Chapter VI: 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

By Sir EDWARD BURNE-JONES, Bart. (_a_).

_To face page 78._ ]

From an original drawing by Sir EDWARD BURNE-JONES, Bart. (_b_).

_To face page 78._ ]

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

From an original drawing by Sir EDWARD BURNE-JONES, Bart.

_To face page 80._ ]

From an original drawing by Sir EDWARD BURNE-JONES, Bart.

_To face page 80._ ]

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.

From the picture by Sir J. E. MILLAIS, Bart., P.R.A.]