Page:The Galaxy (New York, Sheldon & Co.) Volume 24 (1877).djvu/164

 destitute of sides and backs. If it rose beyond this point, the painter would, with his great suggestiveness, be one of the very greatest of artists. His amateurishness of drawing, his lack of being pledged to a single personal type, diminish considerably the weight of his impressiveness; but they have a chance for much that is exquisitely beautiful in execution, and, in particular, for the display of an admirable art of color.

Mr. Burne Jones's most important contribution, the "Days of Creation," is a series of six small pictures in a single frame. The fulness of their mystical meaning I do not profess to have fathomed, but I have greatly enjoyed their beauty. They consist of different combinations of seven female figures, each of whom (save one) bears in her two hands a wonderful image of the globe we inhabit, and represents one of the stages of the process of creation: the light and darkness, the sun and moon, the heavens, the earth, the birds of the air, the human race. Each is accompanied by the mystic nymphs who have figured before, and who are crowded behind her into the narrow canvas, after a fashion which displays the artist's extreme ingenuity and grace of composition. The great burnished ball, its sides embossed with planets and birds, is in each case a beautiful piece of painting, and the folded wings of the angels, overlapping and nestling against each other as they press together, are rendered with even greater skill. Out of this feathery wall rise the angels' faces—faces upon which the artist's critics will find it easy to concentrate their dissatisfaction. We have seen them more or less before in that square-jawed, large-mouthed female visage which the English pre-Raphaelite school five-and-twenty years ago imported from early Florence to serve its peculiar purposes. It has undergone various modifications since then, and in Mr. Burne Jones's productions we see its supreme presentment. Here, it must be admitted, it looks very weary of its adventures—looks as if it needed rest and refreshment. But it still serves admirably well what I have called the peculiar purpose of its sponsors; it still expresses that vague, morbid pathos, that appealing desire for an indefinite object, which seems among these artists an essential part of the conception of human loveliness.

In the "Days of Creation " this morbid pathos, this tearful longing, are expressed with wonderful grace. You may, of course, quarrel with Mr. Burne Jones for desiring to express it, and especially for expressing it so much. He expresses in fact little else, and all his young women conform to this languishing type with a strictness which savors of monotony. I call them young women, but even this is talking a grosser prose than is proper in speaking of creatures so mysteriously poetic. Perhaps they are young men; they look indeed like beautiful, rather sickly boys. Or rather, they are sublimely sexless, and ready to assume whatever charm of manhood or maidenhood the imagination desires. The manhood, indeed, the protesting critic denies; that these pictures are the reverse of manly is his principal complaint. The people, he declares, look debauched and debilitated; they suggest a flaccid softness and weakness. Soft they are, to my sense, and weak and weary; but they have at the same time an enchanting purity, and the perfection with which the painter has mastered the type that seems to say so much to his imagination is something rare in a day of vulgar and superficial study. In the palace of art there are many chambers, and that of which Mr. Burne Jones holds the key is a wondrous museum. His imagination, his fertility of invention, his exquisiteness of work, his remarkable gifts as a colorist, cruelly discredited as they are by the savage red wall at the Grosvenor—all these things constitute a brilliant distinction.

The Royal Academy is, I believe, this year pronounced a rather poor