STANHOPE.Brothers, photo.
THE WATERS OF LETHE.
(By permission of the Corporation of Manchester, the owners of the picture.)

STRUDWICK.ELAINE.STRUDWICK.Dixon, photo.
THY TUNEFUL STRINGS WAKE MEMORIES.
(By permission of the Berlin Photographic Co., the owners of thecopyright.)(By permission of W. Imrie, Esq., the owner of the picture.)

Burne-Jones stands to Botticelli as Botticelli himself stood to the antique, or as Swinburne to his literary models. As a graceful scholar, Swinburne has reproduced all styles: the language of the Old Testament, the forms of Greek literature, and the naïve lisp of the poets of chivalry. He decorates his verses with all manner of strange metaphors drawn from the literatures of all periods. His Atalanta in Calydon is, down to the choruses, an imitation of the Sophoclean tragedies. In his Ballad of Life he follows the model of the singers who made canzonets, the writers who followed Dante and the earliest lyric poets of Italy. In Laus Veneris he tells the story of Tannhäuser and Dame Venus in the manner of the French romantic poets of the sixteenth century; Saint Dorothy is a faithful echo of Chaucer’s narrative style; and the Christmas Carol is modelled upon the Provençal Ballades. Even the earliest lyrical mysteries are reproduced in some poems so precisely that, so far as form goes, they might be mistaken for originals. But the thought of Swinburne’s verse is what no earlier poet would have ever expressed. It is inconceivable that a Greek chorus would have chanted any song of the weariness of man, and of the gifts of grief and tears brought to him at his creation; nor would a Greek have written that Hymn to Aphrodite, the deadly flower born of the foam of blood and the froth of the sea. And in Hesperia, where he describes a man who has loved beyond measure and suffered over-much amid the mad pleasures of Rome, and now sets out, pale and exhausted, to sail the golden sea of the West until he reach the “Fortunate Islands” and find peace before his death, the mood does not reflect the thoughts of the old world, but those of the close of the nineteenth century; and so it is, too, in his “Hendecasyllabics,” where he complains in classically chiselled diction of the swift decay of beauty and the hidden ills which of a sudden consume the inward force of life. And Burne-Jones treats old myths with the same freedom and independence. He takes them up and recasts them, discovers modern passions lying in the very heart of them, enriches them with a wealth of delicate shades, borrowed without the smallest ceremony from a new conception of the world and from the life of his own time. The human soul grown old looks back, as it were, upon the path which it has travelled, and sees the spirit of its own ripe age latent in its infancy, recognising that “the child is father of the man.” All the figures in his pictures are surrounded by a dusk which has nothing in common with the broad daylight in which the Renaissance artists placed the antique world. There remains what may be called a residue of modern feeling which has not been assimilated to the old myth, a breath of magic floating round these figures on their career, something mysterious, an elusive air of fable. This, indeed, is the pervasive temperament and sentiment of our own age. It is our own inward spirit that gazes upon us as though from an enchanted mirror with the mien of a phantom.

And just as he remodels the entire spirit of old myths, he converts the figures which he has borrowed into an artistic form of his own, and, without hesitation, subordinates them in type and physical build and bearing to the new part they have to play.

STRUDWICK.Cassell & Co.
GENTLE MUSIC OF A BYGONE DAY.
(By permission of John Dixon, Esq., the owner of the picture.)