The chain the toilers bear
Is growing thin and frail.
Burne-Jones, as might be expected, did not fail to defend Morris when he heard him attacked. Frances Balfour noticed that he smiled when Morris, ‘having preached at a street corner that all things should be held in common’, appeared at The Grange ‘in explosive indignation’ because his grapes at Hammersmith had been stolen in the night. ‘Then in graver mood he would praise Morris for his advocacy of “causes” he knew little about ‘… while every minute of his time was precious for his designs, and Burne-Jones would glow like the colours he described.’
Yet Ned had failed Morris, and he knew it, though it was, he believed, the only time he did so. He did not either found or join a Fulham Democratic League. Georgie, on the other hand, an organiser and committee-woman of dauntless courage, would have been glad to do either. She remained a staunch Ruskinian Socialist and till the end of her life embarrassed her loving grandchildren who were ready to ‘cry with confusion’ when she fixed her clear gaze on some ‘unlettered old woman, telling her tidings of comfort from Fors Clavigera‘. Meanwhile Morris, sure of her understanding, wrote her a detailed account of every step he took. ‘You see, my dear, I can’t help it,’ he told her in 1883, ‘the ideas that have taken hold of me will not let me rest, nor can I see anything else worth thinking of.’
The beginning of 1883 brought Ned yet another painful blow. This was the announcement of Frances Graham’s engagement to the barrister John Fortescue Horner. She had descended the Golden Stairs. It was a step which she herself described as like coming to port after stormy seas. But she was marrying a man of forty, not so very much younger – Burne-Jones often made this kind of calculation – than he was himself. She was to be taken away to the depth of the country, to Wells in Somerset. Before she went, she came down to Rottingdean and he painted her as The Spirit of the Downs; ‘we all’, says Georgie, ‘recognised the portrait’.
It does not help this kind of regret to know that it is absurd and must always have been absurd. For Frances he had poured out a wealth of invention, not minding if it was lost or kept, but knowing that she had the heart to care for it; he had drawn straight on to linen so that she could embroider it, illustrated, illuminated – ‘many a patient design went to adorning Frances and her ways,’ he wrote to Ruskin, managing after a struggle to strike the correct tone,
sirens for her girdle, Heavens and Paradises for her Prayer books, Virtues and Vices for her necklace-boxes – ah! the folly of me from the beginning – and now in the classic words of Mr Swiveller ‘she has gone and married the gardener.’ Well, I can’t remember a tithe of the folly there.
One of the patient designs (it took five years in all) was the beautiful Graham piano, in green stained wood, with seven roundels of Orpheus and Eurydice; Burne-Jones had included himself as a wintry Pluto. The last roundel was the touching Regained Lost. ‘I wish the past would bury the past,’ he once wrote.13 ‘That was the sin of Orpheus, to look behind him, even though Eurydice called.’ And to Ruskin he added: ‘We’ll paint pictures of the wretches, and laugh and be scornful yet.’ But he could not bring himself to write to Frances for more than a year after her marriage.
‘I have been too miserable for a month past to do anything’, he told the always sympathetic ‘Duchess’.14 His eyes troubled him particularly. ‘I spent all yesterday at an oculist’, he wrote to Swinburne, who after several failed appointments was eager to show him Tristram of Lyonesse,
and when I appear I shall be in blue spectacles like a ···· German – pretend you don’t notice – I know it is a great liberty to go in blue spectacles to the house of even one’s oldest friend – it’s like sitting in a wet macintosh.15
The eye failure, he admitted, ‘frightened me horribly’.
Yet the early eighties brought him great consolations, without which indeed this oddly balanced and tender-hearted man could hardly have continued to work as he did. The first of these consolations was the doing of Ruskin himself. Ned’s letter about Frances was in answer to a request for a list of all his pictures to date: Ruskin’s second Slade lecture was ‘to be about you – and I want to reckon you up, and it’s like counting clouds’. In this lecture, which placed Burne-Jones in relation to the Pre-Raphaelites and to Watts, Ruskin told his audience that to understand this painter they must adventure ‘amidst the insecure snows and cloudy wreaths of the Imagination’; it was a strange land of the heart and intellect, the ‘imagination of learning’, and yet the drawing was ‘entirely masterful’, suggesting ‘the grandeur of action in the moving hand, tranquil and swift as a hawk’s flight, and never allowing a vulgar tremor, or a momentary impulse to impair its precision or disturb its serenity’. Meanwhile Burne-Jones, touched by this fine tribute, but conscious of so many vulgar tremors and momentary impulses, had begun what the Memorials tell us was ‘the most soothing work he ever did’. This was the Flower Book.
The Flower Book consists of thirty-eight water-colours in tiny roundels, only just over six inches across. They were given to Georgie, one by one, as they were finished, and are now in the British Museum. They are mostly in bright colours, predominantly blue, touched with gold, or painted on yellow or red which shows through to make the lights. But gold and white are also hatched and speckled over the surface as highlights, and sometimes Chinese white is floated over pale colours to give the effect of clouds and drapery. They are delicate, fresh and strange, and one would have thought, quite unreproducible. But seven years after Burne-Jones’s death Georgie had 300 copies printed by the Fine Arts Society for private distrubution, and the reproduction was so meticulous that loose pages are still being bought as originals.
In the Memorials Georgie gives no sign of recognising quite how odd the ‘soothing work’ was. Ned did not do pictures of flowers, but of flower names. The names could not be made up; they had to be collected from old botanists or lists sent by country friends. If the name was right, it opened a direct access, like an intensified view through a small round window, into the world where his own limited range of private images joins the world’s store of archetypes – precisely what Yeats described as the Anima Mundi. The first picture he finished, Love in a Mist, showed a naked man helpless in a solid cloud of mist. In Jacob’s Ladder the angels on the ladder seem static while the earth and heaven move in wild circles behind them. Witches’ Tree returns to Merlin and Nimué. The Grail is carried through a dark wood to a dying Knight in Golden Cup. A mermaid has her arms round her drowned man, with a bell ringing under the water, in Grave of the Sea. Meadowsweet is Arthur in Avalon. Golden Shower is in the interior of Danae’s tower, with reflections of light from the gold. Love and his flock of birds reappears several times. Angels do not seem to cast shadows, though everything else does. In Wake Dearest the Prince bends over the Briar Rose. Morning Glory gives the effect of the first light over the cornfields, with an angel floating in a blue mist rapidly disappearing in the heat. In Welcome to the House, a little study in shades of gold, an angel opens a heavy gold door to welcome Margaret (though on the whole the faces are not characterised). Wall Tryst, in greenish moonlight, is Thisbe putting her letter through the wall, according to Ned’s note at the back, where there is a long list of possible names, ending with Broken Hearts. Arbor Vitae is an image which was becoming increasingly important to him – the living Cross, shown as a tree growing from the earth. Only the foot is shown, with the lights of Jerusalem in the distance, and two stones on the ground. ‘You must not call it Jerusalem, Edward.’
These secret designs, being on a miniature scale, could be easily taken down to Rottingdean, and many of them were finished there. He was supposed to rest, but could not acquire the habit of doing nothing. Nor was Rottingdean, however delightful, quite the centre of peace that he had thought it. Guests were asked down, and a bed found in the village for the unexacting Rooke. In the holidays Macdonald, Baldwin and Poynter relations arrived. Rudyard Kipling was brought down by his headmaster, Crom Pric
e, and for the first time, saw where:
The wise turf cloaks the white cliff edge
As when the Romans came.
Up on the downs, as Ned described it, there was ‘the smell of a thousand grasses’, and the wind blew the mind clean. But in the village there were quantities of dogs and hens which disturbed him far more than the noise of traffic and (what in the last resort he always needed) plenty of company.
The consoling influence which, with the Flower Book, helped him to overcome his distress of 1882–3 was the acquaintance of a small girl. This child was Katie Lewis, the youngest daughter of George Lewis, on whom Ned increasingly relied for help with his business affairs.
Lewis really was, and chose to give the effect of being, like a character out of Dickens – probably Jaggers in Great Expectations. He was born, like Ned, in 1833, but as a Jew was not allowed to go to Oxford: he studied at the new University College and was articled at seventeen as his uncle’s solicitor’s clerk. He liked to recall his first client, a very large woman whose son was accused of robbing the till in a public house. In the years that followed he specialised in fraud and commercial libel, and became the defence solicitor, it seemed, for half the Victorian world. By maintaining a network of underworld contacts he got to know enough about all the adventurers and criminals in London to save many clients from blackmail. He was Parnell’s solicitor, and Parnell trusted him; he prepared Whistler’s petition in bankruptcy; he acted in the Balham case and was the only man to know who really poisoned Charles Bravo; he handled the difficult Baccarat case and helped to extricate the Prince of Wales. ‘Oh, he knows everything about us all, and forgives us all,’ said Oscar Wilde, whose real collapse began after Lewis refused to act for him any further. Yet Lewis shared his father’s reputation as a reformer and poor man’s lawyer. He was proud of his Jewish ancestry and kept on the dark warren-like chambers in Holborn where he and all his brothers and sisters had been born. Here visitors were sometimes admitted to the gas-lit strong-room where the great black deed-boxes were turned to the wall so that no names could be seen. Lewis had his enemies, but he had their measure. He committed nothing to paper – all his secrets would die with him – and a man who had no vices except a weakness for a good cigar could not be got at.
When he was left a widower in 1867 Lewis chose his second wife, like his first, from the German Jewish community, and with her by his side he became a genial patron of the arts. His town house in Portland Place was a centre of music and hospitality. The cellars were packed with rich gifts from his clients – gold and silver, oriental curios, weapons, vases, cigar-cases; Lewis neither looked at them nor spoke about them. Upstairs in the great rooms were hung the pictures he loved, and from Burne-Jones he commissioned a portrait of his wife and several portraits of his daughters. A place of honour over the drawing-room fireplace was reserved for Katie.
Burne-Jones took two years to finish the portrait – from 1882 to 1884. Katie is dressed, not at all becomingly, in black velvet with black stockings. She lies at full length on Burne-Jones’s familiar studio couch, absorbed in reading – the picture is signed on the pages of the book – and her expression is uncompromising and even cross. No attempt has been made to give her solidity – her head does not even sink into the pillow – she is a pattern against the red-brown drapery, while the orange, the black velvet, and the little Yorkshire terrier make an absurd but elegant reference to Ned’s favourite Arnolfini portrait. Yet this is one of his most successful portraits, and his treatment of the resolute face has the same respect that Lewis Carroll showed to Alice. For at six years old Katie knew exactly how life should be conducted.
George Lewis recognised the quality of the portrait immediately. ‘Although he knew enough to hang half the Dukes and Duchesses in the kingdom’, Burne-Jones told Rooke, ‘he couldn’t think how to thank me. He fidgeted about and finally gave me as many boxes of cigars as he could lay hands on.’16
It was while Lewis was in Paris with Comyns Carr, during the summer of 1883, that Burne-Jones wrote to the little girl whose Papa was away the famous series of Letters to Katie. They contain some of his most delightful drawings – the pigs and the pork pies, the butler dropping the tea things – and some in which the sadness is not far below the surface: he appears as a crumpled, ageing figure being taught to dance by a graceful Margaret, or vainly trying to climb into his own pictures and falling through the canvas. The letters, as Graham Robertson points out in his reticent introduction to the published edition, were written when Burne-Jones was in ‘a babyless void’; his own children were growing up and ‘he had grown to need the criticism and collaboration of a baby’.
But Katie herself grew up. The imperial certainty of six years old began to fade. Oscar Wilde, writing to Mrs Lewis in February 1882, is already worried to hear from Phil that Katie is turning angelic and ‘giving up’ to her sister. It was her ‘fascinating villainy as a trenchant critic of life’ that had attracted Wilde, and touched Burne-Jones in the sour, forceful little girl whom he immortalised.
As Katie grew up, so too did Margaret, and passing effortlessly from the awkward age which Phil never left, emerged as an enchanting eighteen, ‘dispensing’, as Burne-Jones put it, ‘lower middle-class hospitality with a finish and calm which would not disgrace a higher social position’. The possibility that she might grow up still further – might want to marry – was unthinkable, and therefore unthought of by her father, but in August 1884, when she was getting ready to go to Scotland on holiday, he suddenly became quite certain she would never come back alive. William Richmond was asked to paint a good likeness before she went away. As it happened, Richmond himself had second sight – he ‘saw’ the death of the architect William Burges in his Gothic bedroom in Melbury Road three weeks before it happened – and he painted a most sympathetic portrait which was hanging on the stairs at The Grange when Margaret returned. It was joined later by Burne-Jones’s own Margaret with a Mirror, in which her girlhood room is minutely reflected in the round surface of the glass behind her. She holds a sweet pea – in the language of flowers, departure.
I wonder if in your hand there grows stems of wild-rose such as I have had to paint in my four pictures of the sleeping palace – and if deep in some tangle there is a hoary, aged monarch of the tangle, thick as a wrist and with long, horrible spikes in it? Such a hoary old creature [Ned wrote in 1884 to Lady Leighton Warren] might lurk under the leaves whose aspect would be terrible.
What he could not acknowledge in words must be painted, and in the eighties he returned to the theme of Briar Rose. In this reprise, however, the princess must not, as she had done in his earliest designs, wake up. The sleep itself is much heavier than in the 1870–3 series done for William Graham; it has become a stupor. But the briar with its ‘terrible aspect’ is the key. The briar is at the same time an obstacle to the prince (the only standing figure), a protection for the precious sleeper, and in its unchecked growth – the roses and thorns break through the very bed that she lies in – it can be felt as a threat to the life of the whole palace and everything living in it. In 1886 Burne-Jones painted a single figure of the Sleeping Princess herself, and gave it to Margaret, an unspoken special pleading. But at the same time he painted Flamma Vestalis – ‘looks a little like Margaret’, as he noted in his work-list – a study in profile of a not at all submissive vestal.
Perhaps, in the end, only Ruskin truly divined the inner subjects of Burne-Jones’s pictures. ‘You cannot make a myth unless you have something to make it of. You cannot tell a secret you don’t know … if the sunrise is a daily restoration and the purging of fear by the baptism of the dew, only then shall we understand the sun myth.’ And only if we are afraid to lose a daughter shall we understand Briar Rose. Before the Slade lecture Ruskin had given Ned a commission for a painting, a Rape of Persephone in memory of Rose La Touche, now eight years under the earth – ‘my Persephone’ as he had called her when she had stood in the sunlight in the garden at Denmark Hill. The pencil stu
dy for this (now at Birmingham) is a tense and agitated design with crowded figures protesting as Pluto sinks with Persephone into the ground – ‘a nice garden, a real one, all broken to bits’, Ned wrote to Ruskin, ‘and fire breaking out among the anemones’. The face is recognisably taken from the pure insipid profile of Rose which Ruskin had drawn himself. But the picture was never finished. Perhaps Burne-Jones could not believe that Ruskin wanted to look further into the heart of that particular myth.
The Briar Rose, in various stages of finish, occupied the corners of the studio, but the great exhibit of 1884, whose departure in a cab for the Grosvenor Spring Show left a great bare space on the wall, was King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid. For this picture Burne-Jones made many studies, some of them later than the painting. The subject, like The Mill, is a tribute to his Italian masters – the design is based on the Mantegna Madonna della Vittoria – and the projection of his own deepest inner life. The king in homage offers his crown to the barefoot girl who sits coldly on the throne a step above him, quite alien to the warmth of the golden chamber, the orange trees, the singing boys and the autumnal sunset glimpsed through the high window. Burne-Jones rejected his own earlier concept (and Tennyson’s) of the king ‘stepping down’. That was not possible. The king has searched through the wide world to find his ideal, but now that she is enthroned his glance is dejected. The painter put forth all his expertise in the painting of metal: the king’s armour has become like scales or feathers, and the reflections of the beggar’s pale bare feet are just seen in the bronze floor. The predominant colours, blue and crimson, enter into every tone, even the shadows, so that the king and the beggar, divided by space, are united by colour. But the scattered anemones that fall from her hand mean rejected love, in the language of flowers. All the concentration of the picture is in the relationship between the two, whose eyes cannot meet. They are locked in total absorption and silence. The steady gaze of the beggar, ‘truer than truth’, straight out of the picture, acts as a reproach all the more powerful because it is unconscious; so important did Burne-Jones consider this head that he had drawn his brush-handle round it to mark the paint. Mary Gladstone, seeing it at the opening of the Grosvenor, recognised a ‘bathing feel’ – that is, the shrinking of flesh from ice-cold water.
Edward Burne-Jones Page 25