I want to tell you something of the personality of Burne-Jones and something of what his work stands for. It is extremely difficult to reconstruct a personality, and all those who knew him are now getting old. Before long we shall all have gone, and historians will have to reconstruct him with as great or little success as they reconstructed the great  men of the past.

I suppose one of the first things which must have struck anyone who met him was his singular charm. He had in a remarkable degree the charm which spring from natural grace and kindliness, and he had also what is still rarer, one of the liveliest and most beautiful wits of any man or woman that I have ever met. There must be in private houses in this country hundreds of letters, unknown to this generation, which in time will find their way into collections and will be published. They will be placed by generations to come in that small and supreme class of which Charles Lamb is one of the masters.

His generosity to other artists was remarkable. I think perhaps we might look for a moment at his friendships. The surest was of knowing what a man really is, and not the man as you read of him in the newspapers, is to know who were his real and ultimate friends. Big men attract to them; and just as they attract the best they repel the worst. It is not without significance that when he was a little over thirty Swinburne dedicated to him his volume of Poems and Ballads, a great tribute from a great poet to a young man. And if you remember that in some ways he was shy and never sought the big world, it is surely no coincidence that two of the greatest men of their generation were equally attracted to him and loved his company : Mr Gladstone  and Mr Balfour. No one who was not in essence a great man could have claimed two such men as his friends.

But in these few minutes we must not dwell at undue length on the personality of Burne-Jones. We must consider certain aspects of his work. I do not know what authority Rossetti may have today, but I always think of the tribute Rossetti paid to him when he said, “If, as I hold, the noblest picture is the painted poem, than I say that in the whole history of art there has never been a painter more greatly gifted than Burne-Jones with the highest qualities of poetical invention.”

I think everyone would admit, whether moved by his art or not, that he had one thing which to my mind is the absolute concomitant of genius. That was the amazing fertility of creative invention that poured from him as fecund at the age of sixty-five, when he died, as it had been at the age of thirty, and which would have been pouring from him today if he had been living. As with the letters, so with those innumerable sketches of his. There again in private hands all over the country, I have no doubt that there are today sketch-books or fragments of sketch books containing his inimitable drawings which in time will be the glory of some gallery, or galleries, and which in future generations who love these things will take no less keen a pleasure or interest than literary people will take in his letters.

In my view, in the art of painting there are many mansions. I would never look at a man for what he is not. I will always look at a man for what he is. You have to look at Burne-Jones for what he is, and you can judge for yourself what he is by his work and by what he said of himself. There are two other quotations I should like to give you. One is a wise utterance by Lady Burne-Jones. Anyone who has done any form of work, even such a form as political work, knows the eternal truth of these words ;
 
“He had passed the pleasant wayside places where the labourer rests with his friends after a day’s work, and had begun the world-long day of those who seek no rest or reward but that of contenting the rigour of the Judge Invisible.”

The other quotation is in his own words :

“I need nothing but my hands and my brain to fashion myself a world in which to live in that nothing can disturb. In my own land I am king of it.”  

And that is what he was. He was true to his own inner light from the first day of his artistic life to the end. Gentle, and some may have thought yielding; but like iron and granite where the ideals he worked for were concerned. None of the idols of the market place had the power to tempt him of turn him from the straight path; neither money, position, nor any of those false gods that have so often killed the soul of those whose promise has been greatest. It is not without significance that public recognition came to him for the artist he was, in France long before it came in England.

What was it that his art stood for? I cannot speak the jargon (I cannot even write a treasury letter.) In my view what he did for us common people was to open, as no man had ever opened before, magic casements to a land of faery which he was exploring for us all his life. It always seems to me that poetry and painting, the great creative arts, are but manifestations of one great and eternal spirit, and I cannot help thinking that some observations which I read in a book of Gilbert Murray’s contain the essentials of what I want to say. He tells us that Shelley derives all poetry and indeed all creation from love, and he goes on to say that Shelley’s definition of love was a going out of our own nature and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own. In other words ecstasy.

You remember Shelley’s definition of poetry: “Poetry and the principle of self are God and Mammon of the world.” That is one of the most profound truths that were ever written, but it is a hard saying for this generation. You may express your personality with extreme skill and be popular in the market-place, and be called clever, or, if you are lucky brilliant; but you will never do anything great and you will never be anything after you are dead. The great thing is that you should stand dumb before a great work. No matter about being clever or brilliant; you stand in dumb reverence and awe before something that seems not of this world. There are two lines, well known perhaps, but far less well known than the third line which everybody knows, which are applicable to what I am speaking about :  

“Ah, then, if mine had been a painter’s hand

 To express what then I saw: and add the gleam,

The light that never was on sea or land,…

And so on.

That gleam is what he brought into the world, a gleam of  light “that never was on sea or land.”

I will give you a last quotation in Burne-Jones’s own words :

“That was an awful thought of Ruskin’s, that artists paint God for the world. There’s a lump of greasy pigment on the end of Michelangelo’s hog-bristle brush, and by the time it has been laid on stucco there is something that all men with eyes recognize as divine. Think of what it means. It is the power of bringing God into the world-making God manifest. It is giving back her child that was crucified to our Lady of Sorrows.”

The artist who could use those words could never, if he tried, paint anything ugly or mean.

In this age in which we live there is much that is ugly, much that is vulgar. Many of us, quietly and without talking about it, fashion for ourselves, in his words, “a world to live in that nothing can disturb,” and it is in that world that we can cherish the beauty that he has left us. In it is peace for our souls. Those who knew Burne-Jones, the few of us who knew him and loved him, will always keep him  in our hearts, but his work will go on long after we have all passed away. It may give its message in one generation to a few; it may give it in another generation to more; but there it will be for ever, for those who seek in their generation for beauty and for all those who can recognize and reverence a great man and a great artist.

About Stanley Baldwin

Stanley Baldwin was born in 1867, the only child of Alfred Baldwin, an ironmaster of Stourport in Worcestershire, and his wife Louisa, tenth child of George Browne Macdonald, a Wesleyan minister, and his wife, nee Hannah Jones of Manchester. Louisa’s elder sisters included Georgiana, the wife of Edward Burne-Jones, Agnes the wife of Edward Poynter, and Alice, who married Joseph Lockwood Kipling, and was the mother of Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936), author and poet of Empire. 

Baldwin became a Conservative Member of Parliament in 1908. In 1917 he became joint First Secretary to the Treasury in the National Government led by Lloyd George. In 1919, with Great Britain in serious financial trouble after the First World War, a letter appeared in The Times signed F S T. In it the writer stated that he had calculated his total assets as £580,000, and that he had decided to realise 20% of that sum, say, £120,000, purchase with it £150,000 of the new War Loan, and present it to the Government for cancellation. F S T was, of course, Baldwin, Who intended to set an example to other wealthy men to help their own country. Needless to say few did so. It was, without doubt, an act of decency for the common good, and unhappily a rare one.

Baldwin was Chancellor of the Exchequer 1922-1923, Prime Minister for a few moths in 1923, and again 1924-1929, and 1935-1937. Baldwin was essentially a moderate one-nation Conservative. When he finally retired in 1937, the praise of the country was fulsome. The onset of the Second World War changed this, however, and he was seen as being responsible for the calamitous military unpreparedness of the country for war. Baldwin was, as I say above a moderate, and felt unable to start a programme of re-armament without national consensus. In truth this was the mainstream political view of the time both in Britain and France, and Clement Atlee the leader of the Labour Party was just as culpable. Neville Chamberlain, Stanley Baldwin’s successor as Conservative Prime Minister was also much to blame.

Stanley Baldwin died on the night of 13/14 December 1947, and is buried in Worcester Cathedral.

PHR.  
5 April 2004

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