Edward Burne-Jones

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  Morris, who later faced calmly enough the prospect of May’s marriage to an impoverished socialist comrade, wrote one of his gentlest letters to Margaret that August. Mackail, dropping his reserve for a moment, asks to be ‘pardoned for inserting it’ in his Life. Morris sent her a carpet from the Merton works ‘as an unimportant addition to your “hards”’. In wishing her happiness, he reminded her of how dearly she had behaved to him since she was a little child ‘in the days when I was really a young man, but thought myself rather old’.

  Margaret was married at Rottingdean on 4 September. On the evening of the 3rd she gave Ned a letter, telling him that on the whole – as he put it – he had been a satisfactory parent, and this was one of the few letters he never destroyed.

  The day itself was beautifully sunny and windy; the fields behind the house were yellow with harvest up to the ridge of the downs. Burne-Jones, waking up early and finding himself in everyone’s way, discovered – what he surely might have guessed – that the arrangements were known to everyone in the village and a small crowd was gathering. Someone had the idea of scattering rose-petals as Margaret walked the hundred yards to the church between her father and mother, and they streamed away in the wind and fell everywhere. ‘I behaved pretty well,’ Ned wrote to Lady Leighton Warren. All references to procreation and carnal lusts had been left out of the wedding service to avoid upsetting him further. There was no music, as the organ at St Margaret’s was ‘painful to hear’, but back in London the Kensington bells rang out for an hour.

  After Margaret’s wedding, Burne-Jones began the habit of calculating his age every year from the way he felt: in 1888 his age was ninety-seven. He returned to the Briar Rose series.’I want it to stop with the Princess asleep and to tell no more,’ he wrote, ‘to leave all the awakening afterwards to the invention and imagination of people and tell them no more.’

  The Mackails came back to live at 27 Young Street, within easy walking distance of The Grange, and Margaret was by no means as lost as her father had feared; in fact he could go over there any evening, as soon as the painting light failed. In later years one may well feel sorry for the conscientious Mackail, as he sits for the head of Melchior in the Exeter tapestry, gets stuck in the sash-window at Young Street, struggles with Morris’s biography and accepts patiently his bedroom at Rottingdean, with two rush-bottomed chairs, a towel horse that fell down and an old oaken cupboard with an opening three feet above the ground. He never complained, came back to tea every day at four, lived a life of dignity and scholarship and refused, it is said, the Mastership of Balliol so that Margaret would not have to leave her parents. Burne-Jones could do nothing but try to feel happy in her happiness. But he continued to paint Briar Rose.

  He was revived that autumn by Kipling’s Plain Tales from the Hills and the thought that Ruddy, of whom he was a judicious critic, was ‘losing the manner of a pressman’. George Lewis took him to court to watch the Parnell case, his lifelong sympathy with Ireland was wrought upon and he became such a convinced Parnellite that George Howard absolutely forbade mention of the subject in his letters. In October, he received an invitation which was to have a far greater importance in his life than he at first realised. This was to the first Arts and Crafts Exhibition.

  Both Burne-Jones and Morris had at first looked at the Arts and Crafts movement with some distrust, Morris because he felt that they did not belong to the ‘useful classes’ but were amateurs who would lose money, and Burne-Jones because he was afraid of being ‘got at’. His letters to Selwyn Image (later the editor of the Hobby Horse) show him in full retreat (‘come on Thursday at 5 o’clock as I have to go out and we could talk as we went along’)11 and his suspicions were justified when Image wanted to print some of these ‘conversations’. Later he got Margaret to answer Image’s letters and unwanted gifts of peppermints. But the original committee of the Art Workers’ Guild, which in 1888 produced the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, included W.A.S. Benson, the architect and craftsman who had adapted the house at Rottingdean and who had made the king’s jewelled crown for Cophetua. It was Benson who got Burne-Jones to interest himself in the movement which, particularly through its effect in Scandinavian countries, turned out to be one of the most far-reaching results of the influence of the firm. It must be repeated that Morris and Burne-Jones, those lovers of decorative richness, cared also for simplicity, whitewash and fine line. Things should be either like the king or like the beggar. Some of Burne-Jones’s later drawings and jewellery designs are simplified almost to the standards of the Bauhaus.

  Ned was delighted, too, to hear that his old friend Kate Faulkner was exhibiting a decorated piano at the Arts and Crafts; he had never managed to get Morris to look at musical instruments (though Bernard Shaw persuaded him to say he might try his hand at a fiddle) but for two years past he had been helping Kate with her designs. For her sake and Benson’s he attended the private view, but there was an unfortunate misunderstanding. ‘I kept taking people up to [the piano]’, he told Stephens,12

  and praising it and lauding it to the skies without noticing a label on its top which attributed it to me … I only designed the form, trying to follow the lines of an ancient harpsichord … so a false impression of my character has gone forth, not for the first time.

  The great thing, however, was that the exhibition was well attended. Morris, as Mackail says, ‘seems to have underestimated the amount of public interest which had at last been aroused … in the difference between good and bad decorative art.’ It was at the exhibition, too, that Morris heard a talk by Emery Walker on letterpress-printing, and he began to let his mind turn towards the last of his great crafts.

  The winter was very cold, and in January 1889 old Mr Jones died. He was buried in Brompton Cemetery, side by side with Aunt Catherwood and little Christopher. His widow, the cook whom he had so unaccountably married, was treated with exquisite courtesy by Ned, who offered her the last vacant space, in time to come, in the family grave. But she found another husband, and the space remains empty still.

  The Grange, Ned wrote to Professor Norton, was ‘silent and full of echoes’ without Margaret, and he was not so absorbed in Briar Rose that he had nothing for the second exhibition of the New Gallery, and had to ask Watts to send something extra. Morris often had to leave The Grange early, even from the Sunday breakfasts, for League meetings. Three years earlier Ned had even feared for his life in the street-rioting – ‘many thanks, Ned, for your anxiety, but lay it aside for the present’, Morris wrote back. But the time was coming when the curves of their two lives would draw together again for the close.

  In July 1888, Morris had written to Georgie that he was ‘a little dispirited over our movement in all directions’; in 1889 the executive of the League was captured by anarchists, who removed him from the editorship of the Commonwealth (though he continued to finance it) and abolished the office of chairman as ‘quasi-authoritarianism’. Morris’s interest in the League, though never in socialism itself, began to diminish, and as his vision broadened into the golden hay-harvests of News from Nowhere he wrote to F.S. Ellis, ‘I am really thinking of turning printer myself in a small way.’

  Burne-Jones found it hard to wait for the moment when Morris would come back to what he still felt was his true self. ‘He hasn’t enough practical leadership to button his own waistcoat,’ he wrote in exasperation to George Howard.13 The waistcoat indeed was frequently undone, and Ned’s drawings show him searching helplessly for the buttons on one of his own wondrously patterned carpets. ‘They talk, talk, talk,’ Ned wrote of the times when he sat silent, listening to discussions on socialism, ‘and none of them knows – not one and all the time great hidden movements are going on that will change the world, unnoticed, unsuspected, out of reach of the furthest sight.’14

  In March, Ned and Georgie went as usual to Leighton’s yearly musical afternoon in the noble drawing-room of his great house. These ‘musics’ were a very different matter from Alma Tadema’s cheerful
concerts, where ‘Tad’ had frightened Paderewski terribly by letting off a clockwork tiger under his chair. They were occasions of retrospect, because Leighton never asked anyone new except the ever-growing number of children who sat behind the flowering plants in the north window. ‘No new faces come, and that is kind of him,’ Ned wrote. The performers – Joachim, Madame Neruda, Paderewski – gave, after Leighton’s royal ‘hush’, the very best they had in them. ‘But it is pitiful’, Ned added, ‘to hear the guests say to each other, “you don’t look changed, not a bit.” They do look changed, dreadfully changed.’

  Leighton took the opportunity to ask Ned whether he would let his Cophetua and Depths of the Sea go, as part of the British section, to the Paris Exposition Universelle. With the owners of the pictures Leighton himself would deal. After great hesitation on many counts, Burne-Jones agreed, and from the summer of 1889 can be dated the beginning of his influence in Europe.

  He had, it may be remembered, exhibited The Beguiling of Merlin in Paris in 1878, but without making a wide impression. The atmosphere of 1889 was quite different, and the ever-efficient Luke Fildes, entrusted by Leighton with the hanging, was disgusted by the attention Burne-Jones’s pictures received. The jury, he felt, was ‘a mutual admiration society’.

  In fact it so happened that the Cophetua made the best possible contrast to the glittering Paris of the Expo, which the Tour Eiffel, although not quite ready in time, epitomised. The Beggar Maid appealed equally to the Symbolists in their pursuit of the soul through its expression in form and nuance, to Puvis de Chavannes, who recognised its ritual qualities, and to Sâr Péladan and the lunatic fringe. From these last Burne-Jones received an invitation in 1892 to exhibit with the Rose & Croix, ‘a disgracefully silly manifesto’ as he told Watts, which he quietly and politely avoided. Puvis de Chavannes was a different matter. Although they never met – fortunately, perhaps, as visitors were disconcerted by Puvis’s frock coat and hearty appetite – they corresponded with each other as two masters in their own way. In December 1889 the French government conferred on Burne-Jones the Cross of the Légion d’Honneur, and three years later he was invited to contribute some drawings to the Musée du Luxembourg. It was on this occasion that Whistler (whose Portrait of the Artist’s Mother was in the Luxembourg) wrote to the director that ‘if his Mummy had to keep such bad company he could not let her stay any longer at his auberge’.

  Although Burne-Jones felt honoured by French compliments to the ‘ideals I care for’, he was not at all anxious, either then or subsequently, to go over to Paris – to ‘run over’ as Phil kept suggesting, usually by telegram, and enjoy his ‘triumph’.15 He dreaded the very idea: ‘I can’t go gadding about like that, being very old.’16 But French visitors, from 1889 onwards, came frequently to The Grange – Paul Bourget, as the close friend of Henry James, later on Barthes, Arséne Alexandre, Robert de la Sizeranne, the Belgian Fernand Khnopff. Khnopff, who lived a good deal in England, became an acquaintance, and was ‘a nice fellow’, Burne-Jones told Rooke, ‘but he liked to stand amid rings of admirers, like an omnibus, twelve inside and sixteen out.’17 The most startling admirer by far, who may be taken to represent the fashionable French reaction to Burne-Jones at the turn of the century, was the ‘Baronne’ Deslandes. Mme Deslandes was a tiny, formidable, blonde Jewish Lionne, mysterious as to age and provenance, given to strange gestures and long, swimming, short-sighted glances. Waiting in Paris in her all-white salon for the annulment of her marriage, she was somewhat at a loose end and began to write novels (A Quoi Bon? and Cruauté), which were compared to the scent of white lilac, or the notes of a violin on a hot night. After the Expo she began to dress à la Botticelli in Morris materials sewn with jewels, and produced for Figaro a rhapsody (rather than an article) on Burne-Jones, calling him a primitive who united the griefs, both experienced and dreamed of, through countless ages with the emotions of the cruel nineteenth century. She induced Ned to paint her portait, and he chose to represent her with a crystal ball (he had had this in the studio since he painted Astrologia) which at the same time stood for an imperial globe and a child’s toy. The feeling of the household at The Grange as a whole was against these visitations. ‘William announces “It’s the French, sir,” as though it was the Battle of Hastings,’ Burne-Jones complained.18

  The Exposition Universelle, however, spread his reputation beyond France. The Catalonian critic Casellas went to the British section in search of Postprerafaelismo, and liked only the ‘irremediable sadness and mysterious symbols’ of Cophetua and the mermaid of Depths of the Sea, an ambiguity, it seemed to him, ‘between pleasure, ignorance and perversity’. In the years that followed, Barcelona, already committed to stained glass and the arquitectura ruskiniana, developed its great modern movement, and Burne-Jones’s drawings appeared, without permission, in Juventut; in one number, in fact, he is illustrating d’Annunzio. His influence can easily be seen in the delicious musical women crowned with flowers by the sculptor Escaler, and in the early work of the group that included Opisso, Nonell, Güell, and Picasso.

  John Christian has shown that his reputation declined in France after 1895,19 but in Catalonia, Belgium and Germany his name was invoked much longer in the struggle against industrialism and the slow death of the spirit.

  In October 1889, the Kiplings returned to London from India, and Rudyard, after a few weeks’ stay at The Grange, found himself rooms in Villiers Street. His new establishment in the thick of pubs and music-halls deeply impressed his cousin, Phil Burne-Jones and ‘Ambo’ Poynter, as did the world-travelled Ruddie himself; they brought him their problems. ‘Ambo’ was scarcely ever out of trouble and Phil was in a ‘hole’. He had sold an autobiographical article to a ‘disreputable publishing syndicate’20 and Ruddie had to accompany him to Fleet Street to get him out of their clutches. Phil’s autobiography, whatever else it contained, must have made some reference to the unreliable nature of money and women. Already there were matters which could not be entrusted to the professional care of George Lewis.

  Throughout the eighties and early nineties we have glimpses in Burne-Jones’s letters of Phil worn out by the night before and breakfasting with his eyes shut, of Ned ‘staggering to bed at nine’ while Phil is just making his toilette to go out, of Phil ordering boots from a celebrated firm in Knightsbridge (‘the firm says it is celebrated, and that is my authority’), which arrived in a case marked GLASS WITH CARE, making Ned think wistfully of Cinderella.21 Once, in his periodical destruction of old papers, Ned came across Phil’s old reports from Marlborough: good conduct, bad at French, takes an interest in mathematics.

  Ned understood Phil’s weaknesses better than Georgie did; in fact he understood the position of parents pretty well altogether – ‘their looking such an incredible age’, he said, ‘is so much against them.’ But he had to admit that Phil, though always affectionate, was difficult to live with. The household at The Grange, after all, had increased as Burne-Jones grew more prosperous, and took some management. Besides Rooke and his assistants there was a studio ‘boy’ and Pendry the dwarf, who ran errands, gave glasses of wine to the thirsty cast-makers and kept children in fits of laughter by pretending to be afraid of the dragons on the Chinese carpet. To offset the Hoffmanesque figure of Pendry there was Mrs Wilkinson, the cleaning-woman, in a perpetual state of armed warfare with Ned, menacing him with brooms and soap and a peculiarly significant, ‘Good-morning, sir’. William, like all good butlers, was a depressive. One of the parlourmaids, Annie, stayed with Georgie till her death; it was Annie who called on Kipling in his lonely bachelor days in Villiers Street and offered to sew on his buttons – as it seemed to Kipling, in a very insinuating manner. Georgie, in spite of Annie’s fidelity, considered that the relationship between servants and employers was ‘either a bloody feud or a hellish compact’.

  The Rottingdean house had also been enlarged in 1889. Burne-Jones, who earned about £950 this year for the firm’s glass and tapestry designs, was able to buy the small
property next door, and W.A.S. Benson threw them together to make the present North End House. There were now rooms for everyone, and a ‘bower’ for Margaret with a window opening on to a pear tree full of birds. The small downstairs kitchen Burne-Jones turned into a smoking-room for men only, the ‘Mermaid’, with a blazing wood fire and a view ‘over and beyond the green garden to a line of downs beyond which the sun set’. His friends could drink stout or ginger-beer and play dominoes. The trouble was that by far the most frequent domino-players were Luke Ionides and Charles Hallé, of whom Georgie disapproved.

  Even in the ‘Mermaid’ there was nothing to sit on but hard wooden settles, for it occurred to no one (except Phil) that comfort, as opposed to beauty, was at all necessary. It was in the following year that Newman died, and Burne-Jones recalled that ‘in an age of sofas and cushions he taught me to be indifferent to comfort, and in an age of materialism to venture all on the unseen’.