A Pre-Raphaelite Memory
By COLIN MACINNES rrlir. Kensington house in which my grand- ' parents lived until their deaths after the last war was one of those bleak, inconvenient neo-Roman piles that still encumber the Royal Borough. It is true it had a double frontage, so that there were large rooms on either side of the central corridor, and a grubby square of back garden that somewhat relieved its gloom. But its rooms were all too high for their width, its staircase too narrow for two persons to pass by, and its plumbing recalled that of a provincial railway hotel.
Inside, however, it was thoroughly remark- able, and not least because of the unusual temperaments of my grandparents themselves. J. W. Mackail, my grandfather, had been born a son of the manse in Ayrshire, had found his way via Gottingen to Balliol, and eventually became a classical scholar of repute, a Professor of Poetry at Oxford, and a holder of the Order of Merit. In his younger days he was a disciple of William Morris—whose earliest biographer he also was—and thus came to frequent The Grange, North End Road, Fulham, the home of Morris's closest and life- long friend, the painter Edward Burne-Jones. There he encountered, and fell in love with, the painter's beloved only daughter, Margaret. 'I had thought,' said the Pre-Raphaelite artist wistfully, when the young pair announced their attachment, 'that he was just a nice young man who had come to visit me.'
I am not competent to assess the quality of my grandfather's scholarship, but am told he was a thinker of synthesis, rather than of inspired originality. His literary production was at all events prodigious, and one of its most remarkable features was that, until his retire- ment from the Board of Education (as it then was), all his private work was done at dawn, or on his holidays. In appearance he was immensely distinguished in a rather raw-boned Scottish way, in manner kindly and withdrawn but, if provoked, he could be trenchant in the extreme: all Ayrshire, Balliol, and his own scholastic erudition speaking out with forthright disdain if he disagreed with you. I recall, in the middle Thirties, trying to persuade him of the beauty of a poem by W. H. Auden. He listened magisterially while I read the lyric, then roundly declared—of the work of an artist who was to be .a successor in the Oxford Chair--`That is not poetry.'
But he did not tell me why; and what I found unhelpful, as a young man, about his colossal learning, is •that he would but rarely—unless almost forced to—express any literary opinion and, when he so infrequently did, would fail to advance any reason for his holding it. He gave, perhaps unconsciously, the impression that everything worth writing had been written long before 1910, and that the last modern author worthy of note was Maurice Maeterlinck, whose English translator he had been. But although my grandfather was intellectually arrogant, in personal converse he was most benign; and my chief recollection is of a good and gentle, even timorous man, despite the rigid exclusiveness of his professional opinions.
His wife, my grandmother, was a far more complex and dominating character. In her youth she was a startling beauty in the Pre- Raphaelite manner, and her father had often depicted her both in portraits and in his huge allegorical canvases. (1 use, of Burne-Jones, the term 'Pre-Raphaelite' since this is habitual, if inaccurate; for strictly speaking, he was not one of. the Brotherhood itself, but a disciple of Rossetti and thus a neo-Pre-Raphaelite only.) Her father's home had been, in the last decades of the nineteenth century, a considerable centre of artistic, literary and political intercourse, and she had been brought up to a familiarity with the great by whom, I imagine—as by her father and his wife Georgiana—she had been much spoiled. At her mother's death, and that later of her brother, Philip Burne-Jones, she had inherited a considerable fortune, and was thus an heiress both to wealth and fame, which factor, coupled with her own compelling temperament, made her a rather demanding woman.
Yet I could not but reflect, when I found her unusually exigeante, that whereas her father and husband had done great things—as had even her, mother, Lady Burne-Jones, whose Memorials of her husband are a minor, and reticent, masterpiece—the only work of art she herself had created was her own considerable personality. (Apart from voluminous, and brilliant, letters, her only writing, so far as 1' know, is the description of Mrs. Beeton printed on the' back of the postcard on sale at the National Portrait Gallery.) When we were children she was, to my elder brother Graham and myself, the perfect grandmother: fantastic, forgiving—leaping, as grandparents can, across the barrier of generations, to establish an immediate and heart-stealing relationship. But as we grew older, she set standards for us that I, at any rate, could never hope to rise to nor, to tell the truth, did I particularly wish to do so. She wanted me, 1 think, to be good, obedient and pure; and as I am none of these, she dis- approved. What seemed to interest her less was what sort of personalities her grandchildren really were, or even with improvement conceiv- ably could be.
There was, in her nature—as indeed in that of her illustrious father—a deep strain of melancholy, possibly due in part to her Celtic origins, for her father, before his elevation to a baronetcy, had been Edward Jones from Birmingham, and her mother one of the Macdonald sisters whose marriages led to the Kipling, Baldwin, Poynter and Mackail families all being related. And this melancholy induced in her a kind of resolute pessimism, though this was not unmixed with fun and fantasy. As for the innumerable gifted men and women she had frequented as a girl—who ranged from Little Tich and Yvette Guilbert to Gladstone, Tenny- son and William Morris himself—she was disappointingly reticent about them. All I could persuade her to tell me of Oscar Wilde, for instr :cc, was that when he came to her parents' house he was 'a tease.' On Ruskin, she was slightly more revealing. Recalling a visit to Brantwood she declared, 'Whenever Hr. Ruskin came into the room and found me doing some- thing, he would tell me to do something else.'
Their Kensington house was like a museum of these memories; and it was more, one felt, her house than my grandfather's, for despite his own high achievement, he had been somewhat absorbed into the pre-Raphaelite heritage of his wife. You climbed up a steep stair from the street towards the pillared portico and, as soon as the front door opened, found yourself in a small hall with another door, of frosted glass, beyond. (In our childhood days, one of our grandmother's inventions that delighted us was to pretend this small hall was a lift, and press imaginary buttons before opening the further door of glass.) Inside was a much larger hall with massive bookcases containing huge volumes about art and, somewhat surprisingly, a collection of toys from all parts of the world that had entertained at least three generations. In a huge oak chest there was an enormous assemblage of brown-paper sheets and colossal balls of string, for these my grandmother always saved from any parcel—never tearing the first, nor impatiently cutting the second.
The dining-room beyond had a large oblong cottage table that had been her father's, and to one side a locked bookcase with volumes of their works inscribed to him by Rossetti, Morris, Swinburne and other mid-Victorian colleagues. In one corner was my grandmother's writing bureau (it seems to me somehow typical of her that she chose this unusual room for her corres- pondence) and, on a table by the inadequate gas fire, a backgammon board and pieces, for my grandparents played this game together unfail- ingly after every meal. Among unexpected objects on the wall there was a 'folk art' clock whose face represented Big Ben by moonlight, executed in a mosaic of mother-of-pearl; for my grandmother had a lively appreciation of English, and indeed Continental, kitsch. Near by —and somewhat incongruously—there was an unfinished portrait, by Burne-Jones, of his wife in their young days: the 'Burne-Jones woman' who appeared in his earlier paintings— small, large-eyed, and of immense if rather remote inner dignity; and contrasting with the taller, more willowy heroine of his later pictures, who more strongly resembled his own daughter.
Running the whole length of the house on the further side of the central hall was perhaps the most purely Pre-Raphaelite feature of the house, the drawing-room. Its papers and chintzes were all by Morris, and except for a large and quite conventional sofa, the more decorative pieces of furniture had a splendid Pre-Raphaelite austerity (cushions half an inch thick, I recall, and elegant woodwork backs to thoroughly unwelcoming chairs). There were more paintings by her father on the walls, including a colossal water-colour (can any other artist have painted in this medium on such a scale?) of a. sleeping beauty entwined in thorns, and two portraits of herself—the 'blue,' full face before a convex mirror, and the 'grey' in profile, more restrained. There were a piano, a harpsichord and a clavi- chord which Burne-Jones had decorated as a gift for his child's wedding. Books lined the walls in collected, but by no means luxurious, editions, and the carpets were fine Persian that had been trodden by many feet.
A Chinese chest in one corner had a particular fascination for me. On top of it, there was a rounded brass-bound box containing the letters which her cousin Rudyard Kipling had written to my grandmother from India, when he returned there from Westward Ho! to write for the Civil and Military Gazette, Lahore. These letters were written on the paper both horizontally and then vertically across the horizontal lines—the reasons for this being the expense of postage in those days; but the script was so clear that one had no difficulty in deciphering them. My grandmother never allowed these letters to be published during her lifetime; and indeed, she had become sadly estranged, in later years, from her adored cousin, both because of family altercations and, I believe, because of the support to the Boer cause her branch of the family had given at the turn of the century.
Inside this chest there was a drawer, known as the 'Funny Drawer,' which contained all the curious oddments that had come my grand- parents' way during their long years of married life. There was, for example, a collection of all the envelopes on which their names had been grotesquely misspelt by correspondents—as 'Mocktail' and 'Crockail' for versions of my grandfather's surname. Some of the items, in so austere a household, were astonishingly bawdy: for instance, a massive list of all the English family names they could discover which are indecent. An impressive object was the slate the Burne-Joneses used to keep at The Grange on which visitors, if they were out, were invited to leave. any message; and one day when Tennyson had called, my grandmother, then a girl, had filched the slate so that another had to be provided. (The Laureate's message, by the way, was simply—and quite adequately— 'Tennyson' in a firm but spidery hand.) Up the narrow staircase—the previous tenants, former Anglo-Indian officials, had abandoned the house, so my grandmother told me, because they could not sweep up and down it in sufficient style—was to be found my grand- father's study: the only room in the house that was decidedly his own, and marked by his private personality. Books, proofs and first editions rose from floor to ceiling, and upon the chimneypiece was a photograph much cherished by its owner. This portrayed an African chieftain surrounded by naked wives and warriors, with the simple words underneath this image of 'Macmillan & Co.' The unfortunate ambiguity of this picture—due no doubt to an unattentative proof-reader in the advertising department of this distinguished firm of publishers—delighted my grandfather; and so much so that when Kiriling begged him to surrender what he declared to be a group portrait of the directors of the company, my grandfather refused to part with it.
Passing by the most uncomfortable bathroom in the metropolis—among whose peculiarities was that in order to open the window, you had to climb into the bath—one might reach the top, or nursery, floor. In later days this housed the domestic staff, who never enjoyed even the modest luxury of piped water. This staff consisted of Annie, a kindly cook resembling any one of the three witches in Macbeth, a woman much addicted to Gilbert and Sullivan —of whose productions she had a vast collection of gramophone records which she sometimes played to my grandparents in the drawing-room —and who, somewhat disconcertingly consider- ing her profession, to all appearances ate nothing whatever, and subsisted on tea; also a succession of disgruntled house-parlourrnaids, for I do not think my grandmother was the most benevolent of employers. But in earlier days, two generations had been brought up there — my grandparents' three children, and then my mother's after she took refuge in her parents' house when her first marriage ended in disaster.
It is thus that I have infant memories of the house, as well as maturer ones. I can remember, during the First World War, being carried down to the basement for fear of zeppelins, and being given a whistle to blow out of the window at the German surrender in the war to end all wars. I recall my grandmother teaching me to read (Pauline's First Reading Book—does this still exist?) and reading aloud to us regularly—a family tradition, for even my grandparents often read to each other in the evening, and my mother continued this splendid practice, in later years when we left for Australia, to my own and my brother's immense benefit. I even remember my great-grandmother, Georgiana Burne-Jones, when she visited us in the nursery, and I frightened her out of her considerable wits by greeting her, in bed, disguised by an animal mask from the copious chest that my grandmother kept for dressing-up.
When my grandparents had both died, and the house was gutted, I must confess that I did , not feel great pangs. There had been too much of my life there, and the kind of life, despite its intense joys in childhood, was not really my own. I called, one day, when my mother was sorting out the accumulation of papers, and asked her how she had been getting on. She had been burning some letters, she said. What letters? Letters to Mamma from Mr. Ruskin, she rejoined. My heart missed a beat. My first vulgar reaction was that these letters were surely valuable. My second was that, whatever might be their content, they were of undeniable historic interest. But when my mother explained to me that they were the kind of letter that Mr. Ruskin ought not to have written to a young girl, my third reaction was one of grudging admira- tion. Those letters were a private, family matter, my mother considered, and thus not the concern of anybody else. And in this drastic action, I seemed to recognise a gesture faithful to the austere spirit of the house.
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