The news of the grave turn suddenly taken by William Morris’s illness
prepared the public for the still worse news that was to follow.
The certificate of the immediate cause of death affirms it to have been
phthisis, but one would suppose that almost every vital organ had become
exhausted. Each time that I saw him he declared, in answer to my
inquiries, that he suffered no pain whatever. And a comforting thought
this is to us all—that Morris suffered no pain. To Death himself we may
easily be reconciled—nay, we might even look upon him as Nature’s final
beneficence to all her children, if it were not for the cruel means he so
often employs in fulfilling his inevitable mission. The thought that
Morris’s life had ended in the tragedy of pain—the thought that he to
whom work was sport and generosity the highest form of enjoyment,
suffered what some men suffer in shuffling off the mortal coil—would have
been intolerable almost. For among the thousand and one charms of the
man, this, perhaps, was the chief, that Nature had endowed him with an
enormous capacity of enjoyment, and that Circumstance, conspiring with
Nature, said to him, “Enjoy.”
[Picture: William Morris]
Born in easy circumstances, though not to the degrading trouble of
wealth—cherishing as his sweetest possessions a devoted wife and two
daughters, each of them endowed with intelligence so rare as to
understand a genius such as his—surrounded by friends, some of whom were
among the first men of our time, and most of whom were of the very salt
of the earth—it may be said of him that Misfortune, if she touched him at
all, never struck home. If it is true, as Mérimée affirms, that men are
hastened to maturity by misfortune, who wanted Morris to be mature? Who
wanted him to be other than the radiant boy of genius that he remained
till the years had silvered his hair and carved wrinkles on his brow, but
left his blue-grey eyes as bright as when they first opened on the world?
Enough for us to think that the man must, indeed, be specially beloved by
the gods who in his sixty-third year dies young. Old age Morris could
not have borne with patience. Pain would not have developed him into a
hero. This beloved man, who must have died some day, died when his
marvellous powers were at their best—and died without pain. The scheme
of life and death does not seem so much awry, after all.
At the last interview but one that ever I had with him—it was in the
little carpetless room from which so much of his best work was turned
out—he himself surprised me by leading the conversation upon a subject he
rarely chose to talk about—the mystery of life and death. The
conversation ended with these words of his: “I have enjoyed my life—few
men more so—and death in any case is sure.”
It is difficult not to think that the cause of causes of his death was
excessive exercise of all his forces, especially of the imaginative
faculty. When I talked to him, as I often did, of the peril of such a
life of tension as his, he pooh-poohed the idea. “Look at Gladstone,” he
would say; “look at those wise owls your chancellors and your judges.
Don’t they live all the longer for work? It is rust that kills men, not
work.” No doubt he was right in contending that in intellectual efforts
such as those he alluded to, where the only faculty drawn upon is the
“dry light of intelligence,” a prodigious amount of work may be achieved
without any sapping of the sources of life. But is this so where that
fusion of all the faculties which we call genius is greatly taxed? I
doubt it. In all true imaginative production there is, as De Quincey
pointed out many years ago, a movement not of “the thinking machine”
only, but of the whole man—the whole “genial” nature of the worker—his
imagination, his judgment, moving in an evolution of lightning velocity
from the whole of the work to the part, from the part to the whole,
together with every emotion of the soul. Hence when, as in the case of
Walter Scott, of Charles Dickens, and presumably of Shakespeare too, the
emotional nature of Man is overtaxed, every part of the frame suffers,
and cries out in vain for its share of that nervous fluid which is the
true _vis vitæ_.
We have only to consider the sort of work Morris produced and its amount
to realize that no human powers could continue to withstand such a
strain. Many are of opinion that ‘The Lovers of Gudrun’ is his finest
poem; he worked at it from four o’clock in the morning till four in the
afternoon, and when he rose from the table he had produced 750 lines!
Think of the forces at work in producing a poem like ‘Sigurd.’ Think of
the mingling of the drudgery of the Dryasdust with the movements of an
imaginative vision unsurpassed in our time; think, I say, of the
collaborating of the ‘Völsunga Saga’ with the ‘Nibelungenlied,’ the
choosing of this point from the Saga-man, and of that point from the
later poem of the Germans, and then fusing the whole by imaginative heat
into the greatest epic of the nineteenth century. Was there not work
enough here for a considerable portion of a poet’s life? And yet so
great is the entire mass of his work that ‘Sigurd’ is positively
overlooked in many of the notices of his writings which have appeared
since his death in the press, while in the others it is alluded to in
three words, and this simply because the mass of other matter to be dealt
with fills up all the available space of a newspaper.
Then, again, take his translation of the Odyssey. Some competent critics
are dissatisfied with this; yet in a certain sense it is a triumph. The
two specially Homeric qualities—those, indeed, which set Homer apart from
all other poets—are eagerness and dignity. Never again can they be fully
combined, for never again will poetry be written in the Greek hexameters
and by a Homer. That Tennyson could have given us the Homeric dignity
his magnificent rendering of a famous fragment of the Iliad shows.
Chapman’s translations show that the eagerness also can be caught.
Morris, of course, could not have given the dignity of Homer, but then,
while Tennyson has left us only a few lines speaking with the dignity of
the Iliad, Morris gave us a translation of the entire Odyssey, which,
though it missed the Homeric dignity, secured the eagerness as completely
as Chapman’s free-and-easy paraphrase, and in a rendering as literal as
Buckley’s prose crib, which lay frankly by Morris’s side as he wrote.
This, with his much less satisfactory translation of Virgil, where he
gives us an almost word-for-word translation, and yet throws over the
poem a glamour of romance which brings Virgil into the sympathy of the
modern reader, would have occupied years with almost any other poet. But
these two efforts of his genius are swamped by the purely original poems,
such as ‘The Defence of Guenevere,’ ‘Jason,’ ‘The Earthly Paradise,’
‘Love is Enough,’ ‘Poems by the Way,’ &c. And then come his translations
from the Icelandic. Mere translation is, of course, easy enough, but not
such translation as that in the “Saga Library.” Allowing for all the aid
he got from Mr. Magnússon, what a work this is! Think of the imaginative
exercise required to turn the language of these Saga-men into a diction
so picturesque and so concrete as to make each Saga an English poem, for
poem each one is, if Aristotle is right in thinking that imaginative
substance and not metre is the first requisite of a poem.
And this brings me to those poems without metre which he invented for
himself in the latter portion of his career. There is in these
delightful stories, leaving out of consideration the exquisite lyrics
interspersed, enough poetic wealth adequately to endow a dozen poets.
The last of all of them—the one of which the last two chapters, when he
could no longer hold a pen, he dictated to his friend Mr. Cockerell, in
the determination, as he said to me, that he would finish it before he
died—will be found to be finer than any hitherto published. It is called
‘The Sundering Flood,’ and was written after the story ‘The Water of the
Wondrous Isles.’ It (‘The Sundering Flood’) is as long as ‘The Wood
beyond the World,’ but has lyrics interspersed.
But evidently it is as an inventor in the fine arts that he is chiefly
known to the general public. “Had he written no poetry at all, he would
have been as famous,” we are told, “as he is now.” Anyhow, there is no
household of any culture among the English-speaking races in which the
name of William Morris does not at once call up that great revival in
decorative art for which the latter part of the nineteenth century will
be famous. In his designs for tapestry and other textures, in his
designs for wall-papers and furniture, there is an expenditure of
imaginative force which alone might make the fame of an artist. Then his
artistic printing, in which he invented his own decorations, his own
type, and his own paper—think of the energy he put into all that! The
moment that this new interest seized him he made a more thorough study of
the various specimens of black-letter printing than had ever been made
before save by specialists. But even this could not “fatigue an
appetite” for the joy of work “which was insatiable.” He started as an
apostle of Socialism. He edited _The Commonweal_, and wrote largely in
it, sank money in it week by week with the greatest glee, stumped the
country as a Socialist orator, and into that cause alone put the energy
of three men. Is it any wonder, then, that those who loved him were
appalled at this prodigious output? Often and often have I tried to
bring this matter before him. It was all of no use. “For me to rest
from work,” he would say, “means to die.”
When not absorbed in some occupation that he loved—and in no other would
he move—his restlessness was that of a young animal. In conversation he
could rarely sit still for ten consecutive minutes, but must needs spring
from his seat and walk round the room, as if every limb were eager to
take part in the talk. His boisterous restlessness was the first thing
that struck strangers. During the period when the famous partnership of
Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. was being dissolved I saw him very
frequently at Queen’s Square, for I took a very active part in the
arrangement of that matter, and after our interviews at Queen Square he
and I used often to lunch together at the “Cock” in Fleet Street. He
liked a sanded floor and quaint old-fashioned settles. Moreover, the
chops were the finest to be had in London.
On the day following our first forgathering at the “Cock,” I was lunching
there with another poet—a friend of his—when the waiter, who knew me
well, said, “That was a loudish gent a-lunching with you yesterday, sir.
I thought once you was a-coming to blows.” Morris had merely been
declaiming against the Elizabethan dramatists, especially Cyril Tourneur.
He shouted out, “You ought to know better than to claim any merit for
such work as ‘The Atheist’s Tragedy’”; and wound up with the
generalization that “the use of blank verse as a poetic medium ought to
be stopped by Act of Parliament for at least two generations.” On
another occasion, when Middleton (another fine spirit, who “should have
died hereafter”) and I were staying with him at Kelmscott Manor, the
passionate emphasis with which he declared that the curse of mankind was
civilization, and that Australia ought to have been left to the blacks,
New Zealand to the Maoris, and South Africa to the Kaffirs, startled even
Middleton, who knew him so well.
It was this boisterous energy and infinite enjoyment of life which made
it so difficult for people on meeting him for the first time to associate
him with the sweet sadness of ‘The Earthly Paradise.’ How could a man of
such exuberant animal spirits as Morris—so hearty, so noisy often, and
often so humorous—have written those lovely poems, whose only fault was
an occasional languor and a lack of humour often commented on when the
critic compares him with Chaucer? This subject of Chaucer’s humour and
Morris’s lack of it demands, however, a special word even in so brief a
notice as this. No man of our time—not even Rossetti—had a finer
appreciation of humour than Morris, as is well known to those who heard
him read aloud the famous “Rainbow Scene” in ‘Silas Marner’ and certain
passages in Charles Dickens’s novels. These readings were as fine as
Rossetti’s recitations of ‘Jim Bludso’ and other specimens of Yankee
humour. And yet it is a common remark, and one that cannot be gainsaid,
that there is no spark of humour in the published poems of either of
these two friends. Did it never occur to any critic to ask whether the
anomaly was not explicable by some theory of poetic art that they held in
common? It is no disparagement to say of Morris that when he began to
write poetry the influence of Rossetti’s canons of criticism upon him was
enormous, notwithstanding the influence upon him of Browning’s dramatic
methods. But while Rossetti’s admiration of Browning was very strong, it
was a canon of his criticism that humour was, if not out of place in
poetry, a disturbing element of it.
What makes me think that Morris was greatly influenced by this canon is
the fact that Morris could and did write humorous poetry, and then
withheld it from publication. For the splendid poem of ‘Sir Peter
Harpdon’s End,’ printed in his first volume, Morris wrote a humorous
scene of the highest order, in which the hero said to his faithful fellow
captive and follower John Curzon that as their deaths were so near he
felt a sudden interest in what had never interested him before—the story
of John’s life before they had been brought so close to each other. The
heroic but dull-witted soldier acceded to his master’s request, and the
incoherent, muddle-headed way in which he gave his autobiography was full
of a dramatic and subtle humour—was almost worthy of him who in three or
four words created the foolish fat scullion in ‘Tristram Shandy.’ This
he refused to print, in deference, I suspect, to a theory of poetic art.
In criticizing Morris, however, the critic is apt to forget that among
poets there are those who, treating poetry simply as an art, do not press
into their work any more of their own individual forces than the work
artistically demands, while another class of poets are impelled to give
full expression to themselves in every poem they write. It is to the
former class of poets that Morris belongs.
Whatever chanced to be Morris’s goal of the moment was pursued by him
with as much intensity as though the universe contained no other possible
goal, and then, when the moment was passed, another goal received all his
attention. I was never more struck with this than on the memorable day
when I first met him, and was blessed with a friendship that lasted
without interruption for nearly a quarter of a century. It was shortly
after he and Rossetti entered upon the joint occupancy of Kelmscott Manor
on the Thames, where I was staying as Rossetti’s guest. On a certain
morning when we were walking in the fields Rossetti told me that Morris
was coming down for a day’s fishing with George Hake, and that “Mouse,”
the Icelandic pony, was to be sent to the Lechlade railway station to
meet them. “You are now going to be introduced to my fellow partner,”
Rossetti said. At that time I only knew of the famous firm by name, and
I asked Rossetti for an explanation, which he gave in his usual incisive
way.
“Well,” said he, “one evening a lot of us were together, and we got
talking about the way in which artists did all kinds of things in olden
times, designed every kind of decoration and most kinds of furniture, and
some one suggested—as a joke more than anything else—that we should each
put down five pounds and form a company. Fivers were blossoms of a rare
growth among us in those days, and I won’t swear that the table bristled
with fivers. Anyhow, the firm was formed, but of course there was no
deed, or anything of that kind. In fact, it was a mere playing at
business, and Morris was elected manager, not because we ever dreamed he
would turn out a man of business, but because he was the only one among
us who had both time and money to spare. We had no idea whatever of
commercial success, but it succeeded almost in our own despite. Here
comes the manager. You must mind your _p’s_ and _q’s_ with him; he is a
wonderfully stand-off chap, and generally manages to take against
people.”
“What is he like?” I said.
“You know the portraits of Francis I. Well, take that portrait as the
basis of what you would call in your metaphysical jargon your ‘mental
image’ of the manager’s face, soften down the nose a bit, and give him
the rose-bloom colour of an English farmer, and there you have him.”
“What about Francis’s eyes?” I said.
“Well, they are not quite so small, but not big—blue-grey, but full of
genius.”
And then I saw, coming towards us on a rough pony so diminutive that he
well deserved the name of “Mouse,” the figure of a man in a wideawake—a
figure so broad and square that the breeze at his back, soft and balmy as
it was, seemed to be using him as a sail, and blowing both him and the
pony towards us.
When Rossetti introduced me, the manager greeted him with a “H’m! I
thought you were alone.” This did not seem promising. Morris at that
time was as proverbial for his exclusiveness as he afterwards became for
his expansiveness.
Rossetti, however, was irresistible to everybody, and especially to
Morris, who saw that he was expected to be agreeable to me, and most
agreeable he was, though for at least an hour I could still see the shy
look in the corner of his eyes. He invited me to join the fishing, which
I did. Finding every faculty of Morris’s mind and every nerve in his
body occupied with one subject, fishing, I (coached by Rossetti, who
warned me not to talk about ‘The Defence of Guenevere’) talked about
nothing but the bream, roach, dace, and gudgeon I used to catch as a boy
in the Ouse, and the baits that used to tempt the victims to their doom.
Not one word passed Morris’s lips, as far as I remember at this distance
of time, which had not some relation to fish and baits. He had come from
London for a few hours’ fishing, and all the other interests which as
soon as he got back to Queen’s Square would be absorbing him were
forgotten. Instead of watching my float, I could not help watching his
face with an amused interest at its absorbed expression, which after a
while he began to notice, and the following little dialogue ensued, which
I remember as though it took place yesterday:—
“How old were you when you used to fish in the Ouse?”
“Oh, all sorts of ages; it was at all sorts of times, you know.”
“Well, how young then?”
“Say ten or twelve.”
“When you got a bite at ten or twelve, did you get as interested, as
excited, as I get when I see my float bob?”
“No.”
The way in which he said, “I thought not,” conveyed a world of
disparagement of me as a man who could care to gaze upon a brother angler
instead of upon his own float.