you?’
While these convictions came painfully to him, Burne-Jones had very little reason to believe that he would ever make an artist at all, yet, oddly enough, he had already received his first commission. Archibald Maclaren, surely one of the most unusual proprietors of a gym that Oxford has ever seen, had compiled a volume of the fairy ballads of Europe, and entrusted Ned with the illustrations. Ned had begun a series of minute figures in pen-and-ink, for steel engraving, in the style of Richter and still more of Dicky Doyle, whose set for Ruskin’s King of the Golden River appeared in 1851. Doyle, however, had been trained by his father since infancy in exact draughtsmanship, whereas Burne-Jones had nothing but Mr Cawell’s hints, a few evenings at the Birmingham School of Design, and his own amateur sketches. The illustrations drove him to despair, and in fact were never finished, although Maclaren deferred publication in the hope of getting them.
Meanwhile Morris and Ned were on fire to see the Pre-Raphaelite paintings of the Edinburgh Lectures, or some of them, or even one of them. The place for modern pictures was Wyatt’s, in the High Street. They were allowed there on sufferance, Wyatt apparently lacking the dealer’s instinct which would have told him that the well-off Morris, in his untidy clothes, was a potential buyer. ‘We used to be allowed to look at Alfred Hunt passing through the shop – it would have been too great an honour to be allowed to speak to him.’7 This was because Hunt, the water-colourist and landscape artist, was reputed to have seen Millais and Holman Hunt. But in this same year, 1854, Wyatt exhibited Millais’s The Return of the Dove to the Ark, lent by Mr Thomas Combe, the director of the Clarendon Press. The gesture of the girl on the left, gravely and confidently holding the dove to her breast, had seemed ‘dull’ to Ruskin, but made a deep impression on Burne-Jones. Six years later, when Butterfield commissioned him to do an Annunciation window, ‘I insisted on [Mary] taking a dove to her bosom – an innovation; and Butterfield never asked me to do anything again.’8
During the following long vacation, Morris went for a tour of northern France and Belgium, and Ned, depressed and penniless, had no alternative but to go home. On the way to Birmingham he passed through London, staying as usual with his Aunt Catherwood. He emerged, half-deafened by brass bands, from the Crystal Palace Exhibition. Paxton’s building itself struck him as a ‘length of cheerless monotony, iron and glass, glass and iron’; he did, however, have the chance to visit the Academy, where he was not looking, but searching. He understood what the Crystal Palace meant, but didn’t like the meaning. The Academy pictures, sacred, grand-historical, domestic, fruit-and-flowers, animals and children, seemed not to have meaning at all. Maclise he particularly objected to, resenting the Maclise illustrations to La Motte Fouqué. The picture of the year was Frith’s Ramsgate Sands, which was bought by Queen Victoria; what Ned was looking for was spirituality expressed through colour. In the Stones of Venice Ruskin had just written of colour as the ‘sacred and saving element – the divine gift to the sight of man’. He had also dismissed Salvator Rosa’s pictures as ‘gray’; as Burne-Jones told Rooke, ‘I was very sorry when Mr Ruskin said I mustn’t like Salvator Rosa, but I didn’t hesitate.’9 Only in Holman Hunt’s Light of the World, which was exhibited in the Academy that summer, did he find what he was beginning to understand by colour. Later he came to feel that Hunt’s eccentric schemes only worked on very small canvases ‘and then they can’t be put out of mind’.10 He ceased to admire the Light ‘except for the lantern light, and the things against the door’. But in 1854 he had not yet seen a Rossetti.
The next months had to be spent in the crowded little house in the Bristol Road, where Miss Sampson cooked as she had always done and Ned had to conceal from her in the old way his painful religious doubts. He was also tormented, as he wrote to Crom Price, by ‘love-troubles I have been getting into’, and terribly stuck with the drawings for The Fairy Family. Morris’s letters described the wonders of the cathedral towns of northern France, and gave as much comfort as the travel letters of luckier friends usually do.
Term was late, because of the cholera epidemic, and Ned was ‘sick of home and idleness’. But Morris blew back like a rough wind with a whiff of French onions and water-meadows, and in October they were able to get rooms next to each other in the old buildings at Exeter, appropriately ‘gable-roofed and pebble-dashed’. Here Morris began a new series of readings, this time from Chaucer. He was not disappointed in Ned’s reaction, and perhaps did not notice that, once again, it was different from his own. Burne-Jones’s interpretation of Chaucer was weaker than Morris’s, but more subtle. He never liked the fabliaux, and thought of them, just as to begin with he thought of Morris’s table manners, as the lessening of an image. Before long he came to accept Morris as he was, but he continued to avoid the Miller’s Tale. On the other hand he was a most discriminating reader of the Legend of Good Women, the Parlement of Fowls, the House of Fame and the Romaunt of the Rose. With true insight, he saw Chaucer as sophisticated, courtly and sad. He understood perfectly Criseyde’s remark that we are wretched if we despair of happiness, but fools if we expect it; he responded to what was wistful, dry and ironic in Chaucer, and also to his occasional lapses into total sentimentality. It was only when, at the end of their lives, Morris and Burne-Jones set out at last to collaborate on the Kelmscott Chaucer that the discrepancy between them, which they would never admit, appeared.
It might still be possible, it seemed in the autumn of 1854, to found the Brotherhood, even if by now it would have only the most tenuous link with Newman. Crom Price was still willing. But Morris had begun to write poetry, was mad about the French cathedrals which everyone must visit at once; Crom noticed that the two friends ‘diverged more and more in views, though not in friendship’. It was at this point that Burne-Jones ‘wanted very much to go and get killed’ and actually tried to join the army: the Crimean War had been declared in March, and the Government was offering commissions to undergratuates to replace the terrible losses from untreated wounds and Asiatic cholera; Ned applied to the Engineers,11 and would have been just in time for the march on Balaclava. It was a mercy that he was rejected on the score of delicate health as, neat though he was in all his movements, he was defeated by the simplest mechanical devices, even drawing-pins.
Morris himself put an end to this agony by the sheer presence of friendship; and at the end of May 1855, when they ought to have been entering seriously on their second Trinity term, they were all at Camberwell – Ned, Morris and Crom Price – scrambling about London to see pictures. They had got permission to visit the collection of Benjamin Windus, which at this time included Millais’s Isabella, Madox Brown’s The Last of England, and Arthur Hughes’s study for The Knight of the Sun, though Windus, like other collectors, had ‘laid off’ by buying Maclise’s Youthful Gallantry. But there were no Rossettis in his house at Tottenham Green, and therefore nothing to correspond with the Blessed Damozel, which Morris and Burne-Jones had just read in a chance copy of The Germ. At the end of the summer, however, they were introduced at Oxford to Mr Combe himself – kindly, encouraging, boring, a patron of Hunt and Millais since 1850. At Mr Combe’s they saw, at last, a water-colour drawing by Rossetti – The First Anniversary of the Death of Beatrice – Dante Drawing the Angel.
All that the friends liked was ‘jolly’; everything they did not like was ‘seedy’. Morris still felt that the French cathedrals had been jolliest of all and that Ned must see them; since Ned was too poor to afford the train fares, they must go about on foot. A walking party was made up for the next vacation – Morris, Ned, Crom, William Fulford – though at the last moment Crom could not come.
This was Burne-Jones’s first venture abroad. Fulford and he read Keats to each other at the railway hotel at Folkestone before the crossing, and at Amiens he was up early to make a drawing of a street scene. As they walked the French roads, the rich mythology of William Morris developed; his boots were uncomfortable and he tramped on in ‘gay carpet slippers’, attempting, like the Heir of Redclyffe, to control his violent temper. The slippers wore out as they reached Beauvais, where they attended High Mass at the cathedral on 22 July.
Beauvais, like Hereford, Burne-Jones apprehended as a synthesis of music and spatial relations: ‘the ancient singing … and the great organ that made the air tremble