328. Leighton—Ariadne abandoned by Theseus. Ariadne watches for his return; Artemis releases her by death.—This also is a picture which claims to be of the poetic order, and sustains the claim; it may without rashness be pronounced the loftiest work Mr. Leighton has produced, reckoning together subject-matter, scale, and the result attained. To ignore the limitations of his style, or the symptoms of them which this picture also presents, would be futile. One might sum them up by saying that there is a certain hiatus between his perception of the poetic in art, and his power of expressing it; and that, though he bridges this over with a readiness of resource which is to himself almost as natural as the first perception, yet to others the artificiality of the bridge is glaringly and even irksomely apparent. But the picture of Ariadne is sufficiently noble to keep these considerations in the background, as soon as we have once for all fairly stated or implied them. The face is wrung with sorrow, yet is free from what we mean to condemn in a work of art when we term it “painful.” One might say that this woman has died of the very weariness of daily renewed grief. But the calm now is as profound as the yearning heretofore; profound as the blue sea violet-tinted in its distant intensity, or as the lulling oppression of its clang in the sultry meridian, barely audible as a faint murmur at the dizzy height of Ariadne’s rock-seat. There is a sensation of stationariness, as if Phœbus Apollo might be pausing in heaven to see how his sister Artemis has accomplished her mercy upon the outworn Ariadne. As I looked at the picture, a divine reminiscence of Shelley intervened:—
“Yet now despair itself is mild,
Even as the winds and waters are.
I could lie down like a tired child,
And weep away the life of care
Which I have borne and yet must bear,
Till death like sleep might steal on me,—
And I might feel in the warm air
My cheek grow cold, and hear the sea