Part 5

These qualities of Burne-Jones’s art are not peculiar to him. They find their warrant, as we have seen, in all the work of that earlier school to which he loved to own his obligation. But they were strange to the time in which he first appeared; and to their presence, I think, must be ascribed no small part of the hostility he then encountered. Something, no doubt, was due to the immaturity of resource which marked his earlier efforts. And he knew that. At a time when his imagination had already ripened, he was but poorly equipped in a purely technical sense; and although there is no education so rapid as that which genius bestows upon itself, it was long before his hand could keep pace with the pressing demands of the ideas that called for interpretation. But apart from mere technical failure, there was in his own individuality, and still more in the means which he recognised as the only means that could rightly serve him, not a little that was sure of protest from a generation to whom both were unfamiliar. This also he well knew; and I think it was the clear perception of it which gave him patience and courage to press forward to the goal.

And there were times when he had need of both. The critics who saw in his earlier efforts only the signs of affectation greeted him with ridicule. We are reported a grave nation, but laughter is a safe refuge for dulness that does not understand; and as there were few of the comic spirits then engaged upon art criticism who had the faintest apprehension of the ideal which inspired his art, they found in it only a theme for the exercise of a somewhat rough and boisterous humour. But they never moved him from his purpose; never, I think, even provoked in him any strong feeling of resentment. His nature was too gentle for that, his strength of conviction too deep and too secure. No one ever possessed a larger quality of personal sympathy; no one, it might seem, was on that account so much exposed to the influence of others. And in a sense this was so. In the lighter traffic of life his spirit flew to the mood of the hour. His appreciation was so quick, his power of identifying himself with the thoughts and feelings of others so ready and so real, that he seemed at such moments to have no care to assert his own personality. Nor had he; for of all men he was surely the most indifferent to those petty dues that greatness sometimes loves to exact. That was not the sort of homage he had any desire to win; and as he put forward no such poor claim on his own behalf, his keen sense of humour made him quick to detect in others the presence or assumption of mere parochial dignity. Of that he was always intolerant; indeed, I think there was scarcely any other human failing for which he could not find some measure of sympathy. But although in the free converse of friends his spirit passed swiftly and easily from the gravest to the lightest themes, anxious, as it would seem, rather to leap with the lead of others than to assert his own individuality, it was easy to see how firmly, how resolutely, he refused all concession in matters that concerned the deeper convictions of his life. To touch him there was to touch a rock. Behind the affectionate gentleness of his nature, that was accessible to every winning influence, lay a faith that nothing could shake or weaken. It was never obtruded, but it lay ready for all who cared to make trial of it. In its service he was prepared to make all sacrifice of time and strength and labour. His friends claimed much of him, and he yielded much; generous both in act and thought, there was probably no man of such concentrated purpose who ever placed himself so freely at the service of those he loved; but there was no friend of them all who could boast of having won any particle of the allegiance that the artist owed to his art. That was a world in which he dwelt alone, from which he rigorously excluded all thoughts save those that were born of his task; and though every artist has need of encouragement, and he certainly loved it not less than others, yet such was the tenacity of his purpose, such a fund of obstinate persistence lay at the root of a nature that was in many ways soft and yielding, that even without it I think he would have laboured on patiently to the end.

A mind so constituted was therefore little likely to yield to ridicule. Such attacks as he had to endure may have wounded, but they did not weaken his spirit; and with a playful humour that would have surprised his censors, he would sometimes affect to join the ranks of his assailants, and wage a mock warfare upon his own ideals. I have in my possession a delightful drawing of his which is supposed to represent a determination to introduce into his design a type of beauty that was more acceptable to the temper of his time. He had been diligently studying, as he assured me, the style and method of the great Flemish masters, and he sent me as earnest of his new resolve a charming design of “Susanna and the Elders,”--“after the manner of Rubens.” On another occasion he wrote to me that he felt he had striven too long to stem the tide of popular taste, that he was determined now to make a fresh departure, and that with this view he had projected a series of pictures which were to be called the “Homes of England.” He enclosed for my sympathetic criticism the design for the first of the series. It was indeed a masterpiece. Upon a Victorian sofa, whose every hideous and bulging curve was outlined with the kind of intimate knowledge that is born only of love or of detestation, lay stretched, in stertorous slumber, the monstrous form of some unchastened hero of finance. A blazing solitaire stud shone as a beacon in a trackless field of shirt-front: while from his puffy hand the sheets of a great daily journal had fallen fluttering to the floor. There were others of the series, but none, I think, which imaged with happier humour that masculine type, whose sympathies at the time he was so often charged with neglecting.

For it must not be forgotten that when ridicule had done its work, Burne-Jones was very seriously taken to task by “the apostles of the robust.” There are men so constituted that all delicate beauty seems to move them to resentment; men who would require of a lily that it should be nurtured in a gymnasium; and who go about the world constantly reassuring themselves of their own virility by denouncing what they conceive to be the effeminate weakness of others. To this class the art of Burne-Jones came in the nature of a personal offence. They raged against it, warning their generation not to yield to its insidious and enervating influence; and the more it gathered strength the more urgently did they feel impelled to insist on its inherent weakness. But, as Shakespeare asked of us long ago:

How with this rage shall Beauty hold a plea Whose action is no stronger than a flower?

They forgot that: forgot that something of a feminine, not an effeminate spirit enters into the re-creation of all forms of beauty; that an artist, by the very nature of his task, cannot always be in the mood to pose as an athlete. And, even if they had desired to define the special direction of Burne-Jones’s art, or to mark the limits of its exercise--limits that no admirer, however ardent, would seek to deny--they need not surely have been so angry.

So at least it seemed to me then. And yet, rightly viewed, the very vehemence of such opposition was in its own way a tribute to his power. Any new artistic growth that passes without challenge may perhaps be justly suspected of being produced without individuality, and certainly such work as his, that bears so clearly the stamp of a strong individual presence, could hardly escape a disputed welcome. It must even now in a measure repel many of those whom it does not powerfully attract and charm; for it cannot be regarded with the sort of indifference that is the fate of work less certainly inspired; it must therefore always find both friends and foes. But so does much else in the world of art that speaks with even higher authority than his. There are many to whom the matchless spell of Lionardo’s genius remains always an enigma; many again who yield only a respectful assent to the verdict which would set Michael Angelo above all his fellows.

We may be patient, then, if the genius of Burne-Jones wins not yet the applause of all. It bears with it a special message, and is secure of homage from those for whom that message is written. They are many to-day, who at the first numbered only a few: they are many, and I think even the earliest of them would say that their debt to him was greatest at the last. In praise and love they followed him without faltering to the close of a life that knew no swerving from its ideal; a life of incessant labour spent in loyal service to the mistress he worshipped; and even though he had won no wider reward, this, I believe, would have seemed to him enough.

Painting is perhaps the only art which offers in its practice opportunities of social converse. The writer and musician work alone, or, if their solitude is invaded, it is only by way of interruption. But the practice of the painter’s art admits a measure of comradeship, and the progress of his work is sometimes even advanced rather than hindered by the presence of a friend. The element of manual labour that enters into painting leaves the painter free at many points of his work to enjoy friendly converse with the visitor to his studio; and I have known many an interesting discussion carried on for several hours without the painter ceasing for a moment from his work upon the canvas before him. This might not apply to every stage in the growth and structure of a picture. There are times which demand entire concentration both of brain and hand, and when the painter needs to be as solitary as the poet. But these tenser moments yield to longer intervals wherein the manual element in the painter’s calling holds for a season a more dominating place; and it is at such times that an intimate friend may safely invade the artist’s sanctuary.

Some of the most enjoyable hours of my life have been passed in this intimacy of the studio, and it is interesting to recall, as it was always interesting to note, the different ways in which the individuality of the artist expresses itself in the processes of his work--interesting also to observe how the litter of the studio in its varying degrees of disorder reflects something of the mind of the man. There are studios which seem deliberately fashioned for an effect of beauty--rooms so ornate and so adorned, that the picture in progress upon the easel seems the last thing calculated to arrest the gaze of the spectator. And there are others again, so completely barren of all decoration, and so deliberately stripped of every incident in the way of bric-à-brac or collected treasures, of carven furniture or woven tissue, that were it not for the half-finished canvas, it would be impossible to guess the vocation of its inhabitant. Between these two extremes there is room for every degree of careless or conscious environment; and although it is not always possible to define the exact measure of association between the workman and his surroundings, the visitor becomes gradually aware of a certain element of fitness in the seemingly accidental accumulation of the varied objects which find their way into a painter’s workshop.

It would certainly, however, be erroneous to assume that the disorder of the studio is to be taken as the direct reflex of the habit of an artist’s mind. No man, in the conduct of his work, ever surrendered himself to a stricter discipline of labour than Burne-Jones, though his studio in many respects was a model of apparent disorder. No man certainly in his work ever aimed at a more settled and nicely balanced beauty of design supported by deliberate harmonies of colour; and yet the bare white-washed walls of his studio in the North End Road gave no hint of the coloured glories of the invention that he was seeking to fix upon his canvas; while the litter that scattered the floor or was unceremoniously hustled into the corners of the room seemed strangely inconsistent with the ordered completeness of design that marked every picture from his hand.

There were few more delightful companions in the studio--none, according to my experience, whose talk leapt with such easy alertness from the gravest to the gayest themes. His almost child-like spirit invited humour; and yet his lightest moods of laughter left you never in doubt of the sense of deep conviction that lay at the root of his character. As he stood beside you at his work, his figure relieved against three or four half-completed designs, it was sometimes difficult to find the link which joined the lighter moods of his comradeship with the wistful beauty of the faces that he sought to image in his pictures. But almost at the next moment the difficulty would be solved by a sudden transition to a graver train of thought, and before either of us would be well aware of the swift change of tone, our converse had wandered off to the consideration of some larger ideal of art or life. It was a unique attraction of Burne-Jones’s studio that it nearly always contained a rich and varied record of his work, for the chosen method of his painting rendered it necessary for him to keep several pictures in almost equal states of progress, each being put aside in turn till the surface of pigment was so fixed and hardened as to render it ready for the added layer of colour which was to form the next stage in its progress.

Very often on these occasions our talk was not directly concerned with painting at all, but strayed away into many worlds of the present or the past. As a painter every artist must stand or fall by his command of the particular aspect of beauty which can be rendered by that art, and by no other. If a picture fails, it is no excuse that its author is a poet. If a poet fails, it is idle to plead in his defence that he is an accomplished musician. What added burdens of the spirit the worker in any art chooses to carry, concerns himself alone; what concerns the world is that the result--whatever other message it may undertake to convey--must be perfect according to the laws of the medium he has chosen. In speaking, therefore, of the deep poetic impulse that lay at the back of all Burne-Jones’s achievement in design, I have no thought of seeking to rest the reputation which he will ultimately hold upon any other considerations than those which are proper to the field in which he laboured. He has left enough, and more than enough, to vindicate his high claim to rank among the masters of art, but it is certain, none the less, that his profound interest in those other fields of expression in which the imagination finds utterance, gave him infinite charm as a man.

There was little lovable in literature that he did not keenly love, though in regard to the literature of the past, I think his heart turned by preference to the legendary beauty of the earlier romances, where the story, freshly emerging from its mythical form, may still be captured with equal right of possession by the poet, the musician, or the painter. Great drama, even the drama of Shakespeare, never so strongly appealed to him; and, indeed, I have always noticed in my companionship with painters that in their judgment of the work of the theatre what is most essentially dramatic in drama is not, as a rule, that upon which their imagination most eagerly fixes itself. And yet, in the case of Burne-Jones, it was curious to observe that among the narrative writers of our time the highly dramatised work of Charles Dickens most strongly appealed to him. For Dickens’s genius, its pathos, not less than its humour, he owned an unbounded admiration; and I suppose there were few of the worshippers of the great novelist, except, perhaps, Mr. Swinburne, who could boast so full and so complete a knowledge of his work. The sense of humour, which was a dominating quality in the character of Burne-Jones, could, perhaps, scarcely be surmised by those who know the man only through his painting. His claims in this regard, which could not be ignored by those who knew him, must always be received with a sense of surprise--even of incredulity--by those to whom he was a stranger. And yet, when he was so minded, his pencil could give proof of it in many essays in caricature; while in conversation it was an ever-present quality that lay in wait for the fit occasion.

When Burne-Jones spoke of his own art it was always with complete understanding of its many and divergent ideals, and I have heard him appraise at its true value the genius of men with whom he himself had little in common. Among his contemporaries he could speak with generous appreciation of the great gifts of Millais, and of the acknowledged masters of the past. However little their ideals sorted with his own, his power of appreciation was too liberal and too keen to permit him to ignore or to belittle their claims though his heart’s abiding-place was as I have said with the Florentines of the fifteenth century.

My visits to Burne-Jones’s studio began very early in our acquaintance, and the several errands which took me there varied as time went on. While he was painting his picture of King Cophetua, he asked that my eldest son--who was then a child--should be allowed to serve as model for one of the heads in the picture. I am afraid that, like most children, my boy gave some trouble to the master, who one day rebuked him as being an incorrigibly bad sitter, and the boy, who had been kept standing during the whole of the morning, promptly replied with the indignant inquiry as to whether Burne-Jones called standing sitting--a response that immensely delighted the painter himself, who recognised the justice of the claim by at once releasing him from further service for the day. At a later time I saw much of him in his studio while he was designing the scenery and costumes for my play of _King Arthur_. I read him the play one afternoon while he was at work upon his own great design of King Arthur’s sleep in Avalon, in the lower studio, which stood at the foot of his garden; and the task, which he straightway accepted, of assisting in the production of the drama at the Lyceum Theatre, led to many later meetings, at which our talk turned constantly on that great cycle of romance--one phase of which I had sought to illustrate.

His own mind was steeped in their beauty, as may be seen in his constant recurrence to these legends as chosen subjects for his design, and I fancy it was their common love for this subject in romance which formed one of the strongest links of fellowship between himself and William Morris. I have said that to Rossetti he always confessed his deep obligations as an artist, but there can, I think, be little doubt that of all living comrades it was Morris whom he most loved. Though, as he has himself confessed, they had parted company in regard to some of the problems that beset the artist, in the graver issues of life, no less than in the lighter moods of social comradeship, they were at one to the end. He told me that once in the earlier days of their association they had gone with Charles Faulkner on a boating excursion up the Thames. At that time Morris was apprehensive that he was growing too stout, and at one of the river inns where they had to share the same room the painter conceived the mischievous idea of unduly alarming the poet as to his condition. Morris had retired earlier than the others, and was fast asleep, when Burne-Jones, having procured a needle and thread from the landlady, took a large slice out of the lining of his companion’s waistcoat, and then sewed the two sides together as neatly as he could. In the morning Morris was up betimes, and Burne-Jones, still feigning to be asleep, watched with eager excitement the terror and consternation with which the poet sought, in vain, to make the shrivelled garment meet around his waist. The victim of the plot fancied that his increasing proportions had suddenly taken on a miraculous acceleration of pace, and it was not until the smothered laughter of the painter greeted his ears that he was relieved from the panic of anxiety into which he had been suddenly thrown.

Burne-Jones could sometimes, on occasion, be himself the victim of a practical joke, and once when I paid him a sudden and unexpected visit at his little cottage in Rottingdean, I contrived to play, very successfully, upon what I knew to be his horror of the professional interviewer. I announced myself to the servant as an American colonel, who had called as the special correspondent of the _Cincinnati Record_, and on the message being conveyed to her master, she returned, as I expected, with the curt intimation that he was not at home. But he evidently felt that no precaution was too great to be taken in the face of this threatened invasion, for as I crept by the window that looks out on to the little Village green I saw him, in company with his son, stealthily crawling under the table, and when I afterwards returned and announced myself in my own name, he related with childish delight how skilfully he had avoided the attack of the enemy.

JAMES M‘NEIL WHISTLER

The many pleasant hours I spent in Whistler’s studio in Cheyne Walk are dominated in recollection by the striking personality of the artist. In physical no less than in mental equipment, he stood apart from his generation, and the characteristic peculiarities of his appearance, joined to the marked idiosyncrasy of his temperament, must remain unforgettable to all who knew him. It is easy indeed to recall the tones of the sometimes strident voice as he let slip some barbed shaft in ruthless characterisation of one or other of his contemporaries: easier still to summon again, as though he stood before me now, the oddly fashioned figure, lithe and muscular, yet finely delicate in its outline, as he skipped to and fro in front of his canvas, now with brush poised in the air between those long slender fingers, seeming, as he gazed at the model, to challenge the supremacy of nature, now passing swiftly to the easel to lay on that single touch of colour that was to record his victory. It is not so easy, however, to convey in words the intellectual impression left by the agile movement of his mind, as it leaped in sudden transition from the graver utterance of some pregnant thought concerning the immutable laws of his art, to those lighter sallies of wit and humour that found their readiest and most congenial exercise in the half-playful, half-malicious portraiture of men we both knew.

So notable indeed and so notorious became the sayings of Whistler, uttered in such moods of laughing irony, that the more deeply serious side of his nature was apt in his own time to be ignored or even denied. And for this he himself was partly to blame. His own manifest enjoyment in the free play of a ready and relentless wit was apt sometimes to obscure that deeper insight into the essential principles of the art he practised, to which no one on occasion could give a finer or more subtle expression.