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?