LITMIR.BIZ

       3 1855–6

       MORRIS AND JONES; THE QUEST FOR A VOCATION

      Instead of a monastery, they were going to start a magazine. It was to be in the spirit of The Germ, and so not unworthy of the Brotherhood. Morris paid the expenses, and was editor; the title he chose, the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, was unpretentious, though Mackail tells us that at this time he bought a pair of purple trousers. The set, most of whom were in Birmingham for the vacation, were called upon, and Morris contributed some of his early poetry. ‘You can write poetry on a train or an omnibus,’ he told Burne-Jones.¹ There were evenings of enthusiasm, where the almost unstoppable Fulford read them two thousand lines of Tennyson, and there was still time for furious discussion. The final arrangements for the magazine were with Bell and Daldy, who published it at one shilling a copy.

      While the magazine was in the planning stages, Burne-Jones found, at Cornish’s shop in New Street, the book which was to mean more to him than any other – Malory’s Morte d’Arthur. It was the Southey edition, and since it was expensive he read a little every day and bought cheap books, ‘to pacify the bookseller’. But Morris, when he heard of it, bought it at once, and generously lent it to his friend while he dashed off on further visits.

      It was, therefore, in the two-up, two-down house in Bristol Road that Burne-Jones confirmed his idea of life as a quest for something too sacred to be found, and ending with the death of a king and friend betrayed, which would be the ultimate sadness (Morte Arthur saunz guerdon). In the city beyond, Joseph Chamberlain was just beginning operations in the firm which was to produce twice as many steel screws as the whole of the rest of Britain. Crom and Ned walked round the back-garden, reading in particular the story of Perceval’s sister, who died giving her life-blood to heal another woman, and asked that her body should be put on a ship which departed without sail to the city of Sarras. Without the concept of the book as hero, Victorian idealism can hardly be understood. Morris returned, was enchanted immediately, and had the book bound in white vellum. It was the Quest without Tennyson, and it seems that at first they were embarrassed to speak about it to anyone but Crom, so deeply did they feel the spell of this lost world and its names and places. Yet Burne-Jones must also have noticed that Guinevere and the Haut Prince laughed so loudly that they might not sit at table, that Sir Lancelot went into a room as hot as any stew and found a lady naked as a needle, that the Queen, through Sir Ector, sharply demanded her money back from him, and that a gluttonous giant raped the Duchess of Brittany and slit her unto the navel. In fact Burne-Jones’s letters show that he did notice this and that he could overlook in the Morte what he could not stomach in Chaucer. Malory’s wandering landscape became in its entirely ‘the strange land that is more true than real’, but not just as an escape, the refuge of the romantic without choice. He found what is of much more importance to the artist, a reflection of personal experience in the fixed world of images.

      So far Ned had not told his father what he intended to do, or even that he had given up the idea of the Church. During the Michaelmas Term of 1855 he at last did this, and Mr Jones, whose business by now was in very low water, quietly put away his hopes of seeing his son a bishop, and waited for the moment when he would become a grand historical painter like Maclise.³ But other well-wishers in Birmingham were shocked and hostile, and Ned perhaps felt that he would get more understanding from his favourite cousin Maria Choyce, one of the farming family at Harris Bridge in Worcestershire. In a long letter to her from Oxford,⁴ dated October 1855, he speaks feelingly of the ‘little brotherhood in the heart of London’ which he had hoped to found after his ordination – this dream still lingered – but ‘delay broke up everything’ and reading French and German philosophy ‘shivered the beliefs of one, and palsied mine’. This is probably as near as we can get to the crisis of faith in Burne-Jones and Morris.

      Weary work, this [he continues, rather incoherently] if, doubting, doubting, doubting – so anxious to do well, so unfortunate – friendly sympathy growing colder as the void broadens and deepens. I am offending everybody with my ‘notions’ and ‘ways of going on’ – general uselessness in fact – yes, I fear I have reached the summit of human audacity now as to claim forbearance from the omnipotent many, and even of acting honestly by publishing my defection. I shall not grace my friends now by holding that highly respectable position of a clergyman, a sore point that, giving up so much respectability, going to be an artist too, probably poor and nameless – very probably indeed – and all because I can’t think like my betters, and conform to their thinking, and read my bible, and yes, dear friends, good advice, not very profound perhaps, rather like sawdust to a hungry man.

      Never mind, Y, [Ned’s pet name for Maria Choyce] you won’t cut me will you, or give me up for an utter reprobate, because I am not going to preach immaculate doctrines in stainless gloves and collar, and be a ‘dear man’, and have slippers worked for me, without stint of wool and canvas, till I marry into a respectable family – perhaps grow fat, who knows?

      Ned calls this a ‘savage, gloomy letter’ written on a ‘damp, dark day’. It underlines once again the fact that what he had experienced was a change not of faith but direction; he must find a profession which didn’t give ‘sawdust to the hungry man’. Sintram and Guy, mentioned (together with Clive Newcome) in another letter, are still the heroes of sacrifice, ‘so anxious to do well’. Thackeray’s Clive Newcome, of course, outrages his family by intending to become a painter. As Dixon wrote later, ‘we had all a notion of doing great things for men; in our own way, however: according to our own will and bent.’

      The letter to Maria explains Ned’s first contribution to the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, which was not an illustration (woodcuts were found to be too expensive) but a ‘tale’

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