Edward Burne-Jones

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  Beauvais, like Hereford, Burne-Jones apprehended as a synthesis of music and spatial relations: ‘the ancient singing … and the great organ that made the air tremble … and the roof, and the long lights that are the most graceful things man has ever made.’ But with this Morris had little patience. He had hoped to avoid Paris altogether, dreading the effect on his temper of the restorations to Notre Dame; but Burne-Jones in particular wanted to see the Louvre, and Morris consoled himself by leading his friend up to Fra Angelico’s Coronation of the Virgin, making him shut his eyes and only open them at the last moment. ‘I didn’t imagine I liked painting till I saw Fra Angelico,’12 he told Rooke. They bought engravings of the Coronation, regretting that there were no coloured ones.

  At Rouen he wanted to hear vespers every afternoon and evening, and was disappointed that they had to wait till Saturday. They travelled, since the failure of the carpet slippers, mainly by the hated railway and ‘a queer little contrivance with one horse’, of which the expense must have been paid largely by Morris. They went home through Chartres, then, en route for Calvados, to Le Havre. It was there, as they walked back and forth on the quays in the summer night, that decision came to them and they ‘resolved definitely that we would begin a life of art’. Morris was to be an architect, and Burne-Jones (whose main experience was still his inability to draw The Fairy Family) was to be a painter. Neither of them felt that this was in any way a desertion. As Morris wrote to his mother, they were ‘by no means giving up their thoughts for bettering the world’. ‘We were bent on that road for the whole past year’, Burne-Jones remembered, ‘and after that night’s talk we never hesitated more. That was the most memorable night of my life.’

  It is odd to reflect that only a few months later Whistler was to arrive in Paris as a student of the avant-garde and was to begin the ‘French set’ – the etchings of northern France. At first sight, nothing could be more different than Whistler’s ferociously painterly approach and Burne-Jones’s self-dedication to what he had felt, through space and music, as the life of the spirit. In no case would the two have collided as Ned walked blindly up to the Coronation. And yet, when in later years Burne-Jones told Rooke: ‘I don’t want to copy objects; I want to show people something’,13 the two came closer together than Whistler would have cared to admit.

  The decision which Morris and Ned had made on the quays needed endless talking over: separation was impossible, and Morris soon went to Birmingham, where he must either have slept in the dining-room, or shared with the Joneses’ lodger.

  3

  1855–6

  MORRIS AND JONES; THE QUEST FOR A VOCATION

  Instead of a monastery, they were going to start a magazine. It was to be in the spirit of The Germ, and so not unworthy of the Brotherhood. Morris paid the expenses, and was editor; the title he chose, the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, was unpretentious, though Mackail tells us that at this time he bought a pair of purple trousers. The set, most of whom were in Birmingham for the vacation, were called upon, and Morris contributed some of his early poetry. ‘You can write poetry on a train or an omnibus,’ he told Burne-Jones.1 There were evenings of enthusiasm, where the almost unstoppable Fulford read them two thousand lines of Tennyson, and there was still time for furious discussion. The final arrangements for the magazine were with Bell and Daldy, who published it at one shilling a copy.

  While the magazine was in the planning stages, Burne-Jones found, at Cornish’s shop in New Street, the book which was to mean more to him than any other – Malory’s Morte d’Arthur. It was the Southey edition, and since it was expensive he read a little every day and bought cheap books, ‘to pacify the bookseller’. But Morris, when he heard of it, bought it at once, and generously lent it to his friend while he dashed off on further visits.

  It was, therefore, in the two-up, two-down house in Bristol Road that Burne-Jones confirmed his idea of life as a quest for something too sacred to be found, and ending with the death of a king and friend betrayed, which would be the ultimate sadness (Morte Arthur saunz guerdon). In the city beyond, Joseph Chamberlain was just beginning operations in the firm which was to produce twice as many steel screws as the whole of the rest of Britain. Crom and Ned walked round the back-garden, reading in particular the story of Perceval’s sister, who died giving her life-blood to heal another woman, and asked that her body should be put on a ship which departed without sail to the city of Sarras. Without the concept of the book as hero, Victorian idealism can hardly be understood. Morris returned, was enchanted immediately, and had the book bound in white vellum. It was the Quest without Tennyson, and it seems that at first they were embarrassed to speak about it to anyone but Crom, so deeply did they feel the spell of this lost world and its names and places. Yet Burne-Jones must also have noticed that Guinevere and the Haut Prince laughed so loudly that they might not sit at table, that Sir Lancelot went into a room as hot as any stew and found a lady naked as a needle, that the Queen, through Sir Ector, sharply demanded her money back from him, and that a gluttonous giant raped the Duchess of Brittany and slit her unto the navel. In fact Burne-Jones’s letters show that he did notice this and that he could overlook in the Morte what he could not stomach in Chaucer. Malory’s wandering landscape became in its entirely ‘the strange land that is more true than real’, but not just as an escape, the refuge of the romantic without choice. He found what is of much more importance to the artist, a reflection of personal experience in the fixed world of images.

  So far Ned had not told his father what he intended to do, or even that he had given up the idea of the Church. During the Michaelmas Term of 1855 he at last did this, and Mr Jones, whose business by now was in very low water, quietly put away his hopes of seeing his son a bishop, and waited for the moment when he would become a grand historical painter like Maclise.3 But other well-wishers in Birmingham were shocked and hostile, and Ned perhaps felt that he would get more understanding from his favourite cousin Maria Choyce, one of the farming family at Harris Bridge in Worcestershire. In a long letter to her from Oxford,4 dated October 1855, he speaks feelingly of the ‘little brotherhood in the heart of London’ which he had hoped to found after his ordination – this dream still lingered – but ‘delay broke up everything’ and reading French and German philosophy ‘shivered the beliefs of one, and palsied mine’. This is probably as near as we can get to the crisis of faith in Burne-Jones and Morris.

  Weary work, this [he continues, rather incoherently] if, doubting, doubting, doubting – so anxious to do well, so unfortunate – friendly sympathy growing colder as the void broadens and deepens. I am offending everybody with my ‘notions’ and ‘ways of going on’ – general uselessness in fact – yes, I fear I have reached the summit of human audacity now as to claim forbearance from the omnipotent many, and even of acting honestly by publishing my defection. I shall not grace my friends now by holding that highly respectable position of a clergyman, a sore point that, giving up so much respectability, going to be an artist too, probably poor and nameless – very probably indeed – and all because I can’t think like my betters, and conform to their thinking, and read my bible, and yes, dear friends, good advice, not very profound perhaps, rather like sawdust to a hungry man.

  Never mind, Y, [Ned’s pet name for Maria Choyce] you won’t cut me will you, or give me up for an utter reprobate, because I am not going to preach immaculate doctrines in stainless gloves and collar, and be a ‘dear man’, and have slippers worked for me, without stint of wool and canvas, till I marry into a respectable family – perhaps grow fat, who knows?

  Ned calls this a ‘savage, gloomy letter’ written on a ‘damp, dark day’. It underlines once again the fact that what he had experienced was a change not of faith but direction; he must find a profession which didn’t give ‘sawdust to the hungry man’. Sintram and Guy, mentioned (together with Clive Newcome) in another letter, are still the heroes of sacrifice, ‘so anxious to do well’. Thackeray’s Clive Newcome, of course, outr
ages his family by intending to become a painter. As Dixon wrote later, ‘we had all a notion of doing great things for men; in our own way, however: according to our own will and bent.’

  The letter to Maria explains Ned’s first contribution to the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, which was not an illustration (woodcuts were found to be too expensive) but a ‘tale’ – The Cousins.5 The hero is rejected by his beautiful cousin at a dance because he turns out to be poor, and he leaves the house to wander through the London streets. Although there are a good many of these wanderings in Victorian fiction, Scrooge’s flight being one of the earliest, Ned’s story does not feel like imagination. The sight of drunks and prostitutes huddled in the doorways brings back his remorse of childhood years ‘when a lean starved face pressed itself into silly flatness against a pastry-cook’s window when I was within’. He sees a woman knocked down as she carries her child and the blood from her mouth spatters over him. All he can think of is to offer money, and money again to a wretched young girl whose mother wants to send her out as a prostitute. At Waterloo Bridge, the haunt of suicides, he feels an ‘oppressive haunting’ from the lost lives in the dark swift river which later comes back to him in dreams. Calling again on his cousin to make a last appeal, he notices a water-colour which he has ‘commissioned from a young friend’ of Dante’s vision of hell, with Dante standing in the flow of the ‘iron-walled city’; this is, so to speak, a Rossetti which was never painted. The ‘tale’ ends with the hero’s nervous breakdown and attempted suicide in a river, from which he is rescued by a less worldly cousin.

  The Cousins was a great success with the set, and Ned, who had a pleasant deep voice, was asked to read it aloud and although this brought on an agony of shyness and at the end he rushed out of the room. His only other ‘tale’, A Story of the North (February 1858), is almost a pastiche of Sintram. He may perhaps have had a hand in the article on Oxford (April 1856) which looks forward to a time when closed places will be abolished, ‘ruinous colleges’ swept away, ‘and there in the parks will stand the new Museum, all glorious in bright stone, already sobering with time’, while married Fellows return to their domestic hearth, girl undergraduates brighten the streets, and ‘pale students’ are actually allowed to take books out of the Bodleian. This last prophecy is the only one which has not been fulfilled, although the Museum still does not look sober.

  The contribution which meant most to Burne-Jones himself was his essay on The Newcomes, in which he found room to praise Rossetti’s Blessed Damozel and Hand and Soul, and his illustration to the Maids of Elfenmere. Though he did not know it as yet, Rossetti had been highly gratified by this article ‘being unmistakeably genuine’. But Ned deliberately did not follow up his beginnings as a writer. He did not, as he had first of all intended, produce articles on Ruskin and Sintram. Very well aware of his limitations, he felt that he would be wrong not to concentrate on the one profession he had chosen.

  How did a young man become a painter in 1855? Mr Jones might well have pointed to the expanding Birmingham schools of design, or to Samuel Line’s private school of decoration and engraving (also in Birmingham), which opened at five in the morning. These, of course, supplied designers for Birmingham’s industry. But equally hard work was required of the fine artist, and Birmingham had also been the starting-point of David Cox; his name was revered there and he was now living in honourable retirement at Harborne, on the outskirts. Turner also was much collected, had of course the blessing of Ruskin and had been a close friend of one of his patrons, Mr Gillott the steel-penmaker. Both these successful artists had followed the right way of early apprenticeship, for which Ned was already about ten years too old. Later the water-colourist must hope for old aristocratic or new manufacturing patrons, and the good offices of the Royal Water-Colour Society.

  The career of the painter in oils, nobler but less directly useful, was concentrated on the Academy, although the R.A. had not yet reached its period of supreme power which was to come in the seventies and eighties. The painter was trained from childhood. He passed several preliminary years at Sass’s (until poor Sass went mad in the 1830s – then it was Gandish’s), and entered the Academy Schools in his teens. At that very moment Albert Moore and Simeon Solomon were beginning there at the age of sixteen, and Fred Walker, at eighteen, was apprenticed to a wood-engraver while he studied. The course, though shorter than it had been, still meant at least two years’ study of the antique before life drawing was permitted. Until recognition came, the ‘artist professed’ kept body and soul together by doing illustrations, ornamental capital letters (a great resource), wood-cutting and engraving (the Dalziel brothers and Lane employed as many as forty ‘peckers’ on their special editions) – even, as Madox Brown had had to do, by preparing calotypes.

  The wood engraver was described as looking wistfully out from his lamp-lit night-work while the more fortunate painter, after the daylight had gone, went out to his haunts. But the painter lived under the recurrent threat of varnishing day. Time ran out, his ‘subject’ might be stolen. According to Whistler, as the fatal day approached ‘artists locked themselves into their studio – opened the door only on a chain – if they met each other in the street they barely spoke. Models went round silently with an air of mystery.’ The completed work departed in a cab, or, if the artist was poor, on foot, amid the laughter of the bystanders, to its fate before the Hanging Committee. Sales depended largely on Academy showings, and to a noticeable extent on Ruskin’s Academy Notes as soon as these began to appear in 1855. Engraving fees, if a picture was likely to ‘take’ as a popular print, were important: they had a great bearing on the choice of subject, and Frith at one time was offering £200 for good suggestions. Fame was reached when a picture was railed to keep back the crowd; respectability came with election as an Associate. It was a life of splendours and misères, but the English painter still felt his craft as honourable, hard-earned and necessary to society. Art was not yet fashionable, as it was to become in the seventies. The emphasis was not on beauty but on worth, and the painter was felt to be worthy. ‘[We artists] should cut a sorry figure if we laid down our brushes at any given hour,’ Holman Hunt wrote, ‘our lesson in art is the example it gives of strenuous effort.’

  All this was of no interest to Burne-Jones. Like all living organisms, he anxiously searched his environment for what was hostile and what would be friendly to life; his instinct rejected the acceptable course of ‘doing things properly’.

  It has been said that in his article on The Newcomes Burne-Jones had managed to praise Rossetti’s Maids of Elfenmere. This was an illustration to William Allingham’s Day and Night Songs, published by Routledge in 1855. It showed the three white-clad singing maidens hand in hand casting their spell over the half-unwilling lover. The Dalzeils, in the face of great difficulties (the design as handed to them was unreversed and in mixed pencil, wash, coloured chalk and ink), had reproduced it wonderfully well. Burne-Jones was struck by three things: the weirdness, the suggestion of music itself in the rhythm of the drawing, and the concentrated expression in the man’s face. The Memorials tells us that he returned to The Fairy Family with a new vision – one might say a new dissatisfaction, for although he made the figures larger he could not finish them. But the iron will-power which was so discerning in him now prompted him to drop the whole attempt, to disappoint his father and offend more people with his ‘notions’ and to appeal, somehow and in some way, to the man who had done Dante Drawing the Angel and now the Maids of Elfenmere.

  Morris had written his difficult letter home, announcing his change of intentions, at the same time as Ned. He took his pass degree in the November of 1855, and in the following January signed his articles with the architect G.E. Street, whom they had met respectably at the Oxford Plainsong Society, and whose office was then in Beaumont Street. Morris seemed fairly and solidly started in his profession, among old friends. Ned, without much prospect of an honours or even a pass degree, set out for London after what must hav
e been an awkward Christmas in Birmingham.

  ‘I was two and twenty, and had never met, or even seen, a painter in my life. I knew no one who had ever seen one, or had been in a studio, and of all men who lived on earth, the one I wanted to see was Rossetti.’

  4

  1856

  AN APPRENTICESHIP TO ROSSETTI

  In saying that he had never even seen a painter Burne-Jones was less than grateful for the glimpses of Alfred Hunt in the print shop and for the efforts of his aunt, who had introduced him, as a schoolboy, to her brother-in-law Frederick Catherwood.1 But this, which had seemed important at the time, was of no account now, although as usual he made straight for his aunt’s house in Camberwell. This was 10 Addison Place, a quiet narrowly plain brick house near St Giles’s church, due, at the time of writing, to be pulled down.

  Ned was encouraged in his undertaking by a kind letter from Ruskin, acknowledging a copy of the January issue of the Magazine, which he had ventured to send him. A letter from Ruskin seemed to bring him to the approaches of the world he must enter. He set out on foot from Camberwell to Great Ormond Street. He had been told that Rossetti taught in the Working Men’s College there.

  The Working Men’s College was a new venture – it was established in its final form in 1854, when it incorporated the earlier People’s College and took over their hall under the workshops of the Tailors’ Association. It represented the highest ideals of its founder, F. Denison Maurice, whose aim was not to improve the skill of craftsmen – that was the job of the Government schools at South Kensington – but to give working people the same education as the better-off, in an institution which they could run themselves.