Part 5

In 1859 Morris married Miss Jane Burden, of Oxford. To a man of his profound tenderness for all the simple and rational things of life, home was a symbol of the deepest significance. Homestead and homeland are words used constantly and lovingly in his writing. A man's home was, as he understood it, not merely a refuge from the serious business of life or a comfortable and convenient means of satisfying social requirements, but the temple of his daily worship. It should be at once a centre of his labours and an expression of himself. The application of the artist's understanding to daily conduct is not always possible, or of first importance, for it is the artist's function to persuade, not to compel; but such application is the logical outcome of true development that is not hindered by circumstance. We do not impugn Browning's sincerity either as a man or an artist because he mercilessly exposed the evils of Society and yet was a great diner-out. We feel, indeed, that he was of sounder judgment and a finer charity than Shelley, who not only exposed the evils, but also left society gasping whilst he went naked to his dinner or made his house the asylum for anybody incapable of managing his own affairs. But it is, on the other hand, an everlasting vindication of Byron's strange personality that the man who wrote 'The Isles of Greece' gave his life in the service of the cause that he sang. Morris's unchanging gospel was that man should have joy in his work, which meant that the results of his work would in themselves be beautiful. To accept anything that was unlovely on any terms short of compulsion would, in consequence, have been to proclaim the truth without insisting upon it by example. Had he done so his art might have lost none of its vitality, but by steadily refusing to do so he made the common charge of aloofness even less intelligible than it would otherwise have been. Being a customer in the world's market he was determined not to degrade the men by whom the market was supplied. If he could find no other solution, he would supply it himself.

He bought a piece of land at Upton in Kent, careful that it should include an orchard. Here, with Philip Webb as architect, he built the Red House, which was to be his home for five years--until circumstances made it necessary for him to live again in London. Immediately, the difficulty that had confronted him in his Red Lion Square rooms grew into one that was not to be met by the friendly co-operation of a jobbing carpenter. There was a large house to be furnished and fitted, and beautiful things had to be found for the purpose. He came away from the market empty-handed, but carrying in his mind the idea of Morris and Company. He would not only supply his own needs decently; he would remove a reproach.

The original prospectus of the firm announced the names of Rossetti, Madox Brown, Burne-Jones, Morris himself, and three others as partners. The history of the enterprise has been told by Mr. Mackail and others, and need not be discussed here in any detail. Its influence upon the lesser arts in England has been enormous, and its activities are, fortunately, still growing. When Morris died he had for some years been sole director of the venture, and its work embraced carpets, chintzes, wallpapers, stained glass, tapestries, tiles, furniture, wall-decoration--in short, everything by which a building might gain or lose in beauty. The first premises were in Red Lion Square, near to the poet's old rooms, and the earliest achievement of the firm was to help in making the Red House at Upton, in the words of Burne-Jones, "the beautifullest place on earth." Webb having designed the house--with Morris at his elbow--the firm furnished it and the painters of the group proceeded to decorate the inside surfaces. The house was made to fit the orchard, so that, as Mr. Mackail tells us in a beautiful sentence, "the apples fell in at the windows as they stood open on hot autumn nights." Gardening was one of the things of which Morris seems to have been born with knowledge, and he knew the uses of hollyhocks and sunflowers. Here, then, was a home, fashioned, as far as might be, into an earthly paradise. The story of these five years is a very charming one; open house was kept, and a good cellar and a bowling-green and tobacco jars were not wanting. Here the poet's two daughters were born, and we get a delightful picture of the house at a christening, with Rossetti refusing to wait until dessert for the raisins, and beds strewn about the drawing-room, Swinburne contenting himself with a sofa. These things, however, are to the biographer, and are set down with fitting grace in the book to which I have referred more than once.

Morris went up to London daily to conduct the business at Red Lion Square. The value of the work that he had undertaken is even yet imperfectly realized. Most people whose artistic intelligence is awake contrive to have in their houses many beautiful things, but it is only when we have been into a house where everything is beautiful that we can understand the precise aim that caused Morris to become a manufacturer. There is an enchantment about such a dwelling-place that cannot be described, an atmosphere of health and completeness that must be experienced to be understood. A beautiful house was no more a luxury to Morris than sound meat on his table. But we have laws for our butchers, whilst we have none for our upholsterers. Some one once referred to Morris as the "upholsterer-poet," which pleased him greatly. That such a term should be meant as a reproach he could not understand. He asked for nothing better than to convince people that an upholsterer had a soul, and to make them determined not to deal with him until he showed it in his chairs and sofas.

The five years at Upton were a time of many energies and a steady establishment of the poet's attitude towards life. The London business was a serious and permanent undertaking, and demanded, by the nature of its being, Morris's constant personal attention. This, together with the daily journeys and the claims and responsibilities--of no ordinary kind, as we have seen--of his new home, left little time on his hands, and his work as poet was of necessity put aside for the moment. But this fresh undertaking was of peculiar value to his development, and came at precisely the right moment. In his first volume of poems there had been the shadow of that new world that had already shaped itself in his consciousness. It had been beautiful, full of significance and promise, but still a shadow. It is not fanciful to suppose that had his mind not found some practical means of proving itself, of, so to speak, checking its progress step by step, his poetry would have retained this intangible quality to the end. This is not to suggest that the poetry of the _Guenevere_ volume is in any sense unreal, but to remember its atmosphere of uncertainty, or to say, precisely, that it is but the shadow of the world that was in the poet's mind. In the workshop of Morris and Company, it seems to me, this proving ground was happily discovered. No better illustration, by contrast, of my meaning could be found than in that remarkable book, Mr. Gordon Craig's "Art of the Theatre." We have here, in some ways, the profoundest piece of writing on the theatre that has appeared in England. Many elementary truths that have been forgotten for centuries, if indeed they have even been realized since the days which are commonly supposed to belong to an era before dramatic history had begun, are here made to stand out with startling clearness. But the radical defect of the book is a vagueness, an uncertainty of statement, an indiscipline of theory. We are constantly regretting the fact that Mr. Craig, as these beautiful and strangely suggestive thoughts went through his mind, had no stage and equipment ready to his hand to test them and bring them to perfect articulation--that he had no proving ground. Morris was more fortunate. He carried in his imagination a world of which I attempt to set down the conditions elsewhere. At first he could grasp only its beauty and wonderful hope; its perfect realization eluded him. It was remote not from reality but from his understanding. But now, working in Red Lion Square, delighting in the labour of his hands and inspiring the same delight in others: building a home that should bring daily joy to himself and his friends: investing the offices of husband and father and host with their normal and simple dignity and stripping them of every vestige of insincerity, he brought his dream to the crucible of experience. The result is that when next he attempts to shape his world into poetry there is nothing left of the indefinite. All the beauty and colour are retained, all the tenderness and poignancy, but the poet has come up to his vision and the outlines are no longer in doubt. The shadows of _Guinevere_ have become the vibrant men and women of _Jason_. The paradise has been brought to earth.

The only poetry that Morris wrote during these five years was part of a cycle of poems on the Troy war. The plan included twelve poems, six of which were written, two begun, and four untouched. Those that were written were never published, but Mr. Mackail describes them for us in some detail, and it is clear that Morris followed a just instinct in laying them aside. They are dramatic in form, and if finished they would doubtless have made interesting reading after _Sir Peter Harpdon's End_. But the eager unrest of the early volume is here moving towards turbulence. It is as much a mistake to suppose that turbulence is a quality peculiar to weakness as that it is necessarily a token of strength. Webster as a poet was turbulent and strong: Bulwer Lytton turbulent and weak. On the other hand, the noblest strength may be quiet, but so may the most insipid weakness. The opening of "Paradise Lost" is at once one of the quietest and one of the most powerful passages in poetry; but the quiet ease of the good Mr. Akenside is mere tediousness. The point is that this new temper that showed itself in the Troy poems was not in itself one incapable of fine issues, but that it was at variance with the essential inclination of the poet's development, and that Morris himself felt this to be so. A curious myth has grown up about Morris's methods of work, to the effect that he threw this or that undertaking aside as it were by whim, forgetting all about it unless another whim sent him to it again. Were it not for this myth it would be unnecessary to say that great artists never work in this fashion. If we can but discover it, there is a perfectly hard and logical reason in all they do. When he was writing the Troy poems Morris had thirty years of vigour in front of him. He broke off the work in the middle, and never returned to it. We cannot suppose that he did this other than deliberately and with carefully considered reason. That reason was, it is clear, the conviction that he was labouring in a direction along which his genius did not lead him.

In 1865 Morris moved with his family to Bloomsbury. To leave Red House was a great trouble to his mind, but the daily journeys became increasingly irksome, and some fluctuation in his private money matters made it more than ever imperative that nothing should be left undone to make the business prosper. An able business manager was found, and Morris was able to devote more of his time to actual designing and craftsmanship. The hours saved each day in travelling meant fresh opportunities for his highest creative work, and the scheme of _The Earthly Paradise_ began to take definite shape.

IV

NARRATIVE POEMS

_The Life and Death of Jason_ was originally planned as one of the stories for _The Earthly Paradise_, which appeared in 1868-70. It developed to a length too great, however, for this purpose, and was published separately in 1867. It won for Morris an immediate popularity, and it marks his realization of a matured and fully rounded manner in poetry. The _Guenevere_ volume had announced with certainty the presence of a new poet, but it had said nothing at all conclusively as to the nature of his future development, nothing to prepare us for a narrative poet who should reach out to Chaucer in achievement and surpass all save his master in a form strangely neglected in English verse. The answer to the criticism that holds narrative poetry to be the humblest order of the art is to be made in two words--Chaucer, Morris. It is true that our narrative poetry when set beside our dramatic and lyric wealth is, relatively, but a little store of great worth. But in the hands of these two men the form attains a distinction that proves for ever that when employed with mastery it is capable of the noblest ends. Narrative poetry is, in fundamental intention, closely related to poetic drama, and its failure in most hands springs from the misunderstanding that has already been analysed in connection with _Sir Peter Harpdon's End_. It may be perfectly true to say that by his actions shall a man be known, but there is in the statement the implied qualification that such actions shall be normal and habitual; whilst the actions which narrative poetry usually relates are extraordinary and irregular, exciting the interest momentarily only, and revealing nothing of the characters of the actors. Marlowe wrote a great narrative poem, and Marlowe was a great dramatist. One of the great _lacunæ_ of literature is the play that Chaucer never wrote. Keats in at least two notable successes, small in compass but complete, Byron in work avowedly narrative in intention but largely lyrical in effect, and Scott in admirable stories that lacked something of the finer atmosphere of poetry, all made contributions of value to narrative poetry; Spenser moves with Milton across the boundary line into the region of epic. But until the publication of _Jason_ there had been no poet since Chaucer who had produced a considerable volume of work at once frankly narrative in form and of indisputable greatness in design and achievement. The instinct that had guided Morris safely, or nearly so, through his dramatic experiment in his first volume did not forsake him when he turned to the creation of a great narrative poem, and it was precisely the instinct that was essential to success. For narrative is drama without the stage.

The first requirement that we make of the poet in narrative, after the paramount demand that he shall recognize this essential canon of all art as to the subservience of incident to idea, is that he shall be perfectly lucid. Whilst in lyric verse we are content to be forced at times to pause for thought and comprehension, in narrative verse we insist that we shall instantly perceive. With this condition Morris complies triumphantly. In _Jason_, as in the tales of _The Earthly Paradise_, there is no necessity to pause at a single line. We read with absolute ease from beginning to end, and our interest is almost as absolute. Very occasionally the poet errs by introducing incidents merely for their own sake without intensifying our conception of character, but, with one or two possible exceptions, the tales move swiftly and develop on every page. That Morris should ever fail in this swiftness of narration is, indeed, difficult to believe when we call to mind the innumerable instances where he conducts his story at an almost breathless speed. This is not to say that he is ever indistinct, either through bad craftsmanship or undue compression, but to emphasize his extreme reluctance to allow unnecessary events to distract our attention. An excellent instance is afforded in _The Ring Given to Venus_. Lawrence is told by Palumbus that he must leave him, fast and pray for six days, and return to him on the seventh, when he shall learn how to accomplish his end--the recovery of his bridal ring. The danger at such a juncture is obvious. We dread that the poet shall tell us at length of the passing of those six days, of Lawrence's impatience and distress, and so forth. That is to say, we should dread it of most poets, but, knowing Morris's methods, we feel that he will work more wisely, and we are not deceived. Palumbus' directions being given, Lawrence and his guide depart--

So homeward doubtful went the twain, And Lawrence spent in fear and pain The six long days, and so at last, When the seventh sun was well-nigh past, Came to that dark man's fair abode;

and we are immediately on the full tide of the narrative again.

Morris further achieves that supreme distinction in narrative of indicating clearly at the outset what the issue is to be, and yet retaining our interest easily and completely. One of the most distinguished of living critics[1] has drawn attention to this power in Shakespeare; there is no vulgar endeavour to startle us by any surprising turns of character; what surprise there is to be will be found in the event. So deftly does the greatest of poets embody his characters at the moment when he brings them before us that we know instinctively how they will act in the events presented to us. In the case of Morris this power is, perhaps, even more strongly marked, for the reason that the web of circumstance that he folds round his people is of a far less subtle texture. It may be said, with but little exaggeration, that the sole emotions with which he is concerned are the love of man for woman, physical heroism, and the worship of external beauty. Again, it must be remembered that the simplicity implied by this statement is coloured and invested with the mystery of life itself by the temperament through which it is presented, but with this vital qualification the fact may be so set down. Nearly all his stories are cast in the same general outline: the desire of the lover, consummated or defeated only after long physical struggle and sacrifice; the inscrutable shadow of death looming behind attainment and failure alike; the progress of the narrative fashioned on a background where nature and art combine to please and soothe with an endless pageant of loveliness. _The Life and Death of Jason_ may, perhaps, be advanced as an instance disproving this contention, but a moment's reflection shows that the central interest of the poem, the interest by the side of which all else recedes into the position of that pageantry, is the love of Jason and Medea. The quest of the Golden Fleece, the adventures of the heroes, the treachery of Pelias, these things, exquisitely handled as they are, are but the canvas upon which is thrown a sublime and elemental love story. The finest book of the poem, the last, wherein is told nothing but the triumph and withering of that love, is not only on a level with Morris's own highest achievement, but among the supreme things in poetry. The hopeless yet unutterably poignant figure of Medea; the tenderness and the untutored simplicity of Glance, the child who is the tragic plaything of the deeper and more world-beaten natures against whom she is thrown; the desperate self-deception of Jason and the terrible degradation of his essential nobility--these are drawn with an intensity, at once fierce and restrained, that bears witness to the height that narrative poetry may attain in the hands of a master.

Not only is the substance of these poems of this transparently simple texture, but the form of expression created by Morris is so specially fitted for the purpose that the structures as a whole stand almost without parallel for precision of outline and clearness of detail. He appears to have determined that neither overloading of diction and imagery nor intricacy of metrical effect should interfere with the conduct of his narrative. Having no superficially subtle or complex statement to make, and keeping always before him the purpose to produce a memorable cumulative effect without striving at all for isolated felicities of phrasing, he is never forced to pause for the fitting word. The words that go to the making of a line flow as naturally and certainly from his pen as the letters that fashion a word from the pen of another. Nowhere are there any signs of labour; nowhere the tumultuous glory of language that rushes at times from the lips of more variable if not greater poets; and yet, with the rarest exceptions, he nowhere descends from his own high level. For sheer consistency of excellence he probably has no rival. The supremacy of his narrative poems lies in the fact that Morris achieved what he attempted completely and with perfect ease. As in his life, so in his poetry do we feel that we are in the presence of a titanic strength that is never exerting itself to the utmost; and we are constantly being led, in consequence, to that exercise of the imagination which creates the most potent sympathy between the artist and his audience.

I have spoken of a certain easy decorative elaboration that Morris uses in these stories, and it is this quality that has led many people into a misunderstanding of his poetry. To say that a poet is swift in narration does not necessarily mean that his sole purpose is to get the story finished in the least possible time, but that the narrative is unimpeded at the moments when most we demand its progress. To say that this is the only right method would involve enquiry into notable instances where it is not employed, which would be to digress unduly, but most of Scott's novels might be advanced as examples. There we are constantly brought to a standstill at vital points in the conduct of the story whilst some thread that has been laid aside is again taken up, again to be dropped when it has been drawn to a point in common with the rest of the development. This Morris never does; the sequence of his narrative is always direct, and the crises of his story are always carried through at a stroke. But in observing this condition of emphasizing his most momentous periods in a perfectly logical continuity and boldness of statement, he does not deny himself the right to fill in the spaces between those periods with the large ease and contemplative calm which have their corresponding manifestations in life. Hannibal was not momentarily adding leaves to his laurels. And Jason journeying from Thessaly to Colchis finds many adventures, and Morris records them with vigour and intensity and the sound of swords; but he finds, too, pleasant days of even enjoyment and companionship with his fellows, when they move delightedly about a new countryside or see for the first time some storied place or gather together to talk of their homeland. And these are days that Morris is not at all content to leave unsung, and his instinct is perfectly sound. It is strange that these lovely interludes that lie between adventure and adventure should ever be, as they often are, called "languid." They denote, on the contrary, a spiritual activity astonishing in its range and sanity. For they imply a recognition on the part of the poet that to pass down a river on a golden afternoon, or to lie beneath the stars at night, or to move beneath the walls of an unknown city whilst memories of home and kin crowd on the mind, is an experience as adventurous as the riding of a storm or the winning of a Golden Fleece. To be languid is to be indifferent, and indifference in the presence of anything not wholly alienated from nature and simple humanity was the last thing of which Morris was capable. So that when Medea has to go from her home to the wood, the poet is not forgetful of the path by which she has to go. His eyes are always open.