EDWARD BURNE-JONES
My intimacy with Burne-Jones struck deeper and lasted without
interruption from those earlier days of the “Ignotus” articles in the
_Globe_ to the time of his death in 1898. We were friends for more than
twenty-five years, and during the greater part of that period the
closest and most affectionate friends.
To him also I had written when I thought of enlarging that first crude
criticism of his work. I was a stranger to him then, although my elder
sister had already made his acquaintance, but his letter in reply to my
application is delightful in its considerate tolerance towards the
somewhat audacious challenge of a boy to be supplied with the
particulars of his early career.
Referring to the pictures which I had specially selected for notice he
writes:
“I need not say that such a flattering review of them gave me pleasure,
for, whatever cause I have to see them with disappointment, such
sympathy as you express cannot be anything but most welcome. But there
is so little to say of the kind of information you ask for, and I should
like to say nothing, for a sudden feeling of being ridiculous
overwhelms me. At Oxford till twenty-three, therefore no right to begin
art at all, never having learnt one bit about it practically, nor till
that time having seen any ancient picture at all to my remembrance.
Provincial life at home, at Oxford prints of Chalons and Landseer--you
know them all. I think Morris’s friendship began everything for me,
everything that I afterwards cared for. When I left Oxford I got to know
Rossetti, whose friendship I sought and obtained. He is, as you know,
the most generous of men to the young. I could not bear with the young
man’s dreadful sensitiveness and intolerable conceit as he did with
mine. He taught me practically all I ever learned; afterwards I made a
method for myself to suit my nature. He gave me courage to commit myself
to imagination without shame, a thing both good and bad for me. It was
Watts much later who compelled me to try and draw better. I quarrel now
with Morris about Art. He journeys to Iceland and I to Italy, which is a
symbol. And I quarrel too with Rossetti. If I could travel backward, I
think my heart’s desire would take me to Florence in the time of
Botticelli. I do feel out of time and place, and think you should let me
go crumbling and mouldering on, for I am not fit for much else but a
museum. You see I am writing in front of my work and ought to know, and
I do know.”
The letter ends with a courteous invitation to visit his studio, where
he promised to show me the work he had completed during the year.
Needless to say with what delight I accepted, though I scarcely
realised then that that visit was destined to date the beginning of a
friendship that endured without halt or flaw till the time of his death
in the summer of 1898.
When I first knew him in 1873, his appearance corresponded almost
exactly with that which is imaged in Watts’s beautiful portrait. His
eyes then, as always, were the dominant feature of his face--pale blue
eyes, that revealed in their changing expression the sympathy, the
gentleness, and no less the strength, of his nature.
From the time I am speaking of, I became a constant and always welcome
visitor to his studio at the Grange, and at those simple Sunday
luncheons to which his intimate friends were bidden Burne-Jones very
soon made known to me a side of his character scarcely to be suspected
by those who knew him only from his work.
Playful and humorous, boylike, and even child-like in his quick
surrender to the laughing mood of the moment, he could nevertheless
become swiftly serious at the summons of some deeper thought, and
without the need of any prepared process of transition could shift with
ready and earnest eloquence to the discussion of those deeper problems
which touched the centre of his art.
From the outset we were in close agreement as to the dominating
tendencies which governed the great schools of European painting, and no
less in our common preference for the great tradition of Florentine
design, established by the genius of Giotto and culminating in the
splendid achievement of Michael Angelo. Years afterwards, when I had
sent him a little volume of my gathered essays on Art, he wrote me: “I
found your book when I got home last night, and it was a real pleasure
for me to have another proof of your love and sympathy. And there will
be this additional pleasure about it, that I know how heartily I shall
be at one with you while I read it.” And then, with a sudden turn to a
lighter mood, he adds: “We shall meet on Sunday at lunch. Georgie is
away, but Margaret dispenses lower middle-class hospitality with a
finish and calm which would not disgrace a higher social position.”
I suppose no man ever held with such unswerving fidelity to the ideal
with which he set out upon his career, an ideal as plainly manifest in
those earlier contributions to the old Water-Colour Society as in his
last great picture of “Arthur in Avalon.” In him the sense of design was
all in all, but mere abstract design that missed the impulse of some
legend of passion or romance never quite contented his genius.
It was his delight, as it was the delight of Botticelli, to be always
exercising his invention upon some theme of legendary beauty; and it was
his special gift, as indeed it was also Botticelli’s, to be able to
translate such themes into the appropriate language of Art.
Though he could appreciate at its true value excellence in almost every
school of painting, his temper turned as by instinct even from the
greatest masters who sought only for a faithful rendering of nature.
Blake once said that in his highest moments of inspiration he was often
haunted by those “Flemish Demons,” as he termed them, who came and
blurred his imagination and stole away the thought he desired to
present. I think Burne-Jones was sometimes haunted by them too.
It is not needful now to revive the memories of that fierce hostility of
criticism which greeted his earlier efforts. Rossetti’s determined
reticence in regard to the exhibition of his work left Burne-Jones in
those earlier days to bear the whole brunt of the attack, for the art of
Millais and Holman Hunt made a somewhat different appeal and claimed a
separate victory. Nor was it wonderful that what lay in the mind of both
to do should at first have seemed tinged by something of determined
archaic affectation. The temper of their work was strange to the world
to whom it was offered at first in a form so tentative, and also
confessedly so incomplete.
The history of English Painting, even in its greatest achievement, has
left no tradition to which they could appeal, and, indeed, if we take a
wider range of view, it may be said with equal truth that, since the
downfall of the great school of Florence, Art throughout Europe had
taken a direction which made the efforts of these younger men seem like
a wilful neglect of the accepted models of style.
Such English masters of an earlier time as had attempted to enter into
this higher realm of imaginative painting--Barry, Fuseli, and Haydon, to
name only the leaders--had wrecked their lives in the vain endeavour
suddenly to renew the splendours of the great masters of the sixteenth
century.
With the advent of the pre-Raphaelite movement, marked by a determined
research of greater reality in the rendering of actual fact, the failure
of these earlier experiments became only the more manifest; and it was
left for that little group in which Rossetti and Burne-Jones stand
pre-eminent to realise the truth that, if imagination could ever again
resume its place in pictorial art, the result must be achieved, not by
an endeavour to repeat the triumphs of the past at the epoch of its
culminating glory, but by retracing the stream to its source and
beginning again, where Florence had begun in the earlier period of her
history.
It was, I think, the first exhibition of the Grosvenor Gallery that gave
Burne-Jones’s critics reason to pause in their pitiless onslaught of
ridicule and rebuke. But even then the fight was not ended, and among
the many members of the Academy itself the hostility continued almost
without check.
I remember going round that exhibition with Mr. Gladstone, and recalling
a phrase of his which he used in reference to this very feeling that was
even then sufficiently openly expressed.
Standing before one of Burne-Jones’s pictures which he was warmly
admiring, he turned to me and said, “Dislike of such a painter I can
understand, but such intolerance of dislike as I find on every hand I do
not comprehend.”
It was, perhaps, difficult, even for those to whom such work made a
sympathetic appeal, to realise what a broad and liberal outlook in
Literature, as well as in Art, belonged to the painter whose deliberate
selection of a chosen type of beauty might plausibly seem to argue a
narrow intelligence; and it was, indeed, only by close and intimate
knowledge of the man himself that one was enabled to escape altogether
from this initial prejudice.
As a talker he was wholly delightful. There were few subjects in
literature upon which those who might have thought to convict him of a
narrow intensity of feeling could have dared to challenge him with
success. It was natural, perhaps, that, with his preoccupation as a
painter, his love should have turned most often and most readily to
legend and romance. But in romance his task took a wide range, and it
will surprise many, who see how rigorously all suggestion of humour is
excluded from his paintings, to learn that his knowledge of Dickens was
almost encyclopædic, and his love of him, like that of Mr. Swinburne,
without limit of praise.
As our friendship advanced it came to be our custom to meet periodically
at a little restaurant in Soho, over a quiet dinner which we boasted was
to be a mere preliminary to “seeing Life”; but these evenings nearly
always ended as they began, in talk over the table--light and laughing
to commence, and then drifting finally into deep and earnest discussion
of the things we loved the best in Poetry and Art; until, the lights
gradually extinguished, we were reminded that the closing hour had come,
and that the projected visit to the music-hall, which was to constitute
our vision of Life, must needs be postponed until another occasion.
And so these meetings went on from time to time, but never without a
word of mock indignant protest on his part that he had been cheated of a
promised debauch. Once he fired my imagination by telling me that he had
made a solitary visit to the Aquarium, where he had seen “The Last
Supper” tattooed on a man’s back, and this taste of blood had whetted
his appetite for more salient examples of monstrosity which were at that
time being exhibited in Barnum’s Show.
An appointment made for the purpose I was compelled to abandon by reason
of a social engagement with my wife, a circumstance which drew from him
a little note of pitying sympathy:
“Carr Mio, so you have thrown me over! Well, perhaps you are right; at
any rate I am wrong to have trusted. I confess I marvelled at your
bravery in so openly defying woman, but knew that you must be justified
in some consciousness of strength. But lo! you are even as I, who
boasted not. Still, we will have Barnum another night. I _must_ see the
fat lady, and _will_.”
And then on the facing page he adds a monstrous portrait of that lady
herself, a thing of unimagined wealth of flesh, seated on a velvet
cushion before the upturned eyes of a crowded theatre.
Burne-Jones was wont to be lavish of these humorous sketches in letters
to his intimate friends, and I have one or two supposed to illustrate a
projected fresh departure in his Art, wherein, under the impulse of a
new resolve, he was to abandon finally all future effort after ideal
design, and, conforming to that taste of the public which he had
hitherto failed to satisfy, to embark upon a series of pictures to
represent, as he told me, the homes of England.
“I enclose a sketch,” he writes, “for my next picture. It is a new
departure, but the public
[Illustration: FACSIMILE OF A LETTER
By Sir EDWARD BURNE-JONES, Bart. (_a_).
_To face page 78._
]
[Illustration: THE HOMES OF ENGLAND
From an original drawing by Sir EDWARD BURNE-JONES, Bart. (_b_).
_To face page 78._
]
[Illustration: THE HOMES OF ENGLAND.
From an original drawing by Sir EDWARD BURNE-JONES, Bart. (_c_).
_To face page 78._
]
must be humoured. I have fought the fight of unpopularity long enough.
Tell me what you think,” and accompanying this startling announcement of
the fresh direction his art was to take, he enclosed, not a mere sketch,
but an elaborately finished black and white drawing of the first of the
great series he had projected, wherein he had evidently intended to
present a typical representative of our great commercial nation--a
hideous being stretched in stertorous sleep upon a Victorian sofa of
abominable design, every deformed curve and moulding of which he had
rendered with searching veracity.
I must have sent him in reply some burlesque welcome of the revolution
in his style indicated by the design, for in a day or two I received a
second drawing more monstrous and grotesque than the first, and with the
drawing he wrote: “You divine my purpose. It was the first of a series
to be called the Homes of England.”
But even in these essays in the grotesque, and in the lighter and
sometimes very graceful fancies which he would illustrate so easily and
so rapidly for our amusement, or for the delight of our children, there
was always an unfailing sense of composition and design.
One afternoon on the lawn of Lady Lewis’s cottage at Walton, where we
often met, and where so many happy hours of my life have been spent, he
was discussing in a bantering mood the reproach so often levelled
against him, that his female forms were lean and meagre and lacked the
sense of flesh and blood.
“I think,” he said, “I must make a more determined study of the manner
of Rubens,” and thereupon, taking a sheet of paper from the table where
Lady Lewis was writing, he began at once to compose a picture of
“Susannah and the Elders,” after the manner of the great Flemish master.
It took him only a few minutes to accomplish, and yet, as it lies before
me now, admirable as it is in its sense of caricature, it is no less
striking for a certain beauty in the ordered arrangement of line which
could not desert him even when he was proposing to lampoon himself.
It was, I think, about the same time that he laughingly proposed to
instruct my eldest boy in the principles of anatomy, and there and then
made for him on the spur of the moment two beautiful drawings
representing the anatomy of the good man and the good woman, to which he
added, by special request, a third drawing illustrating the anatomy of
the bad man. On being met with the reproach that the drawing showed
nothing of the details of internal structure, he replied that there were
none, as “the bad man was quite hollow”; and on being further challenged
to illustrate the anatomy of the bad woman, he gravely replied, “My dear
Phil, she doesn’t exist.”
In later days the little Bohemian meetings to which I have referred, at
first restricted to our two selves, took occasionally the form of larger
hospitality. Sometimes Sir George and Lady Lewis, and sometimes Sir
Lawrence Tadema and his wife, would join our party.
On such evenings, to mark the added dignity to
[Illustration: LESSONS IN ANATOMY
From an original drawing by Sir EDWARD BURNE-JONES, Bart.
_To face page 80._
]
[Illustration: LESSONS IN ANATOMY
From an original drawing by Sir EDWARD BURNE-JONES, Bart.
_To face page 80._
]
[Illustration: LESSONS IN ANATOMY
From an original drawing by Sir EDWARD BURNE-JONES, Bart.
_To face page 80._
]
the occasion, we shifted our quarters to Previtale’s, and I have known
no merrier hours before or since than those we passed together.
Burne-Jones always made a grave pretence of being quite ignorant as to
what should be ordered for these little feasts. Of one of them, where he
was to be the host, he wrote to me some few days before imploring me in
a spirit of mock despair to come to his rescue and arrange the _menu_.
“I no more know,” he cries, “what dinner to order than the cat on the
hearth as I write--less, for it would promptly order mice. Oh, Carr,
save my honour and order for me a nice dinner so that I may not be
quoted as a warning of meanness! I am not mean. Order apples of gold on
plates of silver, and let the wine be scented and brought from Lebanon;
but not a mean dinner, nor yet ostentatious or presuming, or such a one
as could possibly compete with the banquets of the affluent. My honour
is in your hands. Oh, Carr, come to the rescue!”
It is extraordinary, in view of the concentrated energy he bestowed upon
his work, how readily and how generously he always responded to the
appeal of his friends. There was no demand they could make upon him
which he seemed unable to satisfy, no help which the youngest or the
most modest student could ask of him which he was not always ready and
willing to give; and yet all these gifts of friendship so lavishly
bestowed were never allowed to interfere with the absolute devotion that
he owed and that he paid to his art.
Behind the affectionate gentleness of his nature, that was susceptible
to every influence, there lay a faith that nothing could shake or
weaken. 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 it.
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, and there were many
who could claim perhaps a closer alliance than I, who could cause him to
swerve for a moment from the labour that was his life.
One of the last letters I received from him must have concerned another
of these little feasts which he had projected and which for some reason
I was compelled to postpone. I cannot now recall what I then wrote to
him, but I suppose my letter must have contained some reference to our
long and close friendship, for I received from him in reply an
affectionate little note that it is a pleasure to me to preserve.
“Dear Carr,” he writes, “I too feel just the same. I want years and
years of us together, and much work and a little play. We will put
it off for a week, then, and I will try and rearrange, and perhaps
Tadema will join.--Yours affectionately,
E. B. J.”
Those “years and years” that would have been so dear to us were
unhappily denied. He was often ailing in the later days of his life, and
it was easy to perceive that he was sometimes apprehensive as to the
condition of his health. And yet he never allowed his own anxieties to
burden others. On one occasion I remember, and it must have been about
this time, he told me he had been to see his doctor, who had questioned
him closely as to his habits as a smoker.
“How many cigars do you smoke in a day?” he had inquired of his patient,
to which Burne-Jones had carelessly replied:
“Oh, I think about six.”
“Well,” replied his adviser, “for the present you had better limit
yourself to three.”
And in detailing the incident to me afterwards Burne-Jones added with a
chuckle:
“You know, my dear Carr, I never did smoke more than three.”
When the end came, and came so swiftly, he left a gap in my life I well
knew could never be filled again. I had not seen quite so much of him
during the last three or four years of his life, but immediately
preceding that period we had been closely associated in a task that lay
very near my heart. I had asked him, with Irving’s concurrence, to
undertake the designing of the scenery and costumes for my play of _King
Arthur_, produced in 1894. At his request I went down to read him the
play while he was at work in the garden studio of the Grange, and at its
conclusion he announced, to my great delight, that he would willingly
undertake the work. The subject was congenial to him; he was deeply
versed in all Arthurian lore, and in his paintings he returned again and
again to that great cycle of romance enshrined for English readers in
the exquisite prose poem of Sir Thomas Malory.
We met often and intimately during the progress of preparation, and I
remember his almost child-like delight when we mounted to the
painting-room at the Lyceum--where Hawes Craven was transferring to a
wider canvas his beautiful design for the scene of the Queen’s
Maying--as he insisted in taking from the scenic artist a brush of giant
dimensions, and executing a passage in one corner of the backcloth so
that he might be able to boast, as he laughingly declared to Craven,
that he had partly painted the scene himself.
[Illustration: OPHELIA
From the picture by Sir J. E. MILLAIS, Bart., P.R.A.]