Edward Burne-Jones

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  My peyne is this, that whatso I desire

  That have I not, ne no-thing like thereto,

  And ever sets Desire myn herte on fire …

  Morris, of course, never dreamed of employing anyone else. Ned felt overwhelmed with tenderness at his enthusiasm. At this time too after the restrictions of the past few years, Morris launched out recklessly on buying illuminated manuscripts. Before a purchase, Ned noticed that he always said ‘prudence is a mistake’, and after it he would get some bottles of good champagne for Janey, ‘to set her up’.25 At The Grange he was sometimes so noisy in denunciation of everything modern that even Georgie ‘prayed for patience’; then he would be taken up to the studio to design capital letters. The amount he ate was also giving rise to anxiety. At the Sunday breakfasts he liked ‘many things on the table and more on the side table’. He would consume sausages, haddock, tongue and plovers’ eggs and then liked to go and look at the side table ‘and wish he had something else’.26

  The summer continued hot, and Alice Kipling exhausted Ned’s patience by staying at Rottingdean for three months (the Kiplings had come back from India to retire). For this reason he went up to London more than usual. In June, Dent began to publish the Morte d’Arthur, in parts with the Beardsley illustrations, something which Ned had looked forward to ever since the young artist had paid his timid call at The Grange. He was bitterly disappointed. Some of the drawings were slovenly – Beardsley had got tired of the commission – and others were fantasies on his own style with borders of phallic stalks and pods. Burne-Jones was under no illusion as to why he mistrusted both these and the later drawings. ‘Lust does frighten me, I must say,’ he told Rooke. ‘It looks like despair – despair of any happiness … I don’t know why I’ve such a dread of lust. Whether it is the fear of what might happen to me if I were to lose all fortitude … let myself rush downhill without any restraint.’27 Beardsley, who had begun by finding Burne-Jones ‘inimitable’ (‘Imitable, surely, Aubrey’, replied William Rothenstein), called for a second time at The Grange. Rooke saw ‘the back of him, going out of the door’, with all that this expressed. He had come to tell Burne-Jones that he hated King Arthur ‘and all mediaeval things’, and Burne-Jones felt the boy had only come ‘to show off and let me know that my influence with him was over, as if it mattered in the least whether it was or not … you know they’re impeccable, the young.’ But some time later he met Mabel again in Victoria Street and ‘she came up to me with her simple, straightforward-looking face with a saddish look on it, as though to say I’m sorry [I] don’t like what my brother is doing any longer – at least that’s what I thought it looked like.’28 He never knew that when five years later Beardsley coughed himself to death in a hotel room in Mentone, the prints of the Mantegna procession were still pinned up round the walls.

  Unsettled and miserable as to both present and future, Burne-Jones began ranging the streets, looking again for the places where he had walked long ago with Rossetti. In July the crisis came. He did in fact ‘lose all fortitude’, and wrote to Mrs Gaskell that he could not go on without her:

  … hadn’t I better say I’m going to you – there must be a scene some day – I don’t like to hurt – can’t bear to hurt, but go to you I must – I think about it every moment – and I see all the rooms – and talk to you all day long – and so I see you haven’t all forgotten the room …29

  It is impossible to tell how Mrs Gaskell answered this wild scrawl or how she calmed him on this occasion, but in any case the approaching shooting season obliged her to leave London with her husband for Beaumont. Georgie was staying with her sister in Brighton, and so was not with Ned when either this, or the next blow fell: Love Among the Ruins, which had been sent to Paris for reproduction by photogravure, had been drastically damaged. William Rothenstein, who was over in Paris, happened to be in the room when Goupil’s man came round to Whistler – an unlucky choice – with a desperate appeal for advice. The picture was water-colour, they had treated the highlights with white of egg, the paint was coming away and what was to be done? It was one of the best opportunities for a laugh that Whistler had ever had and he must have felt avenged at last for the trial.

  Phil came home at once from Paris, where he had been enjoying himself, to break the news and to be of what help he could.

  Burne-Jones had lost other pictures – one of the Rome cartoons had been burnt at Clouds in 1889, and The Merciful Knight had, at this time, disappeared altogether30 – but none had the emotional charge of Love Among the Ruins, painted soon after his break with Mary Zambaco. The owner was a Yorkshire patron, who told Ned that he had hidden the ruined canvas from his old father, so that he could die without knowing what had happened.

  ‘It is quite irreparable, but it is life, and all in the bargain – I don’t know who made the bargain,’ Ned wrote to Georgie. Although Phil had been in every way good and kind to him, he felt that he could stand no more, and went straight to Beaumont. There he was taken on gentle walks to the lake and the farmyard, seeing everything with unnatural sharpness, as one does in a state of unhappiness. Gradually he resumed his lifelong study of piglets and, since Mrs Gaskell had acquired one, of pugs. Olive Maxse and Mrs Pat had also bought pugs, and he was beginning to get a good pug likeness. With this strange consolation – but he caught health from Mrs Gaskell, he said, as others caught sickness – he went back to London and to work.

  The first task was to start an oil replica of Love Among the Ruins, and this, after his golden days at Beaumont, went forward in an unexpectedly cheerful atmosphere; Gaetano Meo, who sat for the lover, was given a joke cigar with a firework in it. Vespertina Quies was finished from Bessie Keene, and this was a soothing deep blue and grey twilight picture, indebted to Leonardo, but as Legros always said, ‘il faut voler des riches, et non pas des pauvres.’ It was autumn, and his friends began to come back to London. If he could not see Mrs Gaskell, he could rely again on the seven posts a day, and ‘Why shouldn’t I write when I like – when I like nearly every minute?’ At any London dinner party, too, he might meet her. He dreamed of an ideal dinner table. Instead of Henry James and the Ranee of Sarawak, who were actually coming that evening, he would have31

  17

  1894–6

  THE KELMSCOTT CHAUCER AND THE PARTING OF FRIENDS

  On 27 January 1894 Gladstone, on the point of retirement, offered a baronetcy to Burne-Jones ‘in recognition of the high position which you have obtained by your achievement in your noble art’.

  ’The honour’, Georgie comments in the Memorials, ‘was accepted.’ ‘The one person in the house who distinctly disliked it was the mistress,’ Rooke wrote in his diary.1 Watts had refused a title on the grounds that artists should not be rewarded in the same way as politicians, and to Morris, of course, the idea would be unmentionable. Nor did Burne-Jones want a title, but Phil did. Unstable as ever, he actually wept as he begged his father to accept it. ‘I didn’t feel that I ought to let my own notions stand in his way or affect his life one can’t tell how,’ Burne-Jones told Rooke. To Norman Grosvenor and his wife he wrote doubtfully, ‘I suppose it is right since friends say so and it concerns them as much as me – concerns Phil most – oh that Phil – I am almost in a hurry to be gone that he may light a long cigar and march down Bond Street – will a rich widow want him now? Many years older than Phil – that makes me anxious – wish I hadn’t thought of it.’2

  Such was the atmosphere at The Grange that the honour must indeed have been hardly worth it. According to Graham Robertson, when the documents about the baronetcy arrived (Burne-Jones said they asked ‘am I clean and sober? – why did I leave my last place?’) Morris was downstairs and there was terror lest he should get wind of them. Almost furtively, poor Ned began to design ‘the necessary heraldic arrangments’. The motto which attracted him most was voluisse sat est (it is enough to have desired) but in the end he chose sequor et attingam (I will follow and attain). As for his crest, he felt that as his only traceable ancesto
r was a schoolmaster, he ought to include a birch and exercise books, but in the end he drew a pair of wings in a circle of fire. ‘I scarcely dare tell Georgie, so profound is her scorn – and I half like it and half don’t care 2d.’, he wrote pathetically to Mrs Gaskell. Perhaps he need not be known as ‘Sir Edward’. ‘Surely,’ he reflected, ‘surely people say “Millais” and “Leighton”’. I’ll give Ralph [Mrs Gaskell’s butler] £5 a year always to announce me as Mr.’3 But Georgie remained implacable; this mark of success, a very notable one for a painter who had steadfastly refused to consider public opinion, must be put with the other offerings of Cophetua and rejected.

  His bad dreams remained:

  needless journeys – train catchings – sea journeys – gloomy waters … I seldom dream of anyone I love – have never yet dreamed of Margaret – sometimes Georgie who is always unkind in dreams, but I have established the tradition and it never varies … much of infancy and dark frightening rooms and staircases and footfalls following me – and doors that are dreadful and of beasts that frighten me.4

  At all costs, he felt, he must remain a painter; all invitations to write or lecture, even at Birmingham, he rejected – it would mean trying to be fair, and all his strength lay in ‘knowing no midway between loving and hating’. In April he sent a Sir Galahad to the Old Water-Colour Society – the first time he had exhibited there for twenty-four years. But another huge canvas, unfinished and unfinishable, now occupied one end of the studio – Love’s Wayfaring, a nightmare vision of love bound to its own car, dragged by naked men and women, and filling stiflingly a narrow street, like the streets of the hill towns of Italy.

  The plates for the Canterbury Tales were complete, and he began on the Romance of the Rose. In July he was drawing Chaucer’s bedroom, giving Chaucer his own face, and, in a queer state of desperation, writing to Mrs Gaskell at the same time: ‘there I’ve sketched him in – put him in bed – little book by him – and curtains and a window in his bed and I’ve drawn his spirit going out of a door … the spirit of him shall not be drawn faintly but stronger than the sleeping figure … we are getting to the truth at last …’5

  Meanwhile Georgie had found work dear to her own heart. The Local Government Act had been passed, giving authority to elected parish councils in all villages of more than 300 inhabitants to manage all local affairs which did not concern the Church. The Act was thought of as a return to a form of mediaeval popular administration, and it was ironic that Morris was not too tired to care for it. But Georgie was now set, with all the strength of will in her tiny iron body, to help him in the cause they both served. The parish councils could either be a stagnant version of the old vestries, or they could be active; Georgie was determined that Rottingdean should be active. She sent Morris a copy of a fighting pamphlet which she was printing to distribute to the electors.6 It reminded them that the ballot was secret, that voting was equal for rich and poor, and called upon them to take charge of their own affairs. Georgie was standing as a socialist, of course, though politics were not named. The squires of Rottingdean, where things had gone along comfortably for centuries, were immediately up in arms. Georgie, supported by the Ridsdales, was demanding a public wash-house. Battle was prepared. ‘Georgie’s love – she is so busy – she is rousing the village – she is marching about – she is going like a flame through the village,’ Burne-Jones wrote to Watts.7

  He was left largely to his own devices, and to Mrs Wilkinson, who ‘infests the house when Georgie is away’ and now carried so much equipment that she had to go through the doors sideways. Margaret and Phil both complained at his crumpled appearance. Largely for Mrs Gaskell’s sake, as he assured her, he resolved to make the attempt to ‘dress foppishly’. He was deeply impressed, certainly, by Phil’s sudden appearance in something quite new, ‘ridged trousers’. Burne-Jones had never seen creases in trousers before, and they interested him, as all shapes did. ‘They have a ridge in them only when new, but I hear it can be simulated if a maid who is skilful sits up the night before and irons and irons them.’8

  Certainly Burne-Jones not only made a creditable appearance before the Queen when he went to pay his respects at the Palace, but impressed the journalists who managed to make their way into The Grange. Of these Julia Cartwright (Mrs Ady) for the Art Journal (Christmas 1894) was much the most successful, making a businesslike catalogue and even getting Ned to say that he still thought of himself as a follower of the Grail. Georgie read the article aloud to him and he felt flattered, though the illustrations were ‘horrid, they were’.9 L.T. Meade, the novelist, did less well for the Strand (July 1895), particularly on the interview. ‘It puzzles me much’, Ned is supposed to have said with a sigh, ‘to know what special interest the public can take in the ordinary domestic life of a man, whether he is well known in his public capacity or not.’

  Arsène Alexandre, a veteran of the literary disputes of Paris, came with some apprehension, fearing he would be thrown out if Burne-Jones discovered that he knew Whistler. As a friend of the symbolists (he had even at one time lived in a tower) he had been struck at the New Gallery retrospectively by the ‘signs’. In the ‘pale and contracted faces’ of the Perseus series and the ‘trace of agitation even in the deepest rest’ he had understood the doubtful balance of tranquillity and suffering. In consequence he was rather dashed by the painter himself, finding him ‘an affable gentleman … the reverse of ascetic, with a short white beard’. He had expected ‘the dreamy worn face of Watts’s portrait’. He did not realise that too much solemnity always had a disastrous effect on Burne-Jones.

  When he spoke to Julia Cartwright about the Grail, Burne-Jones was not only thinking of the Avalon, although it had been moved back to the studio at The Grange, but of the cartoons for the Stanmore tapestries. There were five scenes, the round table, the setting out, failures in the quest, the attainment of Galahad and a ship crossing lonely seas. Among the foliage of the verdure border hung the knights’ shields, and Burne-Jones took a world of trouble and consulted many authorities over the correct arms. His imagination, however, lingered over the rejection of Sir Lancelot – Rossetti’s subject in the Union murals, thirty-eight years ago. There was a familiar irony, too, in these struggles with the red cross of Sir Galahad and the chapel argent of Sir Bedivere, while Morris absolutely refused to admit the existence of Sir Edward. The employees of the firm called him ‘the Bart’ behind his back, and that was all. He looked ruefully at a French newspaper cutting describing ‘la petite maison qu’habite Sir Edward Burne-Jones – Sir Edward, comme l’appelle familièrement son vieil ami William Morris …’11

  In July he went down to Rottingdean and took Angela for her first paddle ‘in undomesticated waters’. This was a relief, since he had just got through the unenviable task of ‘speaking to Phil’. One may imagine that this interview largely consisted of apologies from both sides. A few days later, Phil had collapsed altogether – ‘tired, I suppose,’ Burne-Jones commented doubtfully. He had to ‘clamour for brandy’ from a haughty barmaid to revive his son.

  Phil went to Blumenthal, Ned repaired once again to ‘the Rottingdean hole’. Crowded with donkeys, babies and chickens, it seemed to him much noiser than London, and although the Parish Council elections were not until December, there was a feeling of bitterness in the air. Suddenly Ned left them all, took the train for London and arrived on Mrs Gaskell’s doorstep, ‘I must and will take any chance of seeing you that I can for my life’s sake.’12 He did his best, he told her, to ‘hide things that would burn through’. The one thing he dreaded was to go too far, and lose her.

  A telegram arrived at The Grange. It was from Phil at Blumenthal: ‘Implore come immediately.’ The wretched Burne-Jones started packing; luckily Luke Ionides came to explain how one got tickets. The trouble turned out to be financial, and two days later father and son crawled back together across Europe. Small wonder that Ned’s age on his birthday this year was 485, or that he had nightmares of being examined in subjects he knew nothi
ng about. From this time, too, he began to have decisive warnings of heart trouble. As always, although he remained, as he admitted, an alarmist by nature and on principle’, he made very little of serious symptoms. Heart failure he had recognised ever since his schooldays when he had collapsed over the doorstep with his prizes. ‘Hearts may bang themselves about as much as they like,’ he wrote, after a visit to the doctor, ‘it may come again and probably will – and will not matter.’13

  Nevertheless, looking back as the summer wore on, he felt that his most relaxed, indeed his sanest moments had been spent with ‘theatricals’. Earlier in the year there had been an outing with Ellen Terry, Henry Irving and Kate Perugini, when they had all had to hire a fly to get back to London, because dear Ellen Terry had suddenly taken against the train and declared ‘she wouldn’t get into the nasty thing’. At the end of August he had got a job at the Lyceum for a young burlesque actress, Olga Christer, whom he had seen as Romeo. It was quite understandable that he should be drawn towards the warmth of the theatre and that in the end he should follow the example of Alma Tadema and try his hand at stage design.

  In May 1894, at the Théatre de l’Oeuvre, Lugné-Poe and his company had put on La Belle au Bois Dormant by Henri Bataille. This production is said to have had sets by Rochegrosse based on Burne-Jones’s Briar Rose, but there is no record of negotiations with Agnew’s. (The obvious intermediary would have been the American poet Stuart Merrill, who was acting manager, or possibly Robert d’Humières, who collaborated on the play and was a translator of Rudyard Kipling.) The first night was howled down by one of the theatrical factions of Paris, and Bataille was so embittered that he never printed the text. But clearly (if this word can be applied to an affair of veils and reveries and cloudy multiple meanings) Lugné-Poe’s production came very near to the true meaning of Briar Rose. The scene opened with the Prince awakening the Princess, but she is wretched in the modern world of the evil fairy, represented by a palace of steel girders, and a kindly power puts both of them to sleep again for ever. They lie like two statues, while veil after veil of transparent blue descends, and behind them the Briar Rose grows again. ‘La Princesse est joyeuse d’aller vers ses rêves de jadis.’ Here we are within echoing distance of Le Grand Meaulnes.