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.
Tennyson had established his reputation with the issue of the two
volumes of "Poems" in 1842. Since then he had published "The
Princess" in 1847, and "In Memoriam" in 1850, and was already
generally acknowledged as a great new voice in poetry. Browning with
"Pauline" in 1833, "Paracelsus" in 1835, "Strafford" in 1837, and the
series of plays that followed, had proved his authenticity, but had
not yet gained the general recognition that was to be brought a
little nearer by the "Dramatic Lyrics" and "Dramatic Romances" of
1842 and 1845, and "Christmas Eve and Easter Day" in 1850. "Men and
Women" was not yet published. Clough and Arnold had lately printed
their first books, and seven years were to pass before Swinburne's
name was to appear on a title-page. Rossetti's "Blessed Damozel" had
been printed in the Pre-Raphaelite magazine, "The Germ," but save for
a few contributions to the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine his poetry
was to wait until 1870 before being given to the public. In prose
the influence of the teachings of Carlyle and Ruskin was dominating
criticism and æsthetic thought throughout the country, whilst the
religious unrest and scientific revaluation, that were to leave their
witness to posterity in the work of men so far removed from each
other in temper as Newman and Darwin, and Arnold and Clough, were
forcing a full share of men's attention to the consideration of
abstract ideas.
To determine the exact measure of the influence that the varied
expressions of an age's intellectual process exercises upon any
single mind belonging to that age is difficult to the point of
impossibility. Maeterlinck, in saying that the soul of the peasant
would not be what it is to-day had Plato or Plotinus, of whom he has
never heard, not lived, endorses the precise truth that Shelley
uttered when he said that poets were the unacknowledged legislators
of the world. The influence of one mind on another is one of the
subtlest questions of psychology, and the attempt to trace with any
precision the responsiveness of creative genius at all points to the
mental movement about it is vain. It would be rash to say that the
author of "The Origin of Species" had no influence on the author of
_The Earthly Paradise_, as it certainly would be impossible to define
what that influence was. Darwin and the Tractarians, the puzzled
questionings of the sceptics and the conflicting voices of assertion
and confutation, no doubt meant little enough as such to Morris when
he went up to Oxford. But they were none the less manifestations of
the age that shaped his power of expression, and in a negative and
indirect way at least they had a share in his development. The
limits of the influence of any commanding creative or speculative
mind cannot be laid down. The most romantic poet writing to-day
would be witless to assert that he was wholly uninfluenced by, say,
Mr. Bernard Shaw or Mr. Balfour, for, whether he realizes the fact or
not, these men form part of the intellectual atmosphere in which he
is writing. It is a common charge against Morris that he alienated
himself, as a poet, from the questions that were troubling his time,
as though the poet's theme should undergo continual change with the
generations. All experience is emphatic in its assertion of the
folly of this attitude. Nothing is more dangerous to the poet than
to be in too close contact with the immediate questions of the
moment, for, broadly considered, the things of immediate importance
are the unimportant things. Much of our finest creative energy
to-day is being exhausted in the consideration of problems that are
local and temporary, not fulfilling its creative function with proper
completeness, being, rather, bravely destructive, an office
honourable enough but not that of the poet's supreme distinction.
Morris, from the moment of his earliest artistic consciousness, was
perfectly clear as to this matter. He was not at any time deaf to
the clamour that came from all sides, nor was he indifferent to it.
But he found it partly incomprehensible, partly unlovely, and partly
negative, and he turned away from it, not as in retreat from a thing
that he feared, but in the search for the life which it was unable to
offer. The challenge and counter-challenge of the prophets of the
millennium and confusion worse confounded, the disputations of the
two-and-seventy jarring sects were not outside the range of Morris's
consciousness, but he was content at first to leave them to their own
issues. The socialism that was to enter so largely into his later
life was not the result of a sudden access of new feeling, but a
further expression, in perfectly logical development, of the mental
and spiritual outlook that was substantially unchanged from the
first. The new expression, when it forced itself upon him, was,
indeed, not unconnected with a negative and destructive programme,
but it was in reality no more than an attempt to realize the world
that he had created in his art, the world that contained for him the
only possible life consistent with free beauty and joy. But, with
whatever energy he threw himself into the new work when it came, he
never for a moment allowed it to shake his artistic creed.
Nothing is further from the truth than the common assertion that
Morris in his art turned from a life of realities to a dream-world,
if by a dream-world is meant, and I can apply no other meaning, a
world intangible, unrealizable, and remote from practical
considerations. We have seen that the earth was to Morris from
boyhood in some sort a sacred thing. And the people of the earth
were no less. His one overmastering passion was for a world wherein
men and women lived in full responsiveness to the beauty of the
earth, labouring with their hands and adventurous and capricious in
spirit, finding joy in their work and in contact with each other, and
rejecting all the things of civilization that were dulling and
mechanical. To object that in a commercial civilization so
superficially complex--the complexity is really a thing without the
subtlety of humanity in it, relatively fixed and reducible to exact
formulæ--this passion was in effect no more than a rather futile
dream, might be reasonable if Morris himself had not wholly answered
the objection in his work. He found people not only indifferent to
the loveliness of earth, but destroying it on every hand; not only
forgetting the joy of labour, but debasing it into a daily burden;
measuring the value of all work not by the meaning of the work and
the spiritual satisfaction that it brought but by the wage that it
earned, and fettered in all their relations to each other by
countless considerations imposed by external conditions that were not
essential factors in humanity, but the whims of a social scheme that
mastered men instead of being their servant. From the first he
realized that out of such a life no supreme art could spring; the
material that they offered was ugly and devitalized, and art can only
accept for its service material beautiful and strong. The world as
he found it was fettered and numbed, and he sought in his art to
create a world free and exultant, one peopled by perfectly normal
people whose sorrows were the sorrows of common experience and whose
sins were the expression merely of the darker, but not diseased,
passions of humanity. When active socialism became part of his work,
his sole purpose was, in his own words, to make socialists, which
meant, for Morris, to bring men to a sense of the possibility of the
life of large simplicity that he had created as poet. His practice
and experiments in handicraft and manufacturing process were all
experiments of the same spirit; throughout his many-sided activities
an extraordinary unity of intention can be clearly traced. Morris at
the loom, or decorating a page, or riding his pony through the
Icelandic fords, or proving colours in the vats, or moving among the
haymakers in the Kelmscott meadows, was but one of the men with whom
he peopled his stories. He wanted all men to attain to this same
joyous energy, and the fierce denunciations and charges of his
socialistic days were no more than another expression of this desire.
At Oxford the good beginnings of Woodford Hall and Savernake were
given every opportunity to develop. He found himself associated with
men whose ideals and enthusiasms were as his own. He went into
residence in the same term as Edward Burne-Jones, and quickly laid
the foundations of a lifelong friendship of more than common loyalty.
It is usual to speak regretfully of the growth of modern Oxford. The
mediæval town has, indeed, surrounded itself with reaches of quite
unlovely slums and suburbs giving just reason for the regret. But,
as was said in reply to one who was deploring the vulgarities which
have been carried into modern Venice, 'Exactly, but what else in the
world is there like it?' Oxford has suffered a change, but in Oxford
there are yet survivals scarcely to be found elsewhere in England.
The quadrangles, the bye-streets that curl between the colleges and
churches, the succession of spires and grey walls, still preserve
unbroken a tradition that goes back to the days when men lived, or so
Morris believed, as the men of whom he sang. And in 1853 the
tradition, if not clearer, was less threatened by opposing interests
than it is to-day. With the scholastic discipline, or lack of it, at
Oxford in his time Morris had little or no concern, but he could have
found no place more fitting in which to shape his imaginative powers.
With Burne-Jones and others of his friends he spent many priceless
hours determining all things in heaven and earth with the fine
certainty of youth, reading mediæval chronicles and Thorpe's
"Northern Mythology," exploring the enchanted worlds of the poets and
stirred to new enthusiasms by the latest word of Ruskin or the
newly-discovered revelation of some prophet of an older day.
Architecture had already taken its place in his mind as one of the
noblest of the expressions of man's exultation in his work, and the
intention which he had at this time of entering the church was
manifestly inspired rather by ecclesiastical art than by any doctrine
or dogma. The long vacations of 1853 and 1854 he spent in visiting
the churches of England and Northern France, and in making his first
acquaintance with the work of Van Eyck and Memling and Dürer. In
painting, as in the other arts, he looked already for the grave yet
vigorous simplicity, and that sense of the profound seriousness of
joy that were to be the essential characteristics of his own work.
His love for mediævalism was neither accident nor the fruit of any
refusal to face his own age. It was the logical outcome of this
intense conviction that most of the men about him were exhausting
their energies and deadening their faculties in the conduct of
trivial and inessential things. In the records of the mediæval
spirit, in its art, he found the temper which more clearly than any
other was at once a warning and a corrective to this wastage. A year
spent at Oxford in the company of men who shared his enthusiasms had
sharpened his imagination and quickened his creative instinct. He
was now ready for Malory and Chaucer and the revelation of Rossetti
and the Pre-Raphaelites. With a perfectly defined ideal already
developed in his consciousness, he was beginning to write. It only
needed contact with these new influences to make his utterance
certain and invest the ideal with artistic expression.
When in 1855 he came of age, Morris found himself the possessor of an
annual income of £900, the result of a fortunate business transaction
made by his father a short time before he died. Burne-Jones had
already announced, in a letter to a friend, his intention of forming
a 'Brotherhood,' the purpose of which, shared by Morris among others,
was, of course, nothing less than the regeneration of mankind. Sir
Galahad was to be the patron of the order, the nature of which was to
be a strange blending of social activity and monastic seclusion. The
scheme in detail--if it ever reached so advanced a stage--passed into
the splendid story of youthful enthusiasms, but its principal
projectors never wavered in their loyalty to its spirit. To a man so
fired, the possession of £900 a year was a responsibility not to be
lightly considered. It left him free to choose his course, and it
was an integral part of his faith that that course should be laid
wholly in the service of his ideal. For a time his choice was
uncertain; his original intention of entering the church led to a
momentary idea of founding a monastery with his money. But the
gradually widening influence of the adventurousness of art that was
working in him made him less and less willing to commit himself to
any irrevocable step. He was beginning to realize his powers; his
friends, who were no dishonest critics, confirmed his own feeling
that his earliest poems were signs of a remarkable creative faculty.
But he was not yet certain as to the ways into which his art would
lead him. Painting and architecture divided his allegiance with
literature, and behind his consideration of all was the vague but
unalterable determination to use his art in the service of mankind.
His decision was wisely deferred until it should force itself upon
him.
The first practical step taken by the Brotherhood--the friends
retained the original name whilst renouncing all their monastic
intentions--was the foundation of "The Oxford and Cambridge
Magazine." Chaucer had been discovered, and the group's somewhat
austere asceticism had been sweetened by the charity of the poet to
whom Morris was henceforth never to fail in discipleship. A copy of
the Pre-Raphaelite "Germ" had also established Rossetti in the
friends' worship, and they had seen some of his paintings, together
with those of Millais and Holman Hunt and Madox Brown. In all these
things Morris found the conception of life that he had already made
his own, in beautiful and more or less complete expression. Twelve
numbers of the magazine appeared, financed by Morris. Its aim was
the expression of the Brotherhood's artistic creed and its loyalty to
the essential idea of the identity of art with life. Rossetti was
among its contributors. Of Morris's own work in the venture, his
earliest poems and prose romances, something will be said in the next
chapter.
Before leaving Oxford Morris and Burne-Jones together definitely
abandoned their idea of entering the church. The latter decided on
the work to which his life was to be devoted, whilst Morris formally
adopted architecture as a profession. Arrangements were made for him
to enter G. E. Street's Oxford office, and after a second visit to
France and its churches and passing his Final schools, he took up his
new work at the beginning of 1856. In his spare time he continued
his writing and tried his hand at craftsmanship. Burne-Jones went up
to London a few months later. Morris followed shortly when Street
moved his headquarters. Together they formed a close acquaintance
with Rossetti. That dominating personality was not slow to recognize
the powers of his new friends, and insisted that Morris should turn
painter, asserting, with an inconsequence worthy of one of Oscar
Wilde's creations, that everybody should be a painter. His proposal,
although it had no permanent effect on Morris, showed that the
election of architecture was not unalterable. For a time Morris
painted, throwing into the work the energy that was inseparable from
all his undertakings, but he was quick to realize that with all his
understanding of the painter's art he could not achieve its mastery.
The fact that he had been tempted to alter his choice even
tentatively, however, was enough to make him suspicious of the choice
itself. Without any conviction as to the possibility of a career as
a painter, he abandoned his profession as architect at the end of a
year. His state was one of considerable danger. Rich enough to make
work unnecessary as a means of living, exposed to an influence so
impetuous as Rossetti's, already showing considerable power in
several forms of expression as an artist, wholly unable to dissociate
one from the other, seeing but one purpose behind them all, there was
a probability, in the light of experience almost a certainty, that he
would become an excellent amateur of the arts, practising many things
with credit and triumphant in none, a generous patron, a kind of
titanic dilettante. The manner in which he overcame this danger is
one of the most remarkable things in the history of art. Had some
circumstance, external or internal, forced him to concentrate himself
on one or another of the forms with which he was experimenting, the
escape would have been normal and relatively free of difficulty. But
there was no such circumstance. His activities daily became more
diffused rather than more concentrated. Carving, modelling,
illuminating, designing, painting, poetry and prose-writing, all
became part of his daily scheme. Painting, indeed, he left, save for
incidental purposes, but the scope of his practice widened with every
year. And instead of becoming, as would seem to have been
inevitable, an accomplished amateur, he became a master in everything
he touched. He revolutionized many manufacturing processes and
invested craftsmanship with a vitality that it had not known for
centuries; he rediscovered secrets of mediæval artistry that were
supposed to be finally lost, and re-established the union between
beauty and things of common use; he became printer, and the books
from his press are scarcely excelled in the history of printing; he
wrote prose romances which in themselves would have secured him an
honourable place in literature, and yet all these achievements might
be cancelled and he would still stand as one of the greatest poets of
his age; or, indeed, of any age. It is all an astonishing testimony
to the vitality of his artistic conscience. However uncertain might
be the expression of his art in these early days, the fundamental
significance of art was rooted in his being with an unassailable
strength. In the light of his life-work these first more or less
indefinite gropings appear no longer as the whims of a nature
uncertain of itself. The impulse within him was not to be satisfied
by any partial expression. If it was to create a new world in
poetry, it must also strive to bring that world in some measure into
the affairs of daily life. It was not sufficient for Morris that the
dishes and goblets on the king's table in his song should be
beautiful or that he should commemorate Jason in halls hung 'with
richest webs.' The furnishings of his own table must be comely too,
and the 'richest webs' should not be a memory alone. No more perfect
example of critical stupidity could well be found than the notion
that Morris, as a creative artist, separated himself from the affairs
of the life about him, as if in retreat. Every line of poetry that
he wrote was the direct expression of the spirit in which he ordered
his daily practice.
Morris's feeling for mediævalism must not be misunderstood. He was
fully conscious of the fact that a few centuries are as but a moment
in the development of man, and he did not turn to early art as to the
expression of a humanity differing in any fundamental way from the
humanity of his own day. Nor did he turn to that aspect of
mediævalism which has given it the name of the Dark Ages, but to the
life that produced Giotto and Angelico, Van Eyck and Dürer, and
Holbein and Memling, the monks whose illuminated books he prized so
dearly, and Chaucer.[1] He was not indifferent to the masterpieces
of the modern world. The range of Shakespeare's humanity, Shelley's
spiritual ardour, the passionate identification of truth with beauty
which was as a gospel to Keats, the earlier poems of Tennyson and
Browning, he accepted as revelations. Wordsworth and Milton he
professed to dislike, but he more probably disliked the people who
liked them wrongly. Nothing is more provocative than the praise of
fools. But it was in the work of those early artists, the men from
whom the Pre-Raphaelites took their name, that he found the most
perfect and satisfying expression of the spiritual life which was for
him the only true salvation on earth. It has been said by Paul
Lacroix that in the painting of Jan Van Eyck 'the Gothic school
decked itself with a splendour which left but little for the future
Venetian school to achieve beyond; with one flight of genius, stiff
and methodical conceptions became imbued with suppleness and vital
action.' The same is substantially true of Chaucer in poetry. Some
lessons in rudimentary technique might have been learned by these men
from their predecessors, but their powers of expression were vibrant
as some newly-discovered energy, and they used them in all their
freshness to embody a sane, simple view of life such as Morris
himself held. The subtlety which might follow in the evolution from
these beginnings, the greater intricacy of achievement, would take
their place in his consciousness, but nothing could ever displace his
worship of these frank and exultant records of man's joy in his work,
a joy that he hoped would yet be regained. They and their kind
remained for him, throughout his life, the supreme examples of the
meaning of art.
When he gave up his work in Street's office, Morris moved with
Burne-Jones to rooms in Red Lion Square. They were unfurnished, and
out of this circumstance really sprang the beginnings of 'Morris and
Company,' although the firm was not actually founded until 1861. The
two artists found nothing in the shops that was tolerable, so Morris
made rough designs of furniture and commissioned a carpenter to
execute them in plain deal. Chairs, a massive table, a settle and a
wardrobe were among the first acquisitions. Rossetti painted two
panels of the settle, and Burne-Jones decorated the wardrobe with
paintings from Chaucer. When Morris built his own house this process
was carried out on a larger scale, but the beginnings of the
revolution of house-furnishing in England are clearly traceable to
the rooms in Red Lion Square.
In the Long Vacation of 1875 Rossetti conceived the ill-fated scheme
of mural paintings for the new hall of the Oxford Union. The story
need not be told here in any detail. Morris and Burne-Jones were
pressed unto the service with some six or seven others, and each
painted one picture, Morris in addition designing and carrying out
the decoration of the ceiling. No proper preparations were made for
the work, and the paintings have perished. The undertaking is
interesting to us here as throwing sidelights on certain aspects of
Morris's temperament. He had begun and finished his picture long
before any of the others, and while they were still engaged on their
appointed shares he had voluntarily set himself to the ceiling
design. His capacity for work, of which this is the first striking
example, was always enormous, and it is not surprising to hear that a
distinguished doctor, speaking of his comparatively early death at
the age of sixty-three, said, 'I consider the case is this: the
disease is simply being William Morris and having done more work than
most ten men.' It was on this occasion, too, that his strange store
of assimilated knowledge was put to practical use. The paintings
were all taken from the "Mort d'Arthur," and models were required for
arms and armour. They were not to be found, and Morris, unaided by
books of reference, designed them, and they were made by a jobbing
smith under his supervision. When the Union work was finished he
took rooms in Oxford instead of returning to London, and among the
new friends that he made was Swinburne, then an undergraduate at
Balliol. He continued his apprenticeship as a painter with
enthusiasm but lessening conviction, but poetry was already becoming
a first consideration with him. He had already published a few
poems, as we have seen, in the "Oxford and Cambridge Magazine," and
several others were written during his temporary residence in Oxford.
He was a man of fine physique and a remarkable vehemence of temper.
Burne-Jones tells us that when they were painting the Union walls and
needed models they sat for each other, and that Morris 'had a head
always fit for Lancelot or Tristram.' To think a thing was generally
to say it. His intolerance of everything vulgar and mean and
disloyal in art and life found immediate and forceful expression. A
friend who knew him well tells me of an occasion when he went with
Burne-Jones to the theatre. They were sitting in the pit, and one of
the actresses was incurring Morris's particular displeasure by reason
of her misuse of her mother-tongue. At a moment of tension she had
to enter and announce that her father was dead. She did so, but to
the effect that her 'father was dad.' Morris could bear it no
longer, and standing up with his hands clenched he roared across the
theatre, 'What the devil do you mean by dad?' to the utter
discomfiture of his companion. Insincerity--and incompetence he took
to be a form of insincerity--at all times exhausted his patience, and
he was never careful to conceal his feelings.
The time of preparation was now passing into the time of achievement.
Morris's nature had been spared much of the shock and stress to which
it might have been subjected in its growth by the vulgarity and
violent uncertainty of his age, by the fortunate contact with men who
were in revolt. The movement that they represented and of which he
was a part was large and strong enough to make a positive and
progressive life of its own instead of being merely an isolated
expression of turbulent disagreement. It was one of those rare
manifestations, a revolt the first purpose of which was not to
destroy but to create. To this influence had been added that of a
countryside gravely beautiful, one full of the shadows and colour of
romance, or, more precisely, of the northern romance to which he was
always to lend his most faithful service. It must not be supposed
that this implies any coldness in his nature, which was at all times
finely passionate. But it was, always, also simple, and simplicity
of passion is the ultimate distinction of the North. The luxuriance
of the South, with all its beauty, tends to obscurity. Nothing is
further from wisdom than to suppose that the passion of the North is
cold; it is merely naked. His characteristic simplicity of outlook
was not yet impressing itself with its final certainty on his work,
but it was already in being, as is clear from the records of his
personality as it appeared to his friends at the beginning of his
career.
Such was the nature of the man, who, fostered to articulate
expression in a spiritual atmosphere which it has been my purpose to
describe, was about to make his first appeal as poet to the public.
Early in 1858, Messrs. Bell and Daldy published _The Defence of
Guenevere and Other Poems_.
[1] The chronological irregularity in this passage is deliberate, and
I am aware, of course, that certain of the names mentioned cannot
strictly be credited to mediævalism. But a nice distinction of
epochs is not necessary for the present purpose. There was, in
Morris's view of art, a kinship between Giotto and Holbein which was
unaffected by the fact that the former died in 1336, whilst Holbein
saw the full day of the northern renaissance two hundred years later.