ТОП просматриваемых книг сайта:
Edward Burne-Jones. Frances Spalding
Читать онлайн.Название Edward Burne-Jones
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780007588237
Автор произведения Frances Spalding
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство HarperCollins
‘I have worked very hard at art for two years and find it difficult to live’, Ned had written to Miss Sampson, who complained from Birmingham that her old age was not being provided for. This was true enough, and yet life without Georgie was unbearable. In the end the situation was resolved by the kindly intervention of Madox Brown, who gave the young couple a chance to see more of each other by inviting Georgie for a month’s visit to their home in Fortress Terrace, Kentish Town. For the past few years Brown had been through all kinds of difficulty – even his wife’s shawl had had to go into pawn – and yet in 1860 Georgie was not ever made aware of the strain an extra guest would put on the household. The young lovers could meet discreetly at musical evenings, or at dinners where only good friends sat round the table laid with the large cheap willow-pattern plates which the Pre-Raphaelites favoured, as the only honest pattern available.
Ned hesitated, a pilgrim at the gates of love. He had about £30 ready money in the world, and to this Georgie could add only a small table and the wood-engraving tools which she had been given for her course at South Kensington. There was some plain deal furniture at Russell Place. Mr Plint suddenly sent £25 ‘which you may need just now’ nearly doubling Ned’s capital; but he now owed a good deal of work to Mr Plint.
In the Academy of 1859 Hughes had exhibited his Long Engagement under its original title from Troilus and Criseyde.
For how might ever sweetness have been known
To hym that never tasted bitterness?
The four years’ wait had been bitterness enough for Georgie and Ned, and they reached a decision which was quite unworldly. Georgie went home to make her preparations – not very elaborate ones, as she seems to have taken an old pair of boots on her honeymoon – and Ned passed what the Memorials call an ‘unsettled week’, not in putting his lodgings in a fit state, but in painting ‘kind and cruel ladies’ on a deal sideboard. They were married in the church which is now Manchester Cathedral and, as they had promised, on 9 June 1860 – the anniversary of the death of Beatrice.
Dante, and Rossetti himself, were indeed very much in their minds. On 23 May – the day of Dante’s birth – Gabriel had married Elizabeth Siddal. The young Joneses were to join them in Paris; Georgie had never been abroad before. They started south from Manchester to Dover, stopping for the first night at Chester. But here nervous worry caused Ned to fall ill, and Georgie started her married life as a sick nurse in a strange hotel bedroom. Her spirits were strong enough for this: Lord Baldwin tells us that they only wavered when her coral necklace broke and she had to go down on hands and knees to look for the rolling beads.
From Paris, Rossetti sent her an encouraging letter: ‘Dear Georgie (do let me please, or else Ned shall punch my head as soon as he is well) …’7 Although he marvels that Ned and Georgie could ‘get up life to notice anything’ in such a dull place as Chester, he finds Paris equally dull, and the French are absurd, translating ‘potage à la Reine’ as ‘soup to the Queen’. They are ‘quite sick of it here’, Lizzie is not well enough to see the sights and they will soon be back in England. Long before they had expected, therefore, Ned and Georgie started their new life in London.
EXPANSION: THE FIRM, RUSKIN AND ITALY
Only two people very much in love could have looked with confidence at the Russell Place rooms. They had not even been tidied since Ned left, the water-supply was poor – Poynter, who lived there afterwards, had to save water by washing up in a slop-basin – and there were no chairs. The only reliable article of furniture was a solid oak table made at the Boys’ Home in Euston Road,1 which is still in family use. But Mrs Catherwood did not forget their love of music, and sent a small plain walnut piano. Burne-Jones set to work to decorate this.
His idea was to make the decoration answer to the music itself. What he liked best were stringed instruments (‘the rumble of the ’cello comforts my belly,’ he said),2 accompanied voices, and as soon as he had a chance to hear it, ‘old Italian music’ – Carissimi and Stradella. His reaction, he said, was ‘entirely emotional’. The little piano shows Death on the left-hand side, corresponding to the two bass octaves; his face is hidden by a veil. On the right there are seven seated girls, in olive, brown and white, listening to a stringed instrument for the extreme treble. Whereas Death is crowned and veiled, the girls are simplified into rounded shapes, but the two parts are connected by the feeling that Death also is listening to the music; at some point the girls will realise that he is only a step away. Determined that Georgie’s piano should not fade like the Union murals, Ned used lacquer and deepened the colour with a red-hot poker. In the event, the colour lasted longer than the works of the piano. The decoration does not ‘represent’ music but is an exact equivalent of the piano’s music, just as Browning’s Galuppi is the equivalent of the toccata which made him ‘feel chilly … I grow old’.
Georgie’s singing was not at all ambitious. She set Rossetti’s Song of the Bower to a waltz, and Keats’s In a drear-nighted December to Beethoven’s piano sonata Op. 10, No. 2, and, if the company felt like it, she would sit at the little piano until two or three in the morning, lending a charming air of spirited respectability to their bohemian evenings.
Possibly the red-hot poker was suggested by a new friend, William de Morgan, who, although he did not start experimenting in pottery glazes till the 1870s, was always a great deviser of dodges. De Morgan at this time was only just out of the Academy schools, and it was he and Burne-Jones between them who were accused by the outspoken little maid of losing the key of the beer barrel; amazing that there should be a little maid at all, when Mrs Beeton, in 1861, gives £150 p.a. as the correct income for employing a maid-of-all-work (and a girl occasionally). Another view of Russell Place is given by the young George du Maurier, recently arrived from Paris, and introduced by Val Prinsep: his visit made his dream of ‘five o’clock tea with stunning fellows chatting with Emma [his fiancée]’, and a piano ‘rendered of untold value by my important paintings’. Georgie, who felt that it was ‘well to be amongst those who painted pictures and wrote poetry’, was glad to welcome two poets among her callers, even though, until some rush-bottomed chairs arrived, she had to receive them sitting on the table; the poets were Allingham and Swinburne. William Allingham, the author of the Day and Night Songs where Ned had seen Rossetti’s illustrations to the Maids of Elfenmere, now wrote his fairy poems from the safe employment of a customs officer in Lymington. He was serious and sensitive, ‘talking of Christianity, Dante, Tennyson and Browning’. Later in life he became finical and difficult, was obsessed with germs, refused to touch door-handles, and had to be forcibly got up and dressed, though his Anglo-Irish charm never faded. But whereas Allingham, in 1860, was a presentable mid-Victorian version of a poet, Swinburne had to be accepted by his hosts as a kind of fiery freak or phenomenon, who at the end of the evening would be extinguished by drink and had to be sent home, labelled, in a cab, or, as Rossetti put it, ‘describing geometrical curves on the pavement’. He was still only twenty years old. In such a creature a capacity for affection is an added danger, and Swinburne’s friends could be divided into those who were and were not good for him. He was sympathetic to young married couples, nesting peacefully in their happiness. He amused both Janey Morris and Lizzie Siddal: the Memorials record that when in this same year, 1860, they went to the theatre ‘in our thousands’ it was Lizzie who declared that the boy selling playbooks was frightened at seeing her own red hair at one end of the row and Swinburne’s at the other: ‘good Lord, there’s another of ‘em!’ This is one of Lizzie’s few recorded remarks, and one can feel in the story Georgie’s affection for them both, heightened by her excitement at going to a theatre at all.
The description given in the Memorials is startlingly vivid, and conveys the shock of pure beauty which Georgie felt when