Part 3

That he did not at first secure the unanimous approval of art lovers is scarcely surprising. The markedly individual artist who cares nothing for popular favour and is more anxious to satisfy his own conscience than to gather round him possible clients is never likely to become a favourite offhand. Burne-Jones by the brilliancy of his ability silenced all opposition long before his death, and gained over the bulk of the doubters who questioned his right to the admiration he received when he first began to exhibit at the Grosvenor Gallery. But for some while the unusual character of his art caused it to be much misunderstood by people who had not taken the trouble to analyse his intentions. He was accused of affectation, of deliberate imitation of the early Italians; he was attacked for his indifference to realism and for his decorative preferences. Even the genuineness of his poetic feeling was suspected, and his love of symbolism was ridiculed as the aberration of a warped mind. Much of this misconception was cleared away by the collected exhibition of his works which was held at the New Gallery in the winter of 1892-1893, for this show, by bringing together the best of his productions and by summing up all phases of his practice, proved emphatically that he had been as sincere and logical in his aims as he had been consistent in his expression. It was no longer possible to attack him out of mere prejudice; the verdict given fifteen years before on his art by those who understood him best was seen to be just. When a second collection was shown at the New Gallery--a memorial exhibition arranged in 1898, a few months after his death--few people remained who were prepared to dispute his mastery.

It is fortunate that justice should have been done to him by his contemporaries and that there should have been really so little delay in the wider acknowledgment of his claims. If appreciation had been withheld from him while he lived, if it had been his fate to secure only a posthumous reputation, there would have been some diminution of his influence, and his art would have lost some of its authority. But as a right estimate of his position was arrived at during his lifetime, when he was at the height of his activity as an exponent of an exceptionally intelligent æsthetic creed, he was able to make his beliefs effective in bringing about the conversion of a large section of the public to a truer understanding of the value of decorative qualities in pictorial art. He proved emphatically that decoration does not imply, as is popularly supposed, the abandonment of the characteristics which make a picture interesting; he showed that a subject can be legitimately treated so that it engages fully the sympathies of the average man, and yet can be kept from any descent into obviousness or commonplace conventionality. The painted story in his hands was no trivial anecdote; it was a motive by means of which he conveyed not only moral lessons but artistic truths as well, something didactically valuable but at the same time capable of appealing to the senses with exquisite daintiness and charm.

Indeed, he can best be summed up as a teacher who clothed the lessons of life with noble beauty and with dignity that was commanding without being forbidding. There was human sympathy in everything he painted--a tender, gentle sentiment which escaped entirely the taint of sentimentality and which, tinged as it always was with a kind of quiet sadness, never became morbid or unwholesome. He was too truly a poet to dwell upon the ugly side of existence, just as he was too sincerely a decorator to insist unnecessarily upon common realities. That he searched deeply into facts is made clear by the mass of preparatory work he produced to guide him in his paintings, by the enormous array of drawings and studies which he executed to satisfy the demand he made upon himself for exactness and accuracy in the building up of his designs. But in his studies, as in his pictures, the intention to express a personal feeling is never absent. He selected, modified, re-arranged as his temperament suggested; he omitted unimportant things and amplified those which were of dominant interest; he sought for what was helpful to his artistic purpose and passed by what would have seemed in wrong relation, consistently keeping in view the lesson which he desired to teach. It can be frankly admitted that a certain mannerism resulted from his way of working, but this mannerism was by no means the dull formality into which many artists descend when they substitute a convention for inspiration; it was rather a revelation of his personality and of that belief in the rightness of his own judgment which counts for so much in the development of the really strong man. Except for the short time in which he was influenced by Rossetti, his life was spent in illustrating an entirely independent view of artistic responsibilities; and it would be difficult now to question this independence with the wonderful series of his paintings available to prove how earnestly and how seriously he strove to realise his ideals in art.

The plates are printed by BEMROSE & SONS, LTD., Derby and London The text at the BALLANTYNE PRESS, Edinburgh