Page:The Galaxy (New York, Sheldon & Co.) Volume 24 (1877).djvu/163

 Holman Hunt seems prosaic. At the end of the room in which this picture hangs the crowd is perceptibly thicker than elsewhere, and, glancing over people's heads, you are not slow to perceive an excellent reason for their putting them, as the phrase is, together. Here hang, more than covering a complete wall, the productions of Mr. Edward Burne Jones, who is quite the lion of the exhibition. Mr. Burne Jones's lionship is owing partly to his "queerness" and partly to a certain air of mystery which had long surrounded him. He had not exhibited in public for many years, and people had an impression that in private prosperity his genius was growing "queerer" than ever. This impression will probably have found itself justified. To say everything that Mr. Burne Jones's pictures suggest is to undertake much more than I have either space or ability for; I must content myself with calling them by far the most interesting things in the Grosvenor gallery. They are seven in number, each of them is large and elaborate, and they represent altogether an immense amount of labor, science, and skill. In my own opinion they place their author quite at the head of the English painters of our day, and very high among all the painters of this degenerate time. I hasten to add that this is the opinion of a spectator not at all in sympathy with the school of art, if school there is, to which Mr. Burne Jones belongs, not at all inclined to look at things after that morbidly ingenious fashion which seems to me the sign of this school, and able therefore to enjoy its productions only with a dozen abatements. But after these abatements are made there remains in Mr, Burne Jones a vast deal to enjoy. It is the art of culture, of reflection, of intellectual luxury, of æsthetic refinement, of people who look at the world and at life not directly, as it were, and in all its accidental reality, but in the reflection and ornamental portrait of it furnished by art itself in other manifestations; furnished by literature, by poetry, by history, by erudition. One of Mr. Burne Jones's contributions to the Grosvenor is a very charming picture entitled "Venus's Mirror," in which a dozen young girls, in an early Italian landscape, are bending over a lucid pool, set in a flowery lawn, to see what I supposed to be the miraculously embellished image of their faces. Into some such mirror as this the painters and poets of Mr. Burne Jones's turn of mind seem to me to be looking; they are crowding round a crystal pool with a flowery margin in a literary landscape, quite like the angular nymphs of the picture I speak of. I can easily imagine what these artists find there being intolerable to some people, and in so far as it offers itself as subject matter for painting, can conceive of their having no patience with it. "It is not painting," I hear them say, "and it has nothing to do with painting. It is literature, erudition, edification; it is a superior education, a reminiscence of Oxford, a luxury of culture. Painting is a direct rendering of something seen in the world we live in and look at, we love and admire, and in that sense there is certainly no painting here."

A part of this is very true. What such a critic brutally calls the reminiscences of Oxford occupies a very large place in Mr. Burne Jones's painting, and helps it to give us that feeling that the painter is thinking, not looking, which the critic in question finds so irritating. But it is equally certain that such a remarkable work as the "Days of Creation," such a brilliant piece of simple rendering as the "Beguiling of Merlin," could not have been produced without a vast deal of "looking" on the painter's part. It is just the difference between Mr. Burne Jones and a weakly master, that while the brilliantly suggestive side of his work holds a perpetual revel of its own, the strictly plastic side never really lapses. It never rises beyond a certain point; his figures, for instance, to my eye, always seem flat and