of that quality of youthful conceit that could never, I think, have
entered very largely into his composition; and if I recall them now
with any sort of gratification, it is mainly because they included an
enthusiastic appreciation of so much as was then known to me of the
work of Rossetti and Burne-Jones. Of Rossetti’s art I have already
spoken, and perhaps the time has not yet arrived to record a final
verdict upon the worth of his achievement as a painter. I have also
sought to indicate how irresistible in my own case was the influence
of his strongly marked personality, an influence which enabled me the
more readily to understand how deep may have been the debt that is
here so generously acknowledged. In this matter the witness of his
contemporaries is irrefutable. Even though posterity should not accord
to him the unstinted praise bestowed upon his art by those who then
accepted him as a master, no later judgment can dispute or disturb the
authority he exercised over those who came within the sphere of his
personal fascination.
Little wonder then that to the dream-fed soul of the younger painter,
whose art as yet lacked the means to fix in form and colour the
thronging visions that must have already crowded his brain, the
friendship of such a man must have seemed a priceless possession; and
although, with the patient and gradual assertion of Burne-Jones’s
individuality, their ways in the world of Art divided, yet even in that
later day each knew well how to measure the worth of the other. Of what
was highest and noblest in the art of Rossetti, no praise ever outran
the praise offered by Burne-Jones to the man he had sought and owned
as his master; and I can recall an evening in Cheyne Walk more than
forty years ago, when there fell from the lips of Rossetti the most
generous tribute I have ever heard to the genius of the painter who
was still his disciple. “If, as I hold,” he said, in those round and
ringing tones that seemed at once to invite and to defy contradiction,
“the noblest picture is a painted poem, then I say that in the whole
history of Art there has never been a painter more greatly gifted than
Burne-Jones with the highest qualities of poetical invention.” Here we
have praise indeed; but there is at least one painter, he whose long
life still kept the stainless record of unswerving loyalty to a noble
ideal, to whom also Burne-Jones has here owned his indebtedness, who
would, I believe, have accepted and endorsed even such a judgment as
this. And if an artist’s fame lives most sweetly, most securely, in the
regard of his fellows, who could ask aught higher of the living or the
dead of our times, than that the award of Rossetti should be confirmed
and enforced by the painter of “Love and Death”?
“A picture is a painted poem.” Upon that Rossetti never tired of
insisting. “Those who deny it,” he used to add in his vehement way,
“are simply men who have no poetry in their composition.” We know
there are many who deny it,--many, indeed, who think it savours of the
rankest heresy; for herein, as they would warn us, lurks the insidious
poison of “the literary idea.” Nor can such warning ever be without
its uses. The literary idea, it must be owned, has often played sad
havoc in the domain of art. Much, both in painting and sculpture that
the world has rightly forgotten or would fain forget, found the source
of its failure in misguided loyalty to a literary ideal; much even
that survives still claims a spurious dignity from its fortuitous
attachment to an imaginative conception that had never been rightly
subdued to the service of Art.
But though the warning be timely, the definition which it confronts is
not on that account to be lightly dismissed. It is true, as Rossetti
stoutly maintained, and must ever remain true, of all men who have
poetry in their nature. It was true, from the beginning of his career
to its close, of the art of Burne-Jones. From “The Merciful Knight” to
the unfinished “Avalon,” wherein, as it would seem, he had designed to
give us all that was most winning in the brightly-coloured dreams of
youth, combined with all that was richest in the gathered resources
of maturity, his every picture was a painted poem. Nay, more, every
drawing from his hand, every fragment of design, each patient study
of leaf or flower or drapery, has in it something of that imaginative
impulse which controls and informs the completed work. I have lately
been turning over the leaves of some of those countless books of
studies he has left behind him, studies which prove with what untiring
and absorbing industry he approached every task he had set himself to
accomplish. And yet, amongst them all, of mere studies there are none.
Again and again he went back to nature, but ever under the compelling
impulse of an idea, always taking with him an integral part of what he
came to capture. That unprejudiced inspection of the facts of nature
which, in the preliminary stages of their work, may content those who
are moved by a keener and colder spirit of scientific research, he had
not the will, he had not the power to make. For every force carries
with it its own limitation; nor would it ever have been his boast that
nature owned no more than she was fain to yield to him. If, then, with
unwearied application he was constantly re-seeking the support of
nature, it was with a purpose so frankly confessed, that even in the
presence of the model the sense of mere portraiture is already seen to
be passing under the dominion of the idea. At their first encounter the
artist’s invention asserts its authority over his subject; and not all
the allurements of individual face or form which to men of a different
temperament are often all-sufficing, could find or leave him unmindful
of the single purpose that filled his mind and guided all the work of
his hand.
It is this which gives to the drawings of Burne-Jones their
extraordinary charm and fascination. He who possesses one of these
pencil studies has something more than a leaf torn from an artist’s
sketch-book. He has in the slightest of them a fragment that images
the man: that is compact of all the qualities of his art; and that
reveals his ideal as surely as it interprets the facts upon which
he was immediately engaged. And yet we see in them how strenuously,
how resolutely, he set himself to wring from nature the vindication
of his own design. There is no realist of them all who looked more
persistently at life, who spared himself so little where patient labour
might serve to perfect what he had in his mind to do; and if the
treasure he bore away still left a rich store for others, it is because
the house of beauty holds many mansions, and no man can hope to inhabit
them all.
“A picture is a painted poem.” Like all definitions that pass the
limits of barren negation it contains only half a truth. Like most
definitions forged by men of genius it is chiefly valuable as a
confession of faith. There is a long line of artists to whom, save in
a forced and figurative sense, it has no kind of relevancy. And they
boast a mighty company. Flanders and Spain serve under their banner.
Rubens and Velasquez, Vandyck and Franz Hals, aye, and at no unworthy
distance, our own Reynolds and Gainsborough are to be counted among
the leaders of their host. And long before the first of these men had
arisen, the tradition they acknowledged had been firmly established. It
was Venice that gave it birth. Venice, where not even the commanding
influence of Mantegna could hold back the flowing tide of naturalism
that rose under the spell of Titian’s genius. Out of his art, which
contained them both, came those twin currents of portraiture and
landscape that were destined to supply all that was vital in the after
development of painting in Europe. All that was vital; for though
Religion and Allegory, History and Symbol, still played their formal
part in many a grandiose and rhetorical design, these things were no
longer of the essence of the achievement. To the painters who employed
them, nature itself was already all-absorbing. The true poetry of
their work, whatever other claims it may seem to advance, resides in
the mastery of the craftsman; it cannot be detached from the markings
of the brush that give it life and being. To wring from nature its
countless harmonies of tone and colour, to seize and interpret the
endless subtleties of individual form and character--these are the
ideals that have inspired and have satisfied many of the greatest
painters the world has produced. Who then shall say that Art has need
of any other, any wider ambition?
And yet, as I have said, the house of beauty has so many mansions
that no single ideal can furnish them all. Nature is prodigal to
those who worship her; there is fire for every altar truly raised
in her service. And so it happened that while Venice was perfecting
a tradition destined for many a generation to sway the schools of
Northern Europe, there had risen and fallen at Florence a race of
artists, such as the world had not seen before and may haply not see
again, who had asked of Nature a different gift, and had won another
reward. That imperishable series of “painted poems” which had been
first lisped in the limpid accents of Giotto, had found their final
utterance in the perfected dialect of Michael Angelo. In the years that
intervened many hands had tilled the field; many a harvest had been
gathered in: but so rich had been the yield that the land perforce lay
fallow at the last; and when Michael Angelo died, Florence had nothing
to bequeath that the temper of the time was fit to inherit.
From that day almost to our own the ideal of the Florentine painters
has slept the sleep of Arthur in Avalon. Those who from time to time
have sought to recapture their secret have gone in their quest, not to
the source, but to the sea. They have tried to begin where Lionardo,
Raphael, and Michael Angelo left off; to repeat in poorer phrase what
had been said once and for all in language that needed no enlargement,
that would suffer no translation. They made the mistake of thinking
that the forms and modes of art are separable things, independent
of its essence; that the coinage moulded by the might of individual
genius could be imported and adopted as common currency; and so even
the most gifted of them carried away only the last faltering message
of a style already waning and outworn. To look only to the painters of
our own land, we know well what disaster waited upon men like Barry,
Fuseli, and Haydon in their hapless endeavours to recover the graces
of the grand style; and even Reynolds, though he never wearied in
praise of Michael Angelo, was drawn by a surer instinct as to his own
powers into a field of Art that owed nothing to the great Florentine.
A truer perception of what was needed, and of what was possible, in
order to revive a feeling for the almost forgotten art of design, came
in a later time, and was due, as I have always thought, mainly to the
initiative of Rossetti. Not because he stood alone in the demand for
a more searching veracity of interpretation; that was also the urgent
cry of men whose native gifts were widely different from his, men like
the young Millais, who owned and paid only a passing allegiance to the
purely poetic impulse which youth grants to all, and age saves only for
a few, and then sped onwards to claim the rich inheritance that awaited
him in quite another world of Art. But if this new worship of nature
was indeed at the time a passion common to them all, yet amongst
them all Rossetti stands pre-eminent, if not absolutely alone, in his
endeavour to rescue from the traditions of the past, and to refashion
according to present needs, a language that might aptly render the
visions of legend and romance.
And this in a larger and wider sense became afterwards the mission of
Burne-Jones. This was his life-work--to find fitting utterance in line
and colour for dreams of beauty that in England at least had till now
been shaped only in verse. And to accomplish his task he was driven,
as he has said, to make a method to suit his own nature. The surviving
traditions of style could avail him little, for he already possessed by
right of birth a secret long lost to them. With him there never was any
question of grafting the perfected flower of one art upon the barren
stem of another. There, and there only, lurks the peril of the literary
idea. But it could have had no terrors for him, who from the outset
of his career submitted himself, as by instinct, to the essential
conditions of the medium in which he worked, moving easily in those
shackles which make of every art either an empire or a prison. Of the
visions that came to him he took only what was his by right, leaving
untouched and unspoiled all that the workers in another realm might
justly claim as theirs. Every thought, every symbol, as it passed the
threshold of his imagination, struck itself into form; he saw life and
beauty in no other way. There was no laboured process of translation,
for his spirit lived in the language of design; but labour there must
have been, and, as we know, there was, in perfecting an instrument that
had been so long disused. To be sure of his way he had to seek again
the path where it had been first marked out by men of like ambitions
to his own; and it was by innate kinship of ideas, not by any forced
affectation of archaic form, that at the outset of his career he found
himself following in the footsteps of the painters of an earlier day.
“If I could travel backwards I think my heart’s desire would take me
to Florence in the time of Botticelli.” It was by no accident that he
chose this one name among many, for of all the painters of his school
Botticelli’s art asserts the closest, the most affectionate attachment
to the ideas which gave it birth. Others could be cited whose work
bears the stamp of a deeper religious conviction; others again whose
technical mastery was more complete, who could boast a readier command
of the mere graces of decoration. But he was the poet of them all.
For him, more than for all the rest of his fellows, the beauty of the
chosen legend exercised the most constant, the most supreme authority.
It was the source of his invention and the dominating influence which
guided every subtle detail of his design. It made his art, as it formed
and controlled all the processes of his art, leaving the indelible
record of individual and personal feeling upon the delicate beauty of
every face that he pressed into his service. It is not wonderful then
that the poet-painter of our day should have recognised with almost
passionate sympathy the genius of the earlier master, or that he should
sometimes have travelled backwards in spirit to the city wherein he
dwelt; and if that longer journey upon which he has now set forth
should lead him not to Florence, who is there who shall declare that he
may not have met with Botticelli by the way?
It is no part of my present purpose to offer any laboured vindication
of the art of Burne-Jones. That is not needed now. The generous
appreciation of a wider circle has long ago overtaken the praise of
those who first gave him welcome; and for others who have yet to learn
the secret of his influence, the fruit of his life’s labour is there
to speak for itself. But in the presence of work that is clearly
marked off from so much else produced in our time, it may be well
to ask ourselves what are the qualities we have a right to demand,
what, on the other hand, are the limitations we may fitly concede to
a painter whose special ambition is so frankly avowed. For there is
no individual and there is no school whose claims embrace all the
secrets of nature, whose practice exhausts all the resources of art.
To combine the design of Michael Angelo with the colouring of Titian
was a task that lay not merely beyond the powers of a Tintoret. It
is an achievement impossible in itself; and even could we suppose it
possible, it would be destructive and disastrous. Titian had design,
but its qualities were of right and need subordinated to the dominant
control of his colour; Michael Angelo used colour, but it served only
as the fitting complement of his design; and although the result
achieved by both has the ring of purest metal, there is no power on
earth that can suffice to fuse the two. These two names, we may say,
stand as the representatives of opposite ideals, which have been fixed
and separated by laws that are elemental and enduring; and if between
these ideals--leaning on the one hand towards symbolism, on the other
towards illusion--the pendulum of art is for ever swaying, this at
least we know, that it can never halt midway.
And between these ideals Burne-Jones made no hesitating choice. For
him, from the outset of his career, design was all in all, and the
forms and colours of the real world were in their essence only so many
symbols that he employed for the expression of an idea. His chosen
types of face and form are fashioned and subdued to bear the message
of his own individuality. No art was ever more personal in its aim,
or, to borrow an image of literature, more lyrical in its direction.
The scheme in which he chose to work did not admit of wide variety
of characterisation, but for what is lacking here we have, by way of
compensation, a certainty, an intensity of vision that supplies its
own saving grace of vitality. There is nothing of cold abstraction
or formal classicism. Though his art affects no mere transcript of
nature, and can boast not all the allurements of nature, yet nature
follows close at its heels; and if the beauty he presents has been
formed to inhabit a world of its own, remote from our actual world,
we are conscious none the less that he had fortified himself at every
step by reference to so much of life as he had the power or the will to
use. And again we may see that while his mind was bent upon the poetic
beauty of Romantic legend, he never suffered himself to depend upon
that merely scenic quality that seeks for mystery in vague suggestion
or uncertain definition. His design, whatever the theme upon which
it is engaged, has the simplicity, the directness of conviction. He
needs no rhetoric to enforce his ideas. All that he sees is clearly
and sharply seen, with something of a child’s wondering vision, with
something also of the unsuspecting faith and fearless familiarity of a
child.
And, as with his design, so also with his colour. He worked in both at
a measured distance from reality, never passing beyond the limits he
had assigned to himself, and using only so much of illusion as seemed
needful for the illustration of his idea. The accidents of light and
shade, with their infinite varieties of tint and tone, which yield a
special charm to work differently inspired, were not of his seeking.
He would indeed, on occasion, so narrow his palette as to give to the
result little more than the effect of sculptured relief; he could
equally, when so minded, range and order upon his canvas an assemblage
of the most brilliant hues that nature offers. But in either case he
employed what he had chosen always with a specific purpose--for the
enrichment of his design, not for any mere triumph of imitation. Few
will deny to the painter of the _Chant d’Amour_ and _Laus Veneris_
the native gift of a colourist, but we may recognise in both these
examples, and, indeed, in all he has left us, that the painter disposes
his colours as a jeweller uses his gems. They are locked and guarded in
the golden tracery that surrounds and combines them. And they may not
overrun their setting, for to him, as to all whose genius is governed
by the spirit of design, the setting is even more precious than the
stone.
These qualities of Burne-Jones’s art are not peculiar to him. They
find their warrant, as we have seen, in all the work of that earlier
school to which he loved to own his obligation. But they were strange
to the time in which he first appeared; and to their presence, I think,
must be ascribed no small part of the hostility he then encountered.
Something, no doubt, was due to the immaturity of resource which marked
his earlier efforts. And he knew that. At a time when his imagination
had already ripened, he was but poorly equipped in a purely technical
sense; and although there is no education so rapid as that which genius
bestows upon itself, it was long before his hand could keep pace with
the pressing demands of the ideas that called for interpretation. But
apart from mere technical failure, there was in his own individuality,
and still more in the means which he recognised as the only means that
could rightly serve him, not a little that was sure of protest from a
generation to whom both were unfamiliar. This also he well knew; and
I think it was the clear perception of it which gave him patience and
courage to press forward to the goal.
And there were times when he had need of both. The critics who saw in
his earlier efforts only the signs of affectation greeted him with
ridicule. We are reported a grave nation, but laughter is a safe refuge
for dulness that does not understand; and as there were few of the
comic spirits then engaged upon art criticism who had the faintest
apprehension of the ideal which inspired his art, they found in it only
a theme for the exercise of a somewhat rough and boisterous humour. But
they never moved him from his purpose; never, I think, even provoked
in him any strong feeling of resentment. His nature was too gentle for
that, his strength of conviction too deep and too secure. No one ever
possessed a larger quality of personal sympathy; no one, it might seem,
was on that account so much exposed to the influence of others. And in
a sense this was so. In the lighter traffic of life his spirit flew
to the mood of the hour. His appreciation was so quick, his power of
identifying himself with the thoughts and feelings of others so ready
and so real, that he seemed at such moments to have no care to assert
his own personality. Nor had he; for of all men he was surely the most
indifferent to those petty dues that greatness sometimes loves to
exact. That was not the sort of homage he had any desire to win; and as
he put forward no such poor claim on his own behalf, his keen sense of
humour made him quick to detect in others the presence or assumption
of mere parochial dignity. Of that he was always intolerant; indeed,
I think there was scarcely any other human failing for which he could
not find some measure of sympathy. But although in the free converse of
friends his spirit passed swiftly and easily from the gravest to the
lightest themes, anxious, as it would seem, rather to leap with the
lead of others than to assert his own individuality, it was easy to see
how firmly, how resolutely, he refused all concession in matters that
concerned the deeper convictions of his life. To touch him there was to
touch a rock. Behind the affectionate gentleness of his nature, that
was accessible to every winning influence, lay a faith that nothing
could shake or weaken. It was never obtruded, but it lay ready for all
who cared to make trial of it. In its service he was prepared to make
all sacrifice of time and strength and labour. His friends claimed
much of him, and he yielded much; generous both in act and thought,
there was probably no man of such concentrated purpose who ever placed
himself so freely at the service of those he loved; but there was no
friend of them all who could boast of having won any particle of the
allegiance that the artist owed to his art. That was a world in which
he dwelt alone, from which he rigorously excluded all thoughts save
those that were born of his task; and though every artist has need of
encouragement, and he certainly loved it not less than others, yet such
was the tenacity of his purpose, such a fund of obstinate persistence
lay at the root of a nature that was in many ways soft and yielding,
that even without it I think he would have laboured on patiently to the
end.