Edward Burne-Jones

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  The Broadstone of Honour, or the True Sense and Practice of Chivalry was the book which Burne-Jones kept by his bedside for the whole of his life, even after he had come to feel, or at least to say, that it was childish. It is by the antiquarian Catholic Revivalist, Kenelm Digby, who tells us that he conceived the idea when he was travelling with a band of like-minded friends, collecting ‘whatever legends were credible and suitable to the present age’. It is hard to think what Digby could have meant by ‘credible’ here. The castle of Ehrenbreitstein gives the title because the fortress on the rock seems ‘lofty and free from the infection of a base world’. The Arthurian knights are not ‘enchantments which exist but in a dream of fancy … These images are the only objects substantial and unchangeable.’ Here Platonism and Victorian mediaevalism meet.

  The Broadstone is elaborately but not intelligibly planned – indeed, it could hardly be so, since the crowded pages were to correspond to ‘the symbolical wanderings of the ancient knights’, during which, Digby says, the Catholic faith itself will save him from inconsistency. Book 2, Tancredus, which must certainly have been Burne-Jones’s favourite, winds gradually into a maze of stories and miracles, designed to show that the knights and monks of old possessed every conceivable virtue. At the end we are returned to nineteenth-century industrial England, ‘and it is as if the night had closed on us, and we are among tangled thorns’.

  The author forestalls objections by telling us that these are ‘thoughts that breathe, and words that burn’. It is not a book to analyse, but to be lost in, and if we cannot do this we are not likely to understand Morris’s early poems or Burne-Jones’s early water-colours, the freshest of all their art.

  Sintram and his Companions is the winter story in the tales of the four seasons by H. de la Motte Fouqué. Its inspiration is Dürer’s Knight, Death and the Devil, which appears as the frontispiece, and this woodcut version meant more to Morris and Burne-Jones at Oxford than any other graven image. Ned, who was beginning to try to draw, was fascinated by the compact oneness of man and horse, and the electric tension of the line. ‘No scratching of the pen,’ Ruskin wrote, ‘nor any fortunate chance, nor anything but downright skill and thought will imitate so much as one leaf of Dürer’s.’ But to Fouqué, ‘musing on the mysterious engraving’, the importance of the Dürer was its allegory of the noble soul. The hero’s inspiration, in his struggle against his own violent nature, is his mother Verena, who cannot receive him in her cloister in the snows until ‘all is pure in thy spirit as in here’. The vile dwarf, ‘the little Master’, appears to him in moments of sexual temptation, and Death, the bony pilgrim, plays an ambiguous rôle, so that at the end Sintram, who has met him more than once on his journey upwards, must still wait for him.

  Among the many haunting moments is the fear which possesses Sintram at the first sight of his own reflection in his bright shield. This image of adolescence recognising its own possibilities entered deeply into Burne-Jones’s imagination. The idea of Sintram’s perseverance went to reinforce others, his father, for example, walking ‘tired miles’ to see a cornfield, Newman at the Oratory, Morris’s offer of all his income to found ‘the monastery’.

  If Sintram is inspired by Dürer’s engraving, The Heir of Redclyffe is inspired by Sintram. This, Charlotte M. Yonge’s first real novel, was published in 1853, the very year that Ned and Morris first read it, and, like her other books, was corrected by Keble. Against the background of an amiable country vicarage the hero, Sir Guy Morville, struggles to control the inherited curse of a violent temper. He even cures himself of biting his lip and of ‘cutting pencils’. And Keble’s teaching, that we can live life as a ‘common round’ and still give up the world, is understood so intensely by Guy that his soul consumes his body.

  There was, of course, nothing unusual in two young men reading and feeling deeply affected by these three books in 1853. The Broadstone had been one of the hermetic texts of the Young England movement, which Disraeli had tried, or pretended to try, to turn into practical politics. Newman had been so agitated by Sintram that he could only read it in the garden, and alone. The Heir was to be the favourite reading of the young officers in the Crimea. The odd thing is not that Morris and Burne-Jones should have read them so eagerly, but that doing so should have turned them into artists. In 1853 they both intended to enter the Church; in 1854 they still meant to found a monastery. Within a few years they would be collaborating in a decorators’ firm. But there was no real change of moral direction.

  The direct link beween Sintram toiling through the snows and the ideal of craftsmanship was Ruskin. Far more attractive than Carlyle’s specific of hard work was Ruskin’s doctrine that to work at anything less than the highest was blasphemy. The second volume of Modern Painters told Burne-Jones and Morris that painting was ‘a noble and expressive language, invaluable as the vehicle of thought, but by itself nothing’, and, as Ned recalled, everything was put aside when the Edinburgh Lectures came out and Ruskin declared that academic painting was at an end and that truth and spirituality lay ‘with a very small number of young men’ who were working here and now in England. These were the Pre-Raphaelites, ‘a somewhat ludicrous name’. In this lecture, as Morris read it aloud to him, Burne-Jones heard for the first time the name of Rossetti; ‘so that for many a day after that we talked of little else but paintings which we had never seen, and saddened the lives of our Pembroke friends.’

  However, the two of them had not been affected in quite the same way. The Edinburgh Lectures singled out the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (P.R.B.) for three things: their technical superiority, their ‘enormous cost of care and labour’ (this was to become Ruskin’s Lamp of Sacrifice), and their ‘uncompromising truth’ which in itself was a moral quality. Morris accepted all these things; so that later, when it appeared to him that art, after all, was not a teacher, he would be driven to exclude it from his ideal commonwealth. But Burne-Jones did not, either then or later, believe that art was a moral instrument of any kind. The idea struck him not only as unlikely (‘hardly anything is a lesson to anyone’ he told Rooke5) but irrelevent. What he knew from his own experience was that beauty is an essential element without which human nature is diminished. If art gives us beauty it will make us more like human beings.

  At the beginning of 1854 Ned wrote a letter to his father which indicates clearly the ‘unmanageable’ nature of his need for beauty that winter. ‘I have just come in from my terminal pilgrimage to Godstow and the burial place of Fair Rosamund. The day has gone down magnificently; all by the river’s side I came back in a delirium of joy, the land was so enchanted with bright colours, blue and purple in the sky, shot over with a dust of golden shower, and in the water, a mirror’d counterpart, ruffled by a light west wind – and in my mind pictures of the old days, the abbey, and long crosiers, gay knights and ladies by the river bank, hawking parties and all the pageantry of the golden age – it made me feel so wild and mad I had to throw stones into the water to break the dream. I never remember having such an unutterable ecstasy, it was quite painful with intensity, as if my forehead would burst. I get frightened of indulging now in my dreams, so vivid that they seem recollections rather than imaginings, but they seldom last more than half an hour; and then the sound of earthly bells in the distance, and presently the wreathing of steam upon the trees where the railway runs, called me back to the years I cannot convince myself of living in.’

  From this it appears that ‘ecstasies’ and day-dreams were an accepted part of Ned’s life; in fact that he induced them, and that his experience of Godstow arose from a combination of the winter twilight, the water, pure colour, the legend of Fair Rosamund and her name itself. Burne-Jones seems to have gone on these visits by himself, and the feeling of alienation at the sight of the railway is characteristic. On the other hand, back at Pembroke there was the tea-kettle and chaff of an enviable simplicity, often apparently, ending with a bear-fight, which consisted of pushing someone else over on the floor.


  An acute crisis was gathering which bear-fights could not relieve, and it was in this year that Burne-Jones, and probably Morris also, lost their belief in any doctrinal form of Christianity. For Burne-Jones, the process of loss was an agony, even though mid-nineteenth-century Oxford was well accustomed to counsel on the matter. At one point he was very near to ‘going over’ and following Newman, Hurrell Froude and Wilberforce on the path to Rome. This, in 1854, would have been called ‘submitting’. Certainly, Morris and he did not emerge on the other side with the same faith. Morris’s belief was ultimately in this earth, ‘the nesting and grazing of it’, the men and women that inhabit it, and what they could make with their hands. To Morris, humanism came naturally. Burne-Jones, on the other hand, had long been accustomed to hiding his deepest convictions. In later life he was reported as blandly saying that the Resurrection was too beautiful not to be true, and quoting with approval R.L. Stevenson’s Samoan chief who refused to discuss the Deity, saying that ‘we know at night someone goes by among the trees, but we never speak of it’. He became adept at such evasions. But in truth he found, like Ruskin, that to be born Evangelical is a lifelong sentence. He continued to believe in the Gospels, but transferred the meaning of the events, in particular the Annunciation, Mary’s loss of her Son, and the Passion, to the everyday life of humanity. The Redemption meant the alleviation of suffering in this world, and Judgement Day was a continuous process; and there were only two questions asked in Judgement – why did you, and why didn’t you?6 The artist has the opportunity to supply the beauty which most lives noticeably lack and for which they cry out, even if they scarcely know it. In so far as he fails to show beauty to other people the artist will be asked, ‘Why didn’t you?’

  While these convictions came painfully to him, Burne-Jones had very little reason to believe that he would ever make an artist at all, yet, oddly enough, he had already received his first commission. Archibald Maclaren, surely one of the most unusual proprietors of a gym that Oxford has ever seen, had compiled a volume of the fairy ballads of Europe, and entrusted Ned with the illustrations. Ned had begun a series of minute figures in pen-and-ink, for steel engraving, in the style of Richter and still more of Dicky Doyle, whose set for Ruskin’s King of the Golden River appeared in 1851. Doyle, however, had been trained by his father since infancy in exact draughtsmanship, whereas Burne-Jones had nothing but Mr Cawell’s hints, a few evenings at the Birmingham School of Design, and his own amateur sketches. The illustrations drove him to despair, and in fact were never finished, although Maclaren deferred publication in the hope of getting them.

  Meanwhile Morris and Ned were on fire to see the Pre-Raphaelite paintings of the Edinburgh Lectures, or some of them, or even one of them. The place for modern pictures was Wyatt’s, in the High Street. They were allowed there on sufferance, Wyatt apparently lacking the dealer’s instinct which would have told him that the well-off Morris, in his untidy clothes, was a potential buyer. ‘We used to be allowed to look at Alfred Hunt passing through the shop – it would have been too great an honour to be allowed to speak to him.’7 This was because Hunt, the water-colourist and landscape artist, was reputed to have seen Millais and Holman Hunt. But in this same year, 1854, Wyatt exhibited Millais’s The Return of the Dove to the Ark, lent by Mr Thomas Combe, the director of the Clarendon Press. The gesture of the girl on the left, gravely and confidently holding the dove to her breast, had seemed ‘dull’ to Ruskin, but made a deep impression on Burne-Jones. Six years later, when Butterfield commissioned him to do an Annunciation window, ‘I insisted on [Mary] taking a dove to her bosom – an innovation; and Butterfield never asked me to do anything again.’8

  During the following long vacation, Morris went for a tour of northern France and Belgium, and Ned, depressed and penniless, had no alternative but to go home. On the way to Birmingham he passed through London, staying as usual with his Aunt Catherwood. He emerged, half-deafened by brass bands, from the Crystal Palace Exhibition. Paxton’s building itself struck him as a ‘length of cheerless monotony, iron and glass, glass and iron’; he did, however, have the chance to visit the Academy, where he was not looking, but searching. He understood what the Crystal Palace meant, but didn’t like the meaning. The Academy pictures, sacred, grand-historical, domestic, fruit-and-flowers, animals and children, seemed not to have meaning at all. Maclise he particularly objected to, resenting the Maclise illustrations to La Motte Fouqué. The picture of the year was Frith’s Ramsgate Sands, which was bought by Queen Victoria; what Ned was looking for was spirituality expressed through colour. In the Stones of Venice Ruskin had just written of colour as the ‘sacred and saving element – the divine gift to the sight of man’. He had also dismissed Salvator Rosa’s pictures as ‘gray’; as Burne-Jones told Rooke, ‘I was very sorry when Mr Ruskin said I mustn’t like Salvator Rosa, but I didn’t hesitate.’9 Only in Holman Hunt’s Light of the World, which was exhibited in the Academy that summer, did he find what he was beginning to understand by colour. Later he came to feel that Hunt’s eccentric schemes only worked on very small canvases ‘and then they can’t be put out of mind’.10 He ceased to admire the Light ‘except for the lantern light, and the things against the door’. But in 1854 he had not yet seen a Rossetti.

  The next months had to be spent in the crowded little house in the Bristol Road, where Miss Sampson cooked as she had always done and Ned had to conceal from her in the old way his painful religious doubts. He was also tormented, as he wrote to Crom Price, by ‘love-troubles I have been getting into’, and terribly stuck with the drawings for The Fairy Family. Morris’s letters described the wonders of the cathedral towns of northern France, and gave as much comfort as the travel letters of luckier friends usually do.

  Term was late, because of the cholera epidemic, and Ned was ‘sick of home and idleness’. But Morris blew back like a rough wind with a whiff of French onions and water-meadows, and in October they were able to get rooms next to each other in the old buildings at Exeter, appropriately ‘gable-roofed and pebble-dashed’. Here Morris began a new series of readings, this time from Chaucer. He was not disappointed in Ned’s reaction, and perhaps did not notice that, once again, it was different from his own. Burne-Jones’s interpretation of Chaucer was weaker than Morris’s, but more subtle. He never liked the fabliaux, and thought of them, just as to begin with he thought of Morris’s table manners, as the lessening of an image. Before long he came to accept Morris as he was, but he continued to avoid the Miller’s Tale. On the other hand he was a most discriminating reader of the Legend of Good Women, the Parlement of Fowls, the House of Fame and the Romaunt of the Rose. With true insight, he saw Chaucer as sophisticated, courtly and sad. He understood perfectly Criseyde’s remark that we are wretched if we despair of happiness, but fools if we expect it; he responded to what was wistful, dry and ironic in Chaucer, and also to his occasional lapses into total sentimentality. It was only when, at the end of their lives, Morris and Burne-Jones set out at last to collaborate on the Kelmscott Chaucer that the discrepancy between them, which they would never admit, appeared.

  It might still be possible, it seemed in the autumn of 1854, to found the Brotherhood, even if by now it would have only the most tenuous link with Newman. Crom Price was still willing. But Morris had begun to write poetry, was mad about the French cathedrals which everyone must visit at once; Crom noticed that the two friends ‘diverged more and more in views, though not in friendship’. It was at this point that Burne-Jones ‘wanted very much to go and get killed’ and actually tried to join the army: the Crimean War had been declared in March, and the Government was offering commissions to undergratuates to replace the terrible losses from untreated wounds and Asiatic cholera; Ned applied to the Engineers,11 and would have been just in time for the march on Balaclava. It was a mercy that he was rejected on the score of delicate health as, neat though he was in all his movements, he was defeated by the simplest mechanical devices, even drawing-pins.

  Morris himse
lf put an end to this agony by the sheer presence of friendship; and at the end of May 1855, when they ought to have been entering seriously on their second Trinity term, they were all at Camberwell – Ned, Morris and Crom Price – scrambling about London to see pictures. They had got permission to visit the collection of Benjamin Windus, which at this time included Millais’s Isabella, Madox Brown’s The Last of England, and Arthur Hughes’s study for The Knight of the Sun, though Windus, like other collectors, had ‘laid off’ by buying Maclise’s Youthful Gallantry. But there were no Rossettis in his house at Tottenham Green, and therefore nothing to correspond with the Blessed Damozel, which Morris and Burne-Jones had just read in a chance copy of The Germ. At the end of the summer, however, they were introduced at Oxford to Mr Combe himself – kindly, encouraging, boring, a patron of Hunt and Millais since 1850. At Mr Combe’s they saw, at last, a water-colour drawing by Rossetti – The First Anniversary of the Death of Beatrice – Dante Drawing the Angel.

  All that the friends liked was ‘jolly’; everything they did not like was ‘seedy’. Morris still felt that the French cathedrals had been jolliest of all and that Ned must see them; since Ned was too poor to afford the train fares, they must go about on foot. A walking party was made up for the next vacation – Morris, Ned, Crom, William Fulford – though at the last moment Crom could not come.

  This was Burne-Jones’s first venture abroad. Fulford and he read Keats to each other at the railway hotel at Folkestone before the crossing, and at Amiens he was up early to make a drawing of a street scene. As they walked the French roads, the rich mythology of William Morris developed; his boots were uncomfortable and he tramped on in ‘gay carpet slippers’, attempting, like the Heir of Redclyffe, to control his violent temper. The slippers wore out as they reached Beauvais, where they attended High Mass at the cathedral on 22 July.