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.