Edward Burne-Jones - Frances Spalding

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painter, and even Dixon, on a visit from Oxford, was persuaded to try – so was Philip Webb, the head clerk from Street’s and Morris’s staunch companion; Webb, however, made too many exact measurements to get started at all.18 Morris, after a heroic struggle to carry on at Street’s and do six hours’ drawing a day at art school, threw in his hand and took up almost the only craft which he could never master – painting. For this, old Mrs Morris blamed Burne-Jones, her son’s quiet friend whom she had liked so much, and who had even listened to stories of William’s nursery days until firmly stopped by Morris himself; she divined, with maternal shrewdness, the real balance of will-power between them.

      Mrs Morris may well have been right. If Morris had remained in the profession of putting solid buildings on the earth and designing large spaces, like the barns and cathedrals he loved, for extended family groups, he might not have been driven through life by ‘these outstretched feverish hands, this restless heart’.

      The relationship between Rossetti and Morris had in it, from the very beginning, a hint of uneasiness. Morris tried to submit totally, but couldn’t; he had no more talent for humble discipleship than for painting. Burne-Jones recalled that ‘it was funny to see them together … [Rossetti]’d say to Morris as he came in of a morning, what do you think about that? and Morris would say well, old chap, mightn’t it be put up a bit?’19 Again, Morris was well off and a buyer (he had bought the Fra Pace), and Rossetti could never feel cordially towards patrons. Worse still, the robust and fattening Morris seemed never to be ill, scarcely even ‘seedy’.

      The move to Red Lion Square was made at the end of November 1856. Although the front window had been cut to give a higher light, the rooms were shabby, dark and unfurnished and had apparently not been cleaned for the last five years, since Rossetti, supervising, was still able to recognise an address which poor Deverell had scribbled on the wall. They were also remarkable for their dampness. ‘When Deverell got ill and retired to the back room, the doctor came out and patted Rossetti’s head and said “poor boys! poor boys!”’20 The move was exhausting, the first ‘respectable housekeeper’ Morris engaged was intoxicated. She was replaced by the ‘unfailing good temper’ of Red Lion Mary, who soon gave up the battle for cleanliness. She, however, was prepared to sew draperies and read bits from Reynolds’ Newspaper to Ned as he painted, and could equally well provide ‘victuals and squalor at all hours’ (his own phrase) or a suitable lunch for Louie Macdonald, who made them wait for it while she pronounced a blessing. It is surprising to find, even among helpless Victorian lodgers, that Mary had to wind up their watches and musical boxes and issued them with clean nightgowns only when she felt like it, but not surprising that Ned was favoured in this and in every other way. Although Morris paid the greater share of the rent, he took the smallest room without hesitation: Ned was delicate, and needed good air. In spite of this, Burne-Jones was the wild centre of evening parties, an energetic theatre-goer, and a superb teller of ghost stories in the dimly-lit studio.

      The emptiness of the rooms led to some of Morris’s first experiments in design, and the ordering of hugely mediaeval furniture in solid wood. Burne-Jones’s first illustration of Chaucer, and first attempt at applied art, was on the wardrobe, designed by Webb, which he decorated towards the end of their tenancy with scenes from the Prioress’s Tale. Earnest and touching as the design is, it conceals a typical Burne-Jones allusion to Chaucer’s unfortunate little St Hugh – ‘I saye that in a wardrobe they him threwe’, that is, in a privy. In the end the wardrobe, which is now in the Victoria and Albert, became Ned’s wedding present to Morris, who took it with him wherever he moved.

      The two friends had begun to live out Hand and Soul, realising both sides of Rossetti’s metaphor, as interpreters of the dream and as mediaeval handicraftsmen. The measurements of the furniture were wrong, and Burne-Jones did not know how to lay the ground for his colours, but they persevered in the spirit of Ruskin’s ‘stern habit of doing the thing with my own hands till I know all its difficulties’. Here Rossetti could not teach them, although he goodnaturedly tried his hand at painting the chairs.

      Rossetti, however, began to carry them tempestuously about with him wherever he went. Burne-Jones’s life was one of expanding circles of friendship; the first had been the Brotherhood; now he entered the second. He was introduced, first of all, to the survivors of the P.R.B. and its followers: Arthur Hughes again, Millais, with whose highly-strung emotional nature Ned felt immediately in tune, James Smetham, Madox Brown, Holman Hunt, F.G. Stephens, by now resigned (‘Stephens is Stephens still’ as Rossetti described him) to a life as a dullish journalist and faithful friend and correspondent to the rest. Burne-Jones learned from Stephens to smoke clay pipes, and in 1890 was still writing to him: ‘Get well and strong, dear fellow, and we’ll smoke long clays when we are eighty.’21 All these older friends took more or less kindly to the strange spirit of gaiety which had swept over Gabriel on the acquisition of these new disciples. ‘Calling one day on Gabriel at his rooms in Blackfriars,’ Hunt wrote, ‘I saw, sitting at a second easel, an ingenuous and particularly gentle young man whose modest bearing and enthusiasm at once charmed. He was introduced to me as “Jones”, and was called “Ned”.’ Towards Hunt, who had just returned from the Middle East, Rossetti’s conscience was not quite clear, and it was on this occasion that Ned saw him passing his paintbrush again and again, conciliatingly, through Hunt’s golden beard. Hunt, however, marked this Jones as a young man – at last – who might be taught something, to draw properly, not to use vermilion, to go to Field’s, the only place, in Hunt’s opinion, for colours. James Smetham has left a similar impression in his little pen-and-wash drawing of Burne-Jones watching nervously while two visitors ‘overlook’ his work on the easel.

      Another call, which seemed very far west in a hansom cab, was to Little Holland House, the home of the Prinseps and the studio of G.F. Watts. Here Rossetti introduced him as ‘the genius of the age’, and Mrs Prinsep, pitying his embarrassment, also marked him down as someone in need of protection. Val Princep, the painter son of the house, was under the spell of Gabriel, and recalled that at this time the ‘main requirements’, apart from trying to catch Rossetti’s intonation, ‘were to read Sidonia and Browning’. This of course Ned had done, and now he had the further honour of being taken to Devonshire Place to meet the Brownings.

      Also present that evening was Charles Eliot Norton, the American scholar and man of letters. ‘Twelve years ago I met one evening at Brownings’ … two young fellows lately from Oxford named Morris and Jones. Jones very shy and quiet, and seemed half overpowered by the warmth of eulogy which Browning bestowed on a drawing that Jones had brought to show him – a drawing … of infinite detail, quaint, but full of real feeling and real fancy.’ This was probably the Waxen Image; to show it was an ordeal, and Elizabeth Browning, Norton tells us, tried in vain to put Ned at his ease.

      Norton was also a dear friend of Ruskin, whom he had met in this same year, 1856, on a tour of Switzerland, when he had ventured to introduce his sisters on board a lake steamer. If this suggests an early story by Henry James it is not surprising, since Norton was also to be James’s mentor in matters of art. Wherever Norton enters the course of events, there is a breath of Bostonian high-mindedness, goodness and tedium.

      Ruskin was a different matter, and by the winter of 1856 he was calling at Red Lion Square every Thursday, or even more often, ‘better than his books, which are the best books in the world’. Ruskin, carrying away drawings, fussing and advising, was extending his patronage and his need, half shrinking and half effusive, to love and be loved. Here Burne-Jones came out to meet him, and the sympathy between them was something that would outlast disagreements, and even the darkness of insanity. Burne-Jones understood not only the greatness of Ruskin but his strange reversions to infancy, the compensation for a lonely childhood. Whereas Madox Brown was critical when Ruskin was ‘rompish’ and helped himself too frequently to cake, and Rossetti saw him ‘in person [as] an absolute guy’, Burne-Jones was never surprised to find him at the circus, at the Christie minstrels, or dancing a Scottish reel; his unaffected admiration made nothing of Ruskin’s oddities, though the balance of relationships was delicate. ‘He was a most difficult child.’ But this mattered nothing in comparison with the warm of meeting another ‘scorner of the world’. This was Ruskin’s message as well as Newman’s. It is to the

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