THE LEGEND OF THE BRIAR-ROSE.
Tan critic who, against the undertaker passion of his kind, comes to praise Caesar and not to bury him, feels all the same certain scruples of his trade forcing him to make some show of criticising. He would much rather simply rejoice and admire at a great birth of Time and Art ; but it is in his commission to be conscious not only of the picture, but of its spectators. It will be convenient, then, to speak to some of the points of attack.
Enter, then, first, the modern painter, with his aims and metliods,—say, an ordinary boy, fresh from Julian's atelier. tie would as likely as not deny to Mr. Burne-Jones the name of painter altogether. He has been taught that painting is the effort to render the object as it appears in light and atmo- sphere. Subject and design matter little, for the sun shines on the just and on the unjust; and the poetry of light is given away as much with the just man in a tall hat, as with any- thing in itself beautiful. Now, for Mr. Burne-Jones, he would say, atmosphere does not seem to exist ; the distant object is merely a sort of miniature of the near. Nor, again, does light exist as an agent playing conjuring-tricks with colour, so that five minutes' more or less elevation of the sun alters not merely the strength of colours, but their quality; in this kind of painting a colour is a fixed element in a mosaic that the time of day does not affect. Once more, the drawing is not a close study of the forms of Nature. There is little modelling from life. Even if all this were true, which it only is in a rough caricature way, the truth would be misplaced. If the painter were trying to compete with reality, he must be judged on these terms. But if the principle of his art is less imitation than design, then he is free to throw away as many of the conditions of reality as he pleases. We do not complain of music that it is an unsuccessful imitation of the sounds in the street ; so drawing, if it chooses, may take up or neglect the suggestions of Nature, the pattern in the designer's head determining how much is to be taken and how much left. The roses will be borrowed from the garden, but will also be wrought into a kind of tapestry; and the very faces, however much they may approach to the actual and the individual, will wear still more strongly the birth-mark of importunate dream.
Then might follow the critic who has adopted the latest and most puzzle-headed of formulas. He shudders at a painting that has anything to do with poetry, or that contaminates itself with a story. His simple idea is that poetry and stories are necessarily "literature." "Whereas the poetry and the story are, of course, a common property, and it is as absurd to insist on turning out the footlights as it would be to gag the actors ; and when done it is as futile. When the reader has achieved the acrobatic feat of reading without a picture- context springing up, then he may go on to demand a painting addressed only to the eye, with no context of ideas and associations.
It is, of course, true that, given a story, the best moments for the writer and the painter are not necessarily the same. The moving and speaking moments belong to the writer, the scene and the still moments belong to the painter. And this point brings up naturally a third critic, who is aggrieved that Mr. Burne-Jones has not been more dramatic ; has not in- cluded the Awakening of the Princess in his series. The painter is wiser in two degrees. For one thing, his genius is not dramatic. The Awakening might, indeed, be painted ; but he is perhaps not the man to Taint it. The only active figure here, that of the Prince, is the least expressive. And more generally, the sleeping part of the story is more the proper field of the painter than the waking. Here, indeed, we might carry the war into the territory of the former critic, and point out that the poet who tells this story is the real usurper in Art, if there is one. He does, indeed, carry the story through ; but it is the picture he is tempted to dwell upon. Indeed, it is characteristic of Tennyson, and of Keats before him, and it explains why they were the inspiration of the Pre-Raphaelite painters, to linger amid the still life of their themes. Their sleepers wake perforce. And the painter here, with a painter's tact, seizes on the setting of the story—the Roses ; and upon the actors in the still part of it—the Sleep.
Roses,—their branches have been bent in the designer's brain. They are not to be only a tangle and fence, but to suggest by their form the repetition of waves (they have risen like a tide high over the defeated knights, and lifted the escutcheon of each of them above his head); and the snaky coil and spring of something more than a wave, the curse-
" that floats and flows About the tangle of the rose."
And those loops and arches bind in and govern the whole composition.
Sleep,—the whole thing is a frieze in sleep as that of the Parthenon is in movement—variations on still face and relaxed limbs. This repeated expression becomes most beautiful in the third picture, with its two gently modulated waves of girl-figures drooping from the action in which the spell found them. Most beautiful of all, perhaps, is the girl leaning against the upright of the loom, or the lovely invention of the weaver's arm frozen as it threw the shuttle. It is always the sleep and dream in a face that Mr. Burne-Jones's art renders, —the lines and hollows about the eyelids and the eyes. When the eyes open, they do not observe or search or challenge what is without,—they only disclose their dream. This story might have been made for him to paint, and he seems to let the waking or sleep-walking Prince come in under protest ; the frame will barely let him stand upright.
What is to become of these pictures ? Their subject is not canonical enough for the chapel, and one would not like to see them in the cruel jumble of the museum, " illustrating a phase." They seem to demand a home and setting of their own, as aloof in place as they are in sentiment, to be visited on summer mornings when the roses are in flower.
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