Edward Burne-Jones

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  Morris and he rejoiced together when, in 1890, drawing (though not yet painting) became one of the subjects taught in elementary schools. They had been campaigning now for a long time to open this particular gate of the imagination to every child. On the other hand, Ned seldom or never encouraged beginners to take up art as a profession. An exception to this came in the spring of 1891.

  Since Margaret’s marriage, The Grange had no longer been open to callers on Sunday. But not everybody knew this, and in the spring of 1891 on a day when Oscar and Constance Wilde were expected to tea, a very young artist, who ‘happened’ to have his portfolio with him, called with his elder sister. This was Aubrey Beardsley, and when the two young people were discreetly turned away by William, and ‘left somewhat disconsolately’,

  I had hardly turned the corner when I heard a quick step behind me, and a voice which said ‘Pray come back. I couldn’t think of letting you go away without seeing the pictures, after a journey on a hot day like this.’ The voice was that of Burne-Jones; who escorted us back to his house and took us into the studio, showing and explaining everything. His kindness was wonderful as we were perfect strangers he not even knowing our names … I can tell you it was an exciting moment when he first opened my portfolio and looked at my first drawing …

  ’All this from the greatest living artist in Europe’, as Beardsley says in his letter. Burne-Jones decisively admired the drawings, but clearly thought of them as sketches for large-scale paintings. He suggested a course of study with Frederick Brown at the Westminster School of Art. Then he showed Beardsley the Mantegna prints round the drawing-room walls and suggested that he should go to see the originals at Hampton Court. He had divined that the real point of sympathy between himself and the nineteen-year-old boy was the processional and ritual nature of their art.

  The Oscar Wildes took the Beardsleys home in their carriage, and Burne-Jones provided introductions to Leyland and Puvis de Chavannes, and a good deal of further advice. Nevertheless, it seems that it was Mabel – ‘the pretty red-haired sister’, as he called her to Rooke – who had caught his eye and induced him to ask the young creatures back to The Grange. He was no less distracted than he had always been by a charming face.

  On the verge of old age, he drew as studiously as ever from the model. Bessie Keene came as her mother had done; she sat for Aurora and for the Vespertina Quies. Bessie was an excellent sitter, though unfortunately in love with a heartless Mr Inwick, said to ‘look like the heroes I paint, and I am rather kind, and taken an interest,’ Burne-Jones wrote.9 He was haunted by the type he had himself created. A lady called under the assumed name of Pomeroy, saying that when her hair was brushed forward over her forehead she was considered to look like Madonna ‘and that’s your type, Sir’. Respectability still prevailed. Kate Dolan (a favourite model of Millais’) came, and Miss Tueski, who only ‘sat for the hands’, because she had reserves. Burne-Jones liked Jewish models. ‘When they have beauty it is real beauty … nothing I like so much in the way of work as drawing out their hidden expressions and wondering what their lives are like.’ A little girl from Houndsditch came for the Sponsa di Libano to screw up her face and blow like the wind. Another Jewish model ‘was too proud to look at my drawing; when she was putting on her hat to go I showed it and said, ‘Is it beautiful?’ She said, ‘No, it’s lovely, not beautiful.’10

  Male models were harder to find, and nineteenth-century male costume unpaintable; only plumbers in corduroys, with string round the knees, would ‘compose’, Ned thought. (Whistler, it may be remembered, had wept at the difficulty of getting Leyland’s legs, in their tight trousers, right.) But occasionally the ‘unforgotten face’ appeared. In 1894, when the workmen were at Rottingdean fixing iron piers for ‘the rubbishy blackguard little trumpery railway’ from Brighton, Burne-Jones saw a workman driving piles in the sand who was just right for Perceval. ‘Once they chose Kings because they were like that’ – but he hardly thought he could ask the foreman to let him sit.11

  Perhaps this was just as well, and it was certainly just as well that he avoided telling the foreman what he thought of the Volk Railway. The truth was that the Burne-Joneses were not altogether popular at Rottingdean. Ned made a number of protests about the noise and took legal measures against the introduction of electric light. When the windmill caught fire, only Phil and a sailor tried to save it, while a small crowd collected to watch the blaze and began to throw stones. Mackail’s scholarly lecture on ‘Rottingdean: Past and Present’ fell on deaf ears; ‘it would have been just as good if he’d said: “Once there was no village here, not even a road to the sea.”12 Anything more unlike the ‘frankly and openly joyous’ folk of News From Nowhere than the inhabitants of Rottingdean could hardly be imagined.

  There were many happier moments, however. On the anniversaries of Ned and Georgie’s wedding – Dante’s day – two wagonettes dragged the children of the village up the downs for a picnic. Rottingdean was (and is) grateful for the beautiful windows he designed for their church; and the sea air, so everyone was convinced, was good for his health.

  In the late spring of 1891 he badly needed to recuperate. He was an early victim of the influenza epidemic and the subsequent ‘nightmare of gloom and despair’, as he described it to Sir Henry Layard; promising, however, if Sir Henry would come and see him, not to describe all his symptoms. His recovery was very slow. Rooke was dismayed to see the Master arrive at Rottingdean in a weakened condition, vague and penniless, having apparently been robbed on the Victoria omnibus.13 A fall on a slippery wooden pavement had jarred his arm in its socket. Certainly he grew more absent-minded, and it was not unusual, though annoying, for him to undress, dress again without thinking, and then have to undress once more. Clothes and boots all in one piece, he thought, would lessen life’s difficulties.

  There was a great deal of work to do. Burne-Jones turned down a commission for the mosaic decoration of St Paul’s, a church he had always hated. But the Avalon had come back from the Campden Hill studio, and he had to finish the Sponsa di Libano, a very fine design (developed as usual from an earlier one) of a serene bride standing among fertilising spice winds. The firm was doing the glass for Whitelands Training College and had just accepted another important commission. William Knox d’Arcy, a millionaire from Australia, had settled into a great Gothic mansion at Stanmore, described by Morris, who had been to see it, as ‘a house of the very rich – and such a wretched uncomfortable place’, but the firm had agreed to decorate the first two floors and to design a staircase, mosaic floors in daisy patterns, a ceiling for the banqueting hall, even electroliers, and, most important of all, a set of Burne-Jones’s tapestries illustrating the adventures of Arthur’s knights. It was for these that Ned had wanted the head of Perceval.

  Why should William d’Arcy, after making his pile in the Mount Morgan gold-mines, and coming back to the old country which he had left at the age of seventeen, want to live surrounded with Arthurian tapestries? In truth, he had embarked on a quest of his own, for he had formed the quixotic idea that there might be oil in the deserts of Persia. In 1890 he was opening negotiations for a concession of 500,000 square miles which he would defend against all foreign syndicates, until in 1908 a payable well was found at last and in due time the Anglo-Persian Oil Company was formed. The tapestries were not hung till 1894, but after that d’Arcy negotiated, for nearly thirteen years, under the shadow of the Ruined Chapel and the Siege Perilous.

  Burne-Jones approached the mass of work with a sensation of hardly being up to it. ‘Oh, but such a changed old Ned,’ he wrote to Watts, ‘so old – so worn out – so dispirited – they say it is influenza – and perhaps it is.’14 Georgie, on the other hand, ‘commands and forbids with increasing energy … and looks younger than she has done for many years.’ But the burden of supporting the household, and, of course, Phil, who is ‘not as hard at work as we are, you and I’, fell on Burne-Jones’s shoulders, as did the many private charities and kindnesses of which h
e said little. In 1891 he was also in correspondence with Watts about the possibility of helping Madox Brown. Brown had not spoken to him for years, but Burne-Jones had surreptitiously collected £900 for a memorial presentation, ‘and there shall be no talk of his circumstances’, he told Watts, ‘but we will ask him to paint some subject for this price.’15 According to Ford Madox Ford, by no means a reliable witness, the picture was painted and Brown sent out invitations for a private view, but when he saw Burne-Jones arriving with Leighton he turned off the gas and plunged the studio in ‘gloom of the most tenebrous’ rather than let the detested Academicians see his work. But Ned knew that helping old friends was a delicate matter. In 1888 he had arranged an exhibition of Inchbold’s work at the New Gallery, to ‘try to win him a little renown’. Another problem, which by this time had become familiar, was the reappearances of Simeon Solomon, who would arrive ‘pretty well drunk off the embankment to cry over his fate … and the fire of the gods was on his head once.’16 Solomon was, by fits and starts, a pavement artist in Bayswater, but Ned (perhaps feeling that Selwyn Image owed him something) arranged for his Medusa’s Head stung by its own Snakes to be published in the Hobby Horse. Swinburne, on the other hand, was safely in the charge of Watts-Dunton at Putney, and a quite unexpected bond of sympathy arose: Swinburne, in his fifties, had become devoted to babies, was a respected figure in toy-shops, and was one of the few people who could really enter into Burne-Jones’s feelings about Angela. In 1892 their friendship was ‘breached and shattered with rivalry’ over a delightful photograph of Angela pulling Ned’s beard.

  Perhaps, after sixty years, work, friendship, family and illness should be enough to fill a man’s life. But in 1891 he began to work on a design which he had put aside since 1885, The Sirens. Of all his unfinished paintings this is the one we might most regret. It is a picture where magic is in control – ‘more true than real’ – since a square-rigged ship under full sail is putting, apparently without wind (and as though in defiance of ‘old Duncan’), into a shallow cove. Burne-Jones, as a boy, had

  got all my strongest impression of the beauty of ships and the sea from the Welsh coast – from seeing the great three-masted ships sail past Menai and Bangor. I think a three-masted vessel in full sail is one of the loveliest sights in the world.17

  The Sirens stand before the surrounding rocks, waiting for the ship to beach in the empty foreground, where the water just laps on to the foreshore, and the bones and armour of the few who have landed and met their death lie among the sea-grass. The glances of the sailors and the Sirens are just on the point of meeting. The time is l’heure bleue, the last gleam on the horizon before the dark comes.

  In October 1891 Burne-Jones wrote to Leyland, who wanted to buy the picture, that:

  it is a sort of Siren-land – I don’t know when or where – not Greek Sirens, but any Sirens, anywhere, that lure men on to destruction. There will be a shore full of them, looking out from rocks and crannies in the rocks at a boat full of armed men, and the time will be sunset. The men shall look at the women and the women at the men, but what happens afterwards is more than I can tell.

  But the design suggests that he had not forgotten Ruskin’s words in Queen of the Air: the Sirens, Ruskin says, are spirits of ‘constant desires – the infinite sicknesses of the heart – which, rightly placed, give life, and wrongly placed, waste away; so that there are two groups of Sirens, one noble and saving as the other is fatal.’

  Burne-Jones lost his head repeatedly, but at least he did this in the grand manner. The Siren of his last decade was ‘noble and saving’. In the spring of 1892 he fell in love again.

  16

  1892–4

  ‘THE BEST IN ME HAS BEEN LOVE’

  The ‘bright presence’ was Mrs Helen Mary Gaskell, known always as ‘May’, to whom Burne-Jones wrote: ‘Sunday of Beauvais was the first day of creation, and the day I first saw Gabriel would be another – and there are six – and the seventh day is any day when I see you.’1 One of the most understanding of the ‘Souls’, she was the daugher of Canon Melville of Worcester – ‘I love parsons, and can talk about ancient Oxford to him, and he and I are contemporaries, YES, YES, YES I will have it so,’ Burne-Jones wrote rather wildly, feeling his age, in 1893.

  In fact, May was twenty-five years younger than he was. She had two grown children, a daughter, whom he painted, and a son, whom he taught to draw. In appearance she was frail and charming, with a cloud of hair and slightly hollowed cheeks. The flower which Burne-Jones assigned to her was the lily of the valley (Love Revived). Of her husband, Captain Gaskell of the Ninth Lancers, not much can be said, except that he was a nice fellow with a terrible temper, told barrack-room jokes, and was often away. He had knocked about the Middle East with Holman Hunt, but otherwise was not known to care about art. Captain Gaskell was not a Soul.

  Certainly at the beginning of 1892 Burne-Jones felt desperately in need of ‘help for pain’. He had another bad attack of influenza – this time he fainted and narrowly escaped being crushed by a horse-bus – and he became a ‘passive machine’ when it was discovered that an eye operation was necessary. This was carried out at home, not altogether tactfully perhaps, as while he was being carried upstairs he saw the doctors heating a red-hot wire ‘like mediaeval torturers’.2 Work was impossible, and in fact for the whole of 1892 he had nothing to show in the way of paintings except further cartoons for the Rome mosaics and four Perseus subjects designed seventeen years before. He drew himself in carpet slippers, defeated, in an arm-chair, and surrounded by blank canvases. William de Morgan, in England that year to lecture, was shocked at his old friend’s appearance and begged him to come away from the fogs and ’flu to Italy.

  Georgie placed great confidence in a new and safe acquaintance who had become a frequent caller at The Grange. Dr Sebastian Evans was a Birmingham man – Ned had met him during his visit in 1885, when Kendrick, wanting to indulge the ‘archaic craze’ of his distinguished guest, had introduced Evans, who was planning a High History of the Holy Graal.3 ‘Sebas’ was not a doctor of medicine but of law, though as Burne-Jones charitably said, he was too clever to practise law or anything else. After receiving Evans cordially, he promised him a frontispiece for the High History, though he lost interest when he found it was a ‘rational’ and historical explanation of the Quest. Sebas joined in reminiscences of old Birmingham and in discussions of philosophy and art, during which he, like Rooke and Selwyn Image, was busy taking down surreptitiously everything that was said. Rooke began to dread the ‘mixed asthmatic coughing fit and deprecatory laugh’ which heralded the Doctor’s approach – still more so when his newly-published volume of poems arrived and he proposed reading them aloud in studio.

  But Ned’s confidante was not the safe, tediously coughing Dr Evans, but the ethereal May Gaskell. ‘What are you doing to-night … who is daring to talk to you – is he worthy of seeing you – is he worthy of seeing you and living on the same green ball of an earth?’ Bitterly he regretted his own age and ugliness, the face which, as he put it, had glared from his shaving mirror and haunted his dreams for years. Between 1892 and 1895 he wrote to her as often as five or six times a day, confiding everything to her ‘wide-eyed mercifulness that has no hardness or arid firmness in it’. Mrs Gaskell, if not firm, must have been a tactful woman. She managed a difficult situation extremely well.

  She had been introduced by Frances Horner and first came to The Grange at the beginning of 1892. On seeing the studio she ‘pronounced the word that rankled’ – that is, she said it was in a mess. For her sake Burne-Jones submitted to spring cleaning; she struck him immediately as someone for whom he would do anything:

  Do you remember (oh why should you remember?) one Sunday afternoon coming very late and Georgie and Phil and I were in – I don’t think you liked your visit – so many of one family, and you quite alone – and I couldn’t bear you to go out alone into the cold and darkness and wanted to see you safe then – always fidgetting to se
e you safe – what impudence – and you said you had come on a bus [sic] facing the wind and liked it – and then I hoped you were really stronger than you looked … as for me I was happy because you had come – and how many thoughts – and wanted to make a great fuss of you and couldn’t tell how it could be – or what I could do …4

  But he could, as he had with so many others, show her what beauty was, for in spite of their three houses (3 Cumberland Gate, Beaumont in Lancashire, and Kidlington Hall in Oxfordshire), Mrs Gaskell, that ‘lovely worried little woman’, was starved of beauty. He began, of course, by taking her to Hampton Court to see the Mantegnas.

  The slightest illness or absence of Mrs Gaskell caused Ned extravagant worry, and it was painful for him to see her, as he nearly always had to do, in society. ‘Sometimes you looked ill and sometimes you looked young and lovely and both hurt – can you understand why they both hurt …’5 When Morris read aloud his seemingly endless translation of Beowulf, Burne-Jones shut his eyes and thought of Mrs Gaskell. When he was left alone at The Grange with a chop for his dinner, he impulsively wrote a note begging her to come round – she should have the chop – and his ‘hungry eyes could drink from the fountain of life’. Often he stayed too late, or talked to wildly, and once he did a drawing that was indiscreet. All this meant gentle reproof, but he asked for very little. ‘Ah, dear heart … I know it is difficult for you to write now – in the day time impossible – and I love to think of you sleepy tumbling fast asleep at once and waking late.’6 He faithfully destroyed all her letters as they came, keeping only the latest one which he carried about – ‘such are my principles’ – in his trouser pocket. All that remains of what she wrote is an occasional ‘very like him!’ in the margin of a letter. But perhaps he did not exaggerate when he told her that she had saved his life. She had reached ‘the root of the well of loneliness that is in me’, and made it possible for him to paint again.