Edward Burne-Jones - Frances Spalding

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If he could not give half his money to Burne-Jones, then he was ready to give all of it – catching readily on to this idea – to found a monastic community. In discussing this they must have discovered, what perhaps they might have taken for granted, that both were mediaevalists. But here Ned’s ideas were still hazy, a region where Keats and Tennyson, the Oratory, Hereford Cathedral and the Fairy of the Golden Branch all met, whereas Morris, who had been given a suit of armour at the age of seven and ignored his lessons at Marlborough in favour of books of mediaeval architecture, was already an expert on details. He ‘seemed to have been born knowing them’, Ned thought. Morris already distinguished between two imaginary worlds of the Middle Ages: one clear, hard, active, brightly coloured, highly sexed and plainly furnished, the other a limitless wandering which always led, in the end, to the warring sides of Morris’s temperament, and the difficulty of reconciling them was to cause him both emotional suffering and political inconsistency. The community, if it could be managed when Morris came into £900 per annum the following year, would belong to the second dream.

      Meanwhile they poured out their disillusionment to each other on ‘angry walks’. Although Pusey was still at Christ Church, he was now fifty-three and had grown stout; the university, Matthew Arnold wrote in 1854, ‘in losing Newman and his followers had lost its religious movement, which after all kept the place from stagnating’. As a matter of fact, if they could have waited in patience, Morris and Burne-Jones would have seen the beginnings of change in Oxford: the Royal Commission of 1850 had suggested some, Jowett was already at Balliol, and the new University Museum was soon to arise, ‘complete in every detail down to panels and footboards, gas burners and door-handles’ under the eye of Ruskin. It seems, however, that much of their disappointment arose from their choice of college. According to Mackail, the ‘coarseness of manners and morals’ at Exeter was ‘distressing in the highest degree’ to Morris. Burne-Jones, curiously enough, perhaps because he was used to Saturday nights in Birmingham, seems to have minded it less. ‘One night a man threw a heavy cut-glass decanter of port at someone sitting next to me’, he told Rooke, ‘and it went between us both and smashed to pieces on the wall behind, so that we were both drenched in port, shirts and faces and all over our clothes, as though we were covered in blood.’2 What impressed Burne-Jones was that the man responsible, who had to be dragged forcibly out of Hall, later became ‘a high dignitary of the church’. Those who did not throw decanters were in a minority. William Redmond, the painter, visited his elder brother at Exeter in 1854: ‘my brother did not belong to the aesthetic set … and among them two of them were pointed out to me as special oddities … These were William Morris and Edward Jones.’

      The city, however, was beautiful, still surrounded by its pastoral meadows, as Ned described it, except on the railway side, and ‘there were still many old wooden houses with wood carving and a little sculpture here and there. The chapel of Merton College had been lately renovated by Butterfield, and Pollen, as a former Fellow of Merton, had painted the roof of it. Many an afternoon we spent in that chapel. Indeed I think the buildings of Merton and the cloisters of New College were our chief shrines in Oxford.’ A Miss Smythe had been taken as a model for the angel faces on the Merton chapel roof, a reminder that the ideal of celibacy was the most vulnerable part of the scheme of monastic life. Ned very soon found Oxford a place of unspecified ‘heart-aches’, and Morris’s incoherent story, Frank’s Sealed Letter (1856), which, Mackail tells us, has ‘many details directly taken from his own life’, indicates that ‘wild restless passions’ were giving him the reputation of ‘a weak man’. These were troubles which ran side by side with the lack of spirituality in the university.

      If Exeter was uncongenial, however, there was plenty of company in Pembroke, where the King Edward’s boys were installing themselves as a ‘set’. Dixon had gone up a term earlier, and had been joined by two others. Charlie Faulkner (included although he had been educated privately) was a delightful straightforward person, admired by the others because he was their only mathematician. William Fulford, who was older than the rest, was noted as a talker, such a compulsive one that only Morris could stop him, and then virtually by force. In one of their rooms, usually Faulkner’s, and drinking nothing stronger than tea, they sat down to put the world to rights. It is possible that they remained exclusive not altogether from choice. Lady Mander has shown in her Portrait of Rossetti that Faulkner, even much later as a Fellow, was laughed at by the young bloods for his ‘Birmingham boots’. Morris, certainly, was content to accept the ‘set’ as it was, and Dixon remembered how Ned told him ‘in an earnest and excited manner’ how strongly he felt the expansion of his emotion through friendship in this first year. Nevertheless, his hero was no longer the dapper Fulford but ‘Top’ – his own name for Morris – taken, presumably, from the just-published Uncle Tom’s Cabin. ‘Come and see him,’ he wrote to Crom Price, ‘not in the smoke-room or in disputations (the smoke-rooms of the intellect) but by the riverside and the highways, as I alone have seen and heard him’. Much-loved Crom was always a person to be written to and a keeper of letters, so that many of these details come from him. A year later, having won a scholarship to Pembroke, he did come up to ‘see and hear’ Morris, and the set was complete.

      In October Ned and Morris were able to get rooms in college, and Ned was awarded an exhibition, though this does not seem to have been paid regularly.3 In the intervals of brass-rubbing, listening to Pusey’s sermons on justification, and exercising at Maclaren’s gym in Oriel Lane, where Ned, who had a very strong wrist, proved unexpectedly good at foils, Morris began a lifelong habit of reading aloud to his friend.

      This habit was already well established among the set. They took turns to read Shakespeare in each other’s rooms, and Burne-Jones remembered ‘a poor fellow dying at college while I was at Oxford – his friends took it by turns to read Pickwick to him – he died in the middle of the description of Mr Bob Sawyer’s supper party … and we all thought he had made a good end’.4 Morris and Ned together, however, absorbed books as an immediate physical experience. Books were as important to their future careers as painting itself, life for them, and to Burne-Jones in particular, as has been said, the word and the image were inextricably bound up. Books, also, were a form of friendship between them, speaking through the shyness which both of them had to overcome.

      Some of those they read were apparently their set texts of Church history and theology, but they were also collecting their own sacred books. Keats reappeared, with Tennyson’s Morte d’Arthur; the Arthurian legends were still so little known that they formed a kind of secret bond. In fact, Tennyson’s original introduction to the Idylls had been an apology for using such a queer old story which most men would burn as ‘trash’, but it had set light to a fire of its own, and Crom was told to learn Galahad by heart. The monastic brotherhood – still much under discussion – would be the Order of Galahad. They also read Morris’s favourite, the Arabian Nights in the Lane illustrated edition, Carlyle’s Past and Present, and the second volume of The Stones of Venice, in which Ruskin relates a nation’s art to its moral values. The three books which mattered most to them, however, are less familiar today. They were Kenelm Digby’s The Broadstone of Honour, de la Motte Fouqué’s Sintram and His Companions and the Heir of Redclyffe, by Charlotte M. Yonge.

      The Broadstone of Honour, or the True Sense and Practice of Chivalry was the book which Burne-Jones kept by his bedside for the whole of his life, even after he had come to feel, or at least to say, that it was childish. It is by the antiquarian Catholic Revivalist, Kenelm Digby, who tells us that he conceived the idea when he was travelling with a band of like-minded friends, collecting ‘whatever legends were credible and suitable to the present age’. It is hard to think what Digby could have meant by ‘credible’ here. The castle of Ehrenbreitstein gives the title because the fortress on the rock seems ‘lofty and free from the infection of a base world’. The Arthurian knights are not ‘enchantments which exist but in a dream of fancy … These images are the only objects substantial and unchangeable.’ Here Platonism and Victorian mediaevalism meet.

      The Broadstone is elaborately but not intelligibly planned – indeed, it could hardly be so, since the crowded pages were to correspond to ‘the symbolical wanderings of the ancient knights’, during which, Digby says, the Catholic faith

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