Edward Burne-Jones

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  Among the visitors was an unexpected figure, clearly a sick man, aged, crumpled-looking and wearing an old-fashioned blue stock, accompanied through the galleries by friends. This was the Professor – Ruskin himself. Sir Coutts might well have expected a favourable notice from the great man who (although he did not care for the notion of opposition to the Academy) had done so much to create the climate of opinion which had led to the building of the gallery. But readers of Fors Clavigera, which was becoming increasingly disjoined and puzzling, unfortunately found No. 79 clear enough. In it Ruskin complained – saying what no one else had liked to say – about Sir Coutts’s own pictures, dismissed the crimson walls, praised Burne-Jones, and took extreme objection to the ‘ill-educated conceit’ of Whistler in asking 200 guineas for the Falling Rocket. This was the painting which he called a ‘wilful imposture’.

  The exhibition caught Ruskin just after his return from Venice and an intense study of Carpaccio’s The Dream of St Ursula. The fine detail of the sleeping saint, half confused in his mind with the dead Rose La Touche, made it impossible for him to appreciate the atmosphere, exact and poetic, of the faintly-washed Nocturnes. They appeared to him to be colour notes, or at best, studies. The matter – whatever Whistler might say in his Ten o’clock – was, as perhaps it always was with Ruskin, a matter of craftsmanship. Fors, after all, was addressed to the artisans of England. In Unto This Last, Ruskin had defined just payment as ‘time for time, strength for strength, and skill for skill’. He did not see 200 guineas worth of strength in the Rocket.

  Whistler’s law-suit against him was heard in November 1878. By this time it was clear that Ruskin, who had to avoid any subject which excited him for fear of a new breakdown, could not risk any appearance in court. His friends must stand by him.

  The line-up of witnesses on 25 November (Baron Huddleston and a special jury) might, if the whole case had not been so distressing, have been considered absurd. Burton begged to be excused, so did Charles Keene, so did Leighton, who was going to receive his knighthood that week. Burne-Jones, unwilling to show himself conspicuously anywhere, hated the idea of the witness-box particularly since the article had praised, in comparison to Whistler, his ‘utmost conscience and care’ in finishing his pictures; also, he agreed with Whistler on many points, though not in the claim that an artist should stand above society. But love and duty told him he must appear. His fellow witnesses were Tom Taylor, who had consistently attacked him ever since the Plint sale, and, of all people, Frith, who appeared under subpoena. For the prosecution were the painter Albert Moore, an amiable eccentric who took advice on all matters from the Chelsea cabmen on his rank, and William Michael Rossetti who like Ned was answering the call of friendship.

  ‘The weightiest testimony, the most intelligent and apparently the most reluctant, was that of Mr Burne-Jones, who appeared to appreciate the ridiculous character of the process to which he had been summoned to contribute,’ wrote Henry James, reporting for the Nation. In evidence, Ned painfully declared that he had been a painter for twenty years, but had become known to the public only during the last two or three; he believed that complete finish was the most difficult part of painting and had been acknowledged for centuries as the standard. He praised Whistler’s colour and ‘almost unrivalled sense of atmosphere’: he stuck to it that the Nocturnes were the product of labour and skill, but he still regarded them as sketches. He did not think the Rocket was worth 200 guineas. By contrast, he identified Ruskin’s Titian (the Doge Andrea Gritti) as a ‘splendid arrangement of flesh and blood’. Frances Graham, who was in court, recorded his answer to the judge’s: ‘You are a friend of Mr Whistler, I believe?’ ‘I was,’ Burne-Jones replied, ‘I don’t suppose he will ever speak to me again after today.’ In this, at least his prophecy was correct.

  The Pennells, however, who managed to obtain the papers in the case from Ruskin’s solicitors, Walker, Martineau and Co., were able to show that Ned’s original deposition was far more severe. In these papers he described Whistler’s eccentricities as ‘a joke of long standing’ and said (what was not far from the truth) that Whistler had notoriously ‘deprecated the work of all artists, living and dead’. The bitterness that can be felt here dates back to the day ten years before when Whistler knocked down Legros in Luke Ionides’ office. Evidently Burne-Jones, from the solicitors’ point of view, did not ‘come up to proof’ because in the event he determined not to bring old scores into court.

  Mr Sergeant Parry’s conduct of the prosecution was particularly inept, maintaining (1) that Ruskin was damaging Whistler’s reputation (2) that no one paid any attention to Ruskin, because he was mad. The outcome has always been felt to vindicate the integrity of the artist against the critic; the trial itself has usually been treated as a comedy, but the results for the protagonists were tragic. Burne-Jones felt wretched at this new breach with William Michael Rossetti. Whistler kept his end up gallantly, greeting his friends in the Grosvenor Gallery and insulting the unsmiling Poynter, Ned’s brother-in-law, by shrieking, ‘Hullo Poynter! Your face is your fortune, my boy! Ha! Ha!’ But a few months later he was bankrupt. Ruskin felt it necessary to resign his professorship, and faced a new period of ‘disgustful or ominous dreams’ and broken sanity.

  But the discomfort of the trial could not check the most unfamiliar wave of success which now carried Burne-Jones, protesting, with it. The modest employer of studio assistants found himself with a school. Edmund Evans began to publish Walter Crane’s toy-books in 1878, and in the Baby’s Bouquet the Hesperides was charmingly echoed in Round the Mulberry Bush.In December 1879 we find Henry James directing visiting Bostonians to The Grange. In 1877 at one of the first Wagner rehearsals at the Albert Hall, Ned contrived an introduction to a lady in the audience whose daughter had the right head for Medusa in the Perseus series; Mrs Benson was not surprised, replying ‘with quiet understanding’ that ‘she has often been called my Burne-Jones daughter’ – this was in the same month as the opening of the Grosvenor Gallery. In 1878 the Merlin went to the Exposition Universelle in Paris where – so Rossetti wrote to Howell – it was expected to carry off all the prizes, though in fact it was a success only with the critics. Back in London Sir Coutts, yielding to pressure, replaced the crimson hangings with dull olive green, and greeny-yallery was the colour of the hour. Kensington became Passionate Brompton and all who struck an attitude were P.B.’s. ‘Delightfully un-P.B. for such a P.B. artist’ had been Mary Gladstone’s first opinion of Burne-Jones. The English middle class, exhorted by Ruskin, hectored by Carlyle as to what they shall not believe, invaded (so Whistler complained) by Morris and made to hang wallpapers in their homes, refined by Whistler himself and made to hang Japanese fans, finally taught by Burne-Jones a line of drapery and an unmistakable attitude and glance – it was as if they had taken a loving revenge by giving way to everything at once. In Henry James’s A Bundle of Letters (1879) the English girl abroad wears:

  a sage green robe, ‘mystic, wonderful’, all embroidered with subtle devices and flowers and birds of tender tint; very straight and tight in front, and adorned behind, along the spine, with large, strange, iridescent buttons. The revival of taste, of the sense of beauty, in England, interests me deeply; what is there in a simple row of spinal buttons to make one dream – to donner à rêver, as they say here?

  Even the buttons disappeared when Liberty began to drape, more and more softly, both women and furniture. Frith’s Private View of the Royal Academy, 1881 showed, in his own words, ‘a family of pure aesthetes absorbed in affected study of the pictures. Near them stands Anthony Trollope, whose homely figure affords a striking contrast to the eccentric figure near him.’ ‘These were the days of green serge gowns and Morris papers,’ wrote Elizabeth Wordsworth, describing her experiences, in 1879, as the first Principal of Lady Margaret Hall. ‘Every lady of culture had an amber necklace.’ She also says it was ‘simply impossible to imagine any of the Paters in a crowded railway station’, a reminder of the finely tuned
intellect which was the strength of the aesthetic movement. But Pater’s Marius the Epicurean, who seriously considers that life might be concentrated into the flowering and folding of a toga, is a far cry from Morris and Burne-Jones as they set out to ‘tell the tale’.

  The satirists went to the attack: Mallock’s New Republic defended the present against the past (although he allowed Ruskin to have the last word against Pater), and du Maurier drew Mrs Comyns Carr, with her beads and cloudy fringe, as Mrs Jellaby-Postlethwaite. In 1879 Millais gave a grand ball at which all the ladies wore Grosvenor Gallery dresses; in the following year Luke Ionides suggested to his crony W.S. Gilbert that he might write an opera based on Burne-Jones’s maidens descending the golden stairs, and the outcome was Patience.4 Here Gilbert, faithfully reproducing the popular idea of the movement, muddled everything together, and Grossmith, as ‘Bunthorne, a fleshly poet’, got himself up, for the opening run, as Whistler. Ned enjoyed Patience – he was disappointed that Rossetti could not be got to come to Gilbert and Sullivan – and, again in the face of Rossetti’s protests, he made the acquaintance of Oscar Wilde. Although he had many causes of physical and mental distress, the aesthetic craze was never one of them. About the wholesale borrowing of his decorative motifs he protested mildly: the aesthetic sunflowers, for instance, were meaningless, whereas for Burne-Jones (as for Blake) sunflowers were sleeping beauties; he approved of the soft down on their legs, he said, and ‘I don’t know how they can bear the bees to touch them’. But on the whole he remained imperturbable, knowing that whatever Passionate Brompton was doing, he was doing something else.

  In the restless new atmosphere, where he was accepted as a leader, he characteristically became homesick for his old certainties. It was a deep gratification when Oxford offered him an honorary D.C.L., though there were shouts from the undergraduates at the most un-greeny-yallery gown he had to wear and he was asked how he liked the bright red. The years seemed to roll back, Charlie Faulkner was there, and when he presented the winner of the Newdigate, Jack Mackail, no one could suspect that in a few years this bright young man would deal Burne-Jones a mortal blow. The ‘ancient kindness’ was also renewed with Ruskin, although they still could not agree about Michelangelo; to relieve the Professor’s unhappiness Ned introduced him to France Graham, who instantly became a ‘pet’. He took cabs to Swinburne’s lodgings for poetry readings, ‘agitating affairs’, as Gosse described them, with plates and glasses laid out ‘like a conjuror waiting for his audience’. He consoled the poet’s ‘mighty spirit’ when a whole new work was left in a cab on a foggy night. He wrote loyally to Stephens. But his calls at Cheyne Walk – though Gabriel appreciated the attention – fell heavy as lead; there seemed nothing left to say. In October 1881, when Rossetti sent him a copy of his last book of poems, Ned had not seen him for eight months, but in answer to an imploring letter of thanks he received only a weak chilling scrawl: ‘Thanks, but I am very ill, and not well enough to see you.’ Ned had to apply for news to a new bedside companion, Watts Dunton.

  On the other hand his sympathy with George Eliot deepened, and became something quite distinct from Georgie’s strongly emotional friendship with her. The great novelist was well able to understand the effects of a childhood hungry for beauty, rejection by the world, a sudden access of fame, a highly sexed nature and a conviction – which both of them had held since their earliest years – of being hopelessly ugly. Burne-Jones sometimes went down by himself to Witley, where Eliot had taken a house, and the absent-mindedness of the two dreamers met when she told him one dark night to turn sharp right for the station, causing him to plunge head first over the railway cutting. When G.H. Lewes died in March 1879 he felt intensely for her grief. ‘Her table was covered with Hebrew books’, he wrote wryly to Mary Gladstone, ‘– when I say covered, I mean there were two or three … it all looked so lonely – and I wondered whether she cares to lie down or get up any more.’6 A year later, when George Eliot impulsively decided to marry Cross, she tried to break the news to the Joneses separately, going up first to the studio. Georgie found it hard to adjust to this change in the wise counsellor who, as she wrote, had ‘looked closely into my life’.

  Burne-Jones also began, not boldly, but rather more boldly, to venture out into a wider circle, and again the prompting came from Frances Graham. The young women who were sensitive to his unobtrusive need for friendship were, in general, part of Passionate Brompton; they wanted to paint a little, or did paint a little. They found Burne-Jones considerate, delightful, enigmatic and an expert at escape. ‘I am but a poor wretch, if taken from work but for a day,’ was one polite evasion. A typical letter to Miss Stuart Wortley (Norman Grosvenor’s sister-in-law) began: ‘Heaven is so indignant at the impropriety of my taking you anywhere, that this time it has visited me with the heaviest of all afflications – and I am shut up with a cold in the head.’7 A characteristic way of entertaining these young women – a charming, respectable way – was to take them for a walk, perhaps to escort them home from his studio after Sunday lunch. ‘Nothing escaped him that we passed by,’ Mary Gladstone noted (25 November 1882), ‘and he found subjects of pity and amusement as we walked. First a wretched, stooping, white-faced, red-haired girl with a miserable haunted expression … then two children in a perambulator screaming … with hatred of each other in their looks.’ It was not a painter’s way of looking at things: he never pointed out light effects or colours; his colours were combinations of the inner mind.

  Another account comes from Frances Balfour, the wife of Eustace, Arthur Balfour’s brother. In the late seventies she was, as she tells us in her memoirs, a timid young woman conscious of her crippled leg (she had been lame since the age of two) and ‘wretchedly farouche in my new life and surroundings’. Burne-Jones was asked to draw her portrait, partly to give her confidence, while her husband read Cranford aloud. Ned worked slowly, often stopping to talk. As the delicate drawing progressed Frances fell without effort under his spell. ‘It was not so with Mrs Burne-Jones, she was rather daunting.’

  These portrait commissions, another result of the success of the Grosvenor, were a new departure for Burne-Jones; he frequently declared he had no eye for a likeness, and recommended William Richmond. Certainly he had nothing like Richmond’s competence, but if a rapport was once established, particularly with girls and young children, he could produce strange and desirable portraits with a great purity of outline – he would rather begin again than rub out – and a trance-like calm of pose which has about it a suggestion of tension, either in the hands or the expression of the eyes. His method was to start drawing, and only to go on if the likeness ‘came’. In the summer of 1879 he went – although he dreaded railway ticket-offices – to Hawarden. On 18 August Mary Gladstone noted in her diary that it had been a noisy week, with cousins and the Crown Prince of Sweden and ‘the poor little Duke of Newcastle’; then came a week of repose ‘and most brilliant the place looked, such depth of green, and bright breezy weather … mostly spent lying on the grass under the trees while Mr B.J. drew and I sat to him and an ideal portrait he made.’ This pencil head, as Ruskin says, ‘[with] the pale and subtle tints which give nobleness of expression … reaches a serene depth unattainable by a photograph and which is certain to be lost in finished paintings.’ The drawing is still at Hawarden and it is sad that the top of the head has been cut off by injudicious framing. In Mary’s candid gaze artist and subject exchange, as Matisse said they must, the warmth of each other’s hearts.

  What was it like for a painter, a nobody except by virtue of his painting and his own personality, to stay in the country houses of the eighties? It was ‘horrible’, wrote Burne-Jones, looking back on it,8

  from the dawn when a bore of a man comes and empties my pockets and laughs at my underclothing and carries them away from me, and brings me unnecessary tea, right on till heavy midnight I [was] miserable – and if there is one of all the company that it would be nice to spend all the time with I can never be with her [
him I mean] – somebody else steps in first as at the pool of Siloam.

  Dicky Doyle was actually driven to hiding his wretched underclothes under the pillow, and used to lie in bed pretending to be asleep while the footman vainly searched for them. Like Ned, Doyle was driven to these visits by the unattainable – his hopeless love for Lady Airlie, the Fairy Princess of his later toy-books. For Burne-Jones it was ‘one of all the company’, often, of course, Frances Graham. To the Lindsays’ Scottish mansion, Balcarres (though Mrs Comyns Carr tells us that Blanche was but a poor hostess, and once served paraffin instead of salad dressing, noticed by no one except Arthur Sullivan) to Naworth, and to the Percy Wyndhams at Wilbury, he could go more confidently, as a long established friend, but still in the expectation of:

  An entrance to that happy place

  To seek the unforgotten face …

  It may be added that the country houses, except at the height of summer, were icily cold, so that the ascent to the bedroom, candle in hand, was like an Arctic expedition. When Burne-Jones got back to London he took to meeting the unforgotten young women in the heated Palm House in Kew Gardens.