ART.
MR. BURNE-JONES.
THOSE who dislike Mr. Burne.Jones's painting are in no want of reasons for their dislike, some of them good, some of them good enough to serve. There is the reason that the painting is not cheery and robust. That is a good reason. There is many a cheery and robust person who never has been wistful, and never will. There is an end of the matter ; it is a final difference. He that is cheery will be cheery still, and will be proud of not being able to enter into another mood. But a very real and cordial dislike sometimes expresses itself in reasons that are not themselves valid. Some of them may be enumerated (1.) That this painting is literary.
(2.) That its subjects are not modern.
(3.) That its manner is antiquated.
(I.) "Literary" is a convenient word of abuse, and has some force when applied to a painter who adopts a subject from poetry, and relies on a memory of its literary treatment to do that to the feelings which he is incapable of doing by the means proper to his own art. To write up The Burning of Troy over an ill-designed daub, and trust to the music of Virgil's verse to assail the feelings instead of the music of line in the flames, would be the act of a "literary" painter. But the word in connection with Mr. Burne-Jones is singularly out of place. He is primarily a designer with a passion for coils and tangles of line, and in the less special matter of the dividing and fitting of spaces there are a hundred instances to show that space in its shapes and distribu- tion affects him as sound does a musician. These, then, are the resources of his art, and he applies them, now to an image out of a book, as the musician his notes to a song, and now to an image out of his head. A tangle of lines is a delightful thing, like abstract music, but it is all the more delightful if you discover it in a wave, or in smoke, or in hair, or in a story ; and Love in a Tangle does not make the tangle less pictorial because it makes it poetical. In some of the pictures the motive is more purely rhythmical, as in The Golden Stair; sometimes the rhythm is about a story, as in the sleeping figures of The Briar Bose ; but the picture does not rely upon the story, the story relies upon the picture, upon the music of line and space.
(2.) That an artist should be of his own time is a most im- pudent demand to make. He is a designer against it, and would really, if he could, rub us all out and design us over again. That is why pictures like Mr. Borne-Jones's affect people not merely with dislike but with anger. They feel in- stinctively that here is a plot against their peace, a protest against; their existence. It is, therefore, the safer plan for a painter to disguise his aims, to get his patterns out of the fashions of the day, and let the flattered subject suppose the merit of the art lies in its actuality. But to get labyrinthine effects out of close-cropped hair and frock-coats would be a difficult proceeding ; an ulster does not, like armour, take the form of "splendid weeds ; " it is in the toilette of more fantastic times, or in the forms of more extravagant creatures, like angels and mermaids and dragons, that the artist of the tangle will find free scope. He must leave it to the artist of the line and blot, a Steinlen or Legrand, to find his patterns in the cafe or the street,—he will do better on the shores of old romance. For nothing is more ludicrous in result than for an artist to apply his natural manner to the wrong subject. It is as when Tennyson sets a dignified verse to deal with a picnic. In prose, or in the verse of another, it might be well enough, but into that verse the pie refuses to come, being somehow not a solemn dish.
(3.) But, it will be retorted, what is wrong then is that the manner is antique, that the painter is reviving a conven- tion that is out of date. The argument is obviously absurd. The convention of outline, or of outline and flat tint, is as eternal as any other. If, when you look at a wave, what impresses you is not an image modelled out of light and air and colour, but the maze of its lines of motion, clear outlines, with or without a flat tint to give an allusion to its colour, will be the convention best expressing the character of your impression. Having a passion for intricacies of line, the images you take from natural objects will be what these can afford of such intricacies ; hair will not be a dusky muffle, but a system of serpentine curves ; drapery, not broad and simple colour-spaces, but infinite folds and plaitings and wind-tormented ribbons.
It is, then, no demerit in a painter that he should discard the prevailing modern convention in painting,—the convention that includes the facts of shadow, of distance-value, the fusing of outlines according to the relief of one thing against another. These are elements to take or leave as the artist pleases ; and it is no more to the credit of his picture that he has attempted to combine them all, than to that of a cook that be has made a dish of seven ingredients, instead of two. What is required, is that the dish shall taste well, whatever the number, and that nothing shall be put in merely because it was in the larder, unless it adds to the pleasure of the result.
Now, it is really under this head that a great deal of Mr Burne.Jones's painting is assailable. It is not the strictness of his convention that is at fault, but its want of strictness, those parts in which he attempts realism without getting value for his pains, The extra nature he labours to introduce only upsets the equilibrium of the elements that were there before, which he had really mastered and really enjoyed. To make this clearer, examine the effects of his elaboration in two matters,—modelling and tone. In his early work under Rossetti, such as the two lovely water-colours illustrating Sidonia the Sorceress, he frequently, like Rossetti in his happiest work, is not preoccupied with modelling or tone. A good Rossetti is like this. A woman's face hardly modelled at all tells as a clear space of simple tint against a crowded space of imagery, of which part is a richly figured dress and the rest a background on which objects are embroidered like patterns on the dress ; that is to say, they have no distance value given to them except in the reduction of their scale. By thus throwing overboard modelling and tone and atmos- phere, it is possible to arrange the most curious and beautiful colour, mosaic, But Rossetti wrecked his convention by the introduction of modelling that was not good as modelling, and only muddied his colour. The same thing seems to happen to his pupil. When he is absorbed in the modelling of his figures, the difficulties of a task which is uncongenial to his powers plays havoc with the sense of colour, and instead of the glowing, simple flesh-tints of the early water- colours, we get the brown, unpleasant tint of the larger paintings. In the same way, the preoccupation with tone makes mischief with the sense of colour.
In pictures like the Chant d'Amour, the Mill, and. The Hours, the human figures are in no sort of natural illumination, and there is no reason why they should be. But the same hardihood is not extended to the back- ground and sky. The painter seems there to have attempted natural tone and gradations of colour without getting them, and in the worry of this research he has forgotten to put these colours into a decorative relation with one another, or with the conventional parts of the picture. There is an incoherence of half .realism and half-mosaic convention. Perhaps this incoherence comes out most strikingly in The Garden of Pan, where the painter has clearly laboured at a real piece of nature for his scenery. As a decorative colourist putting one tint against another for pure pleasantness, he could never surely have hit on that unpleasant green of his landscape, nor on the unpleasant brown of the figures; but the attempt in the one case to get the shapes and shadows and values of the fields and trees (an art in which be is unversed), and in the other to get the modelling of the bones and muscles, has so taken up his attention, that the principal affair, the picture as an arrangement of colour, has come to grief. How different the result when be is not thus troubled about many things, but holds and controls the elements of his picture firmly, there is, fortunately, a neighbouring example to show. In the Sea Nymph there has been no worry over natural effect. The forms of waves have been resumed in a delightful pattern of plunging lines, and a colour given them that sufficiently explains them to be sea ; but that is itself a pleasure as colour. So with the sky, and so with the flesh,—simple, beautiful tints, with few gradations, stand for them, and do their main duty- of being right side by side. Then the fun comes in when the tangle of red hair is blown out against the frame, and the flick of the tail is designed, and the sea-forms are parodied in the little monstrous gurnets, and the colours echoed upon their scales. In this picture, too, just because the painter held his inten-
lion firmly, not only is the colour-scheme coherent and beautiful, but there is more of suppleness and zest in the brushwork, a quality in the paint wanting in the others. Oppo- site these hangs another sea-nymph, even finer in design than this, and her face a wonderful expression of elfish glee. But 4111 relapses again into tired brown and green with the worry over natural effect. How different a garden Pan might have had if the trees had grown in it, as they do in some other designs, where the tree-forms are as freely invented upon, as the forms of water in the Sea Nymph ! And what a thousand pities that so great a wealth of poetic feeling and pictorial invention must suffer a heavy discount because of tentative handling !
The deductions must be made ; but when one returns to a design like that on the inside of the piano-lid in the central hall, one acknowledges a master. Where is there such another vine, such an invention of springing and coiling and returning lines filling the spaces with its excursions and reluctances, and weaving itself about the impish babies P Or, take the initials to the rEneid, Juno in her peacock-car, or the death of Dido, or a dozen other drawings in which stories are translated into the dialect of flame or wind or flowing water. Who, again, ever drew a sleepy head so well ?
• The Muse who taught Spenser the drowsy secret of his verse and its picture-imagery, put her spell upon Keats, and he fell 'dreaming of all manner of soft and painted things ; and for Keats's heir in poetry she double-drugged the verse, and let the images almost visibly burn. And then she called a poet, who was also a painter, and led him into the hollow romantic land, where he drew the crowded dream-places and the spell- bound faces that be saw. Then the Muse, who is called .Nimue, laid on another her hypnotic hands, and by her enchantments, wherever he went the locked-up shapes of things were loosened, and took life like the spider-bitten tune, weltering and dancing. And he met only sleep.walking lovers, or shapes half-human, half bird or fish or snake. And where he passed it was as if a wave of sleep and music had washed up the things and the people, and left them strewn.
D. S. M.
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