Edward Burne-Jones

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  ‘We are meeting you all as men’, he wrote, ‘to enable you to work together as men.’2 But by a sad and familiar process, the majority of the students were not the workers whom Maurice wanted to reach, but mainly ‘clericals’, followed by a high proportion of jewellers and cabinet-makers. Furthermore, the admission of women soon led to social functions, teas for the poor and, as the older members complained, ‘overmuch dressing’.

  Admission was one shilling, four shillings for the term, and the instructors gave their services free. Ruskin, of course, had been the inspiration of the place, taught there and wrote his Elements of Drawing for them; at this point Rossetti, at his own request, was helping him with his Thursday night drawing class. This seems to have been open to the public, but Burne-Jones went instead to the monthly council meeting, also public, in Great Titchfield Street at which, he was told Rossetti might appear.

  The atmosphere on all occasions seems to have been much like a school, with elected monitors ‘to stop people loitering round the fire’ and a small charge for tea. Ned sat at a table, he told Mackail, and had thick bread and butter, ‘knowing no one’. He had no idea of speaking to Rossetti: he simply wanted to look at him. But the atmosphere was one of comradeship, and the pale, thin, ingenuous appearance of Burne-Jones aroused, as it usually did, a desire to help. A stranger spoke to him across the table, and another one, Vernon Lushington, offered to tell him when Rossetti entered the room. Lushington was a most interesting person, who had been three years at sea as a midshipman before coming up to Cambridge, and was now just starting his career as a lawyer and philanthropist. As a matter of fact, Ned probably knew him already – he had contributed to the magazine – but he was certainly thankful to see him at that moment.

  After an hour of speeches, Rossetti did come, ‘and so I saw him for the first time, his face satisfying all my worship, and I listened to addresses no more, but had my fill of looking, only I would not be introduced to him’. The introduction came a few nights later in Vernon Lushington’s rooms, where Rossetti (with his brother William Michael quietly in the background) was apparently established as hero and tyrant: someone criticised Browning’s Men and Women and was ‘rent to pieces’. Ned was presented, and with rapid generosity Rossetti told him to come to his studio the next day. This was at Chatham Place, at the north-west corner of Blackfriars Bridge, where Rossetti, ignoring the strong river smells, looked out on three sides at the moving lights and small craft of the Thames. The rooms were full of piles of drawings and books; something about Ned’s face made Rossetti want to exaggerate, and he told him that books were only of use to prop things up. This was a great deal for the follower of King Arthur, Clive Newcome and the Broadstone to swallow. The picture on the easel (later the Fra Pace), was a watercolour of a monk drawing a mouse in the margin of an illuminated manuscript. Ned felt that he had been ‘received very courteously’, and since no one came he stayed ‘long hours’ watching Rossetti at work, not guessing that he particularly hated this. Mrs Virginia Surtees, in her Catalogue Raisonné of Rossetti, mentions a tradition that Burne-Jones was allowed to put in the mouse, but it can hardly have been on this occasion. In the small hours he walked back again from Blackfriars to Camberwell.

  The courteous reception of ‘a certain youthful Jones … the nicest young fellow in – dreamland’, as he described him to Allingham, was due to real gratification on Rossetti’s part. The Pre-Raphaelites had fallen apart, he had for the time being almost given up his struggle to paint in oils, was defeated by his attempt at a contemporary subject in Found; if he had turned to ‘Froissartian’ subjects this was very probably because he had read some of Morris’s early poems in the magazine and felt a new source of inspiration. ‘He asked much about Morris … and seemed much interested in him.’ Although he was not without patrons, and was still encouraged by Ruskin, he was often in a state of ‘tinlessness’, borrowing small sums from his family. He was no longer the leader he had been to Hunt and Millais, and his fine illustrations to the Moxon Tennyson were still in the future. In his emotional life he was feeling the combination of anguish and convenience in the mid-Victorian double standard. The conveniences were Fanny Cornforth and Annie Miller, the young barmaid from the Cross Keys who was supposedly the property of Holman Hunt; the anguish was Elizabeth Siddal, who had been sent abroad on doctor’s advice during the winter of 1855–6 and whose ‘arm chair that suits her size’ stood in the corner of the studio.

  The image of Lizzie Siddal recalls Rossetti’s preoccupation with illness – illness and its remedies, even the most unlikely – and the fact that he could only really warm to those who were unsuccessful, ‘seedy’ or even ‘dreadfully ill’. The death of his friend Walter Deverell in 1854 after months of poverty and sickness had shocked him deeply, and certainly the delicate appearance of Burne-Jones would only recommend him to Rossetti; it was almost as though he had been sent in Deverell’s place. It may be said then that in the January of 1856 Rossetti’s generosity, morbidity and princely powers of encouragement were waiting to expand, and that this was a meeting fortunate on both sides.

  Ned became acutely restless; he wrote a long account to Morris at Walthamstow, rushed up to Oxford for a noisy meeting with the Brotherhood and the long-suffering Maclaren, on to Birmingham and, probably at his father’s suggestion, back again to Exeter for the Easter Term. The effect of his wild exaltation upon Morris, returned to his room in St Giles’s and his articles with Street, was unsettling. Their friendship was not enough to hold Ned to Oxford, and at the beginning of May he was back in London for the Academy. Morris, who joined him there for the day, was struck by Arthur Hughes’s April Love, and commissioned Ned to buy it; Ned went round to Hughes’s lodgings in Pimlico, and more than thirty years later he could recall his expression when he came in with the cheque.

  Burne-Jones never returned to Oxford as a student again, neither did he intend to go on living in Camberwell. Aunt Catherwood found him changed. Both Morris and he had let their hair grow, and wore soft hats. But in any case, it was not possible to launch out into a new life from the Camberwell house where, as the Memorials put it, ‘to write a letter on Sunday was a marked thing, [and] to sit on one chair rather than another was to arouse the anxiety of its owner’. Much though Ned loved his aunt, Camberwell was, as he put it later, ‘a seemingly needless neighbourhood’.

  His intention was to live with William Fulford, who was said to ‘have grown very serious’, and had moved to London on the £100 per annum which Morris was now giving him to edit the magazine. Ned, on the other hand, had at the moment no income at all, and together they quartered the cheaper streets. One of these – in 1856 – was Sloane Street, then a cobbled road bespattered with dung and deafening with the noise of horse traffic. They took lodgings with one of the less frightening landladies at 13 Sloane Terrace. Fulford, however, had to return to Oxford for a few weeks, and Burne-Jones, who had never lived by himself before, concentrated the whole force of his nature on his worship of Rossetti.

  Of this, one of the happiest years of his life, Burne-Jones’s first memories were of weeks of light-headedness, largely the result of hunger. On leaving Exeter he was, he told Rooke, almost penniless. ‘When I came away in the fourth year [sic] there was a lot of money (about £20) owing to me but I never claimed it. Neither did I ask my father for any, for I was much too proud; I had barely half-a-crown about me.’2 A good digestion, for despite every other kind of weakness Ned usually had that, enabled him to survive something close to starvation alternating with princely blowouts at Rossetti’s favourite restaurants: the Bell Savage Inn, the Gun Tavern, and ‘the little à la mode beef shop off Sloane Square’. He could not accept too much hospitality from the Macdonalds, who were now living in Walpole Street, their father having been appointed to the London circuit; he could not apply to Mr Jones, who was still struggling on with Miss Sampson, waiting for the grand historical painting. Unlike Rossetti, he had nothing to pawn. Finally,

  I was very hard up and
much in want of the smallest sums of money – so I asked a lady who had been a friend of my mother’s – almost the only one I knew who had been intimate with her, and asked her to lend me two pounds – but she didn’t send me anything, only wrote back to say that she hoped my present straits to [sic] teach me in future. So I got nothing by that but humiliation, and you may guess whether I was furious or not, and I made up my mind that nothing should ever induce me to ask anyone for money again.’3

  It had not occurred to him that an appeal to his dead mother’s name would fail; and though Burne-Jones’s finances are a complicated study, he never did borrow money from an individual again.

  The necessary things were not eating and sleeping, but being with Rossetti and learning to paint. When he had the boat fare, he went from Chelsea to Blackfriars by river; otherwise he walked, but he was not allowed to go to Chatham Place every day. He was permitted to watch Rossetti make the initial drawing in pencil and go over it in violet carmine, and then to come back again three or four days later, but never to see ‘the hard stage’.4 This ‘overlooking’, with the glorious encouragement of Rossetti, who believed at this time that English poetry had come to an end with Keats but English painting was only just beginning, was all the apprenticeship Burne-Jones had until he attended evening classes in the following year. Everything else had to come by the way as he worked.

  To recommend himself further to his master, who was in reality only six years older than himself but seemed so much more, Burne-Jones tried to turn himself into a Londoner. It was a kind of saturation process, to produce what Henry James called a ‘cockney convaincu’. First Rossetti’s language must be imitated; a good deal of it Ned knew already – ‘stunner’ was current in Oxford in 1850, so were ‘ripper’, ‘spiffy’, ‘cheesy’, ‘jammy’, ‘spoony’, ‘nobble’, ‘stock-dolloger’ (for a knock-down blow), ‘ticker’ (for watch), ‘crib’ (for lodgings), and ‘tin’ (for money) but ‘tinlessness’, and perhaps ‘bogeys’ for the spirits of the departed, were additions by Rossetti; so was the richly resonant, not quite English intonation which carried with ease ‘through rolling drums’. Then the ‘great Italian’ would walk the streets half the night, trailing his umbrella under stars and gaslight, and leaving Ned ill with tiredness: ‘it became too much for me, it would have killed me.’5 Nevertheless, when he was not allowed to accompany Rossetti he would tramp round himself, as though the nightmare of The Cousins had come true, past the terrible nightly parade of prostitutes and child prostitutes in the Haymarket, the pawnbrokers who would accept anything – even babies’ coffins if the babies could be got out of them – and the doorways which were the last refuge of the homeless. ‘What walks I have had in London streets,’ he wrote to Mrs Gaskell, ‘haunted walks – wretched ones.’6 He grew to like barrel-organs, because they were the music of the streets. Not to be touched by it was a proof of hard-heartedness. Of London brutality he kept a curious memory. When the Guards were brought back from the Crimea in 1856 and passed by, almost every man mutilated or bandaged, he saw the crowd laugh at them.7 Probably at this time he had a hallucination which recurred at intervals throughout his life: a man with a black bag would come up to him in the street, whistle in his ear, say ‘God bless you’ and quietly move away.8

  With amazement Ned tried to adapt himself to Rossetti’s careless and lordly domestic arrangements. He was not introduced to Lizzie Siddal, although she had returned to London in May 1856 and was living in her own rooms in Weymouth Street. Except for the landlady’s occasional ‘wench’, there seemed to be no one in attendance. The studio itself, where the artist presided in a long flannel gown over a plum-coloured frock coat, had none of his ‘discrimination for all that was splendid’. The whole place was full of junk. There were musical instruments that could not be played, broken furniture, and the despised books; on one occasion Rossetti threw out of the window all the books that ‘obstructed life’, but the river returned them in a stinking heap. Bills were not regarded as they were in Birmingham. Accounts were not paid, colourmen and wine merchants protested, a Jewish pawnbroker arrived and swept away most of Rossetti’s trousers for only £3, leaving him ‘rather shabby’. With this went a natural prodigality. ‘What he did he did in a moment of time, design was as easy as drinking wine … I used to say to him, why do you paint in colour that you know is not permanent? But he wouldn’t listen to me or entertain the point for a moment.’9 In the studio Ned saw drawings scratched out, thrown away, stuffed in drawers which, if he had dared to open them, would have shown him dozens of beautiful pencil and pen and ink studies of Lizzie. Watercolour was not used as it was by David Cox or in the ‘Views’ in Mr Jones’s back shop, but mixed with gum, hatched and stippled and applied with a dry brush, or scraped away to make the white lights. A set which had been given to Burne-Jones were produced, Malcolm Bell tells us, when Rossetti called, ‘in all their wrappings and protections. Without a word Rossetti took them and to their owner’s horror and dismay, tore the whole set in two and went away.’ This was intended as a sign that Ned, who was timidly painting on a background study, had progressed far enough not to need them. Still more amazing was Rossetti’s scorn of patrons, and the violence of his opinions. He advised his pupil to turn over the pages of Mrs Jameson’s Sacred and Legendary Art, ‘and when you come to the name of Rubens, spit here’.10 Indeed, Rossetti used the strongest language Ned had ever heard. ‘The first time he used a bad word, he saw that I was shocked, but he said in his lofty way, you must know, Ned, that I’ve tried to eliminate that word from my dictionary but find I can’t do without it.’11 Other evidence (for example Allingham’s diary) suggests that this word was ‘bloody’, but the recent publication of one of Rossetti’s limericks, preserved by Bertrand Russell, opens up many other possibilities.

  Saving was not a virtue at Chatham Place, morality was not; generosity ruled, but Rossetti took as well as gave. ‘I’m sure there wasn’t a woman in the world he couldn’t have won for himself! Nothing pleased him better, though, than to take a friend’s mistress away from him.’12 By 1855 Rossetti had broken with Annie Miller, but the search for ‘cordian stunners’, red-haired and wheaten-haired models, went on by day and night, and Fanny Cornforth appeared in the studio. Burne-Jones felt, like the warmth of a fire, the expanding sexuality of the ménage. The temptation of his ingenuousness was sometimes too much for Rossetti. ‘Jones is an angel on earth and too good to be true,’ he told Boyce. But Burne-Jones told Rooke that Gabriel:

  once gave a woman 5/- to go after me – one night as I was going quietly to my bus. He told her I was very timid and shy and wanted her to speak to me. I saw him talking to her as I looked back, and then she came after me and I couldn’t get rid of her. I said no, my dear, I’m just going home – I’m never haughty with those poor things, but it was no use, she wouldn’t go, and there we marched arm-in-arm down Regent Street – I don’t know what any of my friends would have thought if he had caught sight of me.13

  Some of these experiences were lessons on what to avoid. But there were two deeper patterns that Burne-Jones began to study from Rossetti. The first was the art of concealment. Rossetti himself carefully separated the mystical and superstitious self, darkly concerned with the coincidence of his name and life with Dante’s, from the respectable son and brother to his family, and again from the dashing cove, more English than the English, and familiar with pawnbrokers, slop-shops and music-halls. The work which was the magic mirror of the manifest heart could equally be called ‘my rubbish’ or ‘the daubs’. Burne-Jones was to find increasingly over the years that there was a solace in manoeuvring the different aspects of his own personality, sometimes to disconcert people, often to keep them at a distance. And character can be fragmented by space as well as time. Different as he was, as a human being, from Rossetti, Burne-Jones also was to feel himself ‘twice-born’, an inhabitant of two centuries at once.

  The second pattern was one that Burne-Jones himself constantly acknowledged. ‘He taught me to have no f
ear or shame of my own ideas, to design perpetually, to seek no popularity, to be altogether myself.’ Design was not only the measure of the artist’s invention, but the evidence of how far the hand had followed the soul. In Hand and Soul Rossetti’s Chiaro dell’Erma found that the study of beauty alone was an illusion, but so too was commitment – his grand political allegory of peace was spattered with the blood of fighting factions. The painter had only one necessity – to paint his own soul so that he might known her; ‘seek thine own conscience – not thy mind’s conscience, but thy heart’s.’ From Rossetti, Burne-Jones learned to strengthen his Midlands obstinacy and to defy all criticism and rejection in pursuit of his own style.

  In all this Ned heard the note of authority which he needed, and ‘in the miserable ending years I never forgot this image of him’. When, all through his life, he started a new canvas and asked himself, ‘would he have liked it?’, he was thinking of the judging and approving Gabriel of Chatham Place.

  ‘Clinging tight to Gabriel whom I loved, and would have been chopped up for’ (as he described it to Frances Graham), obsessed, over-excited, under-nourished and still with no idea how to paint, Burne-Jones needed the wholesome relief of Saturdays when Morris, after a week or so apart, began coming up from Oxford. The furniture cracked and suffered, Malory was read aloud, as in former days. It was a solid point of reassurance. But Ned could not rest until this friendship too was ratified by Gabriel. ‘When I told him about Morris he said, “What’s he going to be? He’s going to be a painter, isn’t he?”’14 Morris was introduced, and felt the enchantment. On Saturdays they felt privileged to accompany him to the theatre, even though he sometimes grew impatient and took them away (to the distress of Ned, who was longing to know what happened in the fourth Act) go go to a drinking cellar ‘not nearly so diverting as the play, but Gabriel said it was seeing life, and so we went’. On Sundays Rossetti called at Sloane Terrace, and the two green young men made tea, receiving a prince in hiding, and deeply grateful when ‘it became clear that he liked to be with us’. Rossetti told them that he shared their feeling for the Morte, and Ned continued to read Dante in translation, as he had done ever since he saw the Anniversary of the Death of Beatrice, but without feeling that he understood it completely.