3. The buyers were pleased with their purchase, and received a decided
satisfaction in its possession.
4. Readers of the book were gratified to see their author clothed in such
fitting and harmonious dress.
5. Reading the text has instructed some, and possibly inspired a few to
nobler thinking.
After "The Defense of Guinevere" was published, it was thirteen years
before Morris issued another volume. His days had been given to art and
the work of management. But now the business had gotten on to such a firm
basis that he turned the immediate supervision over to others, and took
two days of the week, Saturday and Sunday, for literature.
Taking up the active work of literature when thirty-nine years of age, he
followed it with the zest of youth for over twenty years--until death
claimed him. William Morris thought literature should be the product of
the ripened mind--the mind that knows the world of men and which has
grappled with earth's problems. He also considered that letters should not
be a profession in itself--to make a business of an art is to degrade it.
Literature should be the spontaneous output of the mind that has known and
felt. To work the mine of spirit as a business and sift its product for
hire, is to overwork the vein and palm off slag for sterling metal.
Shakespeare was a theater-manager, Milton a secretary, Bobby Burns a
farmer, Lamb a bookkeeper, Wordsworth a government employee, Emerson a
lecturer, Hawthorne a custom-house inspector, and Whitman a clerk. William
Morris was a workingman and a manufacturer, and would have been Poet
Laureate of England had he been willing to call himself a student of
sociology instead of a socialist. Socialism itself (whatever it may be) is
not offensive--the word is.
* * * * *
The great American Apostle of Negation expressed, once upon a day, a
regret that he had not been consulted when the Universe was being planned,
otherwise he would have arranged to make good things catching instead of
bad.
The remark tokened a slight lesion in the logic of the Apostle, for good
things are now, and ever have been, infectious.
Once upon a day, I met a young man who told me that he was exposed at
Kelmscott House for a brief hour, and caught it, and ever after there were
in his mind, thoughts, feelings, emotions and ideals that had not been
there before. Possibly the psychologist would explain that the spores of
all these things were simply sleeping, awaiting the warmth and sunshine of
some peculiar presence to start them into being; but of that I can not
speak--this only I know, that the young man said to me, "Whereas I was
once blind, I now see."
William Morris was a giant in physical strength and a giant in intellect.
His nature was intensely masculine, in that he could plan and act without
thought of precedent. Never was a man more emancipated from the trammels
of convention and custom than William Morris.
Kelmscott House at Hammersmith is in an ebb-tide district where once
wealth and fashion held sway; but now the vicinity is given over to
factories, tenement-houses and all that train of evil and vice that
follows in the wake of faded gentility.
At Hammersmith you will see spacious old mansions used as warehouses;
others as boarding-houses; still others converted into dance-halls with
beer-gardens in the rear, where once bloomed and blossomed milady's
flowerbeds.
The broad stone steps and wide hallways and iron fences, with glimpses now
and then of ancient doorplates or more ancient knockers, tell of
generations lost in the maze of oblivion.
Just why William Morris, the poet and lover of harmony, should have
selected this locality for a home is quite beyond the average ken.
Certainly it mystified the fashionable literary world of London, with whom
he never kept goose-step, but that still kept track of him--for fashion
has a way of patronizing genius--and some of his old friends wrote him
asking where Hammersmith was, and others expressed doubts as to its
existence. I had no difficulty in taking the right train for Hammersmith,
but once there no one seemed to have ever heard of the Kelmscott Press.
When I inquired, grave misgivings seemed to arise as to whether the press
I referred to was a cider-press, a wine-press or a press for "cracklings."
Finally I discovered a man--a workingman--whose face beamed at the mention
of William Morris. Later I found that if a man knew William Morris, his
heart throbbed at the mention of his name, and he at once grew voluble and
confidential and friendly. It was the "Open Sesame," And if a person did
not know William Morris, he simply didn't, and that was all there was
about it.
But the man I met knew "Th' Ole Man," which was the affectionate title
used by all the hundreds and thousands who worked with William Morris. And
to prove that he knew him, when I asked that he should direct me to the
Upper Mall, he simply insisted on going with me. Moreover, he told a
needless lie and declared he was on the way there, although when we met he
was headed in the other direction. By a devious walk of half a mile we
reached the high iron fence of Kelmscott House. We arrived amid a florid
description of the Icelandic Sagas as told by my new-found friend and
interpreted by Th' Ole Man. My friend had not read the Sagas, but still he
did not hesitate to recommend them; and so we passed through the wide-open
gates and up the stone walk to the entrance of Kelmscott House. On the
threshold we met F.S. Ellis and Emery Walker, who addressed my companion
as "Tom." I knew Mr. Ellis slightly, and also had met Mr. Walker, who
works Rembrandt miracles with a camera.
Mr. Ellis was deep in seeing the famous "Chaucer" through the press, and
Mr. Walker had a print to show, so we turned aside, passed a great pile of
paper in crates that cluttered the hallway, and entered the library.
There, leaning over the long, oaken table, in shirt-sleeves, was the
master. Who could mistake that great, shaggy head, the tangled beard, and
frank, open-eyed look of boyish animation?
The man was sixty and more, but there was no appearance of age in eye,
complexion, form or gesture--only the whitened hair! He greeted me as if
we had always known each other, and Ellis and piles of Chaucer proof led
straight to old Professor Child of Harvard, whose work Ellis criticized
and Morris upheld. They fell into a hot argument, which was even continued
as we walked across the street to the Doves Bindery.
The Doves Bindery, as all good men know, is managed by Mr.
Cobden-Sanderson, who married one of the two daughters of Richard Cobden
of Corn-Law fame.
Just why Mr. Sanderson, the lawyer, should have borrowed his wife's maiden
name and made it legally a part of his own, I do not know. Anyway, I quite
like the idea of linking one's name with that of the woman one loves,
especially when it has been so honored by the possessor as the name of
Cobden.
Cobden-Sanderson caught the rage for beauty from William Morris, and began
to bind books for his own pleasure. Morris contended that any man who
could bind books as beautifully as Cobden-Sanderson should not waste his
time with law. Cobden-Sanderson talked it over with his wife, and she
being a most sensible woman, agreed with William Morris.
So Cobden-Sanderson, acting on Th' Ole Man's suggestion, rented the quaint
and curious mansion next door to the old house occupied by the Kelmscott
Press, and went to work binding books.
When we were once inside the Bindery, the Chaucerian argument between Mr.
Ellis and Th' Ole Man shifted off into a wrangle with Cobden-Sanderson. I
could not get the drift of it exactly--it seemed to be the continuation of
some former quarrel about an oak leaf or something. Anyway, Th' Ole Man
silenced his opponent by smothering his batteries--all of which will be
better understood when I explain that Th' Ole Man was large in stature,
bluff, bold and strong-voiced, whereas Cobden-Sanderson is small,
red-headed, meek, and wears bicycle-trousers.
The argument, however, was not quite so serious an affair as I at first
supposed, for it all ended in a laugh and easily ran off into a quiet
debate as to the value of Imperial Japan versus Whatman.
We walked through the various old parlors that now do duty as workrooms
for bright-eyed girls, then over through the Kelmscott Press, and from
this to another old mansion that had on its door a brass plate so polished
and repolished, like a machine-made sonnet too much gone over, that one
can scarcely make out its intent. Finally I managed to trace the legend,
"The Seasons." I was told it was here that Thomson, the poet, wrote his
book. Once back in the library of Kelmscott House, Mr. Ellis and Th' Ole
Man leaned over the great oaken table and renewed, in a gentler key, the
question as to whether Professor Child was justified in his construction
of the Third Canto of the "Canterbury Tales." Under cover of the smoke I
quietly disappeared with Mr. Cockerill, the Secretary, for a better view
of the Kelmscott Press.
This was my first interview with William Morris. By chance I met him
again, some days after, at the shop of Emery Walker in Clifford Court,
Strand. I had been told on divers occasions by various persons that
William Morris had no sympathy for American art and small respect for our
literature. I am sure this was not wholly true, for on this occasion he
told me he had read "Huckleberry Finn," and doted on "Uncle Remus." He
also spoke with affection and feeling of Walt Whitman, and told me that he
had read every printed word that Emerson had written. And further he
congratulated me on the success of my book, "Songs From Vagabondia."
* * * * *
The housekeeping world seems to have been in thrall to six haircloth
chairs, a slippery sofa to match, and a very cold, marble-top center
table, from the beginning of this century down to comparatively recent
times. In all the best homes there was also a marble mantel to match the
center table; on one end of this mantel was a blue glass vase containing a
bouquet of paper roses, and on the other a plaster-of-Paris cat. Above the
mantel hung a wreath of wax flowers in a glass case. In such houses were
usually to be seen gaudy-colored carpets, imitation lace curtains, and a
what-not in the corner that seemed ready to go into dissolution through
the law of gravitation.
Early in the Seventies lithograph-presses began to make chromos that were
warranted just as good as oil-paintings, and these were distributed in
millions by enterprising newspapers as premiums for subscriptions. Looking
over an old file of the "Christian Union" for the year Eighteen Hundred
Seventy-one, I chanced upon an editorial wherein it was stated that the
end of painting pictures by hand had come, and the writer piously thanked
heaven for it--and added, "Art is now within the reach of all." Furniture,
carpets, curtains, pictures and books were being manufactured by
machinery, and to glue things together and give them a look of gentility
and get them into a house before they fell apart, was the seeming
desideratum of all manufacturers.
The editor of the "Christian Union" surely had a basis of truth for his
statement; art had received a sudden chill: palettes and brushes could be
bought for half-price, and many artists were making five-year contracts
with lithographers; while those too old to learn to draw on
lithograph-stones saw nothing left for them but to work designs with
worsted in perforated cardboard.
To the influence of William Morris does the civilized world owe its
salvation from the mad rage and rush for the tawdry and cheap in home
decoration. It will not do to say that if William Morris had not called a
halt some one else would, nor to cavil by declaring that the inanities of
the Plush-Covered Age followed the Era of the Hair-Cloth Sofa. These
things are frankly admitted, but the refreshing fact remains that fully
one-half the homes of England and America have been influenced by the good
taste and vivid personality of one strong, earnest man.
William Morris was the strongest all-round man the century has produced.
He was an Artist and a Poet in the broadest and best sense of these
much-bandied terms. William Morris could do more things, and do them well,
than any other man of either ancient or modern times whom we can name.
William Morris was master of six distinct trades. He was a weaver, a
blacksmith, a wood-carver, a painter, a dyer and a printer; and he was a
musical composer of no mean ability.
Better than all, he was an enthusiastic lover of his race: his heart
throbbed for humanity, and believing that society could be reformed only
from below, he cast his lot with the toilers, dressed as one of them, and
in the companionship of workingmen found a response to his holy zeal which
the society of an entailed aristocracy denied.
The man who could influence the entire housekeeping of half a world, and
give the kingdom of fashion a list to starboard; who could paint beautiful
pictures; compose music; speak four languages; write sublime verse;
address a public assemblage effectively; produce plays; resurrect the lost
art of making books, books such as were made only in the olden time as a
loving, religious service; who lived a clean, wholesome, manly
life--beloved by those who knew him best--shall we not call him Master?