EDWARD BURNE-JONES
“I think Morris’s friendship began everything for me; everything that I afterwards cared for; we were freshmen together at Exeter. When I left Oxford I got to know Rossetti, whose friendship I sought and obtained. He is, you know, the most generous of men to the young. I couldn’t bear with a young man’s dreadful sensitiveness and conceit as he bore with mine. He taught me practically all I ever learnt; afterwards I made a method for myself to suit my nature. He gave me courage to commit myself to imagination without shame—a thing both bad and good for me. It was Watts, much later, who compelled me to try and draw better.
“I quarrel now with Morris about Art. He journeys to Iceland, and I to Italy—which is a symbol—and I quarrel, too, with Rossetti. If I could travel backwards I think my heart’s desire would take me to Florence in the time of Botticelli.”
So Burne-Jones wrote of himself more than forty years ago. It chanced I had just then written a series of papers on living English painters; and, with the thought of their re-publication, had asked him for some particulars of his earlier career. The scheme, I remember, was never carried into effect; but his answer to my inquiry, from which I have drawn this interesting fragment of autobiography, served as the beginning of a long friendship that was interrupted only by death.
In those boyish essays of mine there was, as I now see, not a little of that quality of youthful conceit that could never, I think, have entered very largely into his composition; and if I recall them now with any sort of gratification, it is mainly because they included an enthusiastic appreciation of so much as was then known to me of the work of Rossetti and Burne-Jones. Of Rossetti’s art I have already spoken, and perhaps the time has not yet arrived to record a final verdict upon the worth of his achievement as a painter. I have also sought to indicate how irresistible in my own case was the influence of his strongly marked personality, an influence which enabled me the more readily to understand how deep may have been the debt that is here so generously acknowledged. In this matter the witness of his contemporaries is irrefutable. Even though posterity should not accord to him the unstinted praise bestowed upon his art by those who then accepted him as a master, no later judgment can dispute or disturb the authority he exercised over those who came within the sphere of his personal fascination.
Little wonder then that to the dream-fed soul of the younger painter, whose art as yet lacked the means to fix in form and colour the thronging visions that must have already crowded his brain, the friendship of such a man must have seemed a priceless possession; and although, with the patient and gradual assertion of Burne-Jones’s individuality, their ways in the world of Art divided, yet even in that later day each knew well how to measure the worth of the other. Of what was highest and noblest in the art of Rossetti, no praise ever outran the praise offered by Burne-Jones to the man he had sought and owned as his master; and I can recall an evening in Cheyne Walk more than forty years ago, when there fell from the lips of Rossetti the most generous tribute I have ever heard to the genius of the painter who was still his disciple. “If, as I hold,” he said, in those round and ringing tones that seemed at once to invite and to defy contradiction, “the noblest picture is a painted poem, then I say that in the whole history of Art there has never been a painter more greatly gifted than Burne-Jones with the highest qualities of poetical invention.” Here we have praise indeed; but there is at least one painter, he whose long life still kept the stainless record of unswerving loyalty to a noble ideal, to whom also Burne-Jones has here owned his indebtedness, who would, I believe, have accepted and endorsed even such a judgment as this. And if an artist’s fame lives most sweetly, most securely, in the regard of his fellows, who could ask aught higher of the living or the dead of our times, than that the award of Rossetti should be confirmed and enforced by the painter of “Love and Death”?
“A picture is a painted poem.” Upon that Rossetti never tired of insisting. “Those who deny it,” he used to add in his vehement way, “are simply men who have no poetry in their composition.” We know there are many who deny it,—many, indeed, who think it savours of the rankest heresy; for herein, as they would warn us, lurks the insidious poison of “the literary idea.” Nor can such warning ever be without its uses. The literary idea, it must be owned, has often played sad havoc in the domain of art. Much, both in painting and sculpture that the world has rightly forgotten or would fain forget, found the source of its failure in misguided loyalty to a literary ideal; much even that survives still claims a spurious dignity from its fortuitous attachment to an imaginative conception that had never been rightly subdued to the service of Art.
But though the warning be timely, the definition which it confronts is not on that account to be lightly dismissed. It is true, as Rossetti stoutly maintained, and must ever remain true, of all men who have poetry in their nature. It was true, from the beginning of his career to its close, of the art of Burne-Jones. From “The Merciful Knight” to the unfinished “Avalon,” wherein, as it would seem, he had designed to give us all that was most winning in the brightly-coloured dreams of youth, combined with all that was richest in the gathered resources of maturity, his every picture was a painted poem. Nay, more, every drawing from his hand, every fragment of design, each patient study of leaf or flower or drapery, has in it something of that imaginative impulse which controls and informs the completed work. I have lately been turning over the leaves of some of those countless books of studies he has left behind him, studies which prove with what untiring and absorbing industry he approached every task he had set himself to accomplish. And yet, amongst them all, of mere studies there are none. Again and again he went back to nature, but ever under the compelling impulse of an idea, always taking with him an integral part of what he came to capture. That unprejudiced inspection of the facts of nature which, in the preliminary stages of their work, may content those who are moved by a keener and colder spirit of scientific research, he had not the will, he had not the power to make. For every force carries with it its own limitation; nor would it ever have been his boast that nature owned no more than she was fain to yield to him. If, then, with unwearied application he was constantly re-seeking the support of nature, it was with a purpose so frankly confessed, that even in the presence of the model the sense of mere portraiture is already seen to be passing under the dominion of the idea. At their first encounter the artist’s invention asserts its authority over his subject; and not all the allurements of individual face or form which to men of a different temperament are often all-sufficing, could find or leave him unmindful of the single purpose that filled his mind and guided all the work of his hand.
It is this which gives to the drawings of Burne-Jones their extraordinary charm and fascination. He who possesses one of these pencil studies has something more than a leaf torn from an artist’s sketch-book. He has in the slightest of them a fragment that images the man: that is compact of all the qualities of his art; and that reveals his ideal as surely as it interprets the facts upon which he was immediately engaged. And yet we see in them how strenuously, how resolutely, he set himself to wring from nature the vindication of his own design. There is no realist of them all who looked more persistently at life, who spared himself so little where patient labour might serve to perfect what he had in his mind to do; and if the treasure he bore away still left a rich store for others, it is because the house of beauty holds many mansions, and no man can hope to inhabit them all.
“A picture is a painted poem.” Like all definitions that pass the limits of barren negation it contains only half a truth. Like most definitions forged by men of genius it is chiefly valuable as a confession of faith. There is a long line of artists to whom, save in a forced and figurative sense, it has no kind of relevancy. And they boast a mighty company. Flanders and Spain serve under their banner. Rubens and Velasquez, Vandyck and Franz Hals, aye, and at no unworthy distance, our own Reynolds and Gainsborough are to be counted among the leaders of their host. And long before the first of these men had arisen, the tradition they acknowledged had been firmly established. It was Venice that gave it birth. Venice, where not even the commanding influence of Mantegna could hold back the flowing tide of naturalism that rose under the spell of Titian’s genius. Out of his art, which contained them both, came those twin currents of portraiture and landscape that were destined to supply all that was vital in the after development of painting in Europe. All that was vital; for though Religion and Allegory, History and Symbol, still played their formal part in many a grandiose and rhetorical design, these things were no longer of the essence of the achievement. To the painters who employed them, nature itself was already all-absorbing. The true poetry of their work, whatever other claims it may seem to advance, resides in the mastery of the craftsman; it cannot be detached from the markings of the brush that give it life and being. To wring from nature its countless harmonies of tone and colour, to seize and interpret the endless subtleties of individual form and character—these are the ideals that have inspired and have satisfied many of the greatest painters the world has produced. Who then shall say that Art has need of any other, any wider ambition?
And yet, as I have said, the house of beauty has so many mansions that no single ideal can furnish them all. Nature is prodigal to those who worship her; there is fire for every altar truly raised in her service. And so it happened that while Venice was perfecting a tradition destined for many a generation to sway the schools of Northern Europe, there had risen and fallen at Florence a race of artists, such as the world had not seen before and may haply not see again, who had asked of Nature a different gift, and had won another reward. That imperishable series of “painted poems” which had been first lisped in the limpid accents of Giotto, had found their final utterance in the perfected dialect of Michael Angelo. In the years that intervened many hands had tilled the field; many a harvest had been gathered in: but so rich had been the yield that the land perforce lay fallow at the last; and when Michael Angelo died, Florence had nothing to bequeath that the temper of the time was fit to inherit.
From that day almost to our own the ideal of the Florentine painters has slept the sleep of Arthur in Avalon. Those who from time to time have sought to recapture their secret have gone in their quest, not to the source, but to the sea. They have tried to begin where Lionardo, Raphael, and Michael Angelo left off; to repeat in poorer phrase what had been said once and for all in language that needed no enlargement, that would suffer no translation. They made the mistake of thinking that the forms and modes of art are separable things, independent of its essence; that the coinage moulded by the might of individual genius could be imported and adopted as common currency; and so even the most gifted of them carried away only the last faltering message of a style already waning and outworn. To look only to the painters of our own land, we know well what disaster waited upon men like Barry, Fuseli, and Haydon in their hapless endeavours to recover the graces of the grand style; and even Reynolds, though he never wearied in praise of Michael Angelo, was drawn by a surer instinct as to his own powers into a field of Art that owed nothing to the great Florentine. A truer perception of what was needed, and of what was possible, in order to revive a feeling for the almost forgotten art of design, came in a later time, and was due, as I have always thought, mainly to the initiative of Rossetti. Not because he stood alone in the demand for a more searching veracity of interpretation; that was also the urgent cry of men whose native gifts were widely different from his, men like the young Millais, who owned and paid only a passing allegiance to the purely poetic impulse which youth grants to all, and age saves only for a few, and then sped onwards to claim the rich inheritance that awaited him in quite another world of Art. But if this new worship of nature was indeed at the time a passion common to them all, yet amongst them all Rossetti stands pre-eminent, if not absolutely alone, in his endeavour to rescue from the traditions of the past, and to refashion according to present needs, a language that might aptly render the visions of legend and romance.
And this in a larger and wider sense became afterwards the mission of Burne-Jones. This was his life-work—to find fitting utterance in line and colour for dreams of beauty that in England at least had till now been shaped only in verse. And to accomplish his task he was driven, as he has said, to make a method to suit his own nature. The surviving traditions of style could avail him little, for he already possessed by right of birth a secret long lost to them. With him there never was any question of grafting the perfected flower of one art upon the barren stem of another. There, and there only, lurks the peril of the literary idea. But it could have had no terrors for him, who from the outset of his career submitted himself, as by instinct, to the essential conditions of the medium in which he worked, moving easily in those shackles which make of every art either an empire or a prison. Of the visions that came to him he took only what was his by right, leaving untouched and unspoiled all that the workers in another realm might justly claim as theirs. Every thought, every symbol, as it passed the threshold of his imagination, struck itself into form; he saw life and beauty in no other way. There was no laboured process of translation, for his spirit lived in the language of design; but labour there must have been, and, as we know, there was, in perfecting an instrument that had been so long disused. To be sure of his way he had to seek again the path where it had been first marked out by men of like ambitions to his own; and it was by innate kinship of ideas, not by any forced affectation of archaic form, that at the outset of his career he found himself following in the footsteps of the painters of an earlier day.
“If I could travel backwards I think my heart’s desire would take me to Florence in the time of Botticelli.” It was by no accident that he chose this one name among many, for of all the painters of his school Botticelli’s art asserts the closest, the most affectionate attachment to the ideas which gave it birth. Others could be cited whose work bears the stamp of a deeper religious conviction; others again whose technical mastery was more complete, who could boast a readier command of the mere graces of decoration. But he was the poet of them all. For him, more than for all the rest of his fellows, the beauty of the chosen legend exercised the most constant, the most supreme authority. It was the source of his invention and the dominating influence which guided every subtle detail of his design. It made his art, as it formed and controlled all the processes of his art, leaving the indelible record of individual and personal feeling upon the delicate beauty of every face that he pressed into his service. It is not wonderful then that the poet-painter of our day should have recognised with almost passionate sympathy the genius of the earlier master, or that he should sometimes have travelled backwards in spirit to the city wherein he dwelt; and if that longer journey upon which he has now set forth should lead him not to Florence, who is there who shall declare that he may not have met with Botticelli by the way?
It is no part of my present purpose to offer any laboured vindication of the art of Burne-Jones. That is not needed now. The generous appreciation of a wider circle has long ago overtaken the praise of those who first gave him welcome; and for others who have yet to learn the secret of his influence, the fruit of his life’s labour is there to speak for itself. But in the presence of work that is clearly marked off from so much else produced in our time, it may be well to ask ourselves what are the qualities we have a right to demand, what, on the other hand, are the limitations we may fitly concede to a painter whose special ambition is so frankly avowed. For there is no individual and there is no school whose claims embrace all the secrets of nature, whose practice exhausts all the resources of art. To combine the design of Michael Angelo with the colouring of Titian was a task that lay not merely beyond the powers of a Tintoret. It is an achievement impossible in itself; and even could we suppose it possible, it would be destructive and disastrous. Titian had design, but its qualities were of right and need subordinated to the dominant control of his colour; Michael Angelo used colour, but it served only as the fitting complement of his design; and although the result achieved by both has the ring of purest metal, there is no power on earth that can suffice to fuse the two. These two names, we may say, stand as the representatives of opposite ideals, which have been fixed and separated by laws that are elemental and enduring; and if between these ideals—leaning on the one hand towards symbolism, on the other towards illusion—the pendulum of art is for ever swaying, this at least we know, that it can never halt midway.
And between these ideals Burne-Jones made no hesitating choice. For him, from the outset of his career, design was all in all, and the forms and colours of the real world were in their essence only so many symbols that he employed for the expression of an idea. His chosen types of face and form are fashioned and subdued to bear the message of his own individuality. No art was ever more personal in its aim, or, to borrow an image of literature, more lyrical in its direction. The scheme in which he chose to work did not admit of wide variety of characterisation, but for what is lacking here we have, by way of compensation, a certainty, an intensity of vision that supplies its own saving grace of vitality. There is nothing of cold abstraction or formal classicism. Though his art affects no mere transcript of nature, and can boast not all the allurements of nature, yet nature follows close at its heels; and if the beauty he presents has been formed to inhabit a world of its own, remote from our actual world, we are conscious none the less that he had fortified himself at every step by reference to so much of life as he had the power or the will to use. And again we may see that while his mind was bent upon the poetic beauty of Romantic legend, he never suffered himself to depend upon that merely scenic quality that seeks for mystery in vague suggestion or uncertain definition. His design, whatever the theme upon which it is engaged, has the simplicity, the directness of conviction. He needs no rhetoric to enforce his ideas. All that he sees is clearly and sharply seen, with something of a child’s wondering vision, with something also of the unsuspecting faith and fearless familiarity of a child.
And, as with his design, so also with his colour. He worked in both at a measured distance from reality, never passing beyond the limits he had assigned to himself, and using only so much of illusion as seemed needful for the illustration of his idea. The accidents of light and shade, with their infinite varieties of tint and tone, which yield a special charm to work differently inspired, were not of his seeking. He would indeed, on occasion, so narrow his palette as to give to the result little more than the effect of sculptured relief; he could equally, when so minded, range and order upon his canvas an assemblage of the most brilliant hues that nature offers. But in either case he employed what he had chosen always with a specific purpose—for the enrichment of his design, not for any mere triumph of imitation. Few will deny to the painter of the Chant d’Amour and Laus Veneris the native gift of a colourist, but we may recognise in both these examples, and, indeed, in all he has left us, that the painter disposes his colours as a jeweller uses his gems. They are locked and guarded in the golden tracery that surrounds and combines them. And they may not overrun their setting, for to him, as to all whose genius is governed by the spirit of design, the setting is even more precious than the stone.
These qualities of Burne-Jones’s art are not peculiar to him. They find their warrant, as we have seen, in all the work of that earlier school to which he loved to own his obligation. But they were strange to the time in which he first appeared; and to their presence, I think, must be ascribed no small part of the hostility he then encountered. Something, no doubt, was due to the immaturity of resource which marked his earlier efforts. And he knew that. At a time when his imagination had already ripened, he was but poorly equipped in a purely technical sense; and although there is no education so rapid as that which genius bestows upon itself, it was long before his hand could keep pace with the pressing demands of the ideas that called for interpretation. But apart from mere technical failure, there was in his own individuality, and still more in the means which he recognised as the only means that could rightly serve him, not a little that was sure of protest from a generation to whom both were unfamiliar. This also he well knew; and I think it was the clear perception of it which gave him patience and courage to press forward to the goal.
And there were times when he had need of both. The critics who saw in his earlier efforts only the signs of affectation greeted him with ridicule. We are reported a grave nation, but laughter is a safe refuge for dulness that does not understand; and as there were few of the comic spirits then engaged upon art criticism who had the faintest apprehension of the ideal which inspired his art, they found in it only a theme for the exercise of a somewhat rough and boisterous humour. But they never moved him from his purpose; never, I think, even provoked in him any strong feeling of resentment. His nature was too gentle for that, his strength of conviction too deep and too secure. No one ever possessed a larger quality of personal sympathy; no one, it might seem, was on that account so much exposed to the influence of others. And in a sense this was so. In the lighter traffic of life his spirit flew to the mood of the hour. His appreciation was so quick, his power of identifying himself with the thoughts and feelings of others so ready and so real, that he seemed at such moments to have no care to assert his own personality. Nor had he; for of all men he was surely the most indifferent to those petty dues that greatness sometimes loves to exact. That was not the sort of homage he had any desire to win; and as he put forward no such poor claim on his own behalf, his keen sense of humour made him quick to detect in others the presence or assumption of mere parochial dignity. Of that he was always intolerant; indeed, I think there was scarcely any other human failing for which he could not find some measure of sympathy. But although in the free converse of friends his spirit passed swiftly and easily from the gravest to the lightest themes, anxious, as it would seem, rather to leap with the lead of others than to assert his own individuality, it was easy to see how firmly, how resolutely, he refused all concession in matters that concerned the deeper convictions of his life. To touch him there was to touch a rock. Behind the affectionate gentleness of his nature, that was accessible to every winning influence, lay a faith that nothing could shake or weaken. It was never obtruded, but it lay ready for all who cared to make trial of it. In its service he was prepared to make all sacrifice of time and strength and labour. His friends claimed much of him, and he yielded much; generous both in act and thought, there was probably no man of such concentrated purpose who ever placed himself so freely at the service of those he loved; but there was no friend of them all who could boast of having won any particle of the allegiance that the artist owed to his art. That was a world in which he dwelt alone, from which he rigorously excluded all thoughts save those that were born of his task; and though every artist has need of encouragement, and he certainly loved it not less than others, yet such was the tenacity of his purpose, such a fund of obstinate persistence lay at the root of a nature that was in many ways soft and yielding, that even without it I think he would have laboured on patiently to the end.
A mind so constituted was therefore little likely to yield to ridicule. Such attacks as he had to endure may have wounded, but they did not weaken his spirit; and with a playful humour that would have surprised his censors, he would sometimes affect to join the ranks of his assailants, and wage a mock warfare upon his own ideals. I have in my possession a delightful drawing of his which is supposed to represent a determination to introduce into his design a type of beauty that was more acceptable to the temper of his time. He had been diligently studying, as he assured me, the style and method of the great Flemish masters, and he sent me as earnest of his new resolve a charming design of “Susanna and the Elders,”—“after the manner of Rubens.” On another occasion he wrote to me that he felt he had striven too long to stem the tide of popular taste, that he was determined now to make a fresh departure, and that with this view he had projected a series of pictures which were to be called the “Homes of England.” He enclosed for my sympathetic criticism the design for the first of the series. It was indeed a masterpiece. Upon a Victorian sofa, whose every hideous and bulging curve was outlined with the kind of intimate knowledge that is born only of love or of detestation, lay stretched, in stertorous slumber, the monstrous form of some unchastened hero of finance. A blazing solitaire stud shone as a beacon in a trackless field of shirt-front: while from his puffy hand the sheets of a great daily journal had fallen fluttering to the floor. There were others of the series, but none, I think, which imaged with happier humour that masculine type, whose sympathies at the time he was so often charged with neglecting.
For it must not be forgotten that when ridicule had done its work, Burne-Jones was very seriously taken to task by “the apostles of the robust.” There are men so constituted that all delicate beauty seems to move them to resentment; men who would require of a lily that it should be nurtured in a gymnasium; and who go about the world constantly reassuring themselves of their own virility by denouncing what they conceive to be the effeminate weakness of others. To this class the art of Burne-Jones came in the nature of a personal offence. They raged against it, warning their generation not to yield to its insidious and enervating influence; and the more it gathered strength the more urgently did they feel impelled to insist on its inherent weakness. But, as Shakespeare asked of us long ago:
How with this rage shall Beauty hold a plea
Whose action is no stronger than a flower?
They forgot that: forgot that something of a feminine, not an effeminate spirit enters into the re-creation of all forms of beauty; that an artist, by the very nature of his task, cannot always be in the mood to pose as an athlete. And, even if they had desired to define the special direction of Burne-Jones’s art, or to mark the limits of its exercise—limits that no admirer, however ardent, would seek to deny—they need not surely have been so angry.
So at least it seemed to me then. And yet, rightly viewed, the very vehemence of such opposition was in its own way a tribute to his power. Any new artistic growth that passes without challenge may perhaps be justly suspected of being produced without individuality, and certainly such work as his, that bears so clearly the stamp of a strong individual presence, could hardly escape a disputed welcome. It must even now in a measure repel many of those whom it does not powerfully attract and charm; for it cannot be regarded with the sort of indifference that is the fate of work less certainly inspired; it must therefore always find both friends and foes. But so does much else in the world of art that speaks with even higher authority than his. There are many to whom the matchless spell of Lionardo’s genius remains always an enigma; many again who yield only a respectful assent to the verdict which would set Michael Angelo above all his fellows.
We may be patient, then, if the genius of Burne-Jones wins not yet the applause of all. It bears with it a special message, and is secure of homage from those for whom that message is written. They are many to-day, who at the first numbered only a few: they are many, and I think even the earliest of them would say that their debt to him was greatest at the last. In praise and love they followed him without faltering to the close of a life that knew no swerving from its ideal; a life of incessant labour spent in loyal service to the mistress he worshipped; and even though he had won no wider reward, this, I believe, would have seemed to him enough.
Painting is perhaps the only art which offers in its practice opportunities of social converse. The writer and musician work alone, or, if their solitude is invaded, it is only by way of interruption. But the practice of the painter’s art admits a measure of comradeship, and the progress of his work is sometimes even advanced rather than hindered by the presence of a friend. The element of manual labour that enters into painting leaves the painter free at many points of his work to enjoy friendly converse with the visitor to his studio; and I have known many an interesting discussion carried on for several hours without the painter ceasing for a moment from his work upon the canvas before him. This might not apply to every stage in the growth and structure of a picture. There are times which demand entire concentration both of brain and hand, and when the painter needs to be as solitary as the poet. But these tenser moments yield to longer intervals wherein the manual element in the painter’s calling holds for a season a more dominating place; and it is at such times that an intimate friend may safely invade the artist’s sanctuary.
Some of the most enjoyable hours of my life have been passed in this intimacy of the studio, and it is interesting to recall, as it was always interesting to note, the different ways in which the individuality of the artist expresses itself in the processes of his work—interesting also to observe how the litter of the studio in its varying degrees of disorder reflects something of the mind of the man. There are studios which seem deliberately fashioned for an effect of beauty—rooms so ornate and so adorned, that the picture in progress upon the easel seems the last thing calculated to arrest the gaze of the spectator. And there are others again, so completely barren of all decoration, and so deliberately stripped of every incident in the way of bric-à-brac or collected treasures, of carven furniture or woven tissue, that were it not for the half-finished canvas, it would be impossible to guess the vocation of its inhabitant. Between these two extremes there is room for every degree of careless or conscious environment; and although it is not always possible to define the exact measure of association between the workman and his surroundings, the visitor becomes gradually aware of a certain element of fitness in the seemingly accidental accumulation of the varied objects which find their way into a painter’s workshop.
It would certainly, however, be erroneous to assume that the disorder of the studio is to be taken as the direct reflex of the habit of an artist’s mind. No man, in the conduct of his work, ever surrendered himself to a stricter discipline of labour than Burne-Jones, though his studio in many respects was a model of apparent disorder. No man certainly in his work ever aimed at a more settled and nicely balanced beauty of design supported by deliberate harmonies of colour; and yet the bare white-washed walls of his studio in the North End Road gave no hint of the coloured glories of the invention that he was seeking to fix upon his canvas; while the litter that scattered the floor or was unceremoniously hustled into the corners of the room seemed strangely inconsistent with the ordered completeness of design that marked every picture from his hand.
There were few more delightful companions in the studio—none, according to my experience, whose talk leapt with such easy alertness from the gravest to the gayest themes. His almost child-like spirit invited humour; and yet his lightest moods of laughter left you never in doubt of the sense of deep conviction that lay at the root of his character. As he stood beside you at his work, his figure relieved against three or four half-completed designs, it was sometimes difficult to find the link which joined the lighter moods of his comradeship with the wistful beauty of the faces that he sought to image in his pictures. But almost at the next moment the difficulty would be solved by a sudden transition to a graver train of thought, and before either of us would be well aware of the swift change of tone, our converse had wandered off to the consideration of some larger ideal of art or life. It was a unique attraction of Burne-Jones’s studio that it nearly always contained a rich and varied record of his work, for the chosen method of his painting rendered it necessary for him to keep several pictures in almost equal states of progress, each being put aside in turn till the surface of pigment was so fixed and hardened as to render it ready for the added layer of colour which was to form the next stage in its progress.
Very often on these occasions our talk was not directly concerned with painting at all, but strayed away into many worlds of the present or the past. As a painter every artist must stand or fall by his command of the particular aspect of beauty which can be rendered by that art, and by no other. If a picture fails, it is no excuse that its author is a poet. If a poet fails, it is idle to plead in his defence that he is an accomplished musician. What added burdens of the spirit the worker in any art chooses to carry, concerns himself alone; what concerns the world is that the result—whatever other message it may undertake to convey—must be perfect according to the laws of the medium he has chosen. In speaking, therefore, of the deep poetic impulse that lay at the back of all Burne-Jones’s achievement in design, I have no thought of seeking to rest the reputation which he will ultimately hold upon any other considerations than those which are proper to the field in which he laboured. He has left enough, and more than enough, to vindicate his high claim to rank among the masters of art, but it is certain, none the less, that his profound interest in those other fields of expression in which the imagination finds utterance, gave him infinite charm as a man.
There was little lovable in literature that he did not keenly love, though in regard to the literature of the past, I think his heart turned by preference to the legendary beauty of the earlier romances, where the story, freshly emerging from its mythical form, may still be captured with equal right of possession by the poet, the musician, or the painter. Great drama, even the drama of Shakespeare, never so strongly appealed to him; and, indeed, I have always noticed in my companionship with painters that in their judgment of the work of the theatre what is most essentially dramatic in drama is not, as a rule, that upon which their imagination most eagerly fixes itself. And yet, in the case of Burne-Jones, it was curious to observe that among the narrative writers of our time the highly dramatised work of Charles Dickens most strongly appealed to him. For Dickens’s genius, its pathos, not less than its humour, he owned an unbounded admiration; and I suppose there were few of the worshippers of the great novelist, except, perhaps, Mr. Swinburne, who could boast so full and so complete a knowledge of his work. The sense of humour, which was a dominating quality in the character of Burne-Jones, could, perhaps, scarcely be surmised by those who know the man only through his painting. His claims in this regard, which could not be ignored by those who knew him, must always be received with a sense of surprise—even of incredulity—by those to whom he was a stranger. And yet, when he was so minded, his pencil could give proof of it in many essays in caricature; while in conversation it was an ever-present quality that lay in wait for the fit occasion.
When Burne-Jones spoke of his own art it was always with complete understanding of its many and divergent ideals, and I have heard him appraise at its true value the genius of men with whom he himself had little in common. Among his contemporaries he could speak with generous appreciation of the great gifts of Millais, and of the acknowledged masters of the past. However little their ideals sorted with his own, his power of appreciation was too liberal and too keen to permit him to ignore or to belittle their claims though his heart’s abiding-place was as I have said with the Florentines of the fifteenth century.
My visits to Burne-Jones’s studio began very early in our acquaintance, and the several errands which took me there varied as time went on. While he was painting his picture of King Cophetua, he asked that my eldest son—who was then a child—should be allowed to serve as model for one of the heads in the picture. I am afraid that, like most children, my boy gave some trouble to the master, who one day rebuked him as being an incorrigibly bad sitter, and the boy, who had been kept standing during the whole of the morning, promptly replied with the indignant inquiry as to whether Burne-Jones called standing sitting—a response that immensely delighted the painter himself, who recognised the justice of the claim by at once releasing him from further service for the day. At a later time I saw much of him in his studio while he was designing the scenery and costumes for my play of King Arthur. I read him the play one afternoon while he was at work upon his own great design of King Arthur’s sleep in Avalon, in the lower studio, which stood at the foot of his garden; and the task, which he straightway accepted, of assisting in the production of the drama at the Lyceum Theatre, led to many later meetings, at which our talk turned constantly on that great cycle of romance—one phase of which I had sought to illustrate.
His own mind was steeped in their beauty, as may be seen in his constant recurrence to these legends as chosen subjects for his design, and I fancy it was their common love for this subject in romance which formed one of the strongest links of fellowship between himself and William Morris. I have said that to Rossetti he always confessed his deep obligations as an artist, but there can, I think, be little doubt that of all living comrades it was Morris whom he most loved. Though, as he has himself confessed, they had parted company in regard to some of the problems that beset the artist, in the graver issues of life, no less than in the lighter moods of social comradeship, they were at one to the end. He told me that once in the earlier days of their association they had gone with Charles Faulkner on a boating excursion up the Thames. At that time Morris was apprehensive that he was growing too stout, and at one of the river inns where they had to share the same room the painter conceived the mischievous idea of unduly alarming the poet as to his condition. Morris had retired earlier than the others, and was fast asleep, when Burne-Jones, having procured a needle and thread from the landlady, took a large slice out of the lining of his companion’s waistcoat, and then sewed the two sides together as neatly as he could. In the morning Morris was up betimes, and Burne-Jones, still feigning to be asleep, watched with eager excitement the terror and consternation with which the poet sought, in vain, to make the shrivelled garment meet around his waist. The victim of the plot fancied that his increasing proportions had suddenly taken on a miraculous acceleration of pace, and it was not until the smothered laughter of the painter greeted his ears that he was relieved from the panic of anxiety into which he had been suddenly thrown.
Burne-Jones could sometimes, on occasion, be himself the victim of a practical joke, and once when I paid him a sudden and unexpected visit at his little cottage in Rottingdean, I contrived to play, very successfully, upon what I knew to be his horror of the professional interviewer. I announced myself to the servant as an American colonel, who had called as the special correspondent of the Cincinnati Record, and on the message being conveyed to her master, she returned, as I expected, with the curt intimation that he was not at home. But he evidently felt that no precaution was too great to be taken in the face of this threatened invasion, for as I crept by the window that looks out on to the little Village green I saw him, in company with his son, stealthily crawling under the table, and when I afterwards returned and announced myself in my own name, he related with childish delight how skilfully he had avoided the attack of the enemy.