Some eminent Victorians: Personal recollections in the world of art and letters

by J. Comyns Carr

Playful and humorous, boylike, and even child-like in his quick surrender to the laughing mood of the moment, he could nevertheless become swiftly serious at the summons of some deeper thought, and without the need of any prepared process of transition could shift with ready and earnest eloquence to the discussion of those deeper problems which touched the centre of his art.

From the outset we were in close agreement as to the dominating tendencies which governed the great schools of European painting, and no less in our common preference for the great tradition of Florentine design, established by the genius of Giotto and culminating in the splendid achievement of Michael Angelo. Years afterwards, when I had sent him a little volume of my gathered essays on Art, he wrote me: “I found your book when I got home last night, and it was a real pleasure for me to have another proof of your love and sympathy. And there will be this additional pleasure about it, that I know how heartily I shall be at one with you while I read it.” And then, with a sudden turn to a lighter mood, he adds: “We shall meet on Sunday at lunch. Georgie is away, but Margaret dispenses lower middle-class hospitality with a finish and calm which would not disgrace a higher social position.”

I suppose no man ever held with such unswerving fidelity to the ideal with which he set out upon his career, an ideal as plainly manifest in those earlier contributions to the old Water-Colour Society as in his last great picture of “Arthur in Avalon.” In him the sense of design was all in all, but mere abstract design that missed the impulse of some legend of passion or romance never quite contented his genius.

It was his delight, as it was the delight of Botticelli, to be always exercising his invention upon some theme of legendary beauty; and it was his special gift, as indeed it was also Botticelli’s, to be able to translate such themes into the appropriate language of Art.

Though he could appreciate at its true value excellence in almost every school of painting, his temper turned as by instinct even from the greatest masters who sought only for a faithful rendering of nature. Blake once said that in his highest moments of inspiration he was often haunted by those “Flemish Demons,” as he termed them, who came and blurred his imagination and stole away the thought he desired to present. I think Burne-Jones was sometimes haunted by them too.

It is not needful now to revive the memories of that fierce hostility of criticism which greeted his earlier efforts. Rossetti’s determined reticence in regard to the exhibition of his work left Burne-Jones in those earlier days to bear the whole brunt of the attack, for the art of Millais and Holman Hunt made a somewhat different appeal and claimed a separate victory. Nor was it wonderful that what lay in the mind of both to do should at first have seemed tinged by something of determined archaic affectation. The temper of their work was strange to the world to whom it was offered at first in a form so tentative, and also confessedly so incomplete.

The history of English Painting, even in its greatest achievement, has left no tradition to which they could appeal, and, indeed, if we take a wider range of view, it may be said with equal truth that, since the downfall of the great school of Florence, Art throughout Europe had taken a direction which made the efforts of these younger men seem like a wilful neglect of the accepted models of style.

Such English masters of an earlier time as had attempted to enter into this higher realm of imaginative painting—Barry, Fuseli, and Haydon, to name only the leaders—had wrecked their lives in the vain endeavour suddenly to renew the splendours of the great masters of the sixteenth century.

With the advent of the pre-Raphaelite movement, marked by a determined research of greater reality in the rendering of actual fact, the failure of these earlier experiments became only the more manifest; and it was left for that little group in which Rossetti and Burne-Jones stand pre-eminent to realise the truth that, if imagination could ever again resume its place in pictorial art, the result must be achieved, not by an endeavour to repeat the triumphs of the past at the epoch of its culminating glory, but by retracing the stream to its source and beginning again, where Florence had begun in the earlier period of her history.

It was, I think, the first exhibition of the Grosvenor Gallery that gave Burne-Jones’s critics reason to pause in their pitiless onslaught of ridicule and rebuke. But even then the fight was not ended, and among the many members of the Academy itself the hostility continued almost without check.