Chapter 26

Here we see Morris in the strength of early manhood and in all the exuberance of his rich vigorous nature, surrounded by friends for whom he kept open house, in high contentment with life, eager to respond to all the claims upon his energy. Here came artists and poets, in the pleasant summer days, jesting, dreaming, discussing, indulging in bouts of single-stick or game of bowls in the garden, walking through the country-side, quoting poets old and new, and scheming to cover the walls and cupboards of the rooms with the legends of mediaeval romance. Visitors of the conventional aesthetic type would have many a surprise and many a shock. The jests often took the form of practical jokes, of which Morris, from his explosive temper, was chosen to be the butt, but which in the end he always shared and enjoyed. Rossetti, Burne-Jones, and Faulkner would conspire to lay booby traps on the doors for him, would insult him with lively caricatures, and with relentless humour would send him to 'Coventry' for the duration of a dinner. Or he would have a sudden tempestuous outbreak in which chairs would collapse and door panels be kicked in and violent expletives would resound through the hall. In all, Morris was the central figure, impatient, boisterous, with his thick-set figure, unkempt hair, and untidy clothing, but with the keenest appreciation and sympathy for any manifestation of beauty in literature or in art. But this idyll was short-lived. Ill-health in the Burne-Jones family was followed by an illness which befell Morris himself; and the demand of the growing business and the need for the master to be nearer at hand forced him to leave Upton. The Red House was sold in 1865; and first Bloomsbury and later Hammersmith furnished him with a home more conveniently placed.

The period of his return to London coincided with the most fruitful period of his poetic work. Already at Oxford he had written some pieces of verse which had found favour with his friends. He soon found that his taste and his talent was for narrative poetry; and in 1856 he made acquaintance with his two supreme favourites, Chaucer and Malory. It is to them that he owes most in all that he produced in poetry or in prose, and notably in the _Earthly Paradise_, which he published between 1868 and 1870. This consists of a collection of stories drawn chiefly from Greek sources, but supposed to be told by a band of wanderers in the fourteenth century. Thus the classic legends are seen through a veil of mediaeval romance. He had no wish to step back, in the spirit of a modern scholar, across the ages of ignorance or mist, and to pick up the classic stones clear-cut and cold as the Greeks left them. To him the legends had a continuous history up to the Renaissance; as they were retold by Romans, Italians, or Provençals, they were as a plant growing in our gardens, still putting out fresh shoots, not an embalmed corpse such as later scholars have taught us to exhume and to study in the chill atmosphere of our libraries and museums. This mediaevalism of his was much misunderstood, both in literature and in art; people would talk to him as if he were imitating the windows or tapestries of the Middle Ages, whereas what he wanted was to recapture the technical secrets which the true craftsmen had known and then to use these methods in a live spirit to carry on the work to fresh developments in the future.

If the French tales of the fourteenth century were an inspiration to him in his earliest poems, a second influence no less potent was that of the Icelandic Sagas. He began to study them in 1869, and a little later, with the aid of Professor Magnusson, he was translating some of them into English. He made two journeys to Iceland, and was deeply moved by the wild grandeur of the scenes in which these heroic tales were set. For many successive days he rode across grim solitary wastes with more enthusiasm than he could give to the wonted pilgrimages to Florence and Venice. When he was once under the spell, only the geysers with their suggestion of modern text-books and _Mangnall's Questions_[51] could bore him; all else was magical and entrancing. This enthusiasm bore fruit in _Sigurd the Volsung_, the most powerful of his epic poems, written in an old English metre, which Morris, with true feeling for craftsmanship, revived and adapted to his theme. His poetry in general, less rich than that of Tennyson, less intense than that of Rossetti, had certain qualities of its own, and owed its popularity chiefly to his gift for telling a story swiftly, naturally and easily, and in such a way as to carry his reader along with him.

[Note 51: Letter quoted in _Life of Morris_, by J. W. Mackail, vol. i, p. 257 (Longmans, Green & Co., 1911).]

His fame was growing in London, which was ready enough in the nineteenth century to make the most of its poets. In Society, if he had allowed it to entertain him, he would have been a picturesque figure, though hardly such as was expected by admirers of his poetry and his art. To some his dress suggested only the prosperous British workman; to one who knew him later he seemed like 'the purser of a Dutch brig' in his blue tweed sailor-cut suit. This was his Socialist colleague Mr. Hyndman, who describes 'his imposing forehead and clear grey eyes with the powerful nose and slightly florid cheeks', and tells us how, when he was talking, 'every hair of his head and his rough shaggy beard appeared to enter into the subject as a living part of himself.' Elsewhere he speaks of Morris's 'quick, sharp manner, his impulsive gestures, his hearty laughter and vehement anger'. At times Morris could be bluff beyond measure. Stopford Brooke, who afterwards became one of his friends, recounts his first meeting with Morris in 1867. 'He didn't care for parsons, and he glared at me when I said something about good manners. Leaning over the table with his eyes set and his fist clenched he shouted at me, "I am a boor and the son of a boor".' So ready as he was to challenge anything which smacked of conventionality or pretension, he was not quite a safe poet to lionize or to ask into mixed company.

But it was less in literature than in art that he influenced his generation, and we must return to the history of the firm. From small beginnings it had established itself in the favourable esteem of the few, and, thanks to exhibitions, its fame was spreading. Though as many as twelve branches are mentioned in a single copy of its prospectus, there was generally one department which for the moment occupied most of the creative energy of the chief.

Painted glass is named first on the prospectus, and was one of the earlier successes of the firm. As it was employed for churches more often than for private houses, it is familiar to many who do not know Morris's work in their homes; but it is hardly the most characteristic of his activities. For one thing, the material, the 'pot glass', was purchased, not made on the premises. Morris's skill lay in selecting the best colours available rather than in creating them himself. For another, he knew that his own education in figure-drawing was incomplete, and he left this to other artists. Most of the figures were designed by Burne-Jones, and some of the best-known examples of his windows are at St. Philip's, Birmingham, near the artist's birthplace, and at St. Margaret's, Rottingdean, where he died.[52] But no cartoon, by Burne-Jones or any one else, was executed till Morris had supervised the colour scheme; and he often designed backgrounds of foliage or landscape.

[Note 52: Other easily accessible examples are in Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, and Jesus College Chapel, Cambridge.]

To those people of limited means who cannot afford tapestries and embroidery (which follow painted glass on the firm's list), yet who wish to beautify their homes, interest centres in the chintzes and wall-papers. These show the distinctive gifts by which Morris most widely influenced the Victorian traditions. It is not easy to explain why one design stirs our curiosity and quickens our delight, while another has the opposite effect. Critics can prate about natural and conventional art without helping us to understand; but a passage from Mr. Clutton-Brock seems worth quoting as simply and clearly phrased.[53] 'Morris would start', he says, 'with a pattern in his mind and from the first saw everything as a factor in that pattern. But in these early wall-papers he showed a power of pattern-making that has never been equalled in modern times. For though everything is subject to the pattern, yet the pattern itself expresses a keen delight in the objects of which it is composed. So they are like the poems in which the words keep a precise and homely sense and yet in their combination make a music expressive of their sense.' Beginning with the design of the rose-trellis in 1862, Morris laid under contribution many of the most familiar flowers and trees. The daisy, the honeysuckle, the willow branch, are but a few of the best known: each bears the stamp of his inventive fancy and his cunning hand: each flower claims recognition for itself, and reveals new charms in its appointed setting. Of these papers we hear that Morris himself designed between seventy and eighty, and when we add chintzes, tapestry, and other articles we may well be astonished at the fertility of his brain.

[Note 53: _William Morris_, by A. Clutton-Brock (Williams and Norgate, 1914).]

Even so, much must have depended on his workmen as the firm's operations extended.

Mr. Mackail tells us of the faith which Morris had in the artistic powers of the average Englishman, if rightly trained. He was ready to take and train the boy whom he found nearest to hand, and he often achieved surprising results. His own belief was that a good tradition once established in the workshops, by which the workman was allowed to develop his intelligence, would of itself produce good work: others believed that the successes would have been impossible without the unique gifts of the master, one of which was that he could intuitively select the right man for each job.

The material as well as the workers needed this selective power. The factories of the day had accustomed the public to second-rate material and second-rate colour, and Morris was determined to set a higher standard. In 1875 he was absorbed in the production of vegetable dyes, which he insisted on having pure and rich in tone. Though madder and weld might supply the reds and yellows which he needed, blue was more troublesome. For a time he accepted prussian blue, but he knew that indigo was the right material, and to indigo he gave days of concentrated work, preparing and watching the vats, dipping the wool with his own hands (which often bore the stain of work for longer than he wished), superintending the minutest detail and refusing to be content with anything short of the best. But these two qualities of industry and of aiming at a high standard would not have carried him so far if he had not added exceptional gifts of nature. With him hand and eye worked together as in few craftsmen of any age; and thus he could carry his experiments to a successful end, choosing his material, mixing his colours, and timing his work with exact felicity. And when he had found the right way he had the rare skill to communicate his knowledge to others and thus to train them for the work.

Queen Square, Bloomsbury, was the first scene of his labours; but as the firm prospered and the demands for their work grew, Morris found the premises too small. At one time he had hopes of finding a suitable spot near the old cloth-working towns at the foot of the Cotswolds, where pure air and clear water were to be found; but the conditions of trade made it necessary for him to be nearer to London. In 1881 he bought an old silk-weaving mill at Merton near Wimbledon, on the banks of the Wandle, and this is still the centre of the work.

To study special industries, or to execute a special commission, he was often obliged to make long journeys to the north of England or elsewhere; but the routine of his life consisted in daily travelling between his house at Hammersmith and the mills at Merton, which was more tiresome than it is to-day owing to the absence of direct connexion between these districts. But his energy overbore these obstacles; and, except when illness prevented him, he remained punctual in his attendance to business and in close touch with all his workers. Towards them Morris was habitually generous. The weaker men were kept on and paid by time, long after they had ceased to produce remunerative work, while the more capable were in course of time admitted as profit-sharers into the business. Every man who worked under him had to be prepared for occasional outbursts of impatient temper, when Morris spoke, we are told, rather as a good workman scornful of bad work, than as an employer finding fault with his men; but in the long run all were sure to receive fair and friendly treatment.

Such was William Morris at his Merton works, a master craftsman worthy of the best traditions of the Middle Ages, fit to hold his place with the masons of Chartres, the weavers of Bruges, and the wood-carvers of Nuremberg. As a manager of a modern industrial firm competing with others for profit he was less successful. The purchasing of the best material, the succession of costly experiments, the 'scrapping' of all imperfect work, meant a heavy drain on the capital. Also the society had been hurriedly formed without proper safeguards for fairly recompensing the various members according to their work; and when in 1875 it was found necessary to reconstitute it, that Morris might legally hold the position which he had from the outset won by his exertions, this could not be effected without loss, nor without a certain friction between the partners. So, however prosperous the business might seem to be through its monopoly of certain wares, it was difficult even for a skilful financier to make on each year a profit which was in any way proportionate to the fame of the work produced. But in 1865 Morris was fortunate in finding a friend ready to undertake the keeping of the books, who sympathized with his aims and whose gifts supplemented his own; and, for the rest, he had read and digested the work of Ruskin, and had learnt from him that the function of the true merchant was to produce goods of the best quality, and only secondarily to produce a profitable balance-sheet.

How it was that from being the head of an industrial business Morris came to be an ardent advocate of Socialism is the central problem of his life. The root of the matter lay in his love of art and of the Middle Ages. He had studied the centuries productive of the best art known to him, and he believed that he understood the conditions under which it was produced. The one essential was that the workers found pleasure in their work. They were not benumbed by that Division of Labour which set the artisan laboriously repeating the same mechanical task; they worked at the bidding of no master jealously measuring time, material, and price against his competitors; they passed on from one generation to another the tradition of work well done for its own sake. He knew there was another side to the picture, and that in many ways the freedom of the mediaeval craftsman had been curtailed. He did not ask history to run backwards, but he felt that the nineteenth century was advancing on the wrong line of progress. To him there seemed to be three types of social framework. The feudal or Tory type was past and obsolete; for the richer classes of to-day had neither the power nor the will to renew it. The Whig or Manchester ideal held the field, the rich employer regarding his workmen as so many hands capable of producing so much work and so much profit, and believing that free bargaining between free men must yield the best economic results for all classes, and that beyond economic and political liberty the State had no more to give, and a man must be left to himself. Against this doctrine emphatic protests had been uttered in widely differing forms by Carlyle and Disraeli, by Ruskin and Dickens; but it was slow to die.

The third ideal was that of the Socialist; and to Morris this meant that the State should appropriate the means of production and should so arrange that every worker was assured of the means of livelihood and of sufficient leisure to enjoy the fruits of what he had made. He who could live so simply himself thought more of the unjust distribution of happiness than of wealth, as may be seen in his _News from Nowhere_, where he gives a Utopian picture of England as it was to be after the establishment of Socialism. Here rather than in polemical speeches or pamphlets can we find the true reflection of his attitude and the way in which he thought about reform.

It was not easy for him to embark on such a crusade. In his early manhood, except for his volunteering in the war scare of 1859, he had taken no part in public life. The first cause which led to his appearing at meetings was wrath at the ill-considered restoration of old buildings. In 1877, when a society was formed for their protection, Morris was one of the leaders, and took his stand by Ruskin, who had already stated the principles to be observed. They believed that the presentation of nineteenth-century masonry in the guise of mediaeval work was a fraud on the public, that it obscured the true lessons of the past, and that, under the pretence of reviving the original design, it marred the development which had naturally gone forward through the centuries. It was from his respect for work and the workman that Morris denounced this pedantry, from his love of stones rightly hewn and laid, of carving which the artist had executed unconsciously in the spirit of his time, and which was now being replaced by lifeless imitation to the order of a bookish antiquary. Against this he was ready to protest at all times, and references to meetings of 'Antiscrape', as he calls the society, are frequent in his letters. He also was rigid in declining all orders to the firm where his own decorations might seem to disturb the relics of the past.

His next step was still more difficult. The plunge of a famous poet and artist into agitation, of a capitalist and employer into Socialism, provoked much wonder and many indignant protests. His severer critics seized on any pamphlet of his in which they could detect logical fallacies and scornfully asked whether this was fit work for the author of the _Earthly Paradise_. Many liberal-minded people indeed regretted the diversion of his activities, but the question whether he was wasting them is one that needs consideration; and to judge him fairly we must look at the problem from his side and postulate that Socialism (whether he interpreted its theories aright or not) did pursue practical ideals. If Aeschylus was more proud of fighting at Marathon than of writing tragedies--if Socrates claimed respect as much for his firmness as a juryman as for his philosophic method--surely Morris might believe that his duty to his countrymen called him to leave his study and his workshop to take an active part in public affairs. He might be more prone to error than those who had trained themselves to political life, but he faced the problems honestly and sacrificed his comfort for the common good.

Criticism took a still more personal turn in the hands of those who pointed out that Morris himself occupied the position of a capitalist employer, and who asked him to live up to his creed by divesting himself of his property and taking his place in the ranks of the proletariat. This argument is dealt with by Mr. Mackail,[54] who describes the steps which Morris took to admit his foremen to sharing the profits of the business, and defends him against the charge of inconsistency. Morris may not have thought out the question in all its aspects, but much of the criticism passed upon him was even more illogical and depended on far too narrow and illiterate a use of the word Socialism. He knew as well as his critics that no new millennium could be introduced by merely taking the wealth of the rich and dividing it into equal portions among the poor.

[Note 54: _Life of Morris_, by J. W. Mackail, vol. ii, pp. 133-9.]

However reluctant Morris might be to leave his own work for public agitation, he plunged into the Socialist campaign with characteristic energy. For two or three years he was constantly devoting his Sundays to open-air speech-making, his evenings to thinly-attended meetings in stuffy rooms in all the poorer parts of London; and, at the call of comrades, he often travelled into the provinces, and even as far as Scotland, to lend a hand. And he spent time and money prodigally in supporting journals which were to spread the special doctrines of his form of Socialism. Nor was it only the indifference and the hostility of those outside which he had to meet; quarrels within the party were frequent and bitter, though Morris himself, despite his impetuous temper, showed a wonderful spirit of brotherliness and conciliation. For two years his work lay with the Socialist Democratic Federation, till differences of opinion with Mr. Hyndman drove him to resign; in 1885 he founded the Socialist League, and for this he toiled, writing, speaking, and attending committees, till 1889, when the control was captured by a knot of anarchists, in spite of all his efforts. After this he ceased to be a 'militant'; but in no way did he abandon his principles or despair of the ultimate triumph of the cause. The result of his efforts must remain unknown. If the numbers of his audiences were often insignificant, and the visible outcome discouraging to a degree, yet in estimating the value of personal example no outward test can satisfy us. He gave of his best with the same thoroughness as in all his crafts, and no man can do more. But, looking at the matter from a regard to his special gifts and to his personal happiness, we may be glad that his active connexion with Socialism ceased in 1889, and that he was granted seven years of peace before the end.

These were the years that saw the birth and growth of the 'Kelmscott' printing press, so called after his country house. Of illuminated manuscripts[55] he had always been fond, but it was only in 1888 that his attention was turned to details of typography. The mere study of old and new founts did not satisfy him for long; the creative impulse demanded that he should design types of his own and produce his own books. As in the other arts, his lifelong friend Burne-Jones was called in to supply figure drawings for the illustrated books which Morris was himself to adorn with decorative borders and initials. Of his many schemes, not all came to fruition; but after four years of planning, and a year and a half given to the actual process of printing, his masterpiece, the Kelmscott edition of Chaucer, was completed, and a copy was in his hands a few months before his death.

[Note 55: Mr. Hyndman (_Story of an Adventurous Life_, p. 355) describes a visit to the Bodleian Library at Oxford with Morris, and how 'quickly, carefully, and surely' he dated the illuminated manuscripts.]