Edward Burne-Jones

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  The Earthly Paradise – the Big Book – was to be the firm’s first challenge to contemporary book production. They saw it, not in the Dalziel manner with illustrations by many hands and varying quality in the cutting, but as a huge folio of consistent design and every page laid out by Morris. This meant, of course, a great sacrifice of time, and just when, partly through the good offices of William Cowper-Temple2 at the Board of Works, the firm was receiving some important commissions. One of these was the Green dining-room at the South Kensington Museum, still preserved intact with Burne-Jones’s charming windows whose only fault is that they admit very little light, and his twelve panels of the Zodiac on a gold ground. Not unexpectedly, Ned fell behind with these and was sharply called to order by the firm’s new book-keeper, Alphonse Warington Taylor. In the margin of his work-book for May 1865 – £5 each for ‘designs of fogies and Angels with Kids’ – is an entry, ‘Taylor disputes this price’.

  With Warington Taylor, who had been taken on to replace Faulkner, a new urgency, the feverish energy of a consumptive, was felt in the conduct of the firm. He wrote letters daily, often twice daily. Morris must be kept in hand, his wine bill and even his gas bills cut down, ‘good pieces of wood’3 must be got for Burne-Jones, who was to get all the work for South Kensington done by Christmas. According to Taylor, ‘Morris and Ned will do no work except by driving, and you must keep up the supply of designs’. This is an admission that the firm by now depended on the talents of two people, and indeed, as he tells Webb, ‘the Guv’nor and them, he felt, were Celts – their names were Welsh, anyway – ‘and we know what that means in the practical line’.

  No one resented Warington Taylor’s remarks, everyone liked him, and however much he came to deplore Ned’s habit of using the firm as a bank (‘What does that £60 owing by Ned mean? He never had £60 to pay anybody’) his fury never lasted for long. He shared Ned’s love of books and music – they exchanged books on Sanskrit and a translation of Renan – and they had both lost a child in the same year. Taylor, ‘lean, unkept and of some Bohemianism’, was of good family and had been at Eton with Swinburne; he had run through his money and come down in the world, returning to England from his army service encumbered with a handsome, ignorant wife. Love of the arts brought him to the Red House, and although he believed that trade was one of the results of the Fall of Man, he gave all his remaining strength to the firm. It was Rossetti who had insisted that ‘a business man is an absolute necessity’, and Taylor was voted a yearly salary of £150 to be paid by the members. But symptoms of consumption developed and he had to retreat, ‘ghastly thin but full of mental energy’, as Allingham described him, to ‘frightful lodgings’ in Hastings. In June 1868 the handsome wife suddenly left him, and searching her pocket book he found that ‘for nearly twenty years she has played the whore’. It struck poor Taylor that Janey Morris might intervene. ‘She would go to see my wife and tell her what she alone can tell her … we men are obliged to crush our feelings amongst ourselves, but I am ashamed to ask Morris’s permission. I am afraid he would think me a fool.’ At this juncture Rossetti wrote to him that he was a ‘damned scoundrel’ to give up such a beautiful woman, which of course was just what Taylor wanted to hear; matters were patched up, but at the end he was alone again, coughing his life away in a little house in Turnham Green. Morris and Ned used to walk across the fields to visit him, and found that his only companions were his cats which, ‘even unsexed’, he said he found preferable to nonconformists. As he lay dying, Ned tried to lift a fine cat off his chest, to be told. ‘O let it stay there, it’s my only comfort’.4

  It was at poor Taylor’s urgent persuasion, then, that Burne-Jones struggled in 1865–6 to finish the panels for the Green dining-room and Birket Foster’s four pictures of the Story of St George. For the first time he had to employ a studio assistant, Charles Fairfax Murray. Murray, known at first as ‘the boy’, considered ludicrous because of his bow legs and fuzzy hair and later because of his numerous children, was in fact a shrewd and competent individual. He was shared between the studios and undertook numerous jobs, lining canvases, buying small items and finding lost ones, fetching a plumber when Rossetti’s bath began to leak and taking larger paintings about in cabs. Burne-Jones gave him twenty-five shillings a week when he was on duty, and the surprising sum of £60 for copying St Theophilus and the Angel. This was one of the few pictures Ned managed to finish in 1866, but the sketch-books show that he was designing jewellery, fantastic armour and drapery, fit for inhabitants of the rooms of the imagination which had been realised in the dimly-lit Green dining-room. His faculty for design was almost too active. Friends who were put up for the night in the dressing-room found it was piled high with Ned’s sketch books.

  These friends increased rapidly in numbers. Without ever losing his shyness or perhaps because of it, Burne-Jones had a quicksilver readiness of sympathy, feeling other people’s pain in his own mind and body, and an earnestness about things that really mattered, which made him one of the most acceptable friends ever to share a hansom cab or listen to a confidence. In company he was brilliantly amusing (though he could only be drawn out gradually) and also amused; he was already noted for his three laughs: the normal, the hearty, and the totally silent and convulsed, which was prized as the unusual response to a really good joke.

  In fact one of the few imperfect sympathies of this time seems to have been the introduction of Carlyle. Ruskin, deeply under Carlyle’s influence in the years of Unto This Last and Sesame and Lilies, swept the young Joneses round to Cheyne Row feeling that they must be acceptable to the sage. But Carlyle, who was grudging towards the visual arts and only tolerated Whistler’s portrait because it gave him a clean collar, was on this occasion unapproachable. Philosopher-lovers will excuse him because he was midway in his titanic struggles with Frederick the Great, animal-lovers because he had recently lost his dog beneath the wheels of a Chelsea butcher’s cart, but despite these explanations, the visit was a failure. The Joneses could only console themselves by the thought that they had seen the tea-kettle lifted by the hand that wrote The French Revolution.

  One friend, too, was lost for the time being – George du Maurier. Feeling snubbed and excluded by the new intimates who were part-sharing Rossetti’s house, he began to publish his parodies of Rossetti and Swinburne in Punch. These caused pain and bewilderment, and Morris could only manage to be ‘fairly civil’ when du Maurier came to the firm to order furnishings for his new house. The loss was, however, partly counter-balanced by a new friend, Alphonse Legros. Legros was a dark, expansive Burgundian, a fine lithographer, etcher and portrait painter, who had come over to England after a run of bad luck. With the help of his old friends of the ateliers, Whistler and Poynter, he was established as an instructor at the South Kensington schools; there, and later at the Slade, he was one of the best teachers they ever had. As a good companion, Legros was immediately surrounded by legend. He refused to learn English, and for fifty years understood only what he chose to. He was said not to be able to read or write (in fact he simply disliked doing so), but had in compensation a wonderful visual memory, trained by the famous Boisbaudran, and could whistle whole operas by ear. In the country Legros appeared as a kind of Tartarin, terribly dangerous on a shooting party; in the drawing-room he frightened the ladies by showing them etchings of the morbid subjects he loved – ‘Mais madame, j’adore le laid.’

  To Burne-Jones he was irresistibly drawn, and indeed, as the Memorials put it, ‘the number of people who surrounded Edward was very great’. When Ned went out, as he did increasingly, he was welcome in several distinct but overlapping circles. To begin with the closest, there were numerous outings to pot-houses and chop-houses with old cronies, and recuperative visits to Turkish baths, after one of which, Luke Ionides tells us, Morris turned cartwheels in Cavendish Square. Ned was still on a good footing, too, with the true London Bohemians of the sixties, whom he had met through the Hogarth Club, the genial drinkers and smokers surro
unding Charles Keene, the greatest draughtsman of them all. Most of these intimates cared for old music and old ‘clays’, some of which Keene dredged up from the Thames; Boyce was there, sad Dicky Doyle, Frederic Sandys, the lordly borrower, and tiresome old Cruikshank, now off the bottle and preaching total abstinence. Still Bohemian, but much more sumptuous, were the ‘evenings’ given by the hospitable Jermyn Street tradesman Arthur Lewis, who liked to mix art and good times. At Moray Lodge on Campden Hill, Lewis (until his marriage put an end to such things) offered music at 8.30 and unlimited oysters at 11; the delightful invitation card, designed by Fred Walker, showed a Grecian Muse offering an oyster on the half-shell. Many ‘theatricals’ came, and Burne-Jones was on the fringe of the theatre which ever since The Fairy of the Golden Branch he had loved so much, and Morris scarcely at all.

  Little Holland House continued to mingle art and society without oysters, and on a higher plane. Watts had survived, apparently without disturbance, the failure of his marriage to young Ellen Terry. He was affectionate always, and so too was Val Prinsep, who took life more and more easily. Legros had begun to visit there, and Ned met for the first time the most amiable of patrons and artists, George Howard.5 Howard (later Earl of Carlisle), instantly likeable from his self-portrait in a large all-weather tam-o’-shanter, had married in 1864 the Hon. Rosalind Stanley; this firm-minded young wife was insistent that he must finish his studies under Legros at South Kensington and must not try to live in two worlds, the dedicated and the pleasurable; yet George Howard did manage to combine them. He and Ned were instant affinities. ‘The two wives drew more slowly but quite steadily, together’, Georgie wrote; she could not know that Mrs Howard’s sister, Kate Russell, had described her in her diary as ‘a very wee little wife, with her hair cut short, a nice little person’. There was also a younger generation, collected by the tireless Mrs Prinsep – Leslie Stephen, who came, so he says, timidly, and Sidney Colvin, just down from Cambridge and beginning to write on the Pall Mall. Another guest was young Blanche Fitzroy, of the house of Rothschild, an enthusiastic student at Heatherley’s. It was at Little Holland House that she met and fell irretrievably in love with Sir Coutts Lindsay, an amateur painter and accomplished man-about-town nearly twenty years older than herself. The Lindsays were to be the founders of the Grosvenor Gallery.

  More energetic, more spiritual, and even more full of goodwill were the Cowper-Temples, Ruskin’s great friends, whose entertainments were likely to be in aid of the new foundation of Toynbee Hall, or of the early temperance movement, or the charitable work of the great unorthodox preacher and writer, George Macdonald. This was a circle of good people who wanted to do good; Edward Clifford recalled how disappointed the Cowper-Temples were on his first visit to find him ‘a polite black-coated young artist rather than a working-man with rudimentary manners and a blouse’. But with their goodness went high spirits. In 1868 we hear of Ruskin leading off ‘Sir Roger de Coverley’ with Octavia Hill at one of these gatherings, as energetically as he had danced at Winnington.

  All this did not preclude many parties given at home. When Morris moved from the Red House to Queen Square, Bloomsbury in the autumn of 1865 he at first tried to give a series of weekly ‘jollies’ for the firm, but Janey, who had had two babies in two years and perhaps wished to avoid the prospect of ten babies in ten years, began to retreat to her sofa in the grip of a mysterious languor which persisted for the rest of her married life; she found the jollies tiring, and they grew fewer. Rossetti went out much less than he had done, but entertained royally, and both Georgie and her sister record one of the studio parties where the moon shone full on the springtide Thames, lapping just the other side of Cheyne Walk, and in the house, away from the noisy studio, the presence of Lizzie Siddal seemed almost palpable, although she had never been there. The Burne-Joneses themselves kept a family Christmas to which de Morgan, still unmarried, always came. In March 1866 their house was ready enough to give ‘a dance, a very swell affair’. Madox Brown wrote,

  the house, being newly decorated in the ‘Firm’ taste, looked charming, the women looked lovely and the singing was unrivalled, and we all luckily escaped with our lives, for soon after the guests were gone, the ceiling of the studio (about 799 lbs of plaster) came down just where the thickest of the gathering had been all night. Morris was to have slept on the sofa on which most of it fell, but, by good luck, he went home to sleep with Prinsep. This I feel triumphantly is something like news, but it prevents Jones having anything for the O.W.S. this year.

  It is sad to hear a note of something like satisfaction in this, yet it is understandable that Madox Brown, a much older man who had been forced to take his picures round on a handcart, ‘like a pedlar’ should feel resentful at what looked like young Jones’s rapid success. Although he had recently been much more prosperous and was now moving from Kentish Town to Fitzroy Square, he who had been so good to Ned when he was young and poor began a gradual withdrawal into settled disapproval. Before they moved house, however, the Madox Browns gave a notable dinner to which everyone was invited and for which even Gabriel bestirred himself and came out, passing like a prince through the small rooms with all his old benevolence. Whistler was there, at his most frighteningly droll, and Georgie had to remind herself that he was said to be good to his mother; Legros had been asked, and Madox Brown tried to explain to him the plot of Sidonia in French, a link with old times on an evening when everyone felt on the brink of change. ‘And on this day of union and reunion of friends,’ the Memorials add, ‘there was one who had come amongst us in friends’ clothing, but inwardly he was a stranger to all that our life meant. This was Mr Howell.’

  George and her sisters, it will be remembered, never began a sentence without knowing how it would end, which helps one to feel the weight of her one and only reference to Charles Augustus Howell. At this point he was a newcomer to most of them, having recommended himself to Rossetti in 1865 as a ‘nice young chap’ by sending him some bottles of Madeira. They saw him as an enterprising, amusing, readily adaptable Anglo-Portuguese, with quick wits and a horse-tamer’s physique. What had not yet emerged was that his arrival meant a clash of romanticisms, disastrous to many since Howell, whose adroitness might have made him rich in any other line of sharp practice, was fatally drawn towards the world of creative artists. It was also evident to him that because of his cleverness he was entitled to a living from the less clever, and looking round the table he must have calculated, though incorrectly, where his best prospects would be.

  This account of friendships might end with one or two who, while so many doors were opening to Burne-Jones, were becoming rather less acceptable. Swinburne, drinking heavily, was dreaded by now in libraries and club-rooms, but as a poet he was still in full flight. ‘His poetry is partly horrible and partly incomprehensible,’ Ned wrote to George Howard,6 ‘but partly perfect, and it has a force like a fever that clears the body as a storm clears the air.’ To Ned he dedicated his Poems and Ballads of 1866, wildly recommending them to his readers.

  Let them enter, unfledged and nigh fainting

  For the love of old loves and lost times,

  And receive in your palace of painting

  My revel of rhymes.

  By ‘unfledged and nigh fainting’ Swinburne meant ‘young and old’ – at such high pitch did the ordinary business of living present itself to him. Poor Swinburne’s equilibrium, ‘as far as he may be said to have any’ as Boyce puts it, had been completely lost over that wild beauty of the studios, Becky Solomon, with ‘hair as the plume of a bright black bird’ who appears to be the model for the final version of Ned’s Wine of Circe. Becky at this time had not begun to drink, and Solomon, nasty, feckless and appealing, was still on the bring of downfall, which he regarded as simply another circumstance of life. It must stand to Burne-Jones’s credit that he shared this view as far as it concerned his friends. The inconveniences of drink, homosexuality, adultery and the workhouse in no way affected his regard. ‘There shou
ldn’t be laws against immorality,’ he told Rooke, adding, ‘It shouldn’t be illegal to prefer Frith to Mantegna.’

  Drawing – and Ned practised drawing in every spare moment – became at times an aspect of friendship. His little horror pictures, the bogey subjects which exorcised the darker side of his imagination, were for the home circle only, though Charlie Faulkner took a collection of them back to Oxford. The girl in her bedroom who opens the drawer and finds a corpse-like bogey folded on top of the wash is typical of these, the protagonists always being caught by the bogeys unprotected and alone. On the other hand, a series of Topsies, studies of Morris from all angles, each one squarer, more determined, and shedding more waistcoat buttons than the last, begins about this time and must run into many hundreds. Ned even risked a picture of Morris with Janey being sick out of a boat. Living as he did in the age of Charles Keene and Phil May, Burne-Jones could never be counted as a great comic draughtsman, but these sketches, which everybody wanted to keep, were thrown off by real disgust or real affection. A case in point is the set of drawings of Swinburne and his queer entanglement with Adah Menken.7 With affectionate tact the last picture (where all is over) shows the tiny Swinburne lighting his cigar with his love letters, and emerging as that which he never seems to have been in any sexual relationship: successful.