law, and is largely the record of a life passed by the two friends in common. But the account of the boyhood will be fresh to every reader. From it we learn that Edward Coley BurneJones was born in 1833 at 11, Bennett's-hill, Birmingham; that his mother died when he was but six days old; that his father was an odd little man of Welsh descent, who never made a succes of his business as carver and gilder, but who retained his son's affection to the end; that Edward from the beginning was shy, delicate in health, charming in disposition, and that very early he gave signs both of a devotion to drawing and of an unusual power of thought on subjects quite outside the realm of art. As with so many English families, religion and theology greatly occupied the mind of the circle in which he moved as a boy; and here we have two letters on these subjects at the age of 15, which show a quite extraordinary power. It is strange, indeed, to think of the painter of "The Briar Rose" giving the best of his mind in early days to an analysis of the chief Christian sects and to a discussion of "the five points of the doctrine of Calvanism" (so he spells the word); but in point of fact, as his best friends always recognized, BurneJones had from the beginning to the end a real interest in metaphysical questions and a thoroughly logical mind. Till the middle of his Oxford time this interest directed itself through orthodox channels towards the ministry of the Church of England, for which his father destined him; then, as readers of Morris's Life will remember, there came a sudden change. The old beliefs relaxed their hold; beauty became a passion, and to realize beauty through art came to be the object of both their lives. Newman had left Oxford some six years before Burne-Jones entered, but the great man's influence had touched him when he was a lad at Birmingham, in the manner that he thus describes some thirty years later: When I was fifteen or sixteen he [Newman] taught me so much I do mind-things that will never be out of me. 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, and this so early that it was well in me when life began, and I was equipped before I went to Oxford with a real good panoply and it has never failed me. So if this world cannot tempt me with money or luxury-and it can't-or anything it has in its trumpery treasure-house, it is most of all because he said it in a way that touched me, not scolding nor forbidding, nor much leading-walking with me a step in front. So he stands to me as a great image or symbol of a man who never stooped, and who put all this world's life in one splendid venture, which he knew as well as you or I might fail, but with a glorious scorn of everything that was not his dream. That is one side of the picture; another is given in a rare extract from a letter to his father after three years of Oxford, after incessant meetings of "the sect," as they called themselves (Morris, Fulford, R. W. Dixon, &c.), and incessant readings of poetry, philosophy, and novels. The letter of 1854 sounds a new note, for in the interval there has come to the young man the revelation that is to make him the artist that we know: I have just come in from my terminal pilgrimage to Godstowe ruins and the burial place of Fair Rosamond. The day has gone down magnificently; all by the river's side I came back in a delirium of joy, the land was so enchanted with bright colors, blue and purple in the sky, shot over with a dust of golden shower, and in the water, a mirror'd counterpart, ruffled by a light west wind-and in my mind pictures of the old days, the abbey, and long processions of the faithful, banners of the cross, copes and croslers, gay knights and ladies by the river bank, hawking-parties and all the pageantry of the golden age-it made me feel so wild and mad I had to throw stones into the water to break the dream. I never remember having such an unutterable ecstasy. We need not dwell upon the wellknown story, here told at length, of the sudden shock of delight with which he first saw some drawings of Rossetti, how he went to the Working Men's College to see the great man, was kindly noticed by him, invited to the studio at Blackfriars, and adopted, if not as a pupil, at least as a younger brother in art. There is already a too copious Rossetti literature, and the poet-painter's reputation bids fair to be overlaid by fraternal tributes. But the occasional pages in which his relations with Burne-Jones are here described are of the greatest interest, and throw more light upon Rossetti's real position as an artist and as the inspirer of artists than almost anything else that has been published. For some years their intercourse was constant, and the debt owed by the younger painter to the elder was great indeed. Then came the tragic death of Rossetti's wife and his gradual decline in health and energy, till, in 1871, Burne-Jones writes, "as for Gabriel, I have seen him but little, for he glooms much, and dulls himself and gets ill and better and is restless, and wants and wants, and I can't amuse him." By 1880 he writes again to the same correspondent, Mr. Norton-"One night lately I spent the evening with Rossetti he has given it all up and will try no more, nor care much more how it all goes. It's nine years since he came to the Grange four or five times a year I go to spend a ghostly evening with him and come back heavy-hearted always." But the old brilliant days mained, of course, and up to the end they saw one another weekly, if not oftener; but Morris, though a devoted friend and a keen sympathizer, was not that perennial fount of ideas which, as all the evidence seems to show, Rossetti had been till his powers began to waste away. Moreover, Morris, in the last ten years of his life, came to be more and more possessed by the passion of a militant socialism; and Burne-Jones, though a Radical, a Parnellite and a Little Englander was no socialist so that there grew up what the book calls a "heart's division" on the subject between the two old friends. Small wonder if, with Rossetti dead, Morris partially estranged, and Ruskin no longer in possession of his marvellous powers, the Celtic melancholy of Burne-Jones grew upon him towards the end of his life, and if, in spite of those flashes of fun which continued to make intercourse with him so delightful, there was a prevailing note of sadness about his works and ways all through the later years. This, however, is to anticipate matters, for we have said nothing of those happy years which are described in the last half of the first volume-the years of his long engagement with Georgiana Macdonald; his early married life, with its struggles and first triumphs; the settlement at the corner of Howland-street, Fitzroy-square, and afterwards in Great Russell-street; the time spent with the Morrises at the Red House in Kent; the days of designing for "the firm," then beginning to make its first successful inroad upon the domain of the Philistines in art; the friendships, like those with young Swinburne the poet, who was as yet keeping for his friends the poems which were soon to electrify the world: and, finally, that move to Kensington square which the writer marks, not without regret, as the end of their first youth and of their Bohemian days. "De Morgan," she says, "sighed for the old Great Russell-street evening, when our little Yorkshire maid came in and asked, "As any of you gentlemen seen the key of the beer-barrel?' " One does not mentally associate the painter of "The Days of Creation" with beer-barrels; but none the less these records show that the second generation of pre-Raphaelite artists, for all their idealism, loved the happy freedom of the Bohemian life as well as any of their brethren in Montmartre or Chelsea. To a certain extent the move to Kensington-square meant a loss of freedom; and so, two years later (in 1867), did the final move to the delightful house in North End-road, Fulham (they now call it West Kensington), which to the end of Burne-Jones's life was his home, his workshop, a place of happy resort for a long succession of friends, and a place of pilgrimage for acquaintances and heroworshippers. There is no need to follow the chronicle of the work done here during thirty years, in the housestudio or in the garden-studio which presently had to be built; nor, indeed, does the biography encourage such a method of examination, for it is avowedly "Memorials," and neither a history of his art nor a catalogue raisonné. Nor is it worth while to make more than a passing reference to the chief outward events in Burne-Jones's career; the opening of the Grosvenor Gallery in 1877, when he, who had till then been called the artist of a coterie, suddenly came forward and captured a great public that was ready for him; his election as A.R.A. in 1885, his resignation eight years after, and the reasons of it (here indicated with sufficient point); the Graham sale in 1886, when for the first time it was proved that pictures by Burne-Jones were as eagerly desired as pictures by Millais; and, finally, the exhibition of "The Briar Rose" series in Bond-street in 1890. These are historical facts, no doubt, but they are external to the real Burne-Jones, and it is not for them that one turns to such a biography as this. The special and, as may truly be said, the unique interest of the book lies in the letters and conversations, fragmentary at best, but all of them of the most self-revealing kind, which are to be found scattered up and down the volumes, especially during the later pages. The difficulty for the reviewer is to choose among them so as to illustrate the many sides of this rich nature-his passionate devotion to his art; his doubts whether the world would accept it or any other poetic revelation as a corrective to materialism, selfishness, and prose; the overflowing humor which made his letters, whether illustrated or not, a joy to those who received them; his fine taste in literature; his acuteness in philosophical discussion; and, not less than any of these, his devotion to his friends. Nowhere does one get nearer to the real man than in the remarkable specimen of the conversations which, towards the end of his life, he used to hold with one of the latest of his friends, Dr. Sebastian Evans, poet and journalist, with whom he had invented a method of what they call "talking after the manner of the ancients," which the biographer explains as "speaking to each other as clearly as possible on things close to their hearts." The quasi-Socratic dialogue given in Chapter XXV., and dating from Burne-Jones's sixtieth year, shows the man and his philosophy with perfect clearness, and here is the striking passage with which it concludes: What you have to do is to express yourself-utter yourself, turn out what is in you--on the side of beauty and right and truth, and, of course, you as can't turn out your best unless you know what your best is. . . . What I am driving at is this:-We are a living part, however small, of things as they are. If we believe that things as they are can be made better than they are, and in that faith set to work to help the betterment to the best of our ability, however limited, we are, and cannot help being, children of the Kingdom. If we disbelieve in the possibility of betterment, or don't try to help it forward, we are and cannot help being damned. It is the "things as they are" that is the touchstonethe trial-the Day of Judgment. "How do things as they are strike you?" The question is bald as an egg, but it is the egg out of which blessedness or unblessedness is everfor lastingly being hatched every living soul. Of course you can translate it into any religious language you please; Christian, Buddhist, Mahometan, or what not. "Have you faith?" I suppose means the same thing. Faith, not amount of achievementwhich, at best, must be infinitesimally small-that is the great thing. you faith, my dear? Do you ever think of this poor old woman, our Mother, trudging on and on towards nothing and nowhere, and swear by all your gods that she shall yet go gloriously some day, with sunshine and flowers and chanting of her children that love her and she loves? I can never think of collective humanity as brethren and sisters; they seem to "Mother"-more nearly Mother me Have than Mother Nature herself. To me, this weary, toiling, groaning world of The London Times. men and women is none other than It lies on Our Lady of the Sorrows. you and me and all the faithful to make her Our Lady of the Glories. Will she ever be so? Will she? Will she? She shall be, if your toil and mine, and the toil of a thousand ages of them that come after us can make her so! This passage, perhaps better than any other, reveals the secret of BurneJones's inmost belief and the motive power of his painting. Its eloquence is striking; it shows that on occasion he could use words as effectively as he could use his brush. The time has not come to decide the question whether he succeeded, we will not say in carrying his beliefs into practice, but in leading mankind, or the better part of it, to see with his eyes and to feel as he felt. He himself, as we have seen, often experienced towards the end of his life the "sense of loneliness" which so often besets the serious artist. It is true that he founded no school and that the main current of art seems to be setting away from him. But man cannot live by realism alone, and-if we may adapt a phrase of Matthew Arnold-Burne-Jones and Watts, and the other poets of the brush, are sure of recognition because their influence will be kept alive by a force which does not fail-by the instinct of selfpreservation in humanity. II. Mr. Harry Keast to the Hon. Felix Stow. Dear Mr. Stow,-I have made some inquiries, and it is generally thought that the time is ripe for another large Meeting. The best dates would be either the 22nd or the 29th of next month-both Thursday, which is market day, when the country people come in. Yours faithfully, III. The Hon. Felix Stow to Mr. Harry Keast. Dear Keast,-I think the 29th is the day. I forgot to say in my last that you must get me a new Chairman. I really cannot stand Burge any more. Yours sincerely, Felix Stow. IV. Mr. Harry Keast to the Hon. Felix Stow. Dear Mr. Stow,-We have fixed the 29th, and all that now remains is the Chairman. The opinion of the influential men here is that you must get Sir Bonian Bogg. He controls a great number of votes and is very highly respected, and is the only man for whom Burge would be willing to stand down. It would be best for you to write to him yourself. Yours faithfully, Sir Bonian Bogg to the Hon. Felix Stow. Dear Mr. Stow,-Before I give my consent to preside over your Meeting I must be fully satisfied that your views coincide with mine on various important problems of the day. Please therefore state as concisely as possible your attitude to the following questions: (a) Old Age Pensions. (b) Deceased Wife's Sister. (d) The Zionist Movement. When replying please mark your letter Z334, as I deal with all my correspondence by method. I am, Dear Sir, Yours faithfully, Harry Keast. V. Bonian Bogg. IX. |