Nevertheless, in the winter of 1889 Ned could not quite face the icy draughts of Rottingdean. Georgie went down there for Christmas with Margaret, who was pregnant, and Jack Mackail. On Christmas Day Ned, Phil and Rudyard Kipling had dinner together at an ‘Italian pot-house’ – Solferino’s. The proprietor had not expected any customers, and gave them a free bottle of wine, because they looked so lonely.
15
1890–2
BRIAR ROSE: BURNE-JONES IN THE NINETIES
The final version of Briar Rose was the culmination of flower languages – the ‘burden’ of the thorn and the rose. On 6 April 1890, Burne-Jones wrote to his old patron Leyland that, if he cared to, he could come and see the four paintings – the Briar Wood, the Council Chamber, the Garden Court, the Rose Bower – they would all be in the studio by the end of the week. He was totally exhausted, too close to the work to be able to judge it.
It was the only time he had ever used direct historical reference. ‘I took the pains to make the armour of the knight many centuries later than the palace and ornaments and caskets and things and the dresses of the ladies and courtiers.’1 The passage of time was essential to the concept – the long years of childhood when the maiden seemed at a standstill, oblivious to threat. The colour was in the same range of Cophetua, purple, rose madder, bronze and blue-grey, with the addition of a strange sea-green. ‘Colour exists only where there is tenderness,’ Ruskin had written in the Two Paths, ‘it should be thinner than the grooves in mother-of-pearl, and the final touches quite invisible.’ The picture was finished. The princess in it would never wake.
The arrangements for showing Briar Rose had been made by Graham with Lockett Agnew. He was to receive £15,000. It was by far the best commission he had ever had. The four pictures were to be exhibited at Agnew’s Old Bond Street showroom, and a condition of sale was that they should be shown afterwards for a week at Toynbee Hall, free of charge to all who wanted to see them. They had already been reserved by Alexander Henderson (later Lord Faringdon), the financier and connoisseur, to be hung (where they still are) in the music-room at Buscot Park, near Lechlade on the Upper Thames, not far from Kelmscott.
Both the exhibitions, in the West and East End, were strikingly successful, and his fellow artists, the only people whose opinions he cared for, told him he had been right to exhibit the pictures by themselves, without distractions. There were a few dissenting voices. Gordon Craig, taken there by his mother Ellen Terry, felt himself quite unmoved as she stood there with tears streaming down her face. But Edward Clifford spoke for the many when he described them as ‘the pictures of the century, I think. Burne-Jones may not be the greatest, but the pictures belong to our own time, and touch different nerves.’
Yet Briar Rose was not understood. On the one hand, Morris wrote a set of verses which relate the paintings to a vaguely socialist future which will ‘smite the sleeping world awake’. On the other hand, Roger Fry, twenty-four and only just down from Cambridge, thought the series ‘very wonderful’ though he wrote that he ‘liked best the one that I had seen before of the knight lying dead in the thicket of roses – it is the only one in which there is any serious attempt at a unity of light and shade.’ Fry was judging by the standards of Impressionism, and not of ‘the hand that is more true than real’. Only Stephens in the Athenaeum said all that Burne-Jones wanted, and he begged him to come to The Grange to choose a drawing ‘for affection’s sake and old times’.2
Alexander Henderson had bought Buscot Park only in the previous year, and when Burne-Jones went to supervise the hanging of the pictures he offered to paint connecting panels, carrying the briar rose over panels showing a hall, a basin and towel, a kitchen with a cupboard, a terrace and a curtain. The whole room was now one harmonious scheme. Balfour, who had now been waiting fifteen years for his Perseus series, had to content himself with hanging the Briar Rose studies, during his premiership, round the dining-room of 10 Downing Street.
With Briar Rose, Burne-Jones exorcised the loss of Margaret. He accepted her as a young mother – the picture on which he was working for the rest of the year was a Nativity, the Star of Bethlehem. In May 1890 her first baby was born. It was a girl, Angela, and Ned, who had suffered endless terrors, entered as a grandfather into a new term of slavery. ‘If Margaret has others I won’t let my heart go out to them as it does to this one,’ he wrote to Mrs Stillman,3 but that was something he never learned to avoid. He made hundreds of endearing pen drawings, and his stories about Angela grew so numerous that even Margaret refused to listen to them.
Burne-Jones entered the nineties, then, with rather fewer financial worries than usual, as a famous painter in his own right, and well able to face the new decade. Long practice had made him master of his own strange art – ‘in my own land I am king of it’. This land was open now to a new generation, offering them;
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.
’I had much trouble with my senses’, Yeats wrote in the first draft of his Autobiographies, ‘for I was not naturally chaste and I was young … I was a romantic, my head full of those fascinating faces, in the art of Burne-Jones, which seemed always waiting for some Alcestis at the end of a long journey.’
The paintings drew further and further apart from any outside influence, except perhaps the hundred years from the end of the twelfth century when, Burne-Jones thought, artists had discovered a new secret of drapery, and the figures on the entrance porch of Chartres Cathedral were given ‘coats like no coats ever were’.4 He could suggest what he wanted with a shadow of body-colour or a touch of gold. He experimented with silverpoint which he made from a sharpened sixpence, and with small gold drawings on vellum. There are sketches in the Secret Book of Designs which he never carried out, and which look to a further stage, beyond anything he ever did. At the other end of the scale, Rooke and he toiled away at the vast canvases which he knew might never find purchasers. He made his final supreme designs for stained glass. He began his last collaboration with Morris with illustrations for the Kelmscott Press.
Burne-Jones was not deceived as to the nature of success. He was saddened by the triumph of the Impressionists, not so much on his own account as for the sake of art itself. ‘They do make atmosphere,’ he said, ‘but they don’t make anything else; they don’t make beauty.’ How could he calculate the shifts of time by which the coal wharf at Argenteuil, and even Upper and Lower Norwood, would come to appear a dream world as remote from ours, and as romantic, as his own? It was slowly borne in upon him, too, that his biography might have to be written one day. This of course would be entrusted to Georgie, but, horrified by the account of Rossetti in Bell Scott’s Autobiographical Notes (‘inaccurate and somewhat malignant gossip’5), he found himself driven to watch sale rooms for his own letters. In November 1890 Ellen Terry wrote to Graham Robertson: ‘Howell is really dead this time! Do go to Christie’s and see what turns up!’ Fairfax Murray went both to Christie’s and to Bain’s, but whatever secrets Howell had, died with him. Burne-Jones himself burned many hundreds of letters, though he hated to lose Swinburne’s.
About his life from day to day, the Memorials are less and less informative as time goes on. But in spite of his own retiring nature, his last years are very well documented, rather better perhaps than he would have wished. In 1892 Rooke began to keep his studio diary, though he could only note things when the Master was out of the room, or when they were painting on different levels. Interviewers and journalists began to intrude, to Burne-Jones’s evident distress. An affectionate but clear-sighted view is given in Angela Thirkell’s Three Houses; Angela was from the first a ‘noticing’ little girl, as well as a triumphantly spoilt one. (Burne-Jones outdid both Millais and Gladstone, with whom he entered into serious competition as a grandfather, by allowing Angela to butter her bread on both sides.) His impact on the young artists of the nineties – ‘no one was very old in the nineties’ – can be felt in Graham Robertson’s Time Was
and in William Rothenstein’s Men and Memories. To Rothenstein, assiduously searching for portrait subjects, a visit to The Grange seemed like entering from the open air into ‘the depths of a shady grove. There was something both rich and sober therein, of which the Victorians alone had the secret.’ Graham Robertson, who got to know the family much better, was struck by the change that took place when the great painter got away from the house into the studio, still more so when Burne-Jones advised him that what would really help him would be ‘to get into the most ridiculous mess over some woman’. Besides these memoirs there are a large number of letters, both printed and in public or private collections. Burne-Jones usually asked his correspondents to burn his letters, but very few of them did.
Burne-Jones brushed lightly with the nineties, taking them on their own terms. The Aesthetes of the seventies and the music-hall culture of the eighties were succeeded by a decade of sensibility which led either into the dead end of the Yellow Book or to the dangerous heart-searching of the ‘Souls’. The Souls were the inner group of friends who had been brought closely together, in the first instance, by the death of Laura Lyttelton. Sensitivity and intelligence – every moment of life was felt – held them together by a kind of electric tension between one great country house and another. We recognise the ‘great want met’ of Henry James. The Wyndhams were Souls, so were the Duke and Duchess of Rutland, Algernon West and Godfrey Webb (both in love with Laura), the Earl and Countess of Pembroke, of whom Burne-Jones was to make one of his last portraits, Arthur Balfour, George Curzon, Frances Horner. Mary Gladstone and Lady Battersea were not Souls; Sir William Harcourt’s remark that all that he knew about the Souls was that they had very beautiful bodies, shows the mystification of those who were excluded. Balfour, ‘King of the Souls’, asked to describe their vanished day, said it was ‘imponderable as goassamer and dew’. In deliberate contrast to the amusements of Prince Tum-Tum and his intimates, the Souls were moved only by beauty and the intensity of friendship. Katie Vaughan, whose art had developed since Ned admired her in the seventies was their chosen dancer, Burne-Jones was their painter. Elusive as before, he was with them and not quite of them. In their own phrase, he was an occasional Soul.
The theatre of the nineties offered a relief from the intensity of the Souls. Just as Ned had tried to get Rossetti to come to H.M.S. Pinafore, so now he made efforts – believing in its relaxing power – to take Morris to the theatre, although this was a risky business; he sometimes answered back loudly from the audience, or turned up covered with blue dye, since, as Mackail says, ‘when he began to add dyeing to his other handicrafts, appearances were completely given up.’ Ned enjoyed simple spectacles – he liked taking friends to see the elephants at the newly opened hall at Olympia, and to a melodrama which apparently contained the line ‘The man who can lay hand on a woman except in the way of kindness is unworthy of the name of a British sailor’. Pantomimes – although he was inclined to think fairy stories should be told straightforwardly, ‘just as they happened’ – pleased him when they reminded him of the Fairy of the Golden Branch, and he would go to see anything played by his great friends Ellen Terry and Mrs Pat Campbell.
All in all, Burne-Jones cut an acceptable figure of the nineties. His silvery beard was shortened to an imperial, and although his tailor, Standen, complained that his bill was only £5 a year and not worth sending in, he acquired a wideawake and a deerstalker, and for cold weather, a sealskin coat lined with red silk. (Sealskin was throughout the Victorian era the sign of an artist’s modest success. Fred Walker had bought a sealskin waistcoat for the long-ago first showing at the Old Water-Colour Society; Howell had bought Whistler’s Henry Irving for £10 and a sealskin coat; Rossetti had given a coat to his mother not long before he died.) Burne-Jones could allow himself, too, a really good cigar; Georgie wrote nostalgically of ‘our dissipations’ when they would go to a decent restaurant and take a cab home, not walk as in younger days. As a host, Ned felt that his own ideas about eating were too simple and frugal, and Phil or the knowledgeable Comyns Carr might be called upon to help; ‘I know no more what dinner to order than the cat upon the hearth – less, for it would promptly order mice,’ he wrote to Carr after inviting the Alma Tadema and the George Lewises to Previtale’s. Music became more than ever important – never Wagner, except for Parsifal, which brought to him ‘the very sounds that were in the Sangraal chapel’ – but private concerts with the Henschels and Dolmetsches and public ones given by, for example, Sarasate, among whose admirers was Sherlock Holmes. We catch glimpses of Burne-Jones playing dominoes with Lord Salisbury, or taking Oscar Wilde home in a four-wheeler when he was ‘the saddest man in London’. Sarah Bernhardt and Paderewski came to the studio. Indeed his influence went farther afield than Europe. The Kiplings had taken his work with them to India, drawings of Fat Men went to the Tuan Muda and the Ranee of Sarawak, the lepers of Molokai received a St Francis which Edward Clifford took out to Father Damien. Clifford described his anxieties as the sufferers, with their fingerless hands, lifted the precious picture out of the boat and carried it to shore.
When, during the nineties, bicycling divided the nation into those who could and those who couldn’t afford, Burne-Jones, like Whistler (but unlike Balfour and Henry James), gave up the attempt to learn; but he did so with some regret, having heard of two young bicyclists, a man and a woman, perfect strangers, who ‘crashed at Ripley, were picked out of a hedge and woke up to find themselves in the same bed’.6
This was only one of hundreds of stories, always delivered in a gentle murmur, for which he became celebrated even in the conversational arena of the nineties, where hostesses arranged their talkers in orchestral counterpoint. Ned admitted that he ‘contributed to history sometimes’ when telling them. As Balfour put it, ‘you never knew where you would find B.J.’ Some of their distinctive rueful tone can be felt in the story of the old French artist who drowned himself rather than submit to the ‘new ways’ of Delacroix: ‘there wasn’t much water in the ditch, but he had rare and high principles, and lay on his face and held his breath and finished, rather than wake up to such a fickle world.’ Then there was the sage who was asked to divide a bag of walnuts according to the higher wisdom, ‘not as man divides, but as God divides,’ and gave to one five, to another fifty, and to another none; the story of Wang, the Emperor of China, on whose bath-tub was written, ‘Daily one must renew life’; the true story of the fat lady who patted Burne-Jones’s leg under the table and said ‘good dog’, so that he didn’t know whether it was better to keep still or waggle enthusiastically; a dream: ‘I was talking to God himself – I knew it was He, but dared not look, and he said: “I have no money” – the only personal communication He made to me, and it sounded as if I had been trying to borrow, doesn’t it?’7
Although he seems to have liked country house-parties less than ever, he continued to go, though Georgie very rarely went with him. His letters show what his unfailing unobtrusive politeness hid: Lady Elcho’s house was unbearably cold (though not quite as bad as Kelmscott, where your water-jug froze as soon as you opened the window), Hawarden was ‘like a railway-station’, and on one occasion Mrs Gladstone forgot to put out sheets and pillowcases. Clouds, on the other hand, built by Webb for the Percy Wyndhams and decorated by the firm, was a wonderfully unpretentious ‘great house’ until it was burnt down in 1889, only three years after it was finished. Delightful letters – then called ‘bread-and-butter letters’ – and showers of little drawings followed the visits. Sometimes these were made on misty windowpanes, and were lost for ever. One beautiful series was found round the outside pages of a Bradshaw’s Railway Guide.
To the Burne-Joneses of the nineties returned William Morris quite unchanged, as shaggy and soft-hatted as ever. ‘Morris belongs to the big past, when we were all young and strong and ready to beat the world to bits and trample its trumpery life out,’8 and he still did, in spite of his noble dreams for the future. Morris’s understaking had been to give ‘d
ecent leading’ and to make people listen to socialist doctrine; however the Movement developed in years to come, he had done what he set out to do and, without meaning to, had given it a dignity it could never have got in any other way. Retired from the active struggle, he still felt that under a social democracy ‘the perception and creation of beauty shall be felt as necessary to man as his daily bread’. In this spirit he began his research into the printed book.
Burne-Jones, of course, must be the chief illustrator for the Kelmscott Press. May remembered that Ned sometimes mildly complained that to hear Morris talk, you wouldn’t think there were any other artists in the world, and Morris agreed that you wouldn’t be far wrong; Bernard Shaw found that Morris was ‘beyond reason’ on this subject. Side by side with his own romances he was impatient to print the sacred books of their young days at Oxford, the Morte, Chaucer, Ruskin’s On the Nature of Gothic, even Sidonia. The two men of fifty-seven felt like children together. They spent hours reading comic weeklies about the misadventures of Ally Sloper (and his daughter Tootsie and her friend Lardi Longsox). A collection was begun of photographs of Wagnerian prima donnas – all of them Prominent Women. The Sunday breakfasts went on till noon, when Georgie presided, almost invisible behind the large joint of beef. Morris’s attitude to her was one of deeply affectionate companionship. Rooke was surprised to hear him ‘call the Mistress “old chap”’. He complained bitterly about her new dresses – Georgie had started to wear a bustle. The restraints of the Heir of Redclyffe were at last relaxed, Morris gave way to emotion more freely and his language became ‘unreserved’. ‘I was ashamed of him – no I wasn’t – I was proud of him, but I pretend to be ashamed’, Burne-Jones told Rooke.
Edward Burne-Jones Page 29