OXFORD LIFE.
Like the majority of the students who went up to Oxford in the fifties,
Morris matriculated with the definite intention of taking holy orders.
Unlike the majority, he was impelled not only by the sensuous beauty of
ritualistic worship, to which, however, no one could have been more keenly
alive than he, but by a genuine enthusiasm for a life devoted to high
purposes. A fine buoyant desire to better existing conditions and sweep as
much evil as possible off the face of the earth early inspired him. His
mind turned toward the conventual life as that which combined the mediaeval
suggestions always alluring to him with the moral beauty of holiness. He
planned a "Crusade and Holy Warfare against the Age," sang plain song at
daily morning service, read masses of mediaeval chronicles and
ecclesiastical Latin poetry, and hovered just this side of the Roman
Communion. Had the ecclesiology of the University been supported at that
time by an inward and spiritual grace sufficient to hold the heart of
youth to a sustained allegiance, there is little doubt that Morris would
have thrown himself ardently into the religious path. But Oxford had
become an indolent and indifferent mother to her children. The storm of
feeling aroused by the Tractarian movement had died down and the reaction
from it was evident. At Balliol Jowett's energy had made its mark, but at
Exeter, where Morris was, the educational system deserved (and received)
the contempt of an ambitious boy with an unusually large supply of
stored-up intellectual force seeking outlet and guidance. Nor was the
social life more stimulating to moral activity. The abuses recorded in
1852 by the University Commission were in essence so shameful that in the
light of that famous report "the sweet city with her dreaming spires"
seems to have only the beauty of the daughter of Helios, under whose
enchantments men were turned to swine for loving her. The clean mind and
honest nature of Morris revolted from the excesses that went on about him.
He wrote to his mother two years after his matriculation, defending the
proposition that his Oxford education had not been thrown away: "If by
living here and seeing evil and sin in its foulest and coarsest forms, as
one does day by day, I have learned to hate any form of sin and to wish to
fight against it, is not this well too?" It is proof of his purity of
taste and strength of will that, despite his ample means, the wanton
extravagance of the typical undergraduate had for him no allurement. It is
certain that he was never seen at those dinners which were pronounced by
an official censor "a curse and a disgrace to a place of Christian
education," and as certainly he played no part in the mad carnivals at
which novices were initiated into a curriculum of vice. Yet he could not
indeed say with any truth what Gibbon had said a hundred years before,
that the time he spent at Oxford was the most idle and unprofitable of his
whole life. If he felt, as Gibbon did, that his formal studies were
"equally devoid of profit and pleasure," and if he found nothing
ridiculous in Ruskin's bitter complaint that Oxford taught him all the
Latin and Greek that he would learn, but did not teach him that
fritillaries grew in Iffley meadow, he did find a little band of helpful
associates. With these he realised the priceless advantages which Mr.
Bagehot says cannot be got outside a college and which he sums up as found
"in the books that all read because all like; in what all talk of because
all are interested; in the argumentative walk or disputatious lounge; in
the impact of fresh thought on fresh thought, of hot thought on hot
thought; in mirth and refutation, in ridicule and laughter." The first of
the few strong personal attachments in the life of Morris dates from his
first day at Oxford. At the end of January, 1853, he went up for his
matriculation, and beside him at the examination in the Hall sat
Burne-Jones, who within a week of their formal entrance to the college
became his intimate. The friendship thus spontaneously formed on the verge
of manhood lasted until Morris died. In their studies, in their truant
reading, in their later aims and work, the two, diametrically as they
differed in aspect and in temperament and in quality of mind, were
sympathetic and dear companions. Together they joined a group of other
happily gifted men--Fulford, Faulkner, Dixon, Cormell Price, and
Macdonald--who met in one another's rooms for the disputatious lounge over
the exuberant ideals by which they were in common inspired. Tennyson,
Keats, and Shelley, Shakespeare, Ruskin, Carlyle, Kingsley, Thackeray,
Dickens, and Miss Yonge were the gods and half gods of their young and
passionate enthusiasm. The last, curiously enough, was an influence as
potent as any. The hero of her novel of 1853, _The Heir of Redclyffe_, was
the pattern chosen by Morris, according to Mr. Mackail's account, to build
himself upon. Singular as it seems to-day that any marked impression
should have been made upon an even fairly well-trained mind by a writer of
such slight literary quality, it is true that the author of _The Daisy
Chain_ counted among her devoted readers men of brilliant and dominant
intellectual power. She had the lucky touch to kindle in young minds that
fire of sympathy with which they greet whatever shows them their own
world, their age, themselves as they best like to see them. To Morris in
particular the young heir of Redclyffe made the appeal of a congenial
temperament in a position similar to his own. Like Morris, he was
headstrong and passionate, given to excessive bursts of rage and to
repentances not less excessive; like Morris, he united to his natural
pride an unnatural and slightly obtrusive humility; like Morris, he was
rich and beautiful, generous and lovable. It was no great wonder that
Morris, poring with his characteristic absorption over the pleasant pages
on which Guy Morville's chivalrous life is portrayed, said as Dromio to
Dromio, "Methinks you are my glass and not my brother; I see by you I am a
sweet-faced youth."
Mr. Mackail notes with an accent of surprise that Kingsley was much more
widely read than Newman, thinking the choice a curious one in the case of
passionate Anglo-Catholics. So far as Morris was concerned, however, there
was little enough to relish in Newman's subtle theology and relentless
logic. The man to whom religion as a mere sentiment was "a dream and a
mockery" could hardly appeal to one to whom all life was a sentiment.
Kingsley, on the other hand, although he was anti-Catholic in temper, and
disposed to overthrow the illusions by which such romanticists as Scott,
such dreamers as Fouque, had surrounded the Middle Ages, picturing their
coarse and barbarous side with harsh realism, was happy in rendering the
charms of outdoor life and bold adventure, and the songs of the Crusaders
in his _Saint's Tragedy_ must have gone farther toward winning Morris than
pages of Newman's reasoning devotion.
Gradually the monastic ideal faded before the brightness of art and
literature and the life of the world as these became more and more
impressed upon Morris's consciousness. To live in the spirit and in the
region of purely intellectual interests could not have been his choice
after the passing of the first fanatic impulse of youth to dedicate itself
to what is difficult, ignorant of the joy of choosing. Many influences
united to determine the precise form into which he should shape the future
that for all practical purposes was under his control. His interest in
pictorial art was stimulated by Burne-Jones, who was already making
fantastic little drawings, and studies of flowers and foliage. Of great
art he knew nothing until he spent the Long Vacation of 1854 in travelling
through Belgium and Northern France, where he saw Van Eyck and Memling,
who at once became to him, as they were to Rossetti, masters of
incontestable supremacy. On this trip he saw also the beautiful churches
of Amiens, Beauvais, and Chartres, which in his unbridled expansiveness of
phrase he called "the grandest, the most beautiful, the kindest, and most
loving of all the buildings that the earth has ever borne." The following
year he repeated the experience, with Burne-Jones and Fulford for
companions. This time the journey was to have been made on foot from
motives of economy, as Burne-Jones was poor and Morris embraced the habits
of poverty when in his company with unaffected delicacy of feeling. At
Amiens, however, Morris went lame, and, "after filling the streets with
imprecations on all boot-makers," bought a pair of gay carpet slippers in
which to continue the trip. These proved not to serve the purpose, and the
travellers were obliged to reach Chartres by the usual methods of
conveyance, Morris arguing with fury and futility in favour of skirting
Paris, "even by two days' journey, so as not to see the streets of it."
They had with them one book, _Keats_, and their minds were filled with the
poetic ideas of art as the expression of man's pleasure in his toil, and
of beauty as the natural and necessary accompaniment of productive labour,
which Ruskin had been preaching in _The Stones of Venice_ and in the
Edinburgh lectures. By this time they had become acquainted with the work
of the Pre-Raphaelites, and Burne-Jones had announced that of all men who
lived on earth the one he wanted to see was Rossetti. Morris had used his
spare time, of which we may imagine he had a considerable amount, in the
study of mediaeval design as the splendid manuscripts in the Bodleian
Library illustrate it. An architectural newspaper also formed part of his
regular reading outside of his studies. Thus primed for definite action,
on this holiday filled with stimulating interests and the delicious
freedom of roaming quite at will with the best of companions through the
sweet fertile country of Northern France, Morris put quite aside all aims
that had not directly to do with art. He and Burne-Jones, walking late one
night on the quays of Havre, discussed their plans. Both gave up once and
for all the idea of taking orders; both decided to leave Oxford as
quickly as they could; both were to be artists, Burne-Jones a painter and
Morris an architect.
Although Morris was never to become a practising architect, this choice of
a profession at the beginning of his career is both characteristic and
significant. Buildings, as we have seen, had interested him from his
childhood. His favourite excursions, long and short, had been to the
region of churches. In the art of building he saw the means of elevating
all the tastes of man. Architecture meant to him "the art of creating a
building with all the appliances fit for carrying on a dignified and happy
life." It seemed to him even at the outset, before the word "socialism"
had come into his vocabulary, incredible that people living in pleasant
homes and engaged in making and using these appliances of which he speaks,
should lead lives other than dignified and happy. It was much more in
accordance with his ideal of a vocation, a ministry to man, that he should
contribute to the daily material comfort and pleasure of the world, that
he should make places good for the body to live in and fair for the eye to
rest upon, and therefore soothing to the soul, than that he should
construct abstract spiritual mansions of which he could at best form but a
vague conception. It was, then, with a certain sense of dedication, an
exchange of method without a change of spirit, that he gave up the thought
of holy orders and turned to the thought of furthering the good of
mankind by working toward the beauty and order of the visible world.
From the point of view of his later interests as a decorator of houses, he
was showing the utmost wisdom in beginning with the framework, which must
exist before any decoration can be applied. "I have spoken of the popular
arts," he says himself, in one of his lectures, "but they might all be
summed up in that one word Architecture; they are all parts of that great
whole, and the art of house-building begins it all. If we did not know how
to dye or to weave; if we had neither gold nor silver nor silk, and no
pigments to paint with but half a dozen ochres and umbers, we might yet
frame a worthy art that would lead to everything, if we had but timber,
stone and lime, and a few cutting tools to make these common things not
only shelter us from wind and weather but also express the thoughts and
aspirations that stir in us. Architecture would lead us to all the arts,
as it did with the earlier men; but if we despise it and take no note of
how we are housed, the other arts will have a hard time of it indeed."
And again: "A true architectural work," he says, "is a building duly
provided with all the necessary furniture, decorated with all due
ornament, according to the use, quality, and dignity of the building, from
mere mouldings or abstract lines to the great epical works of sculpture
and painting, which except as decorations of the nobler form of such
buildings cannot be produced at all. So looked upon, a work of
architecture is a harmonious, co-operative work of art, inclusive of all
the serious arts--those which are not engaged in the production of mere
toys or ephemeral prettinesses."
Morris communicated his momentous decision to his family as soon as it was
made, and they received it with amazement and distress. While their origin
was not especially aristocratic, their tastes ran toward the symbols of
aristocracy. When Morris was nine years old, his father obtained a grant
of arms from the Heralds' College, and the son had no small liking for the
bearings assigned--bearings which included a horse's head erased argent
between three horseshoes. The horse's head he introduced on the tiles and
glass of the house he built for himself in later years, and he was in the
habit of making a yearly pilgrimage to the famous White Horse of the
Berkshire Downs, connecting it in some obscure way with his ancestry. In
England, during the fifties, nothing was less calculated to appeal to an
aristocratic tendency than any form of art considered as a profession. In
_The Newcomes_ Mr. Honeyman remarks with bland dignity to his aspiring
young relative; "My dear Clive, there are degrees in society which we must
respect. You surely cannot think of being a professional artist." In much
this spirit, apparently, Mrs. Morris received her son's announcement,
conveyed in a long and affectionate letter stating in detail the motives
that had led him to his resolution. After defending his chosen profession
at some length, calling it with characteristic avoidance of pompous
phraseology, "a useful trade," he dwells upon the moderation of his hopes
and expectations. He does not hope "to be great at all in anything," but
thinks he may look forward to reasonable happiness in his work. It will be
grievous to his pride and self-will, he says, to have to do just as he is
told for three long years, but "good for it, too," and he looks forward
with little delight to the drudgery of learning a new trade, but is pretty
confident of success, and is happy in being able to pay "the premium and
all that" without laying any fresh burden of expense upon his mother.
Finally he proposes taking as his master George Edmund Street, who was
living in Oxford as architect of the diocese, and whose enthusiasm for the
thirteenth century could hardly have failed to claim the sympathy of
Morris. Certainly it seemed precisely the fitting opportunity that
offered. There could have been no better moment for him to follow the
advice he so frequently gave to others--to turn his back upon an ugly age,
choose the epoch that suited him best, and identify himself with that.
Gothic to the core, he had come to Oxford, not, as Mr. Day has suggested,
to catch the infection of mediaevalism abroad there, but to assimilate and
thrive upon all the influences to which his independently mediaeval spirit
was acutely susceptible. Scott, Pugin, Shaw, Viollet-le-Duc, had broken
the way through popular prejudice, and Street was engaged at the time
Morris went to him in the work of restoring ancient churches and designing
Gothic buildings. "Restoration" had not then so evil a sound to Morris as
it later came to have. Some thirty years after, he was to say: "No man or
no body of men, however learned they may be in ancient art, whatever skill
in design or love of beauty they may have, can persuade, or bribe, or
force our workmen of to-day to do their work in the same way as the
workmen of King Edward I. did theirs. Wake up Theodoric the Goth from his
sleep of centuries and place him on the throne of Italy, turn our modern
House of Commons into the Witenagemote (or Meeting of the Wise Men) of
King Alfred the Great!--no less a feat is the restoration of an ancient
building." In 1855, however, he had not fully arrived at this conviction.
It was then the period of "fresh hope and partial insight" which,
regarding it retrospectively, he says, "produced many interesting
buildings and other works of art, and afforded a pleasant time indeed to
the hopeful but very small minority engaged in it, in spite of all
vexations and disappointments." There seemed no reason to suppose that,
helped as he was by his predilections and by his environment, he could not
become the master-builder of the house beautiful that constantly haunted
his imagination.
He was not to begin at once, however. In deference to his mother's wish he
went through his final term, passed in the Final Schools without
difficulty, and, together with his companions--The Brotherhood as they
now called themselves,--gave distinction to his last year at the
University, where despite all drawbacks he had been aboundingly happy, by
founding the since famous little _Oxford and Cambridge Magazine_.
[Illustration: TITLE-PAGE OF "THE OXFORD AND CAMBRIDGE MAGAZINE"]
Like the Pre-Raphaelite _Germ_, this periodical aimed at an unusually high
standard. It was printed at the Chiswick Press with some pretensions to
typographical beauty. Each number had upon its title-page an ornamental
heading designed by one of Charles Whittingham's daughters and engraved by
Mary Byfield. On the green wrappers the name of the magazine was printed
in the old-fashioned type which the Chiswick Press was the first to
revive, and although, unlike _The Germ_, it was not illustrated,
photographs of Woolner's medallions of Carlyle and Tennyson were mounted
to bind with it and sold at a shilling apiece to subscribers. The price of
each number was also a shilling, and twelve monthly numbers appeared,
making it thrice as long lived as its prototype, _The Germ_. The financial
responsibility, says Mr. Mackail, was undertaken wholly by Morris, and he
at first attempted the general control. This he was soon glad to
relinquish, paying a salary of a hundred pounds a year to his editor. The
title, which in full read _The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, Conducted by
Members of the Two Universities_, indicates rather more co-operation than
existed, the magazine being conducted entirely by Oxford men and fully
two-thirds written by them. The tone of the contributions was to be
impeccable. "It is unanimously agreed," wrote Price, "that there is to be
no shewing off, no quips, no sneers, no lampooning in our Magazine."
Politics were to be almost eschewed, "Tales, Poetry, friendly Critiques,
and social articles" making up the body of the text.
First among the contributors in quantity and regularity of supply was
Morris. During his second year at the University he had discovered that he
could write poetry, and had communicated the fact to his companions
without loss of time. Canon Dixon, recalling the very thrilling occasion
of his reading his first poem to the group gathered in the old Exeter
rooms occupied by Burne-Jones, affirms that he reached his perfection at
once, that nothing could have been altered for the better, and also quotes
him as saying, "Well, if this is poetry, it is very easy to write." He was
not one to let a capability fust in him unused. Poetry and prose, equally
easy to him, poured after this from his pen, giving expression with some
confusion and incoherence to his boyish raptures over the things he best
loved and most thought about. During the twelve months of the magazine's
life he contributed to it five poems, eight prose tales, a review of
Browning's _Men and Women_, and two special articles, one on a couple of
engravings by Alfred Bethel and one on the Cathedral at Amiens. In all
this early work, filled with superabundant imagery, self-conscious,
sensuous, unsubstantial, pictorial, we have Morris the writer as he was
at the beginning and much as he was again at the end. His first strange
little romances pass before the eyes as his late ones do, like strips of
beautiful fabric, deeply dyed with colours both dim and rich, and printed
with faintly outlined figures in postures illustrating the dreamy events
of dreamy lives. Many of the pages echo with the sound of trumpets and the
clash of arms, but the echo is from so far away that the heart of the
reader declines to leap. Passionate emotions are portrayed in passionate
language. Men and women love and die with wild adventure. Splendid
sacrifices are made, and dark revenges taken. But the effect is of
marionettes, admirably costumed and ingeniously managed yet inevitably
suggesting artifice and failing to suggest life. Nevertheless Morris wrote
in the fashion commonly supposed to impart vitality if nothing else to
composition. He sat up late of nights, after the manner of young writers,
and let his words stand as they fell hot and unpremeditated on the page.
The labour of learning the art, as his favourite, Keats, learned it, by
indefatigable practice in finding the perfect word, the one exquisite
phrase, was quite outside his method. As long as he lived, he preferred
rewriting to revising a manuscript. The austerity of mind that leads to
impatience of superfluous colour or tone, and that dreads as the plague
superfluous sentiment, was foreign to him, nor did he ever acquire it as
even the Epicurean temperament may do by ardent self-restraint. In most
of the romances and poems the scene is laid somewhat vaguely but
unmistakably in the Middle Ages. We rarely surprise the young writer in a
date, but the atmosphere is that of the thirteenth century though with
many thirteenth-century characteristics left out. The incidents appeal to
what Bagehot calls "that kind of boyish fancy which idolises mediaeval
society as the 'fighting time.'" The distinction lies in the fertility and
beauty of the descriptions. On nearly every page is some passage that has
the quality of a picture. In _The Hollow Land_, in _Gertha's Lovers_, in
_Svend and his Brethren_, and especially in the article on the Amiens
Cathedral, are exquisite landscapes and backgrounds against which the
personages group themselves with perfect fittingness. "I must paint Gertha
before I die," said Burne-Jones, after Morris himself was dead, recalling
the charm of this story which was written in his company, under the
willows by the riverside. "The opening and the closing sentences always
invited me in an indescribable way, but the motive _par excellence_ was
that of Gertha after death, in the chapter entitled 'What Edith the
Handmaiden Saw from the War Saddle,' where the beautiful queen lies on the
battle-field with the blue speedwell about her pale face, while a soft
wind rustles the sunset-lit aspens overhead."
[Illustration: _Portrait of Rossetti_
_By Watts_]
To his genius for evoking a scene from memory or imagination with a grace
and delicacy missing in the designs he was later to make with tools more
rebellious than words, Morris added a singular ability to convey to
his readers the most significant quality of what he admired, to impress
them with the feature that had most impressed him. The fancy for gold,
inspired perhaps by study of mediaeval illumination, runs like a glittering
thread through the story of _Svend and his Brethren_. Cissela's gold hair,
her crown of gold, the golden ring she breaks with her lover, the gold
cloth over which she walks across the trampled battle-field, the samite of
purple wrought with gold stars, the golden letters on the
sword-blade,--all these recur like so many bright accents from which the
attention cannot escape. Again, in the description of Amiens Cathedral, we
get from simple verbal repetition the effect of massive modelling, the
sense of weight in the design as Morris felt it in one of the sculptured
figures of the niches: "A stately figure with a king's crown on his head,
and hair falling in three waves over his shoulders; a very kingly face
looking straight onward; a great jewelled collar falling heavily to his
elbows: his right hand holding a heavy sceptre formed of many budding
flowers, and his left just touching in front the folds of his raiment that
falls heavily, very heavily to the ground over his feet. Saul, King of
Israel." In another passage describing with minute detail the figures of
the Virgin and Child, a similar emphasis is laid on the quality of
restfulness. "The two figures are very full of rest; everything about them
expresses it from the broad forehead of the Virgin, to the resting of the
feet of the Child (who is almost self-balanced) in the fold of the robe
that she holds gently, to the falling of the quiet lines of her robe over
her feet, to the resting of its folds between them." And if the effect to
be rendered is one of colour, a touch of finer eloquence is added to this
somewhat crude method. The final passage of the account of the great
Cathedral is a genuine triumph of poetic observation, carrying the fancy
of the reader lightly over the silvery loveliness of the picture as it lay
before the boy enraptured by it: "And now, farewell to the church that I
love, to the carved temple-mountain that rises so high above the
water-meadows of the Somme, above the grey roofs of the good town.
Farewell to the sweep of the arches, up from the bronze bishops lying at
the west end, up to the belt of solemn windows, where, through the painted
glass, the light comes solemnly. Farewell to the cavernous porches of the
west front, so grey under the fading August sun, grey with the
wind-storms, grey with the rain-storms, grey with the beat of many days'
sun, from sunrise to sunset; showing white sometimes, too, when the sun
strikes it strongly; snowy-white, sometimes, when the moon is on it, and
the shadows growing blacker; but grey now, fretted into deeper grey,
fretted into black by the mitres of the bishops, by the solemn covered
heads of the prophets, by the company of the risen, and the long robes of
the judgment-angels by hell-mouth and its flames gaping there, and the
devils that feed it; by the saved souls and the crowning angels; by the
presence of the Judge, and by the roses growing above them all forever."
The review of Browning's _Men and Women_, then recently published, is more
valuable as testifying to the impression produced by Browning upon his
young contemporary, than for any especial illumination it throws upon the
poems themselves. Browning was popular with the students of Oxford long
before he gained his wider audience, and although Morris did not follow
him far in his investigation of the human soul and came heartily to
dislike "his constant dwelling on sin and probing of the secrets of the
heart," he placed him at the time of writing his criticism "high among the
poets of all time" and he "hardly knew whether first or second in our
own," and his defence of him, bristling with ejaculations, and couched in
boyish phrases, shows in part a more than boyish divination. "It does not
help poems much to _solve_ them," he says, after what, in truth, is a
somewhat disastrous attempt to interpret the meaning of _Women and Roses_,
"because there are in poems so many exquisitely small and delicate turns
of thought running through their music, and along with it, that cannot be
done into prose, any more than the infinite variety of form, and shadow,
and colour in a great picture can be rendered by a coloured woodcut." It
was "a bitter thing" to him to see the way in which the poet had been
received by "almost everybody," and he assured his little world that what
the critics called obscurity in Browning's poems resulted from depth of
thought and greatness of subject on the poet's part, and on his readers'
part, "from their shallower brains and more bounded knowledge," if not
indeed from "mere wanton ignorance and idleness," and to this kind of
obscurity one had little right to object. It was the first tilt in the
lists, the beginning of the long combat against the Philistines upon which
Morris entered with high resolve and firm conviction, which he lustily
enjoyed, and in which despite many a broken lance he bore himself as a
bold and skilful knight.
In the little tale called _The Hollow Land_, written for the magazine just
before it "went to smash," to use Burne-Jones's expressive phrase, an
amusingly significant sentence occurs: "Then I tried to learn painting,"
says the hero, "till I thought I should die, but at last learned through
very much pain and grief." Here it is not difficult to recognise an
autobiographic touch. Painting was already beginning to beckon Morris away
from the profession he had so recently chosen. At the end of 1855, during
the Christmas vacation, and just before Morris entered Street's office,
Burne-Jones had made a visit to London, where at a monthly meeting at the
Working Men's College he for the first time saw Rossetti, and later heard
him rend in pieces the opinions of those who differed with him, and
stoutly support his infrangible theory that all men should be painters.
How ready Burne-Jones was to yield himself to this potent influence, how
promptly Rossetti's vivid and original temperament acted upon his admirer,
is clear from the latter's description, written many years after, of the
first encounter--the young undergraduate sitting half-frightened,
embarrassed and worshipping, among strangers, eating thick bread and
butter, and listening to speeches about the progress of the college, until
the entrance of his idol, whose sensitive, gentle, indolent face, with its
flickering of humour and the fire of genius, entirely satisfied his poetic
imagination. The great qualities of Rossetti in those days revealed
themselves in his face, and his imperious will and keen intellect were no
less obvious in his talk. Burne-Jones returned to Oxford with the idea of
dedicating himself to art more than ever firmly fixed in his mind.
Rossetti had approved the drawings which he had brought to him for
consideration, and had pronounced the seven months still to elapse before
he could take his degree time too valuable to waste outside of art,
counselling him to fling the University and all its works behind him and
begin painting at once. With mingled delight and terror Burne-Jones, in
spite of small means and weak health, followed his leader, who, however
rash to advise, was not one to neglect his charge, and who worked loyally
to bring him through with triumph, criticising, teaching, approving,
encouraging without stint, and presently, after his own inimitable
fashion, bringing patrons to him, bidding them buy, which obediently they
did.
It was inevitable that Morris should be stirred to emulation by this step
on the part of his friend. After Burne-Jones went to London to begin
painting under Rossetti's direction, Morris spent nearly all his Sundays
with him at his lodgings in Chelsea. These holidays were full of
excitement. It was a glorious little world that opened out under
Rossetti's enthusiastic, dogmatic, and continuous talk and argument.
Morris was deeply impressed by his notion that everyone should be a
painter, and after Street moved his office to London and Morris and
Burne-Jones took lodgings together, the former tried the characteristic
experiment of combining painting with architecture, attempting to get six
hours a day at his drawing in addition to his office work. It is
interesting to find him writing at this juncture that he cannot enter into
politico-social subjects with any interest, that things are in a muddle
and that he has no power to set them right in the smallest degree, that
_his_ work is the embodiment of dreams in one form or another. What
Rossetti thought of his two disciples is seen in a letter written by him
to William Allingham in December, 1856, when Morris had been nearly a year
with Street. He found both "wonders after their kind." "Jones is doing
designs which quite put one to shame," he wrote, "so full are they of
everything--Aurora Leighs of art. He will take the lead in no time."
Morris he deemed "one of the finest little fellows alive--with a touch of
the incoherent, but a real man," and "in all illumination and work of
that kind" he considered him quite unrivalled by anything modern that he
knew. With a guide thus confident and inspiring, it is not strange that
Morris presently yielded to the spell, and renounced architecture to
pursue painting as an end and aim in itself, although, like the hero of
his romance, he learned with much pain and grief.
[Illustration: ILLUSTRATION BY ROSSETTI TO "THE LADY OF SHALOTT" IN THE
MOXON "TENNYSON." THE HEAD OF LAUNCELOT IS A PORTRAIT OF MORRIS]
Rossetti's service to Morris is difficult to estimate. For a brief period
his influence over him was supreme. Perhaps in the work and temper of this
Italian, Morris saw more deeply into the heart of the mediaeval world than
all his churches and illuminated manuscripts could help him to see. At all
events, he was for the time close to genius and dominated by it. His
devotion to his master partook of the violence inseparable from his
temperament. He was soon ready to say, when Burne-Jones complained that he
worked better in Rossetti's manner than in his own: "I have got beyond
that; I want to imitate Gabriel as much as I can." But he was never to be
for very long under any personal influence. Nor could he be persuaded by
the most brilliant eloquence in the world that good could be got out of
doing what he did not enjoy; and he never enjoyed any labour that required
long patience and persistent concentration of effort. Without being
fickle, his mind was so restless as to produce the effect of fickleness
and to preclude the possibility of his doing really great work. While he
was trying, under Rossetti's stimulating but peremptory rule, to master a
painter's methods he became gloomy and despondent. "How long Rossetti's
daily influence might have kept him labouring at what he could not do,"
writes Mr. Mackail with a tinge of bitterness, "when there was work all
round that he could do, on the whole, better than any man living, it is
needless to inquire." But that Rossetti did manage to keep him for a
couple of years at the study of painting cannot be counted a misfortune.
Probably that experience, together with his brief term under Street, did
as much as anything to save his design from mediocrity and imitativeness.
He did not make himself an architect, and he never learned to draw
anything that remotely resembled the actual structure of the human form,
but he must have gained through his study some knowledge of the inviolable
laws of art that he could not have gained by passive observation however
keen, or by sympathy however ardent. Rossetti can hardly have been the
best master for him. His own nature was too undisciplined, and he had as
few of the academic virtues as any man on record of the same technical
ability. But his was the supreme faculty of rousing enthusiasm. It may be
doubted whether any other painter in England could have kept Morris at the
appointed and impossible task for so long a time. It is easy to imagine
how the impatient spirit of the latter rebelled against the slow process
of learning to draw the human figure in its complicated and subtle beauty
of construction and surface. The fact that he stopped so far short of
satisfactory accomplishment seems to account for many of the defects to be
found in his later designs, which at their best were never to be entirely
beautiful, though full of zest and freedom. His tendency to drop any
branch of his work as soon as it became tedious to him, to turn to
something else, kept his creative impulse continually fresh and effective;
but kept him also from achieving the penetrating distinction of artistic
self-possession. Whatever helped him in any degree toward this
self-possession, whatever he got in the way of discipline of mind and
hand, should be acknowledged by his admirers with gratitude, and it is but
just to recognise in Rossetti the one man who seems to have kept the
prodigious impetuosity of Morris down without promptly losing hold upon
his interest. Add to this the clear vision of a romantic ideal which all
who worked with Rossetti were privileged to share, and the constant
inspiration of the drama of sentiment and emotion rendered in his colour
and line and in his exotic treatment of form, and we must own that nowhere
else could Morris have found such food for an imagination already
quickened by influences reaching it from a remote time and an alien world.
Nowhere else could he have come so close to the concealed mysteries of the
human soul, despite the disillusionment he was bound to feel in daily
contact with a character as contradictory as it was compelling.