Angela and Denis, impervious (Angela in particular) to anything except what they wanted at the moment, were the great consolers. Their grandfather amused them with book after book of drawings, including the almost too horrible ones which strong-minded little girls like best. As with the Flower Book, the name suggested the idea. In the corner at Rottingdean where the children sometimes had to stand for a punishment, Burne-Jones painted a kitten playing with its mother’s tail. Angela took this wealth of pictures for granted, but envied him for being allowed to draw on the walls.
Georgie, as she had said, refused to droop and waste the days. Another address to the parishioners of Rottingdean was printed – What We Have Done (1896). She wanted £40 spent under the provisions of the new Lighting Act, and she was still indignant that many of the cottagers had no chance to wash all over. On the question of the public bath and wash-house she was defeated, but she won back her seat in December.
The strength which she had and gave to others was taxed to the uttermost. When Ned was asked whether he found the tall models he used for drapery studies were ‘overbearing’ he said no, it was the little women who were always bursting with energy. To Rooke he praised ‘the Mistress’s cheerful and resolute outlook, always the same.’ His letters, in fact, show him worrying about her health more than about his own.
His first public appearance after Morris’s death (to which Georgie quietly guided him) was a celebration in February at the New Gallery of Watts’s eightieth birthday. First, a children’s party (dominated by Angela), then two weeks later an evening party, a concert by Joachim with Agnes Zimmerman at the harpsichord. The Signor’s reaction to this was characteristic. He hoped it would give as much pleasure to others as it was misery for himself. Burne-Jones, although in acute pain from his eyes, went there to hear music and to meet old friends, including Lady Somers, whose portrait had been one of the first pictures he saw in Watt’s studio. After this, throughout the year he retraced the paths of friendship as though he could gain strength from that sacred earth. He went out to The Pines, where Swinburne, deaf, voluble and affectionate as ever, read him yet more ballads. He saw more of Holman Hunt, whose eyes in old age, he told Mrs Gaskell, had the exact tint of white currants. By a stroke of luck he acquired The Pet by Walter Deverell, who had shared with Rossetti the long-ago room in Red Lion Square. Morris’s cherished Sigurd appeared in 1898, even though in the end it only had two illustrations, and not long afterwards the Kelmscott Press closed down for ever. Burne-Jones even painted a last version of the Prioress’s Tale, the decoration for Morris’s wardrobe which he had done in Red Lion Square. All this matter of the return to the past was obsessive, as though he wanted to deny his own progress towards his later spare, abstracted and elegant style.
The Pilgrim went to the New Gallery that spring, but the one substantial commission was a replica of Hope, largely executed by Rooke, which went to America in March; Burne-Jones said he hoped this would support the household through the summer. Rooke, watching minutely, was not satisfied with the Master’s state of health. His face, Rooke thought, looked grey. Ned’s consultant at this time was Dr Harvey, whose son, like so many others, had come to The Grange to learn to draw. Harvey recommended Burne-Jones to smoke less, sleep more, and to try ‘a change of air’. The loss of a friend is not, of course, a recognised clinical condition. But the greyness was odd, and his fingers began to look grey too, like a dead man’s, or like Leighton’s. Leighton had died of an attack of angina pectoris.
The ‘change of air’ made Ned think of the north of France and the quay of Le Havre. ‘Already I see [Morris] far removed, and cling in my memory most to the days when we seemed equal and began the tales,’ he wrote to Frances Horner. Mrs Gaskell was just setting out for Chartres and Beauvais on the way to Italy, and he told her painfully not to miss the ‘angel with the dial’ and the kings and queens at Chartres ‘with such lovely folds as can hardly be imagined’.5
Georgie also wanted to go to northern France; she had been allowing herself pilgrimage into the past on her own account. In April she went to Upton to see the Red House, which neither Morris nor Ned had done since it was sold in 1865. ‘The apple blossom was out,’ she found, but she was told there would soon be streets all round it. To prepare Ned for the journey to France and to what Morris had called ‘the kindest and most loving of all the buildings the earth has ever borne’, she took him for a fortnight to recuperate at Malvern Spa, only to be met with bitter winds and snow ‘and the usual tale of its being quite unusual to have such a May there’. Stout-hearted Georgie did her best to prevail against the weather and the absence of pictures in the hotel, which drove Ned to reading the ‘Requests to Vistors’, because at least they were in a frame. But the holiday was even more exhausting than most, and at the end of it she felt it best to leave him with Rooke and to set out for France herself with the Mackails. They were not to be away long, and in any case there was plenty of company at Rottingdean, where North End House had been lent for the summer to Rudyard Kipling.
Ruddie had come back to England and showed all his usual warmth towards his family circle. Burne-Jones felt he owed his nephew a debt of gratitude for making Phil’s picture, shown at the New Gallery in April, into a centre of attention. Phil had exhibited his Vampire, a horror picture of Mrs Pat Campbell, over whom he had now lost his head completely. Kipling had written the verses for the catalogue:
There was a fool, and he lost his heart
(Even as you and I!)
To a rag, a bone, and a hank of hair …
Burne-Jones took this from a completely professional point of view. He knew Mrs Pat was quite undisturbed at being called a rag and a bone – she had survived worse things – and that Ruddie once again had come to Phil’s rescue.
Being a guest in his own house Burne-Jones found to be an odd experience, but (not walking as well as he used to do) he hired a kind of fly to get to the downs and breathe the sea air. The Memorials speak of Rottingdean this year as his ‘haven of rest’. But to Mrs Gaskell he wrote that he had brought no work with him because he could not think what to bring, ‘and now come candles, and an endless evening – lasting hours and hours and when it has lasted an eternity and you look at the time it is always half past six – but never mind – courage – ever your E.’6
The tedium was of course not the fault of ‘Ruddie of my heart’. Crom Price, who was still allowed to smoke (and still, according to Ned, in love with someone different every week) came down as well, and they all three talked into the small hours when the first dawn winds began to stir off the sea. In politics, however, Kipling and his uncle could not agree. Burne-Jones was aghast at the Jubilee. Legros had been commissioned to do some elaborate decorations in papier-mâché and gilt of Britannia, Law and Prosperity, and for friendship’s sake Ned had done his best to praise them; ‘all this enthusiasm spent over one little unimportant old lady is the one effort of imagination of the English Race.’ But he hated the screaming crowds and the officers with ‘brass-coloured moustaches and ridiculous bottoms in the saddle’, and the ‘naked calves swelling with pride’ of the Seaforth Highlanders.7 Such pride must lead to certain disaster. Kipling’s view, equally Ruskinian, was of the empire as a harmonious whole to which every part contributed. He felt that his uncle, while he was in humour and imagination undoubtedly king in his own country, in politics was ‘a great child’. Yet Kipling’s Recessional, ‘lest we forget’ – although Burne-Jones absolutely declared that he had nothing to do with it – was written that summer at Rottingdean. It was thrown into the wastepaper basket, rescued by Professor Norton’s daughter Sallie who was staying with the Kiplings, and referred to Aunt Georgie, who took it up to London that evening and despatched it to The Times.
If Kipling expressed his deepest feelings for his uncle anywhere, it was surely in Kim. Who else is the old lama, whose life is a quest which others do not understand, who can draw with pen and ink in a way that is almost lost to the world, who shows Kim his art ‘not fo
r pride’s sake, but because thou must learn’, and who tells stories that hold him spell-bound? When he leaves the lama to discover his own identity, Kim reminds himself that ‘roads were meant to be walked upon, houses to be lived in … men and women to be talked to … they were all real and true – solidly planted upon the feet – perfectly comprehensible’, but he leaves behind him the unworldly quest of his master, who has had a sign that his remaining time on this earth will be short. In fact, Kipling returned to the manuscript of Kim immediately after Burne-Jones’s death. But if he thought that his uncle’s art had little connection with his real life, then he did not altogether understand Burne-Jones.
As far as daily work was concerned, there were two things that really mattered now to Burne-Jones, the Life of William Morris and Avalon. The biography had been entrusted to Jack Mackail. Although Mr Philip Henderson has shown that Mackail had an ordinary human curiosity (telling Mrs Coronio, for instance, how extraordinarily interesting he could make the story of Mary Zambaco ‘if one were going to die the day before it was published’), he was still felt by the family to be reserved and austere. Rooke noted that the Master ‘didn’t like’ to ask Mackail how he was getting on with the Life.8 Ned himself was supposed to be preparing notes, but kept losing them, attributing this, as most of us do, to the ‘malignity of matter’. He wrote, however, a delightful account of the years at Oxford and the time at Red Lion Square.
The Avalon came near to breaking Ned’s heart. Face to face with the vast canvas he found, now when he needed it most, his old certainty of design deserting him. For the last two or three years he had fallen into the dangerous habit of consulting other people – Lady Lewis was asked about the Car of Love, the path in Aurora was widened because ‘several people had mentioned it’, he considered painting the wings crimson in Love and the Pilgrim when it came back unsold – but then the red would have to be ‘quartered’ right through the picture. The Avalon went through a bewildering series of changes. ‘Painting pink harper purple’ … ‘the reds are disapparing from Avalon’ … ‘Pilgrim was thought too grey, so making effort to get colour into Avalon’ … ‘taking out watching figures from wall’ … ‘mailed trumpeter now vivid blue’, Rooke noted day by day in 1897. ‘No-one seems to like Arthur,’ the Master told him, ‘when there’s something going on in a picture they can make it out, but when all is the beauty of repose they feel it is dull.’ But they had not found Briar Rose dull. The cost of straining the canvas for Avalon alone had been over £70, and the picture had been in the studio for eleven years. Of course this did not matter. What mattered was that Avalon should not ‘turn out no more than a piece of decoration with no meaning in it at all and what’s the good of that?’9
Was it worthy of the dead King? First the hill fairies waiting for the reawakening, then the battle raging in the distance seemed wrong to Burne-Jones and he painted them out. Their place was taken by one of the best passages in the picture, the disturbing cloud formations in the western sky. The disappearance of the sea – meant at one point to have ‘the bottle-green colour of waves seen over the side of a boat’ – took away the remoteness of the magical sea passage which can be felt in the earlier versions and in the sketch for the Sirens. But the likeness of Morris was good. Graham Robertson, visiting the studio, was surprised that Arthur should be ‘a little man’. He is shown, in fact, as ‘a glorious head on a crumple of clothes’.
So often in his career Burne-Jones had said that because he cared so much, he had done less well. Arthur must be lost, the picture must give a sense of loss, but also the possibility of return. Burne-Jones was not a great hoper. ‘Hope is a mere luxury, not a necessity,’ he said; ‘the fortunate may safely indulge in it.’ But at the point where hope becomes faith, the faith that the world would listen one day to what Morris had to tell them about joy in work, about respect for the earth and its growth and the people on it, about possessing nothing that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful – in that faith Burne-Jones was immovable. He himself was no more than an old painter, the old enchanter. ‘Every year when the hawthorn buds it is the soul of Merlin trying to live again in the world and speak – for he left so much unsaid … Arthur will come back out of his restful sleep but Merlin’s fate can never be undone.’10
The fate of Merlin was to know the truth that no one would listen to, to know the secrets of humanity and yet to be helpless in the power of his weakness for women. Of his own will he is imprisoned in the tower of air stronger than steel. When in the June of 1897 Burne-Jones was invited to a Jubilee dinner given by a hundred ‘representative women’ he declared that he wanted them to vote, wanted them to govern, but could not bear them to ask him out, instead of waiting to be asked. That summer Amanda Pain, the daughter of the painter Rudolf Lehmann, wanted him to design the frontispiece for her novel St Eva (the long-suffering heroine plays a lute, lives in Melbury Road, and wears ‘Burne-Jones blue’), and he drew for her a lovely head of a girl, nicely engraved by the French artist Emile-Louis Derbier. In July, in a letter to Mrs Gaskell about a party they had both attended the night before, he wrote: ‘Did you see last night a very beautiful radiant-looking woman – she stood for a time in one of the doorways – extraordinarily lovely – I wanted to talk to her but it wasn’t easy because of the music and the people – you didn’t seem to see her – but manners, public manners and the expected decorum of social life made it difficult …’11 Burne-Jones, after all those years, could still be surprised that Mrs Gaskell ‘didn’t seem to see’ this entrancing newcomer. But even in these letters to her he is still marvelling over the difference between men and women.
From another party Georgie had to bring him home because the music was poor. ‘It was no sign of faiblesse’, she told him encouragingly, ‘not to enjoy that party.’ The summer was very hot, but he stayed in London throughout August, because Phil was painting his portrait. The standing tired him (Phil wanted to show him in front of his easel), but the picture, commissioned by Professor Norton, was ‘very like this old man’. Perhaps, after all, Phil might be settling down to work, but ‘about Georgie I am troubled often’, he wrote. Her expenditure of energy frightened him. How could she be got to rest, or indeed to think about herself at all?
In the studio, Rooke and he were what can only be termed messing about. ‘A warm-coloured background’ was laid over the Perseus (Balfour’s music-room was still unfurnished). They redid the background of the portrait of Lady Lewis, and put more thorns into the Pilgrim. They had been worried for nearly a year over the ‘shape between Pilgrim’s sleeve and his knee’, and to Burne-Jones every shape in life was either right or wrong; he could not bear anyone else to cut a slice of bread for him, because ‘in bread, shape is everything’. He found it more and more difficult to pronounce anything as finished. By this time he could not read or write at all without glasses, although Phil, dashing in on rapid visits, reminded him that there had never been a time when he hadn’t said he felt decrepit. Considerable pressure was now needed for him to undertake anything new. Mary Drew’s letters, however, told him that her father was sinking, and he set himself to finish the Hawarden window. There is no sign of weakness in this design of 1897. The problem of the four lights is solved by a majestic Nativity which goes across them all. With the strange, spiky forms of Burne-Jones’s latest work and clear, cold blue and brown colouring, there is a concentration of all the lines on the Mother and Child, the last thing visible in Hawarden church today as the evening light fades. The old pattern-maker could still make a pattern.
Merton Abbey seemed ‘ghost-ridden’, as though Morris were still looking over the shoulder of the workers, but it must be visited. Burne-Jones took Mrs Gaskell down with him to see the new window put in hand, and after this he felt a moment of encouragement. Leaving the Gaskells’ house after dinner on 28 August, he took a hansom (instead of the sedate four-wheeler which he considered suitable to his age). The horse bolted and came down. ‘Indignantly I wriggled out … my mind full of
happy things that no cabs or rain could touch’, and he heard ‘the clashing of the Kensington bells – a tumult of noise that I love’.12
Kensington, he felt, would ‘see him out’. He would stay at The Grange – however much he liked to talk about retreating from the world – till he was turned out or carried out. After that, perhaps the almshouse, if one was allowed to paint there. The tenancy of The Grange ran out in 1902, and this was a source of worry. But the renewal of the lease was child’s play to George Lewis (now Sir George), whose help, the Memorials tell us, ‘made all things plain to us’.
It might be easier to finish the Avalon in a larger studio, with room to step back and judge it properly. In September, the immense canvas was moved to 9 St Paul’s Studios, about half a mile from The Grange. This building was another surprise of Sir Coutts Lindsay, and for the first time Ned had the advantage of a really good north light. He went out to Roberson’s, where he was now a venerated figure, to get ‘new brushes – new paints – new everything’.13 But he did not feel able to start work there until the following spring.
In late autumn, when the Kiplings had moved to The Elms, just across the green, the Burne-Joneses went down to Rottingdean for their winter holiday. The grandchildren came, and Ned set about making a portrait of little Denis Mackail, who unfortunately proved even more mobile than little Dossie; he purchased sleeping dormice for the children’s Christmas stockings, and made a wooden fort which he blew up for them. Georgie was deep in a new enterprise, the transference of the South London Art Gallery to public ownership; she launched into a sea of correspondence.
Edward Burne-Jones Page 35