Rossetti's women are dazzling and glorious figures of a modern and deliberately cruel beauty--sisters of Messalina, Phædra, and Faustina. He delineates them as luxuriant beings with supple and splendid bodies, long white necks, and snowily gleaming breasts; with full and fragrant hair, ardent, yearning eyes, and demoniacally passionate lips. Their mother is the Venus Verticordia whom Rossetti so often painted. Cruel in their love as one of the blind forces of nature, they are like that water-sprite with her song and her red coral mouth dragged from the sea in a fishing-net, as an old French _fabliau_ tells, and so fair that every man who beheld her was seized by the love of her, but died when he clasped her in his arms. What they love in man is his physical strength, his face and sinews of bronze. Only the strong man who loves them with overpowering madness, like a stormy wind, can bend them to his will. Swinburne has sung of "the lips intertwisted and bitten, where the foam is as blood," of
"The heavy white limbs and the cruel Red mouth like a venomous flower."
(_By permission of William Imrie, Esq., the owner of the picture._)]
But the women of Burne-Jones know that this fervour is no longer to be found upon the earth. The blood has been sapped, and the fire burns low, and the glorious, ancient might of love has disappeared. For these women life has lost its sunshine, and love its passion, and the world its hopes. The hue of their cheeks is pallid, their eyes are dim, their bodies sickly and without flesh and blood, and their hips are spare. With pale, quivering lips, and a melancholy smile or a strangely resigned, intensely grieved look flickering at the corners of their mouths, they live consumed by sterile longing, and pine in silent dejection, gazing into vacant space like imprisoned goldfish, or luxuriate in the vague Fata Morgana of an over-delicate, over-refined, and bashfully tremulous eroticism--
"And the chaplets of old are above us, And the oyster-bed teems out of reach; Old poets outsing and outlove us, And Catullus makes mouths at our speech. Who shall kiss in the father's own city, With such lips as he sang with again? Intercede with us all of thy pity, Our Lady of Pain."