Such attacks as he had to endure may have wounded, but they did not
weaken his spirit; and with a playful humour that would have surprised
his censors, he would sometimes affect to join the ranks of his
assailants, and wage a mock warfare upon his own ideals. I have in my
possession a delightful drawing of his which is supposed to represent
a determination to introduce into his design a type of beauty that
was more acceptable to the temper of his time. He had been diligently
studying, as he assured me, the style and method of the great Flemish
masters, and he sent me as earnest of his new resolve a charming
design of “Susanna and the Elders,”--“after the manner of Rubens.”
On another occasion he wrote to me that he felt he had striven too
long to stem the tide of popular taste, that he was determined now
to make a fresh departure, and that with this view he had projected
a series of pictures which were to be called the “Homes of England.”
He enclosed for my sympathetic criticism the design for the first of
the series. It was indeed a masterpiece. Upon a Victorian sofa, whose
every hideous and bulging curve was outlined with the kind of intimate
knowledge that is born only of love or of detestation, lay stretched,
in stertorous slumber, the monstrous form of some unchastened hero of
finance. A blazing solitaire stud shone as a beacon in a trackless
field of shirt-front: while from his puffy hand the sheets of a great
daily journal had fallen fluttering to the floor. There were others of
the series, but none, I think, which imaged with happier humour that
masculine type, whose sympathies at the time he was so often charged
with neglecting.
For it must not be forgotten that when ridicule had done its work,
Burne-Jones was very seriously taken to task by “the apostles of the
robust.” There are men so constituted that all delicate beauty seems to
move them to resentment; men who would require of a lily that it should
be nurtured in a gymnasium; and who go about the world constantly
reassuring themselves of their own virility by denouncing what they
conceive to be the effeminate weakness of others. To this class the art
of Burne-Jones came in the nature of a personal offence. They raged
against it, warning their generation not to yield to its insidious
and enervating influence; and the more it gathered strength the more
urgently did they feel impelled to insist on its inherent weakness.
But, as Shakespeare asked of us long ago:
How with this rage shall Beauty hold a plea
Whose action is no stronger than a flower?
They forgot that: forgot that something of a feminine, not an
effeminate spirit enters into the re-creation of all forms of beauty;
that an artist, by the very nature of his task, cannot always be in the
mood to pose as an athlete. And, even if they had desired to define
the special direction of Burne-Jones’s art, or to mark the limits of
its exercise--limits that no admirer, however ardent, would seek to
deny--they need not surely have been so angry.
So at least it seemed to me then. And yet, rightly viewed, the very
vehemence of such opposition was in its own way a tribute to his
power. Any new artistic growth that passes without challenge may
perhaps be justly suspected of being produced without individuality,
and certainly such work as his, that bears so clearly the stamp of a
strong individual presence, could hardly escape a disputed welcome.
It must even now in a measure repel many of those whom it does not
powerfully attract and charm; for it cannot be regarded with the sort
of indifference that is the fate of work less certainly inspired; it
must therefore always find both friends and foes. But so does much else
in the world of art that speaks with even higher authority than his.
There are many to whom the matchless spell of Lionardo’s genius remains
always an enigma; many again who yield only a respectful assent to the
verdict which would set Michael Angelo above all his fellows.
We may be patient, then, if the genius of Burne-Jones wins not yet the
applause of all. It bears with it a special message, and is secure
of homage from those for whom that message is written. They are many
to-day, who at the first numbered only a few: they are many, and I
think even the earliest of them would say that their debt to him was
greatest at the last. In praise and love they followed him without
faltering to the close of a life that knew no swerving from its ideal;
a life of incessant labour spent in loyal service to the mistress
he worshipped; and even though he had won no wider reward, this, I
believe, would have seemed to him enough.
Painting is perhaps the only art which offers in its practice
opportunities of social converse. The writer and musician work alone,
or, if their solitude is invaded, it is only by way of interruption.
But the practice of the painter’s art admits a measure of comradeship,
and the progress of his work is sometimes even advanced rather than
hindered by the presence of a friend. The element of manual labour
that enters into painting leaves the painter free at many points of
his work to enjoy friendly converse with the visitor to his studio;
and I have known many an interesting discussion carried on for several
hours without the painter ceasing for a moment from his work upon
the canvas before him. This might not apply to every stage in the
growth and structure of a picture. There are times which demand entire
concentration both of brain and hand, and when the painter needs to
be as solitary as the poet. But these tenser moments yield to longer
intervals wherein the manual element in the painter’s calling holds
for a season a more dominating place; and it is at such times that an
intimate friend may safely invade the artist’s sanctuary.
Some of the most enjoyable hours of my life have been passed in
this intimacy of the studio, and it is interesting to recall, as
it was always interesting to note, the different ways in which the
individuality of the artist expresses itself in the processes of his
work--interesting also to observe how the litter of the studio in its
varying degrees of disorder reflects something of the mind of the man.
There are studios which seem deliberately fashioned for an effect of
beauty--rooms so ornate and so adorned, that the picture in progress
upon the easel seems the last thing calculated to arrest the gaze of
the spectator. And there are others again, so completely barren of
all decoration, and so deliberately stripped of every incident in the
way of bric-à-brac or collected treasures, of carven furniture or
woven tissue, that were it not for the half-finished canvas, it would
be impossible to guess the vocation of its inhabitant. Between these
two extremes there is room for every degree of careless or conscious
environment; and although it is not always possible to define the exact
measure of association between the workman and his surroundings, the
visitor becomes gradually aware of a certain element of fitness in the
seemingly accidental accumulation of the varied objects which find
their way into a painter’s workshop.
It would certainly, however, be erroneous to assume that the disorder
of the studio is to be taken as the direct reflex of the habit of an
artist’s mind. No man, in the conduct of his work, ever surrendered
himself to a stricter discipline of labour than Burne-Jones, though
his studio in many respects was a model of apparent disorder. No man
certainly in his work ever aimed at a more settled and nicely balanced
beauty of design supported by deliberate harmonies of colour; and yet
the bare white-washed walls of his studio in the North End Road gave no
hint of the coloured glories of the invention that he was seeking to
fix upon his canvas; while the litter that scattered the floor or was
unceremoniously hustled into the corners of the room seemed strangely
inconsistent with the ordered completeness of design that marked every
picture from his hand.
There were few more delightful companions in the studio--none,
according to my experience, whose talk leapt with such easy alertness
from the gravest to the gayest themes. His almost child-like spirit
invited humour; and yet his lightest moods of laughter left you
never in doubt of the sense of deep conviction that lay at the root
of his character. As he stood beside you at his work, his figure
relieved against three or four half-completed designs, it was
sometimes difficult to find the link which joined the lighter moods
of his comradeship with the wistful beauty of the faces that he
sought to image in his pictures. But almost at the next moment the
difficulty would be solved by a sudden transition to a graver train
of thought, and before either of us would be well aware of the swift
change of tone, our converse had wandered off to the consideration
of some larger ideal of art or life. It was a unique attraction of
Burne-Jones’s studio that it nearly always contained a rich and varied
record of his work, for the chosen method of his painting rendered it
necessary for him to keep several pictures in almost equal states of
progress, each being put aside in turn till the surface of pigment was
so fixed and hardened as to render it ready for the added layer of
colour which was to form the next stage in its progress.
Very often on these occasions our talk was not directly concerned with
painting at all, but strayed away into many worlds of the present or
the past. As a painter every artist must stand or fall by his command
of the particular aspect of beauty which can be rendered by that art,
and by no other. If a picture fails, it is no excuse that its author is
a poet. If a poet fails, it is idle to plead in his defence that he is
an accomplished musician. What added burdens of the spirit the worker
in any art chooses to carry, concerns himself alone; what concerns
the world is that the result--whatever other message it may undertake
to convey--must be perfect according to the laws of the medium he has
chosen. In speaking, therefore, of the deep poetic impulse that lay
at the back of all Burne-Jones’s achievement in design, I have no
thought of seeking to rest the reputation which he will ultimately
hold upon any other considerations than those which are proper to the
field in which he laboured. He has left enough, and more than enough,
to vindicate his high claim to rank among the masters of art, but it
is certain, none the less, that his profound interest in those other
fields of expression in which the imagination finds utterance, gave him
infinite charm as a man.
There was little lovable in literature that he did not keenly love,
though in regard to the literature of the past, I think his heart
turned by preference to the legendary beauty of the earlier romances,
where the story, freshly emerging from its mythical form, may still
be captured with equal right of possession by the poet, the musician,
or the painter. Great drama, even the drama of Shakespeare, never so
strongly appealed to him; and, indeed, I have always noticed in my
companionship with painters that in their judgment of the work of the
theatre what is most essentially dramatic in drama is not, as a rule,
that upon which their imagination most eagerly fixes itself. And yet,
in the case of Burne-Jones, it was curious to observe that among the
narrative writers of our time the highly dramatised work of Charles
Dickens most strongly appealed to him. For Dickens’s genius, its
pathos, not less than its humour, he owned an unbounded admiration;
and I suppose there were few of the worshippers of the great novelist,
except, perhaps, Mr. Swinburne, who could boast so full and so complete
a knowledge of his work. The sense of humour, which was a dominating
quality in the character of Burne-Jones, could, perhaps, scarcely
be surmised by those who know the man only through his painting.
His claims in this regard, which could not be ignored by those who
knew him, must always be received with a sense of surprise--even of
incredulity--by those to whom he was a stranger. And yet, when he
was so minded, his pencil could give proof of it in many essays in
caricature; while in conversation it was an ever-present quality that
lay in wait for the fit occasion.
When Burne-Jones spoke of his own art it was always with complete
understanding of its many and divergent ideals, and I have heard him
appraise at its true value the genius of men with whom he himself had
little in common. Among his contemporaries he could speak with generous
appreciation of the great gifts of Millais, and of the acknowledged
masters of the past. However little their ideals sorted with his own,
his power of appreciation was too liberal and too keen to permit him to
ignore or to belittle their claims though his heart’s abiding-place
was as I have said with the Florentines of the fifteenth century.
My visits to Burne-Jones’s studio began very early in our acquaintance,
and the several errands which took me there varied as time went on.
While he was painting his picture of King Cophetua, he asked that my
eldest son--who was then a child--should be allowed to serve as model
for one of the heads in the picture. I am afraid that, like most
children, my boy gave some trouble to the master, who one day rebuked
him as being an incorrigibly bad sitter, and the boy, who had been kept
standing during the whole of the morning, promptly replied with the
indignant inquiry as to whether Burne-Jones called standing sitting--a
response that immensely delighted the painter himself, who recognised
the justice of the claim by at once releasing him from further service
for the day. At a later time I saw much of him in his studio while he
was designing the scenery and costumes for my play of _King Arthur_. I
read him the play one afternoon while he was at work upon his own great
design of King Arthur’s sleep in Avalon, in the lower studio, which
stood at the foot of his garden; and the task, which he straightway
accepted, of assisting in the production of the drama at the Lyceum
Theatre, led to many later meetings, at which our talk turned
constantly on that great cycle of romance--one phase of which I had
sought to illustrate.
His own mind was steeped in their beauty, as may be seen in his
constant recurrence to these legends as chosen subjects for his design,
and I fancy it was their common love for this subject in romance which
formed one of the strongest links of fellowship between himself and
William Morris. I have said that to Rossetti he always confessed his
deep obligations as an artist, but there can, I think, be little doubt
that of all living comrades it was Morris whom he most loved. Though,
as he has himself confessed, they had parted company in regard to some
of the problems that beset the artist, in the graver issues of life,
no less than in the lighter moods of social comradeship, they were
at one to the end. He told me that once in the earlier days of their
association they had gone with Charles Faulkner on a boating excursion
up the Thames. At that time Morris was apprehensive that he was growing
too stout, and at one of the river inns where they had to share the
same room the painter conceived the mischievous idea of unduly alarming
the poet as to his condition. Morris had retired earlier than the
others, and was fast asleep, when Burne-Jones, having procured a needle
and thread from the landlady, took a large slice out of the lining
of his companion’s waistcoat, and then sewed the two sides together
as neatly as he could. In the morning Morris was up betimes, and
Burne-Jones, still feigning to be asleep, watched with eager excitement
the terror and consternation with which the poet sought, in vain, to
make the shrivelled garment meet around his waist. The victim of the
plot fancied that his increasing proportions had suddenly taken on a
miraculous acceleration of pace, and it was not until the smothered
laughter of the painter greeted his ears that he was relieved from the
panic of anxiety into which he had been suddenly thrown.
Burne-Jones could sometimes, on occasion, be himself the victim of
a practical joke, and once when I paid him a sudden and unexpected
visit at his little cottage in Rottingdean, I contrived to play, very
successfully, upon what I knew to be his horror of the professional
interviewer. I announced myself to the servant as an American colonel,
who had called as the special correspondent of the _Cincinnati Record_,
and on the message being conveyed to her master, she returned, as I
expected, with the curt intimation that he was not at home. But he
evidently felt that no precaution was too great to be taken in the face
of this threatened invasion, for as I crept by the window that looks
out on to the little Village green I saw him, in company with his son,
stealthily crawling under the table, and when I afterwards returned and
announced myself in my own name, he related with childish delight how
skilfully he had avoided the attack of the enemy.
JAMES M‘NEIL WHISTLER
The many pleasant hours I spent in Whistler’s studio in Cheyne Walk are
dominated in recollection by the striking personality of the artist.
In physical no less than in mental equipment, he stood apart from his
generation, and the characteristic peculiarities of his appearance,
joined to the marked idiosyncrasy of his temperament, must remain
unforgettable to all who knew him. It is easy indeed to recall the
tones of the sometimes strident voice as he let slip some barbed shaft
in ruthless characterisation of one or other of his contemporaries:
easier still to summon again, as though he stood before me now, the
oddly fashioned figure, lithe and muscular, yet finely delicate in its
outline, as he skipped to and fro in front of his canvas, now with
brush poised in the air between those long slender fingers, seeming,
as he gazed at the model, to challenge the supremacy of nature, now
passing swiftly to the easel to lay on that single touch of colour that
was to record his victory. It is not so easy, however, to convey in
words the intellectual impression left by the agile movement of his
mind, as it leaped in sudden transition from the graver utterance of
some pregnant thought concerning the immutable laws of his art, to
those lighter sallies of wit and humour that found their readiest and
most congenial exercise in the half-playful, half-malicious portraiture
of men we both knew.
So notable indeed and so notorious became the sayings of Whistler,
uttered in such moods of laughing irony, that the more deeply serious
side of his nature was apt in his own time to be ignored or even
denied. And for this he himself was partly to blame. His own manifest
enjoyment in the free play of a ready and relentless wit was apt
sometimes to obscure that deeper insight into the essential principles
of the art he practised, to which no one on occasion could give a finer
or more subtle expression.
No one, surely, perceived more clearly that there is in every art an
essential quality born of its material and resting with instinctive
security upon its special resources and limitations, without which it
can make no lasting claim to recognition. He never forgot that the
painter or the poet who ventures to take upon himself added burthens of
the spirit which he is unable to subdue to the conditions of the medium
in which he works, can find no just defence for the violation of any
of the conditions the chosen vehicle imposes, by an appeal to the
intellectual or emotional value of the ideas he has sought to express.
He looked perhaps with even excessive suspicion upon the interpretation
through painting of subjects that suggested any sort of reliance upon
the modes appropriate to other arts, with the result that the effects
he achieved bear sometimes too strongly the stamp of calculated
effort. Science was a word he was very fond of employing with regard
to painting, and though it implied a just rebuke to those who were
wont to make a merely sentimental appeal, it sometimes fettered his
own processes and left upon some of the work he produced rather the
sense of a protest against the false ideals of others than of the free
and spontaneous enjoyment of the beauty in nature that he intended to
convey.
But an artist, after all, is either something better or something worse
than his theories, and Whistler was infinitely better. His instinct
was sure, and within the limits he assigned to himself he moved with
faultless security of taste. If the realm he conquered was not over
richly furnished it was at any rate kept jealously free from the
intrusion of inappropriate elements. Whatever was admitted there had an
indisputable right to its artistic existence, and while he excluded
much that other men, differently gifted, might equally have subdued to
the conditions he was so careful to obey, such beauty as he found in
nature was at least always of a kind that painting alone could fitly
render.
To watch Whistler at work in his studio was quickly to forget that he
had any theories at all. Nothing certainly could less resemble the
assured processes of science than his own tentative and sometimes even
timid practice; for although the result, when it received the final
stamp of his approval, seemed often slight and was always free from
the evidence of labour, labour most surely had not been absent, for
the ultimate shape given to his design, though it may have represented
in itself only a brief period employed in its execution, had in many
cases been preceded by unwearying experiment and by many a misdirected
adventure that never reached completion at all.
Whistler’s talk in the studio was not often concerned with the subject
of Art, and even when Art was the topic it was nearly always his
own. His admiration of the genius he unquestionably possessed was
unstinted and sincere, and if he avoided any prolonged discussion of
the competing claims of his contemporaries, it was, I think, in the
unfeigned belief that they deserved no larger consideration. He had his
chosen heroes among the masters of the past, but they were few, and
their superior pretensions, in his judgment, were so manifest that it
seemed sufficient to him to announce their supremacy without further
parley as to the inferior claims of their fellows. The position they
occupied in his regard was as little open to argument as the place
of incontestable superiority he was wont to assign to himself in his
own generation. I remember once, when a friend in his presence rashly
ventured to accuse him of a lack of catholicity in taste, Whistler in
swift response admitted the justice of the charge and excused himself
on the ground that he only liked what was good.
But there were causes, apart from the convinced egotism of his nature,
which led him by preference towards other topics of conversation. He
has written in his lectures and in his letters both wisely and wittily
of the proper mission of painting; so wittily, indeed, that his humour
and satire are apt sometimes to obscure the sound and serious thought
which, on this subject, coloured even his most playful utterances.
For, underlying all he said or wrote, was a conviction he took no
pains to conceal--that the principles of Art, together with its aims
and ideals, were the proper concern only of artists and could scarcely
be debated without impropriety by that larger and profaner circle
whose praise and appreciation, however, he was by no means disposed to
resent. At times he was even greedy of applause, and provided it was
full and emphatic enough, showed no inclination to question its source
or authority. There were moments, indeed, when, if it appeared to lack
volume or vehemence, he was ready himself to supply what was deficient.