LITMIR.BIZ

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to be altogether myself.’ Design was not only the measure of the artist’s invention, but the evidence of how far the hand had followed the soul. In Hand and Soul Rossetti’s Chiaro dell’Erma found that the study of beauty alone was an illusion, but so too was commitment – his grand political allegory of peace was spattered with the blood of fighting factions. The painter had only one necessity – to paint his own soul so that he might known her; ‘seek thine own conscience – not thy mind’s conscience, but thy heart’s.’ From Rossetti, Burne-Jones learned to strengthen his Midlands obstinacy and to defy all criticism and rejection in pursuit of his own style.

      In all this Ned heard the note of authority which he needed, and ‘in the miserable ending years I never forgot this image of him’. When, all through his life, he started a new canvas and asked himself, ‘would he have liked it?’, he was thinking of the judging and approving Gabriel of Chatham Place.

      ‘Clinging tight to Gabriel whom I loved, and would have been chopped up for’ (as he described it to Frances Graham), obsessed, over-excited, under-nourished and still with no idea how to paint, Burne-Jones needed the wholesome relief of Saturdays when Morris, after a week or so apart, began coming up from Oxford. The furniture cracked and suffered, Malory was read aloud, as in former days. It was a solid point of reassurance. But Ned could not rest until this friendship too was ratified by Gabriel. ‘When I told him about Morris he said, “What’s he going to be? He’s going to be a painter, isn’t he?”’¹⁴ Morris was introduced, and felt the enchantment. On Saturdays they felt privileged to accompany him to the theatre, even though he sometimes grew impatient and took them away (to the distress of Ned, who was longing to know what happened in the fourth Act) go go to a drinking cellar ‘not nearly so diverting as the play, but Gabriel said it was seeing life, and so we went’. On Sundays Rossetti called at Sloane Terrace, and the two green young men made tea, receiving a prince in hiding, and deeply grateful when ‘it became clear that he liked to be with us’. Rossetti told them that he shared their feeling for the Morte, and Ned continued to read Dante in translation, as he had done ever since he saw the Anniversary of the Death of Beatrice, but without feeling that he understood it completely.

      ‘Rossetti used to design wonderfully in pen and ink. I used to do it because I saw him do it, as a pupil does – though I never satisfied myself in it.’¹⁵ About this time Burne-Jones began what seems to have been his first finished work, a pen-and-ink drawing, The Waxen Image. He may have put off oil painting because the smell of turpentine made him sick – as it certainly did – or because Rossetti was working mainly in water-colour, but the delay was probably a matter of timidity and sheer inability to afford even the ‘ha’penny colours from the oilman’ which Rossetti said he used (in fact, he dealt with Roberson’s). The two panels of The Waxen Image appear to be an illustration of Rossetti’s poem Sister Helen, but there is an interesting variation: instead of the witch destroying her betrayer, the maiden consults the witch to get her lover back, only to see him die in her arms; and this begins a series of what can only be called defences by Burne-Jones of the femmes fatales of legend and poetry; as far as he was concerned, all pretty women were defensible. The Waxen Image is the first of a series of finely, even anxiously, drawn subjects – even the faintest shadows are cross-hatched – which include Going to the Battle, The Wise and Foolish Virgins, The Kings’ Daughters, Sir Galahad, and The Marriage of Buendelmonte. Buendelmonte, with seventy-one recognisable figures, is the first design to show the typical ambiguous Burne-Jones weather – the central poplars blow in a storm, but others are still – and the first to show a figure of love, which may be crowned or blindfolded; we are not meant to know which. Though they were not the last pen-and-ink drawings he did, they left him with a permanent dislike of what he called ‘etching and scratching, and lines to fill up corners’. When he became a master-draughtsman he found his own instrument – pencil.

      One can feel the weight of patient lamp-lit evenings in these drawings, and in fact some of this work, which he carried about everywhere with him in a portfolio, was done at the Macdonalds, where in his loneliness he now called often. He was welcomed as before. Aggie, the prettiest, sat for him – she is the princess on the right in Going to the Battle. To the young ones, ‘Mr Edward’ was a kind instructor who not only helped them with their drawings and history in what seems to have been one of the most natural Victorian relationships of all – teacher and pupil – but gave them a glimpse of a world they had never even suspected, where beauty was an object of reverence instead of earning quiet reproof for worldliness. In return, Ned had to learn yet another language; the Macdonalds called a mind an ‘understander’, idle conversation a ‘mag’ (from ‘magpie’), unhappiness ‘the screws’, and a nap a ‘modest quencher’. ‘Bare is back without brother behind’, the family proverb on the value of friends, he understood well and indeed, in the absence of Morris, felt. He had a bewildered sensation of falling in love with them all. But a sure instinct of self-preservation led him to fifteen-year-old Georgie.

      Her photograph taken a few months later, in a buttoned black dress and white collar, shows her almost doll-like in size but with a modest dignity, ready for everything, and with a look as though she were about to swallow life like a plum and was not quite sure if she approved of it. Her hair, which at this date had bronze tints in it, is smoothed down and the pose does not show her grey eyes. Several writers have described, and Burne-Jones frequently painted, the sensation of meeting their fearless crystalline gaze, which did not so much seem to reprove small-mindedness as refuse to admit its existence at all. Yet Georgie was sympathetic, kind and witty, not least about her own misadventures.

      Her firmness met Ned’s gentleness; they fell truly in love and he began courting. She was learning drawing at the new Government Schools of Design which were then at Gore House, Kensington, and he could escort her there. He also attended Hinde Street chapel, which he hated, but the Macdonalds went nowhere else on Sundays. It was in this way that he learned that Georgie, like himself, no longer believed in doctrinal Christianity. He took her to the Academy – her second visit – to see April Love, now Morris’s property, Hunt’s Scapegoat, Millais’s Blind Girl; Georgie had also seen the Ophelia, but so far had never been allowed to read Shakespeare, and of course had never been to a theatre.

      In three weeks they were engaged. When Ned ‘spoke’ to Georgie’s father he was asked nothing about his prospects, which could not well have been worse, but was given consent simply on consideration of character. Mr Jones was told, in his turn, by Ned at the side of his mother’s grave, and made a bewildered visit to London. Ned and Georgie agreed on the day of their wedding, however distant: it would be the same as his day of acceptance – 9 June, the anniversary of the death of Beatrice. Georgie felt the excitement and the honour when she was taken to what she calls ‘the shrine of Blackfriars’; on Rossetti, who did not know much about Methodist ministers’ households, she made the impression of a country violet.

      ‘I love you all more than life, and George in some intense way that never can be expressed in words,’ Burne-Jones wrote to ten-year-old Louie, the youngest of the sisters, in the August of 1856. If the Reverend George Macdonald, unworldly in his study, had little idea of what an artist’s life entailed, Burne-Jones himself had not much more. He envisaged himself and Georgie, Morris and Louie, working and learning together in some secluded place, a tower, or a small town with streets leading into the fields, though this, like his dream at the monastery at Charnwood, was a delusion – he needed streets, traffic and company to be at his best. As a practical step, he began to attend night classes in life drawing at Leigh’s¹⁶ in Newman Street; Louie was helped with ‘her’ pen-and-ink subjects, one of which was a Sleeping Princess. When the Memorials tell us that ‘the figure … is the same type that he used in 1890’, Georgie means that in 1856 the unawakened girl was drawn from herself, just as thirty-odd years later it would be drawn from her daughter.

      In August 1856, Street moved his office from Oxford to Bloomsbury, and there was no reason why Morris should not share rooms with Ned. They took furnished lodgings near Street’s new office, in Upper Gordon Street. These, however, were disapproved of; ‘Gabriel thought them too expensive, and he was worried at our not knowing how to help ourselves’,¹⁷ though a reference to Ned shouting for his dinner suggests

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