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?