and miracles, designed to show that the knights and monks of old possessed every conceivable virtue. At the end we are returned to nineteenth-century industrial England, ‘and it is as if the night had closed on us, and we are among tangled thorns’.
The author forestalls objections by telling us that these are ‘thoughts that breathe, and words that burn’. It is not a book to analyse, but to be lost in, and if we cannot do this we are not likely to understand Morris’s early poems or Burne-Jones’s early water-colours, the freshest of all their art.
Sintram and his Companions is the winter story in the tales of the four seasons by H. de la Motte Fouqué. Its inspiration is Dürer’s Knight, Death and the Devil, which appears as the frontispiece, and this woodcut version meant more to Morris and Burne-Jones at Oxford than any other graven image. Ned, who was beginning to try to draw, was fascinated by the compact oneness of man and horse, and the electric tension of the line. ‘No scratching of the pen,’ Ruskin wrote, ‘nor any fortunate chance, nor anything but downright skill and thought will imitate so much as one leaf of Dürer’s.’ But to Fouqué, ‘musing on the mysterious engraving’, the importance of the Dürer was its allegory of the noble soul. The hero’s inspiration, in his struggle against his own violent nature, is his mother Verena, who cannot receive him in her cloister in the snows until ‘all is pure in thy spirit as in here’. The vile dwarf, ‘the little Master’, appears to him in moments of sexual temptation, and Death, the bony pilgrim, plays an ambiguous rôle, so that at the end Sintram, who has met him more than once on his journey upwards, must still wait for him.
Among the many haunting moments is the fear which possesses Sintram at the first sight of his own reflection in his bright shield. This image of adolescence recognising its own possibilities entered deeply into Burne-Jones’s imagination. The idea of Sintram’s perseverance went to reinforce others, his father, for example, walking ‘tired miles’ to see a cornfield, Newman at the Oratory, Morris’s offer of all his income to found ‘the monastery’.
If Sintram is inspired by Dürer’s engraving, The Heir of Redclyffe is inspired by Sintram. This, Charlotte M. Yonge’s first real novel, was published in 1853, the very year that Ned and Morris first read it, and, like her other books, was corrected by Keble. Against the background of an amiable country vicarage the hero, Sir Guy Morville, struggles to control the inherited curse of a violent temper. He even cures himself of biting his lip and of ‘cutting pencils’. And Keble’s teaching, that we can live life as a ‘common round’ and still give up the world, is understood so intensely by Guy that his soul consumes his body.
There was, of course, nothing unusual in two young men reading and feeling deeply affected by these three books in 1853. The Broadstone had been one of the hermetic texts of the Young England movement, which Disraeli had tried, or pretended to try, to turn into practical politics. Newman had been so agitated by Sintram that he could only read it in the garden, and alone. The Heir was to be the favourite reading of the young officers in the Crimea. The odd thing is not that Morris and Burne-Jones should have read them so eagerly, but that doing so should have turned them into artists. In 1853 they both intended to enter the Church; in 1854 they still meant to found a monastery. Within a few years they would be collaborating in a decorators’ firm. But there was no real change of moral direction.
The direct link beween Sintram toiling through the snows and the ideal of craftsmanship was Ruskin. Far more attractive than Carlyle’s specific of hard work was Ruskin’s doctrine that to work at anything less than the highest was blasphemy. The second volume of Modern Painters told Burne-Jones and Morris that painting was ‘a noble and expressive language, invaluable as the vehicle of thought, but by itself nothing’, and, as Ned recalled, everything was put aside when the Edinburgh Lectures came out and Ruskin declared that academic painting was at an end and that truth and spirituality lay ‘with a very small number of young men’ who were working here and now in England. These were the Pre-Raphaelites, ‘a somewhat ludicrous name’. In this lecture, as Morris read it aloud to him, Burne-Jones heard for the first time the name of Rossetti; ‘so that for many a day after that we talked of little else but paintings which we had never seen, and saddened the lives of our Pembroke friends.’
However, the two of them had not been affected in quite the same way. The Edinburgh Lectures singled out the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (P.R.B.) for three things: their technical superiority, their ‘enormous cost of care and labour’ (this was to become Ruskin’s Lamp of Sacrifice), and their ‘uncompromising truth’ which in itself was a moral quality. Morris accepted all these things; so that later, when it appeared to him that art, after all, was not a teacher, he would be driven to exclude it from his ideal commonwealth. But Burne-Jones did not, either then or later, believe that art was a moral instrument of any kind. The idea struck him not only as unlikely (‘hardly anything is a lesson to anyone’ he told Rooke5) but irrelevent. What he knew from his own experience was that beauty is an essential element without which human nature is diminished. If art gives us beauty it will make us more like human beings.
At the beginning of 1854 Ned wrote a letter to his father which indicates clearly the ‘unmanageable’ nature of his need for beauty that winter. ‘I have just come in from my terminal pilgrimage to Godstow and the burial place of Fair Rosamund. 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 colours, 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 crosiers, 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, it was quite painful with intensity, as if my forehead would burst. I get frightened of indulging now in my dreams, so vivid that they seem recollections rather than imaginings, but they seldom last more than half an hour; and then the sound of earthly bells in the distance, and presently the wreathing of steam upon the trees where the railway runs, called me back to the years I cannot convince myself of living in.’
From this it appears that ‘ecstasies’ and day-dreams were an accepted part of Ned’s life; in fact that he induced them, and that his experience of Godstow arose from a combination of the winter twilight, the water, pure colour, the legend of Fair Rosamund and her name itself. Burne-Jones seems to have gone on these visits by himself, and the feeling of alienation at the sight of the railway is characteristic. On the other hand, back at Pembroke there was the tea-kettle and chaff of an enviable simplicity, often apparently, ending with a bear-fight, which consisted of pushing someone else over on the floor.
An acute crisis was gathering which bear-fights could not relieve, and it was in this year that Burne-Jones, and probably Morris also, lost their belief in any doctrinal form of Christianity. For Burne-Jones, the process of loss was an agony, even though mid-nineteenth-century Oxford was well accustomed to counsel on the matter. At one point he was very near to ‘going over’ and following Newman, Hurrell Froude and Wilberforce on the path to Rome. This, in 1854, would have been called ‘submitting’. Certainly, Morris and he did not emerge on the other side with the same faith. Morris’s belief was ultimately in this earth, ‘the nesting and grazing of it’, the men and women that inhabit it, and what they could make with their hands. To Morris, humanism came naturally. Burne-Jones, on the other hand, had long been accustomed to hiding his deepest convictions. In later life he was reported as blandly saying that the Resurrection was too beautiful not to be true, and quoting with approval R.L. Stevenson’s Samoan chief who refused to discuss the Deity, saying that ‘we know at night someone goes by among the trees, but we never speak of it’. He became adept at such evasions. But in truth he found, like Ruskin, that to be born Evangelical is a lifelong sentence. He continued to believe in the Gospels, but transferred the meaning of the events, in particular the Annunciation, Mary’s loss of her Son, and the Passion, to the everyday life of humanity. The Redemption meant the alleviation of suffering in this world, and Judgement Day was a continuous process; and there were only two questions asked in Judgement – why did you, and why didn’t you?6 The artist has the opportunity to supply the beauty which most lives noticeably