DANTE'S DREAM AND CAPTIVE ANDROMACHE.

DR. FRANKLIN B. SAWVEL, GREENVILLE, PA.

"Understand this thoroughly; know once for all, that a poet on canvas is exactly the same species of creature as a poet in song.". John Ruskin in Pre-Raphaelitism.

"Speaking with strict propriety, therefore, we should call a man a great painter only as he excelled in precision and force in the language of lines, and a great versifier as he excelled in precision or force in the language of words."-Ibid. in Greatness in Art.

PICTURES,

ICTURES, like books, must be approached from different view-points. The historical painting must be studied from the standpoint of historic events and historic imagery; the allegorical and mythological from allegory and mythology; the religious from the Bible and the state, conditions and spirit of the Church of its times; landscapes from the pastoral beauties of earth, stream, air and sky; and the delineation of character and passion from psychology and human experience. Yet it must be borne in mind that the artist's aim is not to give an inventory of the minutia that enter into a scene, or a story's make-up,-a sort of table of statistics-but the sum total, the balance-sheet of landscape or legend, passion or history as the eye sees it, and the soul feels and realizes it. And while it is a true maxim, as Millet used to repeat to his pupils, that "the story must be made so plain and complete that it would be told by the painting without previous knowledge or the aid of books," history, literature and science have always been indispensable aids to art study and picture interpretation.

Perhaps in no class of subjects is the story so easily divined as in historical paintings and those founded on some definite portion or passage of literature, or those whose motive has at the same time a parallel literary rendering.

I wish to speak of two modern masterpieces of the latter class of subjects, "Dante's Vision," by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and the "Captive Andromache," by Sir Frederick Leighton; both artists of the modern English school when at its best. The former was born at London in 1828 and died in 1882; the latter was born at Scarborough in 1830 and died in 1896.

To appreciate and enjoy Rossetti's charming picture, the original now in Liverpool, presupposes acquaintance with Dante's "La Vita Nuova," and an appreciative, realizing sympathy for Dante's ecstatic, sighing admiration and frenzied, sobbing love for the blessed Beatrice.

"So gentle and so pure,

One of the beautiful angels of Heaven."

Rossetti like Dante dreamed his picture, and then painted his dream,-in line and color instead of words-and he shows much of the same rich, vigorous, poetical exuberance.

Rossetti gave us the best English translation of the New Life extant, and wrought himself into the half mystical idealism of Dante, with its hints of somber realism, and into the spirit of his weeping phantasies so completely as to infuse the same rays of hope and joy into the sad scene as Dante had done in his He learned at the feet of his master what real, lovelorn, heaven-exalted sorrow is, and then gave it finished expression on canvas.

verse.

In many of his sonnets and shorter poems Dante weepingly sings the same dirge; but the fifth stanza in part XXIII of the New Life expresses more concisely than any other the main idea of the picture, when Love said

"Now shall all things be made clear: Come behold our lady where she lies.' Those 'wildering phantasies

Then carried me to see my lady dead.

Even as I there was led,

Her ladies with a veil were covering her;

And with her was such very humbleness

That she appeared to say, 'I am at peace.''

The moment chosen by the artist is the planting of the fatal kiss on the cheek of the angelic Beatrice. The yet stooping but recoiling Angel of Death holds an arrow in his left hand, the two-fold symbol of Death and Love pointing from the heart of Beatrice to the heart of Dante. As if conducted hesitatingly from some outer chamber of the skies, Dante stands shrinking from the Angel's right-hand grasp, but chained to the spot, disconsolate, though sustained; broken in spirit, yet resigned to the

inevitable. Bowed and grief-smitten, he seems to have just recovered from his vision to hear the cadence of his dream, "O Beatrice! peace be with you." It is not the chivalric love of the Middle Ages, but conjugal affection and sympathy that shine from his heroic face and meaning eyes.

The poppies strewn about are but symbols, and the "Death's Door" behind, grim, black and unobstructed, is not terrible. The doves, emblems of the soul and purity of heart, one entering from either side, are rather messengers of love and consolation; the open door to the left with its gleam of light, the distant radiance, atmosphere and sky above, and the winding stairs to the right, flooded with subdued or rather reflected golden-tinged light, beckon upward to the blessed empyrean whither the kissed-away spirit has just been borne by

"The angels, like a rain of manna

In a long flight flying back heavenward."

Reclining Beatrice—“So perfect is the beauty of her face"seems fit to have been "full of all perfections"; strong as well as gentle; human, yet angelic; earthly, yet holy. She is still the symbol of goodness, charity, sweetness and virtue. The accessory "ladies" emphasize her beauty and gentle humility, and the drapery in sweep and fold of all the figures is graceful to simplicity. Richness, beauty, sentiment and harmony are not lacking, and the artist's language is tersely suggestive and subjective as the treatment demands. Light and shade, atmosphere and texture are good, and the composition and unity of the picture are simple and unique. A literal correspondence, part by part, between picture and poem not only does not exist, but to attempt to divine or construct such would be great injustice to the painter, for the æsthetic effect of the picture as a whole is not translatable into words. Its most delicate impressions and harmonies of composition, line, light and shade, tone and values belong to art language alone. Yet the best interpreter of Dante in modern art is Rossetti, and the best glossary of the "Dante's Dream" is the "Vita Nuova."

The Vision reads like a mystic tragedy of furious love whose hero is wild to the verge of sanity of the passion. In both picture and poetry are intermingled scenes of sweetest tenderness

and deepest pathos, with suggestions of that purer love that is not sensuous, and that higher sorrow, though crushing to the natural senses, that sees death as a translation and an experience not to be dreaded or shunned.

In the second subject Sir Frederick Leighton tells the story of the enslavement of the grieving, widowed queen, Andromache, after the fall of Troy. When ready to go out to do unequal battle with Achilles, the brave Hector repaired to the castle to bid farewell to his despairing wife and . . . "his infant darling boy, beautiful as a star."

One of the most pathetic and most admired as well as most famous passages of the Iliad is the parting of Hector and his lamenting wife on the eve of battle, the last part of which, the "dire presage," furnishes the theme of the painter's exquisite poem-picture, entitled "Captive Andromache":

And yet no dire presage so wounds my mind,
My mother's death, the ruin of my kind,
Not Priam's hoary hairs defil'd with gore,
Not all my brothers gasping on the shore;
As thine, Andromache! thy griefs I dread;
I see thee trembling, weeping, captive led!
In Argive looms our battles to design,
And woes of which so large a part was thine!
To bear the victor's hard commands or bring
The weight of waters from Hyperia's spring.
There, while you groan beneath the load of life,
They cry, Behold the mighty Hector's wife!'

6

Bryant's translation reads.

"And from the fountain of Messeis draw

Water, or from the Hyperian spring."

Other incidents and imagery that help to a fuller appreciation and enjoyment of this truly beautiful picture may be found in the twenty-fourth book.

But the idea and imagery alone are transferable to canvas. The key-note in the composition of the picture is the queenly Andromache with bowed head, standing, almost posing, in the center foreground of the canvas. She is bearing the weight of

*Homer's Iliad, Book VI., lines 574-585, Pope's translation.

waters and has paused, "groaning beneath the load of life." Trojan pride and disgrace are mingled in the interestingly beautiful face, dignity and discontented submission, self-assertion and servile obedience, hope and humility, a prisoner royal and a queen captive. Accessory groups and personages on either side give restful poise and good balance to the picture without appearing in the least mechanical.

The poetical engine of the composition is repetition. Other captives of royal lineage and differing nationalities are paying a like penalty, though with less distaste. Their balanced grouping on her right hand and on her left is careless, simple and artistic, and so disposed as to make the play of light and shadow effective. Her child, the darling Astyanax, caressed by happy maids in the right foreground prattles a note of innocent cheer which is echoed in other countenances among the exiles. Its pure, lofty sentiment, naïve poetic feeling and ensemble effect of drapery, foliage and chaste, varied poses make the picture delightfully pleasing.

Companion pictures they are in more points than the fact that each has its justification and parallel in verse. Each is faithful in treatment to the story it tells, and each deals with those deep mysteries in human experience, the ineffable joy of love and the insatiate sorrow of death.

If the first excels in romantic mystery the second excels in the sentiment of beauty, and both in vigor of conception and richness of poetic feeling.

LIFE.

CHARLES AUGUSTUS SCHUMACHER, ONEONTA, N. Y.

A mellow Instrument, and Master-willed,
Once waked as from a dream, made music low
And sweet, until a Hand, in evening's glow,
Was laid along the strings, and all was stilled.