BIOGRAPHY: The Last Pre-Raphaelite: Edward Burne-Jones and the Victorian Imagination,By Fiona MacCarthy, Faber, 656pp. £25
AS A BOY, Edward Burne-Jones was stabbed in the groin, carried bleeding home from school and put to bed. His father was never told. At the time young Ned was friends with boys next door in Birmingham whose father would horsewhip them till they screamed and then drive them out into the night to wander the streets. Irish readers, mindful of our own child-abuse scandals, will appreciate the wounds inflicted on the future artist’s psyche. And, to strike another topical note, the months of savage rioting by Chartists that wrecked Birmingham in 1839 gave the six-year-old Ned nightmares.
But by then his sense of self had already been fundamentally wounded: his birth had killed his mother. Not surprisingly, he grew up loving women, and they him, but it seems he was afraid of his lust hurting them. In later life the combination of love and fear drew him towards the innocence of little girls, but the inclination was, I think we can be sure, innocent of action. An example of this smothered tendency is the painting he did of Emma Lewis, dressed all in dark adult blue, lying face down on a sofa. She was then eight years old, but the painter waited until she was 18 to deliver the portrait to her solicitor father, Sir George Lewis, who was delighted by it.
Although Fiona MacCarthy's expansive biography doesn't say so, Sir George represented Charles Stewart Parnell in his libel action against the London Times, which led to the suicide of Piggot the forger. We can infer from this connection that the supposedly unworldly Burne-Jones knew the world could be an evil place. It was also filthy: the machines of the Industrial Revolution were then whirring at top speed. As Burne-Jones rather preferred inert girls to the machinations of real women, so too did his art avoid the smuts of what he called "blackguard, button-making, blundering, beastly, brutal, bellowing, blustering, bearish, boiler-bursting, beggarly, black" Birmingham. Although he said he had "no politics and no party and no particular hope", except beauty, his rhetoric reminds one of the rantings of the Irish Chartist leader Feargus O'Connor, an instigator of the Birmingham nightmares.
MacCarthy describes Burne-Jones as “lower middle-class”, but while this was true in the English circumstance, Irish readers will look at the four-storey house his father owned and wonder at “lower”. Daddy, a gilder and framemaker, was also sufficiently well off to send Ned to Oxford. Similarly, the modernist notion that Burne-Jones’s work was “too-too-utterly” and “greenery-yallery”, which banished him to museum basements for most of the 20th century, was blind not just to his formal brilliance but to the raking light he shone on the Machine Age and its anxieties. Happily, tastes have changed, and it is by now not absurd to see Burne-Jones and William Blake as the two ends of the same resistance to the Satanic Mills of Albion.
Ned liked to represent himself, in MacCarthy’s phrase, as a pitiable object. But he had what Turgenev said the poet Belinsky possessed, “the timid sternness peculiar to nervous people”, and in his soul there was, in the words of his nephew, Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, “iron and granite”. The man to whom Burne-Jones deferred all his life, William Morris, was undoubtedly a greater genius as a personality, and yet, perhaps because of his superiority as a draughtsman (in itself a gift that, for proper use, requires moral strength), Burne-Jones did not succumb to Morris’s socialism – when he was offered a knighthood he took it, but only, he said apologetically, for his son’s sake. The hereditary part of a peerage, he hardly needed to say, is pretty much its whole point.
Another way of getting away from the red revolutions of politics and sex was humour, an avoidance technique Burne-Jones used from an early age. Any time his nanny – he was wary of her “potentially overwhelming fondness” – asked what he was thinking he always had the same answer: “Camels”. This constant jokiness is very English: Ned, after all, is a character in The Goon Show, and an avatar of Prince Charles. But Irish humour, in the portly person of Oscar Wilde, also appealed to Burne-Jones. At the artist’s first and only one-man show, the playwright wore a bronze-red coat, the back of which was cut in the shape of a cello. As Wilde’s commerce with prostitutes was revealed, Burne-Jones referred to him as “that horrible creature” and lamented that “he hadn’t had the common courage to shoot himself”. But, as MacCarthy intelligently points out, what upset the sexually tolerant artist was “his perception that Wilde had betrayed the cause of beauty . . . a heinous crime”. In any event Ned relented: before Oscar was released from prison he said, “I should shake hands or bow to him if I saw him.”
MacCarthy is shaky on Burne-Jones’s finances. For the wonderful Briar Rose series, she says he was paid £15,000, “around £1.8 million in today’s currency”, but she also reports that the studio sale after his death fetched £29,500, “approximately £1,700,000”. Whatever the correct conversion – the second figure is correct, whereas £15,000 is now worth £900,000, according to the UK National Archives – Ned had plenty of money and plenty to spend it on: a formidable wife, two children, a pair of substantial houses in London and what Dante Gabriel Rossetti cattily described as “a mansion near Brighton”.
He also had a mistress, Maria Zambaco, a Greek “of all too evident allure”, who was the wife of a suspected child pornographer and the mother of two children, one of whom had brain damage. If, in order to ensnare Ned, Maria exploited her “erotic capital” (a term coined by sociologists, irrepressibly romantic as ever), she didn’t do it for the money – she had an £80,000 fortune of her own. MacCarthy’s description of Zambaco’s eyes as “faintly baleful” seems harsh; the poor beauty often looks less sinister than scared. If Maria was guilty of anything it was “free love”. She gave herself freely to Burne-Jones and as a result he blossomed, as an artist and a liberated man.
In the end, which came soon enough, Ned, like many men in his situation, did the sensible thing and behaved badly: instead of going off with his lover to Greece, he stayed with his unsensual wife in Fulham. Maria attempted suicide by taking laudanum and jumping into Regent’s Canal. When the police arrived she and Ned were rolling around in the street, wrestling. That mortifying scene cries out to be described by a novelist; not, though, one of Wilkie Collins’s limited abilities, as MacCarthy suggests, but one capable of combining psychological and comic insights – Henry James, for example (if only he could have unbuttoned his vulgarity and set free his inner fishwife).
Burne-Jones, an “art Catholic” and, in his youth, “a whey-faced maniac” for John Henry Newman, was antipathetic to the Protestantism of the Establishment: “Belong to the Church of England? Put your head in a bag!” He particularly loathed St Paul’s Cathedral, and as a result his memorial service was held at Westminster Abbey. When he died his other famous nephew, Rudyard Kipling, said of him: “The man was a God to me.” A good deal of his all-too-human divinity is to be found in this enthralling book.
Brian Lynch is a poet, novelist, screenwriter and art critic
