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.