Edward Burne-Jones

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  I keep thinking of that first sight of you – and why didn’t you come in dreams to me last night instead of Mr Longman – damn Longman – but I still see those divine little figures moving in a land no man ever saw, in a light none can dream of – better than Italy sun ever did.*7

  ‘… I had a glimpse of what a heaven life could be – of sustained ecstasy at visible beauty.’ He had only felt this once before, in 20 October 1894, ‘in a painted church at Oxford’.

  This comes close to the heart of Burne-Jones’s painting, and explains why in spite of illness and depression, the year 1892–3 was, he told Mrs Gaskell, the happiest one he had ever known. ‘I suppose I have learned my lesson at last … the best in me has been love, and it has brought me the most sorrow, but it has this supreme excellence, that in its sight no mean thing can exist.’8

  With this inspiration Burne-Jones began his first rough designs for the Kelmscott Chaucer. ‘The form and detail of the great folio’, Mackail writes, ‘was taking definite shape in Morris’s mind.’ Ned was struck, half enviously, half pityingly, with the difference between them. As Morris arrived with his familiar satchel full of work, with his enormous impatient enthusiasm, he seemed past the disturbance of any kind of human passion. ‘No disaster can touch him now,’ Ned wrote to Mrs Gaskell, ‘and my happiness hangs on a little thread.’

  He is a world to himself – isn’t it great to be made like that? Such strength as his I see nowhere – I suppose he minds for me more than for anyone, yet the day I go he will lose nothing, only he will have to think of himself instead of thinking aloud – no more than that. Yet side by side at Oxford it looked as if we had just the same thoughts about all things. The invisible seed was growing – sometimes in the depths I think mine the best. Only it is so short lived on the crest, and the trough is so deep and long.9

  In saying this Burne-Jones seemed to have overlooked (even though he designed the frontispiece) the late romance which Morris was writing every day before his household was awake. In these marvellous tales the young man is always setting out anew on the journey, the grey-eyed maidens of the Wondrous Isles and the Acre of the Undying have ‘no mere good will, but longing and hot love’ and the return is always to Upton or Kelmscott, where all abide in contentment. But this was a dream, while a letter from Mrs Gaskell might come at any moment.

  Morris still read aloud as the generations passed. Rudyard Kipling had only half understood when he recited the sagas, sitting on the nursery rocking-horse. Angela refused to listen altogether. Georgie, who had stabbed herself with pins to keep awake for the Earthly Paradise, was still at her post; Rooke could tell, through the closed door, whether he was reading prose or poetry to the Mistress.

  Denis Mackail, Margaret’s second child, was born on 3 June, and Burne-Jones, once again, went through a torture of anxiety and amazement at Mackail’s apparent calmness. Only three days later he had news of the death of his royal patron Frederick Leyland. Leyland had died on a train between Mansion House and Blackfriars, going to business as usual. In his way the President of the National Telephone Company had been a kind of saint of patronage, suffering in the cause of painting not only Whistler’s furious satire but many smaller things – Aggie Poynter had been taken in childbirth at one of his dinner parties, the indolent Val Prinsep had married his daughter. His famous ‘royal black sulks’ had never touched Ned, who had received at his hands nothing but kindness. Now he was given the commission for his old patron’s tomb. The strange little Byzantine sarcophogus which he designed shines out, totally different from the surrounding memorials in the shades of Brompton cemetery.

  At the Leyland sale Whistler’s Princess du Pays de Porcelaine fetched 420 guineas, four Botticelli illustrations to Boccaccio fetched 1,300 guineas, and the Beguiling of Merlin, which started at 1,000 guineas, was bought by Agnew’s for 3,600. This was another thing for which Whistler was not to forgive Burne-Jones.

  Summer was spent at Rottingdean, where the family gathered in their hundreds for the marriage of Stanley Baldwin to Lucy Ridsdale, from the much grander house across the village green. Phil showed no signs of following Stan’s example. ‘I know very little, indeed next to nothing about Phil’s history with D.D.,’ Ned wrote to Mrs Gaskell,10

  something has hurt him and embittered him … I can say very little to him because he never tells me anything … Ah me I do hate marriage and think it a wicked mechanical device of lawyers for the sake of property and such beastliness, and so I can’t pity him for not getting what he wanted and yet I do.

  In the middle of his distress Phil valiantly attempted from time to time to cheer up his gloomy elders, but always with poor success. He took Poynter out to the Café Royal, but they were besieged by prostitutes who followed the gloomy Poynter into his cab. He took Ned to the Savoy, but Whistler was there with a party of his friends, and the evening was ruined for both of them.

  This, of course, was after the return to London, when the autumn fogs descended and Burne-Jones felt poignantly the rapid passing of time. In November he met Millais in the street, in tears: the doctors had given him the first warning of a mortal disease. A few weeks earlier, as the result of many tactical moves, many pleas and persuasions, Ned had agreed that the winter exhibition of the New Galleries should be a retrospective of his own work. The owners had been applied to. His lifetime’s work was coming back to him. His age, that year, he put at 175.

  ’It is a mixed feeling I have about those ancient paintings of mine,’ he wrote to Mrs Norman Grosvenor.11 ‘I feel as if I should be glad not to see them again sometimes … just at first I felt as if it was a little hard on me to have two Days of Judgement.’ The idea of judgement, which had never been far from Ned’s mind since childhood and always present to Georgie, weighed upon him more and more. ‘There are days of bede,’ he told Mrs Gaskell, ‘fifteen days before the trumpet blows and day by day it grows so dreadful that no tongue can tell it – but the wind is the worst.’12 Had he, or hadn’t he, done what he had undertaken to do? In the winter of 1893 he was deeply moved by Francis Thompson’s Hound of Heaven. Like the poet, he could make only pitiful attempts to hide from the Judge who followed after.

  The kindness of friends made the retrospective tolerable. Du Maurier wrote a particularly delightful letter of nostalgia, ‘très doux et un peu triste’, on the ‘special glamour – the Burne-Jonesiness of Burne-Jones’. Another outcome was to be a magnificent volume, Edward Burne-Jones: A Record and Review by Malcolm Bell, illustrated with Hollyer photographs. But Ned, probably alarmed at the solemn tone of the book, seems to have given little, if any, help. He turned his biographer over to Stephens, explaining that Malcolm Bell is not only a lady, but the son of Poynter’s elder sister. For the moment he felt unexpectedly younger. ‘You are pretty much the age I first knew you,’ he told ‘Steev’, ‘about thirty or so, and I feel a few years younger – if I catch sight of myself in a tall mirror it is a mocking surprise, but I get over it and forget it.’

  The retrospective ended with a party at the New Gallery. Ned had hoped this would be ‘an evening of friends’ and was appalled to find that ‘everyone’ had been invited and the Comyns Carrs were in a state of agitation over the reception of Prince Tum-Tum, while Cardinal Vaughan insisted on being received, in full pontificals, in the street. All that mattered to Ned was that Frances Horner was ill and had to refuse, and Mrs Gaskell, who was getting ready to go to Italy, could not come either.

  His own quiet personal celebration was to resign from the Academy; since The Depths of the Sea he had exhibited nothing there,13 and he regretted the hostility which was preventing his election to full membership. He was sorry to hurt Leighton and Watts – but, as he explained, he felt at the Academy as though he was kept ‘on the hall mat … and I want to be away and free and in the open air.’14 He resigned as courteously as possible. His presence in any academy was an absurdity. After writing the letter on 10 February 1893 he felt, as he told Mrs Gaskell, ‘cleaner than soap and mops can make me�
�, (Mrs Wilkinson was on the rampage again).

  During the 1893 Georgie’s energy, which had always been astonishing in anyone so small and frail, became formidable. Still ‘commanding and forbidding’ with equal firmness, she threw herself into the organisation of the South London Gallery in Camberwell, which was to show pictures without charge to the poor children of Peckham. Leighton was enlisted as President. ‘Georgie I haven’t seen for days,’ Ned wrote to Watts. ‘She is somewhere behind a heap of Rossiter’s correspondence15 … I can see only the top of her head, but I believe she is pretty well.’ The prospect of the Local Government Act (which was passed in the following year, one of the last achievements of Gladstone’s administration), meant that she would have scope for activity in the politics of Rottingdean, and Burne-Jones looked ahead to his prospect with awe. He bought two hats with a feather, one for Angela, one for Georgie, to induce a gayer mood, and Angela, at least, liked hers.

  In his intense craving for sympathy he made many other confidantes. Mrs Pat Campbell responded, she declared, with all the warmth of her Italian nature to the beauty of The Grange. She must stretch out her arms to it, she said – she would arrive and ask to lie down in a darkened room, since there was no peace in her own house, or even retreat to Rottingdean, where Ned told her to hire a good piano, at his expense, from Brighton. The walls of her blue and white drawing-room were crowded with Burne-Jones engravings; but among them, unfortunately, was an extravagant picture by Phil, representing ‘Stella’ gazing longingly at the stars, while worshippers looked upon her from below as a star. Phil, who was silly about so many things, was becoming silly about Mrs Pat.

  Burne-Jones, on the other hand, understood Mrs Pat perfectly, but felt that a little of her went a long way. She was incomparable, she had fine eyes (‘God gave me boot-buttons, but I invented the glance’) – but she had not the native generosity of dear Ellen Terry.

  He found a gentler and closer companionship with two young sisters, both of whom he taught to draw, Violet and Olive Maxse. Burne-Jones, who was affectionately treated by all the pretty daughters of his friends (with the exception of May Morris), was particularly in tune with these two daughters of a sensitive artistic mother, separated from her husband, Admiral Maxse. Violet, in the memoirs she wrote as Viscountess Milner, calls Burne-Jones ‘deep and true and unselfish under the chaff’. ‘My dear,’ he wrote to her in March 1893, when she was going off to Paris to try her luck as an art student,

  A certain kind of silly rubbish has always helped me – deep down we are all face to face with a certain solemnity – we can guess that much of each other with certainty even if we know nothing – so I shall be silly till you want me to be sad, and then you shall have all the sadness that is in me … whether I see you or not, God bless you, my dear.

  This letter strikes the note of true feeling he had for beginners in life, as well as his surface gaiety: when Violet became engaged the next year to Lord Edward Cecil, he told her that he hoped many men would drown themselves on hearing the news. Olive, the ‘unparalleled and exceptional darling’, he drew and wrote to again and again. He was her ‘affectionate, failing, but still reasonable E.B.J.’ To Mrs Gaskell he confided that he was trying to think of someone who would ‘do’ for Olive; Charles Hallé was in love with her, but he was not steady enough.

  Spring brought a characteristic depression. ‘I don’t know myself these days that my pride seems gone as if it had never been … my Fortune’s Wheel is a true image, and we taken our turn at it, and are broken upon it.’16 He was working badly: he compared himself to the fallen Lucifer of his Rome mosaics. On 9 March 1893 he wrote to Mrs Gaskell that, on the whole, he wished he had never been born.

  … indeed what a solution of troubles that idea suggests – and who would have been the worse off? Georgie? Well it would have been much better for her – she could have married a good good clergyman – Phil and Margaret … they wouldn’t have been born at all or would have waited a more favourable opportunity. My friends? … they would never have known their inestimable loss … My purchases? [i.e. for the National Gallery] O they could have saved their money – the art of the country? Well there is no art of the country …17

  He was aware that he was making a fool of himself and staying too late, so that he had to be sent tactfully away, at Mrs Gaskell’s. In April there was a third and much more violent attack of ’flu. Reduced to a diet of quinine and beef tea, he drew himself as a skeleton – ‘O but it looks rather graceful and like Kate Vaughan – I meant a limp thing.’18 The weather was oppressively hot, even at Rottingdean. The emotional strain was reaching breaking point; Ned appealed to that wisest of all counsellors – if he believed it was in a good cause – Arthur Balfour. Balfour was still in the thick of the fight over the second reading of Gladstone’s Home Rule Bill, and it is astonishing to find that he spared the time to take the train and horse-bus down to Rottingdean because of a letter from Burne-Jones (who had still not finished the Perseus decorations) ‘telling him I had a perplexity about the conduct of my life’. ‘Thank God for holy friendship’, Ned wrote to Mrs Gaskell after this visit, ‘to take away my bitterness and disappointment of the past and make my last days here the best of all’.19

  Although Burne-Jones ends this letter by telling her that he worships and loves her more every day, Balfour had clearly advised moderation, and he returned to The Grange and the studio. Apart from his other work for the firm he wanted to supervise the three-light east windows for Rottingdean which he had both designed and presented ‘in gratitude for Margaret’. It was a proud moment when the grave-digger told him that the village approved of the windows and thought them the finest ones in Sussex.

  The stout child led by a guardian angel in the predella was of course Angela, but Burne-Jones, among his four portrait commissions for this year, had been asked to paint three-year-old Dossie, the daughter of Mary Drew. The picture was to be a present to Gladstone himself. In 1885 Mary Gladstone had married Harry Drew, a local clergyman, and Ned had sent her a quiet, sincere letter of congratulation on being ‘out of the great world’ at last. Dossie, however, was a tornado of energy, barefoot and wildly curly, and so uncontrollable in the studio that Ned had to get photographs made at Styles, in Kensington High Street.20 But he loved Dossie. ‘Tell me about [her] – her plans – her views,’ he wrote to Mary – and his touch with little children never failed. At the age of eighty-one, when she was Mrs Parish, Dossie remembered the painter’s kindness and the fascination of watching the mice running round the water pipes in the garden studio. Miss Helen Henschel, who also sat for him as a tiny girl, arrived in a green dress and was delighted to be ‘mistaken’ for an apple.21

  Another sitter was Lady Windsor (later the Countess of Plymouth), an exquisite Soul. He painted a discreetly elegant full-length portrait with a scheme of cool grey-greens which would focus the eye on the dark red hair. Yet even in the Lady Windsor tension is present – much more so in Miss Amy Gaskell, where it appears in the slight nervous gesture of the hands. The stillness in a Burne-Jones portrait is deceptive, or rather it is always possible to see how precarious it is and with what difficulty it has been won.

  So far Morris had paid him £300 in advance for the Chaucer drawings, and these, he knew, must have priority. He had promised to do two or three a week, but couldn’t; he told Mrs Gaskell, ‘you know why – I must lock myself into a room, but I can’t lock my soul up – but Morris … never fails, nothing disturbs the tranquil stream of his life … he looked so disappointed that I had done nothing since last year – and I couldn’t tell him why …’22

  Progress, however, was not always a tranquil stream and Morris ‘would roar “d–d bad!” and grump’. The discrepancy between their ideas was becoming obvious. As Burne-Jones reread Chaucer, determined to be absolutely true to him, he was struck by how Provençal the poet was at his greatest. Morris wanted illustrations of the Miller’s Tale, while Burne-Jones was lost, once again, in the magic rose-garden. Worse still, although h
e enjoyed the actual restriction of the page form, the delicate pencil drawings were, more than ever before, quite out of key with the great wondrously bordered folio for which Morris, at the same time, was drawing the ornaments. Catterson-Smith was called in to translate the plates into black and white; he had to work on photographs brushed with Chinese white, and draw on them with Indian ink, altering all the shadows and half-tones into lines so that they could be cut on wood by W.H. Hooper. ‘I have had to give a drawing lesson to the lad,’ Ned wrote. ‘The lad is about 35, but still a lad – as in art one is a lad at a hundred.’23 The best comment on the undertaking is the anxiety of Sydney Cockerell (who began to act as Morris’s secretary in 1893) to pass the whole thing off: writing to May Morris in June 1922, he suggested putting the blame on Burne-Jones’s eyesight (‘he no longer possessed the extraordinary actueness of early days’), but later added, ‘I think it better not to give as a reason the failure of B-J’s eyesight as at no time would he willingly have made the necessary black and whites. He hated the restriction of tone that they involved. The Cupid and Psyche drawings were all made in pencil. The drawings are wonderfully delicate things – pencil not silverpoint.’24 And so, too, in spite of increasing pain from his eyes, are the whole Chaucer set, though only twelve out of the eighty-seven were made from earlier designs. An edition of Chaucer with the original illustrations in collotype would be a revelation, not only of Burne-Jones as a draughtsman, but of the poet who wrote: