Edward Burne-Jones

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  Burne-Jones was a man who could scarcely face a railway carriage or a bad cold, and yet this reception which threatened his whole career, not to speak of the support of his young family, only stiffened his resolve. On touching-up day, when he added to his offence by varnishing his pictures while older members were dabbling in pots of water, he met an atmosphere which he remembered as ‘fury … The Merciful Knight was objected to and hung high … there was a sense of continual opposition and even covert insult now and again.’6 The open insult, which Ned heard perfectly well, was ‘papistical’.

  The critics, whom he now faced for the first time, were kind to Walker, aghast at The Merciful Knight, and even more so (perhaps because it was better hung and easier to see) at the Dalziels’ Annunciation.

  For Mr Burne Jones we know not what spectacles he can have put on to gain a vision so astonishing. Had Duccio of Siena, or Cimabue of Florence, walked into Pall Mall and hung upon these walls their medieval and archaic panels, surely no surprise could have been in reserve for visitors to the Gallery. Let us approach by way of the Annunciation. Here is a bedstead set above a garden, at which the virgin kneels in her nightdress; the angel Gabriel in his flight appears to have been caught in an apple tree; however, he manages just to look in at a kind of trap-door opening, to tell his errand.

  This was the Art Journal, which added that Mr Jones’s exhibits struck a ‘distinctly discordant note’. The reference to Cimabue shows that the press was preparing to fight the Pre-Raphaelite battle over again; but the P.R.B. had faced criticism as a group, if not quite as a brotherhood. Burne-Jones, in the summer of 1864, stood alone.

  But he made some valuable allies. Birket Foster, an early patron of the firm who had brought the news of Ned’s election to Great Russell Street, stood by him, and so did Frederick Burton. At the same time, Burne-Jones, at the age of thirty-one, became the acknowledged leader of a group of young students.

  The curtain has been lifted [Walter Crane wrote], and we had a glimpse into … a twilight world of dark mysterious woodlands, haunted streams, meads of dark green starred with burning flowers, veiled in a dim and mystic light, and stained with low-toned crimson and gold … it was not, perhaps, to be wondered at that, fired with such visions, certain young students should desire to explore further for themselves.

  Henry Holiday was one of them and so was Edward Clifford, attracted, so he tells us, by the ‘spirit of other-worldliness’ and a desire to know the secret of the colouring and the ‘white skies’.

  There were two important regular visitors to the O.W.S. who in 1864 saw a painting by Burne-Jones for the first time, and before long became his patrons and friends for life. These were the ship-owner Frederick Leyland, and the Liberal M.P. for Glasgow, William Graham. Leyland (so Whistler told the Pennells) had sold meat pies from door to door as a child in Liverpool, began his career when the shipping magnate Bibby bought one of his pies, and eventually took over the business. Graham was of a very different temperament, an India merchant, a fervent Scottish Presbyterian and an equally fervent lover of beauty. Both were discrimating collectors far beyond kind Mr Plint, whose ‘I do love to look on a picture’ was now silenced for ever. In 1864 they were both making up their minds. Graham began to purchase in 1865.

  Georgie was pregnant again in the spring, and Ned took her down to the Red House. Her two younger sisters, Aggie and Louie, were always welcome there, and in May 1864 Ned began his magical Green Summer, which was to recall for all of them those still early years when Janey had not yet succumed to her mysterious illness, Philip and Jennie and May were babies playing on the orchard grass and the two ‘maidens’ were carefree, though Aggie, defying the mediaeval mode, complained that her crinoline would not fit into the little bedroom.

  Green Summer shows a group of seven girls, dressed in green relieved by touches of red, sitting on the grass while another girl in black reads to them. The air is full of floating white seeds and white birds flying. It is a poesia which seems to have no story, but it takes us to the heart of Burne-Jones and his treatment of the subject.

  First there is the outward form: the picture strikes the eye as an arrangement of greens in light and shadow, then as a pastorale, as though Giorgione had come to Abbey Woods in Kent. Edward Clifford, who later made an ‘undistinguishable copy’ of it, calls it ‘the flower and quintessence of summer’, and so it is, even though it was painted in the studio – experience with cold winds and flies sticking to the canvas had shown Ned that he would never be a plein air painter.

  Secondly, there is the personal reference. The central figures are variations on the Macdonald sisters, Georgie being the reader in black, while Louis is in Profile perdue as she is in Theophilus and the Angel. Janey Morris presides, more clearly in the 1868 version where she holds a peacock feather, the attribute of Maia, and so of the month of May. In the group is concentrated the ‘time of such quality’, the source of happiness for Morris and Ned in the summer of 1864.

  Thirdly, there is the name, and for Burne-Jones the name itself has power to create substance. The title Green Summer is an echo of the end of Book XVIII of Morte d’Arthur Part 2: ‘How true love is likened to summer’. ‘For like as winter rasure doth always erase and deface green summer, so fareth it by unstable love in man and woman. For in many persons there is no stability; we may see all day, for a little blast of winter’s rasure, anon we shall deface and lay apart true love for little or nought.’ The name, therefore, implies something poised on the brink of dissolution through time and human weakness.

  Lastly, there is the ‘burden’. This was Burne-Jones’s own term, and the example he gave was of a pavement artist’s own work, where the burden would be ‘I am starving’. The burden of Michaelangelo, he added, is that the nearest thing to God is the body and mind of man. This suggests that ‘burden’ is not far from Hopkins’s ‘instress’, the totality of the given thing which is not complete until it has been understood by a sympathetic attention. The burden of Green Summer is a certain surcharged ache in the girls’ expression which gives a tension at odds with their tranquil pose. They do not look at each other; in fact Burne-Jones’s figures scarcely ever do look at each other; except in scenes of meeting or rescue. They look inwards or away, and even Morris was doubtful on this one point, saying he would like less ‘concentration of expression’ in the faces. The burden of Green Summer is beauty guilty of its own mortality.

  Since March, Morris had been struggling to keep the books of the firm himself: loyal, harassed Charlie Faulkner had gone back to Oxford as bursar of University College. Added to this uncongenial work was the tiresome journey to London – the Red House was three miles from the station – and Morris now put forward, in a revised form their old idea of community living. The Red House, which was L-shaped, could be extended round the lawn. The plans, drawn up by Philip Webb, would make it into a kind of guild workshop:

  Midways of a walled garden

  In the happy poplar land.

  The Joneses would live in one wing, and the whole work of the firm, as orders increased, could be carried out on the fourth side.

  In September the two families, with their children and the plans, went down to Littlehampton for a holiday during which everything could be discussed. Charlie Faulkner, on vacation, came too with his mother and two sisters, Lucy and ‘dear and gifted Kate’. Mrs Faulkner undertook the housekeeping, the days were free for chaff and sea air, and youngest in heart of all was Mr Jones, on leave from Birmingham and the doleful Miss Sampson to play with his little grandson on the beach. Morris, as might be expected, took charge of the construction of sand-castles, and reinforced the merlons and embrasures with ginger beer bottles. Georgie was near her time and Ned, who usually spent every spare minute drawing, allowed himself to help Morris with the castles and even to throw stones into the water.

  On 28 October, back in Great Russell Street, Ned’s second son, Christopher Alvin, was born. He lived only three weeks and three days.

  Aunt Cath
erwood had bought a plot on the south side of the newly opened Brompton cemetery, and they buried him there.

  Two months ago [Ned wrote to Allingham in December 1864]7, Pip fell ill with the scarlet fever, and then Georgie was prematurely confined and immediately seized with the fever so that for eight days their life was in danger, then when she rallied a fortnight ago her own little child died – for these three months I have done no work, but lived most anxiously from day to day.

  Rossetti wrote from Paris advising them to ‘leave your present place altogether’. Ruskin had sawdust put down outside the house to deaden the noise of traffic. Swinburne, always responsive to children, wrote the gentlest of letters: ‘I had been quite counting on the life of your poor child, and wondering when I might see it.’

  There are no entries for work in Ned’s book between August 1864 and March 1865. It was clear that if the Red House building scheme went forward, Morris would have to meet the whole expense. This was too much to ask, and the young Jones had to withdraw. Morris, who was ill himself with rheumatism, the whole district having suddenly been discovered to be unhealthy, was bitterly disappointed – ‘In short, I cried’, he wrote from bed in what Mackail calls ‘a very shaky hand’, ‘but I have got over it now … suppose in all these troubles you had given us the slip what the devil should I have done?’ This recalls a later entry in Burne-Jones’s work-book: ‘I asked Mr Morris what he should do when in the course of nature I should be removed – his reply was irrelevant, irreligious, and even coarse – for which I shall also charge.’

  Morris’s letter ends by begging Ned and Georgie to come to Upton as soon as they left Hastings, where they were recouperating, though it must have been dismal enough in November. ‘I would give £5 to see you, old chap.’ But this proved impossible, and soon Ned was busy tramping the streets of London once again ‘as far as Kensington’, this time for a lodging. Georgie had such a horror of the room where her baby had died that it was agreed she must never enter it again. Fortunately Ned could count on the help of Cormell Price, who had just returned from his tutoring job in Russia; together they moved the furniture, including the Webb dining table and the little painted piano, to 41 Kensington Square. There was nothing but gardens then between the square and the narrow countrified Kensington High Street. No. 41 was on the north side and the light was poor, but there was a garden big enough to play bowls in on summer evenings, and it was quiet.

  When they brought Georgie home her complexion – what was called in those days her ‘bloom’ – was gone, and for the rest of her life she was noticeably pale. To judge from her portraits, her hair had also lost the bronze lights it once had. She was only twenty-five, and Ned thirty-one. She had the strength to rise above her loss, and one of the first things she did was to look out her old music to sing at the piano. But it struck her that somewhere at 65 Great Russell Street she and Ned had left their youth behind them.

  8

  1865–6

  FRIENDS AND ENEMIES

  In the spring of 1865 the Joneses were furnishing their new house, of course from the firm. They ordered blue and green serge, ‘Pomegranate’ wallpaper, and more Sussex rush-bottomed chairs. Workmen came up from Red Lion Square (at seven shillings a day) to fix shelves and, apparently, a bath. Ruskin contributed a set of Dürer prints; Watts, from the twilit depths of Holland House, sent an unexpectedly practical gift, a sewing machine. Ned’s tobacco was banished to a back room, and he threw himself into the task of keeping the garden free of cats. Georgie, worried by his frailty, tried to fatten him with milk and rum; this mixture was too much for Aggie, and she nearly fell off her chair at one of de Morgan’s tea parties.

  Aggie had come for the wedding of their elder sister Alice to John Kipling, an architectural sculptor and art teacher, on 18 March 1865. The Macdonalds were still in Manchester, and as the newly-married couple had to set off almost at once for Bombay, they were married at St Mary Abbott’s and the modest wedding reception, with tea and coffee only, was held at Kensington Square. It was on this occasion that the hard-working classical painter Edward Poynter endeared himself to Aggie by staying behind to clean the silver.

  Among these domestic scenes Ned began to paint in oils, with three-year-old Philip playing with the empty tubes. Allingham, calling on them later this year, noted that there were two studios, or anyway two rooms used for painting. ‘Zephyr carrying Psyche – delightful – precipice, green valley, love’s curly little castle below. Designs of St George and the Dragon. Drawings of heads, Circe (a-doing), she stretching her arm across.’

  These subjects show the loyalty of Burne-Jones’s early patrons, and how little he needed the help of dealers. The St George and the Dragon was for Birket Foster’s house at Witley. Circe was originally commissioned by Ruskin, though it was bought eventually by Leyland. Here Burne-Jones had hit, as he liked to do, on the exact gesture just before the decisive moment. Circe, even at this early stage of the picture, had been given her half-stretching, half-crouching movement which Ruskin described as ‘going round the table like a cat’.

  At the O.W.S. that year Ned showed Green Summer, Merlin and Nimuë, the Astrologia, a red chalk head of Becky Solomon, and Blind Love. In 1866 he sent one of his most distinctive paintings, Chant d’Amour. The triangular structure of three figures – blind-folded Love, the open-eyed girl playing the organ, the seated knight – is another poesia, this time in white, scarlet and reddish violet, with no apparent subject beyond the chanson:

  Hélas! je sais un chant d’amour

  Triste ou gai, tour à tour.

  The figures sit, entirely self-centred, in their queer little meadow, again not looking at each other, though they could not exist apart. The early dawn light makes a strip of white over the half-seen meadow, and the wind is ambiguous, blowing love’s cloak to the left, the woman’s hair to the right. The sensation is of music that has just been played and of listening to silences. In fact the picture might be said to have been born out of music, since the first design for it was inside the lid of the Russell Place piano.

  The flowers in the foreground of the Chant d’Amour are tulips and wallflowers – ‘the yellow flowers stained with red’ – emblems respectively of ardent love and of bitterness, in the Victorian iconography of flowers. This language, now forgotten, was well understood in the 1860s. George Eliot, as a young girl, used it in letters to her teacher; Ruskin used it to Rosie La Touche; Rossetti, though as William Michael says, ‘assuredly the reverse of a botanist’, shows considerable anxiety about it in his letters. Strangely enough, all the Victorian flower books seem to be derived from an anonymous Language of Flowers published in Edinburgh in 1849, which, the eccentric author tells us in his Preface, was written while he was living in Turkey, but homesick for Scotland. This accounts for the odd mixture of names (harebells and cowslips with lemon blossom, liquorice and cactus), reproduced in other publications down to Kate Greenaway’s Flower Book, where the artist has given up trying to illustrate most of the flowers at all. Burne-Jones, who was later to arrive at a secret flower language of his own, certainly knew this one. The briar rose means ‘I wound to heal’, yellow iris means ‘passion’, marigolds are ‘chagrin and pain’.

  He had always worked hard at flower drawing, and had made copies of the schematised plants in Gerard’s Herbal which Morris used for some of his early wallpapers. But on the Italian journey of 1862 he had been attracted, in the painting of the quattrocento, by something more mysterious, the green plants springing from the ruins, symbol of new-born life, and the carpet of flowers that accompanies a miracle. In 1862 the National Gallery acquired Piero di Cosimo’s Mythological Subject. Here the dead nymph lies between two plants whose English name is Love Lies Bleeding. But what is the white flowering weed in the foreground?

  The language of flowers is a means of communicating, and yet concealing the secrets of the heart. Burne-Jones’s pictures, like Burne-Jones himself, must be numbered among those ‘who have learned to disguise themselves and meanly
to lie low, so as not to let it be seen what we’re really made of’.1 A fixed meaning, as George Eliot said, substitutes the diagram for the pattern. An unfixed meaning may make a different pattern, though equally real, for sender and receiver. All the same, quite as truly as Morris, Burne-Jones could say that his work, though difficult of access, had ‘little skill to lie’.

  The chief literary work which Morris had in hand in the mid-1860s was the Earthly Paradise. Like the great collections of the Middle Ages, the Decameron, Arabian Nights and Canterbury Tales, it was to be a cycle of stories drawn from many sources. The title, too, was a kind of challenge to Rossetti and, through him, to Dante; Morris’s earthly paradise was not that of the Purgatorio, but a place where all that he loved best could be brought together; in fact, he need scarcely have added the world ‘earthly’ – all Morris’s paradises were that, and all had to be lost.

  Working in the small hours of the morning before his business day, Morris versified the ‘tales’ with amazing rapidity and they soon became a vast project, as dear to him as the abandoned Red House itself. Ned was to illustrate the poems – Morris, however, liked the pictures to show the main point of each story and nothing more – and there were to be five hundred illustrations, reproduced not by the newer photographic process but directly from the wood. George Wardle, from the firm, Campfield, the foreman, and Lucy Faulkner all tried their hand at this from what Wardle calls the ‘rather rough drawings on tracing paper’ which Ned had produced, but they found the work seized away from them by Morris himself. Without apprenticeship, and with ‘lively scenes’ when things did not quite go right, he engraved the remaining blocks, and Ned drew him as he sat squarely in the lamplight, the floor littered with broken tools.