Edward Burne-Jones Read online

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 Newman’s secession, attending his last university sermon on ‘the parting of friends’. This had now been printed, and Goss lent the volume to Ned. It became clear to Burne-Jones that he must be a priest like Goss; if he was to serve the drunks and vagrant workers that littered the pavements on the way to school, it must be in a community like the Oratory, or perhaps like the semi-monastic group suggested in Hurrell Froude’s Project for the Revival of Religion in Great Towns. There must be a meeting point between the need to serve and the need for beauty. Mr Jones, when his son returned to Birmingham, was quietly ready to exchange his pew in St Mary’s for one in Puseyite St Paul’s, where there was ceremonial and music. He had made up his mind that Ned was to become, if not a successful manufacturer of steel pens, then a bishop.

  This, of course, meant Oxford, although most of the Upper School boys went on to Cambridge. Dixon was ready to matriculate and Crom Price, two years younger, hoped to follow them. Both of these were down for Pembroke, where the master, Dr Jeune, was a former headmaster of King Edward’s, but Goss had been at Exeter, and for Exeter, therefore, Mr Jones put down his son. When he found that Ned, unlike Dixon, had not been awarded an exhibition, he faced a total payment, over the three years before an honours degree, of about £600. There would be tuition fees of about £20 per annum, coals, room-rent, hire of furniture, charges for servants (about £30 a term), kitchen bill, buttery bill (for bread, butter and beer), washing bill, college subscriptions; even the travelling expenses to Oxford were a consideration. With heaven knows what further economies and calculations, Mr Jones ‘determined to send him at his own expense’. The Bennett’s Hill house was let, except for the workshop, and a smaller house taken, where Miss Sampson and the furniture accompanied them, father and son shared a bedroom as usual, and a lodger was squeezed in as well. This was in the Bristol Road, which the Memorials tell us ‘provided better air and exercise’, though in fact the drains at this time ran into open ditches on the west side.

  Ned matriculated on 2 June 1852. He had his first sight of the city of Oxford, the river, and the meadows. Excitement, and possibly some guilt at the sacrifices made for him, brought on a severe illness, the first since he had nearly died at birth, but one which was to set a pattern for the rest of his life – heart weakness, spectacular fainting, a black depression on recovery. Harder to bear, at the age of nineteen, was delay; he would have to wait till the following spring before there was room for him in the overcrowded college.

  Kicking his heels in Birmingham, he went to call for the first time on his school friend Harry Macdonald, and so met the family where, a few years later, he would find his wife. They were then living in a house in Nursery Terrace, Handsworth, the Rev. George Macdonald having been recently appointed for the second time to the Birmingham circuit.

  In 1852 the minister’s house was crowded from attic to cellar. The children at home were Harry, Alice, Carrie, Georgie, Fred, Agnes (the prettiest) and Louisa. They had already lost two little brothers, and had gone upstairs to see one of them ‘stamped with the marble hue of death’; Carrie had only two more years to live.

  Their story (as it is told by their descendant Lord Baldwin in The Macdonald Sisters) is of an unworldly preacher bringing up, or rather letting his wife bring up, a large family on a tiny income, sometimes less than £200 a year, so that to buy a book or to have the piano tuned was a heroic event. This, however, was never felt as poverty, and the affection between the sisters was very close. They all had in common integrity and decisiveness – William de Morgan said that they never began a sentence without knowing how it would end. Visitors who were in the least pretentious were cut short. Lord Baldwin records that a preacher who spoke of his heart as ‘black, and full of stones’ was told by little Louie that he must mean his gizzard. This firmness went with a tendency to melancholy and poor health. What redeemed it, besides its own moral purity, was a dry sense of humour and an acceptance of the ‘stages of life’, which implied a reverence for life itself.

  Such unworldliness, combined with sharpness, could alarm casual visitors. Ned shrank. But the praying, singing, cooking, sewing, turning, boot-patching, ‘putting-up’ of preserves, making do, giving charity, racing up and down stairs, self-criticising and self-improving could make way at once for a lonely visitor. Ned, although he called with Crom Price, could be seen at once as lonely. To Georgie, a child in a pinafore, his pallor and delicacy suggested that he needed looking after. Georgie, at the age of ten, was quite used to this. She noticed also an unexpected source of power in him, like an illumination, when the conversation moved him.

  How Burne-Jones – the Memorials are ‘confident that the mystery which shrouds men and women from each other in youth was sacred to him’ – dealt with his own growing sexuality can hardly be judged. He referred to it only ironically, for example, in reference to a visit to the theatre when he was staying at the Camberwell home of his father’s sister, Aunt Catherwood. Mr Catherwood took him to the Lyceum pantomime, where they stood in the pit and Ned fell hopelessly in love with the probably forty-year-old Fairy of the Golden Branch. ‘She held out something, and I thought it was too beautiful ever to be.’ But this was not surprising, since the Fairy – supported by Blueruino, an Illicit Spirit – was none other than Madame Vestris herself. Complementary to these fantasies was the very strong reaction of a sisterless young man, in the presence of young girls en fleur, on the verge, some sooner, some later, of a natural but despoiling experience. This, which was to be one of the recurrent themes of his painting, took its origin from the daughter-crowded minister’s house in Nursery Terrace.

  In
the Hilary Term of 1853, Burne-Jones finally went up, and passed from the small shop and the grimy streets of Birmingham to Newman’s own university.

  2

  1853–5

  OXFORD: LOSS AND GAIN

  Burne-Jones’s disappointment with Oxford was at first intense, proportionate to the vastness of his expectations. There was still no room in college for him when he arrived in the January of 1854. He had to get his meals out and sleep, a most unwelcome raw provincial guest, in someone else’s study. In a few weeks he was writing to Cormell Price that he meant only to try for a pass degree. ‘I’m wretched, Crom, miserable.’ The stones did not cry out, he could not find the ‘note’. The absence of Newman seemed a positive element. On the other hand, he made in these first few weeks a new friend who seemed as disgusted as himself. This was a thickset dark curly young man – variously described as ‘triumphantly’ and ‘unnecessarily’ curly – who to judge from his Oxford parlour photograph, seems to have worn a velveteen jacket and to have clenched his fists very hard. Ned had noticed his name, the Memorials tell us, when he wrote it on his matriculation paper the year before: William Morris.

  Morris took instantly to Burne-Jones, whose background was so unlike his own. This, like many of the things Morris did, must have been a matter of instinct, which told him that the likenesses between the two were as important as the differences. Physically they looked as unlike as they well could do. Ned was too tall and too pale, gentle, fragile, hesitant, with wide very light eyes and a face ‘oddly tapering towards the chin’, quietly witty until he was excited, then outrageous; Morris looked strong. There was unmanageable energy in his mind as well as his body, so that his characteristic gesture was to hit the air, or his own head, with a kind of smothered exasperation. Morris broke chairs beneath him, Ned sank into them ‘as though his whole spine was seeking rest’. Together they looked like a blundering king and an ailing aspirant to knighthood. Morris had the impatience – as Bernard Shaw pointed out – of the comfortably off, whereas Ned, at Oxford, was ‘distinctly the poorest of anyone I knew’.1 According to Mackail, neither of them realised this until Ned went to stay at the Morris family house near Walthamstow, but this seems unlikely, particularly as Morris, within a few weeks of meeting Burne-Jones, characteristically offered to share all his money with him.

  On the other hand, both were emotional and tender-hearted young men who could rapidly be rendered helpless by affection, and both were depressives who had to face a life-long struggle with melancholia. This black enemy was always in waiting. Both of them had come to Oxford with the same kind of not yet directed idealism, both meant to take orders. Morris, like Burne-Jones, had been under the influence of one of the ‘devoted remnant’, his private coach, F.B. Guy, who had survived, just as John Goss had done, the storm of Newman’s resignation. 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.