mantic dream of something
that never was, never will be--in a light better than any light that ever
shone--in a land no one can define or remember, only desire--and the forms
divinely beautiful--and then I wake up, with the waking of Brynhild." No
artist was ever more true to his aim. Ideals resolutely pursued are apt to
provoke the resentment of the world, and Burne-Jones encountered, endured
and conquered an extraordinary amount of, angry criticism. In so far as
this was directed against the lack of realism in his pictures, it was
beside the point. The earth, the sky, the rocks, the trees, the men and
women of Burne-Jones are not those of this world; but they are themselves a
world, consistent with itself, and having therefore its own reality.
Charged with the beauty and with the strangeness of dreams, it has nothing
of a dream's incoherence. Yet it is a dreamer always whose nature
penetrates these works, a nature out of sympathy with struggle and
strenuous action. Burne-Jones's men and women are dreamers too. It was this
which, more than anything else, estranged him from the age into which he
was born. But he had an inbred "revolt from fact" which would have
estranged him from the actualities of any age. That criticism seems to be
more justified which has found in him a lack of such victorious energy and
mastery over his materials as would have enabled him to carry out his
conceptions in their original intensity. Representing the same kind of
tendency as distinguished his French contemporary, Puvis de Chavannes, he
was far less in the main current of art, and his position suffers
accordingly. Often compared with Botticelli, he had nothing of the fire and
vehemence of the Florentine. Yet, if aloof from strenuous action,
Burne-Jones was singularly strenuous in production. His industry was
inexhaustible, and needed to be, if it was to keep pace with the constant
pressure of his ideas. Invention, a very rare excellence, was his
pre-eminent gift. Whatever faults his paintings may have, they have always
the fundamental virtue of design; they are always pictures. His fame might
rest on his purely decorative work. But his designs were informed with a
mind of romantic temper, apt in the discovery of beautiful subjects, and
impassioned with a delight in pure and variegated colour. These splendid
gifts were directed in a critical and fortunate moment by the genius of
Rossetti. Hence a career which shows little waste or misdirectio