Arts

A tardy revival

Colin MacInnes

The death of a famed artist usually heralds a time of temporary eclipse, lasting often for a generation or so, after which his reputation either revives, or sinks gently to oblivion. Occasionally, it is true, artists vanish altogether, even for centuries, until their identity is re-discovered, as happened with Vermeer, or Jacques La Tour. Yet generally one may say that if an artist's reputation languishes for more than fifty years, the likelihood of its revival is but slender.

So what are we to make of the reputation of Edward Burne-Jones which, plummeting swiftly after his death in 1890, has suddenly soared again some eighty-five years later ? In the 'thirties, it is true, there was a centennial retrospective at the Tate, opened by his nephew Stanley Baldwin, but this attracted scant attention, and most of his paintings remained in the cellarage of public galleries, or the attics of the descendants of his original patrons. As for the cruel verdict of the salesroom, huge paintings, once respectfully commissioned for ample thousands, could now be had for modest hundreds . . . if there were buyers.

Nor, until quite recently, were there many indications that the revival of the 1970s was imminent. True, the public attitude to all things Victorian had greatly altered since the Strachey era of witty denigration; true also, that our fall from political supremacy had taught us some modesty about our wisdom, and a greater respect for the achievements of our immediate ancestors. True again, so far as the Pre-Raphaelite period went, there had been pioneering reassessments by Lord Clark, John Betjeman and William Gaunt. Yet even so, one could scarcely anticipate that 1975 would bring a highly successful exhibition of Burne-Jones's work, and a biographical study as respectful as that of Penelope Fitzgerald.

I offer in explanation some reasons having little to do with Burne-Jones himself, and others, more creditable, that derive from a realisation of neglected qualities he possessed both as a man and artist. As to the first, one may say that, if the achievements of contemporary English painters do not rank particularly high, those of our arthistorians and exhibition impresarios undoubtedly do, so that, in the very nature of things, these cultural entrepreneurs were bound to get around to Burne-Jones's case sooner or later. And then television, having discovered that the Pre-Raphaelite circle, hitherto present (if at all) in the public mind as persons as pure as were their theories of art, engaged, in reality, in somewhat eccentric extra-marital relationships, the public

was re-introduced to Burne-Jones as a minor character in these riveting domestic dramas.

Now for the better reasons. Even the educated had long considered Burne-Jones to be an 'establishment' figure of the late Victorian era, analogous to Leighton (England's only painter peer) and Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema. Now, it is true that, thanks to his friendship with Gladstone, BurneJones accepted a baronetcy, and hyphenated his plebeian Welsh name. It is also exact that, thanks to a purely personal regard for Leighton, he did enter the Royal Academy for a while, before finally severing all connection with it. It is also true that he never, like his lifelong friend and colleague William Morris, became a socialist, let alone a social radical. Nor, in the Ruskin-Whistler case, could his real, if conditional, admiration for Whistler overrule his loyalty to his earlier, if now manic, patron Ruskin.

Yet he was a staunch Gladstonian liberal, detesting all that Disraeli stood for, and manifesting this attitude publicly on numerous occasions. He loathed the jingo spirit of the innumerable colonial wars, and was as resolutely pro-Boer in the first war against them as, after his death, his widow was to be in the second; when, living alone in a Sussex village, she celebrated the final Boer surrender by hanging out an embroidered banner (a truly Pre-Raphaelite gesture!) inscribed, 'We have killed, and also taken possession'—the villagers' wrath having to be assuaged by her nephew Rudyard, who hastened across from The Elms in Rottingdean, where the young Kiplings had settled on their return from America, to protect his embarrassingly outspoken aunt.

And since, before the days of private galleries, exhibition at the Academy was vital for material reasons as much as for any hope of fame, the young Jones was obliged, though with the initial help of Ruskin and Rossetti, to create his own patronage by personal endeavour; for it was not until he already had a 'public' that the Grafton, and other emerging private galleries, began to show his work. And what is remarkable about his achievement is that he and his wife, though both persons of character and talent, possessed none of the conventional social graces or resources; while his style and theme of painting were ones which, however 'typically Victorian' they may seem to us now, were regarded with horror and disdain by the generality of painters, critics and, most importantly, patrons. This 'establishment insider' thus turns out to be, in reality, a maverick artist who, insofar as he did, in the end, win the respect and support of the powerful, achieved this, both artistic ally and socially, in his own way and on his own terms.

The revived interest in art nouveau and, in particular, the work of Aubrey BeardsleY, have also brought a greater understanding of Burne-Jones's key place in this development. Burne-Jones was not, of course, an original member of the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, any more than was his coeval William Morris; for while both were influenced by the older Pre-Raphaelite artists, they developed, especially in their creation of works of applied art for the firm of Morris and Cc), styles very different from those of their earlier mentors. These Morris and Co creations in turn influenced the burgeoning art nouveau movement of the turn of the century, while so far as painting went, BurneJones's impact on, and encouragement of, the young Beardsley, were vital to him. Then, after undergoing a short eclipse in the austere Bauhaus period of the late 1920s and '30s, art nouveau itself has since been increasingly admired until, by the 1960s, it became, in revised forms, a favourite style, especially among the young.

To this generation Burne-Jones therefore seemed not, as to their fathers, a decorous conformist, but a precursor and pioneer of the visual styles they most admired. Nor have present generations been in the least shocked by the revelations, well summarised by Miss Fitzgerald, of his infatuation with some of the more sensational ladies of the gifted Greek colony of Victorian London; rather the contrary, indeed, since this 'Victorian' figure appears to them to be in revolt against all they now least esteem about that era.

But I think it is an artistic quality that ultimately compelled attentions; to BurneJones's work, and assured its eventual revival. And this is, that whatever one maY think otherwise of his painting ,i BurneJones created a highly individual, and compulsively memorable, imaginative vision. One may feel that he ignored all the plastic and aesthetic developments that made of the nineteenth-century French school one of the greatest in visual history; one may even feel that his own vision is not only conveyed by meagre aesthetic means, but is in itself morbid, 'escapist' or whatever. And yet, it Is undoubtedly there; as was recognised instantly not only by intimates and disciPles, but by patrons as varied as dour north country merchants, fastidious Arthur Balfour, or hyper-critical Oscar Wilde. And indeed, the truth of the matter seems to be not so much that Burne-Jones suffered, until quite recently, from a merited neglect, as from the critical sloth of later generations who, rather than seeking to give even a hostile explanation of his earlier influence, have preferred to ignore or mock its impact on Victorian culture. And what, one may well wonder; wotd.c1 he think of this reawakened interest in his endeavours? This we may guess at by considering the clearly expressed views of the human person closest to him, his mid! Georgiana (henceforeward G B-J). An

since I must be one of the few people alive who saw her daily for two years, even if I was three to five and she in her late seventies, I would take the occasion of offering some personal recollections of her.

G B-J was one of the 'Macdonald sisters' Who founded yet another of those characteristic Victorian 'cultural dynasties'. Daughters of a remarkable Methodist minister, the Revd George Browne Macdonald, she and three of her sisters became wives or mothers of figures who, together with descendants of their own, now sit within, or about the portals of, the D N B; the most illustrious being the Burne-Jones, Poynter, Baldwin and Kipling families.

G B-J married Edward Jones when he was young, poor, and still a disciple of Rossetti; and remained his closest confidant and companion till his death in 1890. Thereafter she closed The Grange, once Samuel Richardson's house, and their often described home in Fulham, and retired for all seasons to North End House, the summer cottage they had taken in Rottingdean (in its later, much embellished, manifestalion, to be celebrated by Enid Bagnold in The Chalk Garden); and there she embarked Upon the writing of what Harold Nicolson Considered to be an English classic, The Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones.

It is indeed an astonishing creation, for though G B-J spoke and wrote letters with grace and clarity, she had never, until The Memorials, been 'a writer' nor, after comMeting them, did she ever write another line. The content is no less remarkable than the style; for though there are reticences as to Personal lives, some judgments (as of Ruskin) seem over-generous, and it is by no means r critical biography, it presents one of the best-informed and most revealing portraits of the whole Pre-Raphaelite era and ts aftermath. Indeed, all subsequent Writers on the period have quarried in it; Often, unlike the courteous Miss Fitzgerald, Without acknowledgement.

When G B-J came to London, she stayed with, her daughter Margaret, married to the scholar J. W. Mackail, later to be Professor of Poetry at Oxford, and a holder of the

• GM; and when World War I began, and it was thought, as in 1940, that the south coast might be invaded, G B-J came to her daughter's Kensington house for all save the months of summer. Meanwhile, in 1917, G B-J's granddaughter, my mother Angela, had left her husband, the singer James ,a1nPbel1 MacInnes and, in preparation tor the high drama of divorce, had also taken refuge in her mother's house, bringing her three children, of which I was the middle one. It was thus that, for some years tuntil my mother's re-marriage to an Aus.r.alian soldier, and our own emigration to hIS home land in 1920 (which was also the rear in which my great-grandmother died), Saw G B-J either in Kensington, or when we went on summer holidays to her house in Rottingdean. „ I have already described in the Spectator me Pre-Raphaelite spirit, as much of decor ation as of human conduct, of this highly unusual establishment—the more so then, as four generations were ensconced there. As to describing G B-J, I shall not attempt this in any detail, since infant recollections, however fascinating to their possessor, are apt to be tedious to anyone else. However: though I, God knows, was small then, I remember that, while most adults seemed giants, I could tell G B-J was an unusually small woman. I also knew that, although she was infinitely just and kind, one must not, as with other benevolent seniors, take any liberties with her. Compared with my more fanciful grandmother, I found her wanting as a reader aloud, for though she read exquisitely, she did not succeed, as did her daughter, in reading the speech 'in character'—without which agreeable gift, even Dickens can sound dull to childish ears. At her home in Rottingdean, I remember her tame tortoise, her triumphant fig tree, the unusual device she had for causing, by pressing a switch, the time to appear in ghostly blue figures on her bedroom ceiling, and also visiting the churchyard with her, where her husband was buried beneath windows of his own design, then my young sister Mary (carried off in the pneumonia epidemic), where she herself was soon to

lie, and more recently, her granddaughter and my mother, Angela.

What, then, might the austere and noble woman have thought of the `Burne-Jones revival'? That his work was loved at last, seen again, could scarcely fail to please her; nor, despite her own silence over his infidelities, would she, being no prude, have much objected to the franker (or more inquisitive?) spirit of our age. She would be pleased too, surely, that he stood revealed as an original and independent spirit, the more so as her own ideas were far closer to William Morris's towards the end.

But what I think would have pained her would be the total absence, in this modern re-appraisal, of any recognition of a quality in art which seemed vital to Ruskin and all whom he came to influence: namely, that art has at its highest a moral purpose—that it cart regenerate the spirit, as well as delighting the eye. This consideration seems irrelevant to us now, since we judge art-works by their appearance, rather than the motivation of their creators. The dispute as to whether art should serve God, or society, or exist as an end in itself, is as old as art history; and it may be that we incline to the latter view today because we no longer have any faith in human nature or redemption.