As to public affairs, Ned, the much-loved friend of both Gladstone and Balfour, made it a rule to talk as little about politics as he could, though he worried about them much more. He was profoundly distressed by the Jameson Raid and the prospect of war. ‘Ours is a material empire’, he told Rooke, ‘leaving traces in stout and soda-water bottles, and no material empire can last for ever; it might go in fifty years or even half of that … I love the immaterial in English achievements.’ He was thinking of the many hundreds like Lockwood Kipling, Ruddie’s father, who had spent his working life reviving the craft traditions of India. ‘Let’s have no more dominant races, we don’t want them,’ he added.
Georgie had been distressed by a letter from Morris at Kelmscott, wishing he had not wearied himself out in attempting the impossible, but ‘swallowed down my sorrow and anger’ and taken to bed, like Icelandic heroes; ‘I am grown old, and see that nothing is to be done.’ She, on the contrary, was determined that something should be. In Rottingdean she had seen to the repair of the fire engine and the railways round the village pond, formed a footpath committee, and helped to appoint an inspector of the knacker’s yard. On such things a social democracy is based. Once again, Ned told Olive Maxse, she was marching ‘with great decision on her features’. But the opposition she had stirred up, particularly among the farmers over the question of rights of way, was strong. The villagers, Burne-Jones wrote to Lady Rayleigh, had been diverted by a wreck on their beach – a grand piano had been washed up with a whale, a baby, whisky and a bundle of sermons – but in the parish elections afterwards Georgie had lost her seat, and there were ‘feuds innumerable’.32
Georgie was undaunted. Ned, in spite of himself, went on searching for the kind of sympathy where one weakness and disheartenment met another. There could of course be defeats even there.
What do you do when a lady weeps? [he asked Rooke]. Either you take her to your bosom and try to comfort her or you do nothing. If you allow your feelings to carry you away and you do the former, her husband is sure to come in or a visitor is announced: and if you do nothing, what a fool you look … I did nothing … I suppose that little lady is saying ‘that old fool very likely thought I was crying because of him – it would be just like a man’s conceit’.33
On 27 December, he could report that he had finished the Chaucer drawings, although his eyesight was seriously affected (one eye by now was almost useless). The last drawings to be done were for Troilus and Criseyde – the most elegant, but also the strangest. In this at least he had not failed Morris. ‘I have worked at it with real love,’ he wrote to F.S. Ellis.
1896, however, opened with the familiar troubles at The Grange. ‘I generally go and see Burne-Jones when there’s a fog,’ Ellen Terry told Bernard Shaw. ‘He looks so angelic, painting away there by candlelight.’ But the studio was leaking and even the famous bell-pull which Ruddie had loved was out of order. Rooke overheard the Mistress say there was nothing she liked to see so much as a paid bill, and the Master replied that a back is bare without money behind. He began to arrange another show of drawings, his third in three years, this time with the Fine Arts Society. ‘When I’m taken with all my unfinished pictures and studies to the Fulham Workhouse I shall want to occupy the whole of it, and then all the poor of Fulham will have to turn out and come and live here instead … sometimes I feel I should be well content to die … but at other times I have had such joy in being alive as I could hardly contain.’34 The happiness, though, was always paid for by depression and ‘a hopeless state of mind’.
Besides the pain from his eyes he was worried about a certain loss of memory. ‘Shall I be a wearying old man, I wonder, if I live much longer?’ he wrote to Mrs Gaskell. Stephens had asked him about the Lancelot pictures and he could only write:
I don’t think it can be very closely identified – I meant it for a symbol generally of the rejection of Lancelot but the words are in the book of the S. Grail somewhere – and I have been hunting for them and cannot find them – because of the cussedness of things – I know they are there for I copied them out the other night – not quoting them from memory – which fails me much at present – it is the subject of the failing or rejection of Lancelot in his quest––35
He was going out even less than before, remarking that though he hated to be made to feel revolutionary, dinners in restaurants made him work out the cost of feeding hungry children at 4d. each. Mrs Gaskell was always an exception, but on only three occasions in his life was he allowed to take her to a ‘pot-house’. Weekends in country houses had also lost most of their meaning; they were ‘two days stolen out of time’, and he was not sure how much time he had left.
In January Leighton died. He lay in state at the Royal Academy with his Presidential gold medal on the bier and his paints and brushes framed in velvet; at noon, ‘punctual in death as in life’, his cortège entered St Paul’s. It was a princely funeral, but of a magnificence which could only depress Ned (as Browning’s had done) because it had nothing to do with art. He had loved Leighton – ‘always noble and jolly’ as Poynter called him – and yet his death, and even Millais’s and du Maurier’s later in the year, were lessened for him by his fears for Margaret, who was pregnant again, and for Morris. ‘Mr Morris comes in very ghostlike, feeble, and old looking; followed by Mistress and Pendry with a low easy chair … Mr Morris no longer able to pick up his keys and has the devil of a job getting his trousers on and off … can only look at his books for five minutes together …’36
On 22 February Ned went with him to consult an eminent physician, Sir William Broadbent. Part of the trouble was that the doctors could not or would not say what was wrong with Morris. Broadbent diagnosed diabetes, but said there was no immediate danger. Ned did not believe this. On the following Sunday Morris did not come to breakfast, nor did he ever come again in the old way.
But there were other callers at The Grange who could not be neglected. On the same 22 February Constance Wilde arrived unexpectedly. She had come from Bordighera to break the news to Oscar of his mother’s death. Wilde, she told Ned, was ‘changed beyond recognition, but they give him work to do in the garden and the work he likes most to do is to cover the books with brown paper – for at least it is books to hold in his hand – but presently the keeper made a sign with his finger and like a dog he obeyed and left the room … it is all inexpressibly dreadful – I wish they could see their way to let him go … the youngest child has quite forgotten him already.’37
Comyns Carr and Hallé were anxious to know what Ned would be showing at the New Gallery, and under pressure he finished Aurora (Rooke helping him up to the last minute with the reflections in the river). But sometimes Ned felt an absolute necessity to look at things quietly by himself, and this was not easy for someone who had become, as Rothenstein put it, ‘an enviable figure who had gained the homage of the greatest minds of his day’. When he went to the British Museum to look at mosaics, officials ‘sprang at him’ and ‘showed him things’. The exhibition of Tissot’s illustrations to the New Testament that April was of particular interest because Ned remembered Tissot’s strange ‘conversation’ after his visit to the Grosvenor Gallery. ‘But dear Henry James was there and began to sum them up critically’, ruining it for Burne-Jones, who just wanted ‘to place them in my own mind’.38 And yet he was afraid of his own thoughts. Anyone who has ever had a sleepless night will respond to his description of the small hours:
After a time the clock begins to strike slowly, and as it says ‘one’ you think ‘oh, that’s terribly early’ and then it goes on to 2 and 3 and you say ‘Come, that’s not so bad’ – then at 4 and 5 ‘it’ll be morning soon’ and 6 ‘it must be full daylight out of doors now’ – when 7 sounds ‘Pendry will be here with the hot water in a minute’. But then it goes on to 8, and you start up in horror, and as you hear 9, 10, 11, 12, one after the other you realise the full misery of your position, the whole night yet to go through.39
Sometimes he played draughts a
gainst himself (the charm of this is that you always lose), or read The Broadstone of Honour all night.
When morning came he could start work. Frances Horner’s visit had led to a design which was an affectionate allusive tribute to their long friendship, the Magician. Burne-Jones gave his own face to the necromancer who is himself enchanted, and drew Frances as the young woman who looks away from him and into the magic mirror at a ship crossing distant seas. He had hoped to get the dark tones a little like the blacks of the Arnolfini portrait, which, after a lifetime’s study of the masters, he concluded was the greatest picture in the world. But ‘the Magician isn’t within 100 thousand leagues of it’. A little panel was prepared at the same time, ‘to help sell the biggest one’ if possible.
Morris in the spring of 1896 was pressing on with several projects besides the Chaucer. He had set his heart on a Morte d’Arthur with Ned’s illustrations, a Froissart, and an edition of the Hill of Venus with the Earthly Paradise cuts of thirty years earlier. This last was to be written in prose, simply to give a better lay-out, although Burne-Jones still hoped he might do it in verse with ‘whack-fol-de-rol right up to the margin’. All this was in addition to the Sigurd with which Ned told Rooke he was ‘hopelessly stuck’. In spite of this he offered to increase the number of designs to forty, which ‘roused Morris’, Mackail says, ‘to a little fresh life’. But the great hope, which almost seemed to be keeping Morris alive, was to see the Chaucer through the press. The elaborate title page had been finished earlier in January. The last time he went anywhere with Ned was to look at the manuscripts at the Society of Antiquaries. In June he was sent to Folkestone, ‘a change of air’ having been suggested, rather strangely, as a cure for diabetes. Friends came regularly to keep him company and report on the printing of the Chaucer, and on 24 June the first fully bound copy of the great book was brought down and put in his hands. Out of the edition of thirteen copies on vellum one was sent to Swinburne and another was for Burne-Jones, who made a present of it to Margaret on her birthday; her own third baby had been born on 1 July – Mackail remaining, as it seemed to Ned, ‘quite impassive’ – and it was the finest thing he had to offer her.
The doctors’ next suggestion was that Morris should try a sea voyage to Norway. They talked of an improvement. Ned could not see it, nor could Janey, nor Philip Webb – those who knew him best – but it would be another ‘change of air’. While he was away Burne-Jones went down to Rottingdean. He could do nothing except ‘a few little drawings in tints of gold on coloured grounds, and my heart is about as heavy as it can be’ even though Margaret brought down the three children and Phil came back from Monte Carlo. Phil always knew when his father really needed him, and the two erring human beings consoled each other.
If Morris were to die, what would be left? The century was closing on an imperialist nation, preparing for next year’s jubilee, well on the way to destroying everything that was relevant to the human scale of living in a small green country. More people than ever lived on a blackened earth, under clouded skies. ‘Shoddy is king’, Morris had said, and with all his influence in so many directions, the values of craftsmanship were more in peril than ever. In Burne-Jones’s own chosen field of painting, Impressionism seemed to be all anyone cared about, not hand painting soul, but hand painting hand. ‘A disappointment to find the future of painting turning in that direction, so opposite to all I’ve wished and thought … Difficult to prevent Georgie from seeing too much of it. It isn’t fair to let it affect her.’40 But beyond all this he would lose his friend; the king would die. ‘Fellowship is heaven,’ says Morris’s John Ball, ‘and lack of fellowship is hell.’ As for Georgie, every heart has its own bitterness. In January Morris had sent her the last poem he ever wrote. It began, as in former days, with the flowering may – ‘the blossoms white upon the thorn’ and ended with
The hail and the haw on the wandering sea,
And one farewell to Hope.
Burne-Jones believed, with justice, that the future would partly be shaped by Morris’s ideas. But he had to live in the present. ‘As soon as Morris was back from the voyage it was clear what he would soon be … [He was] no more than a glorious head on a crumple of clothes. His poor body had dwindled away to absolutely nothing. The strain of watching it was terrible.’41 ‘Such hopes as I had of the voyage but all are dashed,’ he wrote to George Howard.42
Morris was brought back to Kelmscott House. Almost his last gleam of excitement came, Burne-Jones thought, when he turned over in bed to spit and broke all the breakfast things, including Janey’s best blue teapot. Ned or Georgie called at Kelmscott House every day. Graham Robertson describes how one evening Janey saw her guests downstairs and when asked how Morris was ‘she made no reply, but turning to the wall, fell against it, her bowed head hidden in her hands’. Morris lay in bed in his first-floor room, suffering from the heat and craving for rain. ‘… real rain,’ Janey wrote to Lucy Faulkner; ‘we have been taken in so many times by the leaves against the window.’43
From his sickbed Morris still talked of the Morte d’Arthur. The last letter he had been able to write himself, Mackail says, ‘was one of a few lines to Lady Burne-Jones, who was at Rottingdean, on the 1st of September. “Come soon,” it ended, “I want a sight of your dear face.”’ On 8 September he dictated the last chapter of his last ‘tale’, The Sundering Flood; ‘… so when Osborne saw it would not better be, he wept and bade farewell to the Lord of Longshaw … and it is not said that he met the Lord of Longshaw face to face again in this life.’ On Friday, 2 October, Morris did not recognise Burne-Jones. ‘I cannot leave him or go away at all,’ Ned wrote to Mary Drew. On 3 October 1896 Morris died.
When Burne-Jones came he asked to be taken to the room where his friend lay dead and to be left alone there. ‘There was for a short period a look of something like indignation about him; but that soon passed away … all that about the beauty of death I don’t believe a rap in … But I’m sorry for the world … he could do without it, but the world’s the loser.’44
18
1896–8
ROTTINGDEAN AND AVALON
The letters began to come in. To Olive Maxse he answered disjointedly: ‘O little Olive, write I can’t … I am quite alone now – quite quite I don’t think he had much pain … And so it’s over – this is something is over – and I can’t be the same any more.’1 To Watts he could only write ‘dearest Signor – This is a little hand grasp, that’s all – just a squeeze of the hand.’ Only Ruskin, from whom a word would have meant so much, was silent. Although he still talked at Brantwood of ‘my dear brother Ned’ he no longer took in what was happening around him.
The coffin left Paddington in a carriage decorated with green leaves like a chapel and was drawn to Kelmscott churchyard on a haywain. Nothing more different from Leighton’s funeral could be imagined. ‘The little waggon with its floor of moss and willow branches broke one’s heart,’ Ned wrote to Mrs Gaskell, ‘the King was being buried, and there was none other left.’2
Some of the hundreds of letters were answered for him by Margaret and Georgie, who told Mrs Pat Campbell that they had come back ‘prepared to go on living for as long as may be, not to droop and waste the days’.3 She added that Morris had left nothing unfinished, forgetting perhaps the novel on blue paper, about which she had given him no hope. Her task now was taking care of Ned – ‘feeding as far as he will let me – companioning as far as may be.’ Drawing he could always do, and he turned to the work which always came easiest to him, cartoons for glass. In the last months of 1896 he designed two windows for Newcastle upon Tyne, David Lamenting and David Consoled. He had started on this subject deliberately, facing his own fear, and recollecting David’s words over the dead child: ‘I shall come to him, but he shall not come again to me.’ The Jesse Tree and Jacob’s Ladder windows for Rottingdean were wonderfully well adapted to the tall thin lancet windows in the tower; they were paid for by the parishioners in memory of the Revd Arthur Thomas, who died in
1895. This popular vicar (according to Ned, who had been fond of him) had kept a good horse and known every flower and bird on the downs; indeed, instead of the prescribed questions on catechism he had asked the little boys how many birds’ eggs they could recognise. The windows were installed the following year. Then, for the west window of St Philip’s, Birmingham, he did the superb Last Judgement. No agitation here, the dwellers on the earth simply stand waiting for their sentence. The whole effect depends on the late afternoon sun slanting through the glorious red of the massed angels’ wings. It is a window for Evensong.
While Morris was alive, the day when a window was finished would be a kind of picnic when both families went down to the works to see it propped up against the light. Now Ned went over to Merton Abbey once or twice a week by himself to see to the execution of the glass and above all to the colour, where Dearle was least to be relied on.
A letter to Mary Drew sets out the business side of commissioning a window. The Gladstones wanted a west window for Hawarden church to commemorate the life of their father, and they wanted him to see it before it was too late; Gladstone was in his eighty-seventh year. Burne-Jones explains that they must first get an estimate of cost from Dearle, who would then send him the template to work on. The cheapest plan is to fill up the bottom and top with grisaille and use figures which he has designed already, then ‘all the cost can be expended on splendid colour – a window is colour beyond anything and [this] should be the chief thought’. Mary’s brother, he says, keeps asking for a central figure, impossible in a four-light window – ‘I can see he is thinking of a picture all the time’. In a window ‘the figures must be simply read at a great distance … the leads are part of the beauty of the work and as interesting as the lines of masonry in a wall – and the more of them … the deeper the colour looks … It is a very limited art and its limitations are its strength.’4 He is writing, he tells her, with Angela and Denis pulling at his legs, and his tiredness is clear enough. But the Gladstones did not want a design that had been used before, they were ready to pay whatever was necessary. The templates arrived. Burne-Jones put off the job until the right idea and the right design should come to him.
Edward Burne-Jones Page 34