“Death is a fearful thing,”
“And shamed life a hateful.”
The nun, we are sometimes told, is a repellent person; what business had she to urge her brother to die when she could save him by doing wrong herself? To look at “Claudio and Isabella” is to believe her and to understand.
Another picture owes its motto to one of Edgar’s mad bursts of song in “King Lear.”
“Sleepest or wakest thou, jolly shepherd?
Thy sheep be in the corn;
And yet one blast of thy minnikin mouth,
Thy sheep shall take no harm.”
It is not an actual shepherd and shepherdess who are seated in this leafy English landscape, among the green pastures and by the still waters. Still less is it the kind of shepherd and shepherdess that Watteau, Fragonard, and the china manufactory of Dresden have accustomed us to associate with the words. Who and what are they, those careless people in the bright sunshine, letting the sheep eat the corn that kills them and the unripe apples? The shepherd’s crook lies idle on the ground. He has found a death’s-head moth; he is too busy showing it to his companion to have any use for that. She is flattered and pleased that he should attend to her rather than to the sheep.
When this picture was painted, the Oxford Movement was in the air; the shepherd and the shepherdess were alike busy with the death’s-head moth.
Turning to modern minds, the poet whose word weighed most with England at the time was undoubtedly Tennyson. A verse from “In Memoriam” describes “The Ship.” “The Lady of Shalott” gave the subject of a work which took twelve years in painting. It was enlarged from a small design in a volume of Tennyson illustrated by Hunt, Millais, and Rossetti; and by several other artists, not of their persuasion. This particular illustration did not find favour with the poet, he objected to the lady’s hair, to her manner of wearing it. The dream has been changed into a profound allegory. The lady is—if we mistake not—the artist who, through neglect of the divine gift of reflective imagination, has failed in the high purpose of art. It was hers to weave the Quest of the Holy Grail, as she saw it in the magic mirror. If she had stayed at her appointed work, all had gone well. But she looked out of window to see Sir Lancelot—not the Sir Lancelot of Tennyson, but a boastful, pleasure-loving knight, going on his way in the sunlight, with two trumpeters before him. Then came the curse upon her, for the order of the world was broken, the order of the world all about her, in the flower of the earth, in the bird of the air, in the stars, governed and guided each by its own angel. On one side of her room order is strength as seen in Hercules—on the other submission, as typified in the earlier design by the Cross, in the later by the Nativity. This order she has broken, against this order she has sinned. The lovely picture of her weaving the likeness of the Holy Grail itself will come to naught. But up above there chimes the one word, Spes; even for those who have failed there is hope.
“This subject was the ceremony of May Morning, Magdalen Tower, Oxford, at sunrise, when the choristers, in perpetuation of a service which is a survival of primitive Sun-worship—perhaps Druidical—sing a hymn as the sun appears above the horizon.… For several weeks I mounted to the Tower roof about four in the morning with my small canvas to watch for the first rays of the rising sun, and to choose the sky which was most suitable for the subject. When all was settled I repeated the composition upon a larger canvas.”
W. H. H.
The picture is at the painter’s home in Kensington.