The well-known composition of "Francesca da Rimini" may well conclude our brief notice of the pictures of this second epoch. M. Vitet regards it as the most harmonious and complete of all his works; but we think it has taken less hold on the popular heart than the "Mignons" and "Margaret." Yet it is a work of great skill and beauty. The difficult theme is managed with that moderation and good taste which recognize the true limits of the art. The crowd of spirits which Dante so powerfully describes as driven by the wind without rest are only dimly seen in the background. The horrors of hell are shown only in the anguish of those faces, in the despairing languor of the attitude, which not even mutual love can lighten. The love which made them one in guilt, one in condemnation, is stronger than death, stronger than hell; but it cannot bring peace and joy to these souls shut out from heaven and God.
"Se fosse amico il Re dell' universo, Noi pregheremmo."
But even prayer is denied to him who feels that he has not God for a friend. There is no mark of physical torture; it is pure spiritual suffering,--restless, aimless weariness,--the loss of hope; it is death,--and love demands life. How strangely appropriate is this punishment of spirits driven hither and thither by the winds, with no hope of rest, to those who reject the firm anchorage of duty and principle, and allow themselves to float at the mercy of their impulses and passions! The overpowering compassion and sympathy of the poets is shown in their earnest faces. Neither here, nor in the well-known "Dante and Beatrice," which is too familiar to need description, does Scheffer quite do justice to our ideal of the sublime poet of Heaven and Hell; but neither do the portraits which remain of him. The picture was first exhibited in 1835. As it had suffered very much in 1850, Scheffer painted a repetition of it, with a few slight alterations, in which, however, his progress in his art during twenty years was very evident. This copy is very far superior to the engraving.
About this period Scheffer seems to have wandered a little from the true mission of Art, and to have esteemed it her province to represent abstract theological truths. His religious feeling seems to have become morbid, and his natural melancholy intensified. The death of his wife, and consequent loneliness, may have given this ascetic tinge to his feelings. But we must acknowledge, if it were so, that the sorrow which oppressed did not embitter his heart, and that a brave and humane spirit appears even in those works which have the least artistic merit to recommend them. The "Christus Consolator" is the best known of this class of pictures. It is cold, abstract, and inharmonious; but its religious spirit and the beautiful truth which it expresses have won for it a welcome which it seems hardly to merit. Yet it has touching beauty in the separate figures. The woman who leans so trustingly on her Saviour's arm has a very high and holy face, whose type we recognize in more than one of his pictures; and the mother and her dead child form a very touching group. But the various persons are not connected by any common story or mutual relation, and we feel a want of unity in the whole work. Perhaps the strongest tribute to its power of expression is the story, that religious publishers found it necessary to blot out the figure of the slave who takes his place among the recipients of Christ's blessing, in order to fit their reprint for a Southern market. As a companion to it, he painted the "Christus Remunerator," which is less interesting. To this same class of pictures we should probably refer "The Lamentations of Earth to Heaven," which we have never seen, but which is thus described by M. Anatole de la Lorge:--