Part 1

WILLIAM MORRIS

_UNIFORM WITH THIS VOLUME:_

J. M. SYNGE By P. P. Howe

HENRIK IBSEN By R. Ellis Roberts

THOMAS HARDY By Lascelles Abercrombie

GEORGE GISSING By Frank Swinnerton

THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK By A. Martin Freeman

ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE By Edward Thomas

[Frontispiece: William Morris. from a photograph by Frederick Hollyer.]

WILLIAM MORRIS

A CRITICAL STUDY

BY

JOHN DRINKWATER

LONDON MARTIN SECKER NUMBER FIVE JOHN STREET ADELPHI MCMXII

_BY THE SAME AUTHOR_

POEMS OF MEN AND HOURS, 1911 COPHETUA. A Play in One Act, 1911 POEMS OF LOVE AND EARTH, 1912 ETC.

TO ERNEST NEWMAN _Who Loves the Arts With a Just and Fine Impatience_

NOTE

A few paragraphs in this book are reprinted, by permission of Messrs. George Routledge and Sons, Ltd., from introductions written for The Muses' Library; others, by permission of the Editor, from articles contributed to _The Nation_.

My thanks are due to William Morris's Trustees for permission to use such quotations from his works as I wished, and to Miss May Morris for her generous assistance in this and other matters. My indebtedness to Mr. Mackail I have acknowledged in more than one place in the body of this volume, but I should like here to emphasize my appreciation of the service that he has done to all who reverence Morris and his work.

I would also thank my friend, Mr. Oliver W. F. Lodge, for the many delightful hours that I have spent with him in talking of a poet whom we both love. What understanding I may have of Morris has been deepened and quickened by his enthusiasm and fine judgment. No thanks that I might offer to another friend could be in any way adequate; in inscribing this book to him I can but make slight acknowledgment of one of those whole-hearted services that stand for so much in the craft of letters.

J. D.

_Birmingham_, 1912.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTORY EARLY POEMS AND PROSE INTERLUDE NARRATIVE POEMS LOVE IS ENOUGH AND SIGURD THE VOLSUNG TRANSLATIONS AND SOCIALISM PROSE ROMANCES AND POEMS BY THE WAY CONCLUSION

I

INTRODUCTORY

To the isolation, the loneliness, of the poet, criticism is apt to give far less than due heed. At a time when literature is daily becoming more responsive to the new spirit which we call Democracy, such a complaint may seem to be reactionary in temper, and some explanation may be made by way of defence against any such possible charge. Nothing is more disastrous to a poet than that he should dissociate his art from the life of the world; until the conflict and destiny of humanity have become the subjects of his contemplation he cannot hope to bring to his creation that vitality which alone makes for permanence. Ultimately it is the great normal life of mankind which is immortal, and the perishable things are the grotesque, the odd, the experiences which are incomplete because they are unrelated to the general experience. But whilst the insistence that the poet should be swiftly responsive to the life about him is perfectly just, indeed inevitable in any right understanding of art, it is equally necessary to remember always that the poet's vision itself is turned upon life from places remote and untrodden, that the seasons of his contemplation are seasons of seclusion. To say that the poet is the product of his age is to be deceived by one of the most dangerous of critical half-truths. The poet is the product of his own temperament and personality, or he is nothing. Clearly, if the age in which the poet lived were in any wide sense his creator, the poets of an age would bear unmistakable tokens of their relationship. The perfectly obvious fact that they do not do so is, however, no obstacle to the criticism that wishes to satisfy its own primary assumption that with the age does remain this supreme function of making its own poets. Recognizing that its theory demands the presence of such affinity in its support, this criticism proceeds, in violation of the most direct evidence, to discover the necessary likeness. Perhaps the crowning achievement of this ineptitude is the constant coupling of the names of Tennyson and Browning. If ever two poets were wholly unrelated to each other in their reading of life and spiritual temper, they were the poets of "In Memoriam" and "Pippa Passes," of "Crossing the Bar" and "Prospice." But the accident of their being contemporaries is taken as sufficient reason for endless comparisons and complacent decisions as to their relative greatness, leading nowhere and establishing nothing. And parallel cases are common enough: Gray and Collins, Shelley and Keats, and, in daily practice, any one poet and any other whose books happen to be on the table at the same moment.

The relation of the age to its poets is that of sunlight to a landscape. The trees and the rivers, the hills and the plains, all turn to the same source for the power whereby to express themselves, the same light is upon them all. But no one thinks in consequence of comparing Snowdon with the Thames. Without his age a poet cannot speak, but the thing that his age empowers him to utter is that which is within him. His song, if it be a song of worth, is a manifestation apart from the age, from everything whatever save his own spiritual distinction. In this sense the poet must always be isolated and lonely, and it is solely by divining the secrets of this isolation and loneliness, not concerning itself unduly with circumstantial kinship in expression that may exist between one poet and another, that criticism may justify itself. Occasionally a poet may arise whose faculty has a vital sympathy with another's, whose vision may accord in some measure with that of one perhaps centuries dead. Then enquiry as to the affinity is likely to be fruitful. The poet is not so much a reflection of his age as a commentary upon it and its attitude towards life. Twenty poets may be writing together, the age reacting upon their creative energy in every instance, but it is more than probable that the essential significance of their work will be alike in no two cases. So that in writing about Morris my purpose is chiefly to discover what are the aim and ultimate achievement of his artistic activity; in a smaller degree to ascertain what was his relation to his age; to compare him with his contemporary creators scarcely at all, believing such comparisons to be misguided in intention and negative in result.

To attempt a new definition of poetry is a task sufficiently uninviting. And yet it is well to be clear in one's own mind, or as clear as possible, as to what one is writing about. If I try to set down, with as little vagueness as may be, the nature of my conception of the meaning of poetry, I do so in all humility, not in any way suggesting that here at last the eternal riddle has been solved, but merely to define the point from which I start, the standard which I have in mind. It is certain that each man of intelligence and fine feeling will make his own demand as to the values of poetry. A man's worship is directed at last by his needs, and it is as vain in art as in life to seek to impose a love where there is no corresponding receptivity, assuming, of course a quick intelligence and not one stupefied. A man spiritually asleep may be awakened, but once awake his adventures must be chiefly controlled by himself. Fitzgerald was a man of taste and understanding, but he did not care for Homer and found _The Life and Death of Jason_ 'no go.' Arnold was as passionate a man as might be in his allegiance to art, notwithstanding the somewhat false report bestowed upon him by his so-called classicism, and we know his estimate of Shelley and of Byron, whilst Swinburne would have denounced him with equal vigour for his indifference on the one hand and his commendation on the other. These differences do not, of course, diminish the value of critical opinion, they merely point to the futility of attempting to find any common touchstone, and counsel a wise humility and tolerance. That Arnold and Swinburne demanded different things in poetry reflects to the discredit of neither. All men who care for the arts are pledged to refuse the false, the mean, and the vulgar at all seasons; but they do well to remain silent in the presence of things which they know to be none of these yet find themselves unable to love. Without this love criticism is ineffectual. Macaulay in writing of Montgomery merely antedated the ruin of a reputation by a decade or two; in writing of Milton he helped in the discipline of our understanding. Morris is for me among the supremely important poets, but I know that to some men to whose powers of perception I bow he is not of such vital significance. I do not dispute their conclusions; I can only endeavour to explain and justify my own.

Poetry seems to me to be the announcement of spiritual discovery. Experience might be substituted for discovery, for every experience which is vital and personal is, in effect, a discovery. The discovery need not be at all new to mankind; it is, indeed, inevitable that it will not be so. Nor need it be new to the poet himself. To every man spiritually alive the coming of spring is an experience recurrent yet always vital, always a discovery. Nearly every new poet writes well about the spring, just as every new poet writes well about love. So powerful is the creative impulse begotten by these experiences that it impels many men to attempt utterance without any adequate powers, and so the common gibes find their justification. But it is absurd to pronounce against the creative impulse itself whilst condemning the inefficient expression. The bad love poetry of the world is excluded from my definition not because it is unconcerned with discovery, but because it is not, in any full sense, an announcement. The articulation is not clear. And by reason of this defect a great deal of other writing which has behind it a perfectly genuine impulse is excluded also. On the other hand, much verse which has a good deal of perfection in form perishes, is, indeed, never alive, because its reason has been something other than spiritual discovery. But whenever these things are found together, the discovery and the announcement, then is poetry born, and at no other time. The magnitude of the poet's achievement depends on the range of his discovery and the completeness of his announcement. If I add that verse seems to me to be the only fitting form for poetry, I do so with full knowledge that weighty evidence and valuable opinion are against me. Nevertheless the term prose-poem seems to be an abomination. The poet in creation, that is to say the poet in the act of announcing spiritual discovery, will find his utterance assuming a rhythmical pattern. The pattern may be quite irregular and flowing, but unless it is discernible the impulse is incomplete in its effect. To think of the music of verse as merely an arbitrary adornment of expression is wholly to misunderstand its value. It is an integral part of expression in its highest manifestation. It is in itself expression. There is an exaltation at the moment of discovery which is apart from the discovery itself, a buoyancy as of flight. The significance of this exaltation is indefinable, having in it something of divinity. To the words of poetry it is given to announce the discovery; to the music to embody and in some inadequate measure translate the ecstasy which pervades the discovery. The poet's madness is happily not a myth; for to be mad is to be ecstatic.

A poet who in rather more than a generation had produced a small volume of exquisite work complained that a poet's greatness was too often measured by the bulk of his activity. Examination of the nature of the poet's function shows the complaint to be groundless. A man may indeed be immortal by virtue of a stanza if not of a single line. Edward Dyer's report could ill bear the loss of 'My mind to me a kingdom is.' And Martin Tupper passes with his interminable jingles safely into oblivion. But if a man is truly possessed of the poetic fire, we must accept as no negligible measure of his greatness not only the force with which it burns, but also the frequency. Dr. Johnson came nearer to the truth than is generally admitted when he said that the poet who had to wait for 'inspiration' was in a bad way. He was not altogether right, for in practice it is possible for the poet to lose his technical cunning for long periods, which really amounts to saying that there are times when the spiritual discovery is unaccompanied by the ecstatic exaltation. But he based his pronouncement on sound sense, as was his habit. What he meant was that a poet, before he could lay just claim to high rank, must so discipline himself to disentangle the significant from the insignificant in life as it presented itself to him day by day, that he should never be at a loss for something to say, that he should not have to wait for the event. Milton was not careless in his use of words, and when he said, 'I was confirmed in this opinion, that he who would not be frustrated of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things ought himself to be a true poem ... not presuming to sing high praises of heroic men or famous cities, unless he have in himself the experience and practice of all that which is praiseworthy,' he revealed the secret of the poet's necessity with perfect precision. The greater and more vital the poet, the less will he look upon his poetry as a casual incident of his life, the more will it become for him the impassioned and refined expression of his life in its entirety. Many men turn from the claims of their daily life to art as a recreation. This is far better than having no concern with art at all, but it is at best but a compromise. In reading a great poet we feel that here is a man to whom art and life are coincident, inseparable. In other words, that he is a man vitally curious about life in all its essential aspects, just as another man will be curious about market prices or electrical development; and just as they must by nature give daily expression to their curiosity about those relatively trivial things, so must he by nature strive to give daily expression to his curiosity about that supremely important thing. And as their constant preoccupation with those ephemeral matters will from time to time bear fruit in the shape of some weighty decision as to a course of action or the evolution of some new design and its application, so will his constant preoccupation with the permanent manifestations of life from time to time bear fruit as a creation of art--as a poem.

Throughout a life of phenomenal artistic energy, Morris never for a moment failed to realize this supreme requirement of the poet's being. He was pre-eminent in many activities, but it is upon his poetry that his reputation will ultimately depend, for in his poetry, inevitably, is found his clearest challenge to oblivion. Had he not written at all he would still have been a remarkable and memorable man, but having written much, and as poet, his claim as such must be considered before all others. And Morris's poetry is a permanent record of the man's temper, of his spiritual adventures and discoveries, not a desultory series of impressions imposed by external events, but the continuous manifestation of his reading of life. His conception of art, formed in his youth, as the expression of joy in living, as the immediate and necessary outcome of life itself wherever life was full, knew no change to the end. Art was this always to him, and it had no other value. Nothing made by man's hand or brain had any beauty in his eyes unless it expressed this intensity of life which went to its creation. The talk about art for art's sake would have been merely unintelligible to him, because the existence of art apart from life was inconceivable.

William Morris was born at Walthamstow on the 24th of March, 1834. The external record of his life has been given finally by Mr. J. W. Mackail in his _Life_, a book which, besides being a storehouse upon which all writers on Morris must draw and remain thankful debtors, is certainly one of the most beautiful biographies in the language. The wisdom of childhood is sometimes supposed to lie in the child's attitude of unquestioning acceptance, but the truth is that it lies in a constant sense of adventure. The wisdom of the poet is as the child's in this; for both wake daily in the hope and expectancy of new revelations. Unquestioning acceptance and the stifling of curiosity are the last infirmities of foolish minds. Life ceases to be lovely when it ceases to be adventurous. Morris in his boyhood was rich in a full measure of this wisdom of childhood, and by a fortunate circumstance his earliest days were spent in surroundings that gave ample opportunity for the development of his nature. If he owed his creativeness to nothing but his own endowment, the colour and atmosphere with which his work came to be suffused were largely influenced by the memory of days spent among the hornbeam thickets of the Essex woodlands and the meadows of Woodford, on the fringe of Epping Forest, the Morris family moving to Woodford Hall when the poet was six years old. By this time he was, we hear, already 'deep in the Waverley novels,' and in this connection we have the authority of one of his sisters for a circumstance that is curiously prophetic of a quality that was to mark his life-work. 'We never remember his learning regularly to read.' This instinctive acquisition of knowledge was not the least remarkable of Morris's faculties. He seemed always to understand the things he loved without taking thought. In the practical application of his knowledge no labour was too great; when he wanted to re-establish the art of dyeing, he spent weeks working at the vats in Leek; when he was directing the Kelmscott Press, whole pages would be rejected for a scarcely visible flaw; when he wished to furnish his house he found little enough in the market to satisfy his conscience, and so became a manufacturer; when he was drawn to the stories of the North he worked unweariedly with an Icelandic scholar and made two pilgrimages--no light undertakings in those days--to the home of his heroes. Miss May Morris in one of her admirable introductions to the complete edition of her father's works, tells us that he once said, 'No man can draw armour properly unless he can draw a knight with his feet on the hob, toasting a herring on the point of his sword.' It is easy to understand that he never learnt to read, for learning by any laborious process was foreign to his nature; knowledge of the things that were of importance to him was in some obscure way born in him. He would spare no pains to shape his knowledge into a serviceable instrument, but the knowledge itself was inherent in him. He moved among the men of the Sagas, of Greek mythology and the old romances, as intimately as we ordinarily move among the people of the house. Many of his friends give independent testimony to the fact that he never seems to have learnt deliberately of these men; his knowledge of them grew as his knowledge of speech and the ways about him. In considering his work in detail, the value of this instinctive familiarity will be apparent; it brings a sense of reality into his stories as could nothing else. We are hardly ever given laboured details of environment or appearance--merely a few casual strokes of suggestion that, by their very assurance and implication of knowledge, both on the part of the poet and of his reader, carry conviction. For this reason we never feel ourselves to be in strange surroundings or listening to strange men, and it is this privilege of close association with the world of the poet's fashioning that enables us to realize how accessible is that larger and clearer life of which he sings.

Throughout his life not only the beauty but the homeliness, the fellowship, of earth was a passion with him, and to the Woodford Hall days and the rambles over the downs and through Savernake, when a little later he was one of the earliest Marlborough boys, may be traced the beginnings of this strain in his temper. In a famous passage in his biography Mr. Mackail tells us how the boy, dressed in a suit of toy armour, used to ride through the park; how he and his brothers used to shoot red-wings and fieldfares in the winter holidays and roast them before a log fire we may be sure--for their supper; how he longed to shoot pigeons with a bow and arrow; how to the end of his life he carried with him recollections of stray sounds and sights and scents of those childhood days; how he would pore over the brasses and monuments that he discovered in the churches near to his home. It is doubtful whether anyone who has not spent some part of his early life in a countryside which has none of the striking beauties that make a landscape famous, that is, in the common phrase, uneventful, can quite realize the meaning of all this. In such surroundings a peculiar intimacy with the earth is born, a nearness to the change of season and the nature and moods of the country, which form a background of singular values in the whole of a man's later development. A man nurtured among the more majestic manifestations of natural beauty will, if he be a poet, in all probability translate his early impressions into single memorable passages, but the effect of environment such as that in which Morris's childhood was passed is of another kind. The whole of Morris's work is coloured and sweetened by a tenderness for earth which, while it does not fail to find at times direct expression of exquisite loveliness, is nevertheless a pervasive mood rather than a series of isolated impressions. It is this circumstance that came to give quite common words an unusual significance in his poetry. When he speaks of 'the half-ploughed field' or 'the blossomed fruit trees' or 'the quivering noontide haze' or 'the brown bird's tune' or 'the heavy-uddered cows,' or simply 'the meadows green,' the whole of his passionate earth-worship is thrown up with clear-cut intensity and his utterance takes on a value which is wholly unexplained by the mere words of his choice.

At Marlborough the poet's independence of character was already shown. The school-games had no attraction for him. Birds'-nesting, excursions to outlying churches and ruins, explorations of any early remains of which he could discover the whereabouts, long walks accompanied by the improvisation of endless stories of knightly adventure, the reading of any books of romance, archæology and architecture that came to his hand--these were his chief occupations. Before he left the school, his father died, and the family again moved, this time to Water House at Walthamstow. Here again the boy found full store upon which to indulge his imaginative bent. A broad moat, a great paved hall, a wooded island, wide marshlands, all fitted well with the tendencies that had already asserted themselves. When he left Marlborough at the age of seventeen, there was nothing to show that he was to become a great creative artist, but there was everything to show the atmosphere in which his work would be conceived in such an event. After reading with a private tutor for a year, Morris went up to Oxford at the beginning of the Lent term in 1853.