Edward Burne-Jones

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  The world perchance to mock and jest would turn

  My love to thee, and ask what I desire

  Or with the name of some unholy fire

  Would name the thing wherewith my heart doth yearn.

  It is clear (as Mr Philip Henderson was the first to point out) that many of Morris’s poems of ‘the Earthly Paradise time’ are to Georgie or about her.10 In another incoherent sonnet he thanks her because she does not ‘deem my service sin’. But sympathy in such a case was an awkward matter. ‘We two are in the same box and need conceal nothing,’ he wrote in pencil at the end of one manuscript, ‘don’t cast me out – scold me but pardon me.’ We are strongly directed by Mackail to look to the introductory sections of the Earthly Paradise for ‘autobiography so delicate and outspoken that it must needs be left to speak for itself’. From the introductions to November, December and January, and still more from the fragment Alone, Unhappy by the fire I sat, where the woman checks his kiss with the word ‘Brother!’ it appears that Morris did make some kind of declaration, how decent and embarrassed can be judged from the transparent goodness of his character. ‘Rhyme slayeth shame’, as he put it, but shame remained in real life.

  … nor joy nor grief nor fear

  Silence my love; but those grey eyes and clear

  Truer than truth pierce through my weal and woe …

  These are recognisably Georgie’s eyes, and she dealt with the situation with the dignity of a true daughter of the manse.

  ‘At the age of more than thirty years,’ Morris wrote in his last unfinished romance, Killian of the Closes, ‘men are more apt to desire what they have not than they that be younger or older.’ Time, as he very well knew, would heal the relationship, and the ‘frank and fathomless’ grey eyes would not then be felt as a reproach.

  Be patient, heart, thy day they yet shall fill

  With utter rest – yea, now thy pain they bless,

  And feed thy last hope of the world’s redress …

  Morris ‘late made wise’, as he says himself, to his own feelings, wanted to give Georgie something – the best thing that he had. For her he wrote out and illuminated, in 1870, his Lovers of Gudrun; for her, too, he produced the beautiful manuscript Book of Verse,11 bordered with green leaves. The frontispiece shows him in miniature, in his blue suit and blue blouse, and there is a note to the effect that the illustrations with the exception of page I, are not by Burne-Jones (although he designed them) but by Fairfax Murray.

  Meanwhile Mary Zambaco did not accept the idea of parting from Ned, and her erratic behaviour and wild dashes through the fog and rain began to affect her health; this attracted increased sympathy from Rossetti when he returned to London from Scalands in September 1869. ‘I like her very much and am sure that her love is all to her,’ he wrote to Janey Morris (5 March 1870). ‘She is really extremely beautiful when one gets to study her face. I think she has got much more so within the last year with all her love and trouble.’12 This letter also refers to an outing – Rossetti and Janey, Ned and Mary, Alecco and his ‘flame’ (Miss Zarifi, Mary’s cousin); they were to go to Evans, the famous supper and singing club where ladies were only admitted to the gallery. Just at this time Professor Norton was regretting, in his dull kindly way, that though he saw Morris often Mr Morris was ‘generally too delicate to be of the party’.

  Although Burne-Jones had nothing to send to the 1869 winter exhibition at the O.W.S., ‘Really he has nothing to show for the year scarcely’, Georgie wrote to Rosalind Howard,13 he was at work on the loveliest series of drawings he ever did. These are the studies of M.Z., which compare directly with Rossetti’s dawings of Lizzie Siddal, or Whistler’s etchings of Jo. But whereas Lizzie is most touching asleep in her chair, and so too is Jo in Weary, M.Z. gazes towards us or away with eyes brilliant with unshed tears. The drawing is not sensuous but precise and delicate, tracing the contrast between the cheek and the cloud of hair streaked with light. They are a lover’s drawings, searching by instinct and through the exact pressure of the pencil for the secret of her unhappiness.

  But Burne-Jones was not satisfied. He felt, as he was to do many years later in the case of his daughter, that this particular face must be recorded, like a talisman, by another hand. He wanted a picture of Mary by Rossetti. Rossetti was much occupied, preparing his poems for publication in April, but he did not refuse this urgent appeal from Ned. ‘I think I have made a good portrait of Mary and Ned is greatly delighted with it’, he told Janey. If it had ever been possible to take the affair lightly, he could not do so now. Ned’s letter of thanks showed his feelings without reserve.

  I didn’t bore you the other day, did I? It is hard not to behave quite badly – but all that portrait-making excited and exhilarated me and made me silly – I was so glad to have such a portrait, and for you to know her a little better – if ever so little – I thought you had little sympathy for me in the matter, before – and as I believed it to be all my future life this hurt me a bit. I can’t say how the least kindness from any of you to her goes to my heart. Before you send it home let me have a frame made that has a door in it that locks up, and that I may return an evasive answer to an inquisitive word. Keep well and strong. I feel as if I depended on you so much – nothing has happened since that I should say it – I may say it if I feel it – ever your affectionate Ned.14

  The phrase ‘as I believed it to be all my future life’ shows that at one point Burne-Jones intended to throw in his lot with Mary, which would certainly have meant leaving the country, perhaps for the Greek Islands which he wanted to see all his life, but never saw. That was not an impossibility. In 1869 the Joneses had been among the first to call upon George Eliot and George Lewes when they came back from Germany, unmarried, but living together as man and wife.

  The fact that Morris, Burne-Jones and Rossetti could live through these days and months and maintain such a convincing everyday life will only seem strange to those whose marriage has experienced no crisis. The expression of the ‘manifest heart’ was confided to their poetry and painting and it was almost a sign of desperation in Morris when he turned to a novel of contemporary life.15 This novel, on fifty-three sheets of blue paper, remains unfinished among his papers at the British Museum, and once again Mackail tells us that it has ‘many passages unmistakably drawn from his own experience’. This ‘tale’ introduces in the opening pages a jilted woman who walks through the rain ‘with a feeling of being too late’, and creeps, wet and tired, up to her bedroom. ‘When I began to take off my clothes – dear, I can’t tell you any more what I did, but it was very dreadful.’ But the main story, set against the river meadows and farmsteads that Morris loved, concerns two brothers who grow up to be rivals for the same girl. They represent not Morris and Rossetti, as has been suggested, but the two sides of Morris himself. John is practical and doing, a good fisherman with difficulty in controlling his temper, Arthur is the dreamer. The heroine is a Methodist minister’s daughter, with grey eyes.

  Amidst apparent coldness they would be tender, O how tender with love, amid apparent patience they would burn with passion, amid apparent cheerfulness they would be dull and glassy with anguish. No lie or pretence could ever come near them, they were the index of a love and greatness of heart that wielded the strong will in her and that serious brow which gave her the air of one who never made a mistake, an [sic] look which without the sanctification of the eyes might perhaps have given an expression of sourness and narrowness to her face.

  If Morris does not mean Georgie it is hard to tell what he does mean, since the heroine, Clara, does not in fact suffer any anguish at all. Not surprisingly Morris could not finish his novel – his notes for the ending are on the lines of the Heir of Redclyffe, though they show that John will be defeated. He sent part of the manuscript to Georgie – so he told Louie Baldwin – ‘to see if she could give me any hope. She gave me none, and I have never looked at it since.’

  While Ned continued to draw Mary Zambaco and to bear her repr
oaches, the ‘Duchess’, quite undaunted, commissioned him to paint her as Dante’s Beatrice. ‘A woman in a red dress’ is his laconic entry in his list of pictures. The portrait drew him even closer to Rossetti, the one most likely to understand, poich’io no trovo chi mecco ragione. But, as no one knew better than Rossetti, Beatrice only wore ‘a crimson garment’ when she was nine years old, and the Burne-Jones Beatrice in a red dress is not Beatrice at all, but Cavalcanti’s mistress; in fact, the quotation on the frame is from Cavalcanti’s Ballate, praising his lady above all others, including Beatrice herself. Beatrice herself at this period of Rossetti’s life, meant only Jane Morris.

  In 1870 Ned also finished the Phyllis and Demophoön. In the later version of 1882 the feeling, as well as the likeness to Mary Zambaco, is lost, but the original water-colour is a study in movement, counter-movement and restraint which he never managed again. The strong impulse comes from left to right as Phyllis, imprisoned against her will in the green sap of the tree, throws herself against the wind, and against the drifting blossoms, towards her lover. ‘The head of Phyllis in the Demophoön picture is from the same’ – he wrote in 1893,16

  and would have done for a portrait … don’t hate [her] – some things are beyond scolding – hurricanes and tempests and billows of the sea – it’s no use blaming them … no, don’t hate – unless by chance you think my workmanship is bad, it was a glorious head – and belonged to a remote past – only it didn’t do in English suburban surroundings – we are soaked in Puritanism and it will never be out of us and I hate it and it makes us the most cautious hypocritical race on earth …

  To Beatrice and Phyllis Burne-Jones added an Evening Star, Night, and Love Disguised as Reason, half comically treated, with Georgie in doctor’s gown admonishing her two sisters. The studio became full of work, which overflowed into the next room. All five pictures were sent to the O.W.S. summer exhibition, which opened in the April of 1870. Burne-Jones, to all appearances, had no suspicion that they would cause any trouble.

  Most of the notices of the exhibition were as hostile to Burne-Jones as usual. The Illustrated London News had bought the rights of Carl Haag’s Bearded Bedouin Smoking which, according to the reviewer, ‘occupied the post of honour’, and intended to publish it as an engraving; they compared Haag most favourably to Burne-Jones. This was in no way the fault of Carl Haag, a cosy, gin-drinking German Hofmaler who had been established for twenty years in St John’s Wood. The Illustrated called Mr Jones’s subjects morbid, emaciated, thick-lipped, loathsome were it not for their fantastic unreality, and appealing only to ‘dilettante tastes, acquired or pretended to be acquired’. They also, quite unfairly, protested against his use of gum ‘to reproduce the present appearance of old Venetian pictures’. The Times was even harder. Although their critic, Tom Taylor, didn’t like Carl Haag either, and was scornful of the Smoking Bedouin, he was disturbed by the ‘spread of mediaevalism’; he was glad, or said he was, that Mr E.B. Jones ‘had a large circle of friends and admirers’, but that Phyllis and Demophoön disgusted him. He could not deny the intensity of the expression of the pursuing nymph, but ‘the idea of a love-chase, with a woman follower, is not pleasant’. The Evening Star, described by young Sidney Colvin in the Pall Mall as ‘an embodied soul floating in the cool blue-glimmering twilight’, seemed to Taylor a ‘figure in light bottle green, grasping, not gracefully, a drapery of rather darker bottle green’.

  Although Taylor felt uncomfortable at the deeply-realised subject of Phyllis and Demophoön, he made no objection to the nudity of the male figure, and the press were surprised when, as the Graphic put it (21 May 1870), the picture was ‘unaccountably removed from the walls’. This was two weeks after the opening, and different accounts of the matter show how confused it was from the start. The Memorials speak of an anonymous letter; the Dalziel brothers ‘if we remember rightly’, thought ‘that some great lady had been very much shocked’; Walter Crane blamed ‘the representations of influential members of the Society’; and Roget refers to it as ‘an unfortunate difference … The Painter, it is said, declined to make some slight alteration in removable chalk’. This presumably meant blocking out the genitals. The matter rested on the decision of the President.

  The President was still Fred Tayler, who only wanted to finish his last year of office without tiresome disturbances. He called on Ned and asked him to withdraw the picture; this was done at once. It was already sold to Leyland. Then, losing his head, and not liking the empty space on the wall, Tayler suggested that Ned should call on Carl Haag and choose a replacement from one of his ample store of Bedouins. This was a worse insult than the chalk, and Burne-Jones refused. The space was filled up with two small pictures, a Study by Willis and a View of Frankfurt by Callow, but the effect on Burne-Jones was decisive.

  Why should he care so much? The hostility of the critics and of the O.W.S. itself was nothing new, and the campaign against nudity, led by the academician ‘Clothes’ Horsley, had been fought for years and was no longer taken very seriously. Millais was risking a life-size nude at the Academy (the Knight Errant) that very year. Burne-Jones was guilty of many weaknesses, but in defence of his art, never. The real ground of complaint against the picture was surely the poignant reference to a physical and emotional situation which a good many people knew about, and the fact that the half-naked Phyllis had the striking profile of Mary Zambaco. The Ionides, of course, great patrons that they were, were not so ignorant as to think the model for the face must be the model for the body, but the public could think so and did think so.

  At some point during those deeply embarrassing weeks Howell was as he put it himself, ‘struck’. His own account was that he tried, with ill success, to bring Mary and Georgie together, but there is no question that he interfered and that he caused grave injury.17 All that can be safely said is that after 1870 he ceased to be Ruskin’s secretary. He was never again received by the Ionides or at Little Holland House, and neither Burne-Jones, who was tolerant, nor Georgie, who was scrupulously fair, could ever feel able to forgive him.

  Ned wrote almost in despair to Rossetti to reproach him for the ‘countenance’ he gave Howell. ‘I feel I could not endure a man who had hurt you one tenth part as much … it is just to say this much isn’t it old man.’ In a second letter he says he could overlook Howell’s ‘looseness in money matters’ but ‘here are your friends suffering possibly for life from him … and it is a great disaster we ever knew him or let others know him … when I think of this last I could bury my head in a bag.’18 Although Rossetti wrote to William Michael that he intended to keep clear of Howell, ‘Jones being so much the older and more valued friend of the two’, he was beginning to find Howell useful as an agent, and this made him slow to respond.

  Georgie stayed away a good deal through 1869, mainly with her family, but she began to feel the need of more counsel than her sisters could give. Morris could not be consulted, for, as he says in a letter to Aglaia Coronio, ‘my intercourse with G. has been much interrupted, not from any coldness of hers, or violence of mine; but from so many untoward nothings.’ She returned, as so many others did, to the wise friend she had made during the previous year, George Eliot, and formed the habit of calling not on the crowded ‘Sundays’, but at the quiet end of the day. In the July of 1870 she went with the children to Whitby, where the Leweses were taking seaside lodgings. They went down to the beach, the two women discussed Faust, and whatever George Eliot said, it was certainly of comfort. ‘My heart smites me that I have somewhat resembled those friends who talk only of themselves to you,’ Georgie wrote, ‘… the only atonement I can make is a resolve that what you have said to me in advice and warning shall not be lost.’

  Ned, alone at The Grange, wrote affectionately to the children; he was at work on yet another commission from the ‘Duchess’ – the Allegorical Portrait of Mary Zambaco. This beautiful little picture might be related to Rossetti’s Mrs Morris in a Blue Silk Dress. Mary is in sea-green silk, with a flower
and an open book, as in Rossetti’s design. The book is opened at a miniature of Blind Love, the first version of Chant d’Amour, so that the mysterious suspended emotion of the picture, triste ou gai, tour à tour, is identified for ever with Mary Zambaco. The flowers are iris and white dittany (passion). The arrow on the table, which she neither touches nor looks at, transfixes a paper signed E.B.J. 1870. Mary’s glance is exceedingly sad, and one of the owners of the picture, after the Cassavetti sale in 1965, was not able to live with it and turned its face to the wall.

  Mary’s portrait is dated 7 August 1870. At the end of July, when the O.W.S. exhibition closed, he had sent in his formal resignation to the Society. In a dignified letter he had referred to the antagonism which had met him from the beginning – ‘therefore I accept your desertion of me this year merely as the result of so complete a want of sympathy between us in matters of Art, that it is useless for my name to be enrolled amongst yours any longer.’ He offered the usual thanks and regret, ‘but in so grave a matter as this I cannot allow any feeling except the necessity for absolute freedom in my work to move me.’ The committee took the risk of asking him to reconsider, but he stood firm.

  His decision was made, and he stood to lose a great deal. The Society’s gallery was his only direct contact with the public. He had no dealers and no agents. Through the O.W.S. shows he had met his chief patrons, Graham and Leyland, and with Sidney Colvin just established on the Pall Mall, and Stephens on the Athenaeum he could just begin to count on some understanding notices. Now he would stand, as a painter, entirely alone. He knew, however, that he had the support of some of the profession.19 The O.W.S. received a shock when Frederick Burton, returned from his summer tour, heard what had happened and resigned in sympathy. Burton had been an exhibitor since 1856, was learned in music and antiquities, altogether a man of standing. When, like Ned, he refused to reconsider his decision, the committee must have felt not relief but dismay.