She herself is an English, not a Jewish girl, of about sixteen or seventeen, of such pale and thoughtful beauty as Rossetti could best imagine for her; concerning which effort, and its degree of success, we will inquire farther presently.
She has risen half up, not started up, in being awakened; and is not looking at the angel, but only thinking, it seems, with eyes cast down, as if supposing herself in a strange dream. The morning light fills the room, and shows at the foot of her little pallet-bed, her embroidery work, left off the evening before,—an upright lily.
Upright, and very accurately upright, as also the edges of the piece of cloth in its frame,—as also the gliding form of the angel,—as also, in severe foreshortening, that of the Virgin herself. It has been studied, so far as it has been studied at all, from a very thin model; and the disturbed coverlid is thrown into confused angular folds, which admit no suggestion whatever of ordinary girlish grace. So that, to any spectator little inclined towards the praise of barren "uprightnesse," and accustomed on the contrary to expect radiance in archangels, and grace in Madonnas, the first effect of the design must be extremely displeasing, and the first is perhaps, with most art-amateurs of modern days, likely to be the last.
229. The background of the second picture (Millais' "Blind Girl"), is an open English common, skirted by the tidy houses of a well-to-do village in the cockney rural districts. I have no doubt the scene is a real one within some twenty miles from London, and painted mostly on the spot. The houses are entirely uninteresting, but decent, trim, as human dwellings should be, and on the whole inoffensive—not "cottages," mind you, in any sense, but respectable brick-walled and slated constructions, old-fashioned in the sense of "old" at, suppose, Bromley or Sevenoaks, and with a pretty little church belonging to them, its window traceries freshly whitewashed by order of the careful warden.
The common is a fairly spacious bit of ragged pasture, with a couple of donkeys feeding on it, and a cow or two, and at the side of the public road passing over it, the blind girl has sat down to rest awhile. She is a simple beggar, not a poetical or vicious one;—being peripatetic with musical instrument, she will, I suppose, come under the general term of tramp; a girl of eighteen or twenty, extremely plain-featured, but healthy, and just now resting, as any one of us would rest, not because she is much tired, but because the sun has but this moment come out after a shower, and the smell of the grass is pleasant.
The shower has been heavy, and is so still in the distance, where an intensely bright double rainbow is relieved against the departing thunder-cloud. The freshly wet grass is all radiant through and through with the new sunshine; full noon at its purest, the very donkeys bathed in the rain-dew, and prismatic with it under their rough breasts as they graze; the weeds at the girl's side as bright as a Byzantine enamel, and inlaid with blue veronica; her upturned face all aglow with the light that seeks its way through her wet eyelashes (wet only with the rain). Very quiet she is,—so quiet that a radiant butterfly has settled on her shoulder, and basks there in the warm sun. Against her knee, on which her poor instrument of musical beggary rests (harmonium), leans another child, half her age—her guide;—indifferent, this one, either to sun or rain, only a little tired of waiting. No more than a half profile of her face is seen; and that is quite expressionless, and not the least pretty.
230. Both of these pictures are oil-paintings. The third, Mr. Burne Jones's "Bridal," is a small water-color drawing, scarcely more than a sketch; but full and deep in such color as it admits. Any careful readers of my recent lectures at Oxford know that I entirely ignore the difference of material between oil and water as diluents of color, when I am examining any grave art question: nor shall I hereafter, throughout this paper, take notice of it. Nor do I think it needful to ask the pardon of any of the three artists for confining the reader's attention at present to comparatively minor and elementary examples of their works. If I can succeed in explaining the principles involved in them, their application by the reader will be easily extended to the enjoyment of better examples.
This drawing of Mr. Jones's, however, is far less representative of his scale of power than either of the two pieces already described, which have both cost their artists much care and time; while this little water-color has been perhaps done in the course of a summer afternoon. It is only about seven inches by nine: the figures of the average size of Angelico's on any altar predella; and the heads, of those on an average Corinthian or Syracusan coin. The bride and bridegroom sit on a slightly raised throne at the side of the picture, the bride nearest us; her head seen in profile, a little bowed. Before them, the three bridesmaids and their groomsmen dance in circle, holding each other's hands, bare-footed, and dressed in long dark blue robes. Their figures are scarcely detached from the dark background, which is a willful mingling of shadow and light, as the artist chose to put them, representing, as far as I remember, nothing in particular. The deep tone of the picture leaves several of the faces in obscurity, and none are drawn with much care, not even the bride's; but with enough to show that her features are at least as beautiful as those of an ordinary Greek goddess, while the depth of the distant background throws out her pale head in an almost lunar, yet unexaggerated, light; and the white and blue flowers of her narrow coronal, though merely white and blue, shine, one knows not how, like gems. Her bridegroom stoops forward a little to look at her, so that we see his front face, and can see also that he loves her.
231. Such being the respective effort and design of the three pictures, although I put by, for the moment, any question of their mechanical skill or manner, it must yet, I believe, be felt by the reader that, as works of young men, they contained, and even nailed to the Academy gates, a kind of Lutheran challenge to the then accepted teachers in all European schools of Art: perhaps a little too shrill and petulant in the tone of it, but yet curiously resolute and steady in its triple Fraternity, as of William of Burglen with his Melchthal and Stauffacher, in the Grutli meadow, not wholly to be scorned by even the knightliest powers of the Past.
We have indeed, since these pictures were first exhibited, become accustomed to many forms both of pleasing and revolting innovation: but consider, in those early times, how the pious persons who had always been accustomed to see their Madonnas dressed in scrupulously folded and exquisitely falling robes of blue, with edges embroidered in gold,—to find them also, sitting under arcades of exquisitest architecture by Bernini,—and reverently to observe them receive the angel's message with their hands folded on their breasts in the most graceful positions, and the missals they had been previously studying laid open on their knees, (see my own outline from Angelico of the "Ancilla Domini," the first plate of the fifth volume of Modern Painters);—consider, I repeat, the shock to the feelings of all these delicately minded persons, on being asked to conceive a Virgin waking from her sleep on a pallet bed, in a plain room, startled by sudden words and ghostly presence which she does not comprehend, and casting in her mind what manner of Salutation this should be.