized by the tender light of the dawn,
which creeps through the orchard trees outside, and makes the lamp
within appear more yellow and dull and weak.
Entirely modern in spirit and execution is Holman Hunt’s treatment of a
similar theme. The “Awakening Conscience” is that of a girl idling with
her paramour in a newly and luxuriously furnished room. He has been
singing to her, not noticing the change in her face, and his hands still
pass carelessly over the pianoforte keys. But the words of the song—
Moore’s “Oft in the Stilly Night”—have stirred a sudden anguish in her
heart; she has started up, tortured with long pent memories and overcome
with shame and despair. The utter falsity of her new surroundings seems
to strike her as she gazes round the cruelly unhomelike home. A terrible
symbolism confronts her on every side; the showy tapestry is woven with
a design of ripe corn on which the carrion birds are feeding; the
picture hanging above the mantelpiece represents the woman taken in
adultery. The tragic intensity of the painting is hardly surpassed by
any other of the artist’s work.
Far back in the golden ages of classic myth, the ever-significant story
of “Psyche” suggests the same stern lesson,—of the irretrievable loss
which comes by violation of the moral law or disobedience to the dicta
of those “gods” by which the men of old time knew the divine and
imperative instincts of the soul. The fall of Psyche has its message for
to-day. It was made known to her that the god Eros should come to earth
to be her husband. In the darkness of the night he should visit her bed,
and there he should vouchsafe to her the sacrament of his love,—but on
one condition: that she should never seek to look upon his face, or lift
the veil of mystery by which Nature shrouded the sanctities of the
godhead from her eyes. But Psyche’s curiosity overcame her reverence and
trustfulness. In her eagerness to know Love’s sacred secrets and lay
bare the holiest of holies upon earth, she took a lamp, and would have
looked boldly at her visitant. But immediately the spell was broken; the
heavenly Eros fled from her, never to return. The widowed Psyche, in Mr.
Watts’s picture, stands ashamed and broken-hearted, knowing too late the
prize that she has forfeited. Her drooping figure is the embodiment of
dazed remorse. She has dared to trifle with the divinest things, to be
familiar with that which is rare, to probe too curiously into the mystic
borderland between earth and heaven. The devout sense of the limitations
of man’s knowledge, and of the penalty attaching to any impious
familiarity with the supernatural world, has thus its roots in
Hellenism, but attains its finest flower in the spirit of romance. It is
the blending of the sensuous dignity of classicism with the subtle
tenderness of romance that gives so fine a pathos to this poor
“Psyche,”—typical as she is of the modern age, mourning the lost mystery
which its own thirst for knowledge at all hazards has dispelled; or
again, that places Rossetti’s “Pandora” and “Proserpine” in the highest
rank of contemporary art. For Proserpine too has eaten the forbidden
fruit of the lower knowledge, whereby the higher wisdom is driven away.
She has eaten one grain of the fatal pomegranate of Hades, which
enchains her to the lower world; and only at rare seasons can her
sullied spirit attain the upper air. Her troubled face, as she stands in
the picture, in a gloomy corridor of her prison-palace, with the broken
fruit in her hand, seems to tell of the long struggle of a soul that,
having once tasted the coarser joys, has become less sensitive to the
higher, and is torn between the baser enchantment and the pure delights
which it longs to regain. A critic already quoted[12] has pointed out
that there is “always in Rossetti’s women the kind of sorrow that
ennobles affection.” The painter never loses the sense of conflict
between the dangers of the physical nature and the glories of the spirit
which it serves. The sorrow of his great “Pandora,” even more than of
the beautiful “Proserpine,” is the sorrow of a goddess over her own
infirmity. She has opened the mystic casket which she was bidden to keep
sealed, and now she stands helpless before the witness of her deed. The
potent spirits are escaping from the box, and she can never undo the
mischief she has done. “The whole design,” says Mr. Swinburne, “is among
Rossetti’s mightiest in its godlike terror and imperial trouble of
beauty, shadowed by the smoke and fiery vapour of winged and fleshless
passions crowding from the casket in spires of flame-lit and curling
cloud round her fatal face and mourning veil of hair.”
“What of the end, Pandora? Was it thine,
The deed that set these fiery pinions free?
Ah! wherefore did the Olympian consistory
In its own likeness make thee half divine?
Was it that Juno’s brow might stand a sign
For ever, and the mien of Pallas be
A deadly thing? And that all men might see
In Venus’ eyes the gaze of Proserpine?
What of the end? These beat their wings at will,
The ill-born things, the good things turned to ill,—
Powers of the impassioned hours prohibited.
Ay, clench the casket now! Whither they go
Thou may’st not dare to think: nor canst thou know
If Hope still pent there be alive or dead.”[13]
It follows, then, that the earnest apprehension of the spiritual sphere,
and of a divine justice and retribution for sin, will give a special
power and reality to pictures dealing with a crisis of duty, or a moment
of choice between martyrdom and sin. Such a choice, such a
responsibility, is the motive of some of the finest work of Millais’s
transition period,—“The Hugenot,” “The Proscribed Royalist,” “The
Rescue,” and “The Black Brunswicker.” “The Hugenot” is probably the most
popular, as it is the most perfect, of the painter’s earlier
masterpieces. The story which it tells is explained in its full title:
“A Hugenot, on St. Bartholomew’s Day, refusing to shield himself from
danger by wearing the Roman Catholic badge.” “When the clock of the
Palais de Justice shall sound upon the great bell at daybreak” (so ran
the order of the Duke of Guise), “then each good Catholic must bind a
strip of white linen round his arm, and place a fair white cross in his
cap.” A Catholic lady is beseeching her Protestant lover to wear the
white scarf which will preserve him from the coming massacre. Her
beautiful face is drawn with anxious terror as she tries to bind the
kerchief round his arm, but he, embracing her, draws it resolutely away;
the mental struggle is not his, but hers; in spite of the tenderness of
his face, there is a certain sternness and solemnity in it which tells
that nothing will move him from his purpose; that he is ready, and
gladly ready, for martyrdom. The girl’s love pleads vainly against his
duty and his doom. In “The Black Brunswicker,” which formed the pendant
to “The Hugenot,” the same drama of conflicting love and duty is set
forth, though with less convincing fervour and exalted passion than
before. The lady seems to be of French family, and is somewhat pettishly
delaying the departure of her lover, an officer of the Black Brunswick
corps, before the Battle of Waterloo. The converse of the choice of man
and woman between disloyalty and death is nobly given us by Holman Hunt
in his “Claudio and Isabella” (from Shakespeare’s “Measure for
Measure”), where the heroism and the devotion lie on the woman’s side.
Claudio has been condemned to death, and his sister’s honour is asked as
the price of his release. She visits him in prison, clad in her nun’s
garb, and Claudio—the human craving for life conquering for the moment
his better nature, cries out in a half shamed appeal, “O Isabel, ...
death is a fearful thing.” But Isabella, standing before him, pressing
her hands against his heart, her face full of pity and distress, gives
back her resolute answer, “And shaméd life a hateful!”
Together with the conception of duty in its relation to romantic love is
linked the ideal of chivalry,—of the immediate glory of duty and its
supreme rewards, especially when exercised in championship of the weak,
of a defenceless foe, or of womanhood. The splendour of physical courage
tends always to give place to the power of moral courage, as in mercy
and forgiveness rather than in revenge; or if the physical courage be
brought into play, it will, in progress of civilization be applied to
deeds of helpfulness instead of cruelty. The nobility of true
knighthood, which Rossetti conceived almost exclusively in the mediæval
spirit, and presented with exquisite verve and passion in his little
sketches of “St. George” and the “Princess Sabra,” and of which the
converse—the potential knightliness of woman—was suggested both by
Rossetti and Millais in their “Joan of Arc” designs, finds full
expression in the latter’s picture of “Sir Isumbras at the Ford.” An
aged knight, clad in splendid armour, and bearing with courtly dignity
his honours and his years, is fording a river on his war-horse, and
pauses to lift up two little peasant children who have asked him to
carry them to the other side. The simple graciousness and humility of
the act seem to transfigure the old warrior’s face, which is further lit
by the rich light of the landscape in the setting sun. By the side of
this great painting should be set the earlier, but in great measure the
companion work, “The Rescue,” in which the same artist translates the
thought of beneficent chivalry into modern and familiar life. For the
knight of “The Rescue” is a London fireman, in the act of saving three
children from a burning house. The light that suffuses his calmly heroic
face is not the natural radiance of a sunset glow, but the fierce glare
of flames around the staircase, down which he brings his precious burden
safe and sound. “The Rescue” is a poem of modern chivalry in a great
crisis: “Sir Isumbras” celebrates mediæval chivalry in common things.
The strong self-possession of the fireman in the midst of imminent
peril, beset on all sides by heat, smoke, water, and burning brands, not
callous or insensible to fear, but superior to it, gives us, as it were,
the other side of that perfect knighthood suggested by the simple
kindness of “Sir Isumbras at the Ford.” In both these pictures, as
indeed in “The Hugenot” and in Hunt’s “Claudio and Isabella,” the
impression conveyed is not merely of a momentary heroism of choice or
deed, but of the long discipline which must have gone to produce it, and
of what all goodness costs to the life and lives behind it. It is in
these aspects that the Pre-Raphaelites portray, as we have already
contended, not merely action but character; not drama only, but the
hidden forces of human struggle and circumstance which give the drama
its meaning for all time.
But great as are these pictures in thought and emotion, excellent as are
most of them in technical quality, they are even surpassed, in the sheer
passion of romantic worship, in the purest essence of religious
chivalry, by one of the earliest and, technically, crudest paintings of
Burne-Jones in what may fairly be called his Rossettian period. “The
Merciful Knight” stands apart, in its desperate realism, its mystic
exaltation and fervour, its emotional abandonment, from all the ethereal
and chastened ideals of his imaginative maturity. It represents a phase
of feeling very transitory, for the most part, with the Pre-Raphaelite
Brotherhood,—a return to the most devout and ascetic mediævalism,
untempered by the larger Hellenic spirit which re-awoke in modern
romance. And, full charged as it is with the inspiration of Rossetti in
drawing and colour, its religious severity links it rather to the manner
of Holman Hunt. It tells the story “of a knight who forgave his enemy
when he might have destroyed him, and how the image of Christ kissed
him, in token that his acts had pleased God.” Low at a wayside shrine
bends the Merciful Knight, prostrated by the spiritual struggle between
magnanimity and vengeance which he has just passed through. And as he
kneels in mingled prayer and thankfulness over his own self-conquest and
moral victory, the image of Christ, rudely carved and hanging on a
simple cross, bends down, miraculously moved, to kiss his cheek. Rarely
if ever have the Pre-Raphaelite painters surpassed in any field the
emotional power of this great design. The conflict between loyalty to a
cause and charity towards its fallen enemy was for some years a
favourite subject with the Pre-Raphaelites of every grade. It yielded
the motive, for instance, of Millais’s “Proscribed Royalist,” in which a
Puritan lady secretly conveys food to her lover, a Cavalier, who is in
hiding in a woodland oak; of W.S. Burton’s “Puritan,” where the austere
lady, walking with her lover, takes pity on a dying Cavalier, wounded by
Roundhead soldiers in a wood; and of W.L. Windus’s “Outlaw,” similarly
hurt and tended in an equally sylvan scene. But in none of these cases
is the spiritual struggle of the ministering visitant portrayed with an
intensity at all to be compared with the exalted passion that dominates
“The Merciful Knight.”
Such are the principal stages of thought and feeling through which the
Pre-Raphaelite painters pass—in no given order indeed, but with a wholly
intelligible sequence of ideas—from the first impulses of romance—the
apprehension of the supernatural, of the mystery of fate, of the moral
order, and the divine possibilities of human life—to that highest
idealism of romantic love, and of its power over death and destiny,
which we find in their interpretation of Keats’s “Eve of St. Agnes,” and
supremely in Rossetti’s imaginative treatment of the love of Dante for
Beatrice. Something of the mystical glory of a pure and lofty passion,
and of the power of perfect womanhood to raise, as in Keats’s poem, the
earthlier elements of love into the very essence of worship, appears in
Hunt’s early picture, “The Flight of Madeline and Porphyro,” and in the
triptych of “The Eve of St. Agnes,” by Arthur Hughes; but its most
complete expression, apart from Rossetti, must be sought in Millais’s
“St. Agnes’ Eve,”—in the opinion of many, the greatest of his paintings;
the consummation of that wonderful aftermath of poetic genius which
followed a full decade later than what seemed to be his prime. For the
beauty of Madeline, by a significant paradox, is that she is not
beautiful. Her attitude is daringly simple; she is standing by her bed
in the moonlight, half-unclad; her gown has slipped from her waist to
her feet, and the keen, silver-blue rays creep softly about her slender
figure and shed a faint light into the foreground of the deep-shadowed
room. Yet with all the mellow tenderness of colour and atmosphere that
wrap her round, there is in no detail of her form or gesture, or the
aspect of her averted face, the slightest appeal to the sensuous
possibilities of the scene. There is about her an extraordinary
spiritual loveliness, born of the utter artlessness and sincerity of her
pose and the girlish innocence of her look, as if the absolute
naturalness of the situation were its own protection from all thought of
ill. Everything around her speaks of her simple holiness and purity, and
seals, as it were, the pledge of the answering purity of Porphyro’s
love.
But it is in the presence of the greatest romantic passion known to
European poetry—the ideal, immortal love of Dante for Beatrice—that Pre-
Raphaelite painting reaches, in the art of Rossetti, the acme of its
power to transfigure and interpret the highest experiences of the human
soul. With the most chastened symbolism, the finest selectiveness of
design and colouring, the loftiest fervour of thought and expression,
Rossetti unfolds to us the inmost glories of Platonic love, as Dante
knew it, and Michaelangelo; and as our own age vaguely but with
increasing aspiration seeks it through many an error and much pain. He
leads us in imagination through the sacred course of that all-embracing
worship which upheld the soul of Dante through every vicissitude of toil
and trial, from the first hour in which the smile of the Blessed
Beatrice made the boy’s heart tremble for joy, until the solemn moment
of resignation when “it was made known to him that his beloved Lady must
die.” Again and again did Rossetti attempt the unwearying subject of
“The Salutation of Beatrice.” The most important that remain to us of
those efforts, which in one medium or another cover nearly the whole of
his artistic career, are the early water-colour sketches in which the
scene of the fateful meeting is laid in the portico of a church; the
diptych showing in one compartment Beatrice saluting Dante in a street
in Florence, while in the other she appears to him in a field of lilies
in Paradise (“Il Purgatorio,” canto 30); the triptych repeating the same
designs, but having in the centre panel a figure of Love holding a dial
whereon is marked the date (June 9, 1290) of the salutation; and a much
later version in single form, representing Beatrice, walking alone in
Florence, within sight of Dante, but watched over by the guardian figure
of Love, with crimson robe and wings. Of these works, the triptych is
perhaps the most perfect. The left compartment is inscribed with Dante’s
words, “E cui saluta fà tremar lo core,” and the right with those of the
salutation in Paradise, “Guardami ben; ben son, ben son Beatrice”
(“Behold and see if I am truly Beatrice”).
Again we see the gracious lady passing before the eyes of her young
lover in a procession through the chapel at Bargello, while above her is
depicted “Giotto painting the portrait of Dante,”—a portrait actually
discovered five centuries later on the chapel wall. Once more, Rossetti
pictures Beatrice embarking with Dante in “The Boat of Love.” The motive
of this work is taken from Dante’s sonnet to Guido Calvacanti, his poet-
friend (who figures, together with Cimabue, the master of Giotto, in the
sketch above mentioned), beginning:
“Guido, I would that Lapo, thou, and I
Were taken by some skilled enchanted spell,
And placed on board a barque that should speed well
Through wind and wave, and with our will comply.”
With reverent humility and tenderness Dante is leading Beatrice into the
enchanted boat of which he dreamed. She yields her hands to him and
seems to pause beneath his earnest gaze as she steps down. Around her
are the companions of their voyage,—Guido Calvacanti with his lady
Giovanna, also known as Primavera, and Lapo degli Uberti and his love.
“Beata Beatrix,”—“The Blessed Beatrice,”—depicts, not the actual death
of Dante’s beloved, but rather a mystic trance in which is made known to
her the nearness of her end. She sits on a balcony overlooking the city
of Florence, which is already shadowed by the coming loss. Before her is
a sundial, marking the fatal hour. A dove, flying into her lap, carries
a poppy-blossom, the symbol of sleep. The lovely face of Beatrice is
upturned, as if to greet the unseen messenger, and full of perfect
peace. She seems to have attained the sight of blessedness, and to be
yielding her spirit to a deep and sweet content, but the earthly
weariness lingers about her brows and on her pale and parted lips. In
the background, Dante and the figure of Love are seen passing in the
street below. Love holds a flaming heart in his hands, and they both
gaze in grief and awe at the rapt countenance which the dignity of the
coming death suffuses with exquisite pathos and transcendent charm. In
the features of this Beatrice, more than in any other, Rossetti has
regained and embodied the thought that found superlative expression in
Michaelangelo,—“the notion of _inspired_ sleep, of faces charged with
dreams.”[14]
A more familiar passage from the “Vita Nuova” is illustrated by the
largest, and in many respects the finest, of Rossetti’s completed
pictures, “Dante’s Dream;” dealing with the poet’s record of the vision
in which “it was revealed to him that the Lord God of Justice had called
his most gracious lady unto Himself.” “Then feeling bewildered,” says
Dante, writing of that strange experience, which occurred to him at the
age of twenty-five, “I closed mine eyes, and my brain began to be in
travail, as the brain of one frantic. And I seemed to look toward
Heaven, and to behold a multitude of angels who were returning upwards,
having before them an exceedingly white cloud. Then my heart, that was
so full of love, said unto me, ‘It is true that our lady lieth dead;’
and it seemed to me that I went to look upon the body wherein that
blessed and most noble spirit had had its abiding place. And so strong
was this idle imagining that it made me to behold my lady in death;
whose head certain ladies seemed to be covering with a white veil, and
who was so humble of her aspect that it was as though she had said, ‘I
have attained to look on the beginning of peace.’” On a red-draped couch
in the chamber of death lies the Blessed Beatrice, clad in white robes,
her hands folded on her bosom, and her bright hair spread about her
pillow. Her maidens, at her head and feet, are hanging over her a purple
pall, filled with May-blossoms, the emblem of the spring-time of her
life, in which she died. The floor is strewn with poppies, symbolizing
again the sleep in which she takes her unbroken rest; and on the frieze
above are roses and violets, suggestive of the beauty and purity of the
departed soul. Over the couch hangs a lamp, glimmering with a fast-
expiring flame; and high up in air, through an opening in the roof, is
seen a flight of angels, garbed in the deep red of a damask rose,—
symbolic of the Platonic love which should immortalize the beloved in
the sight of all men,—and bearing the white cloud that represents the
life that has fled. The crimson doves, of which Rossetti made his
constant symbol of heavenly ministries, flutter up and down the
staircases on either side of the room. Before the couch stands the
figure of Love, with his flame-coloured robes fastened at the shoulder
by a scallop-shell, signifying pilgrimage. In one hand he holds a winged
arrow—his weapon for the heart—and a bunch of rosemary; with the other
he leads Dante, who, clad in the black garb of mourning, tinged with the
purple of consecration, advances as if in a dream, and shrinks, dazed
and awed, before the beauty of the dead Beatrice. And Love, still
holding Dante by the hand, bends forward and kisses the face of the
beloved, thus making himself the mediator between Dante and Beatrice,
and the reconciler of life with death. It is as though the poet’s life-
long worship were summed up and presented at the gate of heaven by a
higher power than his own, and a benediction wrested for him, by the
very humility and devoutness of his passion, from the glorified spirit
beyond the grave. The dominant note of the design is one of resignation
and hope; the passionate, strenuous, mystical resignation which
Platonism brought into Christianity at the dawn of the Renaissance, and
hope, born of the quickened fervour and resolution of romantic love.
In two notable subjects Rossetti deals with incidents recorded by Dante
of himself after the death of Beatrice. In a early water-colour of
singular dignity and elevation of feeling, he celebrates “The
Anniversary of the Death of Beatrice.” “On that day,” says Dante in the
“Vita Nuova,” “which completed the year since my lady had been made of
the citizens of eternal life, I was sitting in a place apart, where,
remembering me of her, I was drawing an angel upon certain tablets; and
as I drew, I turned my eyes, and saw beside me persons to whom it was
fitting to do honour, and who were looking at what I did: and according
as it was told me afterwards, they had been there awhile before I
perceived them. Then I arose for salutation and said, ‘Another was
present with me.’” The poet, kneeling at a window overlooking the Arno,
absorbed in his memorial task, has suddenly become conscious of his
visitors, and is overwhelmed with delicate pride and shame.
“OUR LADY OF PITY.”
From an unfinished study.
_By permission of the Corporation of Birmingham._
[Illustration]
Again, among the latest of Rossetti’s unfinished works, we have the
illustration of another passage in the “Vita Nuova,” telling of Dante’s
mourning for his lady’s death. “La Donna della Finestra” (“The Lady of
the Window”), better known as “Our Lady of Pity,” represents the
beautiful woman who looked down on Dante from a window when, as he
passed weeping through the streets, and fearing lest the passers-by
should mock him, he glanced up, craving for some sign of sympathy, and
was consoled by her calm and pitying gaze. Sketches for this design were
made in several media, but the head in the unfinished painting at
Birmingham is the most perfect of the series, and in fact ranks among
the finest of the female heads in all Rossetti’s single-figure pictures.
The artist has caught with rare felicity the expression so acutely
described by the poet:
“Whereupon she, after a pitying sigh,
Her eyes directed towards me with that look
A mother casts on a delirious child.”
All the depth, all the tenderness, all the heroic strength of a divine
sorrow that sees the end of sorrow, shines in this full-souled face. It
is the ideal of the highest womanhood, and indeed of the highest
humanity; of the love that has attained to be godlike, redeeming the
world by infinite compassion; a love that “hopeth all things and
endureth all things,” and in whose steadfast courage lies the conquering
principle of the life to be. It is the companion picture—and in some
respects it is a nobler, healthier version—of “The Blessed Damozel,”
leaning from the bar of heaven to console the mourner on the earth
below. The love that can so take hold of immortality, bring comfort even
from the gates of death, and bridge over, by the sweet persistence of
its ministry, by the passionate reality of its inspiration, the gulf
between the physical and the spiritual world, is the love which of old
was the source of the “Vita Nuova,” and which springs anew in our own
age through “Our Lady of Pity” and “The Blessed Damozel.” In such
designs Rossetti has restored to us all that was best in the mediæval
thought of womanhood,—adding the “ever-motherly” to the “ever-womanly”
of the Hellenic model, and the Divine Motherhood to the Divine
Fatherhood of the Christian ideal; and enriched it with the whole wealth
of psycho-sensuous beauty brought over from the region of romance. And
in this consummation is justified the verdict of Ruskin: that “Rossetti
was the chief intellectual force in the establishment of the modern
romantic school in England.”
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Footnote 9:
William Tirebuck: “D.G. Rossetti; his work and influence.”
Footnote 10:
Gabriel Sarrazin: “Poètes Modernes d’Angleterre.”
Footnote 11:
Rossetti’s sonnet, “Found.”
Footnote 12:
Rev. P.F. Forsyth: “Religion in Recent Art.”
Footnote 13:
Rossetti’s sonnet, “Pandora.”
Footnote 14:
Walter Pater, “The Renaissance: Studies of Art and Poetry.”