THE HOMES OF ENGLAND.
From an original drawing by Sir Edward Burne-Jones, Bart. (c).
To face page 78.
must be humoured. I have fought the fight of unpopularity long enough. Tell me what you think,” and accompanying this startling announcement of the fresh direction his art was to take, he enclosed, not a mere sketch, but an elaborately finished black and white drawing of the first of the great series he had projected, wherein he had evidently intended to present a typical representative of our great commercial nation—a hideous being stretched in stertorous sleep upon a Victorian sofa of abominable design, every deformed curve and moulding of which he had rendered with searching veracity.
I must have sent him in reply some burlesque welcome of the revolution in his style indicated by the design, for in a day or two I received a second drawing more monstrous and grotesque than the first, and with the drawing he wrote: “You divine my purpose. It was the first of a series to be called the Homes of England.”
But even in these essays in the grotesque, and in the lighter and sometimes very graceful fancies which he would illustrate so easily and so rapidly for our amusement, or for the delight of our children, there was always an unfailing sense of composition and design.
One afternoon on the lawn of Lady Lewis’s cottage at Walton, where we often met, and where so many happy hours of my life have been spent, he was discussing in a bantering mood the reproach so often levelled against him, that his female forms were lean and meagre and lacked the sense of flesh and blood.
“I think,” he said, “I must make a more determined study of the manner of Rubens,” and thereupon, taking a sheet of paper from the table where Lady Lewis was writing, he began at once to compose a picture of “Susannah and the Elders,” after the manner of the great Flemish master. It took him only a few minutes to accomplish, and yet, as it lies before me now, admirable as it is in its sense of caricature, it is no less striking for a certain beauty in the ordered arrangement of line which could not desert him even when he was proposing to lampoon himself.
It was, I think, about the same time that he laughingly proposed to instruct my eldest boy in the principles of anatomy, and there and then made for him on the spur of the moment two beautiful drawings representing the anatomy of the good man and the good woman, to which he added, by special request, a third drawing illustrating the anatomy of the bad man. On being met with the reproach that the drawing showed nothing of the details of internal structure, he replied that there were none, as “the bad man was quite hollow”; and on being further challenged to illustrate the anatomy of the bad woman, he gravely replied, “My dear Phil, she doesn’t exist.”