Thirty years apart from “The Light of the World” and “Mary in the House of John,” but akin to both in motive and spirit, is “The Tree of Life,” one of the latest and noblest of Mr. Burne-Jones’s paintings. This sombre monochrome, so absolutely original in design, so chastened and restrained in execution, ranks with the highest symbolic work of the Pre-Raphaelites in its grasp of the idea of victory through suffering. For “The Tree of Life” is the Cross. Its roots are in the very foundations of the earth; its branches are fed with the heart’s blood of humanity, and its fruit reaches unto Heaven. The Figure that hangs upon it is brooding in benediction over the whole world; the supreme type of that immortal love which fulfils the divine law of sacrifice; embodying in one great symbol the lesson of all history,—
“Knowledge by suffering entereth,
And Life is perfected by Death.”
Man, woman and children are gathered beneath the shadow of the Tree. On the one side is a garden of flowers, and on the other a harvest of corn. Along the margin of the earth is the inscription:—“In Mundo pressuram habebitis; sed confidite; ego vici mundum.” (“In the world ye shall have tribulation; but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.”) The painting is carried out in a very low key of colour, and a kind of austere and grave conventionalism restrains the sweeping outlines and the sober light. The accessories of the landscape are of the simplest character; no extraneous detail intrudes upon the perfect harmony of the at-one-ment; no over-elaboration mars the calm of that absolute resignation, that unquenchable hope. The Christ upon the Cross is at once the interpretation of the mystery of pain, and the covenant of a complete redemption wherein man at last “shall see of the travail of his soul and shall be satisfied.”
CHAPTER VII.
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.