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.