One of the most interesting things in the life-story of Edward Burne-Jones is the manner of his advance, within some twenty years only, from a position of obscurity to one of exceptional authority in the British school. The young student, who in 1855 had just discovered his vocation and was beginning to feel his way under the guidance of Rossetti, had become in 1877 one of the most discussed of British artists, and had with dramatic suddenness entered into the company of the greatest of the nineteenth-century painters. With no effort on his part to attract attention, without having recourse to any of those devices by which in the ordinary way popularity is won, he secured, practically at the first time of asking, all that other men have had to strive for laboriously through a long period of probation. Although the few things he exhibited while he was a member of the Royal Water Colour Society were sufficient to rouse in the few real judges a deep interest in his future achievement, it was the singular merit of his contributions to the first exhibition at Grosvenor Gallery that made him instantly famous. The wider public realised then, and realised most forcibly, that he was an artist to be reckoned with, and that his work, whether people liked it or not, could by no means be ignored.
PLATE VIII.—THE ENCHANTMENTS OF NIMUE
(South Kensington Museum)
Painted, like the "[Sidonia von Bork]," while Burne-Jones was still under the influence of Rossetti, "The Enchantments of Nimue" is interesting as an example of his earliest methods. It was finished in 1861, but it was not exhibited until 1865, when it was hung in the Gallery of the Royal Society of Painters in Water Colours; it was bought for the South Kensington Museum in 1896. The painting shows how Nimue "caused Merlin to pass under a heaving-stone into a grave" by the power of her enchantments.
From that time onwards there was for him no looking back. The twenty years of preparation, which were spent mainly in ceaseless seeking after completer knowledge and in careful study of the practical details of his profession, were followed by another twenty years of strenuous production, in which he worked out more and more effectively the ideas formed in his extraordinarily active mind. In the series of his paintings there is a very perceptible advance year by year in technical facility, but to suggest that they show also a growth of imaginative power would scarcely be correct, because there seems to have been no moment in his career when he did not possess in fullest measure the faculty of poetic invention and the capacity to put his mental images into an exquisite and persuasive shape. What he acquired as a result of his exhaustive study was a closer agreement between mind and hand, the skill to convey to others what he himself felt. But he had no need to labour to make his intelligence more keen or his fancies more varied; nature had endowed him with a temperament perfectly adapted for every demand which he could make upon it in the pursuit of his art.
That he did not at first secure the unanimous approval of art lovers is scarcely surprising. The markedly individual artist who cares nothing for popular favour and is more anxious to satisfy his own conscience than to gather round him possible clients is never likely to become a favourite offhand. Burne-Jones by the brilliancy of his ability silenced all opposition long before his death, and gained over the bulk of the doubters who questioned his right to the admiration he received when he first began to exhibit at the Grosvenor Gallery. But for some while the unusual character of his art caused it to be much misunderstood by people who had not taken the trouble to analyse his intentions. He was accused of affectation, of deliberate imitation of the early Italians; he was attacked for his indifference to realism and for his decorative preferences. Even the genuineness of his poetic feeling was suspected, and his love of symbolism was ridiculed as the aberration of a warped mind. Much of this misconception was cleared away by the collected exhibition of his works which was held at the New Gallery in the winter of 1892-1893, for this show, by bringing together the best of his productions and by summing up all phases of his practice, proved emphatically that he had been as sincere and logical in his aims as he had been consistent in his expression. It was no longer possible to attack him out of mere prejudice; the verdict given fifteen years before on his art by those who understood him best was seen to be just. When a second collection was shown at the New Gallery—a memorial exhibition arranged in 1898, a few months after his death—few people remained who were prepared to dispute his mastery.
It is fortunate that justice should have been done to him by his contemporaries and that there should have been really so little delay in the wider acknowledgment of his claims. If appreciation had been withheld from him while he lived, if it had been his fate to secure only a posthumous reputation, there would have been some diminution of his influence, and his art would have lost some of its authority. But as a right estimate of his position was arrived at during his lifetime, when he was at the height of his activity as an exponent of an exceptionally intelligent æsthetic creed, he was able to make his beliefs effective in bringing about the conversion of a large section of the public to a truer understanding of the value of decorative qualities in pictorial art. He proved emphatically that decoration does not imply, as is popularly supposed, the abandonment of the characteristics which make a picture interesting; he showed that a subject can be legitimately treated so that it engages fully the sympathies of the average man, and yet can be kept from any descent into obviousness or commonplace conventionality. The painted story in his hands was no trivial anecdote; it was a motive by means of which he conveyed not only moral lessons but artistic truths as well, something didactically valuable but at the same time capable of appealing to the senses with exquisite daintiness and charm.
Indeed, he can best be summed up as a teacher who clothed the lessons of life with noble beauty and with dignity that was commanding without being forbidding. There was human sympathy in everything he painted—a tender, gentle sentiment which escaped entirely the taint of sentimentality and which, tinged as it always was with a kind of quiet sadness, never became morbid or unwholesome. He was too truly a poet to dwell upon the ugly side of existence, just as he was too sincerely a decorator to insist unnecessarily upon common realities. That he searched deeply into facts is made clear by the mass of preparatory work he produced to guide him in his paintings, by the enormous array of drawings and studies which he executed to satisfy the demand he made upon himself for exactness and accuracy in the building up of his designs. But in his studies, as in his pictures, the intention to express a personal feeling is never absent. He selected, modified, re-arranged as his temperament suggested; he omitted unimportant things and amplified those which were of dominant interest; he sought for what was helpful to his artistic purpose and passed by what would have seemed in wrong relation, consistently keeping in view the lesson which he desired to teach. It can be frankly admitted that a certain mannerism resulted from his way of working, but this mannerism was by no means the dull formality into which many artists descend when they substitute a convention for inspiration; it was rather a revelation of his personality and of that belief in the rightness of his own judgment which counts for so much in the development of the really strong man. Except for the short time in which he was influenced by Rossetti, his life was spent in illustrating an entirely independent view of artistic responsibilities; and it would be difficult now to question this independence with the wonderful series of his paintings available to prove how earnestly and how seriously he strove to realise his ideals in art.