Читать книгу Edward Burne-Jones - Frances Spalding - Страница 12

In saying that he had never even seen a painter Burne-Jones was less than grateful for the glimpses of Alfred Hunt in the print shop and for the efforts of his aunt, who had introduced him, as a schoolboy, to her brother-in-law Frederick Catherwood.¹ But this, which had seemed important at the time, was of no account now, although as usual he made straight for his aunt’s house in Camberwell. This was 10 Addison Place, a quiet narrowly plain brick house near St Giles’s church, due, at the time of writing, to be pulled down.

Ned was encouraged in his undertaking by a kind letter from Ruskin, acknowledging a copy of the January issue of the Magazine, which he had ventured to send him. A letter from Ruskin seemed to bring him to the approaches of the world he must enter. He set out on foot from Camberwell to Great Ormond Street. He had been told that Rossetti taught in the Working Men’s College there.

The Working Men’s College was a new venture – it was established in its final form in 1854, when it incorporated the earlier People’s College and took over their hall under the workshops of the Tailors’ Association. It represented the highest ideals of its founder, F. Denison Maurice, whose aim was not to improve the skill of craftsmen – that was the job of the Government schools at South Kensington – but to give working people the same education as the better-off, in an institution which they could run themselves.

‘We are meeting you all as men’, he wrote, ‘to enable you to work together as men.’² But by a sad and familiar process, the majority of the students were not the workers whom Maurice wanted to reach, but mainly ‘clericals’, followed by a high proportion of jewellers and cabinet-makers. Furthermore, the admission of women soon led to social functions, teas for the poor and, as the older members complained, ‘overmuch dressing’.

Admission was one shilling, four shillings for the term, and the instructors gave their services free. Ruskin, of course, had been the inspiration of the place, taught there and wrote his Elements of Drawing for them; at this point Rossetti, at his own request, was helping him with his Thursday night drawing class. This seems to have been open to the public, but Burne-Jones went instead to the monthly council meeting, also public, in Great Titchfield Street at which, he was told Rossetti might appear.

The atmosphere on all occasions seems to have been much like a school, with elected monitors ‘to stop people loitering round the fire’ and a small charge for tea. Ned sat at a table, he told Mackail, and had thick bread and butter, ‘knowing no one’. He had no idea of speaking to Rossetti: he simply wanted to look at him. But the atmosphere was one of comradeship, and the pale, thin, ingenuous appearance of Burne-Jones aroused, as it usually did, a desire to help. A stranger spoke to him across the table, and another one, Vernon Lushington, offered to tell him when Rossetti entered the room. Lushington was a most interesting person, who had been three years at sea as a midshipman before coming up to Cambridge, and was now just starting his career as a lawyer and philanthropist. As a matter of fact, Ned probably knew him already – he had contributed to the magazine – but he was certainly thankful to see him at that moment.

After an hour of speeches, Rossetti did come, ‘and so I saw him for the first time, his face satisfying all my worship, and I listened to addresses no more, but had my fill of looking, only I would not be introduced to him’. The introduction came a few nights later in Vernon Lushington’s rooms, where Rossetti (with his brother William Michael quietly in the background) was apparently established as hero and tyrant: someone criticised Browning’s Men and Women and was ‘rent to pieces’. Ned was presented, and with rapid generosity Rossetti told him to come to his studio the next day. This was at Chatham Place, at the north-west corner of Blackfriars Bridge, where Rossetti, ignoring the strong river smells, looked out on three sides at the moving lights and small craft of the Thames. The rooms were full of piles of drawings and books; something about Ned’s face made Rossetti want to exaggerate, and he told him that books were only of use to prop things up. This was a great deal for the follower of King Arthur, Clive Newcome and the Broadstone to swallow. The picture on the easel (later the Fra Pace), was a watercolour of a monk drawing a mouse in the margin of an illuminated manuscript. Ned felt that he had been ‘received very courteously’, and since no one came he stayed ‘long hours’ watching Rossetti at work, not guessing that he particularly hated this. Mrs Virginia Surtees, in her Catalogue Raisonné of Rossetti, mentions a tradition that Burne-Jones was allowed to put in the mouse, but it can hardly have been on this occasion. In the small hours he walked back again from Blackfriars to Camberwell.

The courteous reception of ‘a certain youthful Jones … the nicest young fellow in – dreamland’, as he described him to Allingham, was due to real gratification on Rossetti’s part. The Pre-Raphaelites had fallen apart, he had for the time being almost given up his struggle to paint in oils, was defeated by his attempt at a contemporary subject in Found; if he had turned to ‘Froissartian’ subjects this was very probably because he had read some of Morris’s early poems in the magazine and felt a new source of inspiration. ‘He asked much about Morris … and seemed much interested in him.’ Although he was not without patrons, and was still encouraged by Ruskin, he was often in a state of ‘tinlessness’, borrowing small sums from his family. He was no longer the leader he had been to Hunt and Millais, and his fine illustrations to the Moxon Tennyson were still in the future. In his emotional life he was feeling the combination of anguish and convenience in the mid-Victorian double standard. The conveniences were Fanny Cornforth and Annie Miller, the young barmaid from the Cross Keys who was supposedly the property of Holman Hunt; the anguish was Elizabeth Siddal, who had been sent abroad on doctor’s advice during the winter of 1855–6 and whose ‘arm chair that suits her size’ stood in the corner of the studio.

The image of Lizzie Siddal recalls Rossetti’s preoccupation with illness – illness and its remedies, even the most unlikely – and the fact that he could only really warm to those who were unsuccessful, ‘seedy’ or even ‘dreadfully ill’. The death of his friend Walter Deverell in 1854 after months of poverty and sickness had shocked him deeply, and certainly the delicate appearance of Burne-Jones would only recommend him to Rossetti; it was almost as though he had been sent in Deverell’s place. It may be said then that in the January of 1856 Rossetti’s generosity, morbidity and princely powers of encouragement were waiting to expand, and that this was a meeting fortunate on both sides.

Ned became acutely restless; he wrote a long account to Morris at Walthamstow, rushed up to Oxford for a noisy meeting with the Brotherhood and the long-suffering Maclaren, on to Birmingham and, probably at his father’s suggestion, back again to Exeter for the Easter Term. The effect of his wild exaltation upon Morris, returned to his room in St Giles’s and his articles with Street, was unsettling. Their friendship was not enough to hold Ned to Oxford, and at the beginning of May he was back in London for the Academy. Morris, who joined him there for the day, was struck by Arthur Hughes’s April Love, and commissioned Ned to buy it; Ned went round to Hughes’s lodgings in Pimlico, and more than thirty years later he could recall his expression when he came in with the cheque.

Burne-Jones never returned to Oxford as a student again, neither did he intend to go on living in Camberwell. Aunt Catherwood found him changed. Both Morris and he had let their hair grow, and wore soft hats. But in any case, it was not possible to launch out into a new life from the Camberwell house where, as the Memorials put it, ‘to write a letter on Sunday was a marked thing, [and] to sit on one chair rather than another was to arouse the anxiety of its owner’. Much though Ned loved his aunt, Camberwell was, as he put it later, ‘a seemingly needless neighbourhood’.

His intention was to live with William Fulford, who was said to ‘have grown very serious’, and had moved to London on the £100 per annum which Morris was now giving him to edit the magazine. Ned, on the other hand, had at the moment no income at all, and together they quartered the cheaper streets. One of these – in 1856 – was Sloane Street, then a cobbled road bespattered with dung and deafening with the noise of horse traffic. They took lodgings with one of the less frightening landladies at 13 Sloane Terrace. Fulford, however, had to return to Oxford for a few weeks, and Burne-Jones, who had never lived by himself before, concentrated the whole force of his nature on his worship of Rossetti.

Of this, one of the happiest years of his life, Burne-Jones’s first memories were of weeks of light-headedness, largely the result of hunger. On leaving Exeter he was, he told Rooke, almost penniless. ‘When I came away in the fourth year [sic] there was a lot of money (about £20) owing to me but I never claimed it. Neither did I ask my father for any, for I was much too proud; I had barely half-a-crown about me.’² A good digestion, for despite every other kind of weakness Ned usually had that, enabled him to survive something close to starvation alternating with princely blowouts at Rossetti’s favourite restaurants: the Bell Savage Inn, the Gun Tavern, and ‘the little à la mode beef shop off Sloane Square’. He could not accept too much hospitality from the Macdonalds, who were now living in Walpole Street, their father having been appointed to the London circuit; he could not apply to Mr Jones, who was still struggling on with Miss Sampson, waiting for the grand historical painting. Unlike Rossetti, he had nothing to pawn. Finally,

I was very hard up and much in want of the smallest sums of money – so I asked a lady who had been a friend of my mother’s – almost the only one I knew who had been intimate with her, and asked her to lend me two pounds – but she didn’t send me anything, only wrote back to say that she hoped my present straits to [sic] teach me in future. So I got nothing by that but humiliation, and you may guess whether I was furious or not, and I made up my mind that nothing should ever induce me to ask anyone for money again.’³

It had not occurred to him that an appeal to his dead mother’s name would fail; and though Burne-Jones’s finances are a complicated study, he never did borrow money from an individual again.

The necessary things were not eating and sleeping, but being with Rossetti and learning to paint. When he had the boat fare, he went from Chelsea to Blackfriars by river; otherwise he walked, but he was not allowed to go to Chatham Place every day. He was permitted to watch Rossetti make the initial drawing in pencil and go over it in violet carmine, and then to come back again three or four days later, but never to see ‘the hard stage’.⁴ This ‘overlooking’, with the glorious encouragement of Rossetti, who believed at this time that English poetry had come to an end with Keats but English painting was only just beginning, was all the apprenticeship Burne-Jones had until he attended evening classes in the following year. Everything else had to come by the way as he worked.

To recommend himself further to his master, who was in reality only six years older than himself but seemed so much more, Burne-Jones tried to turn himself into a Londoner. It was a kind of saturation process, to produce what Henry James called a ‘cockney convaincu’. First Rossetti’s language must be imitated; a good deal of it Ned knew already – ‘stunner’ was current in Oxford in 1850, so were ‘ripper’, ‘spiffy’, ‘cheesy’, ‘jammy’, ‘spoony’, ‘nobble’, ‘stock-dolloger’ (for a knock-down blow), ‘ticker’ (for watch), ‘crib’ (for lodgings), and ‘tin’ (for money) but ‘tinlessness’, and perhaps ‘bogeys’ for the spirits of the departed, were additions by Rossetti; so was the richly resonant, not quite English intonation which carried with ease ‘through rolling drums’. Then the ‘great Italian’ would walk the streets half the night, trailing his umbrella under stars and gaslight, and leaving Ned ill with tiredness: ‘it became too much for me, it would have killed me.’⁵ Nevertheless, when he was not allowed to accompany Rossetti he would tramp round himself, as though the nightmare of The Cousins had come true, past the terrible nightly parade of prostitutes and child prostitutes in the Haymarket, the pawnbrokers who would accept anything – even babies’ coffins if the babies could be got out of them – and the doorways which were the last refuge of the homeless. ‘What walks I have had in London streets,’ he wrote to Mrs Gaskell, ‘haunted walks – wretched ones.’⁶ He grew to like barrel-organs, because they were the music of the streets. Not to be touched by it was a proof of hard-heartedness. Of London brutality he kept a curious memory. When the Guards were brought back from the Crimea in 1856 and passed by, almost every man mutilated or bandaged, he saw the crowd laugh at them.⁷ Probably at this time he had a hallucination which recurred at intervals throughout his life: a man with a black bag would come up to him in the street, whistle in his ear, say ‘God bless you’ and quietly move away.⁸

With amazement Ned tried to adapt himself to Rossetti’s careless and lordly domestic arrangements. He was not introduced to Lizzie Siddal, although she had returned to London in May 1856 and was living in her own rooms in Weymouth Street. Except for the landlady’s occasional ‘wench’, there seemed to be no one in attendance. The studio itself, where the artist presided in a long flannel gown over a plum-coloured frock coat, had none of his ‘discrimination for all that was splendid’. The whole place was full of junk. There were musical instruments that could not be played, broken furniture, and the despised books; on one occasion Rossetti threw out of the window all the books that ‘obstructed life’, but the river returned them in a stinking heap. Bills were not regarded as they were in Birmingham. Accounts were not paid, colourmen and wine merchants protested, a Jewish pawnbroker arrived and swept away most of Rossetti’s trousers for only £3, leaving him ‘rather shabby’. With this went a natural prodigality. ‘What he did he did in a moment of time, design was as easy as drinking wine … I used to say to him, why do you paint in colour that you know is not permanent? But he wouldn’t listen to me or entertain the point for a moment.’⁹ In the studio Ned saw drawings scratched out, thrown away, stuffed in drawers which, if he had dared to open them, would have shown him dozens of beautiful pencil and pen and ink studies of Lizzie. Watercolour was not used as it was by David Cox or in the ‘Views’ in Mr Jones’s back shop, but mixed with gum, hatched and stippled and applied with a dry brush, or scraped away to make the white lights. A set which had been given to Burne-Jones were produced, Malcolm Bell tells us, when Rossetti called, ‘in all their wrappings and protections. Without a word Rossetti took them and to their owner’s horror and dismay, tore the whole set in two and went away.’ This was intended as a sign that Ned, who was timidly painting on a background study, had progressed far enough not to need them. Still more amazing was Rossetti’s scorn of patrons, and the violence of his opinions. He advised his pupil to turn over the pages of Mrs Jameson’s Sacred and Legendary Art, ‘and when you come to the name of Rubens, spit here’.¹⁰ Indeed, Rossetti used the strongest language Ned had ever heard. ‘The first time he used a bad word, he saw that I was shocked, but he said in his lofty way, you must know, Ned, that I’ve tried to eliminate that word from my dictionary but find I can’t do without it.’¹¹ Other evidence (for example Allingham’s diary) suggests that this word was ‘bloody’, but the recent publication of one of Rossetti’s limericks, preserved by Bertrand Russell, opens up many other possibilities.

Saving was not a virtue at Chatham Place, morality was not; generosity ruled, but Rossetti took as well as gave. ‘I’m sure there wasn’t a woman in the world he couldn’t have won for himself! Nothing pleased him better, though, than to take a friend’s mistress away from him.’¹² By 1855 Rossetti had broken with Annie Miller, but the search for ‘cordian stunners’, red-haired and wheaten-haired models, went on by day and night, and Fanny Cornforth appeared in the studio. Burne-Jones felt, like the warmth of a fire, the expanding sexuality of the ménage. The temptation of his ingenuousness was sometimes too much for Rossetti. ‘Jones is an angel on earth and too good to be true,’ he told Boyce. But Burne-Jones told Rooke that Gabriel:

once gave a woman 5/- to go after me – one night as I was going quietly to my bus. He told her I was very timid and shy and wanted her to speak to me. I saw him talking to her as I looked back, and then she came after me and I couldn’t get rid of her. I said no, my dear, I’m just going home – I’m never haughty with those poor things, but it was no use, she wouldn’t go, and there we marched arm-in-arm down Regent Street – I don’t know what any of my friends would have thought if he had caught sight of me.¹³

Some of these experiences were lessons on what to avoid. But there were two deeper patterns that Burne-Jones began to study from Rossetti. The first was the art of concealment. Rossetti himself carefully separated the mystical and superstitious self, darkly concerned with the coincidence of his name and life with Dante’s, from the respectable son and brother to his family, and again from the dashing cove, more English than the English, and familiar with pawnbrokers, slop-shops and music-halls. The work which was the magic mirror of the manifest heart could equally be called ‘my rubbish’ or ‘the daubs’. Burne-Jones was to find increasingly over the years that there was a solace in manoeuvring the different aspects of his own personality, sometimes to disconcert people, often to keep them at a distance. And character can be fragmented by space as well as time. Different as he was, as a human being, from Rossetti, Burne-Jones also was to feel himself ‘twice-born’, an inhabitant of two centuries at once.

The second pattern was one that Burne-Jones himself constantly acknowledged. ‘He taught me to have no fear or shame of my own ideas, to design perpetually, to seek no popularity, 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 that the standard of living had been raised. Rossetti suggested his old rooms at 17 Red Lion Square, which he had once shared with Walter Deverell. Morris, of course, must be a 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 credit of humanity that whenever it has been clearly put, there have always been people to attend to it.

This can have been one of the few periods in Burne-Jones’s life when he was not reading Ruskin, since he had given every copy he possessed to Georgie as a betrothal present. Meanwhile, Georgie and Morris drew together only slowly, but Ned of course still had his permitted outings with his sweetheart – now referred to as ‘my stunner’, although, as Norton noticed, she looked not Pre-Raphaelite, but exactly like a Stothard print. One outing where pennilessness did not matter was to the National Gallery, which, though it was still hemmed in with washhouses and barracks, had started its career as a representative collection. Under Sir Charles Eastlake it now had an annual purchasing grant of £10,000 and a clear mandate to buy early German and Italian pictures, for the ‘primitive rooms’, with Ruskin to advise on how to protect them against London soot.

Here Burne-Jones studied the Van Eyck Marriage of Arnolfini (acquired in 1842). The year before his death he told Georgie that his whole life long he had hoped to do something as rich and deep in colour as the Arnolfini, and now it was too late. ‘It’s all very well to say it’s a purple dress – very dark brown is more like it.’ The extreme depths of the blacks, the corresponding whites with no pure white in them, the strange room, the tender marriage symbolism, the orange, the famous mirror (which Holman Hunt had already copied in The Lost Child) continued to haunt him. In 1858 the gallery also possessed Botticelli’s Virgin and Child, the Three Maries from the Lombardo-Baldi collection, and three Perugino panels, one of which, the St Michael, has a waisted suit of fantastic armour, like birds’ wings or fishes’ scales; this is the dream armour which Burne-Jones already preferred to careful historical reconstructions. To go forward a little, in 1860 the gallery acquired the Filippo Lippi Annunciation which Ned studied in hopeless admiration at its use of gold, and Fra Angelico’s Christ Glorified in the Courts of Heaven, surely the origin of Morris’s remark that the heads in a picture should be ‘all in a row, like shillings’. In 1862 came the Piero di Cosimo Mythological Subject (then called the Death of Procris). In front of these pictures the shadow of the young Burne-Jones, in his soft hat, must still hover, as it does in the tapestry courts ‘like little chapels’ of what was then the South Kensington Museum. No amount of travel abroad could give him the familiar love which he had for these treasures when he had scarcely a shilling in his pocket.

The book which expressed what Ned could hardly put in words about these pictures was Rio’s Poetry of Christian Art, translated in 1845 because of what the introduction calls ‘the daily increasing taste and appreciation of early Italian art’. This, of course, was a sign of the times. Christian Art, in fact, is the heroine of the book, brought to life by Giotto, humbly served by Fra Angelico, cruelly betrayed by the Medici, who favoured profane poetry and banking houses, rescued by Savonarola, betrayed again by the ‘defection’ of Raphael; in Venice she was in her glory with Carpaccio, and Rio speaks of visitors ‘whose looks and gestures showed that the picture of St Ursula sleeping had put them into an ecstasy’, but once again she was betrayed by Squarcione, rescued just in time by Gentile Bellini, and destroyed by the paganism of the seventeenth century. Aesthetic considerations are not Rio’s concern. Botticelli is little mentioned; Ruskin’s (and Proust’s) favourites, the blonde-haired Daughters of Jethro in the Vatican, are criticised because they draw attention away from Moses. But Rio has presented the history of Italian art as an adventure worthy of Sintram. This was the book which Ned put aside to give to Georgie on their wedding day.

This was a year when the air seemed ‘sweet and full of bells’ to Burne-Jones, and although Morris, in a letter of 1875, recalls these as the ‘tin-pot bells of St Pancras’, he also calls them ‘well-remembered days, when all adventure was ahead’. Later still, in 1893, Burne-Jones wrote to Mrs Helen Gaskell that he was alone in London and;

it was a little like it was when I first came to London and hadn’t a friend … I wandered alone the streets looking in pawn-brokers’ shops, and went over all the streets I used to know, I even dined at the same place where I first dined with Gabriel the first time I was admitted to that heavenly company and I thought and thought and thought.²²

So sure an instinct has the human heart for its happiest time.