Dante Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelite movement

by Esther Wood

Thou may’st not dare to think: nor canst thou know

If Hope still pent there be alive or dead.”[^[13]]

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:

“Guido, I would that Lapo, thou, and I

Were taken by some skilled enchanted spell,