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