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.

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.

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.

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.:

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.”

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:

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.