Carrie and Rudyard left on honeymoon, planning an around-the-world trip after first taking a look at Vermont, Carrie’s home state. This meant that they would miss Stan’s wedding.
Stan had been spending more and more of his free time in Rottingdean. The attraction was no longer his Aunt Georgie, rather it was her friends across the way. Mr Ridsdale was an assay master at the Mint and Mrs Ridsdale was a force in village life, ‘sailing down the village street, commanding of figure, a large silver-topped leather bag always hanging at her side, a word for everyone, an eye to everyone’s business’. They were the terror of the neighbourhood, their ‘alarming frankness of speech’ reducing outsiders to jelly. ‘In any other family the torrent of criticism and plain speaking which burst out would have meant a violent family row. But with the Ridsdales it was merely a family conversation.’1*
Into this atmosphere came Stan. Stan had always been shy, diffident. Like his father, he suffered from a facial twitch, and in addition he had a nervous habit of snapping his fingers: not precisely the kind of personality that would be thought suited to the Ridsdale rough and tumble. It was Stan’s love of sport that had brought him into contact with Lucy Ridsdale, known as Cissie, two years his junior and a stalwart of the Rottingdean ladies’ cricket club. Village cricket was taken extremely seriously by the whole family: Cissie and her brother Arthur wrote a description of it which nicely captures the flavour – a combination of wildness, great seriousness and charming eccentricity:
John Sladescane, ‘Civil John’ as he was called, landlord of the Plough Inn … supplied the cricket luncheons on Beacon Hill, or ‘Bacon Hill’ as the villagers called it, to home and visiting teams at 2/6 a head, with a barrel of beer on tap all day.
The luncheon table, forms, mugs, barrels, etc., were all carted up to the top of the hill via the windmill and a booth erected. There was a long table and cloth, with forms but no chairs except for the scorer.
This booth was covered with canvas with a place at the side where you bought glasses of beer on tap from a barrel, ginger beer, shandygaff, etc. The booth was always counted as a boundary, which the villagers called ‘a boother’.* Dandy Hyde, one of the old characters, often tipsy, was an enthusiast and always attended matches: he sometimes stood umpire and his attire for those occasions was a grey square bowler hat, frock coat and light trousers. He was not employed for serious cricket, for when appealed to ‘How’s that?’ he never said ‘Out’ or ‘Not Out’, but would turn to the batsman and say, ‘If ’ee do it again, I shall give ’er out!’ Old Trunky Thomas, the bathing man, was another of our ‘umpires’.2
Because of the slope, Beacon Hill was not ideal for cricket, particularly in those pre-boundary days. Its topography lent itself to one of the many shaggy-dog stories that vie to describe the most runs ever scored off one ball. The ball was hit down the hill. When it was finally retrieved, it was thrown hard at the stumps, missed them, and rolled all the way down the opposite slope, to allow a staggering sixty-seven runs for the batter.
All this was irresistible to Stan. His emotions were bounded by home, Church and cricket – and here was Cissie, a member of a large, loving family, with a religious cast of mind, and a demon fast bowler to boot: not a combination to be found just anywhere. He was besotted, and allowed his affection to pull him out of some of his shyness: on his way home from one visit he sent Cissie a telegram from every station between Brighton and Worcester. He kept his feelings to himself, as was his habit, and told his parents only in April 1892, when he had already proposed and been accepted. Even when he was planning to make the break from his family home, he remained the dutiful son. He told Alfred and Louie that he hoped he and Cissie would ‘live to be half as good to everybody & as much of a blessing to the community as you’.3
Louie arrived at the Norfolk Hotel, Brighton, in August, nearly a month ahead of the wedding, in preparation. Agnes came down too, and Georgie was of course at North End House. This was a sisterly reunion, something that was getting rarer all the time as they grew older and their family demands remained while their energies decreased. On 12 September 1892 Stan and Cissie were married from Cissie’s home in Rottingdean. The honeymoon was of a seriousness appropriate to such a serious man – a tour of the cathedral cities of the West Country. They then moved into a house that Stan had rented not far from his parents, Dunley Hall, where they were to spend the next ten years. They settled down to the life of a prosperous businessman and his wife, and Cissie learned to modify her behaviour to suit Stan’s temperament. If she called out suddenly, if she coughed too long, if they had to drive in foggy weather, he became worried and afraid. She stopped appearing in amateur dramatics, because he found it too distressing. Anything could become an ordeal – a speech, reading the lesson in church, going to the dentist, even speaking to his workers. His son claimed that any of these horrors could make him turn white, sweat profusely, feel nauseous. An orderly, quiet life was what he needed, and what Cissie gave him.
The Rudyard Kiplings were not the only ones to miss Stan’s wedding – Lockwood and Alice had returned to Lahore towards the end of 1891. With them went Edie, invited to spend a few months in the Kiplings’ now childless home. Lockwood worried that ‘Alice of that ilk would be considerable lonely now her Trix is gone, and she will be glad of a companion in the long days when one is at work.’4 It did not work as well as they had hoped. Edie herself said on her return to Wilden that she had found the climate ‘not kind’; Lockwood was more forthcoming. He clearly felt for Edie, even as he realized how funny she was:
In this little shanty we have been a good deal drawn towards gruesome thoughts because of poor Edie Macdonald who has been very near death during the past week and at the moment is only better in that the fever has left her – pretty much as the surf leaves a swimmer after a battle for life, high and dry on the beach, but exhausted. She had remittent fever (which really had no intervals) for fifteen days … she has been conscious all the time – perhaps better for her, but very serious for her nurses (Alice and Trix [who had come home to help her mother], with a professional lady). Because in the clearest way and with perfect self-possession she has, as Trix says – ‘bossed her illness herself, ridden on the whirlwind and directed the storm’, giving instructions at most frequent intervals and constantly announcing her most immediate dissolution. The Bishop … has been most kind. He gave her the Holy Communion during one of these convictions of death and was much struck by the terse, calm … way in which she spoke of herself in extremity and just about to go … Alice and Trix are a good deal worn … by the incessant watching and nursing, for not half an hour passes but she asks for something. Both doctor and nurse say they had never seen a case like it, for fever so bad and so long continued generally leaves the patient with very little will … But with Edith, her constant cry is – ‘Now give me something, I am sinking’, – and she has been able to take nourishment and stimulant enough for a man at work …5*
Far from India, its fevers and family, Rudyard and Carrie now decided that, rather than return to England, they would make their future in America, and they bought a parcel of land in Brattleboro, Vermont, on which they planned to build a house. In the meantime they settled next door, into the aptly named Bliss Cottage, lent to them by Carrie’s brother Beatty Balestier, and awaited their first child. There had been some talk about going to India – on a trip or for longer is not clear – but this was aborted, ostensibly for financial reasons. It may partly have had to do with the fact that Carrie was pregnant; it may equally have had to do with another fact, which was that Carrie and her mother-in-law were, to say the least, not soulmates but rather two strong women fighting for control of one man, who only wanted a woman to look after him.† (Carrie, throughout her married life, adopted Rudyard’s name for Lockwood – the Pater – while she resolutely called Alice ‘Mrs Kipling’ until the day she died.) She and Alice were alike in dominating their menfolk, but Carrie’s slow, rather prosaic mind was never a match for Alice’s barbs, which clearly stung. She took her revenge in disparaging Alice to anyone who would listen. Soon after her marriage she wrote to her mother, ‘Mr. Kipling said last night, “Cant [sic] we make the mother [that is, Mrs Balestier] come”. But he cant make his mother either … but it is quite for a different reason for she is selfish about it.’7 Carrie was never one to worry about beams while discussing other people’s motes.
There was enough to keep her occupied. She and Rudyard had an architect draw up plans for their house, which measured ninety by twenty-six feet and had eleven rooms. Rumours of its lavishness and cost were to reach ludicrous proportions. Beatty later claimed that it cost $50,000.* Rudyard was rather more realistic. He wrote to the editor of the Ladies’ Home Journal, ‘When are you going to bring out a set of articles “Housekeeping in all Countries” – with weekly bills appended. You owe the innocent public some amends for luring them to financial destruction with $1000 and $1500 houses. I know these cheap houses. They end by costing from $5600 to $11,374. I built one.’8 Even this was an enormous sum, and it is an indication of how well Rudyard’s writings were doing. In addition, a more permanent occupation came their way. Josephine Kipling was born a few days after Rudyard’s twenty-seventh birthday. One source (admittedly prejudiced) claimed that the father was disappointed the baby was not a boy;† if this had been the case, within days he was infatuated. Mary Cabot, their friend and neighbour in Vermont, went so far as to say that Josephine ‘was Mr. Kipling’s idol’.9* He had always been fond of children; four years later he commented to a friend in England whose wife had just given birth, ‘Now you are a complete man.’10
As their children moved into their adult lives – settling down with wives, husbands, children, houses – the earlier generation accepted the shift in focus, but did not necessarily feel their own lives were over. Before the 1892 general election, yet again the local Conservatives offered Alfred a parliamentary candidature in the division of his choosing. Unlike 1884, when he had refused, this time he accepted, choosing West Worcestershire, the safest seat. He was returned with a plentiful majority.† Alfred saw parliamentary office not as a route to advancement, but rather as an obligation – a duty conferred upon him as part of his role as leader in the community. One of his fellow magistrates, who had served with him for many years, understood this well: ‘He was a man that one rarely met with in this world … His great idea and one that he fully carried out was to do his duty to God, his King and his country, and therefore to humanity.’11 Alfred rarely spoke in the House, but was a busy and useful committee member, in particular in dealing with special interest groups that he knew intimately through his business life. He was no longer simply an ironmaster, even a prosperous one: in London he was now a director of the Metropolitan Bank. He also became a director of the Great Western Railway, based at Paddington.12
Louie, in the midst of all this business activity, continued on the path she had set for herself, publishing her third book, Richard Dare, in 1894. By now the pattern of Louie’s novels must have been obvious, maybe even to her. As usual, in Richard Dare there is one man who is caught between two women. This time he is a doctor. In her next novel, The Story of a Marriage, published the following year, it is a young upper-class man interested in ‘social questions’ who must decide between two women. Again, as in the template set in her first book, all the men choose wrongly at first, only to be redeemed by the love of the good woman in the final chapters.
It may have been her inability to break out of this rut that led to Louie finding an ‘adviser’. She began to send material to her nephew Rudyard for his comments. Over the years he patiently, endlessly, went over her work, pointing out her strengths and weaknesses. Dozens of letters from him survive, all along the lines of ‘It’s good work well conceived but, as usual, the descriptive part is much weaker than the dialogue. When your characters get to talking they live and move all right but you must look out for new adjectives and new cadences and new methods of approaching common objects in your descriptions.’13 He gave her advice about how to publish short stories; he asked publishers of his acquaintance to read her manuscripts. If nowhere else, his fondness for her shows through in these letters – never impatient, always treating her as his equal in the writing game. It was more than ordinary kindness, particularly as Alfred felt, now that his wife was a published author, he could not discuss her work with her. In token of thanks, Louie dedicated her collection of ghost stories, published in 1895, ‘To My Friend and Kinsman, Rudyard Kipling’.
The letters to Rudyard found him wherever he settled. He and Carrie had nearly finished their house in Vermont, which was to be named Naulakha, after the novel Wolcott and Rudyard had begun together, and presumably in Wolcott’s memory. In March 1893, although they had not yet moved into the new house, Lockwood was for the first time able to travel to America to see them. He had been unwell for almost a year, and was now anxious to retire. Alice too was keen to leave India – despite nearly thirty years there, she had grown no fonder of the place than she had been when she first arrived. The only catch, as usual, was money. Officially, Lockwood had not worked for the civil service for his first three years in India and he worried that he would have to work an additional three yean in order to collect his pension. Five months before he had written to Rudyard that he would leave the next day if it were not for that, ‘but I have a morbid horror of going abegging’,14 and he would not pull strings. This may have been an oblique way of asking Rudyard for help. If it was, it worked. Rudyard spoke to some people who spoke to the Viceroy; Lock-wood’s long service and distinguished career were taken into account, and by the early spring of 1893 Lockwood and Alice were preparing to return home for good.
On her visits to England, Alice had become particularly friendly with the Burne-Joneses’ friends the Wyndhams. They had been building a house outside Tisbury, in Wiltshire, for several years, and Alice decided that this would be the perfect place for herself and Lockwood to end their days – near their friends, and in a less expensive area than they would find around London. It is notable that Alice did not consider either Rottingdean or Worcestershire. As with her children’s education, perhaps she thought being near her family would still cause ‘complications’. From Liverpool, where she landed, Alice travelled to the Grange and stayed with Georgie and Ned until she had found a house; Lockwood went straight on to New York to spend six months with Rudyard, Carrie and Josephine.
Lockwood, as usual, made himself agreeable, and was immediately at home. Carrie reported to her new friend Meta, the wife of Lockwood’s old friend from India and near-namesake Lockwood de Forest:
The father is vastly pleased with everything he sees and his sober judgement of me and things is delightful. He has the keenest eye for all the differences in ways and means and immensely admires our handy ways … He … is at present most occupied painting pictures of all the animals on cotton cloth which I cut out and button hole onto a large square of cloth which is to be used for little Jay as a rug when she sits on the floor. He is so patient with all our inconveniences and little difficulties of living that I am much less unhappy than I could have hoped to be over his being in these small quarters …15
Finally, however, Carrie decided that the men were more trouble around the house than they were worth. When the time came to move from Bliss Cottage to Naulakha, she sent them to Quebec. Lockwood was a bit shamefaced about it to de Forest:
To the outer world I suppose that the spectacle of Father and Son mooning round appears decent enough, – but I’m not sure that the severe moralist might not find serious fault with the conduct of two fairly able-bodied men who have both deserted their wives and a severe domestic crisis. Rud: is sent away because he would be very much in Carrie’s way now that like General Wolfe storming the heights of Abram [sic], she is attacking and driving out the French (carpenters and painters) from the new house, and I am keeping away from England to give Mrs. Kipling a free elbow in getting in to the little shanty she has taken near Salisbury.
It is sad from the moralists’ point of view, I fear, – but amusing from mine.16
Ten days later, when the de Forests received a letter from Rudyard solemnly telling them that ‘when the workmen take to drinking malt extract out of the refrigerator besides stealing the lard to grease their saws with, it seems to me that a man must stay by his wife’,17 they probably knew whom to believe.
It was not only with his family that he was agreeable – Lockwood made friends everywhere, by the age-old formula of being interested in whatever he saw and heard. On a train
I noticed a gold mohur hanging on a man’s watch chain in the ‘smoker’. So I beguiled him to talk and he told me he was in Calcutta for some years, – the last representative of the Tudor Ice Company that used to import … ice, Kerosene, apples and lumber &c, and he further declared himself a sworn admirer of the works of one Rudyard Kipling. I found it very amusing to listen to this, but at last I told him I knew that author.18
Then the gadding about ended and in October Lockwood returned to England, where Alice had found a house for them, although it would be some time before they could move in. Still, it had ‘hot and cold water and bathroom and many more conveniences than one is apt to find’, and all for £33 a year – a very reasonable price.19 In the interim she had not made Lockwood’s easy conquests, for she never had his ability to fit in wherever she found herself. At the end of her three months with Georgie and Ned, Ned wrote of his relief that the visit was over, although ‘it rather touched me that she did not see I was not in harmony with her – yes, I’m glad it’s over’.20
He was writing to Mrs Helen Mary Gaskell, known as May, the final woman he was to romanticize. As with Mary Zambaco and Frances Horner before her, she was younger than he – this time twenty-five years younger (he was her father’s age, and his second grandchild, Denis Mackail, had just been born). She was married to a captain in the 9th Lancers, and had children nearing adulthood herself. As now suited Ned, she moved easily in the moneyed world where he had grown so comfortable. The Gaskells had three homes – near Marble Arch in London, in Lancashire, and in Oxfordshire – and they travelled between them. With May away so much, he wrote to her every day – and often half a dozen times a day.21
He set out to be amusing. He sent her cuttings from newspapers (‘At Westminster Police-court, John Thurston, a boy of twelve, residing with his parents at Lower Sloane Street, was summoned under the Police Act, at the instance of Inspector Noviss, for discharging a missile, to wit, by spitting from Chelsea Bridge at a passing steamboat on the 7th inst. – The defendant pleaded guilty.’)22 He regained some of his youthful interests: ‘The lady whose shoulders are tattooed with the Last Supper is in town – is at the Aquarium – and I am going with [Luke Fildes] to see her. On Saturday he [Luke] saw her – the tattooings are still perfect – only she is somewhat fatter, and all the faces of the Apostles are a little wider, and have a tendency to smile.’23* He also turned some of what he considered to be the travails of life at the Grange into amusements for his upper-class friend, who, he seemed to feel, would not have to undergo such indignities herself. A new char came to work at the Grange: ‘Mrs. Wilkinson and I have had a very interesting conversation, and I see we shall get on well together for life. She said “Good morning sir” and I said “Good morning” and I think this has cleared the air.’25
Despite this new love, Burne-Jones had been depressed for months, and he had begun 1893 no more happily. In February he had decided he could no longer, remain a member of the Royal Academy. He confided to May, ‘It is an honour to be associated with about 6 of them – and nothing at all to be associated with about a dozen more of them, and positive disgrace to be allied with the rest.’ Despite his assurance here, he had recently been going through one of his periodic crises of faith regarding his work:
I have worked so badly this morning that I even took the model into my confidence, and said I wished I had never been born – indeed what a solution of trouble that idea suggests – and who would have been the worse off? Georgie? Well, it would have been much better for her – she could have married a good clergyman – Phil and Margaret? Well, I don’t know what they would have been, it is outside practical politics, even practical metaphysics … My friends? They would have been in the same case as Phil and Margaret. They would never have known their inestimable loss – and be none the wiser, nor foolisher. My purchasers? Oh, they could have saved their money – The art of the country? There is no art of the country – I have only bewildered it. The public – OH D—N THE PUBLIC and the public be d—d. A few art critics, god help them poor creatures, would have earned a few less pennies-a-line. I really think they are the only ones to whom the least difference can have happened – and it would be morbid to lament their case.
… I must have cost such a lot in food, too …26
He may have been reduced to the depths by the sight of Ford Madox Brown. Brown was fading fast – he would be dead by October – and he had never received the recognition Burne-Jones felt he was due. A couple of years before, Burne-Jones had had to encourage his friends to club together to buy a painting, anonymously, to ensure that Brown had some money to live on. ‘It is sad’, he wrote to Val Prinsep, ‘to think of the dear old fellow at the end of life, alone and unlucky.’27
That was one form of patronage – the kind one hoped never to need oneself. The other sort, putting a word in with influential friends, was different, and Burne-Jones had no problems with that. In October 1893 he wrote to the only person he knew with Oxbridge contacts, his friend Mary Gladstone Drew. Mary’s sister Helen was still at Cambridge, and might be expected to know what was happening in Oxford as well. He asked ‘if the Greek Professorship at Oxford is a settled thing already – more likely it is – and if you said “Yes, it is all arranged” then it would save Angela’s papa from much labour in his already over-taxed days – but if it isn’t he would try I think.’28 Little did he know his daughter. Mackail was anxious to return to academia, but, whenever it was mooted in the coming years, Margaret – normally the softest, quietest of women – showed that she was her parents’ child. She combined her mother’s determination with her father’s nervousness, and tears, hysteria, long periods locked in her room were guaranteed until the danger was past. When Mackail gave up the idea of leaving London, she would emerge, smiling, and return to her place as the shy wife of a rising civil servant. Even the Mastership of Balliol was refused so that Margaret could stay near her father, where he could drop by regularly, listen to her practise her music, play with her babies, stroll in the neighbourhood with her. They were no less attached than they had been before his marriage – Burne-Jones described to May a typical day in which he had gone to visit Margaret in the afternoon, ‘then I came home to dine. We grew restless and went back to look at Margaret for another hour and so back to bed.’
If it did not work for Mackail, Burne-Jones was always willing to lend his influence to other family members. In 1892 the question of who was to replace Sir Francis Burton as director of the National Gallery when he retired in 1894 came up for consideration. George Howard, now Earl of Carlisle and a trustee of the gallery, wrote to Gladstone to say that he felt strongly that the new director should be a painter, not an administrator. Poynter, via his brother-in-law, made it known that he would be interested. Burne-Jones wrote Mary Gladstone Drew a preliminary note:
I wonder if very soon would not be the time to present the substance of that letter about the Directorship of the National Gallery – I heard your father had given over this matter to Sir William Harcourt – but that might be rumour – if so it would be useless for me to plead I suppose, for I do not know him and my partisanship might be injurious – I wonder if you know or could discover – the new appointment will be made, I am told, at Christmas …29
He must have been given some encouragement, for in August the following year he wrote to her again, in a letter clearly intended to be passed on to her father:
[This] is a sort of business letter – pray thee observe that it is dated – it was no trifle to find the date, for to ten days or so I never know how any month goes on. – It is a subject I do want you if you can, to mention to your father – and it is to save him if it were but one letter that I ask you to be my mouthpiece and to bring the matter before him at a fitting moment – It regards the appointment of a new Director of the National Gallery – which I learn from Sir Henry Layard* may probably take place before long. Burton having done his work finely and being full of years and deserving of rest–I want to say, if it is any use my doing so, that I believe Edward Poynter, whose name has from time to time come up in connection with the idea of a successor to Burton, is so admirably fitted and equipped for the post that I should like your father to be aware of the fact.
I need not say this opinion is as it were a public one – based upon private knowledge of his qualities and capacities–the fact of his being a connection of mine does not count in it – this I may say to you for you would believe me – and indeed is it human to call a brother-in-law a relation at all? That wouldn’t influence me one way or other you will believe, I know. But he would do splendidly for the post – he is a good man of business, has a great knowledge of ancient art, indeed I think he has no superior in that science – and of modern too – with a very wide sympathy for good work at all times and schools – moreover he is a most conscientious fellow – and laborious and painstaking beyond word in all that he does.
I know Layard, who is Senior Trustee and Lord Carlisle have a very high opinion of his fitness knowing both the place and the man, and as I have lately learned that he himself would be willing to accept the position if it were offered him, I determined to say what I could on his behalf before any names are mentioned – for honestly I don’t know that a better man could be found.
He does not know that I am writing this, nor would he ever push himself forward in this or any other matter that affected his own interest – so his friends must do for him what he would never stir a step to do for himself- for he is a most proper gentleman.
It is a most serious matter to creatures like me, of whom there are probably too many, who shall be the next chooser of treasures – but I do hope I am not asking you to do anything you will really dislike … Layard told me that he himself had no idea that Poynter would take the place if it were offered – and that unless he would come forward in the matter it might be assumed he was indifferent to it – it wouldn’t [sic] be like him. I have never seen anyone who would do so well there – and on the strength of Layard’s hint, I wrote and definitely asked him if he would accept supposing it were offered to him – and he said yes but in a voice so low that it might have been an offer of marriage, and there I must leave it in your judicious hands.30
With this letter, Burne-Jones shows himself to have been a shrewd judge of character. A civil servant or a businessman might have wanted to get his protégé the job out of self-interest; an artist, he is saying, is surely above that, and he proves he is an artist at the very start: his mind is on higher things – only those whose minds run on the mundane know such tedious things as the date. In addition, he emphasizes what he knows will be considered Poynter’s strengths for the job: he has two strings to his bow – both working artist and, as Slade Professor and director of the Art Department at South Kensington, a known administrator. (He does not, it is clear, think that it is worth spending much time discussing Poynter’s ability as an artist, but the two together are useful.) And then the final consideration: Poynter is ‘a proper gentleman’ – who could hope for more?
As an artist, Poynter had been made prominent by controversy. He was still producing his sub-Alma-Tadema-ish pictures of the domestic lives of ancient Greeks and Romans – Caesar and Calpurnia at home, that sort of thing. Historical painting was, despite the rise of the Aesthetic movement nearly a quarter of a century before, continuing to be publicly well received. The Art Journal in 1896 wrote that people in historical pictures ‘are beautiful types of humanity … undisturbed by any sordid emotions. Their lovers’ quarrels and reconciliations, their partings and welcomes, and all the other small events of their placid lives, are presented with a gentle suggestion of properly ordered passion which recognizes the importance of obeying the laws of self-repression laid down by good society.’31 In addition, it was clear that a lot of work – both scholarly research and actual painting – had gone into each canvas, and the influence of Ruskin held: the amount of work involved in any picture in part determined its artistic value. By this measure Poynter’s work was meritorious, and it may have been in reference to this that Burne-Jones described him as ‘laborious and painstaking beyond word’. In general, his pictures were received without great enthusiasm. The technique and the research that went into them were praised, but no one ever went into raptures over his canvases.
In 1885 there had been as usual a large number of ‘antique’ pictures on display at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, including Poynter’s Diadumenè, a painting of a young girl binding up her hair before stepping into her bath. It was based on a pose inspired by a sculpture by Polyclitus, discovered in the 1870s, showing a male athlete binding up his hair before entering a competition. Poynter’s reworking of the subject should therefore have been sanctified by its connection to the antique, but ‘A British Matron’ wrote to The Times following the opening of the exhibition, saying that the ‘indecent pictures that disgrace our exhibitions’ were ‘an insult to that modesty which we should desire to foster in both sexes’.32 Others sprang to the artist’s defence – ‘An English Girl’, ‘Common Sense’ and ‘A British Parent’ all wrote to support Poynter the following day, and John Brett, a landscape painter, suggested that ‘the lady calmly assumes that purity and drapery are inseparable … that decency and indecency are dependent on a textile fabric’.33 After another two days of battles in the letters column, even Jerome K. Jerome weighed in:
Sir – I quite agree with your correspondent, ‘A British Matron’, that the human form is a disgrace to decency, and that it ought never to be seen in its natural state. But ‘A British Matron’ does not go far enough in my humble judgment. She censures the painters, who merely copy Nature. It is God Almighty who is to blame in this matter for having created such an indelicate object.34
But Poynter did not want a public dispute. He certainly didn’t want one that looked as if it might turn into a joke. He had, as always, the courage of others’ convictions and added clothes to the offending figure, despite writing to The Times himself to claim that the purpose of the picture had been to show what a Greek or Roman bathroom might have been like – art as social history, which would ‘lift my figure out of the category of baigneuses of the French Salon’.35 He was not in the market to offend anybody.
In his theories on art he was grandiloquent, if unhelpfully vague. A modern critic has commented intelligently on his lectures:
Since Greek painting has perished entirely and is known only through a very few Roman imitations of doubtful accuracy, it might seem difficult to create a genuinely Hellenic style of pictorial art. The Victorians were not so easily deterred … Poynter was able [in his Lectures on Art] by some mysterious insight to draw detailed comparisons between the developments of the Greek and Italian schools: Polygnotus was the Orcagna of Greek art, producing works ‘in a severe style, without perspective … possibly of one colour’, while Zeuxis probably combined ‘the pictorial and monumental character in about the same degree as the exquisite little picture of the Graces by Raphael … or, may we venture to bring in for comparison, at least as regards simplicity of arrangement and perfection of composition, the Creation of Adam and the Creation of Eve in the Sistine Chapel?’ These speculations combine apparent exactitude with an enormous vagueness: if one can compare an artist equally well with the heroic grandeur of Michelangelo and with Raphael at his most miniature and precise, one might as well admit to ignorance.36
At the time, however, Poynter’s theories went down remarkably well,* and he had his supporters for the National Gallery job. The Earl of Carlisle said that his training in France would be useful. France remained the mecca of serious art, and Poynter’s background would enable him to value what came out of that unwholesome place better than one who knew it less well. Some people in England were demanding that, of all ridiculous things, Impressionist paintings should be bought for the nation, and Carlisle noted that this ‘discloses a real danger, and one which can be best guarded against by the director possessing, from his own training and study, a criterion which will enable him to resist the demands of temporary crazes and modern fashions’.38* But there were others equally prominent who did not support him–Morris put forward his friend (and Burne-Jones’s old studio assistant) Charles Fairfax Murray; Carlisle himself wavered in the two years before the appointment was made and in the end supported another candidate. When Poynter’s appointment was announced, in April 1894, Sir Frederic Leighton, president of the Royal Academy, wrote to Lord Rosebery that ‘on public considerations … I deplore the appointment more than you can possibly imagine’.39 This is interesting, as Poynter and Leighton had been friends since they were students in Italy together in the 1850s, and Poynter was wont to boast that he was the only man Leighton allowed in his studio when working.
Whatever the hesitations, the appointment was made, and as far as Burne-Jones was concerned
the Nat. Gall is safe for a time – and the newspapers routed, and the wire-pullers dismayed† – good news for me and I am heartily glad. Lord! What a peril it has been, and who really cared? All those treasures – irreplaceable – the pick of centuries – who minded whether they were imperilled or not … at any rate Poynter will buy beautiful ancient art … and he’s a fine fellow to consent to put by part of his own work for the public good – public good – no d—n the public – private good – the good of the half dozen who really care.40‡
Agnes’s views on the scandal of Diadumenè are as unknown as those on her husband’s advancement – there is, as usual, no mention of her in any of his correspondence, and her own has vanished. There are very few direct instances where Agnes’s thoughts are available. Her voice, rather depressed, rather depressing, can perhaps be heard in one of the few scraps to survive. She wrote to a friend who had asked her to pass on information about an entertainment she was getting up at home:
I will certainly do what I can … but I am very much afraid it is too far away to be of much use to people in from town. I am quite sure that many people don’t know where Powerscourt Park is and in any case it takes half an hour to get there. However I daresay you have thought about all this as well as I and I hope it will be a success.42
Reading someone’s life from their art is a very dubious business, and it should be allowed only to influence, rather than initiate conclusions. It is, however, striking that much of Poynter’s art depicts women who lure men to their deaths. He painted sirens (in the late nineteenth century commonly used to mean prostitutes), Medea (who murdered her children for love of a man), Orpheus (who was destroyed by his love for Eurydice). Nothing definite can be made of this. But, given the paucity of material reflecting Agnes’s own thoughts, and noting that contemporaries found Poynter a chilling personality, it may be useful to bear in mind the women he chose to represent. It can be noted more specifically that Agnes did not stay in London long enough to watch him become settled in his new job. By July 1894 she and Hugh had gone to Tisbury, to stay with Rudyard and Carrie, who had come over with Josephine and taken a house near Alice and Lockwood for three months in the summer.
News about Burne-Jones was rather more discussed by the families. In November 1893 Mary Gladstone Drew had written to see if he would accept a baronetcy if it were offered by her father. He replied that he and Georgie had consulted briefly, and then Georgie … said she wanted to be no hindrance to anything Phil would prize. So I am writing to say yes to the Question – it is a brief time, of necessity, in which it could affect me, a long time please God in which Phil would be affected by it, and if to maintain an honour that has been done to me would be a fine incentive to him, as it will be, it would prove a great future. So it will be yes, and I would sooner receive honour from your father than from any living man.43
Not an enthusiastic acceptance, but an acceptance nonetheless.
In February 1894, just before formal notification of the honour, Burne-Jones finally changed his name officially, from Jones to Burne-Jones. Nine years before he had still been explaining away the usage: ‘I have just stuck in at the point the name “Burne” having long ago, in the natural yearning of mortal man not to be lost in the millions of Joneses put another family name before it -not from pride … but solely from dread of annihilation.’44 Now he had a baronetcy to explain away too. Phil was his explanation, and probably was most of the reason. From his twenties, Phil had gone ‘out a great deal in the highest of the high world and move[d] in circles one can scarcely mention without a gasp’.45 He mixed with the Prince of Wales’s set, visited at country houses, dressed the part, and ‘dandled’, in the phrase of the time, after married women. A baronetcy would make all the difference to the smart set’s view of him, it appeared, and he certainly enjoyed it to the full. Over fifty years later his niece remembered that he had always ‘insisted on all the right forms’ for a baronet.46
One very interesting reflection on Phil’s self-image, compared to that of an older generation who had had to make their own way in the world, is the responses he and Lockwood gave at different times regarding permission to use their work. Macmillan got in touch with Lockwood in 1895 to say that a firm wanted to use his illustrations from Beast and Man in India to decorate luggage labels: would he agree? He replied:
it is a pity to put illustrations to their uses: – but, as they might have used the illustrations for their tickets without asking leave, with scarcely any chance of detection – (for it is only the Manchester warehouse people and the Indian piece-goods dealers who ever use these blazing labels,) and, as, after they had re-drawn and coloured them it would be almost impossible to recognize them, – I thought it would be an encouragement of virtue rare in Manchester to allow them to pay for such use as they can make of the sketches.47
By contrast, Phil wrote in a rage about Longman, the publisher, who had asked to reproduce something of his, ‘that it is quite impossible. Did he seriously expect that he would get permission to reproduce this design as an illustration to an unknown “author’s” work for a guinea!’48 It may be the inverted commas around ‘author’s’ that give most offence. But Phil’s opinion of himself was always higher than others’.
Burne-Jones had known that for a long time. He had told May Gaskell, before accepting the baronetcy,
I do love Phil – I ought to please him -1 am responsible for his life – and it is the first time I have been called upon to do a thing I dislike for his sake.
I do dislike it and shall for a long time, and it might happen you know … Dear fil [sic] – when I told him I had made up my mind to say yes – he was quiet a good time and then came behind me where I was writing to you and sd. ‘I know you have done this for my sake.’ I said O no fil, not at all – and he gave me a cuddle round the neck and cried a bit – so I wasn’t sorry … I’ll give Ralph [Mrs Gaskell’s butler] £5 a year always to announce me as Mr. –
Oh! I shall hate it if it ever comes to pass –
And when it did come to pass he replied to people who congratulated him, ‘don’t mistake – it’s Phil who’s the baronet – I am but Phil’s papa’.49
This was the way the baronetcy was explained to Morris too. Morris was Burne-Jones’s greatest worry over this change. He had now left all his socialist work behind and was deeply involved in his latest enthusiasm, the publishing house the Kelmscott Press, but his views were the same as they had always been. Burne-Jones was too afraid to tell him of the honour, and left him to hear about it on his own. Janey commented:
The baronetcy is considered a joke by most people, we had not heard of it before seeing the announcement in the papers – my husband refused to believe it at first, but afterwards when the plain fact was known, he said, ‘Well, a man can be an ass for the sake of his children’ – it seems that Phil was the chief culprit – I did hear that Sir George Lewis started the idea – in case his daughter wanted to marry Phil, so that he might be their equal in rank. It is all too fanny, and makes one roar with laughing – I have got over the sadness of it now – it seemed to me such an insult to offer the same to a man of genius and a successful publican, and then for him to accept.50
This was probably partly true – it seems likely from what we know of him that Morris had initially refused to believe that Burne-Jones would have accepted a baronetcy. The notion of Sir George Lewis starting the idea is probably partly spite, but it is most likely that Morris’s views were neatly captured at the end. Georgie, whose political ideas were far more radical than her husband’s, merely noted in her memoir, ‘The honour was accepted.’51 The terseness says it all.