William Morris: Poet, Craftsman, Socialist
by Elisabeth Luther Cary · English · Gutenberg #39725 · 490,643 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: William Morris: Poet, Craftsman, Socialist
Author: Elisabeth Luther Cary
Release date: May 18, 2012 [eBook #39725]
Language: English
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[Illustration: _William Morris_]
WILLIAM MORRIS
POET
CRAFTSMAN
SOCIALIST
BY
ELISABETH
LVTHER
CARY
ILLVSTRATED
G. P. PVTNAM'S SONS
THE KNICKERBOCKER PRESS
NEW YORK & LONDON
COPYRIGHT, 1902
BY
G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
Published, October, 1902
Reprinted, June, 1903; December, 1905
The Knickerbocker Press, New York
PREFACE.
The personal life of William Morris is already known to us through Mr.
Mackail's admirable biography as fully, probably, as we shall ever know
it. My own endeavour has been to present a picture of Morris's busy career
perhaps not less vivid for the absence of much detail, and showing only
the man and his work as they appeared to the outer public.
I have used as a basis for my narrative, the volumes by Mr. Mackail;
_William Morris, his Art, his Writings, and his Public Life_, by Aymer
Vallance; _The Books of William Morris_, by H. Buxton Forman; numerous
articles in periodicals, and Morris's own varied works.
I wish to express my indebtedness to Mr. Bulkley of 42 East 14th Street,
New York City, for permission to reproduce a number of Morris patterns in
his possession, notably a fragment of the St. James's wall-paper.
Much material for the letter-press and for the illustrations I have
obtained through the Boston Public Library. The _Froissart_ pages were
found there and most of the Kelmscott publications from which I have
quoted.
The bibliography is that prepared by Mr. S. C. Cockerell for the last
volume of Mr. Morris issued by the Kelmscott Press, under the title of _A
Note by William Morris on His Aims in Founding the Kelmscott Press_. To
the Cockerell bibliography have been added a few notes of my own.
E. L. C.
BROOKLYN, Sept. 10, 1902.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER PAGE
I.--BOYHOOD 1
II.--OXFORD LIFE 21
III.--FROM ROSSETTI TO THE RED HOUSE 46
IV.--MORRIS AND COMPANY 69
V.--FROM THE RED HOUSE TO KELMSCOTT 96
VI.--POETRY 114
VII.--PUBLIC LIFE AND SOCIALISM 146
VIII.--PUBLIC LIFE AND SOCIALISM (_Continued_) 174
IX.--LITERATURE OF THE SOCIALIST PERIOD 194
X.--THE KELMSCOTT PRESS 219
XI.--LATER WRITINGS 239
XII.--THE END 255
BIBLIOGRAPHY 269
INDEX 291
ILLUSTRATIONS.
_Page_
_William Morris_ _Frontispiece_
_From Life._
_Title-page of "The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine"_ _32_
_Portrait of Rossetti_ _36_
_By Watts._
_Illustration by Rossetti to "The Lady of Shalott" in the
Moxon "Tennyson." The Head of Launcelot is a Portrait of
Morris_ _42_
_Portrait of Jane Burden (Mrs. Morris)_ _58_
_By Rossetti_
_Wall-Paper and Cotton-Print Designs_ _60_
_"Acanthus" Wall-Paper_
_"Pimpernel" Wall-Paper_
_"African Marigold" Cotton-Print_
_"These designs must not be taken as exact as to colour
afterwards used, Mr. Morris using the colours to his
hand and afterwards superintending the actual colouring
in the course of manufacture, in most cases many
experimental trials being made before the desired
colouring was actually decided upon."_
_Reproduced from examples obtained by courtesy of Mr.
A. E. Bulkley._
_The Morris designs in this book were reproduced by permission
of Messrs. Morris & Company._
_"The Strawberry Thief" Design for Cotton-Print_ _66_
_Tulip Design for Axminster Carpet_ _70_
_Peacock Design for Coarse Wool Hangings_ _72_
_Painted Wall Decoration Designed by Morris_ _76_
_Painted Wall Decoration Designed by Morris_ _80_
_Design for St. James's Palace Wall-Paper_ _82_
_Reproduced from sample obtained through courtesy of Mr.
Bulkley._
_Early Design for Morris Wall-Paper "Daisy and Columbine"_ _84_
_Chrysanthemum Design for Wall-Paper_ _84_
_Anemone Pattern for Silk and Wool Curtain Material_ _88_
_Portion of Hammersmith Carpet_ _90_
_Secretary Designed by the Morris Co._ _94_
_In possession of Mr. Bulkley._
_Sofa Designed by the Morris Co._ _94_
_In possession of Mr. Bulkley._
_Illustration by Burne-Jones for Projected Edition of "The
Earthly Paradise," Cut on Wood by Morris Himself_ _98_
_Kelmscott Manor House. Two views_ _100_
_Design by Rossetti for Window Executed by Morris & Co.
("The Parable of the Vineyard")_ _110_
_Design by Rossetti for Stained-Glass Window Executed by
the Morris Co. ("The Parable of the Vineyard")_ _110_
_Morris's Bed, with Hangings Designed by Himself and
Embroidered by his Daughter_ _114_
_Kelmscott Manor House from the Orchard_ _118_
_Portrait of Edward Burne-Jones_ _120_
_By Watts._
_William Morris_ _130_
_Picture by Rossetti in which the Children's Faces are
Portraits of May Morris_ _148_
_Honeysuckle Design for Linen_ _162_
_Washing Cloth at the Merton Abbey Works_ _174_
_Merton Abbey Works_ _174_
_Portrait of Mrs. Morris_ _200_
_By Rossetti._
_Study of Mrs. Morris_ _216_
_Made by Rossetti for picture called "The Day Dream."_
_Kelmscott Types_ _220_
_Page from Kelmscott "Chaucer." Illustration by
Burne-Jones. Border and Initial Letter by Morris_ _222_
_Title-page of the Kelmscott "Chaucer"_ _224_
_The Smaller Kelmscott Press-Mark_ _228_
_The Larger Kelmscott Press-Mark_ _228_
_Drawing by Morris of the Letter "h" for Kelmscott Type,
with Notes and Corrections_ _228_
_Specimen Page from the Kelmscott "Froissart"_ _234_
_Projected Edition_
CHAPTER I.
BOYHOOD.
There is, perhaps, no single work by William Morris that stands out as a
masterpiece in evidence of his individual genius. He was not impelled to
give peculiar expression to his own personality. His writing was seldom
emotionally autobiographic as Rossetti's always was, his painting and
designing were not the expression of a personal mood as was the case with
Burne-Jones. But no one of his special time and group gave himself more
fully or more freely for others. No one contributed more generously to the
public pleasure and enlightenment. No one tried with more persistent
effort first to create and then to satisfy a taste for the possible best
in the lives and homes of the people. He worked toward this end in so many
directions that a lesser energy than his must have been dissipated and a
weaker purpose rendered impotent. His tremendous vitality saved him from
the most humiliating of failures, the failure to make good extravagant
promise. He never lost sight of the result in the endeavour, and his
discontent with existing mediocrity was neither formless nor empty. It was
the motive power of all his labour; he was always trying to make
everything "something different from what it was," and this instinct was,
alike for strength and weakness, says his chief biographer, "of the very
essence of his nature." To tell the story of his life is to write down the
record of dreams made real, of nebulous theories brought swiftly to the
test of experiment, of the spirit of the distant past reincarnated in the
present. But, as with most natures of similar mould, the man was greater
than any part of his work, and even greater than the sum of it all. He
remains one of the not-to-be-forgotten figures of the nineteenth century,
so interesting was he, so impressive, so simple-hearted, so nearly
adequate to the great tasks he set himself, so well beloved by his
companions, so useful, despite his blunders, to society at large.
The unity that held together his manifold forms of expression was
maintained through the different periods of his life, making him a "whole
man" to a more than usual degree. From the earliest recorded incidents of
his childhood we gain an impression not unlike that made by his latest
years, and by all the interval between. The very opposite of Rossetti,
with whose "school" he has been so long and so mistakenly identified, his
nature was as single as his accomplishment was complex, and the only means
by which it is possible to get a just idea of both the former and the
latter is to regard him as a man of one preoccupation amounting to an
obsession, the reconstruction of social and industrial life according to
an ideal based upon the more poetic aspects of the Middle Ages. From first
to last the early English world, the English world of the thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries, was the world to which he belonged. "Born out of his
due time," in truth, he began almost from his birth to accumulate
associations with the time to which he should have been native and whose
far off splendour lured him constantly back toward it.
The third of nine children, he was born at Walthamstow, in Essex, England,
on the 24th of March, 1834. On the Morris side he came of Welsh ancestry,
a fact accounting perhaps for the mingled gloom and romance of his
temperament. His father was a discount broker in opulent circumstances,
and his mother was descended from a family of prosperous merchants and
landed proprietors. On the maternal side a strong talent for music
existed, but in the Morris family no more artistic quality can be traced
than a devotion to general excellence, to which William Morris certainly
fell heir. For a time he was a sickly child, and used the opportunity to
advance his reading, being "already deep in the Waverley novels" when four
years old, and having gone through these and many others before he was
seven.
In 1840 the family removed to Woodford Hall, a house belonging to the
Georgian period, standing in about fifty acres of park, on the road from
London to Epping, and here Morris led an outdoor life with the result of
rapidly establishing his health, steeping mind and sense in the sights and
sounds of nature dear to him forever after, and gaining intimate
acquaintance with the romantic and mediaeval surroundings by which his
whole career was to be influenced. The county of Essex was well adapted to
feed his prodigious appetite for antiquities. Its churches, in numbers of
which Norman masonry is to be found, its ancient brasses (that of the
schoolboy Thomas Heron being among many others within easy reach of
Woodford), and its tapestry-hung houses, all stimulated his inborn love of
the Middle Ages and started him fairly on that path through the thirteenth
century which he followed deviously as long as he lived. Even in his own
home, we are told, certain of the habits of mediaeval England persisted,
such as the brewing of beer, the meal of cakes and ale at "high prime,"
the keeping of Twelfth Night, and other such festivals. The places he
lived in counted for much with him always, and the impressions of this
childish period remained, like all his later impressions, keen and
permanent. Toward the end of his life he printed at the Kelmscott Press
the carol _Good King Wenceslas_, which begins with a lusty freshness:
Good King Wenceslas look'd out,
On the feast of Stephen,
When the snow lay round about,
Deep and crisp and even.
Brightly shone the moon that night,
Though the frost was cruel,
When a poor man came in sight
Gath'ring winter fuel.
"The legend itself," he comments, "is a pleasing and genuine one, and the
Christmas-like quality of it, recalling the times of my boyhood, appeals
to me at least as a memory of past days."
Beside angling, shooting, and riding, he very early occupied much of his
time with visits to the old churches, a pursuit of which he was never to
weary, studying their monuments and accumulating an amount of genuine
erudition concerning them quite out of proportion to his rather moderate
accomplishment along the ordinary lines of study. At an age when Scott was
scouring his native heath in search of Border ballads and antiquities,
this almost equally precocious boy was collecting rubbings from ancient
inscriptions, and picturing to himself, as he wandered about the region of
his home on foot or on horseback, the lovely face of England as it looked
in the thirteenth or fourteenth century. In one of the earliest of the
boyish romances that appeared in the _Oxford and Cambridge Magazine_, he
imagines himself the master-mason of a church built more than six
centuries before, and which has vanished from the face of the earth with
nothing to indicate its existence save earth-covered ruins "heaving the
yellow corn into glorious waves." His description of the carving on the
bas-reliefs of the west front and on the tombs shows with what loving
intensity he has studied the most minute details of the work of the
ancient builders in whose footsteps he would have rejoiced much to tread.
How far his family sympathised with his tastes it is impossible to say,
but probably not deeply. We have few hints of the personal side of his
home-life; we know that a visit to Canterbury Cathedral with his father
was among the indelible experiences of his first decade, and that he
possessed among his toys a little suit of armour in which he rode about
the park after the manner of a Froissart knight, and that is about all we
do know until we hear of the strong disapproval of his mother and one of
his sisters for the career that finally diverted his interest from the
Church for which they had designed him.
His formal education began when he was sent at the age of nine to a
preparatory school kept by a couple of maiden ladies. There he remained
until the death of his father in 1847. In February, 1848, he went to
Marlborough College, a nomination to which his father had purchased for
him. The best that can be said for this school seems to be that it was
situated in a part of England ideally suited to a boy of archaeological
tastes, and was provided with an excellent archaeological and architectural
library. Here his eager mind browsed on the literature of English Gothic,
and his restless feet carried him far afield among pre-Celtic barrows,
stone circles, and Roman villas. Savernake Forest was close at hand and
he spent many of his holidays within it. It was doubtless the familiarity
with all aspects of the woods, due to his pilgrimages through Savernake
and Epping Forests and the long roving days idled away among their
shadows, that gave rise to the allusions in his books--early and late--to
woodland life. The passage through the thick wood and the coming at last
to the place where the trees thin out and the light begins to shimmer
through them is a constantly recurring figure of his verse and of his
prose. Frequently the important scene of a romance or of a long poem is
laid in a wildwood, as in the story entitled _The Wood beyond the World_,
or in _Goldilocks and Goldilocks_, the concluding poem of the volume of
_Poems by the Way_, in which the great grey boles of the trees, the
bramble bush, the "woodlawn clear," and the cherished oaks are as vivid as
the human actors in the drama. His heroes seldom fail of being deft
woodsmen, able to thread the tangle of underbrush by blind paths, and
observant of all the common sights and sounds of the woodland, rabbits
scuttling out of the grass, adders sunning themselves on stones in the
cleared spaces, wild swine running grunting toward close covert, hart and
hind bounding across the way. They know the musty savour of water dipped
from a forest brook, they know how to go straight to the yew sticks that
quarter best for bow-staves, they know the feeling of the boggy moss under
their feet, and the sound of the "iron wind" through the branches in the
depth of winter; there is no detail of wild wood life of which they are
ignorant. This intimacy with Nature in her most secluded moments, in her
shyest and most mysterious aspect, forms an element of inexpressible charm
in the lovely backgrounds against which Morris delighted to place his
visionary figures. He never tired of combining the impressions stored away
in his mind on his boyish rambles into pictures the delicate beauty of
which can hardly be overestimated.
While he was at school, his already highly developed imagination found an
outlet in constant fable-making, his tales of knights and fairies and
miraculous adventures having a considerable popularity among his comrades,
with whom, however, he himself was not especially popular, making friends
with them only in a superficial fashion. Judging from the autobiographic
fragments occasionally found in his work, he was a boy of many moods, most
of them tinged with the self-conscious melancholy of his early poetry.
Sentiment was strong with him, and a peculiar reticence or detachment of
temperament kept him independent of others during his school years, and
apparently uninfluenced by the tastes or opinions of those about him, if
we except the case of his Anglo-Catholic proclivities, which obviously
were fed by the tendencies of the school, but which, so far from diverting
him from the general scheme of his individual interests, fitted into them
and served him as another link between the present and the much preferred
past.
Outwardly he can hardly have seemed the typical dreamer he has described
himself as being. Beautiful of feature, of sturdy build, with a shouting
voice, extraordinary muscular strength, and a gusty temper, he impressed
himself upon his comrades chiefly by his impetuosity in the energetic game
of singlestick, by the surplus vigour that led him at times to punch his
own head with all his might to "take it out of himself," and by the
vehemence and enthusiasm of his argumentative talk.
He was little of a student along the orthodox lines, and Marlborough
College was not calculated to increase his respect--never undue--for
pedagogic methods. A letter written when he was sixteen to his eldest and
favourite sister reflects quite fully his pre-occupations. It has none of
the genuine wit and literary tone of the juvenile letter written by
Stevenson to his father, presenting his claims for reimbursements. It
shows no such zest for bookish pursuits as Rossetti's letters, written at
the same age, reveal. But it is entirely free from the shallow flippancy
that frequently characterises the correspondence of a young man's second
decade--that characterised Lowell's, for example, to an almost painful
degree; nor has it a shade of the self-magnification to which any amount
of flippancy is preferable. It is straightforward and boyish, and
remarkable only as showing the thorough and intelligent method with which
its writer followed up whatever commanded his interest. Commencing with
the description of an anthem sung at Easter by the trained choir of
Blore's Chapel connected with his school, he passes on to an account of
his archaeological investigations, giving after his characteristic fashion
all the small details necessary to enable his correspondent to form a
definite picture of the places he had visited. After he had made one
pilgrimage to the Druidical circle and Roman entrenchment at Avebury, he
had learned of the peculiar method of placing the stones which, from the
dislocated condition of the ruins, had not been obvious to him. Therefore
he had returned on the following day to study it out and fix the original
arrangement firmly in his imagination, and, at the time of writing the
letter, was able to explain it quite clearly, a result, derived from the
expenditure of two holidays, that was completely satisfactory to him. He
winds up with a purely boyish plea for a "good large cake" and some
biscuit in addition to a cheese that had been promised him, and for paper
and postage stamps and his silkworm eggs and a pen box to be sent him from
home.
At school he was "always thinking about home," and when the family moved
again to Walthamstow, within a short distance of his first home, and to a
house boasting a moat and a wooded island, he was eagerly responsive to
the poetic suggestions conveyed by these romantic accessories. When at
the end of 1851 he left school to prepare under a private tutor for
Oxford, he renewed his early familiarity with Epping Forest and spent most
of his holidays among the trees that had not apparently changed since the
time of Edward the Confessor. The great age of the wood and its peculiarly
English character made a profound impression upon him, and it is easy to
imagine the fury with which he must have received the suggestion, made
forty years later by Mr. Alfred Wallace, that in place of "a hideous
assemblage of stunted mop-like pollards rising from a thicket of scrubby
bushes," North American trees should be planted and a part of the forest
made into an "almost exact copy" of North American woodland. Indeed, a
suppressed but unmistakable fury breathes from the letters written to the
_Daily Chronicle_, as late as 1895, regarding the tree-felling that was
going on ruthlessly in the forest, destroying its native character and
individual charm. These letters, curiously recalling those written half a
century before concerning boyish excursions through the same region, are
well worth quoting here, where properly they belong, as they are inspired
by the earliest of the associations and ideals cherished by Morris to the
end of his life. They are fine examples of his own native character in
argument, his humbly didactic tone early caught from Ruskin and never
relinquished, his militant irony, his willingness to fortify his position
by painstaking investigation, his moral attitude toward matters artistic,
his superb rightness of taste in the special problem under discussion.
They show also how closely his memory had held through his manifold
interests the details that had appealed to him in his boyhood. The first
letter is dated April 23rd, and addressed to the editor of the _Daily
Chronicle_.
"SIR: I venture to ask you to allow me a few words on the subject of
the present treatment of Epping Forest. I was born and bred in its
neighbourhood (Walthamstow and Woodford), and when I was a boy and
young man I knew it yard by yard from Wanstead to the Theydons, and
from Hale End to the Fairlop Oak. In those days it had no worse foes
than the gravel stealer and the rolling-fence maker, and was always
interesting and often very beautiful. From what I can hear it is years
since the greater part of it has been destroyed, and I fear, Sir, that
in spite of your late optimistic note on the subject, what is left of
it now runs the danger of further ruin.
"The special character of it was derived from the fact that by far the
greater part was a wood of hornbeams, a tree not common save in Essex
and Herts. It was certainly the biggest hornbeam wood in these
islands, and I suppose in the world. The said hornbeams were all
pollards, being shrouded every four or six years, and were
interspersed in many places with holly thickets, and the result was a
very curious and characteristic wood, such as can be seen nowhere
else. And I submit that no treatment of it can be tolerable which does
not maintain this hornbeam wood intact.
"But the hornbeam, though an interesting tree to an artist and
reasonable person, is no favourite with the landscape gardener, and I
very much fear that the intention of the authorities is to clear the
forest of native trees, and to plant vile weeds like deodars and
outlandish conifers instead. We are told that a committee of 'experts'
has been formed to sit in judgment on Epping Forest; but, Sir, I
decline to be gagged by the word 'expert,' and I call on the public
generally to take the same position. An 'expert' may be a very
dangerous person, because he is likely to narrow his views to the
particular business (usually a commercial one) which he represents. In
this case, for instance, we do not want to be under the thumb of
either a wood bailiff whose business is to grow timber for the market,
or of a botanist whose business is to collect specimens for a
botanical garden; or of a landscape gardener whose business is to
vulgarise a garden or landscape to the utmost extent that his patron's
purse will allow of. What we want is reasonable men of real artistic
taste to take into consideration what the essential needs of the case
are, and to advise accordingly. Now it seems to me that the
authorities who have Epping Forest in hand may have two intentions as
to it. First, they may intend to landscape-garden it, or turn it into
golf grounds (and I very much fear that even the latter nuisance may
be in their minds); or second, they may really think it necessary (as
you suggest) to thin the hornbeams, so as to give them a better chance
of growing. The first alternative we Londoners should protest against
to the utmost, for if it be carried out then Epping Forest is turned
into a mere place of vulgarity, is destroyed in fact.
"As to the second, to put our minds at rest, we ought to be assured
that the cleared spaces would be planted again, and that almost wholly
with hornbeam. And, further, the greatest possible care should be
taken that not a single tree should be felled unless it is necessary
for the growth of its fellows. Because, mind you, with comparatively
small trees, the really beautiful effect of them can only be got by
their standing as close together as the emergencies of growth will
allow. We want a thicket, not a park, from Epping Forest.
"In short, a great and practically irreparable mistake will be made
if, under the shelter of the opinion of 'experts,' from mere
carelessness and thoughtlessness, we let the matter slip out of the
hands of the thoughtful part of the public; the essential character of
one of the greatest ornaments of London will disappear, and no one
will have even a sample left to show what the great north-eastern
forest was like. I am, Sir, yours obediently,
"WILLIAM MORRIS
"Kelmscott House, Hammersmith."
The second letter is written two or three weeks later, and shows Morris as
characteristically prompt and thorough in action as he is positive in
speech.
"Yesterday," he says, "I carried out my intention of visiting Epping
Forest. I went to Loughton first, and saw the work that had been done
about Clay Road, thence to Monk Wood, thence to Theydon Woods, and
thence to the part about the Chingford Hotel, passing by Fair Mead
Bottom and lastly to Bury Wood and the wood on the other side of the
road thereby.
"I can verify closely your representative's account of the doings on
the Clay Road, which is an ugly scar originally made by the lord of
the manor when he contemplated handing over to the builder a part of
what he thought was his property. The fellings here seem to me all
pure damage to the forest, and in fact were quite unaccountable to me,
and would surely be so to any unprejudiced person. I cannot see what
could be pleaded for them either on the side of utility or taste.
"About Monk Wood there had been much, and I should say excessive,
felling of trees apparently quite sound. This is a very beautiful
spot, and I was informed that the trees there had not been polled for
a period long before the acquisition of the forest for the public; and
nothing could be more interesting and romantic than the effect of the
long poles of the hornbeams rising from the trunks and seen against
the mass of the wood behind. This wood should be guarded most
jealously as a treasure of beauty so near to 'the Wen.' In the Theydon
Woods, which are mainly of beech, a great deal of felling has gone on,
to my mind quite unnecessary, and therefore harmful. On the road
between the Wake Arms and the King's Oak Hotel there has been again
much felling, obviously destructive.
"In Bury Wood (by Sewardstone Green) we saw the trunks of a great
number of oak trees (not pollards), all of them sound, and a great
number were yet standing in the wood marked for felling, which,
however, we heard had been saved by a majority of the committee of
experts. I can only say that it would have been a very great
misfortune if they had been lost; in almost every case where the
stumps of the felled trees showed there seemed to have been no reason
for their destruction. The wood on the other side of the road to Bury
Wood, called in the map Woodman's Glade, has not suffered from
felling, and stands as an object lesson to show how unnecessary such
felling is. It is one of the thickest parts of the forest, and looks
in all respects like such woods were forty years ago, the growth of
the heads of the hornbeams being but slow; but there is no difficulty
in getting through it in all directions, and it has a peculiar charm
of its own not to be found in any other forest; in short, it is
thoroughly _characteristic_. I should mention that the whole of these
woods are composed of pollard hornbeams and 'spear'--_i.e._,
unpolled--oaks.
"I am compelled to say from what I saw in a long day's inspection,
that, though no doubt acting with the best intentions, the management
of the forest is going on the wrong tack; it is making war on the
natural aspect of the forest, which the Act of Parliament that
conferred it on the nation expressly stipulated was to be retained.
The tendency of all these fellings is on the one hand to turn over
London forest into a park, which would be more or less like other
parks, and on the other hand to grow sizable trees, as if for the
timber market. I must beg to be allowed a short quotation here from an
excellent little guidebook to the forest by Mr. Edward North Buxton,
verderer of the forest (Sanford, 1885). He says, p. 38: 'In the drier
parts of the forest beeches to a great extent take the place of oaks.
These "spear" trees will make fine timber for future generations,
provided they receive timely attention by being _relieved of the
competing growth of the unpicturesque hornbeam pollards_. Throughout
the wood between Chingford and High Beech, _this has been recently
done_, to the great advantage of the finer trees.'
"The italics are mine, and I ask, Sir, if we want any further evidence
than this of one of the verderers as to the tendency of the fellings.
Mr. Buxton declares in so many words that he wants to change the
special character of the forest; to take away this strange,
unexampled, and most romantic wood, and leave us nothing but a
commonplace instead. I entirely deny his right to do so in the teeth
of the Act of Parliament. I assert, as I did in my former letter, that
the hornbeams are the most important trees in the forest, since they
give it its special character. At the same time I would not encourage
the hornbeams at the expense of the beeches, any more than I would the
beeches at the expense of the hornbeams. I would leave them all to
nature, which is not so niggard after all, even on Epping Forest
gravel, as _e. g._, one can see in places where forest fires have
denuded spaces, and where in a short time birches spring up self-sown.
"The committee of the Common Council has now had Epping Forest in hand
for seventeen years, and has, I am told, in that time felled 100,000
trees. I think the public may now fairly ask for a rest on behalf of
the woods, which, if the present system of felling goes on, will be
ruined as a natural forest; and it is good and useful to make the
claim at once, when, in spite of all disfigurements, the northern part
of the forest, from Sewardstone Green to beyond Epping, is still left
to us, not to be surpassed in interest by any other wood near a great
capital. I am, Sir, yours obediently,
"WILLIAM MORRIS."
These letters emphasise in a single instance what the close student of
Morris will find emphasised at every turn in his career,--the persistent
and strong influence over him of the tastes and occupations of his
boyhood. Unless this is kept constantly in mind, it is easy to fall into
the common error of regarding the various activities into which he threw
himself as separate and dissociated instead of seeing them as they were,
component parts of a perfectly simple purpose and unalterable ideal. With
most men who are on the whole true to the analogy of the chambered
nautilus and cast off the outworn shell of their successive phases of
individuality as the seasons roll, the effect of early environment and
tendency may easily be exaggerated, but Morris grew in the fashion of his
beloved oaks, keeping the rings by which his advance in experience was
marked; at the end all were visible. His education began and continued
largely outside the domain of books and away from masters. His wanderings
in the depths of the quaint and beautiful forest, his intimate
acquaintance with the nature of Gothic architecture, his familiarity with
Scott, his prompt adoption of Ruskin, all these formed the foundation on
which he was to build his own theory of life, and all were his before he
went up to Oxford. They prepared him for the many-sided profession, if
profession it can be called, which was to absorb and at last to exhaust
his mighty energy. It was the tangible surface of the world that most
inspired him in boyhood and in maturity. Loving so much even as a child
its aspects, its lights and shadows, the forms of trees and birds and
beasts, the changes of season, the lives of men living close to "the kind
soil" and in touch with it through hearty manual labour, it was but a step
to the occupations that finally engrossed him. He never got so far away
from the visions of his youth as to forget them. In one form or another he
was constantly trying to embody them that others might see them with his
eyes and worship them with his devotion. "The spirit of the new days, of
our days," says the old man in _News from Nowhere_, "was to be delight in
the life of the world, intense and almost overweening love of the very
skin and surface of the earth on which man dwells."
CHAPTER II.
OXFORD LIFE.
Like the majority of the students who went up to Oxford in the fifties,
Morris matriculated with the definite intention of taking holy orders.
Unlike the majority, he was impelled not only by the sensuous beauty of
ritualistic worship, to which, however, no one could have been more keenly
alive than he, but by a genuine enthusiasm for a life devoted to high
purposes. A fine buoyant desire to better existing conditions and sweep as
much evil as possible off the face of the earth early inspired him. His
mind turned toward the conventual life as that which combined the mediaeval
suggestions always alluring to him with the moral beauty of holiness. He
planned a "Crusade and Holy Warfare against the Age," sang plain song at
daily morning service, read masses of mediaeval chronicles and
ecclesiastical Latin poetry, and hovered just this side of the Roman
Communion. Had the ecclesiology of the University been supported at that
time by an inward and spiritual grace sufficient to hold the heart of
youth to a sustained allegiance, there is little doubt that Morris would
have thrown himself ardently into the religious path. But Oxford had
become an indolent and indifferent mother to her children. The storm of
feeling aroused by the Tractarian movement had died down and the reaction
from it was evident. At Balliol Jowett's energy had made its mark, but at
Exeter, where Morris was, the educational system deserved (and received)
the contempt of an ambitious boy with an unusually large supply of
stored-up intellectual force seeking outlet and guidance. Nor was the
social life more stimulating to moral activity. The abuses recorded in
1852 by the University Commission were in essence so shameful that in the
light of that famous report "the sweet city with her dreaming spires"
seems to have only the beauty of the daughter of Helios, under whose
enchantments men were turned to swine for loving her. The clean mind and
honest nature of Morris revolted from the excesses that went on about him.
He wrote to his mother two years after his matriculation, defending the
proposition that his Oxford education had not been thrown away: "If by
living here and seeing evil and sin in its foulest and coarsest forms, as
one does day by day, I have learned to hate any form of sin and to wish to
fight against it, is not this well too?" It is proof of his purity of
taste and strength of will that, despite his ample means, the wanton
extravagance of the typical undergraduate had for him no allurement. It is
certain that he was never seen at those dinners which were pronounced by
an official censor "a curse and a disgrace to a place of Christian
education," and as certainly he played no part in the mad carnivals at
which novices were initiated into a curriculum of vice. Yet he could not
indeed say with any truth what Gibbon had said a hundred years before,
that the time he spent at Oxford was the most idle and unprofitable of his
whole life. If he felt, as Gibbon did, that his formal studies were
"equally devoid of profit and pleasure," and if he found nothing
ridiculous in Ruskin's bitter complaint that Oxford taught him all the
Latin and Greek that he would learn, but did not teach him that
fritillaries grew in Iffley meadow, he did find a little band of helpful
associates. With these he realised the priceless advantages which Mr.
Bagehot says cannot be got outside a college and which he sums up as found
"in the books that all read because all like; in what all talk of because
all are interested; in the argumentative walk or disputatious lounge; in
the impact of fresh thought on fresh thought, of hot thought on hot
thought; in mirth and refutation, in ridicule and laughter." The first of
the few strong personal attachments in the life of Morris dates from his
first day at Oxford. At the end of January, 1853, he went up for his
matriculation, and beside him at the examination in the Hall sat
Burne-Jones, who within a week of their formal entrance to the college
became his intimate. The friendship thus spontaneously formed on the verge
of manhood lasted until Morris died. In their studies, in their truant
reading, in their later aims and work, the two, diametrically as they
differed in aspect and in temperament and in quality of mind, were
sympathetic and dear companions. Together they joined a group of other
happily gifted men--Fulford, Faulkner, Dixon, Cormell Price, and
Macdonald--who met in one another's rooms for the disputatious lounge over
the exuberant ideals by which they were in common inspired. Tennyson,
Keats, and Shelley, Shakespeare, Ruskin, Carlyle, Kingsley, Thackeray,
Dickens, and Miss Yonge were the gods and half gods of their young and
passionate enthusiasm. The last, curiously enough, was an influence as
potent as any. The hero of her novel of 1853, _The Heir of Redclyffe_, was
the pattern chosen by Morris, according to Mr. Mackail's account, to build
himself upon. Singular as it seems to-day that any marked impression
should have been made upon an even fairly well-trained mind by a writer of
such slight literary quality, it is true that the author of _The Daisy
Chain_ counted among her devoted readers men of brilliant and dominant
intellectual power. She had the lucky touch to kindle in young minds that
fire of sympathy with which they greet whatever shows them their own
world, their age, themselves as they best like to see them. To Morris in
particular the young heir of Redclyffe made the appeal of a congenial
temperament in a position similar to his own. Like Morris, he was
headstrong and passionate, given to excessive bursts of rage and to
repentances not less excessive; like Morris, he united to his natural
pride an unnatural and slightly obtrusive humility; like Morris, he was
rich and beautiful, generous and lovable. It was no great wonder that
Morris, poring with his characteristic absorption over the pleasant pages
on which Guy Morville's chivalrous life is portrayed, said as Dromio to
Dromio, "Methinks you are my glass and not my brother; I see by you I am a
sweet-faced youth."
Mr. Mackail notes with an accent of surprise that Kingsley was much more
widely read than Newman, thinking the choice a curious one in the case of
passionate Anglo-Catholics. So far as Morris was concerned, however, there
was little enough to relish in Newman's subtle theology and relentless
logic. The man to whom religion as a mere sentiment was "a dream and a
mockery" could hardly appeal to one to whom all life was a sentiment.
Kingsley, on the other hand, although he was anti-Catholic in temper, and
disposed to overthrow the illusions by which such romanticists as Scott,
such dreamers as Fouque, had surrounded the Middle Ages, picturing their
coarse and barbarous side with harsh realism, was happy in rendering the
charms of outdoor life and bold adventure, and the songs of the Crusaders
in his _Saint's Tragedy_ must have gone farther toward winning Morris than
pages of Newman's reasoning devotion.
Gradually the monastic ideal faded before the brightness of art and
literature and the life of the world as these became more and more
impressed upon Morris's consciousness. To live in the spirit and in the
region of purely intellectual interests could not have been his choice
after the passing of the first fanatic impulse of youth to dedicate itself
to what is difficult, ignorant of the joy of choosing. Many influences
united to determine the precise form into which he should shape the future
that for all practical purposes was under his control. His interest in
pictorial art was stimulated by Burne-Jones, who was already making
fantastic little drawings, and studies of flowers and foliage. Of great
art he knew nothing until he spent the Long Vacation of 1854 in travelling
through Belgium and Northern France, where he saw Van Eyck and Memling,
who at once became to him, as they were to Rossetti, masters of
incontestable supremacy. On this trip he saw also the beautiful churches
of Amiens, Beauvais, and Chartres, which in his unbridled expansiveness of
phrase he called "the grandest, the most beautiful, the kindest, and most
loving of all the buildings that the earth has ever borne." The following
year he repeated the experience, with Burne-Jones and Fulford for
companions. This time the journey was to have been made on foot from
motives of economy, as Burne-Jones was poor and Morris embraced the habits
of poverty when in his company with unaffected delicacy of feeling. At
Amiens, however, Morris went lame, and, "after filling the streets with
imprecations on all boot-makers," bought a pair of gay carpet slippers in
which to continue the trip. These proved not to serve the purpose, and the
travellers were obliged to reach Chartres by the usual methods of
conveyance, Morris arguing with fury and futility in favour of skirting
Paris, "even by two days' journey, so as not to see the streets of it."
They had with them one book, _Keats_, and their minds were filled with the
poetic ideas of art as the expression of man's pleasure in his toil, and
of beauty as the natural and necessary accompaniment of productive labour,
which Ruskin had been preaching in _The Stones of Venice_ and in the
Edinburgh lectures. By this time they had become acquainted with the work
of the Pre-Raphaelites, and Burne-Jones had announced that of all men who
lived on earth the one he wanted to see was Rossetti. Morris had used his
spare time, of which we may imagine he had a considerable amount, in the
study of mediaeval design as the splendid manuscripts in the Bodleian
Library illustrate it. An architectural newspaper also formed part of his
regular reading outside of his studies. Thus primed for definite action,
on this holiday filled with stimulating interests and the delicious
freedom of roaming quite at will with the best of companions through the
sweet fertile country of Northern France, Morris put quite aside all aims
that had not directly to do with art. He and Burne-Jones, walking late one
night on the quays of Havre, discussed their plans. Both gave up once and
for all the idea of taking orders; both decided to leave Oxford as
quickly as they could; both were to be artists, Burne-Jones a painter and
Morris an architect.
Although Morris was never to become a practising architect, this choice of
a profession at the beginning of his career is both characteristic and
significant. Buildings, as we have seen, had interested him from his
childhood. His favourite excursions, long and short, had been to the
region of churches. In the art of building he saw the means of elevating
all the tastes of man. Architecture meant to him "the art of creating a
building with all the appliances fit for carrying on a dignified and happy
life." It seemed to him even at the outset, before the word "socialism"
had come into his vocabulary, incredible that people living in pleasant
homes and engaged in making and using these appliances of which he speaks,
should lead lives other than dignified and happy. It was much more in
accordance with his ideal of a vocation, a ministry to man, that he should
contribute to the daily material comfort and pleasure of the world, that
he should make places good for the body to live in and fair for the eye to
rest upon, and therefore soothing to the soul, than that he should
construct abstract spiritual mansions of which he could at best form but a
vague conception. It was, then, with a certain sense of dedication, an
exchange of method without a change of spirit, that he gave up the thought
of holy orders and turned to the thought of furthering the good of
mankind by working toward the beauty and order of the visible world.
From the point of view of his later interests as a decorator of houses, he
was showing the utmost wisdom in beginning with the framework, which must
exist before any decoration can be applied. "I have spoken of the popular
arts," he says himself, in one of his lectures, "but they might all be
summed up in that one word Architecture; they are all parts of that great
whole, and the art of house-building begins it all. If we did not know how
to dye or to weave; if we had neither gold nor silver nor silk, and no
pigments to paint with but half a dozen ochres and umbers, we might yet
frame a worthy art that would lead to everything, if we had but timber,
stone and lime, and a few cutting tools to make these common things not
only shelter us from wind and weather but also express the thoughts and
aspirations that stir in us. Architecture would lead us to all the arts,
as it did with the earlier men; but if we despise it and take no note of
how we are housed, the other arts will have a hard time of it indeed."
And again: "A true architectural work," he says, "is a building duly
provided with all the necessary furniture, decorated with all due
ornament, according to the use, quality, and dignity of the building, from
mere mouldings or abstract lines to the great epical works of sculpture
and painting, which except as decorations of the nobler form of such
buildings cannot be produced at all. So looked upon, a work of
architecture is a harmonious, co-operative work of art, inclusive of all
the serious arts--those which are not engaged in the production of mere
toys or ephemeral prettinesses."
Morris communicated his momentous decision to his family as soon as it was
made, and they received it with amazement and distress. While their origin
was not especially aristocratic, their tastes ran toward the symbols of
aristocracy. When Morris was nine years old, his father obtained a grant
of arms from the Heralds' College, and the son had no small liking for the
bearings assigned--bearings which included a horse's head erased argent
between three horseshoes. The horse's head he introduced on the tiles and
glass of the house he built for himself in later years, and he was in the
habit of making a yearly pilgrimage to the famous White Horse of the
Berkshire Downs, connecting it in some obscure way with his ancestry. In
England, during the fifties, nothing was less calculated to appeal to an
aristocratic tendency than any form of art considered as a profession. In
_The Newcomes_ Mr. Honeyman remarks with bland dignity to his aspiring
young relative; "My dear Clive, there are degrees in society which we must
respect. You surely cannot think of being a professional artist." In much
this spirit, apparently, Mrs. Morris received her son's announcement,
conveyed in a long and affectionate letter stating in detail the motives
that had led him to his resolution. After defending his chosen profession
at some length, calling it with characteristic avoidance of pompous
phraseology, "a useful trade," he dwells upon the moderation of his hopes
and expectations. He does not hope "to be great at all in anything," but
thinks he may look forward to reasonable happiness in his work. It will be
grievous to his pride and self-will, he says, to have to do just as he is
told for three long years, but "good for it, too," and he looks forward
with little delight to the drudgery of learning a new trade, but is pretty
confident of success, and is happy in being able to pay "the premium and
all that" without laying any fresh burden of expense upon his mother.
Finally he proposes taking as his master George Edmund Street, who was
living in Oxford as architect of the diocese, and whose enthusiasm for the
thirteenth century could hardly have failed to claim the sympathy of
Morris. Certainly it seemed precisely the fitting opportunity that
offered. There could have been no better moment for him to follow the
advice he so frequently gave to others--to turn his back upon an ugly age,
choose the epoch that suited him best, and identify himself with that.
Gothic to the core, he had come to Oxford, not, as Mr. Day has suggested,
to catch the infection of mediaevalism abroad there, but to assimilate and
thrive upon all the influences to which his independently mediaeval spirit
was acutely susceptible. Scott, Pugin, Shaw, Viollet-le-Duc, had broken
the way through popular prejudice, and Street was engaged at the time
Morris went to him in the work of restoring ancient churches and designing
Gothic buildings. "Restoration" had not then so evil a sound to Morris as
it later came to have. Some thirty years after, he was to say: "No man or
no body of men, however learned they may be in ancient art, whatever skill
in design or love of beauty they may have, can persuade, or bribe, or
force our workmen of to-day to do their work in the same way as the
workmen of King Edward I. did theirs. Wake up Theodoric the Goth from his
sleep of centuries and place him on the throne of Italy, turn our modern
House of Commons into the Witenagemote (or Meeting of the Wise Men) of
King Alfred the Great!--no less a feat is the restoration of an ancient
building." In 1855, however, he had not fully arrived at this conviction.
It was then the period of "fresh hope and partial insight" which,
regarding it retrospectively, he says, "produced many interesting
buildings and other works of art, and afforded a pleasant time indeed to
the hopeful but very small minority engaged in it, in spite of all
vexations and disappointments." There seemed no reason to suppose that,
helped as he was by his predilections and by his environment, he could not
become the master-builder of the house beautiful that constantly haunted
his imagination.
He was not to begin at once, however. In deference to his mother's wish he
went through his final term, passed in the Final Schools without
difficulty, and, together with his companions--The Brotherhood as they
now called themselves,--gave distinction to his last year at the
University, where despite all drawbacks he had been aboundingly happy, by
founding the since famous little _Oxford and Cambridge Magazine_.
[Illustration: TITLE-PAGE OF "THE OXFORD AND CAMBRIDGE MAGAZINE"]
Like the Pre-Raphaelite _Germ_, this periodical aimed at an unusually high
standard. It was printed at the Chiswick Press with some pretensions to
typographical beauty. Each number had upon its title-page an ornamental
heading designed by one of Charles Whittingham's daughters and engraved by
Mary Byfield. On the green wrappers the name of the magazine was printed
in the old-fashioned type which the Chiswick Press was the first to
revive, and although, unlike _The Germ_, it was not illustrated,
photographs of Woolner's medallions of Carlyle and Tennyson were mounted
to bind with it and sold at a shilling apiece to subscribers. The price of
each number was also a shilling, and twelve monthly numbers appeared,
making it thrice as long lived as its prototype, _The Germ_. The financial
responsibility, says Mr. Mackail, was undertaken wholly by Morris, and he
at first attempted the general control. This he was soon glad to
relinquish, paying a salary of a hundred pounds a year to his editor. The
title, which in full read _The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, Conducted by
Members of the Two Universities_, indicates rather more co-operation than
existed, the magazine being conducted entirely by Oxford men and fully
two-thirds written by them. The tone of the contributions was to be
impeccable. "It is unanimously agreed," wrote Price, "that there is to be
no shewing off, no quips, no sneers, no lampooning in our Magazine."
Politics were to be almost eschewed, "Tales, Poetry, friendly Critiques,
and social articles" making up the body of the text.
First among the contributors in quantity and regularity of supply was
Morris. During his second year at the University he had discovered that he
could write poetry, and had communicated the fact to his companions
without loss of time. Canon Dixon, recalling the very thrilling occasion
of his reading his first poem to the group gathered in the old Exeter
rooms occupied by Burne-Jones, affirms that he reached his perfection at
once, that nothing could have been altered for the better, and also quotes
him as saying, "Well, if this is poetry, it is very easy to write." He was
not one to let a capability fust in him unused. Poetry and prose, equally
easy to him, poured after this from his pen, giving expression with some
confusion and incoherence to his boyish raptures over the things he best
loved and most thought about. During the twelve months of the magazine's
life he contributed to it five poems, eight prose tales, a review of
Browning's _Men and Women_, and two special articles, one on a couple of
engravings by Alfred Bethel and one on the Cathedral at Amiens. In all
this early work, filled with superabundant imagery, self-conscious,
sensuous, unsubstantial, pictorial, we have Morris the writer as he was
at the beginning and much as he was again at the end. His first strange
little romances pass before the eyes as his late ones do, like strips of
beautiful fabric, deeply dyed with colours both dim and rich, and printed
with faintly outlined figures in postures illustrating the dreamy events
of dreamy lives. Many of the pages echo with the sound of trumpets and the
clash of arms, but the echo is from so far away that the heart of the
reader declines to leap. Passionate emotions are portrayed in passionate
language. Men and women love and die with wild adventure. Splendid
sacrifices are made, and dark revenges taken. But the effect is of
marionettes, admirably costumed and ingeniously managed yet inevitably
suggesting artifice and failing to suggest life. Nevertheless Morris wrote
in the fashion commonly supposed to impart vitality if nothing else to
composition. He sat up late of nights, after the manner of young writers,
and let his words stand as they fell hot and unpremeditated on the page.
The labour of learning the art, as his favourite, Keats, learned it, by
indefatigable practice in finding the perfect word, the one exquisite
phrase, was quite outside his method. As long as he lived, he preferred
rewriting to revising a manuscript. The austerity of mind that leads to
impatience of superfluous colour or tone, and that dreads as the plague
superfluous sentiment, was foreign to him, nor did he ever acquire it as
even the Epicurean temperament may do by ardent self-restraint. In most
of the romances and poems the scene is laid somewhat vaguely but
unmistakably in the Middle Ages. We rarely surprise the young writer in a
date, but the atmosphere is that of the thirteenth century though with
many thirteenth-century characteristics left out. The incidents appeal to
what Bagehot calls "that kind of boyish fancy which idolises mediaeval
society as the 'fighting time.'" The distinction lies in the fertility and
beauty of the descriptions. On nearly every page is some passage that has
the quality of a picture. In _The Hollow Land_, in _Gertha's Lovers_, in
_Svend and his Brethren_, and especially in the article on the Amiens
Cathedral, are exquisite landscapes and backgrounds against which the
personages group themselves with perfect fittingness. "I must paint Gertha
before I die," said Burne-Jones, after Morris himself was dead, recalling
the charm of this story which was written in his company, under the
willows by the riverside. "The opening and the closing sentences always
invited me in an indescribable way, but the motive _par excellence_ was
that of Gertha after death, in the chapter entitled 'What Edith the
Handmaiden Saw from the War Saddle,' where the beautiful queen lies on the
battle-field with the blue speedwell about her pale face, while a soft
wind rustles the sunset-lit aspens overhead."
[Illustration: _Portrait of Rossetti_
_By Watts_]
To his genius for evoking a scene from memory or imagination with a grace
and delicacy missing in the designs he was later to make with tools more
rebellious than words, Morris added a singular ability to convey to
his readers the most significant quality of what he admired, to impress
them with the feature that had most impressed him. The fancy for gold,
inspired perhaps by study of mediaeval illumination, runs like a glittering
thread through the story of _Svend and his Brethren_. Cissela's gold hair,
her crown of gold, the golden ring she breaks with her lover, the gold
cloth over which she walks across the trampled battle-field, the samite of
purple wrought with gold stars, the golden letters on the
sword-blade,--all these recur like so many bright accents from which the
attention cannot escape. Again, in the description of Amiens Cathedral, we
get from simple verbal repetition the effect of massive modelling, the
sense of weight in the design as Morris felt it in one of the sculptured
figures of the niches: "A stately figure with a king's crown on his head,
and hair falling in three waves over his shoulders; a very kingly face
looking straight onward; a great jewelled collar falling heavily to his
elbows: his right hand holding a heavy sceptre formed of many budding
flowers, and his left just touching in front the folds of his raiment that
falls heavily, very heavily to the ground over his feet. Saul, King of
Israel." In another passage describing with minute detail the figures of
the Virgin and Child, a similar emphasis is laid on the quality of
restfulness. "The two figures are very full of rest; everything about them
expresses it from the broad forehead of the Virgin, to the resting of the
feet of the Child (who is almost self-balanced) in the fold of the robe
that she holds gently, to the falling of the quiet lines of her robe over
her feet, to the resting of its folds between them." And if the effect to
be rendered is one of colour, a touch of finer eloquence is added to this
somewhat crude method. The final passage of the account of the great
Cathedral is a genuine triumph of poetic observation, carrying the fancy
of the reader lightly over the silvery loveliness of the picture as it lay
before the boy enraptured by it: "And now, farewell to the church that I
love, to the carved temple-mountain that rises so high above the
water-meadows of the Somme, above the grey roofs of the good town.
Farewell to the sweep of the arches, up from the bronze bishops lying at
the west end, up to the belt of solemn windows, where, through the painted
glass, the light comes solemnly. Farewell to the cavernous porches of the
west front, so grey under the fading August sun, grey with the
wind-storms, grey with the rain-storms, grey with the beat of many days'
sun, from sunrise to sunset; showing white sometimes, too, when the sun
strikes it strongly; snowy-white, sometimes, when the moon is on it, and
the shadows growing blacker; but grey now, fretted into deeper grey,
fretted into black by the mitres of the bishops, by the solemn covered
heads of the prophets, by the company of the risen, and the long robes of
the judgment-angels by hell-mouth and its flames gaping there, and the
devils that feed it; by the saved souls and the crowning angels; by the
presence of the Judge, and by the roses growing above them all forever."
The review of Browning's _Men and Women_, then recently published, is more
valuable as testifying to the impression produced by Browning upon his
young contemporary, than for any especial illumination it throws upon the
poems themselves. Browning was popular with the students of Oxford long
before he gained his wider audience, and although Morris did not follow
him far in his investigation of the human soul and came heartily to
dislike "his constant dwelling on sin and probing of the secrets of the
heart," he placed him at the time of writing his criticism "high among the
poets of all time" and he "hardly knew whether first or second in our
own," and his defence of him, bristling with ejaculations, and couched in
boyish phrases, shows in part a more than boyish divination. "It does not
help poems much to _solve_ them," he says, after what, in truth, is a
somewhat disastrous attempt to interpret the meaning of _Women and Roses_,
"because there are in poems so many exquisitely small and delicate turns
of thought running through their music, and along with it, that cannot be
done into prose, any more than the infinite variety of form, and shadow,
and colour in a great picture can be rendered by a coloured woodcut." It
was "a bitter thing" to him to see the way in which the poet had been
received by "almost everybody," and he assured his little world that what
the critics called obscurity in Browning's poems resulted from depth of
thought and greatness of subject on the poet's part, and on his readers'
part, "from their shallower brains and more bounded knowledge," if not
indeed from "mere wanton ignorance and idleness," and to this kind of
obscurity one had little right to object. It was the first tilt in the
lists, the beginning of the long combat against the Philistines upon which
Morris entered with high resolve and firm conviction, which he lustily
enjoyed, and in which despite many a broken lance he bore himself as a
bold and skilful knight.
In the little tale called _The Hollow Land_, written for the magazine just
before it "went to smash," to use Burne-Jones's expressive phrase, an
amusingly significant sentence occurs: "Then I tried to learn painting,"
says the hero, "till I thought I should die, but at last learned through
very much pain and grief." Here it is not difficult to recognise an
autobiographic touch. Painting was already beginning to beckon Morris away
from the profession he had so recently chosen. At the end of 1855, during
the Christmas vacation, and just before Morris entered Street's office,
Burne-Jones had made a visit to London, where at a monthly meeting at the
Working Men's College he for the first time saw Rossetti, and later heard
him rend in pieces the opinions of those who differed with him, and
stoutly support his infrangible theory that all men should be painters.
How ready Burne-Jones was to yield himself to this potent influence, how
promptly Rossetti's vivid and original temperament acted upon his admirer,
is clear from the latter's description, written many years after, of the
first encounter--the young undergraduate sitting half-frightened,
embarrassed and worshipping, among strangers, eating thick bread and
butter, and listening to speeches about the progress of the college, until
the entrance of his idol, whose sensitive, gentle, indolent face, with its
flickering of humour and the fire of genius, entirely satisfied his poetic
imagination. The great qualities of Rossetti in those days revealed
themselves in his face, and his imperious will and keen intellect were no
less obvious in his talk. Burne-Jones returned to Oxford with the idea of
dedicating himself to art more than ever firmly fixed in his mind.
Rossetti had approved the drawings which he had brought to him for
consideration, and had pronounced the seven months still to elapse before
he could take his degree time too valuable to waste outside of art,
counselling him to fling the University and all its works behind him and
begin painting at once. With mingled delight and terror Burne-Jones, in
spite of small means and weak health, followed his leader, who, however
rash to advise, was not one to neglect his charge, and who worked loyally
to bring him through with triumph, criticising, teaching, approving,
encouraging without stint, and presently, after his own inimitable
fashion, bringing patrons to him, bidding them buy, which obediently they
did.
It was inevitable that Morris should be stirred to emulation by this step
on the part of his friend. After Burne-Jones went to London to begin
painting under Rossetti's direction, Morris spent nearly all his Sundays
with him at his lodgings in Chelsea. These holidays were full of
excitement. It was a glorious little world that opened out under
Rossetti's enthusiastic, dogmatic, and continuous talk and argument.
Morris was deeply impressed by his notion that everyone should be a
painter, and after Street moved his office to London and Morris and
Burne-Jones took lodgings together, the former tried the characteristic
experiment of combining painting with architecture, attempting to get six
hours a day at his drawing in addition to his office work. It is
interesting to find him writing at this juncture that he cannot enter into
politico-social subjects with any interest, that things are in a muddle
and that he has no power to set them right in the smallest degree, that
_his_ work is the embodiment of dreams in one form or another. What
Rossetti thought of his two disciples is seen in a letter written by him
to William Allingham in December, 1856, when Morris had been nearly a year
with Street. He found both "wonders after their kind." "Jones is doing
designs which quite put one to shame," he wrote, "so full are they of
everything--Aurora Leighs of art. He will take the lead in no time."
Morris he deemed "one of the finest little fellows alive--with a touch of
the incoherent, but a real man," and "in all illumination and work of
that kind" he considered him quite unrivalled by anything modern that he
knew. With a guide thus confident and inspiring, it is not strange that
Morris presently yielded to the spell, and renounced architecture to
pursue painting as an end and aim in itself, although, like the hero of
his romance, he learned with much pain and grief.
[Illustration: ILLUSTRATION BY ROSSETTI TO "THE LADY OF SHALOTT" IN THE
MOXON "TENNYSON." THE HEAD OF LAUNCELOT IS A PORTRAIT OF MORRIS]
Rossetti's service to Morris is difficult to estimate. For a brief period
his influence over him was supreme. Perhaps in the work and temper of this
Italian, Morris saw more deeply into the heart of the mediaeval world than
all his churches and illuminated manuscripts could help him to see. At all
events, he was for the time close to genius and dominated by it. His
devotion to his master partook of the violence inseparable from his
temperament. He was soon ready to say, when Burne-Jones complained that he
worked better in Rossetti's manner than in his own: "I have got beyond
that; I want to imitate Gabriel as much as I can." But he was never to be
for very long under any personal influence. Nor could he be persuaded by
the most brilliant eloquence in the world that good could be got out of
doing what he did not enjoy; and he never enjoyed any labour that required
long patience and persistent concentration of effort. Without being
fickle, his mind was so restless as to produce the effect of fickleness
and to preclude the possibility of his doing really great work. While he
was trying, under Rossetti's stimulating but peremptory rule, to master a
painter's methods he became gloomy and despondent. "How long Rossetti's
daily influence might have kept him labouring at what he could not do,"
writes Mr. Mackail with a tinge of bitterness, "when there was work all
round that he could do, on the whole, better than any man living, it is
needless to inquire." But that Rossetti did manage to keep him for a
couple of years at the study of painting cannot be counted a misfortune.
Probably that experience, together with his brief term under Street, did
as much as anything to save his design from mediocrity and imitativeness.
He did not make himself an architect, and he never learned to draw
anything that remotely resembled the actual structure of the human form,
but he must have gained through his study some knowledge of the inviolable
laws of art that he could not have gained by passive observation however
keen, or by sympathy however ardent. Rossetti can hardly have been the
best master for him. His own nature was too undisciplined, and he had as
few of the academic virtues as any man on record of the same technical
ability. But his was the supreme faculty of rousing enthusiasm. It may be
doubted whether any other painter in England could have kept Morris at the
appointed and impossible task for so long a time. It is easy to imagine
how the impatient spirit of the latter rebelled against the slow process
of learning to draw the human figure in its complicated and subtle beauty
of construction and surface. The fact that he stopped so far short of
satisfactory accomplishment seems to account for many of the defects to be
found in his later designs, which at their best were never to be entirely
beautiful, though full of zest and freedom. His tendency to drop any
branch of his work as soon as it became tedious to him, to turn to
something else, kept his creative impulse continually fresh and effective;
but kept him also from achieving the penetrating distinction of artistic
self-possession. Whatever helped him in any degree toward this
self-possession, whatever he got in the way of discipline of mind and
hand, should be acknowledged by his admirers with gratitude, and it is but
just to recognise in Rossetti the one man who seems to have kept the
prodigious impetuosity of Morris down without promptly losing hold upon
his interest. Add to this the clear vision of a romantic ideal which all
who worked with Rossetti were privileged to share, and the constant
inspiration of the drama of sentiment and emotion rendered in his colour
and line and in his exotic treatment of form, and we must own that nowhere
else could Morris have found such food for an imagination already
quickened by influences reaching it from a remote time and an alien world.
Nowhere else could he have come so close to the concealed mysteries of the
human soul, despite the disillusionment he was bound to feel in daily
contact with a character as contradictory as it was compelling.
CHAPTER III.
FROM ROSSETTI TO THE RED HOUSE.
Although a blight of discouragement seems to have fallen upon Morris under
Rossetti's tuition, there were some blithe compensations. Not the least of
these was the fitting up of the rooms at 17 Red Lion Square where he and
Burne-Jones took quarters. "Topsy and I live together," wrote Burne-Jones,
"in the quaintest room in all London, hung with brasses of old knights and
drawings of Albert Duerer." For the furniture, Morris, who, Rossetti said,
was "bent on doing the magnificent," made designs to be carried out in
deal by a carpenter of the neighbourhood. Everything was very large and
heavy, intensely mediaeval, and doubtless rather ugly in an honest fashion,
but in the end it was furniture to be coveted, for it offered great spaces
for decoration, and Rossetti as well as Morris and Burne-Jones painted on
it subjects from Chaucer and Dante and the Arthurian stories. The panels
of a cupboard glowed with Rossetti's beautiful pictures representing Dante
and Beatrice meeting in Florence and meeting in Paradise, and on the wide
backs of the chairs he painted scenes from some of the poems Morris had
written. The wardrobe was decorated by Burne-Jones with paintings from
_The Prioress's Tale_. On the walls of the room were hung, no doubt, the
several water-colours bought from Rossetti, to the lovely names of which
Morris promptly wrote ballads. An owl was co-tenant with the young
artists, and they were served and also criticised by a housemaid of
literary ambitions. In this highly individual apartment, where, curiously
enough, Rossetti and his friend Deverell had had their studio together
five or six years before, life was not all labour and striving. There
were, moreover, holidays spent at the Zooelogical Gardens, evenings at the
theatre, night-long sessions in Rossetti's rooms, and excursions on the
Thames. One of the latter is vividly described in Dr. Birkbeck Hill's
_Letters of Gabriel Rossetti to William Allingham_, giving a joyous
picture of Morris at the mercy of his ungovernable temper. The party,
consisting of Hill, Morris, and Faulkner, had started out to row down the
Thames from Oxford to a London suburb. By the time they had reached Henley
they had spent all their money except enough for Faulkner's return ticket
to Oxford, where he was to attend a college meeting. For this he departed,
promising to bring back a supply of money in the evening. "The weather was
unusually hot," writes Dr. Hill, "Morris and I sauntered along the
river-side. I have not forgotten the longing glances he cast on a large
basket of strawberries. He had always been so plentifully supplied with
money that he bore with far greater impatience than I did this privation.
At last the shadows had grown long and the heat was more bearable. We went
with light hearts to the railway station to meet our comrade. 'Well,
Faulkner,' cried out Morris, cheerfully, 'how much money have you
brought?' Our friend gave a start. 'Good heavens,' he replied, 'I forgot
all about it.' Morris thrust both his hands into his long dark curly hair,
tugged at it wildly, ground his teeth, swore like a trooper, and stamped
up and down the platform--in fact, behaved just like Sinbad's captain when
he found that his ship was driving upon the rocks. His outbursts of rage,
I hasten to say, were always harmless. They left no sullenness behind, and
as each rapidly passed away he was ready to join in a hearty laugh at it.
Faulkner, who was not the most patient of men, noticed that passengers,
station-master, porters, engine-driver, and stoker were all gazing in
astonishment. He, too, lost his temper, and, though in a far lower key,
stormed back. Morris soon quieted down, and a council of war was held. He
fortunately had a gold watch-chain on which he raised enough to pay all
needful expenses. I remember well how the rest of our journey we rowed by
many a tavern on the bank as effectually constrained as ever was Ulysses
not to listen to its siren call. It was through no earthly paradise that
the young poet and artist passed on the afternoon of our last day." When
they landed they had just a penny among them, and were still some six or
seven miles from their destination, so they were obliged to hire a cab and
trust to good fortune for not coming to a turnpike gate before arriving at
Red Lion Square.
About this time also Rossetti and Morris made an excursion to Oxford for
the purpose of visiting Benjamin Woodward, the architect and Rossetti's
friend. Mr. Woodward had recently erected a building for the Oxford Union,
a society composed of past and present members of the University. In
exhibiting the building to Rossetti it was suggested that the blank
stretch of wall which ran around the top of the Debating Room afforded an
admirable opportunity for decoration, and Rossetti with prompt enthusiasm
evolved a plan for a cooeperative enterprise. He and Morris, with several
other willing spirits,--Burne-Jones, of course, Arthur Hughes, Valentine
Prinsep, Spencer Stanhope, and J. Hungerford Pollen,--were to go up to
Oxford in a body. Each was to choose a subject from the _Morte d'Arthur_,
and execute it to the best of his ability on the walls of the Debating
Room. The whole affair was to be a matter of a few weeks. The artists
offered their services for nothing; their expenses (which turned out to be
as free as their offer) were to be paid by the Union. It is easy to
imagine the ensuing bustle and ardour. Rossetti eagerly managing, Morris
delighted with the charmingly mediaeval situation,--a few humble painters
working together piously, without hope of glory or thought of gain,--the
others following their leader with lamb-like docility. Had their knowledge
of methods been equal to their zeal, the walls of the Debating Room must
have become the loveliest of realised visions and the delight of many
generations. The young workmen sat for each other, Morris, Burne-Jones,
and Rossetti all possessing fine paintable heads. They clambered up and
down endless ladders to gain a satisfactory view of their performance, and
attacked the most stupendous difficulties with patience and ingenuity. The
faces in the subject undertaken by Burne-Jones were painted, for example,
in three planes at right angles to one another, owing to the projection of
a string-course of bricks straight across the space to be filled by the
heads of the figures. Some studies by Rossetti have been preserved, and
show that his part at least of the decoration was conceived in a fresh
poetic spirit, with fulness and quaintness of expression and suggestion.
But the congenial band had entered upon their labours with a carelessness
that can only be described as wanton. Not one of them knew how to paint in
tempera, and the new damp walls were smeared over with a thin coat of
white lime wash laid upon the bare bricks as sole preparation for a sort
of water-colour painting that blossomed like a flower under the gifted
hands of the artists, and faded almost as soon away. The effect at the
time was so brilliant as to make the walls, according to Mr. Coventry
Patmore's contemporaneous testimony, "look like the margin of an
illuminated manuscript," but in the course of a few months the colours had
sunk into the sponge-like surface to such an extent that the designs were
already dim and indistinguishable.
Morris, with characteristic promptness, was the first on the field, and
his picture was finished in advance of any of the others. He was, however,
no better instructed than his companions in the special requirements of
his material, and presently all that was left of his painting was the head
of his brave knight peering over the tops of multitudinous sunflowers. The
decoration of the ceiling was also assigned to him, and he made his design
for it in a single day. Later, in 1875, he repainted it, but most of the
art of this merry period has receded into complete oblivion. The stay in
Oxford lengthened into months as complications increased, and finally the
enterprise was abandoned with the work unfinished. It had led, however, to
an event of paramount importance to Morris, and of considerable importance
to Rossetti--the meeting with Miss Burden, who was to figure in so many of
Rossetti's symbolic pictures, and who became the wife of Morris. Her
remarkable beauty had attracted the attention of the young men one night
at the little Oxford theatre. "My brother was the first to observe her,"
writes William Rossetti; "her face was at once tragic, mystic, passionate,
calm, beautiful, and gracious--a face for a sculptor and a face for a
painter--a face solitary in England, and not at all like that of an
English woman, but rather of an Ionian Greek." In Rossetti's portrait of
her at eighteen, painted shortly after this meeting, we see the grave,
unusual features almost precisely as they are drawn with words in a poem
by Morris, entitled _Praise of My Lady_, which Mr. Mackail says was
written during a visit to the Manchester Exhibition of 1857, but which
assuredly is no earlier than the date of his acquaintance with Jane
Burden. The description, Pre-Raphaelite in its detail, runs through the
first half of the poem:
My Lady seems of ivory
Forehead, straight nose, and cheeks that be
Hollow'd a little mournfully.
Beata mea Domina!
Her forehead, overshadow'd much
By bows of hair, has a wave such
As God was good to make for me.
Beata mea Domina!
Not greatly long my lady's hair,
Nor yet with yellow color fair,
But thick and crisped wonderfully;
Beata mea Domina!
Heavy to make the pale face sad,
And dark, but dead as though it had
Been forged by God most wonderfully;
Beata mea Domina!
Of some strange metal, thread by thread,
To stand out from my lady's head,
Not moving much to tangle me.
Beata mea Domina!
Beneath her brows the lids fall slow,
The lashes a clear shadow throw
Where I would wish my lips to be.
Beata mea Domina!
Her great eyes, standing far apart,
Draw up some memory from her heart,
And gaze out very mournfully;
Beata mea Domina!
So beautiful and kind they are,
But most times looking out afar,
Waiting for something, not for me.
Beata mea Domina!
I wonder if the lashes long
Are those that do her bright eyes wrong,
For always half tears seem to be.
Beata mea Domina!
Lurking below the underlid,
Darkening the place where they lie hid--
If they should rise and flow for me!
Beata mea Domina!
Her full lips being made to kiss,
Curl'd up and pensive each one is;
This makes me faint to stand and see.
Beata mea Domina!
It was the force of this attraction that kept Morris long at Oxford after
Rossetti and Burne-Jones had returned to London, leaving the walls of the
Oxford Union to their sad fate. But it was no love in idleness for him,
rather a time of many beginnings. He was carving in stone, modelling in
clay, making designs for stained glass windows, even "doing worsted
work," in Rossetti's contemptuous phrase for his efforts at reviving the
lost art of embroidery, with a frame made from an old model and wools dyed
especially for him. Most of all he was writing poetry, the proper
occupation of a lover so aesthetically endowed. Early in 1858 he had _The
Defence of Guenevere_, a collection of thirty poems, ready to bring out.
Save for a slim little pamphlet entitled _Sir Galahad: A Christmas
Mystery_, the contents of which were included in it, it was his first
volume and, like Swinburne's _Rosamond_ published two years later, it was
dedicated to Rossetti.
In this youthful, fantastic, emotional poetry we get the very essence of
the writer's early spirit without the strange shadow of foreboding, the
constant sense of swiftly passing time, that comes into the poetry of his
maturity. Technically, the poems could hardly be more picturesquely
defective than they are. The one giving the volume its name is nearly
unintelligible in parts, even when the reader is aware of the incidents of
Guenevere's story, and prepared to interpret the hysterical ravings of a
woman overcome by sorrow, shame, and love.
But no poems, except Rossetti's own, have so suggested romantic art in
strange shapes and unbridled colour. They, too, like the wall-paintings of
that early and unrivalled time, resemble the margins of an illuminated
manuscript, reminding one of nothing in nature, but flashing the richness
of mediaeval symbolism upon the imagination in more or less awkward forms.
If Morris could not "imitate Gabriel" in his pictures, he could at least
imitate Gabriel's pictures in his poems. From the _Beata Beatrix_, from
the _Ghirlandata_, from the _Proserpine_, from almost any of Rossetti's
paintings of women, these curious and affected lines, for example, might
have been gleaned:
See through my long throat how the words go up
In ripples to my mouth; how in my hand
The shadow lies like wine within a cup
Of marvellously colour'd gold.
In _The Eve of Crecy_ we have the glitter of gold and the splendour of
material things, rendered with a childish abandon, as in the prose
romances:
Gold on her head and gold on her feet,
And gold where the hems of her kirtle meet,
And a golden girdle round my sweet;--
Ah! qu'elle est belle, La Marguerite.
Yet even now it is good to think
* * * * *
Of Margaret sitting glorious there,
In glory of gold and glory of hair,
And glory of glorious face most fair;
Ah! qu'elle est belle, La Marguerite.
The full hues that had for the decorators of mediaeval missals a religious
significance recur again and again in lines that have much more to do with
earth than with heaven, and show less concern with the human soul than
with the human heart. Damozels hold scarlet lilies such as Maiden
Margaret bears "on the great church walls;" ladies walk in their gardens
clad in white and scarlet; the vision of Christ appears to Galahad "with
raiment half blood-red, half white as snow"; angels appear clad in white
with scarlet wings; scarlet is the predominating colour throughout, if we
except gold, which serves as background and ornament to everything. Next
to scarlet comes green, which Morris was later to call "the workaday
colour," and we find occasional patches of blue and of grey in painted
boats and in hangings. The following stanza shows a favourite method of
emphasising the prevailing colour of a poem:
The water slips,
The red-bill'd heron dips,
Sweet kisses on red lips,
Alas! the red rust grips,
And the blood-red dagger rips,
Yet, O knight, come to me!
For pure incoherence, the quality that Rossetti discerned in Morris at
their first meeting, the song from which this stanza is taken is
unsurpassed. Yet an emotional effect is gained in it. What we chiefly miss
in the little craft sailing under such vivid colours, is that
"deep-grasping keel of reason" which, Lowell says, "alone can steady and
give direction" to verse. Excitable and impatient, in pursuit of a vague
ideal, gifted with the power to bring out the pictorial quality of
detached scenes, but without a fine metrical sense, and averse to lucid
statement, the young poet introduced himself to the world as a symbolist
in the modern acceptation of the word. One of his poems, _Rapunzel_, has
been said to forecast Maeterlinck's manner and spirit, and the general
characteristics of the poem--a fairy tale somewhat too "grown-up" in
treatment--certainly suggest the comparison. In all this work physical
characteristics play an important part. Long hands with "tenderly shadowed
fingers," "long lips" that "cleave" to the fingers they kiss, lips "damp
with tears," that "shudder with a kiss," lips "like a curved sword," warm
arms, long, fair arms, lithe arms, twining arms, broad fair eyelids, long
necks, and unlimited hair, form an equipment somewhat dangerous for a poet
with anything short of genius to sustain him. For themes Morris had gone
chiefly to the Arthurian stories and to the chronicles of Froissart. His
style, he himself thought, was more like Browning's than anyone else's,
though the difference that lay between him and Browning even at the
beginning forbade any essential likeness. Browning's effort was always to
render an idea which was perfectly clear in his own mind. His volubility
and obscurity and roughness frequently arose from his over-eagerness to
express his idea in a variety of ways, leading him to break off with half
statements and begin afresh, to throw out imperfect suggestions and follow
them with others equally imperfect. But all his stutterings and broken
sentences failed to disguise the fact that an intellectual conception
underlay the turbulent method, giving substance and life to the poem
however much it might lack grace and form. With Morris the intellectual
conception was as weak as with Browning it was strong, and apparently
existed chiefly to give an excuse for the pictures following one another
in rapid succession through every poem, short or long, dramatic or lyric,
of both his youth and maturity. In this early volume there was, to be
sure, an obvious effort toward rendering psychological effects. Most of
the longer poems are miniature dramas with a march toward some great event
in the lives of the actors. The author observes the dramatic requirement
of sinking himself in the identity of his characters. Knights are slain
and ladies die of love and witch-bound maidens are rescued by their
princes without the sounding of a personal note on the part of their
creator. And in two instances, _Sir Peter Harpdon's End_ and _The Haystack
in the Floods_, there is ruddy human blood in the tortured beings whose
extremity moves the reader with a genuine emotion. In these two poems the
voice might indeed be the voice of Browning, though the hand is still
unmistakably the hand of Morris. In the main, however, the appeal that is
made is to the imagination concerned with the visible aspect of
brilliantly coloured objects and with the delirious expression of
overwrought feelings.
[Illustration: _Portrait of Jane Burden (Mrs. Morris)_
_By Rossetti_]
One defect, calculated to interfere with a warm reception of the volume on
the part of the general public, Morris shared with Browning, possessing
even more than Browning the merit attending it. Familiarity with the
art and literature of the Middle Ages made it natural for him to preserve
the thin new wine of his youthful poetry in the old bottles of the defunct
past, using motives and scenes and accessories alien to our modern life,
and only dimly understood by the modern reader. The true spirit of that
past it is hardly necessary to say he did not revive,--no writer has ever
revived the true spirit of any age antecedent to his own,--and Morris,
with his remarkable faculty for eliminating from his mental conceptions
whatever did not please his taste, was wholly unfitted by temperament,
however well fitted by his acquirements, to carry through successfully a
task so tremendous.
_The Defence of Guenevere_ was received by the public without enthusiasm.
About half an edition of five hundred copies was sold and given away, and
the remainder lingered for a dozen years or more until the publication of
_The Earthly Paradise_ stimulated the interest of readers in the previous
work of its author.
Whatever disappointment Morris may have felt must soon have given way to
the excitement of the plunge he now made into a new life and the most
intense personal interests. On the twenty-sixth of April, 1859, he was
married to Jane Burden, and after a brief interval of travel he began to
build the beautiful house which he then supposed would be his home for the
rest of his days.
His personal attractiveness at this time was keenly felt by his
companions. He had been "making himself," as the phrase is, since his
childhood, and if Stevenson's dictum--to know what you like is the
beginning of wisdom and of old age--be applied to him he can never have
been wholly ignorant or a child. Knowledge of what he liked, and even more
definitely of what he did not like, was his earliest as well as his most
notable acquirement. But he was a boy, too, in his excessive restless
vitality, and hitherto with all his enthusiasms he had been a somewhat
cold boy. Just now he was beginning to "take a fancy for the human," as
one of his friends put it. He was connecting his vague schemes and
ambitions with a personal and practical enterprise. His ideals dropped
from a region always too rare for them to an atmosphere of activities and
interests in which the vast general public could breathe as easily as he.
In building his new home to his fancy he was unconsciously laying the
corner-stones of the many homes throughout England into which his
influence was afterward to enter. He was just twenty-five, filled with
energy, generous impulse, honesty, and kindness. The bourgeois touch which
his biographer declares was inherent in his nature was far from obvious as
yet. Society for its own sake he liked little, and was not above getting
out of unwelcome invitations by subterfuge, if fair means would not avail.
He affected a Bohemian carelessness in dress, and his hair was uniformly
wild. His language was generally forcible, often violent, always
expressive. He lived in the company of his intimates and cared for nothing
beyond the range of his fixed interests. The remark made long after--"Do
you suppose that I should see anything in Rome that I can't see in
Whitechapel?"--was perfectly indicative of his mood toward everything that
failed to arouse his intellectual curiosity. But the places and things
that did arouse it were never tawdry or valueless, and his reasons for
caring for them, of which he was always remarkably prolific, were such as
appeal strongly to the mind in which homely associations hold a constant
place. It must be an out and out classicist who fails to detect in himself
a pulsation of sympathy in response to the wail which Morris once sent
home from Verona: "Yes, and even in these magnificent and wonderful towns
I long rather for the heap of grey stones with a grey roof that we call a
house north-away."
[Illustration: "ACANTHUS" WALL-PAPER, "PIMPERNEL" WALL-PAPER, "AFRICAN
MARIGOLD" COTTON-PRINT
WALL-PAPER AND COTTON-PRINT DESIGNS
(_Reproduced from examples obtained by courtesy of Mr. A. E. Bulkley_)]
His first house, in which he took unlimited delight, was not, however, a
heap of grey stones, but a structure of brick, its name, the Red House,
indicating its striking and then unusual colour. Its architect was Philip
Webb, who had been an associate of Morris during the brief period passed
in Mr. Street's office. Situated not far from London, on the outskirts of
the village of Upton and in the midst of a pleasant orchard, whose trees
dropped their fruit into its windows, the Red House wore an emphatically
Gothic aspect. It was L-shaped, with numerous irregularities of plan, and
entirely without frippery of applied ornament. Its great sloping roof, the
pointed arches of its doorways, the deep simple porches, the large hall,
with its long table in place of an entrance alley the open-timbered roof
over the staircase, the panelled screen dividing the great hall from a
lesser one,--all these were characteristic of the old English house before
the day of Italian invasion, while the mobile Gothic style, adapting
itself readily to individual needs, prevailed. It stood among the old and
gnarled trees, only two stories in height, but with an effect of rambling
spaciousness and hospitality, and the garden that lay close to it was as
individual and old-fashioned as itself. Morris prided himself, Mr. Mackail
tells us, on his knowledge of gardening, and his advice to the Birmingham
Society of Artists in one of the lectures of his later years shows how
thoughtfully he considered the subject. As he always acted so far as he
could upon his theories, we may be fairly sure that the Red House garden
was planned in conformity with the ideal place sketched in this lecture,
and may assume in it a profusion of single flowers mixed to avoid great
masses of colour, among them the old columbine, where the clustering doves
are unmistakable and distinct, the old china aster, the single snowdrop,
and the sunflower, these planted in little squares, divided from each
other by grassy walks, and hedged in by wild rose or sweet-briar
trellises. We may be sure the place contained no curiosities from the
jungle or tropical waste, that everything was excluded which was not
native to the English soil, and that ferns and brakes from the woodland
were not enticed from the place of their origin to take away the
characteristic domestic look of a spot that ought to seem "like a part of
the house." "It will be a key to right thinking about gardens," says
Morris, "if you consider in what kind of places a garden is most desired.
In a very beautiful country, especially if it be mountainous, we can do
without it well enough, whereas in a flat and dull country we crave after
it, and there it is often the very making of the homestead; while in great
towns, gardens both private and public are positive necessities if the
citizens are to live reasonable and healthy lives in body and mind."
Passing from this first necessity of reasonable and healthy living through
the rose-masked doorway into the Red House itself, we find it equally
suggestive of its master's personal tastes and beliefs. For everything
Morris had his persuasive reason. His windows had small leaded panes of
glass, because the large windows found "in most decent houses or what are
so called," let in a flood of light "in a haphazard and ill-considered
way," which the indwellers are "forced to obscure again by shutters,
blinds, curtains, screens, heavy upholsteries, and such other nuisances."
By all means, therefore, fill the window with moderate-sized panes of
glass set in solid sash bars--"we shall then at all events feel as if we
were indoors on a cold day"--as if we had a roof over our heads. The fact
that small windows were used in mediaeval times and must therefore of
necessity be superior is not brought forward in this argument, and the
charm of the reasoning is not marred by any reminder of the actual
conditions of which small heavily leaded windows are a survival--such as
the fortress style of building belonging to a warlike time, and the great
costliness of glass, and the inability to support large panes by leads.
Morris could always be trusted to support his fundamental liking for a
thing by a host of assurances as to its sensible merits and practical
advantages, but the mere fact that he liked it was quite sufficient for
his own satisfaction of mind. When one of his comrades once suggested to
him that personal feeling ought not to count for too much, and that not
liking a thing did not make it bad, he replied: "Oh, don't it though! What
we don't like _is_ bad." And he had a fashion which must have produced an
irritating effect upon some of his hearers, of declaring that the people
who did not hold his ideas must be unhealthy either in body or mind or
both. Certainly the aspect of the Red House suggested health within its
walls. With a slight stretch of imagination one could argue from its
furnishings that its master was a northerner, a middle-class man, the
admirer of a rough age, a sturdy art, a plain habit of life; that he was a
worker whose dreams tormented him to speedy and vigorous action, a
creature whose vitality was too great even for his strong frame and
physical power. He liked a massive chair, and well he might, for one of
his amusements was to twist his legs about it in such a way that a lightly
built affair must instantly succumb. He liked a floor that he could stamp
on with impunity; he liked a table on which he could pound with his fists
without danger to its equilibrium. In the Red House these requirements
were fully met. In the lecture called _The Beauty of Life_ is an account
of the fittings "necessary to the sitting-room of a healthy person."
Beside the table that will "keep steady when you work upon it," and the
chairs "that you can move about," the good floor, and the small carpet
"which can be bundled out of the room in two minutes," there must be "a
bookcase with a great many books in it," a bench "that you can sit or lie
upon," a cupboard with drawers, and, "unless either the bookcase or the
cupboard be very beautiful with painting or carving," pictures or
engravings on the wall, "or else the wall itself must be ornamented with
some beautiful and restful pattern," then a vase or two, and fireplaces as
unlike as possible to "the modern mean, miserable, and showy affairs,
plastered about with wretched sham ornament, trumpery of cast iron, and
brass and polished steel, and what not--offensive to look at and a
nuisance to clean." To these necessaries, "unless we are musical and need
a piano, in which case as far as beauty is concerned we are in a bad way,"
we can add very little without "troubling ourselves, and hindering our
work, our thought, and our rest."
In accordance with these opinions, but with a fulness and richness of
ornament not suggested by the simplicity of their expression, the pleasant
building at Upton gradually took on great beauty and individuality. The
walls were hung with embroidered fabrics worked by Mrs. Morris and her
friends, or painted by Burne-Jones, who, undeterred by the Oxford episode,
started an elaborate series of mural decorations in illustration of the
wonderful adventures of Sire Degravant, the hero of an ancient romance.
Another series of scenes from the War of Troy was started for the walls of
the staircase, and although both schemes were abandoned, enough was done
to give an effect of splendour to the rooms. Up to the large drawing-room
came the ponderous and mighty settle which had cost so many expletives in
the course of its adjustment to the old room in Red Lion Square, and which
was now embellished by a balcony at the top to which a stairway led up.
All minor accessories were thoughtfully considered and for the most part
designed by Morris or by friends pressed into service at his eager demand.
He found little to content him in the articles of commerce on sale at the
orthodox shops in the early sixties. "In looking at an old house," he says
in one of his books, "we please ourselves by thinking of all the
generations of men that have passed through it, remembering how it has
received their joy and borne their sorrow and not even their folly has
left sourness on it; and in looking at a new house if built as it
should be, we feel a pleasure in thinking how he who built it has left a
piece of his soul behind him to greet the newcomers one after another,
long after he is gone." Such an impress he left upon the Red House, so
that no one passing it or even hearing of it can fail to think of it as
belonging to William Morris, whoever may have the fortune to live in it
hereafter, and fall heir to the associations with which he invested it.
[Illustration: "THE STRAWBERRY THIEF" DESIGN FOR COTTON PRINT]
During the time of building and furnishing he was exuberantly happy and
wholly in his element. Turning constantly from one thing to another, yet
keeping along the line of his united interests, giving his magnificent
energy free scope in doing and accomplishing, seeing grow into visible
form the theories and tastes so dear to his heart, letting out his
enthusiasms and carrying others along on their current, setting a
practical example in what he believed to be of the deepest importance by
requiring for himself artistic handicraft, acting out a vigorous protest
against the mechanical arts and the shams of the commercial world,--all
this was meat and drink to him, and out of it grew an enterprise
representing what to the public has been probably the most valuable side
of his many-sided career, the establishment of a firm engaged in various
forms of decorative art. At about this time he adopted, after the fashion
of the master-workman of the Middle Ages, a device or legend expressive in
one way or another of his aim. He chose the one used by Van Eyck, "Als
ich kanne,"--if I can,--and distributed it in French translation and in
English over his house, on windows and tiles and in tapestry hangings. The
modesty of the words was no doubt as sincere in his case as in the case of
the old Flemish painter who excelled all his contemporaries, but the
extent to which he could and did in the new business on which he was about
to enter has been the wonder of his followers.
CHAPTER IV.
MORRIS AND COMPANY.
The formation of the firm of "Morris, Marshall, Faulkner, & Company," as
it was first called, appears to have been highly incidental in character,
despite the assertion of Morris himself in a letter to his old tutor, that
he had long meant to be a decorator, and to that end mainly had built his
fine house. "One evening a lot of us were together," says Rossetti, in the
account given by Mr. Watts-Dunton, "and we got to talking about the way in
which artists did all kinds of things in olden times, designed every kind
of decoration and most kinds of furniture, and someone suggested--as a
joke more than anything else--that we should each put down five pounds and
form a company. Fivers were blossoms of a rare growth among us in those
days, and I won't swear that the table bristled with fivers. Anyhow the
firm was formed, but of course there was no deed or anything of that kind.
In fact it was a mere playing at business, and Morris was elected manager,
not because we ever dreamed he would turn out a man of business, but
because he was the only one among us who had both time and money to spare.
We had no idea whatever of commercial success, but it succeeded almost in
our own despite."
In the mind of Morris it doubtless promised to be the sort of association
about which he was constantly dreaming; a group of intelligent craftsmen
interested in making the details of daily life as full as possible of
beauty, each man fitted to his task and loving it, each in his way a
master-workman of the guild, counting his craft honourable and spending
his best thought and labour on it. There was ground enough for faith in
the artistic if not in the commercial outcome of the enterprise. The
associates, beside Morris, Rossetti, and Burne-Jones, were Madox-Brown,
then an artist of established reputation, Webb, the architect of the Red
House, who was also a designer of furniture and ornament; Peter Paul
Marshall, to whom Mr. William Rossetti ascribes the first suggestion of
the formation of the firm, a "capable artist" although an amateur; and
Charles Faulkner of the Oxford group, who had followed his mates to London
unable to endure the loneliness of Oxford without them. They proposed to
open what Rossetti called "an actual shop," and sell whatever their united
talent produced. "We are not intending to compete with ----'s costly
rubbish or anything of that sort," Rossetti wrote to his friend Allingham,
"but to give real good taste at the price as far as possible of ordinary
furniture."
[Illustration: TULIP DESIGN FOR AXMINSTER CARPET]
In the Spring of 1861, premises were taken over a jeweller's shop at 8 Red
Lion Square. Two floors and a part of the basement were used by the firm,
and about a dozen men and boys were presently employed. There were regular
weekly meetings carried on with the boisterousness of youth and high
spirits, but with thorough efficiency, nevertheless, where plans that were
to modify and influence the household decoration of all England were gaily
formed and put into practice.
The prospectus, in which Mr. Mackail discerns Rossetti's "slashing hand
and imperious accent," was not entirely calculated to mollify rival
decorators, calling attention to the fact that attempts at decorative art
up to that time had been crude and fragmentary, and emphasising the want
of some one place where work of "a genuine and beautiful character could
be obtained." The new firm pledged itself to execute in a business-like
manner:
"I. Mural Decoration, either in Pictures or in Pattern Work, or merely in
the arrangement of Colours, as applied to dwelling-houses, churches, or
public buildings.
"II. Carving generally, as applied to Architecture.
"III. Stained Glass, especially with reference to its harmony with Mural
Decoration.
"IV. Metal Work in all its branches, including jewellery.
"V. Furniture, either depending for its beauty on its own design, on the
application of materials hitherto overlooked, or on its conjunction with
Figure and Pattern Painting. Under this head is included Embroidery of all
kinds, Stamped Leather, and ornamental work in other such materials,
besides every article necessary for domestic use."
Clearly this was not the usual thing, nor was the business conducted in
the usual way. According to Mr. William Rossetti, the young reformers
adopted a tone of "something very like dictatorial irony" toward their
customers, permitting no compromise, and laying down the law without
concession to individual taste or want of taste. You could have things
such as the firm chose them to be or you could go without them.
The finance of the company began, Mr. Mackail says, with a call of one
pound per share and a loan of a hundred pounds from Mrs. Morris of Leyton.
In 1862 a further call of nineteen pounds a share was made on the
partners, raising the paid-up capital to one hundred and forty pounds,
which "was never increased until the dissolution of the firm in 1874." A
few hundred pounds additional were loaned by Morris and his mother. Each
piece of work contributed by any member of the firm was paid for at the
time, and Morris as general manager received a salary of a hundred and
fifty pounds a year.
[Illustration: PEACOCK DESIGN FOR COARSE WOOL HANGINGS]
It is obvious that with this slender financial basis the business required
the utmost energy, industry, skill, and talent to keep it from being
promptly wrecked on the very uncertain coast of public opinion. During
the first year all the members of the firm were active, although even at
the first Morris led the rest. A stimulus was provided by the
International Exhibition of 1862, whither they sent examples of their
work, at the cost, wrote Faulkner, of "more tribulation and swearing to
Topsy than three exhibitions will be worth." The exhibits attracted
attention, and were awarded medals, in the case of the stained glass, "for
artistic qualities of colour and design," and in the case of the
furniture, hangings, and so forth, for the "closeness with which the style
of the Middle Ages was rendered." It happened that the chief work in
stained glass in the exhibit of the firm consisted of a set of windows
designed by Rossetti, and giving, according to a Belgian critic, "an
impression of colour, dazzling and magnificent, velvety and harmonious,
resembling the Flemish stained glass windows decorating the Gothic
cathedrals." Thus, fortunately, the first appearance of the firm was
distinguished by the splendour which Rossetti alone among the group of
workers could achieve, but his interest and activity shortly flagged and
were absorbed in his individual work outside the company.
At first, despite the lordly prospectus, there were occasional blunders.
Dr. Birkbeck Hill tells of a study table and an arm-chair, neither one of
which was so thorough a piece of workmanship as the firm would have turned
out later on, and Mr. Hughes remembers a sofa with a long bar beneath
projecting six inches at each end so that it tripped up anyone who
hastily went round it. These, however, were blunders of a kind soon
remedied by experience. So long as the associates kept up their enthusiasm
there were among them ample skill to grapple with technicalities, and
ample artistic faculty to defy all ordinary competition. Whoever dropped
behind from time to time in this most essential quality of enthusiasm it
was never Morris, and all accounts agree in attributing to his energy and
industry and unutterable zest the success of the novel and interesting
experiment. "He is the only man I have known," said Rossetti once, "who
beats every other man at his own game." The men he had to beat at this
game of decoration were for the most part unworthy foes. Decorative art
was at a low ebb in the early Victorian age, the age of antimacassars,
stucco, and veneer. From this cheap vulgarity and pretentiousness Morris
turned back--as he was wont to do on every occasion that offered
excuse--to the thirteenth century as the purest fount of English
tradition, where, if anywhere, could be found models showing logical
principles of construction and genuine workmanship. His companions either
caught from him the infection of the mediaeval attitude or were already in
sympathy with it, and the work of the firm took on an emphatically Gothic
aspect from the beginning. How great or how important a part each member
played in the sum of the production is very difficult to estimate owing to
the cooeperative plan by which several artists frequently united in
executing one and the same piece of work. Sometimes Burne-Jones would
draw the figures, Webb the birds, and Morris the foliage for a piece of
drapery or wall-paper. Again portions of separate designs would be used
over and over in different combinations for different places. This free
cooeperation, this moving about within the limits of a general plan, suited
the restless spirit of Morris, and chimed also with his profound
admiration for the way in which the mediaeval works of art were brought
about, no one man standing high above the others or trying to preserve his
name and the fame of his performance. Working for the pleasure of the work
was of the very essence of his philosophy, and nothing could be more
unjust than the sneers from time to time launched at him because his
venture proved a commercial triumph. Perhaps it would be going too far to
say that money-getting was never in his mind, but there is no question
that it was never first in his mind, and never in the slightest degree
crowded his desire to put forth sincere, fine work, worth its price to the
last detail, and worthy of praise and liking without regard to its price.
There was not the slightest suggestion of pose or sham of any kind in his
thought when he wrote, as he often did, against the greed of gain and in
praise of the kind of labour that may be delighted in without regard to
pounds and pence. He could say quite faithfully that he shared the
humility of the early craftsmen, of whom he speaks with reverence.
"In most sober earnest," he says in one of his lectures, "when we hear it
said, as it often is said, that extra money payment is necessary under all
circumstances to produce great works of art, and that men of special
talent will not use those talents without being bribed by mere gross
material advantages, we, I say, shall know what to reply. We can appeal to
the witness of those lovely works still left to us, whose unknown, unnamed
creators were content to give them to the world, with little more extra
wages than what their pleasure in their work and their sense of usefulness
in it might bestow on them." There is no room for doubt that he approached
his work in precisely the spirit here described by him. He was willing to
exercise his faculties on the humblest undertakings, with no other aim
than to make a common thing pleasant to look upon and agreeable to use.
Half a century ago "craft" was not the fashionable word for the kind of
work with which the firm chiefly concerned itself, and in doing the
greater part of what he did Morris was merely writing himself down, in the
language of the general public, an artisan. Conforming to the truest of
principles he raised his work by getting under it. Nothing was too
laborious or too lowly for him. Pride of position was unknown to him in
any sense that would prevent him from indulging in manual labour. His real
pride lay in making something which he considered beautiful take the place
of something ugly in the world. If it were a fabric to be made lovely with
long disused or unfamiliar dyes, his hands were in the vat. If tapestry
were to be woven, he was at the loom by dawn. In his workman's blouse,
steeped in indigo, and with his hair outstanding wildly, he was in the
habit of presenting himself cheerfully at the houses of his friends,
relying upon his native dignity to save appearances, or, to speak more
truly, not thinking of appearances at all, but entirely happy in his role
of workman, though frankly desirous that the business should prosper
beyond all danger of the "smash" that would, he owned, "be a terrible
nuisance." "I have not time on my hands," he said, "to be ruined and get
really poor." It was to the peculiar union of the ideal and the practical
in his nature that his success in the fields on which he ventured is due.
[Illustration: PAINTED WALL DECORATION DESIGNED BY MORRIS]
It must be admitted, however, that while his soul and vigour found vent in
his designing and in the journeyman work--"delightful work, hard for the
body and easy for the mind"--at which he was so ready to lend a hand, his
artistic product lacked somewhat in the qualities that come from the
exercise of the higher intellectual gifts. It was more than an attempt to
revive old Gothic forms; it was an adoption of old forms with an infusion
of modern spirit; but it missed the native and personal character of work
growing out of contemporaneous conditions and tastes. Imaginative
craftsman as he was, Morris was never quite an artist in the strict sense
of the word. He had a fine sense of colour and, within certain limits, a
right feeling for pattern; but his invention was too exuberant for
repose, and he displayed in the greater part of his work an ornamental
luxuriance that destroyed dignity and simplicity of effect. He did not
like the restraints of art, and he seems to have been incapable of
entering the sphere of abstract thought in which the principles governing
great art are found. "No schools of art," he says with his superbly
inaccurate generalisation, "have ever been contented to use abstract lines
and forms and colours--that is, lines and so forth without any meaning."
Such ornament he deemed "outlandish." He wanted his patterns, especially
his wall-paper patterns, to remind people of pleasant scenes: "of the
close vine trellis that keeps out the sun by the Nile side; or of the wild
woods and their streams with the dogs panting beside them; or of the
swallows sweeping above the garden boughs toward the house eaves where
their nestlings are, while the sun breaks the clouds on them; or of the
many-flowered summer meadows of Picardy,"--all very charming things to
think about, but as really pertinent to wall-paper designing as the
pleasant memory of a hard road with a fast horse speeding over it would be
to the designing of a carpet. He preached the closest observation of
nature and the most delicate understanding of it before attempting
conventionalisation, but he did not hesitate to break all the laws of
nature in his designs when he happened to want to do so. He did not
hesitate, as Mr. Day has said, to make an acorn grow from two stalks or to
give a lily five petals. Fitness in ornament was one of his fundamental
principles, and he made his designs for the place in which they were to be
seen and with direct reference to the limitations of opportunities of that
place. It was never his way to turn a wall-paper loose on the market for
any chance purchaser. He must know, if possible, something of the walls to
which the design was to be applied and of the room in which it was to
live, and he then adapted his design to his idea of what was required.
This idea, however, was commonly much influenced by certain pre-conceived
theories. He believed, for example, that there should be a sense of
mystery in every pattern designed. This mystery he tried to get, not by
masking the geometrical structure upon which a recurring pattern must be
based, but by covering the ground equably and richly, so that the observer
may not "be able to read the whole thing at once." Thus many of his
designs are so over-elaborated as to give the effect of restlessness,
whereas "rest" was the word oftenest on his lips in connection with
domestic art. In common with most designers who derive their ideals from
mediaeval sources, he was less impressed by the tranquillity gained from
calm clean spaces, the measure, order, and stateliness brought about by
the simple relation of abstract lines, the repose of the rhythmical play
of mass in perfect proportion, undisturbed by decorative detail, than by
the charm of highly vitalised imagery. But though he erred on the side of
luxuriance--while preaching simplicity--he never allowed his design to
sink into vulgarity or petty picturesqueness. He might be intricate but he
was not vague. "Run any risk of failure rather than involve yourself in a
tangle of poor weak lines that people can't make out," he says. "Definite
form bounded by firm outline is a necessity for all ornament. You ought
always to go for positive patterns when they may be had." They might
always be had from him. And it is due to his positive quality, his
uncompromising certainty of the rightness of the thing that he is doing,
that even when he is most imitative he gives an impression of originality,
and is in fact original in the sense that he has thought out for himself
the methods and motives of the ancient art by which he is consciously and
intentionally influenced.
[Illustration: PAINTED WALL DECORATION DESIGNED BY MORRIS]
Finish, it need hardly be said, was not prized by him. It was one of his
assumptions that "the better is the enemy of the good," and he preferred
the roughness of incompleteness to the suavity of perfect workmanship. He
dreaded the suggestion of the machine that lurks in the polished surface
and the perfect curve. Nor did he at any time believe in the subdivision
of labour by which a workman learns to do one thing with the utmost
efficiency, holding that no workman could enjoy such specialised work, and
therefore, of course, could not through it give pleasure to others. The
following is the creed which, according to his "compact with himself,"
he made it a duty to repeat when he and his fellow-men came together to
discuss art:
"We ought to get to understand the value of intelligent work, the work of
men's hands guided by their brains, and to take that, though it be rough,
rather than the unintelligent work of machines or slaves though it be
delicate; to refuse altogether to use machine-made work unless where the
nature of the thing compels it, or where the machine does what mere human
suffering would otherwise have to do; to have a high standard of
excellence in wares and not to accept make-shifts for the real thing, but
rather to go without--to have no ornament merely for fashion's sake, but
only because we really think it beautiful, otherwise to go without it; not
to live in an ugly and squalid place (such as London) for the sake of mere
excitement or the like, but only because our duties bind us to it--to
treat the natural beauty of the earth as a holy thing not to be rashly
dealt with for any consideration; to treat with the utmost care whatever
of architecture and the like is left us of the times of art."
[Illustration: DESIGN FOR ST. JAMES'S PALACE WALL-PAPER
(_Reproduced by courtesy of Mr. Bulkley_)]
Wall-papers were among the earliest staple products of the firm in Red
Lion Square, although Morris always regarded them in the light of a
compromise; an altogether unsatisfactory substitute for the hand-painting,
or tapestry or silk or printed cotton hangings, which he considered the
proper covering for the bare walls which, of course, no one not in "an
unhealthy state of mind and probably of body also" could endure to leave
bare. The first to be designed, the _Trellis_ paper, was the combined work
of Morris and Webb, the former being responsible for the rose-trellis
intended, we may suppose, to bring with it pleasant recollections of
gardens in June and inspired by his own sweet garden at Upton, the latter
for the birds that cling to the lattice or dart upward among the heavily
thorned stems. In the early papers the designs were very simple and
direct, often more quaint than beautiful, as in the case of the well-known
_Daisy_ paper, and depending greatly on the colouring for the
attractiveness they possessed. Later came such intricate patterns as the
_Pimpernel_, the _Acanthus_, so elaborate as to require a double set of
blocks and no less than thirty-two printings, and the paper designed for
St. James's Palace, as large and magnificent as the environment in which
it was to be placed demanded. It is quite obvious from these designs that
Morris did not regard his wall-hangings as backgrounds but as decorations
in themselves. As a matter of fact he did not fancy pictures for his
walls. After his early burst of enthusiasm over Rossetti's paintings he
bought few pictures if any, and they do not seem ever to have entered into
his schemes of decoration. The wall of a room was always important to him,
and despite his discontent with paper coverings for it, he was anxious to
have such coverings as ornamental as possible, admitting them to be useful
"as things go," and treating them in considerable detail in his lectures
on the decorative arts. He advised making up for the poverty of the
material by great thoughtfulness in the design: "The more and the more
mysteriously you interweave your sprays and stems, the better for your
purpose, as the whole thing has to be pasted flat upon a wall and the cost
of all this intricacy will but come out of your own brain and hand."
Concerning colour he was equally specific. In his lecture
characteristically called _Making the Best of It_, in which with an accent
of discouragement he endeavours to show his audience how at the time of
his speaking to make a middle-class home "endurable," he lays down certain
rules which indicate at one and the same time his mastery of his subject
and the incommunicability of right taste in this direction, although many
of his ideas may be pondered to great advantage by even the mind untrained
in colour schemes. He begins with his usual preliminary statement as to
the health of those who disagree with him. "Though we may each have our
special preferences," he says, "among the main colours, which we shall do
quite right to indulge, it is a sign of disease in an artist to have a
prejudice against any particular colour, though such prejudices are common
and violent enough among people imperfectly educated in art, or with
naturally dull perceptions of it. Still colours have their ways in
decoration, so to say, both positively in themselves, and relatively to
each man's way of using them. So I may be excused for setting down some
things I seem to have noticed about these ways." After thus establishing
friendly relations with his audience, he instructs them that yellow is a
colour to be used sparingly and in connection with "gleaming materials"
such as silk; that red to be at its finest must be deep and full and
between crimson and scarlet; that purple no one in his senses would think
of using bright and in masses, and that the best shade of it tends toward
russet; green, he continues, must seldom be used both bright and strong.
"On the other hand," he adds, "do not fall into the trap of a dingy,
bilious-looking yellow-green, a colour to which I have a special and
personal hatred, because (if you will excuse my mentioning personal
matters) I have been supposed to have somewhat brought it into vogue."
Dingy colours were abhorred by him in all cases, and his patience with
those customers who demanded them was extremely limited. Blue was his
"holiday colour," and "if you duly guard against getting it cold if it
tend toward red, or rank if it tends toward green," you "need not be much
afraid of its brightness."
[Illustration: EARLY DESIGN FOR MORRIS WALL-PAPER "DAISY AND COLUMBINE"]
[Illustration: CHRYSANTHEMUM DESIGN FOR WALL-PAPER]
From his hatred of mechanical methods grew his preferences among the
lesser arts. He once complained that he never could see any scene "with a
frame as it were around it," and the less necessity there was for bounding
and limiting his design the happier he was in making it. Embroidery he
loved, for here the worker had an almost absolutely free hand. There was
no "excuse" in embroidery for anything short of striking beauty. "It is
not worth doing," he said, "unless it is either very copious and rich,
or very delicate--or both. For such an art nothing patchy or scrappy, or
half-starved should be done." Tapestry-weaving stood next in freedom of
method, and this was not only a favourite art with him, but one which he
carried to an extraordinary degree of perfection, he and Burne-Jones
combining their designs to produce results coming nearer to the old Arras
effects than to the work of modern weavers. In tapestry-weaving Morris
used the _haute lisse_ or "high loom," the weaver holding apart with his
left hand the threads of the warp which stands upright before him as with
his right hand he works his bobbins in and out, seeing the picture he is
making in a mirror placed on the other side of the loom. The interest of
Morris in the weaving craft is said to have been first awakened by the
sight of a man in the street selling toy models of weaving machines, one
of which he promptly bought for experimental purposes. It was many years
before he could find a full-sized loom of the kind he wanted, which had
become obsolete or nearly so, and which was the only style of loom he
would consider using as it was most like the looms on which the splendid
fabrics of mediaeval times had been woven. By such difficulties he was
rarely baffled. In the case of his tapestries the method he proposed to
revive had died out in Cromwell's time and there was no working model
which could be used as a guide. But there was an old French official
handbook that came in his way, from which he was able to pick up the
details of the craft and this sufficed. His personal familiarity with his
process is apparent in his various discussions of it. He speaks with the
authority of a workman whose hand has held the tool. This practical and
positive knowledge saved him from the sentimentalism into which his
theories might otherwise have led him. He designed his patterns fully
aware of the way in which they were going to behave in the process of
application. When in 1882 he was called upon to give evidence before the
Royal Commission appointed to inquire into the subject of technical
instruction, he urged the necessity of this working-knowledge on the part
of every designer. "I think it essential," he said, "that a designer
should learn the practical way of carrying out the work for which he
designs; he ought to be able to weave himself." In all his talk about art
he tried to tell people how to do only the things he himself had done, in
which he differed widely and wholesomely from his master Ruskin whose
teachings were so often on his lips. The activity of his hand was a needed
and to a great extent an effective check upon the activity of his
sentiment. But--like Ruskin here--he found it hard to stay long away from
the moral or emotional significance of the art he was discussing. The art
that speaks to the mind he did not completely understand. The art that
speaks to the senses he abundantly explained. The amazingly ingenious
point of view from which he defends his preoccupation with what he has
named "the lesser arts" is displayed in the following passage, beginning
with the almost inevitable formula:
"A healthy and sane person being asked with what kind of art he would
clothe his walls, might well answer, 'with the best art,' and so end the
question. Yet out on it! So complex is human life, that even this
seemingly most reasonable answer may turn out to be little better than an
evasion. For I suppose the best art to be the pictured representation of
men's imaginings: what they have thought has happened to the world before
their time, or what they deem they have seen with the eyes of the body or
the soul; and the imaginings thus represented are always beautiful indeed,
but oftenest stirring to men's passions and aspirations and not seldom
sorrowful or even terrible.
"Stories that tell of men's aspirations for more than material life can
give them, their struggle for the future welfare of the race, their
unselfish love, their unrequited service; things like this are the
subjects for the best art; in such subjects there is hope surely, yet the
aspect of them is likely to be sorrowful enough: defeat, the seed of
victory, and death, the seed of life, will be shown on the face of most of
them.
"Take note, too, that in the best art all these solemn and awful things
are expressed clearly and without any vagueness, with such life and power
that they impress the beholder so deeply that he is brought face to face
with the very scenes, and lives among them for a time: so raising his life
above the daily tangle of small things that wearies him to the level of
the heroism which they represent. This is the best art, and who can deny
that it is good for us all that it should be at hand to stir the emotions;
yet its very greatness makes it a thing to be handled carefully, for we
cannot always be having our emotions deeply stirred: that wearies us body
and soul; and man, an animal that longs for rest like other animals,
defends himself against that weariness by hardening his heart and refusing
to be moved every hour of the day by tragic emotions,--nay, even by beauty
that claims his attention overmuch. Such callousness is bad, both for the
arts and our own selves, and therefore it is not so good to have the best
art forever under our eyes, though it is abundantly good that we should be
able to get at it from time to time.
"Meantime, I cannot allow that it is good for any hour of the day to be
wholly stripped of life and beauty, therefore we must provide ourselves
with lesser (I will not say worse) art with which to surround our common
work-a-day or restful times; and for those times I think it will be enough
for us to clothe our daily and domestic walls with ornament that reminds
us of the outward face of the earth, of the innocent love of animals, or
man passing his days between work and rest as he does. I say with ornament
that reminds us of these things and sets our minds and memories at work
easily creating them; because scientific representation of them would
again involve us in the problems of hard fact and the troubles of life,
and so once more destroy our rest for us."
[Illustration: ANEMONE PATTERN FOR SILK AND WOOL CURTAIN MATERIAL]
Was ever a craftsman of the ancient guilds so at pains to make clear the
propriety and usefulness of his wood-carving or enamelling or niello! Like
the early workman, however, he moved with marvellous facility from one
branch of his art to another. From wall-papers it was but a step to cotton
prints which in a way were the playthings of a mind at leisure. They might
be as gay as one chose to make them, and "could not well go wrong so long
as they avoided commonplace and kept somewhat on the daylight side of
nightmare." From the weaving of hangings to the weaving of carpets was a
step as easily taken, and when the impulse seized him to carry on the
great but dying art of Persia in this direction, Morris so effectively
applied himself to mastering the conditions under which the beautiful
Eastern carpets were brought to their perfection as to produce at least
one example--that called _The Buller's Wood Carpet_--that fairly competes
with the splendour of its prototypes. Stained glass for a time baffled
him. "His was not the temperament," says one of his critics, "patiently to
study the chemistry of glass colour; or to prove by long experiment the
dependence to be placed upon a flux." Although many windows were made by
the firm, the larger number of them designed by Burne-Jones, Morris being
responsible for the colour, he never seemed to forget that he had come
near to being worsted in his fight with the technical difficulties of this
most difficult art, and economised his enthusiasm for it accordingly.
Hand-painted tiles, however, which he was the first to introduce into
England, were favourites with him, and in them he perpetuated some of his
attempts at drawing the human figure. Furniture, though an important
feature of the work undertaken by the firm, did not appeal to him, and he
left it to his associates. His experiments in vegetable dyes produced
interesting results, although here also his technical knowledge was not
entirely adequate to his task. In connection with his textile work he
early felt the imperative necessity of having finer colours than the
market offered. To get them as he wanted them he was obliged to go back as
far as Pliny, but this was a small matter to one whose mind was always
ready to provide him with an Aladdin's carpet. Back to Pliny he went to
learn old methods, and in addition he called to his aid ancient herbals
and French books of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, finally
setting up his own vats and becks and very literally plunging in. At first
he complained of "looking such a beast," but his enthusiasm soon overcame
this rather remarkable display of concern for his personal appearance, and
he wrote most joyously of working in sabots and blouse in the dye-house
"pretty much all day long." Out of his vats came the blue of his
indigo, the red of his madder, the yellow of weld or Persian berry, the
rich brown of walnut juice, making beautiful combinations, which, when
they faded, changed into paler tints of the same colour and were not
unpleasant to look upon. The aniline dyes, which in 1860 were the latest
wonder of science, and in a very crude stage of their development, called
out his most picturesque invective. Each colour was hideous in itself,
crude, livid, cheap, and loathed by every person of taste, the "foul blot
of the capitalist dyer." In brief, the invention supposed to be for the
benefit of an art "the very existence of which depends upon its producing
beauty" was "on the road; and very far advanced on it, towards destroying
all beauty in the art." The only thing to do was to turn one's back on the
chemical dyes, relegate them to a museum of scientific curiosities, and go
back "if not to the days of the Pharaohs yet at least to those of
Tintoret." It was highly characteristic of him that he chose the remedy of
"going back" in place of progressing with the new material as far as
possible.
[Illustration: PORTION OF HAMMERSMITH CARPET]
His work with silks and with wools was naturally greatly enriched by his
use of his own full, soft and brilliant colours, and his personal
attention to the art of dyeing counted for so much that one of his most
accomplished pupils in embroidery is quoted by Mr. Mackail as saying that
she promptly felt the difference when Morris ceased to dye with his own
hands, that the colours became more monotonous and prosy and the very
lustre of the silk was less beautiful. It is, however, difficult to
impress yourself upon the public precisely as you are, whatever vigour
your personality may have. Morris, with his intense love of bright full
hues, has come down as the promoter of the so-called "aesthetic" dulness of
colour, and his name has been especially associated with the peacock blue
and the "sage-green" to which he had an especial aversion. It was one of
his doctrines that a room should be kept cheerful in tone, and how happily
he could carry out this doctrine is seen in more than one of the rooms
decorated by the firm. A visitor to Stanmore Hall, for example, has noted
the delicate tones of the painted ceilings as looking like embroidery on
old white silk, giving a bright yet light and aerial effect, and forming
with the woodwork of untouched oak an impression of delightful gayety.
That Morris made himself a master of so many crafts and grappled even so
successfully as he did with the technical difficulties involved would be
somewhat remarkable had he attempted none of the other undertakings in
which he gained for himself a name to be remembered. His eagerness to
express his ideals in a practical form led him on indefinitely. To the
very last a new world to conquer roused his spirit and made him tingle to
be off. For a man with the trace of the plodder in him such a career would
have been an impossible one, but Morris went blithely from craft to craft
by a series of leaps and bounds. He stayed with each just long enough to
understand its working principles and to make himself efficient to teach
others its peculiar virtues and demands, and he then passed on. "Each
separate enterprise on which he entered," says one of his biographers,
"seems for a time to have moved him to extraordinary energy. He thought it
out, installed it, set it going, designed for it, trained men and women in
the work to be done, and then by degrees, as the work began to run
smoothly and could be trusted to go on without him, his interest became
less active: a new idea generated in his mind, or an old one burst into
bud, and his energies burst out afresh in some new doing." As time went on
he had less and less practically to do with the firm of which he was the
head and of which he continued to the end to be the consulting adviser. He
gathered about him cooeperators who not only were sympathetic with his
methods but absorbed his style. His distinction as a designer was neither
so great nor so personal that it could not to a considerable degree be
communicated, and this accounts for the enduring quality of his influence
which has been handed down to us through others without too much
subtracted from it, with many of the characteristics most to be cherished
still present. Greater decorators have existed, indeed, but it may be
questioned if anyone has been quite so inspiriting; has had the matter
quite so much at heart. He persuaded the multitude from the intensity of
his own conviction, and he persuaded them on the whole toward good things
and toward beauty. He made other men's ideas his own but he adopted them
body and soul. He followed his own fashion, inveighing with vigour and
frequently with logic against nearly all the fashions of his time. It is
not surprising that he himself became the great fashion of the nineteenth
century in matters of decoration. And this certainly was what he wanted,
in the sense of wanting everyone in England to see as he did the
possibilities of household art and to share in furthering them by turning
their backs upon the sham art with which the commercial world was largely
occupied. But he made no effort toward gaining the patronage of those
unwilling to admit that what he disliked was intolerable. His was never a
conciliatory policy. The following passage from his lecture on _The Lesser
Arts_ reveals his attitude in his own phrasing:
"People say to me often enough: If you want to make your art succeed and
flourish, you must make it the fashion: a phrase which I confess annoys
me: for they mean by it that I should spend one day over my work to two
days in trying to convince rich, and supposed influential people, that
they care very much for what they really do not care in the least, so that
it may happen according to the proverb: _Bell-wether took the leap and we
all went over_; well, such advisers are right if they are content with the
thing lasting but a little while: say till you can make a little money, if
you don't get pinched by the door shutting too quickly: otherwise they are
wrong: the people they are thinking of have too many strings to their
bow, and can turn their backs too easily on a thing that fails, for it to
be safe work trusting to their whims: it is not their fault, they cannot
help it, but they have no chance of spending time enough over the arts to
know anything practical of them, and they must of necessity be in the
hands of those who spend their time in pushing fashion this way and that
for their own advantage.
[Illustration: SOFA DESIGNED BY THE MORRIS CO.
(_Reproduced by courtesy of Mr. Bulkley_)]
[Illustration: SECRETARY DESIGNED BY THE MORRIS CO.
(_Reproduced by courtesy of Mr. Bulkley_)]
"Sirs, there is no help to be got out of these latter, or those who let
themselves be led by them: the only real help for the decorative arts must
come from those who work in them: nor must they be led, they must lead.
"You whose hands make those things that should be works of art, you must
all be artists, and good artists too, before the public at large can take
real interest in such things; and when you have become so, I promise you
that you shall lead the fashion; fashion shall follow your hands
obediently enough."
CHAPTER V.
FROM THE RED HOUSE TO KELMSCOTT.
While Morris was developing the industries of the firm with essential
steadiness, despite the rapid transitions from one pursuit to another, he
was going through a variety of personal experiences, some of which
involved his disappointment in deeply cherished plans. For one thing, and
this perhaps the most grievous, he was obliged to give up the Red House
upon which so much joyous labour had been spent. Several causes
contributed to the unhappy necessity, chief among them an attack of
rheumatic fever that made him sensitive to the bleak winds which the
exposed situation of the building invited. The distance between London and
Upton became also a serious matter after his illness, as he found it
almost impossible to make the daily journeys required by his attention to
the business. Several compromises were thought of, the most enticing being
the removal of the works from Red Lion Square to Upton, and the addition
of a wing to the Red House for Burne-Jones and his family; but in the end
the beautiful house was sold, Morris, after leaving it, never again
setting eyes upon it.
[Illustration: ILLUSTRATION BY BURNE-JONES FOR PROJECTED EDITION OF "THE
EARTHLY PARADISE," CUT ON WOOD BY MORRIS HIMSELF]
The first move was to Queen Square, London, where Morris and the business
became house-mates in the autumn of 1865, remaining together there, with
more or less interruption, for seven years. Queen Square is in Bloomsbury,
not far from the British Museum, and a part of the ugly London
middle-class region for which Morris had so little liking, but as a place
to carry on the rapidly increasing work of the firm it possessed great
advantages. The number of the house was 26, and adjacent buildings and
grounds were used for the workshops. At this time Mr. George Warrington
Taylor was made business manager for the company, and Morris gained by his
accession much valuable time, not only for designing and experimenting,
but for the literary work that again began to claim his attention. He was
still, however, a familiar figure in "the shop," acting as salesman,
showman, designer, or manual labourer. His aspect as he strode along the
streets of the dull neighbourhood must have been refreshing. Those who
knew him have repeatedly described him as the image of a sea-captain in
general appearance. He wore habitually a suit of navy-blue serge cut in
nautical fashion, and his manner was bluff and hearty as that of the
proverbial seaman. Mr. Mackail gives a breezy picture of him in his
workman's blouse, hatless, with his ruddy complexion and rocking walk,
bound for the Faulkners' house where once upon a time a new maid took him
for the butcher. To have seen him in these days was to have seen one of
his own ideal workmen out of _News from Nowhere_. As a master of men he
seems to have been singularly successful, despite the temper which led him
at times to commit acts of positive violence. His splendid zest for work
must have been stimulating and to a degree contagious. Merely to be in the
company of one who thought hearty manual labour so interesting and so
pleasant and so heartily to be desired by everyone, must have had its
vivifying effect. He was stating the simple truth when he said that he
should die of despair and weariness if his daily work were taken from him
unless he could at once make something else his daily work, and he is
constantly drawing persuasive pictures of the charm of the various
handicrafts--that of weaving for example, his description of which would
invite the most discontented mind. He does not call the weaver's craft a
dull one: "If he be set to doing things which are worth doing--to watch
the web growing day by day almost magically, in anticipation of the time
when it is to be taken out and one can see it on the right side in all its
well-schemed beauty--to make something beautiful that will last out of a
few threads of silk and wool, seems to me not an unpleasant way of earning
one's livelihood, so long only as one lives and works in a pleasant place,
with work-day not too long, and a book or two to be got at." His own
weavers were some of them boys trained in the shop from a condition of
absolute ignorance of drawing and of the craft to such an efficiency as
enabled them to weave the Stanmore tapestry, one panel of which took two
years to the making, and which was of the utmost elaboration and
magnificence of design. The exigencies of the business presently made it
necessary to devote the whole of the premises in Queen Square to the work
going on there, and the Morris family removed in 1872 to a small house
between Hammersmith and Turnham Green, near Chiswick Lane, Morris
retaining a couple of rooms in the Queen Square house for his use when
busy there. Even the extended quarters soon proved insufficient, however,
and in 1877 rooms were taken in Oxford Street for showing and selling the
work of the firm, the manufacturing departments being still ensconced in
Queen Square. In 1881 these also were transferred to more suitable
premises. The dyeing and cotton-printing demanded workshops by the side of
some stream of clear water "fit to dye with," and after much search Morris
found an ideal situation on the banks of the little Wandle River, near
Wimbledon. There were the ruins of Merton Abbey where the Barons once gave
their famous answer "Nolumus leges Angliae mutari," and there manufactures
had been carried on for centuries. In the long low-roofed worksheds on the
river's bank his workmen could move about in ample space, practising
ancient methods of dyeing, printing, and weaving, seven miles from Charing
Cross. It is anything but a typical manufactory that has been depicted by
visitors to the Merton Abbey works. We read of an old walled garden gay
with old-fashioned flowers and shrubs, of the swift little Wandle River
rushing along between the buildings, its trout leaping under the windows,
a water-wheel revolving at ease, hanks of yarn, fresh from the vats,
drying in the pure air, calico lying "clearing" on the meadow grass in an
enclosure made by young poplar trees, a sunlit picture of peaceful work
carried on by unharried workers among surroundings of fresh and wholesome
charm. Women and men were both employed, some of them old and not all of
them competent, but none of them overworked or underpaid. Though Morris
had somewhat scant courtesy of manner toward those who worked for and with
him, he had at least the undeviating desire to promote their welfare. If
he expected work of his work-people, as certainly he did, he expected it
only under the most healthful and agreeable conditions. Judging others by
himself, he could not conceive anyone as happy in idleness, but neither
did he expect anyone to be happy without leisure. In his own business he
proved what the nineteenth century found hard to believe, that honest,
thorough, and artistic workmanship, accomplished under reasonable
exactions by people enjoying their occupation, could be combined with
commercial prosperity. That the products of such labour could not be
bought by the poorer classes was due, he argued, to a social order wrong
at the root. The time when art could be made "by the people and for the
people, as a happiness to the maker and the user," was a far-off dream.
[Illustration: _Kelmscott Manor House_]
Shortly before Morris abandoned Queen Square as a place of residence, he
discovered for himself a "heaven on earth," in which he could spend his
vacations from town, and free himself from the contamination of London
streets. This was Kelmscott Manor House, which he rented--at first jointly
with Rossetti--in 1871, and in which he took infinite satisfaction for the
remainder of his life. The beautiful old place was in its way as
characteristic of him and of his tastes as the Red House had been, and has
become intimately associated with him in the minds of all who knew him
during his later years, his passion for places investing those for which
he cared with a sentiment not to be ignored or slighted in making up the
sum of his interests. For a couple of years Rossetti was an inmate of
Kelmscott Manor, and through his letters many vivid glimpses of it are
obtained. The village of Kelmscott was at the time no more than a hamlet
containing a hundred and seventeen people, and situated two and a half
miles from the nearest town, Lechlade, to whose churchyard Shelley lent
distinction by writing a poem there. The nearest station-town was
Farringdon, so far off that the carrier who brought railway parcels to the
occupants of the Manor charged six shillings and sixpence for each trip.
"Thus," writes Rossetti, who was chronically short of money, "a good deal
of inconvenience tempers the attractions of the place." Nothing, however,
unless the presence of Rossetti, who was "unromantically discontented"
there, tempered them for Morris. In an article for _The Quest_ for
November, 1895, he describes the house in the most minute detail,
accentuating its charms with a touch of comment for each that falls like a
caress. The roofs are covered with the beautiful stone slates of the
district, "the most lovely covering which a roof can have." The
"battering" or leaning back of the walls is by no means a defect but a
beauty, "taking from the building a rigidity which otherwise would mar
it," and the stout studded partitions of the entrance passage are "very
agreeable to anyone who does not want cabinet work to supplant carpentry."
To the building of it all must have gone, he thinks, "some thin thread of
tradition, a half-anxious sense of the delight of meadow and acre and wood
and river, a certain amount (not too much, let us hope) of common-sense, a
liking for making materials serve one's turn, and perhaps at bottom some
little grain of sentiment." And from Rossetti we hear of the primitive
Kelmscott church "looking just as one fancies chapels in the _Mort
d'Arthur_," of clouds of starlings sinking in the copses "clamourous like
mill-waters at wild play," of "mustering rooks innumerable," of a
"delicious" garden and meadows leading to the river brink, of apple
blossoms and marigolds and arrow-heads and white lilies "divinely
lovely," of an island by the boat-house rich in wild periwinkles, and of
many another exquisite aspect of a place whose unvexed quietness was
nevertheless powerless to soothe the turmoil of that tormented soul.
[Illustration: _Kelmscott Manor House_]
To realise fully how Morris himself felt toward it, one must turn to his
description in _News from Nowhere_. There he is supposed to see it through
the kindly mist of time, returning to it from a regenerate and beautified
world, and his problem is to write of it with the penetrating eloquence
and melancholy associated with remembered happiness. It is supremely
characteristic of him that he could perfectly strike this note while still
living in hale activity upon the spot he is to praise with the tenderness
of reminiscence. The great virtue of his temperament lay in this peculiar
intensity of realisation. He needed neither loss nor change to spur his
sensibility and awaken his recognition of the worth or special quality of
what he loved. Vital as few men are, he seems, nevertheless, always to
have dwelt in sight of death and to have grasped life as though the next
moment he was to be torn from it. The burden of the song which Ogier the
Dane hears on a fair May morning:
Kiss me love! for who knoweth
What thing cometh after death?
so often quoted in evidence of his fainting and dejected spirit, embodies
indeed the sentiment of his attitude toward the pleasures and
satisfactions to be drawn from the visible and perishable world, but does
not hint at the energy with which he seized those pleasures, the
sturdiness with which he filled himself with those satisfactions. When
_News from Nowhere_ was written, Morris had lived the better part of
twenty years in close relation with the Kelmscott house, but custom had
not staled for him its infinite variety. This is what he writes of it and
of its surroundings in his romance of _An Epoch of Rest_: He and his
companions have approached it by way of the river.
"Presently we saw before us a bank of elm trees, which told us of a house
amidst them. In a few minutes we had passed through a deep eddying pool
into the sharp stream that ran from the ford, and beached our craft on a
tiny strand of limestone gravel, and stepped ashore.
"Mounting on the cart-road that ran along the river some feet above the
water, I looked round about me. The river came down through a wide meadow
on my left, which was grey now with the ripened seeding grasses; the
gleaming water was lost presently by a turn of the bank, but over the
meadow I could see the gables of a building where I knew the lock must be.
A low wooded ridge bounded the river-plain to the south and south-east,
whence we had come, and a few low houses lay about its feet and up its
slope. I turned a little to my right and through the hawthorn sprays and
long shoots of the wild roses could see the flat country spreading out
far away under the sun of the calm evening, till something that might be
called hills with a look of sheep pastures about them bounded it with a
soft blue line. Before one, the elm boughs still hid most of what houses
there might be in this river-side dwelling of men; but to the right of the
cart-road a few grey buildings of the simplest kind showed here and there.
"I had a mind to say that I did not know the way thither, and that the
river-side dwellers should lead: but almost without my will my feet moved
on along the road they knew. The raised way led us into a little field
bounded by a backwater of the river on one side: on the right hand we
could see a cluster of small houses and barns and a wall partly overgrown
with ivy, over which a few grey gables showed. The village road ended in
the shallow of the aforesaid backwater. We crossed the road, and again
almost without my will my hand raised the latch of a door in the wall, and
we stood presently on a stone path which led up to the old house to which
fate in the shape of Dick had so strangely brought me in this world of
men. My companion gave a sigh of pleased surprise and enjoyment, nor did I
wonder, for the garden between the wall and the house was redolent of the
June flowers, and the roses were rolling over one another with that
delicious superabundance of small well-tended gardens which at first sight
takes away all thought from the beholder save that of beauty. The
blackbirds were singing their loudest, the doves were cooing on the
roof-ridge, the rooks in the high elm trees beyond were garrulous among
the young leaves, and the swifts wheeled, whining, about the gables. And
the house itself was a fit guardian for all the beauty of this heart of
summer.
"Once again Ellen echoed my thoughts as she said: 'Yes, friend, this is
what I came out to see; this many-gabled old house built by the simple
country-folk of the long-past times, regardless of all the turmoil that
was going on in cities and courts, is lovely still amidst all the beauty
which these latter days have created; and I do not wonder at our friends
'tending it so carefully and making much of it. It seems to me as if it
had waited for these happy days, and held in it the gathered crumbs of
happiness of the confused and turbulent past.'
"She led me up close to the house and laid her shapely sun-browned hand
and arm upon the lichened wall as if to embrace it, and cried out: 'O me!
O me! How I love the earth and the seasons and weather, and all the things
that deal with it and all that grows out of it,--as this has done!'
"We went in and found no soul in any room as we wandered from room to
room--from the rose-covered porch to the strange and quaint garrets
amongst the great timbers of the roof, where of old time the tillers and
herdsmen of the manor slept, but which a-nights seemed now, by the small
size of the beds, and the litter of useless and disregarded
matters--bunches of dying flowers, feathers of birds, shells of
starling's eggs, caddis worms in mugs and the like,--seemed to be
inhabited for the time by children.
"Everywhere there was but little furniture, and that only the most
necessary, and of the simplest forms. The extravagant love of ornament
which I had noted in this people elsewhere, seemed here to have given
place to the feeling that the house itself and its associations was the
ornament of the country life amidst which it had been left stranded from
old times, and that to reornament it would but take away its use as a
piece of natural beauty.
"We sat down at last in a room over the wall which Ellen had caressed, and
which was still hung with old tapestry, originally of no artistic value,
but now faded into pleasant grey tones which harmonised thoroughly well
with the quiet of the place, and which would have been ill supplanted by
brighter and more striking decoration.
"I asked a few questions of Ellen as we sat there, but scarcely listened
to her answers, and presently became silent, and then scarce conscious of
anything but that I was there in that old room, the doves crooning from
the roofs of the barn and dovecot beyond the window opposite."
* * * * *
In 1878 Morris took a London house on the Upper Mall, Hammersmith, which
he occupied alternately with Kelmscott Manor. This place, which Mr.
Mackail describes as "ugly without being mean," was also on the banks of
the river, and Morris gained much satisfaction from the thought that the
water flowing by it had come in its due course past the beloved Kelmscott
garden. A somewhat inconvenient touch of sentiment caused him to give his
Hammersmith home the name of "Kelmscott House" in compliment to the home
actually situated at Kelmscott, the latter being distinguished by the
title of "Manor," a title that seems to belong to it by courtesy alone.
From the great fondness felt by Morris for these places on which he
lavished his art until they spoke more eloquently than his words of the
aims and theories so dear to him, the domesticity of his life would
naturally be inferred. Nor was he an eager traveller judged by modern
standards. Nevertheless, he managed to find time for some extended trips
just as he found time for everything that came in his way with an appeal
to his liking. The most important of these was a voyage to Iceland, made
in company with Faulkner and two other friends during the summer of 1871,
just after the acquisition of Kelmscott Manor, in which he left Rossetti.
His mind was ripe for the experience. He had already published
translations from the Icelandic sagas made in collaboration with Mr.
Magnusson, and his interest in the bracing Northern literature was
reaching its height. Long years after, Rossetti said of him, "There goes
the last of the Vikings!" and his mood in visiting Iceland was not unlike
that of a modernised Viking returning to his home. Thoughts of the
country's great past were constantly with him. The boiling geysers, the
conventional attraction for tourists who "never heard the names of Sigurd
and Brunhild, of Njal, or Gunnar, or Grettir, or Gisli, or Gudrun," were a
source of irritation to him. His pilgrimages to the homes of the ancient
traditions were the episodes of his journey worth thinking about, and
about them he thought much and vigorously, seeing in imagination the
figures of the old heroes going about summer and winter, attending to
their haymaking and fishing and live stock, eating almost the same food
and living on the same ground as the less imposing Norsemen of the
present. "Lord!" he writes, "what littleness and helplessness has taken
the place of the old passion and violence that had place here once--and
all is unforgotten; so that one has no power to pass it by unnoticed." His
two months spent among the scenes of the greater sagas left him with an
intense impression of a land stern and terrible, of toothed rocks and
black slopes and desolate green, a land that intensified his melancholy by
its suggestion of short-lived glory and early death, and intensified also
his enjoyment of life by the sense of adventure, the rugged riding, and
the fresh keen air. One of the important events of the trip was the
exploration of the great cave at Surts-hellir, and twenty years after,
many of its incidents were embodied in the book called _The Story of the
Glittering Plain_, wherein Hallblithe and the three Seekers make their
way through the stony tangle of the wilderness seeing "nought save the wan
rocks under the sun."
Two years later he made a still more adventurous journey across the arid
tableland occupying the central portion of Iceland and across the northern
mountains to the sea. It was highly characteristic of him that for the
time he yielded himself utterly to the influence of the strange and awful
land upon his imagination, and that for years afterward his writing was
flooded by the impressions that continually swept back upon his mind as he
reverted to these experiences. Mr. Mackail gives an amusing instance of
the way in which the interest uppermost with him became an obsession
leading to the most childlike extravagances. During a holiday tour in
Belgium he came to a place where neither French nor English was spoken. He
therefore "made a desperate effort at making himself understood by
haranguing the amazed inn-keeper in Icelandic." His first visit to Italy,
made between the first and second visits to Iceland, took faint hold upon
him, nor was the second Italian journey, made some years later, and marked
by a troublesome attack of gout, notably successful. He was a man of the
North as surely as Rossetti was a man of the South, and it would have been
a renaissance indeed that could have turned him into a Florentine or a
Venetian.
[Illustration: DESIGN BY ROSSETTI FOR WINDOW EXECUTED BY MORRIS & CO.
(_THE PARABLE OF THE VINEYARD_)]
[Illustration: DESIGN BY ROSSETTI FOR STAINED-GLASS WINDOW EXECUTED BY THE
MORRIS CO. (_THE PARABLE OF THE VINEYARD_)]
During this middle period of his life, at the height of his great
activity, an event occurred involving the element of tragedy, if the
breaking of friendships be accounted tragic. In 1875 the firm was
dissolved. Following Mr. Mackail's account of the circumstances that led
to the dissolution, we find that the business had become one in which
Morris supplied practically all the capital, invention, and control. It
was also the chief source of his income. On the other hand, his partners
might find themselves at any time seriously involved in the liabilities of
a business which was rapidly extending. Hence the desirability of the
dissolution and reconstitution of the firm. But in connection with this
step an embarrassing situation arose. Under the original instrument, each
partner had equal rights in the assets of the firm. After the first year
or two the profits had never been divided, and the six partners of Morris,
for the hundred and twenty pounds by which they were represented in the
contributed capital at the beginning, had now claims on the business for
some seven or eight thousand pounds. If these claims were insisted upon,
Morris would be placed in a position of considerable financial difficulty.
Burne-Jones, Webb, and Faulkner refused to accept any consideration. "The
other three," says Mr. Mackail, "stood on the strict letter of their legal
rights." Naturally the relations between Morris and the latter became
grievously strained, and with Rossetti the break was absolute and
irremediable. In passing out of Morris's life, as he then did, he
certainly left it more serene, but with him went also the vivifying
influence of his genius. In considering the very unfortunate part played
by him in the conflict among the members of the firm, it is fair to give a
certain weight to details emphasised in Mr. William Rossetti's account as
modifying--to a slight degree, it is true, but still modifying--the sordid
aspect of Rossetti's action. Madox Brown, who was one of the partners
wishing not to forego their legal rights, was getting on in years and was
a comparatively poor man. He had always counted on the firm "as an
important eventual accession to his professional earnings." No one
familiar with Rossetti's character can doubt that a desire to stand by his
old friend and teacher in such a matter would have a strong influence with
him. To his brother's mind, his attitude was throughout "one of
conciliation," with the wish "to adjust contending claims had that but
been possible." "He himself," says Mr. William Rossetti, "retired from the
firm without desiring any compensation for his own benefit. A sum was,
however, assigned to him. He laid it apart for the eventual advantage of a
member of the Morris family, but, ere his death, circumstances had induced
him to trench upon it not a little." It is easy to imagine circumstances
trenching upon any sum of money under Rossetti's direct control, and in
the absence of any testimony the reader acquainted with his prodigal
disposition may very well be pardoned for doubting whether any member of
the Morris family became appreciably the richer for his impulse.
Nevertheless, it is a reasonable conclusion that he was not actuated by a
sordid motive in opposing the essentially just claim made by Morris, but
was to his own mind acting in accordance with the demands of a friendship
older and closer than that between him and Morris. It must be noted,
however, that a reconciliation was effected in the course of time between
Morris and Madox Brown, while in Rossetti's case the wound never healed.
The outcome of the negotiations was that Madox Brown was bought out,
"receiving a handsome sum," says Mr. William Rossetti, and the business
went on under the sole management and proprietorship of Morris.
In addition to the annoyance and real trouble of mind caused Morris by
these transactions, he had the further anxiety at about this time of a
breakdown of a serious and permanent nature in the health of his eldest
daughter. This he took deeply to heart, losing spirits to a marked degree,
but nothing human had power to stay his fertile brain and busy hand.
CHAPTER VI.
POETRY.
Intent as he was upon the artistic success of his work in decoration, and
ardent in giving time and thought to achieving this success, Morris was
far from excluding poetry from the sum of his occupations. The five years
following his marriage (1859-1864), indeed, were barren of any important
literary work. He had planned, somewhat anticipating the large scale of
his later verse, a cycle of twelve poems on the Trojan War, but he
completed only six of the twelve, and the project was presently abandoned.
After the Red House was sold, however, and he was back in London with the
time on his hands saved from the daily journey, he began at once to make
poetry of a form entirely different from anything he had previously
written. The little sheaf of poems contained in his early volume had been
put together by the hand of a boy. The poem published in June, 1867, under
the title _The Life and Death of Jason_, was the work of a man in full
possession of his faculty. It was simple, certain, musical, and
predestined to speedy popularity, even Tennyson, with whom Morris was
not a favourite, liking the Jason. It flowed with sustained if monotonous
sweetness through seventeen books in rhymed pentameter, occasionally
broken by octosyllabic songs. Although published as a separate poem, on
account of the length to which it ran, apparently almost in despite of its
author's will, it had been intended to form part of the series called _The
Earthly Paradise_, the first division of which followed it in 1868. This
ambitious work was suggested by Chaucer's _Canterbury Tales_, and consists
of no fewer than twenty-four long narrative poems, set in a framework of
delicate descriptive verse containing passages that are the very flower of
Morris's poetic charm. The scheme of the arrangement is interesting. A
little band of Greeks, "the seed of the Ionian race," are found living
upon a nameless island in a distant sea. Hither at the end of the
fourteenth century--the time of Chaucer--come certain wanderers of
Germanic, Norse, and Celtic blood who have set out on a voyage in search
of a land that is free from death, driven from their homes by the
pestilence sweeping over them. Hospitably received, the wanderers spend
their time upon the island entertaining their hosts with the legends
current in their day throughout Western Europe, and in turn are
entertained with the Hellenic legends which have followed the line of
living Greek tradition and are told by the fourteenth-century islanders in
the mediaeval form and manner proper to them at that time. Among the
wanderers are a Breton and a Suabian, and the sources from which the
stories are drawn have a wide range. They were at first, indeed, intended
to represent the whole stock of the world's legends, but this field was
too vast for even the great facility of Morris, and much was set aside. At
the end we find _The Lovers of Gudrun_, taken from the Laxdaela Saga of
Iceland, and bearing witness in the grimness of its tragedy and the
fierceness of its Northern spirit to the powerful influence of the
Icelandic literature upon the mind of Morris. It is the only story in the
collection which has dominated his dreamy mediaevalism and struck fire from
his pen.
[Illustration: _Morris's Bed, with Hangings designed by himself and
embroidered by his Daughter_]
In _The Earthly Paradise_ we have all the qualities that make its author
dear to most of his readers. The mind is steeped in the beauty of imagery,
and content to have emotion and thought lulled by the long, melancholy
swing of lines that seem like the echo of great poetry without its living
voice. Such poetry is what Morris wished his decorations to be--the
"lesser art" that brings repose from the quickening of soul with which a
masterpiece is greeted. The spirit revealed through the fluent murmur of
the melodious words is very true to him and lies at the root of all his
efforts toward making life fair to the eyes and soothing to the heart. The
"unimpassioned grief," the plaintive longing with which he regarded the
fleeting and unsatisfying aspects of a world so beautiful and so
sorrowful, never found more exquisite expression than in passage after
passage of this pellucid and lovely verse. The flight from death and the
seeking after eternal life on this material globe constitute a theme that
had for him a singular fitness. No one could have rendered with more
sensitive appreciation the mood of men who set their life at an unmeasured
price. No one could have expressed the dread of dying with more poetic
sympathy. The preludes to the stories told on the island are poems
addressed to the months of the changing year, and not one is free from the
grievous suggestion of loss or the weary burden of fear and dejection.
Read without the intervening narratives, they wrap the mind in an
atmosphere of foreboding. There is no welcome unaccompanied by the shadow
of farewell. There is no leaping of the heart to meet sunshine and fair
weather without its corresponding faintness of shrinking from the clouds
and darkness certain to follow. With a brave determination to seize
exultation on the wing, he cries to March:
Yea, welcome March! and though I die ere June,
Yet for the hope of life I give thee praise,
Striving to swell the burden of the tune
That even now I hear thy brown birds raise,
Unmindful of the past or coming days;
Who sing: "O joy! a new year is begun:
What happiness to look upon the sun!"
But what follows? The sure reminder of the silence that shall come after
the singing:
Ah, what begetteth all this storm of bliss
But Death himself, who crying solemnly,
E'en from the heart of sweet Forgetfulness,
Bids us "Rejoice, lest pleasureless ye die.
Within a little time must ye go by.
Stretch forth your open hands, and while ye live
Take all the gifts that Death and Life may give."
And in the stanzas for October, written, Mr. Mackail tells us, in memory
of a happy autumn holiday, we have the most poignant note of which he was
capable:
Come down, O Love; may not our hands still meet,
Since still we live to-day, forgetting June,
Forgetting May, deeming October sweet--
--O hearken, hearken! through the afternoon,
The grey tower sings a strange old tinkling tune!
Sweet, sweet, and sad, the toiling year's last breath,
Too satiate of life to strive with death.
And we too--will it not be soft and kind,
That rest from life, from patience and from pain;
That rest from bliss we know not when we find;
That rest from Love which ne'er the end can gain?--
Hark, how the tune swells, that erewhile did wane?
Look up, Love!--ah, cling close and never move!
How can I have enough of life and love?
June, the high tide of the year, he selects as the fitting month in which
to tell of something sad:
Sad, because though a glorious end it tells,
Yet on the end of glorious life it dwells.
In February he asks:
Shalt thou not hope for joy new born again,
Since no grief ever born can ever die
Through changeless change of seasons passing by?
[Illustration: _Kelmscott Manor House from the Orchard_]
Thus across the charming images of French romance, Hellenic legend, and
Norse drama, falls the suggestion of his own personality, and it is due to
this pervading personal mood or sentiment that _The Earthly Paradise_ has
a power to stir the imagination almost wholly lacking to his later work.
It cannot be said that even here he is able to awaken a strong emotion.
But the human element is felt. A warm intelligence of sympathy creeps in
among dreams and shadows, the reader is aware of a living presence near
him and responds to the appeal of human weakness and depression. It is
because Morris in the languid cadences of _The Earthly Paradise_ spoke
with his own voice and took his readers into the confidence of his
hopeless thoughts, that the book will remain for the multitude the chief
among his works, the only one that portrays for us in its most
characteristic form the inmost quality of his temperament. Nor does he
seem to have had for any other book of his making quite the intimate
affection he so frankly bestowed upon this. The final stanzas in which the
well-known message is sent to "my Master, Geoffrey Chaucer," confide the
autobiographic vein in which it was written. Says the Book of its maker:
I have beheld him tremble oft enough
At things he could not choose but trust to me,
Although he knew the world was wise and rough:
And never did he fail to let me see
His love,--his folly and faithlessness, maybe;
And still in turn I gave him voice to pray
Such prayers as cling about an empty day.
Thou, keen-eyed, reading me, mayst read him through,
For surely little is there left behind;
No power great deeds unnameable to do;
No knowledge for which words he may not find;
No love of things as vague as autumn wind--
Earth of the earth lies hidden by my clay,
The idle singer of an empty day.
Written at great speed, one day being marked by a product of seven hundred
lines, the last of _The Earthly Paradise_ was in the hands of the printers
by the end of 1870, and Morris was free for his Icelandic journey and new
interests.
[Illustration: _Portrait of Edward Burne-Jones_
_By Watts_]
He was no sooner home from Iceland than he set to work upon a curious
literary experiment--a dramatic poem of very complicated construction,
called _Love is Enough, or the Freeing of Pharamond: A Morality_, the
intricate metrical design of which is interestingly explained by Mr.
Mackail. Rossetti and Coventry Patmore both spoke in terms of enthusiasm
of its unusual beauty. The story is that of a king, Pharamond, who has
been gallant on the field and wise on the throne, but is haunted by
visions of an ideal love sapping his energy and driving peace from his
heart. He deserts his people, and with his henchman, Oliver, wanders
through the world until he encounters Azalais, a low-born maiden, who
satisfies his dream. He returns to find that his people have become
estranged from him and he abdicates at once, to retire into obscurity with
his love. There has been an obvious struggle on the part of the poet
to obtain a strong emotional effect, and certain passages have indeed the
"passionate lyric quality" ascribed to them by Rossetti; but as a drama it
hardly carries conviction. The songs written to be sung between the scenes
have nevertheless much of the haunting beauty soon to be lost from his
work, and of these the following is a felicitous example:
Love is enough: it grew up without heeding
In the days when ye knew not its name nor its measure,
And its leaflets untrodden by the light feet of pleasure
Had no boast of the blossom, no sign of the seeding,
As the morning and evening passed over its treasure.
And what do ye say then?--that Spring long departed
Has brought forth no child to the softness and showers;
That we slept and we dreamed through the Summer of flowers;
We dreamed of the Winter, and waking dead-hearted
Found Winter upon us and waste of dull hours.
Nay, Spring was o'er happy and knew not the reason,
And Summer dreamed sadly, for she thought all was ended
In her fulness of wealth that might not be amended,
But this is the harvest and the garnering season,
And the leaf and the blossom in the ripe fruit are blended.
It sprang without sowing, it grew without heeding,
Ye knew not its name and ye knew not its measure,
Ye noted it not 'mid your hope and your pleasure;
There was pain in its blossom, despair in its seeding,
But daylong your bosom now nurseth its treasure.
Although Morris planned a beautifully decorated edition of the poem which
was highly valued by him, its failure to impress itself upon the public
was no great grief to him, and he put it cheerfully out of mind to devote
himself to translation and to Icelandic literature.
The surprising task to which he first turned was a verse translation of
Virgil's _AEneid_, in which he attempted to give the closest possible
rendering of the Latin and to emphasise the romantic side of Virgil's
genius. He followed with an almost word-for-word accuracy the lines and
periods of the original using, and he threw over the poem a glamour of
romance, but Mr. Mackail says truly that he had taken his life in his
hands in essaying a classic subject with his inadequate training and
unclassic taste. The same authority, who on this subject, certainly, is
not to be disputed by the lay reader, considers the result a success from
Morris's own point of view, declaring that he "vindicated the claim of the
romantic school to a joint ownership with the classicists in the poem
which is not only the crowning achievement of classical Latin, but the
fountain-head of romanticism in European literature." The opposing critics
are fairly represented by Mr. Andrew Lang, who, in this case as in many
another, is an ideal intermediary between scholar and general reader.
"There is no more literal verse-translation of any classic poem in
English," he says, "but Mr. Morris's manner and method appear to me to be
mistaken. Virgil's great charm is his perfection of style and the
exquisite harmony of his numbers. These are not represented by the
singularly rude measures and archaistic language of Mr. Morris. Like Mr.
Morris, Virgil was a learned antiquarian, and perhaps very accomplished
scholars may detect traces of voluntary archaism in his language and
style. But these, if they exist, certainly do not thrust themselves on the
notice of most readers of the _AEneid_. Mr. Morris's phrases would almost
seem uncouth in a rendering of Ennius. For example, take
'manet alta mente repostum
Judicium Paridis, spretaeque injuria formae.'
This is rendered in a prose version by a fine and versatile scholar, 'deep
in her soul lies stored the judgment of Paris, the insult of her slighted
beauty.' Mr. Morris translates:
'her inmost heart still sorely did enfold
That grief of body set at naught by Paris' doomful deed.'
Can anything be much less Virgilian? Is it even intelligible without the
Latin? What modern poet would naturally speak of 'grief of body set at
naught,' or call the judgment of Paris 'Paris' doomful deed'? Then 'manet
alta mente repostum' is strangely rendered by 'her inmost heart still
sorely did enfold.' This is an example of the translation at its worst,
but defects of the sort illustrated are so common as to leave an
impression of wilful ruggedness, and even obscurity, than which what can
be less like Virgil? Where Virgil describes the death of Troilus, 'et
versa pulvis inscribitus hasta' ('and his reversed spear scores the
dust'), Mr. Morris has 'his wrested spear a-writing in the dust,' and
Troilus has just been 'a-fleeing weaponless.' Our doomful deed, is that to
be a-translating thus is to write with wrested pen, and to give a
rendering of Virgil as unsatisfactory as it is technically literal. In
short, Mr. Morris's _AEneid_ seems on a par with Mr. Browning's
_Agamemnon_. But this," Mr. Lang is careful to add, "is a purely personal
verdict: better scholars and better critics have expressed a far higher
opinion of Mr. Morris's translation of Virgil."
Mr. Lang's whimsical despair over the affectations of language which
abound in the translation of the _AEneid_ with less pertinence than in many
other writings of Morris where also they abound, recalls the remonstrance
that Stevenson could not resist writing out in the form of a letter
although it was never sent on its mission. Acknowledging his debt to
Morris for many "unforgettable poems," the younger writer and more
accomplished student of language protests against the indiscriminate use
of the word _whereas_ in the translations from the sagas. "For surely,
Master," he says, "that tongue that we write, and that you have
illustrated so nobly, is yet alive. She has her rights and laws, and is
our mother, our queen, and our instrument. Now in that living tongue,
_where_ has one sense, _whereas_ another."
The translation of the _AEneid_ was published under the title of _The
AEneids_, in the autumn of 1875. Morris had written a good part of it in
the course of his trips back and forth on the Underground Railway, using
for these first drafts a stiff-covered copybook, which was his constant
companion. In the summer of the same year he had brought out a volume of
the translations from the Icelandic which he was making in collaboration
with Mr. Magnusson, calling it _Three Northern Love-Stories and Other
Tales_. He had still, he declared "but few converts to Saga-ism," and he
regarded his translating from the Icelandic as a pure luxury, adopting it
for a Sunday amusement. During the winter of 1875-76, however, he was
embarked on a cognate enterprise of the utmost importance to him, although
he thought, and with truth, that his public would be indifferent to it.
This was the epic poem which he called _The Story of Sigurd the Volsung_,
based on the Volsunga Saga, the story of the great Northern heroes told
and re-told from generation to generation, polished and perfected until
the final form, in which it preserves the traditions of the people who
cherish it, is the noblest attained in the Icelandic legends. Morris had
published a prose translation of the saga in 1870, and the following
passage from his preface shows how deeply his emotions were stirred by his
subject:
"As to the literary quality of this work we might say much," he writes,
"but we think we may well trust the reader of poetic insight to break
through whatever entanglement of strange manners or unused element may at
first trouble him, and to meet the nature and beauty with which it is
filled: we cannot doubt that such a reader will be intensely touched by
finding amidst all its wildness and remoteness such startling realism,
such subtlety, such close sympathy with all the passions that may move
himself to-day. In conclusion, we must again say how strange it seems to
us, that this Volsung Tale, which is in fact an unversified poem, should
never before have been translated into English. For this is the Great
Story of the North, which should be to all our race what the tale of Troy
was to the Greeks--to all our race first, and afterwards, when the change
of the world has made our race nothing more than a name of what has
been--a story too--then should it be to those that come after us no less
than the Tale of Troy has been to us."
In the course of the following six years, during which he was constantly
increasing his intimacy with the literature of the North, an impulse not
unlike that which tempted Tennyson toward the _Idylls of the King_ led him
to try the winning of a wider audience for the tale of great deeds and
elemental passions by which he himself had been so much inspired. In the
prose translation he had given the Volsunga Saga to the public as it had
been created for an earlier public of more savage tastes and fiercer
tendencies. Now he proposed to divest it of some of the childish and ugly
details that formed a stumbling block to the modern reader (though
plausible and interesting enough to those for whom they were invented),
and to add to the "unversified poem" rhyme and metre, emphasising the
essential points and such characteristics of the actors as most appealed
to him. A comparison of the saga with the poem will show that in his
effort to preserve the heroic character of the antique conception by
accentuating everything pleasing, leaving out much of the rudeness and
cruelty, and adorning it with copious descriptive passages, he robs the
story of a great part of the wild life stirring in its ancient forms, and
more or less confuses and involves it. The modern poem really requires for
its right understanding a mind more instructed in its subject than the
prose translation of the old saga, and readers to whom the latter is
unfamiliar may find a plain outline of the story not superfluous.
In the translation, the origin of the noble Volsung race, of which Sigurd
is the flower and crown, is traced to Sigi, called the son of Odin, and
sent out from his father's land for killing a thrall. He is fortunate in
war, marries a noble wife, and rules over the land of the Huns. His son is
named Rerir. Volsung is the son of Rerir, and thus the great-grandson of
Odin himself. He marries the daughter of a giant, and the ten sons and one
daughter of this union are strong in sinew and huge in size, the Volsung
race having the fame of being "great men and high-minded and far above the
most of men both in cunning and in prowess and all things high and
mighty." Volsung becomes in his turn king over Hunland, and builds for
himself a noble Hall in the centre of which grows an oak-tree whose limbs
"blossom fair out over the roof of the hall," and the trunk of which is
called Branstock.
The poem opens with the description of a wedding-feast held in this Hall
for Signy, King Volsung's daughter, who has been sought in marriage by
Siggeir, King of the Goths, a smaller and meaner race than the Volsungs.
Signy is not content with her fate, but her father has deemed the match to
be a wise one, and, eminent in filial obedience as in all things else, she
yields. From this point for some distance saga and poem march together
save for certain minor changes intended to increase Signy's charm. During
the feasting a one-eyed stranger enters the Hall and thrusts his sword up
to its hilt into the tree-trunk, saying that who should draw the sword
from the trunk should have it for his own and find it the best he had ever
borne in his hand. This, of course, is Odin. Siggeir tries to draw the
sword, and after him his nobles, and then the sons of King Volsung, but
none succeeds until Sigmund, the twin of Signy, draws it lightly forth as
an easy task. Siggeir is wroth and offers to buy the sword for thrice its
weight in gold, but Sigmund will not part with it, and Siggeir sets sail
for home in dudgeon, though concealing his feelings from the Volsungs and
inviting them cordially to visit him in Gothland. Signy reads the future,
and implores her father to undo the marriage and let Siggeir depart
without her. (In the poem Morris has her offer herself as a sacrifice if
her father will but remain in his kingdom and decline Siggeir's
invitation.) King Volsung, however, insists on keeping his troth, and
Signy and Siggeir depart, followed in due time by King Volsung and his
sons and nobles in response to Siggeir's request. What Signy prophesied
comes to pass and King Volsung falls at the hands of the Goths while his
ten sons are taken captive. Now Signy prays her husband that her brothers
be put for a time in the stocks, since home to her mind comes "the saw
that says _Sweet to eye while seen_." Siggeir is delighted to consent
though he deems her "mad and witless" to wish longer suffering for her
brothers. Here the poem departs from the original in that Morris puts the
idea of the stocks into the mind of Siggeir in answer to Signy's
suggestion that her brothers be spared for a little time. Sigmund and the
rest of the brothers are taken to the wildwood, and a beam is placed on
their feet, and night by night for nine nights a she-wolf comes to devour
one of them. (In the poem Morris hastens matters somewhat by having two
wolves appear each night to despatch the brothers two at a time.) Each
morning Signy sends a messenger to the wildwood who brings back the woeful
news. Finally she thinks of a ruse, and on the tenth night the messenger
is sent to smear the face of Sigmund, now the sole remaining brother, with
honey, putting some also into his mouth. When the wolf comes she licks his
face, and then puts her tongue into his mouth to get the last delicious
drop. Sigmund promptly closes his teeth upon her tongue and in the
struggle that ensues Sigmund's bonds are burst and the wolf escapes,
leaving her tongue between his teeth. This incident was probably not
sufficiently heroic to please Morris, and in the poem no mention is made
of Signy's clever device, Sigmund gaining his freedom in a more dignified
fashion and the details being slurred over lightly, with a vague and
general allusion to snapping "with greedy teeth." Sigmund dwells in the
wildwood in hiding, and Signy sends to him in turn her two sons by King
Siggeir, that he may test their fitness to help avenge the fate of her
family. Here again Morris mitigates the stern temper of Signy for a more
womanly type. In the saga when Signy finds that the boys are not stout
enough of heart to accomplish her purpose she bids Sigmund kill them at
once: "Why should such as they live longer?" In the poem, however, when
Signy sends her son to Sigmund he is delivered with the diplomatic message
that if his heart avail not he may "wend the ways of his fate," and when
it is found that his heart does not avail, he is returned in safety to his
mother, Sigmund awaiting the slow coming of the competent one.
[Illustration: _William Morris_
_From painting by Watts_]
The story of the birth of Sinfjotli, in whose veins runs unmixed the blood
of the Volsungs, is given a certain dignity not accorded it in Wagner's
familiar version of the legend as Mr. Buxton Forman, Morris's most devoted
critic, has pointed out, but true to the account in the original saga. The
saga is followed, also, in the burning of Siggeir's Hall by Sigmund
and Sinfjotli, but the Signy who kisses her brother in "soft and sweet"
farewell certainly fails to recall to the mind the vengeful creature of
the original. Sigmund returns to the Hall of the Volsungs with Sinfjotli,
and marries Borghild. Presently Sinfjotli sails abroad with the brother of
Queen Borghild, Gudrod by name, and kills him for reason--as given in the
translation--of their rivalry in loving "an exceeding fa
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