Edward Burne-Jones - Frances Spalding

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a lonely shack had to be passed where a man had lived who had gone crazy through disappointment in love; the pond where he had drowned himself was still in front of the shack.8 Terror attached to certain names and words – ‘progeny’ was one – and to the sight of the swollen full moon. All these were lonely fears, but less so than his first experience of education, when he was seven years old. His aunt, Mrs Choyce, took him to a small school at Henley-in-Arden during one of his country visits and stayed to talk to the master while Ned went on alone into the classroom, where he met ‘a shout of derision’9 from the boys he when they saw how small he was. Writing fifty years later to Olive Maxse, he described himself as ‘the kind of little boy you kick if you are a bigger boy’.10

      This may have been a good preparation for King Edward’s Free School ‘where I proceeded at the age of 12’. By this time Burne-Jones had developed, in spite of his delicacy, a surprising power of survival. At King Edward’s, magnificent grammar school though it was, ‘the masters sometimes fought the boys’. Ned himself was stabbed in the groin during prayers ‘and I found something warm on my leg and putting my hand there found it was blood’. He had the uneasy distinction of being taken home in a cab, to avoid explanations with the headmaster; it was the first time he had been in a cab and he was sick on the floor.11 Later came the traditional challenge ‘from a very large boy’ to fight him after school. Ned, who was terrified, ‘flew at him like a dog and then it was all over and I was sick as a dog’.12, Instruction was in two large rooms for all classes, and order was kept by beating and by end of term prizes. But in his seven years he received an excellent education and never quite got over his surprise at knowing more Latin, history and geography than William Morris, who went to Marlborough.

      Like many imaginative children, Burne-Jones could only learn from one master, though his temperament, needing an absolute hero, rejected Mr Thompson’s name and the coarse black hair on his hands. ‘I worshipped him when I was little, and we used to look at each other in class. I wonder what he thought when he looked.’ The boy survived furious beatings to absorb what the teacher had to give; his habit was to improvise on a few words read out at random – ‘with the flattest sentence in the world he would take us to ocean waters and the marshes of Babylon … and the constellations and abysses of space’. To this Burne-Jones must have responded completely, since to the end of his career he drew inspiration from the word itself – the image that springs from the name. He noticed, however, as he listened to Mr Thompson’s fantasies in word-derivation, that the master was sometimes drunk.13

      Ned entered King Edward’s in 1844, ten years after the school had been rebuilt to Barry’s hard Gothic designs, which left the outside impressive and the inside dark and draughty. The headmaster was Dr Prince Lee, a magnificent autocrat who taught the boys that every minute of life was accountable, his motto being Salpisei – ‘the trumpet of judgement shall sound’. Ned was put into the ‘commercial’ department, where Greek was not studied, and the boys left at fifteen or sixteen with a sound preparation for business. It was Mr Thompson who advised Mr Jones, when his son was fifteen years old, to let him stay on at school. Instead of going straight to a counting house at eight shillings a week, which meant a positive contribution to the economy of Bennett’s Hill, Ned passed straight into the Classical school, where boys were prepared for university. His friends received the impression, when they called for tea at Bennett’s Hill, that ‘he always used to have nice things about him, to a schoolboy extent’. In point of fact, as Ned told Rooke, his pocket money, until he was eighteen years old, was a penny a week, and his father allowed him to sell his school prizes to buy his class books.14 Even homework was an extravagance because it meant burning a candle till two o’clock in the morning.15 Mr Jones agreed to this, because he supposed it was the right thing.

      In the upper forms of the school Burne-Jones had his first real experience of friendship, that is, of openly giving and receiving affection; he formed his own circle, who were staggered by his practical jokes (these sometimes attracted the attention of the police) and fascinated by his queer mixture of gentleness and underlying fierceness, not so well hidden then as it was later. This was the second quarter of the nineteenth century, the golden age of intense male friendships, whose delicate emotional balance is hard to assess today. Chivalry and uncertain hope entered into them when the boys, in the haven of the school library, made themselves ‘exquisitely miserable’ over Keats on ‘long hot afternoons’ or read Tennyson’s Morte d’Arthur and In Memoriam. Outside, they were adolescents, and Ned was growing too tall for his strength. They were ‘quizzed’ by the girls, and at a loss for a smart reply.

      It was Richard Dixon who first introduced Burne-Jones to Keats; coming from a large poor Methodist household, he later became a canon of Worcester, a poet and the correspondent of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Another intimate was Cormell Price; ‘Crom’ was two years younger than Ned and had known him in the Commercial school. He was to try many things – medicine, Russia, teaching – before becoming headmaster of the United Services school (and consequently of Stalky & Co), without ever adapting significantly to this world. He began and ended as hopelessly enthusiastic and unpractical Crom; others looked after him. Harry Macdonald was the son of another Methodist minister on the Birmingham circuit, whose large family were to be of the greatest importance to Burne-Jones.

      Both Dixon and Cormell Price support Burne-Jones’s recollections of the crude misery of Birmingham. Crom Price remembered seeing men killed at prize fights. ‘At Birmingham school a considerable section of the upper boys were quite awake to the crying evils of the period,’ he told Mackail, William Morris’s biographer. ‘… I remember one Saturday night walking five miles into the Black Country, and in the last three miles I counted more than thirty lying dead drunk on the ground, more than half of them women.’ As small boys it had shocked them and made them run faster for the safety of the lighted shop fronts. Now it was a matter of humanitarian conscience. How could the world be served?

      From concern with human suffering and the uneasy craving for beauty there was only a short step, for an adolescent thinking young Evangelical, to the edge of the Apostolic movement. (The precise shade of Mr Jones’s Evangelicalism can be judged by the fact that Ned was not allowed to read novels until he was in the First Class, but did occasionally go to the theatre.) In 1849, the same year that Ned entered the Classical school, Newman was sent to Birmingham and arrived in a fly full of luggage and plaster Madonnas to open the Oratory in an old gin distillery in Alcester Street. His first sermon, preached to hundreds of operatives and dirt-poor Irish, with a sublime inappropriateness that could only come from great spiritual depths, was on ‘how to escape the false worship of the world’. There was of course no question of Mr Jones and his son attending mass. But ‘the effect of Newman, even on those who never saw him’, Burne-Jones told Frances Graham, was a ‘leading – walking with me a step in front’. The adventure of the Oratory impressed him as a glorious gamble ‘putting all this world’s life in one splendid venture … in an age of sofas and cushions he taught me to be indifferent to comfort, and in an age of materialism he taught me to venture all on the unseen.’ In this way Newman at long distance touched the unborn firm of Morris & Co., and through wallpaper and rushback chairs would continue to preach that there are greater things in this world than comfort.

      Newman was in no way a mediaevalist and did not recognise the ‘note’ of sanctity in the mediaeval church, but those who saw and heard him from a distance did not always make this distinction. The Oratory entered into the classroom mythology of the King Edward’s boys, and Ned became ‘Edouard, Cardinal de Birmingham’, sending missives illuminated in red and blue, while Crom Price was a less distinguished member of the ‘Order of St Philip Neri’ (Newman’s own order). When the ‘cardinal’ was invited during his holidays to Hereford by a brother of Mr Caswell’s, a further transformation took place: at the cathedral he heard church music well sung for the first time, and saw in the building itself something he had never guessed from the brand new Gothic of King Edward’s. He was in direct contact with beauty, the acute physical and emotional effect of ‘old music’ combining with the remoteness of the lamp-lit chancel. It was his own ‘note’. At the same time he passed easily under the influence of a young, serious, singing and choir-mastering Puseyite clergyman, John Goss, who had been at Oxford in the heroic days of

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