ART.
THE LATE SIR EDWARD BURNE-JONES. DEATH has taken away from among our artists one who was not only important for his own work, but for his influence on other men. The art of the man whose work is finished was of
the imitable kind, hence his influence was visible. From this it must not be inferred that the imitators equalled the master, for that was not so ; but some men are capable of imitation while others are not. As an instance of the art that cannot be imitated it is only necessary to quote that of Mr. Watts. This artist's manner is so abstract, so deeply personal, and the form so completely a part of the underlying idea, that unless the imitator could make his own the poetic inspiration that lies below the surface, the mere form and manner can be of no use to him. The conventions created by Mr. Watts to embody his thoughts are of no use for the embodiment of the thoughts of other people. This is not so with Sir E. Borne-Jones. The conventions he used were quite capable of use by others. Designers of all kinds were influenced by him, and the forms of beauty he developed were taken up and used in many branches of art ; not by mere imitators, but by capable artists who found that their own ideas were best expressed by the intelligent use of these symbols which had emanated from a master. If we ask how came it that this master was imitable, where is the answer to be found? The answer is that the artist had himself derived his conventions from existing sources. He was no mere copyist, but he assimilated ideas of form and colour from the early Italians ; and these he used to express his own personality. Sir Borne-Jones is reported to have said : " I am not an Englishman of to-day, but a Florentine of the fourteenth century." In the spirit which prompted this saying lies his greatness and his limitation. In the early periods of art, before freedom has been attained, the vulgar and the common- place are scarcely to be found, and austere, though limited, beauty reigns supreme. By his devotion to this early art Si, E. Burne-Jones perpetually kept himself in touch with a great and serious style of painting free from soulless realism, and by this he was the gainer. But this isolation from the present made his art remote and unhuman. How could this attempt to put back the wheels of time succeed ? Benozze Gozzoli was a modern Florentine of his day, and his art still lives. But had Benozzo tried to reconstruct the epoch of Cimabue, should we care for him now ? Hardly,—a galvanised mummy cannot touch the heart as does a living man.
The works of Sir E. Burne-Jones, considered from the technical point of view, raise many interesting questions. First, let us take composition. This may be of two kinds. Either a picture may be made up of a variety of figures and other objects, which, like a mosaic, are cunningly pieced together. Or else the parts may be brought into such intimate relation that the whole appears to be the result of a single act of creation. To the former class belongs the work of the painter now under study. His pictures are pieced together with the greatest skill, but they are always a mosaic. It is- impossible not to feel that the given parte might have been rearranged, and still have produced a satisfactory result. The pattern of the picture is put together with enormous skill, but it has not the quality of inevitableness possessed by the other class of composition alluded to. As with composition, so it was with colour. The eye travelled over the canvas delighted by exquisite patches of colour. The effect aimed at seemed to be that of a casket of jewels. There is a way of producing a gorgeous harmony by subtly balancing colours,. no one much stronger than the other, till the whole picture glows, while no portion insists on itself. This style was practised by the great colourists of Venice, such as Veronese and Titian; the chromatic impression made by their best works is not of a splendid piece of blue, red, or orange, but of a general glow of colour pervading the picture. In fact, sometimes it is astonishing how little positive brightness of hue there is to be found in some of the finest works of the great colourists. This was not the case with Sir E. Barrie-Jones. When he was in the humour for splendid colour, he applied it to his pictures in harmonious but isolated patches. When gorgeousness was not a part of his idea, his sober tones became almost a monochrome. In form lay this painter's, greatest originality ; he may be said to have invented a type of feminine beauty, which was largely copied. The peculiarity of this type was the negative sadness of the faces. For some- reason, this artist seldom allowed his men and women to betray any definite emotion,—a veil seems drawn between us and the people of these pictures. They hardly ever seem, ..ctuated by an overmastering and definite impulse to
be read in their faces. A mask keeps the soul from looking out. That this was intentional is proved by the two pictures which contain facial expression rendered with supreme power. There is no question as to the emotion of the mermaid in The Depth of the Sea, or of that of the Royal lover in King Cophetua. These two pictures show that the painter cast aside facial expression for some reason of his own, and not because it was foreign to his powers. Some draughtsmen realise a figure as a whole, view its weight, balance, and movement, its contour and modelling, as it were, simultaneously. Others realise the figure bit by bit, as it were,—build up detail upon detail till the whole is put together. Each system has its merits and drawbacks. The danger of the former plan is that figures done by it may be too formal in their suppression of detail. The danger of the other system is that general impression is forgotten in the multiplicity of parts. For this defect there is no cure unless the artist is possessed of a very strong sense of construction. It is in this direction that Sir E. Burne-Jones's figures are most open to criticism. Conscientious to the last degree, as may be seen by the beautiful drawings he made for his pictures, too often figures which were irreproachable in all their parts failed to satisfy the eye trained to look for coherent structure. No wealth in the invention of details— and extraordinary inventive powers this artist had—can ever hide faults of construction. The imagination of Sir E. Burne- Jones was definitely of a Celtic nature. Magic and enchant- ments seem to be the natural surroundings of the people of his pictures; love-potions and spells are everyday occur- rences in their world. The great forces which shake the souls of men have only a faint echo in this dim fairy land, where love and death even seem like some fantastic game. The great variety of means of expression possessed by Sir E. Burne-Jones seemed to mark him out as a man who could have accomplished some great work of artistic decoration. If only the country could have realised what a palace of art this man could have created, we might have possessed a great national monument, for he had an endless fertility of decora- tive invention, and could use stained glass, tapestry and mosaic, as well as he could painting. Had the artist lived in Florence four hundred years ago no doubt such a work would have been entrusted to him, and some church or palace would have become a marvel of beauty under his hand. Nowadays, painting unless it is enclosed in a rectangular gilt frame seems hardly understood; and so often a mind which natu- rally tends toward decoration of the highest kind, is forced into channels not fitted for it.
The nation, no more than his friends, could spare the man who has just passed away. There are too few left of that great band of imaginative painters who have glorified English art during the last fifty years. For whatever may be said to the contrary, men always come back to the art which possesses imagination. All the artistic talents imaginable, if untouched by the fire of the spirit, become cold and dead in time, but imagination will keep a work of art alive through ages. It is because Sir E. Burne-Jones's work contains imagination that it is valuable. There have often been finer colourists and better draughtsmen among men who had not his poetic vision, but their work will not live. Even if Burne- Jones cannot be accorded a place by the side of England's two greatest imaginative painters, Turner and Watts, still what he has given us is so valuable a possession that his name and his work will not be forgotten. H. S.
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