It may, as I have said, have been true then—though I was unaware that I had ever betrayed the feeling to Rossetti—that Burne-Jones stood foremost in my appreciation of the painters of the time. It is certainly not true now in any sense that would consign Rossetti to an inferior place; for I have come to think, in the light of later study of the two men’s work, that, in some undefinable and yet indisputable quality of genius, especially as exemplified in his earlier work not then so well known to me, he stands pre-eminent among those who influenced his generation.
As a colourist in that supreme sense in which colour is inspired by the purpose of the design, he had in his earlier period no equal among them all. In later life, under the shadow of suffering and sickness, the tones he employed had lost the first glowing radiance of the dawn. But an artist lives only by his best; and if the best of Rossetti be fairly measured and appraised, it will, I think, be hardly possible to dispute his right and claim to have been the foremost leader in the movement with which his name is associated.
CHAPTER VI
EDWARD BURNE-JONES
My intimacy with Burne-Jones struck deeper and lasted without interruption from those earlier days of the “Ignotus” articles in the Globe to the time of his death in 1898. We were friends for more than twenty-five years, and during the greater part of that period the closest and most affectionate friends.
To him also I had written when I thought of enlarging that first crude criticism of his work. I was a stranger to him then, although my elder sister had already made his acquaintance, but his letter in reply to my application is delightful in its considerate tolerance towards the somewhat audacious challenge of a boy to be supplied with the particulars of his early career.
Referring to the pictures which I had specially selected for notice he writes:
“I need not say that such a flattering review of them gave me pleasure, for, whatever cause I have to see them with disappointment, such sympathy as you express cannot be anything but most welcome. But there is so little to say of the kind of information you ask for, and I should like to say nothing, for a sudden feeling of being ridiculous overwhelms me. At Oxford till twenty-three, therefore no right to begin art at all, never having learnt one bit about it practically, nor till that time having seen any ancient picture at all to my remembrance. Provincial life at home, at Oxford prints of Chalons and Landseer—you know them all. I think Morris’s friendship began everything for me, everything that I afterwards cared for. When I left Oxford I got to know Rossetti, whose friendship I sought and obtained. He is, as you know, the most generous of men to the young. I could not bear with the young man’s dreadful sensitiveness and intolerable conceit as he did with mine. He taught me practically all I ever learned; 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 good and bad 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 backward, I think my heart’s desire would take me to Florence in the time of Botticelli. I do feel out of time and place, and think you should let me go crumbling and mouldering on, for I am not fit for much else but a museum. You see I am writing in front of my work and ought to know, and I do know.”
The letter ends with a courteous invitation to visit his studio, where he promised to show me the work he had completed during the year. Needless to say with what delight I accepted, though I scarcely realised then that that visit was destined to date the beginning of a friendship that endured without halt or flaw till the time of his death in the summer of 1898.
When I first knew him in 1873, his appearance corresponded almost exactly with that which is imaged in Watts’s beautiful portrait. His eyes then, as always, were the dominant feature of his face—pale blue eyes, that revealed in their changing expression the sympathy, the gentleness, and no less the strength, of his nature.
From the time I am speaking of, I became a constant and always welcome visitor to his studio at the Grange, and at those simple Sunday luncheons to which his intimate friends were bidden Burne-Jones very soon made known to me a side of his character scarcely to be suspected by those who knew him only from his work.