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BURNE-JONES.PERSEUS AND ANDROMEDA.
BURNE-JONES.   THE ANNUNCIATION.
(By permission of Mr. F. Hollyer, the owner of the copyright.)

This tendency of spirit was so novel, this plunge in the tide of mysticism so enchanting, this delicate, archaic fragrance so overwhelming, that a new stage in the culture of modern England dates from the appearance of Rossetti. He borrowed nothing from his contemporaries, and all borrowed from him. There came a time when budding girls in London attired themselves like early Italians from Dante’s Inferno, when Jellaby Postlethwaite, in Du Maurier’s mocking skit, entered a restaurant at luncheon-time, and ordered a glass of water and placed in it a lily which he had brought with him. “What else can I bring?” asked the waiter. “Nothing,” he sighed; “that is all I need.” There began that æstheticism, that yearning for the lily and that cult of the sunflower, which Gilbert and Sullivan parodied in Patience. Swinburne, who has tasted of emotions of the most various realms of spirit, and in his poems set them before the world as though in marvellously chiselled goblets, represents this æsthetic phase of English art in literature. As a painter, Edward Burne-Jones—the greatest of that Oxford circle which gathered round Rossetti in 1856—began to work at the point where Rossetti left off.

Sir Edward Burne-Jones, who must now be spoken of, was born in Birmingham in August 1833, and was reading theology in Oxford when Rossetti was there painting the mural pictures for the Union. Rossetti attracted him as a flame attracts the moth. As yet he had not had any artistic training, but some of his drawings which were shown to Rossetti by a mutual friend revealed so much poetic force, in spite of their embarrassed method of expression, that the painter-poet entered into communication with him, and allowed him to paint in the Debating Room of the Union a subject from the Arthurian legends, “The Death of Merlin.” The picture met with approval, and Burne-Jones abandoned theology, became an intimate friend of Rossetti and the companion of his studies, and went with him to London. There he designed a number of church windows for Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, and in 1864 exhibited his first picture, “The Merciful Knight.” Later there followed the triptych “Pyramus and Thisbe” and a picture called “The Evening Star,” a glimmering landscape through which a gentle spirit in a bronze-green garment is seen to float. But none of these works excited much attention. The small picture exhibited in 1870, “Phyllis and Demophoön,” was even thought offensive on account of the “sensuous expression” of the nymph. So Burne-Jones withdrew it, and for many years from that time held aloof from all the exhibitions of the Royal Academy. For seven years his name was never seen in a catalogue. It was only on 1st May 1877, at the opening of the Grosvenor Gallery—founded by Sir Coutts Lindsay, likewise a painter, to afford himself and his comrades a place of exhibition independent of the Academy—that Burne-Jones once more made his appearance before the eyes of the world. But his pictures, like those of Rossetti, had found their way in secrecy and by their own merit, and of a sudden he saw himself regarded as one of the most eminent painters in the country.

Mansell Photo.
BURNE-JONES.THE MILL.
BURNE-JONES.L’Art.
THE ENCHANTMENT OF MERLIN.		BURNE-JONES.Pageant.
THE SEA NYMPH.
(By permission of Mr. F. Hollyer, the owner of the copyright.)(By permission of Mr. F. Hollyer, the owner of the copyright.)

His art is the flower of most potent fragrance in English æstheticism, and the admiration accorded to him in England is almost greater than that which had been previously paid to Rossetti. The Grosvenor Gallery, where he exhibited his pictures at this period, was for a long time a kind of temple for the æsthetes. On the opening day men and women of the greatest refinement crowded before his works. There was a cult of Burne-Jones at the Grosvenor Gallery, as there is a cult of Wagner at Bayreuth. One had to work one’s way very gradually through the crowd to see his pictures, which always occupied the place of honour in the principal room of the gallery, and I remember how helplessly I stood in 1884 before the first of his pictures which I saw there.

In a kind of vestibule of early Gothic architecture there was seated in the foreground an armed man, who, in his dark, gleaming harness and his hard and bold profile, was like a Lombard warrior, say Mantegna’s Duke of Mantua, and as he mused he held in his hand an iron crown studded with jewels; farther in the background, upon a high marble throne, a maiden was seated, a young girl with reddish hair and a pale worn face, looking with steadfast eyes far out into another world, as though in a hypnotic trance. Two youths, apparently pages, sang, leaning upon a balustrade; while all manner of costly accessories, brilliant stuffs, lustrous marble, grey granite, and mosaic pavement, shining in green and red tones, lent the whole picture an air of exquisite richness. The title in the catalogue was “King Cophetua and the Beggar-Maid,” and any one acquainted with Provençal poetry knew that King Cophetua, the hero of an old ballad, fell in love with a beggar-girl, offered her his crown, and married her. But this was not to be gathered from the picture itself, where all palpable illustration of the story was avoided. Nevertheless a vague sense of emotional disquietude was revealed in it. The two leading persons of the strange idyll, the earnest knight and the pallid maiden, are not yet able themselves to understand how all has come to pass—how she, the beggar-maid, should be upon the marble throne, and he, the king, kneeling on the steps before her whom he has exalted to be a queen. They remain motionless and profoundly silent, but their hearts are alive and throbbing. They have feeling which they cannot comprehend themselves, and the past and present surge through one another: life is a dream, and the dream is life.