The Re-birth of Religious Art—“God, Immortality, Duty”—The Pre-Raphaelites and the Reconstruction of Christianity—The Halo in Painting—The Responsibility of Womanhood—The “Girlhood of Mary Virgin” and “Ecce Ancilla Domini”—The Problem of Suffering—“Christ in the House of His Parents,” “The Passover in the Holy Family,” “The Shadow of Death,” “The Scapegoat”—Hunt’s Symbolism—“The Light of the World”—Rossetti’s Symbolism—“Mary Magdalene at the Door,” and “Mary in the House of John”—The Idea of Victory Through Suffering—“Bethlehem Gate”—“The Triumph of the Innocents”—The Spirit of Inquiry—“Christ in the Temple”—The Atonement—“The Infant Christ Adored”—Comparison with Madox Brown and Burne-Jones—“The Entombment”—“The Tree of Life.”

“God—Immortality—Duty;” such were the weighty words chosen by one of the greatest women of our century as the text of a now historic conversation in the shadow of St. John’s College, Cambridge. The student to whom she spoke has told us with what a tender solemnity she approached the great postulations which those words conveyed, and challenged them in her inflexible judgment one by one;—to her, how inconceivable the first, how unbelievable the second, but yet how imperative and irresistible the third.

The attitude of George Eliot, even in the phase of intellectual scepticism from which she then spoke, was deeply significant of that fundamental change in the constitution of religion, that entire transference of Christian or non-Christian “evidences,” from the intellectual to the moral sphere, from the argument to the instinct, which is now largely accepted as the supreme result of modern thought in Europe. For the repudiation of prior conceptions of “God” and “Immortality,” so far from precluding a reconstructive faith, rather prepared the way for it; making the belief in unseen goodness a deduction from instead of a premise to the recognition of visible goodness in the present world, and leaving the more scope for that growing reverence for the physical nature of man which,—having its origins in Paganism and its highest sanction in the Gospel of Galilee, and revealing itself in a passionate exaltation of bodily beauty as a symbol of the divine, a resolute acceptance of the laws of nature and destiny, and a strenuous blending of resignation to those laws with conquest of them by spiritual powers,—has inspired the great humanitarian movement of to-day, wherein the faith of the future finds the witness and the justification of its ideal.

To what degree, then, has the Pre-Raphaelite movement in English art affected, or reflected, that momentous revolution? The pictures of Rossetti, Millais, and Holman Hunt have been by turns exalted and condemned by the apologists of contending theological schools, and the painters stigmatized, now as followers of Tractarianism and instruments of Popery, now as leaders of the coarsest rationalism in sacred art, now as apostles of a sensual neo-Paganism brought over from the Renaissance, and credited to hold mystic and sceptic in equal defiance. One clerical critic, indeed, in 1857, sought in an ineffectual volume to prove the essential atheism of all Pre-Raphaelite work. His protest was but typical of that still extant species of mind to which the worship of the body implies the profanation of the soul. It remains to be decided whether such paintings touched the deepest religious principles which underlie all change of creed or ritual, and if so, in what way the art of the Pre-Raphaelites has joined or swayed the general current of humanitarian feeling which is slowly absorbing all forms of religion into a universal spirit and will.

These questions bring us to the great group of pictures in which English artists for the first time have aspired to deal in all simplicity and earnestness with the bases and principles of the Christian religion. It should not be difficult to discern the dominant idea, the moral keynote, so to speak, of the highest utterances of art in an age of such religious revolution as has been suggested by the proposition of George Eliot. The philosophy of “Duty,” presented by her in its sternest aspect, but brought more into line with the common heritage of religious thought by Browning, Tennyson, F.D. Maurice, and other contemporaries of the Pre-Raphaelite band, has in fact led in art, as it has led in religion, directly, if unconsciously, to that reverent re-discovery of “God,” that transfiguration of the ideal of “Immortality,” which the revival of the spirit of romance has made possible to modern England. It has been said that “the romantic temper is the essentially Christian element in art.”^[7] Let us rather say that it is the medium through which Christianity itself has been renewed and quickened into a richer and fuller life. The romantic temper, in Pre-Raphaelite art, takes hold of the eternal verities of the Christian faith, and humanizes its whole cycle of history and legend in the atmosphere of the real and present world. It ignores any sort of dividing line between sacred tragedy and the great problems of modern time. It abjures for ever the “glass-case reverence” of relic-worship, the superstition which isolates Christian history as a record of exceptional events, instead of an interpretation of universal experiences. Ruskin justly says that “imagination will find its holiest work in the lighting-up of the Gospels;” but the illumination must have a reconstructive as well as an analytic consequence; must be, as the late Peter Walker Nicholson expresses it in his fine critique on Rossetti,^[8] instinctively synthetic—which is the quality of genius: and all true art is synthetic in its essence and its end. The tendency of modern religious science to discredit the exceptional and the unique, and set the basis of morals in universal and familiar things,—in other words to deduce “God” and “Immortality” from the instinct of “Duty” and not “Duty” from the arguments for “Immortality” and “God,”—finds its correlative in the tendency of romantic art to subject the remote specialities of classicism to the test of known conditions and actual character.

Therefore the four gospels, to the Pre-Raphaelite painters, do not stand alone as “religious” history, distinct from the world-wide record of human aspiration and struggle from age to age. They merely afford the supreme examples of man’s apprehension of “God, Immortality, Duty,” and of his capability of heroic labour and self-sacrifice in the pursuit of an ideal. The Pre-Raphaelites draw their first principle of religion from the beauty and glory of the natural world, and the intrinsic dignity and sacredness of human life. Their Christ is re-incarnate in the noblest manhood of all time; their Virgin Mary lives again in every pure girl that wakes to the solemn charm, the mysterious power and responsibility of womanhood. In humanity itself, with all its possibilities, in its triumphs and in its degradations, its labours and its sufferings, they re-discover “God,”—an “unknown God,” it may be; “inconceivable,” if we will; but evident in the quickened conscience of a growing world, and in the invincible instincts of human pity and love. Millais sees a young Christ in the delicate boy with the wounded hand in the dreary and comfortless carpenter’s shop. Hunt sees a crucified Christ in the tired workman, over-tasked and despairing amid the calm sunlight of eventide. Rossetti sees a risen Christ in the noble poet whose great love could conquer death and enter upon the New Life in the present hour. The true Pre-Raphaelitism does not take the halo from the head of the Christ of history; but it puts the halo on the head of every suffering child, of every faithful man and woman since the world began. It is not that the historic Christ is less divine; but that all humanity is diviner because He lived and died.

In such a spirit does Rossetti conceive “The Girlhood of Mary Virgin,”—not as a miraculous but an exquisitely natural thing; miraculous, at least, in Walt Whitman’s sense of the word,—the sense in which all beauty and all goodness are miracles to man. He shows us the up-growing of a simple country girl, in a home full of the sweetness of family love; remote and quiet, yet with no artificial superiority or isolation from the average world. The maiden in the picture, with an innocent austerity of face, sits at an embroidery-frame by her mother’s side. In front of her is a growing lily, whose white blossoms, the symbol of her purity, she is copying with her needle on the cloth of red, beneath St. Anna’s watchful eye. The flower-pot rests on a pile of books, inscribed with the names of the choicest virtues, uppermost of which is Charity. Near to these lie a seven-thorned briar and a seven-leaved palm-branch, with a scroll inscribed “Tot dolores tot gaudia,” typical of “her great sorrow and her great reward.” The lily is tended by a beautiful child-angel, the guardian both of the flower and the girl who is herself, in Rossetti’s words,

Around the balcony trails a vine, which St. Joiachim is pruning above; significant of the True Vine which must hereafter suffer “the chastisement of our peace.” The dove that broods among its branches promises the Comforter that is to come. The realism of the picture is a realism of the mediÆval kind, that takes possession of, instead of ignoring, the spiritual world, and overleaps the boundaries of visible things; depicting the invisible with the daring confidence of imaginative faith. The child-angel with her crimson pinions is as substantial on the canvas as the soberly-clad virgin at her symbolic task.

In the companion-picture, “Ecce Ancilla Domini” (“Behold the handmaid of the Lord!”) Rossetti repeats and develops much of the same symbolism in the accessories of the painting, but the universal meaning of the Virgin’s call is far more clearly brought out. The design differs from all familiar versions of the Annunciation in that the message is delivered to Mary as she wakes out of sleep, and that she is depicted, not among beautiful and well-ordered surroundings, but in a poor and bare chamber, rising, half-awake, in a humble pallet-bed, and sitting awed before the angel whose presence, perhaps, is but the visualized memory of her dream. The rapt stillness of her look recalls the pregnant line in which Byron speaks of a troubled waking,—“to know the sense of pain without the cause.” In Mary’s mind there should rather be a sense of joy without the cause; but even in her joy there lies a mystery, a burden of responsibility and foreboded sorrow, that makes it heavy to bear. It is as if some simple girl, waking to the golden glories of a summer morn, should wake at the same time to the thought of the world’s pain, and realize, in a sudden exaltation of pity and love, that somehow, by whatever path of grief and loss, her purity, her goodness, must help humanity and bless the race to be. The angel at her side is a girl-child no longer, but a youth, full of strength and graciousness, as if to suggest that the sanctities of manhood are now to be revealed to the maid. In his hand the radiant Gabriel holds the full-grown and gathered lily, whose image is now completed on the embroidered cloth, which hangs near the bed. The dove, the symbol of the Holy Spirit, flies in at the window, and the light is soft and warm from the sun-bathed landscape without.

Once again did Rossetti attempt the subject of “The Annunciation,” but only in a water-colour sketch, which found a place, however, in the small but choice collection in the Burlington Club. Here also the lily affords the symbolic keynote of the design,—the Virgin is seen bathing among the water-lilies in a stream; but the singularly fine conception of the angel’s salutation gives a special value and interest to the work. The figure that appears before her on the bank assumes for the moment the aspect of a cross; being so enfolded with his golden wings that the Virgin sees not only the glory of her visitant but the dire portent of the message which he brings. “The Annunciation” of Mr. Arthur Hughes is more conventional in spirit, with its veiled Virgin and its stiffly self-conscious Gabriel, and lacks the note of prescience which gives solemnity to Rossetti’s designs. Mr. Burne-Jones, on the other hand, gives us a more mature and stately maid. His Mary, nobly simple though she is, seems better prepared for the sacred honour of her destiny, and does not touch us so deeply as the shrinking girl in “Ecce Ancilla Domini,” or even as the poor beggar-maiden (for so she appears) in Mr. Hughes’s “Nativity,” bending timid and reverent on her knees in the straw before the Holy Child.

But the note of prescience, as we have seen,—the prophetic symbolism which brings to mind in every incident of the Saviour’s life the whole scheme of sacrifice and redemption, dominates all the greatest Pre-Raphaelite work. The suggestions of the inevitable Cross recur in Rossetti’s early picture, “The Passover in the Holy Family,” in Millais’s “Christ in the House of His Parents,” and in Holman Hunt’s “Shadow of Death,” with a force and urgency that points at once to the universal significance of the history. “The Passover in the Holy Family” shows us the boy Christ carrying a bowl filled with the blood of the newly-slain Paschal lamb, and gazing at it with a mysterious foreboding in his eyes. In the dim background St. Joseph and St. Anna (or, according to Mr. William Rossetti, and as seems more probable, St. Elizabeth), are seen kindling a fire for the ritual. Mary is gathering bitter herbs, and Zacharias is sprinkling the door-posts and lintel with the lamb’s blood. The youthful John Baptist is kneeling at the feet of Christ, binding His shoe.

Rossetti, however, does not attempt quite so bold a translation of the Biblical narrative into modern form as does Millais when, depicting “Christ in the House of His Parents,” he sets the poor and mean-looking child in the midst of almost wholly English surroundings, in a carpenter’s workshop, looking out upon a landscape of thoroughly English meadow-land;—a literalism of method since adopted with more daring fidelity to local colour in their respective fields by such later realists as Fritz von Uhde and Vassili Verestchagin, and others of the German and neo-French schools, but never pursued to the same length in any later experiment from the studios of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Critics probably will long be divided as to the legitimacy of such a process, and its success must be judged largely by the intention of the painter,—whether he seeks merely to present an historical incident with vividness and force, and employs familiar scenery to emphasize the hard reality of his narrative, and whether he rather aspires to interpret the universal truth beneath the incident, and to illustrate its bearing upon present life; in other words, whether he desires to impress us (for example) with the reality of the sufferings of Christ, or with the problem of human suffering in all ages, of which the sacred story is at once the type and the key. It can scarcely be argued that the latter object does not come within the scope of art. The point at issue, however, seems to be that the sense of anachronism aroused by the presentation of great historical or legendary figures in present-day garb, amid the surroundings of contemporary life, is apt to endanger the solemnity of the theme, and to some extent defeat the object of the painter,—in which case it may be urged that the failure is quite as likely to lie upon the spectator’s side.

But the literalism of Millais’s picture is eclipsed by the exhaustive symbolism which he uses in common with his colleagues of the Brotherhood, though never carrying it into the elaborate detail cultivated by Mr. Holman Hunt. The “house” of Christ’s Parents is a wooden shed, strewn with shavings and hung with tools. The young Christ has torn his hand on a nail, and St. Joseph, turning from his bench, holds up the wounded palm, which Mary hastens to bind with a linen cloth. John the Baptist brings water to bathe the hurt before she covers it, and the elder woman bends forward to remove the tools with which the boy, perhaps, has carelessly played.

The nail-mark in the palm is an obvious presage of the coming Cross. The rough planks and the half-woven basket convey the idea of unfinished work; and on a ladder overhead broods the ever-present dove. The picture is inscribed from the verse in Zechariah,—“And one shall say unto him, ‘What are these wounds in thine hands?’ Then shall he answer, ‘Those with which I was wounded in the house of my friends.’”

To recover the actual conditions of the early life of Christ—to reproduce the aspect of a Nazarene cottage eighteen centuries ago—and yet to charge the historic figure with a vitality and emotion that brings it home with irresistible significance to the heart of the spectator of to-day, is perhaps a higher triumph of art than could be achieved by Millais’s neo-realistic method. Rare as is success in this dual effort—the union of archÆological accuracy with profound insight into the eternal meanings of the ancient tragedy—it has been attained beyond question by Holman Hunt in his greatest picture, “The Shadow of Death.” Sojourning for four years at Nazareth and Bethlehem (the latter on account of the alleged resemblance of its people to the ancient House of David), the painter equipped himself with knowledge of every detail of domestic life, furniture, custom, and dress that could heighten the literal truthfulness of his work. To that scientific fidelity he added the elaborate symbolism of which he made a studious art, and through that symbolism he poured a wealth of imagination, a dignity of thought and an intensity of feeling which steeped the subject in a moral glow hitherto unknown to English painting. The scene is laid at sunset in the carpenter’s shop. The Christ, whose face and form, now grown to manhood, speak utter weariness of body and soul, seems to stand there for all humanity, confronting the whole problem of labour and suffering and death. There is something more than physical exhaustion, though that is paramount, in the drooping figure of the tired workman as He lifts His arms from the tools and stretches them out in the evening sunlight, all unconscious that as He does so, the slant rays cast His shadow, in the semblance of a crucifix, upon the cottage wall behind, where a wooden tool-rack forms as it were the arms of the cross on which the shadow of His arms is cast; and near it a little window, open to the east, makes an aureole of light around His head. His mother, kneeling on the floor, examining the casket in which she keeps the long-treasured gifts of the Magi—gold, and frankincense, and myrrh, glances up and sees the terrible image on the wall. It is the cross of a daily crucifixion, rather than of the final death, that weighs upon the soul of Christ;—the crucifixion of unhonoured labour in obscurity; the hard, despised routine of toil endured by the uncomplaining workers of all time. He knows both the dignity of labour and its shame;—the dignity, that is, of all honest, healthy, and profitable toil; the shame of that industrial slavery which in any land can make a man too weary to enjoy the sunset glories or to revel in the calm delights of eventide.

In turning to Hunt’s earlier picture, “The Scapegoat,” we pass from the problem of the slavery of labour to the deeper question of vicarious sacrifice. The solitary figure of the dumb and helpless animal, dying in the utter desolation of the wilderness, the unconscious and involuntary victim of human sin, speaks more eloquently than any words of the reality and pathos of the suffering of innocence for guilt. Seldom if ever has the problem been so directly urged upon us in pictorial art,—Can the law of vicarious sacrifice be reconciled with our highest ideals of moral justice? Can a beneficent and omnipotent God permit one innocent being, without choice or knowledge, to pay another’s penalty? Or, on the other hand, can we formulate any other method by which humanity could be taught its own solemn power, and its absolute community and interdependence of soul with soul? The painter’s business is to state that problem, not to solve it; and this Hunt does with the utmost simplicity, sincerity, and earnestness. Pitching his tent in the most inhospitable region on the shores of the Dead Sea, the artist painted the actual landscape upon which the ancient victim was cast adrift, to perish slowly in the desert without the camp; and from that strange, wild studio his picture came full-charged with the loneliness and terror of the scene, and the momentous meaning of the scapegoat’s sacrifice.

“The Light of the World,” frequently regarded as Holman Hunt’s greatest work, though more mystical and appealing less directly to common sentiment than “The Shadow of Death,” is purely symbolic in design and character; and indeed may be taken to represent the high-water mark of abstract symbolism, as distinct from Biblical history, in the paintings of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The circumstances of its execution, partly at Oxford, and partly in his studio at Chelsea by moonlight, have already been referred to. The picture tells no story; deals with no incident or condition of the human life of Christ, but presents the ideal figure in the threefold aspect of prophet, priest, and king. The Saviour appears in the guise of a pilgrim, carrying a lantern, and knocking in the night at a fast-closed door. He wears the white robe of inspiration, typical of prophecy; the jewelled robe and breastplate of a priest; and a crown of gold interwoven with one of thorns. The legend from Revelation, iii. 20, gives the keynote of the work: “Behold I stand at the door and knock. If any man hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with Me.” The fast-barred door, with its rusty nails and bolts overgrown with ivy, and its threshold blocked up with brambles and weeds, is the door of the human soul. The light from the lantern in Christ’s hand is the light of conscience (according to Mr. Ruskin’s well-known description of the picture), and the light which suffuses the head of the Saviour, issuing from the crown of thorns, is the hope of salvation. The lamp-light rests on the doorway and the weeds, and on a fallen apple which gives the suggestion of hereditary sin. The thorns in the crown are now bearing fresh leaves, “for the healing of the nations.”

It has been charged against many Pre-Raphaelite paintings that their elaborate symbolism, and the highly subjective development of the designs, require not merely titles and texts, but footnotes also, for their explanation. In the pictures of Holman Hunt especially, this charge may have some weight; but it may be fairly met by the consideration of the close and deep thought, the prolonged spiritual fervour—unexampled since the Italian Pre-Raphaelites—in which each masterpiece is steeped, and which surely brings a claim upon such intelligent study as would enable all but those wholly ignorant of Christian symbology to interpret the details for themselves. Rossetti said of one of Hunt’s pictures that “the solemn human soul seems to vibrate through it like a bell in a forest.” That sound, once caught, yields the keynote to the pictorial scheme, and attunes all the latent music to its perfect end.

Rossetti, however, in no case employed the symbolic-figure method, so triumphantly used in “The Light of the World,” for his Biblical subjects; but reserved it for the realm of romantic allegory and classic myth. His illustration of the eternal truths of penitence and aspiration, of “the awakening conscience” and the resurrection of the soul, is given us in his beautiful drawing of “Mary Magdalene at the door of Simon the Pharisee.” The scene is laid amid the revelry of a village street at a time of festival. Mary, passing with a throng of gay companions, sees, through the window of a house, the face of Christ; and with a sudden impulse leaves the procession and tears the flowers passionately from her hair, seeking to enter where He sits; the while her lover, following, strives to dissuade her, and to lead her back to the mirthful company. The appeal of passion and the answer of the repentant woman, beautiful in her mingled shame and triumph, are best recounted in Rossetti’s own words, from the most successful of his sonnets on his own designs: