Edward Burne-Jones

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  Frances knew Burne-Jones for nearly thirty years, and when Georgie’s Memorials appeared in 1904 she was struck by their excellence, but also by how much they left out. ‘Long familiarity and loving comradeship, although they tell the truest stories, may not tell all the life of men who dream. It needs another dreamer to do that … But failing that book of dreams, those with eyes to see may read much in his pictures, and the rest of the story in that admirable biography.’

  With some difficulty, Ned found a present fit for Frances – a copy of Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyat, illuminated by Morris with gold initials and floral margins and illustrated by himself with six miniatures, each in a different predominant colour. Morris, who had presented the first copy he did to Georgie, intended the second to be for Ned. But Ned could not resist giving the exquisite ‘painted book’ to Frances. He also, of course, began to draw her. Her profile appears first as the young bride in the King’s Wedding (1870) where Mary Zambaco is one of the ring of dancers.

  1872 was the year of what were almost his last studies of Mary Zambaco. Although he had written in apparent despair about the Faith, Hope and Temperance commission, suggesting that Ellis might like Drink and Polygamy instead, he produced three beautiful figures, the Temperance, obstinately six inches shorter than the others, being ‘the best I think – it will only be in the faintest tones I can get, and will take time to finish.’16 As Temperance, Mary pours water, with a fine sweeping gesture, on to the last fires of love, and Burne-Jones uses, for almost the first time, the elaborately folded and wrinkled draperies which he now drew easily and which seem to have a life of their own, independent of the body underneath them. Mary’s eyes are downcast in this version of her, hiding their light.

  Her health had continued to suffer, and in October 1872 Morris wrote to Aglaia Coronio, ‘I suppose you will have heard before this reaches you about Mary’s illness and how ill she has been, though I hope it all will come right now. I did see Ned for a fortnight and Georgie scarcely more; it was a dismal time for all of us … [Ned] has not been well at all, sad dog! apart from other matters.’ It is possible that this was one of the nervous and mental breakdowns which recurred at intervals throughout Mary’s life. On recovery she made up her mind to try her luck again in Paris, though not with her husband; the ‘Duchess’, left in charge of her little boy and girl, at once began negotiating with Watts for a portrait, but the uninhibited Greek children were the terror of the studio (Whistler had been quite worn out by little Ossie Coronio) and we find Watts excusing himself – little Demetrius was so tiresome that the painter became ill.17 Mary, meanwhile, was going, but her image remained, and connoisseurs of that haunting irregular profile will find it in unexpected places – on any of the firm’s ‘Luna’ tiles, or in Burford parish church, where she is in one of the west windows.

  Of the Three Graces, only Mrs Coronio was now left, for Marie Spartali was, for the time being, leaving London. Of all the Greeks, Ned had acknowledged her as the most beautiful, ‘and so constant of heart am I’, he wrote twenty years later, ‘that I think so still – she is a Greek and is married to a husband – women often are – I never know why.’18 Indeed most of her friends, and all her family, were amazed at her marriage to the American, W.S. Stillman. He, however, had a romantic story of his own, having emerged from a Seventh-Day Baptist childhood and a journalist’s career as a battered, forty-year-old widower, whose first wife had committed suicide during the horror of the Cretan insurrection of 1866. Marie loved him, and was totally resistant to the idea of marrying into another Greek business house. The myth to which Burne-Jones related her was Danae, quietly watching the building of the brazen tower which will not restrain her. He painted a small panel of this in 1870, and made the allusion even clearer in the later version (1888) which is said to be the best likeness of all of Marie Stillman.

  The year 1872 opened and continued with losses of friends and to friends, a grief which Ned and Georgie shared together. In February, Norton, who was travelling in Germany, lost his young wife in childbirth. On 18 March Aunt Catherwood died, at the age of seventy-two. She was buried in the plot in Brompton cemetery, in the same grave as Christopher, with the inscription ‘childless, but beloved’. Before her death she had moved from Addison Place to 93 Camberwell Road, and it was here that Ned and Georgie went to hear the will read by candlelight. Apart from the legacies to friends and servants and £500 to old Mr Jones, everything (about £3,000) was left to Ned. He had remained for her the schoolboy nephew whose visits she had so much looked forward to.

  The worst blow of all was the breakdown, physical and mental, of Rossetti. Gabriel’s increasing fits of gloom had not deeply worried Ned, who was so liable to them himself; but if he had been with Gabriel that summer he would have been able to warn the doctor in charge that 8 June was a dangerous date in the calendar – the eve of the death of Beatrice. On that night Rossetti took a nearly fatal dose of chloral. Although he recovered, delusions of horror and persecution increased. It could not be denied that, in William Michael’s words, he ‘was not entirely sane’. He was brought back to London, where both Ned and Morris offered to look after him, though as Janey wrote to Bell Scott, ‘my opinion is that he would not care to have my husband’.19 Finally Madox Brown stoutly offered to take him back to Fitzroy Square.

  Burne-Jones felt that the very ground had been cut away beneath his feet. Rossetti was not only his glorious first teacher and generous supporter, but the poet who had understood his love for Mary Zambaco. But the link with the past to which he desperately appealed was exactly what was most disagreeable to Rossetti. The one face Gabriel did not care to look on was Might-Have-Been. He left with his attendants for Pitlochry, where Graham had offered him the use of one of his Scottish houses, and in September he went down to Kelmscott.

  Morris meanwhile had moved out of 26 Queen Square, keeping it as an office and workshop, and had moved to a small house at Turnham Green. It was only half-an-hour’s walk from North End, and Morris was able to come over regularly to The Grange, as he had always meant to do, for Sunday breakfast. Ned had suggested this idea when he first moved to Fulham, and had got a letter back from Morris ‘full of rather more emotion that he usually permitted himself’.

  Continuing as they did over more than twenty years, these breakfasts became legendary. Small wonder that Georgie excused herself from the discussions (though she tells us that she did not want to intrude on their ‘hour and power’) if Ned was really quite so absentminded, and Morris quite so hearty. Occasional visitors watched the meal in dismay. A.W. Mackmurdo says that at table ‘Morris spent his righteous anger in bursts of denunciation against the powers that be while EBJ made comic sketches on the envelopes of the unopened morning letters’. A specially large coffee-cup was kept for Morris (it is now at the Walthamstow Galleries) because he had promised his doctor never to exceed one cup. In later years, when Ned offered him a nice piece of ham, Morris shouted that if he fancied swine’s flesh he would have it, and cared not how it was called.

  The conference on the week’s work took place afterwards, and in 1872 there was a start to be made on the great Christ Church window – ‘the Oxford commission has cheered me I own’, Ned wrote to Fairfax Murray.20 The firm’s middle period glass (of which the Christ Church St Cecilia is a fine example) was often in clear pale colouring on a plain or verdure background. Ned remained a perfectionist. ‘A Christ and a Magdalene – the latter perfectly lovely (the former I grant a failure as usual)’ he noted under ‘Jan: 1st 1872’. C.H. against many of these entries in the account book stands for a large-scale commission at Castle Howard for decoration and stained glass, including a Resurrection (‘as I live, another!’) for the chapel. Fairfax Murray was to assist with the plasterwork but he was so anxious to go to Italy that he left without doing it and Ned, as he wrote to the Howards, felt like beating him. Rooke’s brother-in-law, who came as a temporary replacement, contracted smallpox, and altogether Burne-Jones was distracted between the work and the assist
ants. Further entries in his book suggesting extra payments for ‘nausea at repeating the same subject’ and ‘exhaustion at lifting heavy cartoons’ was, he complains, disregarded.

  He still remained restless at the quarrel with Ruskin. When Professor Norton returned to London that winter he suggested their going down to Oxford together to hear one of the Slade lectures and Ruskin must have been gratified indeed to see them in the audience. Once again Ned saw the rumpled queer-looking academic figure, once again he was moved by the Scottish-Biblical intonation, rivalled only by Newman in its power to hold and move. Ruskin was praising Botticelli’s illustrations to Dante for two reasons: first, Botticelli had wanted to give the people something they would understand, even though he lost money and brought ‘infinite disorder into his affairs’; secondly, Botticelli’s ‘arrangement of pure line in labyrinthine intricacy’ is not an ‘idle arabesque’ but relates directly to the subject; an example is the Sybilla Elispontica in which the withered tree-trunk itself suggests old age.

  This idea of drapery answered exactly to what Burne-Jones had been trying to do in the Phyllis and Demophoön and Temperance – a drapery that ‘speaks for itself’. After the lecture he wrote to Ellis that he could not live without a copy of the Botticelli Dante, which apparently was on offer at Quaritch’s. Ruskin, for his part, invited Georgie and Margaret for a long visit to Brantwood, where he showed them his treasures and entertained the little girl on wet days by piling up his books and jumping over them.

  In the studio, Ned had run into serious trouble with a picture for which Leyland had already waited patiently for four years, The Beguiling of Merlin. The beguiling of Merlin, as a subject, punctuated the life of Burne-Jones (1857, 1861, 1869–73, 1874–7, 1884). Now that, with more time to himself, he had begun to study the Latin, Welsh and French versions of the Arthurian story his imagination still returned to this moment, when Merlin willingly goes to his death rather than break the spell of physical love which subjects him to the enchantress. He placed the figures not against a landscape but in the enclosed space of a hawthorn tree in full flower, the ‘hawthorn brake’ of white May blossom which in the Morte d’Arthur, in mediaeval romance, and indeed in Morris’s Book of Verse, is the traditional scene of love. The branches writhe and twist beneath the load of flowers. The picture was to be the last of his secret acknowledgements to Mary Zambaco.

  The head of Nimuë in the picture called The Enchanting of Merlin was painted from the same poor traitor [he wrote], and was very like – all the action is like – the name of her was Mary. Now isn’t that very funny as she was born at the foot of Olympus and looked and was primaeval and that’s the head and the way of standing and turning … and I was being turned into a hawthorn bush in the forest of Broceliande – every year when the hawthorn buds it is the soul of Merlin trying to live again in the world and speak – for he left so much unsaid.21

  The bush of white hawthorn comes, not from the Morte, but from the French Romance of Merlin. In this version Merlin wakes to find himself in a tower not of steel but of air, which can never be undone while the world endures, and it is Arthur and Gawain who hear while they are out walking the thin voice of the enchanter from the maybush. Only in this intensely personal conception did Burne-Jones record how much of him was imprisoned when he broke with Mary Zambaco. The hidden charge of the picture made him even more distressed than ever when his experimental medium failed and the paint refused to bite. Staring at the canvas he felt ‘flattered’ and saw ‘a dishonoured grave’ in front of him. ‘I don’t know if it was my fault or Robersons’ – let us call it Roberson’s,’ he wrote to George Howard.22 For the new version which he began in 1874 Stillman, at Rossetti’s suggestion, eventually sat for the head of Merlin; Ned was diffident about asking him, but he knew Stillman’s queer face, almost destroyed in childhood by a lump of falling snow, had the right blankness and whiteness for the enchanted enchanter.

  Meanwhile, after the disappointments of 1873, Burne-Jones, although he could not afford it, hoped to have another look at Italy that spring, and to persuade Morris who had found that autumn ‘a specially dismal time’ to come with him. Morris, who had no longer much interest in easel pictures except for Ned’s own, was exceedingly busy, worried about the firm’s finances, hated warm weather and, above all, was planning another journey to Iceland that summer. Yet he agreed to come.

  Before they set out Ned had time for a very characteristic kindness – he put in a good word for Simeon Solomon, who was arrested on a charge of indecent behaviour in a public lavatory; the only other two people concerned with his well being were Becky Solomon and Walter Pater. That February Ned also took an unexpected step – he exhibited again in public. Two pictures, Love Among the Ruins and the Hesperides, were sent to the spring show of the Dudley Gallery. The Dudley was a salon des refusés which had been started (originally for drawings only) in 1864 and which had had considerable success, although visitors tended to get mixed up with the queue for the conjuring at the Egyptian Hall near by. When the pictures were shown later in the year at the South Kensington Museum, Gerard Manley Hopkins, on a day visit to London, noted their ‘instress of expression’. Among the visitors to the Dudley itself was George Eliot, who wrote somewhat awkwardly to Ned that his paintings, in spite of their beauty, had too much personal emotional in them ‘as the result of “outer forces” and not enough of the “inner impulse towards inner struggle”.’

  In April Morris and Ned started by way of Paris for Florence. It may be hazarded that one of the motives of this odd journey was to make sure of Mary’s wellbeing; she had begun work again in Paris as a sculptor and medallist under the name Cassavetti-Zambaco. In any case, Morris did not pretend to enjoy the pictures, being largely occupied with looking round for crockery for the firm; and then, particularly in Venice (where George Howard joined them), there was always the danger that he would be sent into a rage by the restorations. ‘He squashed up George Howard’s hat, thinking it was his own in his rage at what they were doing to St Marks. He … would have liked it all fresh, just done yesterday.’23 They went to Spencer Stanhope’s studio at Bellosguardo, but it rained for a whole week, ‘much to [Morris’s] joy, because for all his life he can speak of the bleak days he spent in Italy’. Spencer Stanhope, as kindly now as when they had all first met on their painting ladders at the Union, was settling down as a disciple of Burne-Jones; his Mill, one of his most successful pictures, was painted at Bellosguardo. Ned, who had found Morris ‘rather an exacting companion’, stayed on another two weeks after he left, but the cough he had developed at Florence, and the fever he had contracted while he was trying to draw the pattern of the chilly old floor of the Duomo at Siena, left him hardly able to crawl. At Bologna he was actually delirious, and when he arrived back in London it took him months to recover. By his own high standards he had not even brought back many drawings. But he found himself ‘pining to be back there, and thinking of little else than high up cities and pictures’. The notion that the name Burne-Jones should ‘really’ be Buon Giorno arose about this time, and he wrote to Fairfax Murray (who had met him in Siena) that he was ‘meditating’, apparently for the first time, a skylight, presumably to try for more solidity of form. But the study of mosaic which he had begun in 1862 in St Mark’s and Torcello was the most important thing he brought back this time from Italy.

  In September Morris returned from Iceland, more devoted to ‘ice and fish and raw snow’ than ever, while Ned privately determined never, if possible to go north of Hampstead. The two families celebrated Christmas together at The Grange, with Janey Morris reclining on her sofa and Charlie Faulkner, Allingham, William de Morgan and Frederic Burton as guests. De Morgan, although or perhaps because he would never allow an unjust word about another person, had a bad effect on Ned, encouraging him to tell excruciating cockney jokes; but the children loved them, and although Burne-Jones claimed that he detested Christmas and would like to go back a year in time every 24 December, Rudyard Kipling’s memory on
ce again was of real family affection and ‘the loveliest sound in the world – deep-voiced men laughing together over dinner’. For companions, Ruddie had not only Phil but his other cousins, Ambo, the son of Georgie’s sister Aggie, and the eight-year-old Stanley Baldwin.

  At the beginning of 1874, Burne-Jones still largely confined himself to the family and friends of long standing. But Frances Graham and her sister had decided that this curious painter, ‘abnormally sensitive’ with strangers, must be brought gradually back into the world. By this time they had bribed their father with the gift of one of Ned’s drawings, bought for 7s 6d., to allow them to go to the theatre, and the four of them began to see plays together. The girls were wild over Ellen Terry, who had just returned to the stage after her exile and had opened as Portia at the Prince of Wales. She joined them sometimes in Graham’s stage box or at supper afterwards; Coventry-born, another Midlander come up to the big city, she was not too impetuous to listen to Ned’s diffident voice, so much quieter and wittier than the others around her.

  To Frances he began to write a long series of illustrated letters, ready to amuse or interest her at every turn of her life, sometimes confiding, sometimes fantastic, sometimes taking her back to his own images of the past – becoming that already – when he had shared the world with Rossetti. He asked her, as he asked all his correspondents, to destroy his letters and, like most of them, she didn’t. She was one of the first girls, in the London of the seventies, to be allowed to receive her own guests, and she presided over her salon in velveteen dresses of sage green and autumn brown, the colours which Morris was now giving up, but which would be forever identified as ‘art shades’, with the firm. At these occasions Burne-Jones was a modest onlooker. It was a standing fiction between them that they would run away together, with Frances doing the cooking, ‘in which particular’, Ned added, ‘I am soon pleased’. (This was not altogether true: he told Rooke he could only face two puddings, cold apple pie and cold currant pie.) In the year of his death Frances still gently revived the fantasy, suggesting that they should go and live ‘dishonoured in lodgings’. It was the acknowledgement of one dreamer to another. Frances told Mrs Bellock Lowndes, with her usual dash and spirit, ‘if she had been born ten years later she would have run off with Burne-Jones’. There was, of course, no such possibility. It was his role to give to her and teach her what he could, and watch her grow up with admiring anguish.