Edward Burne-Jones

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  What struck him about this wild Greek creature, Mary Zambaco, scarcely disguised as an elegant Londoner, was the famous red hair, and next to that the curious irregularity – as against Marie Spartali’s perfection – of her face. ‘It was a wonderful head,’ he wrote,5 ‘neither profile was like the other quite – and the full face was different again.’ More touching still was her expression, as of something that has been unjustly hurt. ‘Two things had power over him,’ Georgie wrote in the Memorials for 1867, ‘beauty and misfortune – and far would he go to serve either; indeed his impulse to comfort those in trouble was so strong that while the trouble lasted the sufferer took precedence over everyone else.’

  Once again, two romanticisms had met. Mary Zambaco brought to Kensington and Bayswater a Byronic afterglow, a reckless determination to love again, and be again undone. She was a natural force, ‘like the billows of the sea’ as Ned later described her, and a beauty of the High Renaissance, so that to study her he had to turn seriously for the first time to da Vinci and Michaelangelo. From a human point of view his attitude needs no explanation. ‘Since you drive me into a corner’, he told Rooke, ‘I must confess that my interest in a woman is because she is a woman and is of such a nice shape and so different to mine.’6

  His reaction to the intense emotional experience of 1866–7 was a fit of depression which left him unable to work, even for the firm. Ruskin came over every day for three or four hours to counsel him, and ‘I have been a nuisance to everyone’.7 By way of relief both families, the Morrises and the Joneses, took lodgings in Oxford for the long vacation. Charlie Faulkner was in residence and eager to see them but there were no larks now and Ned passed through ‘a terrible time of perplexity and self-abasement’. He drew street corners, canal banks, plants and animals – no human beings. ‘Mention Mantegna to me. I am doing nothing – can’t in lodgings with the noise of children,’ he wrote to Fairfax Murray. It was a mercy he did not run into ‘old Duncan’, who was pounding up and down the river that summer in a steam launch, looking for subjects.

  Morris’s account of the holiday was quite different; though he, too, was ill at first, he soon recovered and was happy messing about in boats, happy, too, to be active and hurrying down from London to read aloud further sections of the Earthly Paradise. Both Ned and he were aware that their marriages were reaching a point of crisis, but whereas Ned was on the verge of an experience he couldn’t control, with awkward feelings towards the family he still dearly loved, Morris was grateful for what seemed a truce in Janey’s unaccountable tiredness.

  Now came fulfilment of the year’s desire,

  The tall wheat, coloured by the August fire

  Grew heavy-headed, dreading its decay …

  The introductions to the June, July and August sections of the Earthly Paradise speak of ‘leaving hopes and fear behind’ on the excursions up-river, although they end with the hesitant question, ‘Have we been happy on our day of rest?’ Burne-Jones had been unable to shed his hopes and fears, and it was now time to return to them.

  They came back to London to find that 41 Kensington Square had been sold in their absence, apparently without notification, and they could not renew the lease. But to Georgie this did not seem altogether a disadvantage. She knew that Ned was in perilous company, and she directed their search towards somewhere farther out of London. They fixed on The Grange, in North End, Fulham. The site is now part of a council estate, one block of which is named Burne-Jones House. The Grange was to be their home for the next thirty years.

  10

  1867–70

  PHYLLIS AND DEMOPHOÖN: THE DANGERS OF ENCHANTMENT

  Apparently they had first seen The Grange with Allingham the year before, although in his diaries Allingham says that when he first visited them he had no idea where the place was. Fulham did, indeed, seem a very long cab-ride out of London, virtually a retreat into the country.

  The Grange consisted of two spacious patched-up eighteenth-century houses thrown together and three-quarters of an acre of garden. Samuel Richardson had lived there, although the Joneses did not know this, and it had the right air of studious seclusion. Kelly’s Directory shows that it was surrounded by several market gardeners, a basket-maker, a willow lodge (presumably for the basket-maker) two home-made beer retailers, a horse-dealer, and (this alone shows the remoteness of the place) and a private asylum for ladies. There was also a walnut orchard, from which came sounds that Ned explained to an Italian model as the sound of Englishmen beating their wives. At the corner of the lane you could gather briar roses, in their season. Two terraces had recently been built at the back of the house, but the railway was still several fields away. ‘It is too grand for us,’ Ned wrote to George Howard, ‘we have no right to such a place.’1 But they moved in.

  Both parts of the house belonged to a Mr Charles Johnson, and the Jonses chose the north side as having the better light for painting. Even then, to help out with the rent, they shared with the Wilfred Heeleys. Heeley, waiting to go out east, was a steady old friend from Birmingham days; his wife was a quiet young woman. What the Memorials describe as ‘a veil of green paint and Morris paper’ was drawn over the walls, and the firm, as usual, supplied almost everything, incuding the wine, which Morris imported from France and bottled himself, charging Ned twenty-four shillings a dozen. The consumption at The Grange was about two bottles a day, not a great deal, for although Georgie drank nothing but water Swinburne was a frequent visitor.

  In the November of 1867, shortly before they left Kensington Square, Burne-Jones had opened a bank account for the first time at Praed’s in Fleet Street. Up till then he had been unable to cash crossed cheques at all. He paid in a deposit of £127 10s, presumably from the sale of pictures, as he was still overdrawn with the firm by £62 6s 9d. He had no idea how to draw a cheque and had to be instructed by Leyland, the first of several businessmen who undertook to help him with his affairs; in this Ned was, most satisfactorily, what a businessman expects of an artist. After Leyland, Graham took over, and after Graham, George Lewis. ‘Rossetti had the greatest contempt for my abilities in that way. He used to say, ‘My dear fellow, you’ll always need someone to look after you – you’re no better than a child.”’2 Yet Ned’s helplessness proved, in the end, a better system than Rossetti’s.

  On 4 March 1868, the new life was signalled by a large party at The Grange ‘which’, William Michael Rossetti noted, ‘I see for the first time.’ But Ned could not settle to work in the new large studio. Although Warington Taylor ‘kept on at Ned every other day’ there are no designs entered in the work-book between June 1867 and March 1868, or again between November 1868 and May 1869. ‘This year did little work through illness’ was Ned’s own explanation.

  By the beginning of 1868 his debt to the firm had increased to £121 2s 11d and this was only providentially relieved by a small legacy from Mr Jones’s half-brother. The Grange in 1869 did not have the ordered peace, described in so many memoirs, of later years. Besides the familiar shortage of money, there were tyrannous or drunken Victorian cooks to settle, an unexpected pregnancy on Mrs Heeley’s part, Alice Kipling’s proposal to come on leave from India for a long visit; in the nursery there was an awkward balance of power between the nervous, easily-wounded little boy and the confident, much-admired little girl. But these things did not disturb Georgie so much as the fact that Howell had followed them down to Fulham.

  He had established himself at North End Grove, about two miles away, giving William Michael Rossetti to understand that Ruskin had set him up there ‘that he may be close to Jones, and keep him in health and spirits’. This was in February, although the Fulham rate books show that no rates were paid on his house between 1868 and 1872. But in spite of the familiar mystery of his finances, Howell was certainly in Fulham. Burne-Jones no longer had to ‘run up’ to Brixton to see him. The dangerous confidant was close at hand.

  In the light of this situation it is sad to read Allingham’s account of a dinner party
given by the Morrises at Queen Square to celebrate the publication of the Earthly Paradise.

  Wed, May 27 [1868]. To Queen Square … and find just alighting Mrs Ned in a gorgeous yellow gown: it is a full dress party! and I in a velveteen jacket. Morris, Ned J. (thin), D.G.R. (looking well), Boyce (‘has been ill’), F.M. Brown (oldened), Webb, Howell, Mr Wilfrid Heeley, Publisher Ellis and W.A., Mrs Morris, Miss Burden, Mrs Ned (gay) …

  Georgie’s gaiety must be taken as evidence of courage, in every kind of domestic difficulty. Not long afterwards Alice Kipling arrived from Lahorre, in time for her second baby to be born at The Grange. Difficult Phil, and still more difficult Rudyard Kipling (now two years old) were sent to their grandparents at Bewdley. The new baby, a girl, was delivered on 11 June in Ned’s study, Georgie standing by and rolling it up in a rug, while Ned ‘went out for a walk’. Subsequently the unfailing firm produced an oaken cradle and a workman who for 2s 6d ‘fixed the knobs’, but these entries in his account book are not in Ned’s handwriting.

  As the year wore on Burne-Jones frequently escaped this domestic scene. He had, of course, to call in at the firm, where some of the old easy-goingness still prevailed; when the Prince of Wales opened the new wing at the Great Ormond Street Hospital, they all rushed to the window and hung out Ned’s cartoon of Samuel, weighed down with ginger beer bottles. But he also attended large parties of ‘the Greeks’, and saw a good deal of Howell, Luke Ionides and Legros. Legros was painting his portrait for Constantine Ionides, and this head is a different Burne-Jones from any other likeness, sadder, more sensual, and uglier.

  He had begun to try to break with Mary Zambaco, a process which he found painful beyond measure. 3 June 1868 Ruskin noted in his diary as ‘a terrible day … poor Ned ill’. The pain projected itself in the painter’s imagination through the myth of Phyllis and Demophoön. In this legend the Queen of Thrace begs her lover, the son of Theseus, to return, but he delays and she hangs herself, changing as she dies into an almond-tree. As he embraces the tree it puts out flowers and leaves. Ovid’s second Heroides is an imaginary letter from Phyllis to Demophoön, threatening suicide.

  Dic mihi quod feci? Nisi non sapienter amavi – ‘Tell me what I have done, except to love unwisely?’ This, in fact, was the epigraph which Burne-Jones a year later gave to his picture.

  The heart of the Victorian concept of myth, painted by Rossetti and Burne-Jones, interpreted by Ruskin and Pater, is what Pater called the ‘latent capability’ of the story. Though the mid-nineteenth century was interested in higher criticism and comparative studies, these were felt not to be adequate; they led to the dusty, never-to-be-completed files of Dr Casaubon. The myth is only alive if it is the image of individual experience, and as Ruskin says, if we have ‘the material in our own minds for an intelligent answering sympathy’. In this sense Burne-Jones felt the ‘dic mihi quod feci?’ in the reproaches of Mary Zambaco. Phyllis had been one of Chaucer’s Good Women, but he knew that Mary was not Chaucerian; her ordered image could only be found on the wilder shores of Greece and Rome.

  On 24 January 1869, the painter J.W. Inchbold arrived at The Grange, ‘without, it would seem, any definite invitation’, as W.M. Rossetti put it. Seedy Inchbold, like Solomon but without his alcoholic unworldliness, was a perpetual charge on the Pre-Raphaelite circle. But he had chosen the wrong moment: the crisis at The Grange had reached breaking point.

  Private

  Poor old Ned’s affairs have come to a smash altogether, and he and Topsy, after the most dreadful to-do started for Rome suddenly, leaving the Greek damsel beating up the quarters of all his friends for him, and howling like Cassandra. Georgie has stayed behind. I hear today, however, that Top and Ned got no further than Dover … She [M.Z.] provided herself with laudanum for two at least, and insisted on their winding up matters in Lord Holland’s Lane. Ned didn’t see it, when she tried to drown herself in the water in front of Browning’s house &c. – bobbies collaring Ned who was rolling with her on the stones to prevent it, and God knows what else.

  Under the jauntiness of this letter to Madox Brown, Rossetti conceals, as he often does, a real distress. The tone of his letters to Howell – ‘I have asked for the next news at once, as if it is bad I shall go and see him without delay’ (a great concession) – and to Janey Morris, are in quite a different tone. ‘Do let me know any news of Ned and his affairs … P.S. How is poor Mary Z?’ he adds to Howell (25 January 1869).

  The wretched scene began in Lord Holland’s Lane (now Holland Walk), behind the Ionides’ house at 1 Holland Park. There was heavy fog that night. They proceeded, presumably up Westbourne Grove towards Mary’s house at the end of Porchester Terrace. But they stopped short at the bridge over the Regent’s canal which marked the place where the two tow-paths met. It was notorious for suicides. Browning’s house was 19 Warwick Crescent, immediately behind it, and since at this time he kept geese, which gave instant alarm, in his back garden, he may well have been the source of Rossetti’s information. The arrival of the police meant a real struggle – indeed they were lucky to escape trouble, for the number of police charges for attempted suicides equalled those for street-trading in indecent Valentines in that cold January of 1869. There is no reason to think that Mary did not really mean to destroy herself, or that the image did not imprint itself on Burne-Jones’s memory. ‘I once saw a ghost,’ he wrote to Olive Maxse in 1894, ‘Georgie says it was Margaret’s nurse, who used to walk in her sleep, who stood by my bed – but I think it was a real ghost, because it looked drowned, and the nurse would not look – [sic].’3

  The attempt failed, Morris and Ned did not cross the Channel, but the crisis was not relieved. ‘Forgive my reserve’, Georgie wrote to Rosalind Howard, ‘but I am obliged to show it in time of trouble or I should break down’, adding in a P.S. ‘Thus far I wrote this morning, but Edward is so much better than I am now able to tell you that he is at home again, having been too weak to face the journey.’4 In answer to an anxious letter from Rosalind, she wrote again:

  indeed, my dear, I am no heroine at all, and I know where I come short as well as anyone else does – I have simply acted all along from very simple little reasons, which God and my husband know better than anyone – I don’t know what God thinks of them – Dearest Rosalind, be hard on no one in this matter, and exalt no one and may we all come well through it at last. I know one thing, and that is that there is love enough between Edward and me to last out a long life if it is given us.5

  Of this letter one can only say that not many painters, and not many men, deserve such a wife.

  But even Georgie could not stand the strain indefinitely, and for the time being she left home taking the children with her. ‘Do not speak with Webb or anyone about me,’ Ned wrote to George Howard, ‘but say I am out of sorts and no more … I mean to go nowhere but shut myself up from everyone.’6 He ‘trembled’, he said, ‘at the sound of the bell’, and he had written in the same sense to Howell and Rossetti.

  Georgie’s refuge, once again, was Oxford. She took lodgings at 18 Museum Terrace, and here she sat, after Phil was in bed, reading the books and imagining she was the undergraduate they belonged to. ‘There are a great many hours in every day, I assure you,’ she wrote to Rosalind, ‘more than usual.’7

  Ned’s natural confidant was Morris, who had dropped everything to make the wild dash to Dover. ‘Bare is back without brother behind.’ But for Morris the writing of the Earthly Paradise, and even the worries of the firm, had been a distraction from the ambiguous situation in his home. Janey’s illness was (like all illnesses) taken very seriously by Rossetti; that she understood this is shown by her ‘presentiment’ that if she were to ‘feel myself well, all those I now call my friends would change, and would not be able to stand me’. His concern had grown into an obsession with her beauty, and in 1868 or 1869, into a positive physical need for her presence in the room. Before he had finished her Portrait in a Blue Silk Dress he began a study of her as La Pia of the Purgatorio, who died in
her castle in the marshes, locked up by her husband; ‘this is known to him’, La Pia tells Dante, ‘who wedded me with his jewel.’

  Morris steadfastly continued to regard Rossetti, with some justification, as a sick man. But Rossetti began to treat him with a jocular patronage, even in public, which made Burne-Jones, as soon as he emerged from The Grange, feel wretched. ‘You don’t know how lonely I am,’ he wrote to Rossetti, ‘… if you gird at Top I grow impatient and feel cross – if it’s before strangers I feel explosive and miserable and so on –’. This letter is signed ‘your sick-at-heart Ned’.8

  1869 is the year Georgie does not deal with at all in her Memorials – she indicates it only through the chapter heading (otherwise quite unexplained) from the Keats sonnet

  Heart, thou and I art here, sad and alone!

  What is far more difficult to describe is Morris’s feeling, throughout these troubled months, for Georgie. She felt it better to destroy his letters. ‘I turned to my archives, and find that the letters from your father that I have kept only begin in 1876,’ she told May Morris.9 Possibly she did not need to turn to her archives to know this, for in 1869 Morris felt a loyalty and sympathy for her, combined with a need to give and receive affection, which trembled on the brink of love. The withdrawal of his wife, the situation with Rossetti, made him not jealous but nostalgic, though it is possible for human beings to feel nostalgia for what they have never had. But his deeper tenderness was called out by his knowledge of what Georgie was suffering.

  Peevish and weak and fretful do I pray

  To thee greathearted, to thee wise and strong

  Who bearst the burden of thy grief and wrong