Edward Burne-Jones

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  Very different was the first production in which Burne-Jones was induced to lend a hand himself – the Lyceum King Arthur. The subject was approached not with the reverence of Lugné-Poe, but through an easy cloud of late-Victorian cigar smoke. Irving had shown Comyns Carr (who was managing the theatre) a play by Wills and asked him to knock it into shape. Carr declared that he read it aloud to Burne-Jones in the garden studio while he was working on the Avalon, in which case Ned must have heard such lines as:

  GAWAIN: His name, my lord, is Lancelot.

  ARTHUR: Lancelot, ah!

  However, the play gave great scope for stage effect, and had a leading part for Irving; Sullivan agreed to do the music, and, of course, only Ned could do the designs. Alma Tadema had made sketches for the Lyceum Coriolanus, though, as he said, he had ‘no end of difficulties in persuading them to be truly Roman in appearance’; on Arthur and Guinevere there could be no greater expert than Burne-Jones.

  ’In the main I should like to keep all the highest things secret and remote from people; if they want to look they should go a hard journey to see.’ This remained Burne-Jones’s considered opinion on the Arthur story. He accepted the commission because ‘weak moments come to me through friendship. I can’t expect people to feel about the subject as I do, and have always. It is such a sacred land to me’, he added. Gradually he was drawn into the excitement of designing costumes and armour. He made sketches for the five main scenes – the magic Mere, Camelot, the Maying of Queen Guinevere, the Chamber in the Turret, the Passing of the Barge.

  Unlike ‘Tad’, who was an expert scene painter, Burne-Jones knew nothing about large-scale effects, and in October 1894 he went to the Lyceum to see the work in progress. It was here that the first signs of trouble appeared. Old Hawes Craven, the foreman painter, received him cordially enough; in fact it turned out that he had worked on the sets of the first play Ned ever saw, the Fairy of the Golden Branch. Unfortunately, the reminiscences, aided by a glass of whisky, which Ned felt was called for, excited the old man and he broke into a comic dance, to the embarrassment of his sons who were acting as assistants and stood by ‘with sour and gloomy expressions’. More whisky, and Craven began to call the sword Excalibur ‘Excelsior’, and to address Ned himself as ‘Sir Arthur’. After this, although Burne-Jones went again to show Margaret the stage-machinery and to try his hand with the large brushes, he became understandably cautious.

  King Arthur was rehearsed under difficulties. The Christmas pantomime was still playing, and the stage manager, unable to get to work until the matinée was over, trusted a good deal to chance. On one occasion the platform of the Royal Maying collapsed and Queen Guinevere and her attendant damsels crashed to the ground. How lucky that the queen was Ellen Terry! Burne-Jones gave various reasons for the delay which prevented his going to rehearsals until the last moment. He kept away just as he had kept away from the Rome mosaics: he suspected that his instructions were not being followed, and thought it best to detach himself. When he did go down to the first dress rehearsal, his heart sank. Sullivan and Carr were both fussing about at the front of the house – ‘Sullivan in a fury – telling me he would have given £100 to be out of it’ – while Carr drew him aside and complained about Sullivan. Irving, alone on the stage on a golden throne, was declaiming: ‘And then, my own true Guinevere, my queen – what’s gone with the gas there? Who’s up there?’ The play seemed even worse than Ned remembered. Sir Mordred had to say that he had seen the queen and Lancelot ‘lip to lip cuddling beneath the may’, and there were ‘jingo bits about the sea and England which Carr should be ashamed of’. As for Merlin, ‘they have set aside my design and made him filthy and horrible … Morgan le Fay is simply dreadful … she is half divine in the ancient legend – as Merlin is – here they are scandal mongering gossips.’ The armour, specially made in Paris, was effective, and when the glittering knights assembled with their banners for the quest there was a moment of real magic in the theatre; apart from that, Ned felt that Perceval looked ‘the one romantic thing’. (This, by the way, was ungrateful to Forbes-Robertson as Lancelot; he had seen the Pre-Raphaelites through, from the day when he sat as a boy for Love in Rossetti’s Dante’s Dream.) Finally Irving complained that the hawthorn brake looked like a cauliflower, and substituted a canvas rock.14

  At midnight, by which time Irving had only rehearsed two scenes, Ned went home. Before the opening he got Irving to make a few changes – ‘it is enough for its purpose the whole thing’. But he avoided the first night (14 January 1895). ‘The morning papers say I was there, constantly leaving my box to superintend,’ he wrote. ‘I was here all evening playing dominoes.’ The reviews were not unfriendly. The Times said that ‘the dim spectral light of the Mere accorded ill with the glare of the footlights’, but also that the play, over four hours long, had held the audience. However, the ‘Guvnor’, as King Arthur, had no intention of putting himself out. He was too lazy to get up and walk towards the lake, so that the mystic arm in white samite had to approach him.

  King Arthur, however, ran for a hundred nights, went to America, and lost all its scenery in a warehouse fire. Burne-Jones’s conception had, as he said, ‘gone to nothing … why? Never mind.’ His friendship with Ellen Terry and the ‘Guvnor’ was unaffected – so, too, of course, was his feeling for the Grail. ‘To care as I care and as 3 or 4 others care one must have been born in the lull of things between the death of Keats and the first poems of Tennyson. There was some magic in the air then that made some people destined to go mad about the S. Grail.’15

  That autumn, Burne-Jones had to face the fact that his pictures were beginning to not sell. The popular artist was Sargent, whose work he disliked though he was fond of him personally, ‘so the time of lying must begin’. But his own large canvases looked like staying in his hands. Criticism did not worry him; it never had. ‘How can you ever read criticism dear heart, and how can they be wise, seeing what haphazard people write them?’ he wrote consolingly to Mrs Gaskell.16 But the loss of his old patrons, he told Rooke, made him feel like a ‘discarded mistress’. He arranged an exhibition of drawings at the Goupil Gallery, and for the first time he asked dealers to the studio. The presence was so objectionable that the studio had to be fumigated with cigars after they left, and Ned felt he kept a specially unnatural tone of voice for them. Sometimes he indulged a daydream in which Barnato and Rothschild entered with a cheque-book and begged him on their knees to sell them a picture.17

  In October, he had been to Hawarden and Beaumont, with Georgie this time. Perhaps there was some disloyalty in the letter to Mrs Gaskell which he scribbled desparately on the return train via Crewe: ‘I wonder if I can write … at least it will help to pass the time if I can – Georgie is sound asleep, nor have I anything to say to her … Crewe – that is where I wanted to travel with you two years ago, to see you safe and get soup for you and hot water too … doesn’t it seem years and years since that day? – it isn’t two years yet – such a long way we have travelled since then not all of it a summer journey …’18 But he felt only tenderness and admiration for Georgie as she braced herself for the local council elections. She had taken on no easy task, and it was sad that Morris, although he wrote wishing her well, was still too tired to take more than a lukewarm interest. Many of the villagers, too, were apathetic, caring nothing about the insanitary state of their cottages. Others, like Mr Tuppence the grocer, ‘Trunky’ Thomas, who owned the bathing machines and did a bit of smuggling, and ‘Stumpy’ Mockford the beachcomber, were just as much opposed to change, and to any inquiry into their doings, as the squire and the farmers themselves. But Georgie swept all before her: ‘Many a man goes across the world to find a fresh chance to better his life, and here is one brought to our doors,’ she had written in her pamphlets. ‘Shall we take it?’ In December she was elected, with a majority of ‘those who think as I do’ on the Parish Council. Burne-Jones, left in London, continued to paint on the Sirens.

  Quite undeterred by the fat
e of King Arthur, he began a new season’s theatre-going. On 5 January 1895 he had been with Phil to the disastrous first night of Guy Domville when poor white-faced Henry James had to face a hostile audience, jeering at his play. In the thick of the shouts and catcalls Phil stood up and began sarcastically to applaud the demonstrators in the gallery, making things, by his generous impulse, much worse. They even succeeded that spring in getting Morris to the theatre; he came to ‘a tavern’, and to Charley’s Aunt, which he enjoyed. But this was the last time. He absolutely refused to see Mrs Pat as Juliet.

  It was only one sign that a change in Morris, which, Georgie tells us in the Memorials, ‘we tried to think was nothing more than the usual effect of time.’ Morris began to talk of ‘finishing off our old things’ as though the business of life was almost behind him. He could only take short walks. A terrible possibility appeared which Ned felt as a ‘suspended sentence’, and dared only consider sometimes.

  What could he do for Morris? ‘His soul is in the Chaucer – he thinks of nothing else … it would be hard on him if it wasn’t finished … he must have risked much money with it – five or six thousand pounds.’19 The printing went forward. Ned put aside part of each day for the last drawings and took his friends round to the Kelmscott printing-room, though he stopped doing this after Lady Rayleigh, ‘seeing the immeasurable care and toil of the printing, asked if it couldn’t be more easily done by machinery’ and Morris was in danger of exploding.20 To the expense of the Chaucer was added the heavy purchases of ‘painted books’. For a year past Ned had wanted to save ‘so that [Morris] might not be bothered about money … it’s the only thing I can think of now to help him with.’21 He set himself to review his assets – the unfinished work in the studio.

  In hand were Psyche’s Wedding (finished that April), Aurora, The Fall of Lucifer, Love and the Pilgrim, Venus Concordia, and The Car of Love. These last four all went to the New Gallery and came back unsold, although he had painted on them or painted duplicates the next year. Love and the Pilgrim, the old haunting design from the Romance of the Rose, was to be a dawn picture in monotone, ‘a rich black and silvery picture’. Worry over the placing of the figures made Ned dream that he had painted a barrel of spirits, with labels, round Love’s neck, like a St Bernard. The immense Car of Love, on a canvas especially made at Roberson’s, was now dedicated to Mrs Gaskell, and ‘IN GLORIAM DOMINAE MEAE will be written very small somewhere’.22 Phil thought it colourless and suggested pink nipples and knee-caps. Aurora went forward more easily. The background was taken from the sketches he had made at Oxford in 1867, though the view from the canal bridge where he had drawn a woman bathing her baby was ‘all gone, every bit’, he told Rooke.23 Meanwhile The Dream of Launcelot, with the threatening forest round him, was in its first stages, but he felt it looked ‘like a park, not the strange, wild place it ought to be’.

  Burne-Jones could not be sure of getting ready money, if it should be needed, for any of these paintings, but neither now nor ever would he change his ideas to suit other people. From the firm he could still count on about £700 per annum, and there was £1,000 for the Stanmore tapestry designs. But Phil only worked occasionally, and had to be supported. Out of the £15,000 for Briar Rose he still had £14,000, but that was invested and he paid his life insurance out of the interest; Georgie’s future, and possibly Morris’s, must be secure. He decided to sell all the drawings, the favourite ones, which he had kept in the studio – the illustrations to the Aeneid, many that he had intended for Ruskin’s Oxford Museum, all, in fact, except the head of Mary Zambaco … ‘the Heads done from that strange weird-looking damsel I wouldn’t sell – for a time at least I will keep them,’ he wrote to Mrs Gaskell.24 He seems strangely to have ignored the fact that Mary Zambaco had returned to London and was living, a successful sculptress and middle-aged beauty, at 6 Clarendon Place, within easy walking distance, in fact, of Mrs Gaskell. She lived in his mind only as the wild, delicate Phyllis and Nimu‘. But even to part with the rest of the drawings, and to see their empty spaces, was an agony; he had an artist’s true affection for ‘the little ones’.

  Portrait commissions, although Burne-Jones never went on with them if the likeness didn’t ‘come’, were welcome. In the spring of 1895 Frances Horner came to London, an honoured visitor, with her golden-haired daughter Cecily; Frances’s birthday, as Ned well remembered, was in April, and Cecily’s portrait was to be a present from her husband. Then Frances returned to Somerset, ‘to the milking pails and buttercups and daisies and all that is good for her – poor Frances.’25 He could never quite believe that anyone wanted to live permanently in the country.

  Apart from this interlude – and the portrait was one of his most successful – 1895 was a year of catastrophe for his friends. In 1895 Georgie and Ned attended Leighton’s last ‘music’ – Flaming June on the easel, his godchildren dancing round the fountain as the President came down the steps to say a courteous farewell to each guest; then, ashen pale and obviously very ill, he turned back into his House Beautiful. A few weeks later Luke Ionides was in bad trouble – ‘the ugly Luke matter’, Ned called it – and left The Grange in tears, while Georgie ‘scornfully’ went off to Rottingdean and the Parish Council. The clouds were gathering too round Oscar Wilde – the irresistible Oscar who had entertained Phil and Margaret, who had been so excited by the birth of his first son that he told Mrs Maxse: ‘He’s like a sun-flower!’ On 3 April Burne-Jones waited in misery for ‘the probable ruin of Wilde tomorrow’. To the evidence of the trial he reacted at first with extreme disgust, not because of Wilde’s sins of the flesh, but because he had spent £50 a day on boys at the Savoy while his wife was left in difficulties.26 He took the practical step of lending Constance £150 to tide her over. In public, he told Mary Drew that he intended to defend Wilde as best he could. If Wilde liked the worst society as well as the best, ‘I undertake to say that [the worst] is more serviceable to art … and knowing Oscar’s many generous actions and the heavy merciless fist of London society … [I] shall speak up for him whenever I hear him abused.’27

  Distress of a different kind arose from the dinner in honour of Alphonse Daudet, given by Henry James on 6 May at the Reform Club. It is curious to find that although Burne-Jones still declared he knew no French at all except ‘oui!’ (which had got him into difficulties) he was included on this occasion among the French-speaking guests. Daudet was half paralysed with syphillis and demanded what James referred to as ‘strange precautions’ because of his weak bladder, but he talked brilliantly and James congratulated himself on a successful evening. On Burne-Jones, however, sitting between James and du Maurier, the effect was depressing in the extreme. Everyone talked about friends who were ill, dead or blind. Daudet could only lift his glass with two hands and Ned regretted the days when ‘men drank deep and waxed merry’. If only some women could have been there!28

  In 1895 young William Rothenstein – who rather liked doing this sort of thing – took him to the Café Royal to meet, after so many years, Alphonse Legros. ‘It amused me to sit in this place with these two great artists: Burne-Jones saying that of course Rothenstein would have an absinthe.’ Burne-Jones was charming and funny and glad to see his old friend, but Legros had fallen on evil days. With the help of George Howard and Watts, Ned found the usual way out: there was a secret subscription to buy Legros’s Les Femmes in Prière for the newly-opened Tate Gallery.

  And Morris was no better, even though he was struggling to go on with some of his public work, and actually spoke on a socialist platform on 1 May that year. But he had a new project for the Kelmscott Press – a folio edition of Sigurd the Volsung. Burne-Jones, who was confidently asked to do thirty illustrations, was struck with dismay. He was no more in sympathy than he ever had been with ‘raw fish and ice’, the stories of the north. His comment on one subject – Atli’s Hall in Flames – was ‘… it never happened … in the second place, it isn’t desirable that it ever should have happened.’29 His imagination rej
ected the myth. Out of sheer affection he took the work down to Rottingdean, but could do nothing with it, though he started the designs for the Romance of the Rose. Meanwhile Morris was ‘urgent with me’, so Ned told Swinburne to illustrate the Miller’s Tale, which only shows how little he can really have considered the style of his old friend’s work. Indeed, it was Morris’s practice to look at the cuts upside down, to get an idea of the ‘blacks’. The nearest Ned got to a bedroom scene was the Wife of Bath’s Tale, and even there the knight and his bride look sad indeed. All this time he had an aching sense of Morris’s physical weakness. There was something ‘mysterious’ about Morris’s illness, he told Rooke. ‘I hope they won’t send him away – it breaks his heart to leave his books’, he wrote to Fairfax Murray.30 In the summer he took a week off to work on the picture of the passing of the king – the Avalon.

  In the autumn the business of going out to dinner began to be tedious. One had to pretend to have read the new books, and Burne-Jones had not read Stevenson’s Letters; and Sidney Colvin, always after some job or other, was at every dinner. In his own quiet mind, as he worked at the Chaucer, the fantasies were not quite a joke. In his old age, he told Phil, he would have to be fastened in his chair and given things to play with. ‘… I shall want the vellum Chaucer to daub over with colours and some vermillion to paint the faces red.’ But Phil told him that the book would still be valuable and would be catalogued in the saleroom as ‘coloured by Burne-Jones in his dotage’.31