FROM ROSSETTI TO THE RED HOUSE.
Although a blight of discouragement seems to have fallen upon Morris under
Rossetti's tuition, there were some blithe compensations. Not the least of
these was the fitting up of the rooms at 17 Red Lion Square where he and
Burne-Jones took quarters. "Topsy and I live together," wrote Burne-Jones,
"in the quaintest room in all London, hung with brasses of old knights and
drawings of Albert Duerer." For the furniture, Morris, who, Rossetti said,
was "bent on doing the magnificent," made designs to be carried out in
deal by a carpenter of the neighbourhood. Everything was very large and
heavy, intensely mediaeval, and doubtless rather ugly in an honest fashion,
but in the end it was furniture to be coveted, for it offered great spaces
for decoration, and Rossetti as well as Morris and Burne-Jones painted on
it subjects from Chaucer and Dante and the Arthurian stories. The panels
of a cupboard glowed with Rossetti's beautiful pictures representing Dante
and Beatrice meeting in Florence and meeting in Paradise, and on the wide
backs of the chairs he painted scenes from some of the poems Morris had
written. The wardrobe was decorated by Burne-Jones with paintings from
_The Prioress's Tale_. On the walls of the room were hung, no doubt, the
several water-colours bought from Rossetti, to the lovely names of which
Morris promptly wrote ballads. An owl was co-tenant with the young
artists, and they were served and also criticised by a housemaid of
literary ambitions. In this highly individual apartment, where, curiously
enough, Rossetti and his friend Deverell had had their studio together
five or six years before, life was not all labour and striving. There
were, moreover, holidays spent at the Zooelogical Gardens, evenings at the
theatre, night-long sessions in Rossetti's rooms, and excursions on the
Thames. One of the latter is vividly described in Dr. Birkbeck Hill's
_Letters of Gabriel Rossetti to William Allingham_, giving a joyous
picture of Morris at the mercy of his ungovernable temper. The party,
consisting of Hill, Morris, and Faulkner, had started out to row down the
Thames from Oxford to a London suburb. By the time they had reached Henley
they had spent all their money except enough for Faulkner's return ticket
to Oxford, where he was to attend a college meeting. For this he departed,
promising to bring back a supply of money in the evening. "The weather was
unusually hot," writes Dr. Hill, "Morris and I sauntered along the
river-side. I have not forgotten the longing glances he cast on a large
basket of strawberries. He had always been so plentifully supplied with
money that he bore with far greater impatience than I did this privation.
At last the shadows had grown long and the heat was more bearable. We went
with light hearts to the railway station to meet our comrade. 'Well,
Faulkner,' cried out Morris, cheerfully, 'how much money have you
brought?' Our friend gave a start. 'Good heavens,' he replied, 'I forgot
all about it.' Morris thrust both his hands into his long dark curly hair,
tugged at it wildly, ground his teeth, swore like a trooper, and stamped
up and down the platform--in fact, behaved just like Sinbad's captain when
he found that his ship was driving upon the rocks. His outbursts of rage,
I hasten to say, were always harmless. They left no sullenness behind, and
as each rapidly passed away he was ready to join in a hearty laugh at it.
Faulkner, who was not the most patient of men, noticed that passengers,
station-master, porters, engine-driver, and stoker were all gazing in
astonishment. He, too, lost his temper, and, though in a far lower key,
stormed back. Morris soon quieted down, and a council of war was held. He
fortunately had a gold watch-chain on which he raised enough to pay all
needful expenses. I remember well how the rest of our journey we rowed by
many a tavern on the bank as effectually constrained as ever was Ulysses
not to listen to its siren call. It was through no earthly paradise that
the young poet and artist passed on the afternoon of our last day." When
they landed they had just a penny among them, and were still some six or
seven miles from their destination, so they were obliged to hire a cab and
trust to good fortune for not coming to a turnpike gate before arriving at
Red Lion Square.
About this time also Rossetti and Morris made an excursion to Oxford for
the purpose of visiting Benjamin Woodward, the architect and Rossetti's
friend. Mr. Woodward had recently erected a building for the Oxford Union,
a society composed of past and present members of the University. In
exhibiting the building to Rossetti it was suggested that the blank
stretch of wall which ran around the top of the Debating Room afforded an
admirable opportunity for decoration, and Rossetti with prompt enthusiasm
evolved a plan for a cooeperative enterprise. He and Morris, with several
other willing spirits,--Burne-Jones, of course, Arthur Hughes, Valentine
Prinsep, Spencer Stanhope, and J. Hungerford Pollen,--were to go up to
Oxford in a body. Each was to choose a subject from the _Morte d'Arthur_,
and execute it to the best of his ability on the walls of the Debating
Room. The whole affair was to be a matter of a few weeks. The artists
offered their services for nothing; their expenses (which turned out to be
as free as their offer) were to be paid by the Union. It is easy to
imagine the ensuing bustle and ardour. Rossetti eagerly managing, Morris
delighted with the charmingly mediaeval situation,--a few humble painters
working together piously, without hope of glory or thought of gain,--the
others following their leader with lamb-like docility. Had their knowledge
of methods been equal to their zeal, the walls of the Debating Room must
have become the loveliest of realised visions and the delight of many
generations. The young workmen sat for each other, Morris, Burne-Jones,
and Rossetti all possessing fine paintable heads. They clambered up and
down endless ladders to gain a satisfactory view of their performance, and
attacked the most stupendous difficulties with patience and ingenuity. The
faces in the subject undertaken by Burne-Jones were painted, for example,
in three planes at right angles to one another, owing to the projection of
a string-course of bricks straight across the space to be filled by the
heads of the figures. Some studies by Rossetti have been preserved, and
show that his part at least of the decoration was conceived in a fresh
poetic spirit, with fulness and quaintness of expression and suggestion.
But the congenial band had entered upon their labours with a carelessness
that can only be described as wanton. Not one of them knew how to paint in
tempera, and the new damp walls were smeared over with a thin coat of
white lime wash laid upon the bare bricks as sole preparation for a sort
of water-colour painting that blossomed like a flower under the gifted
hands of the artists, and faded almost as soon away. The effect at the
time was so brilliant as to make the walls, according to Mr. Coventry
Patmore's contemporaneous testimony, "look like the margin of an
illuminated manuscript," but in the course of a few months the colours had
sunk into the sponge-like surface to such an extent that the designs were
already dim and indistinguishable.
Morris, with characteristic promptness, was the first on the field, and
his picture was finished in advance of any of the others. He was, however,
no better instructed than his companions in the special requirements of
his material, and presently all that was left of his painting was the head
of his brave knight peering over the tops of multitudinous sunflowers. The
decoration of the ceiling was also assigned to him, and he made his design
for it in a single day. Later, in 1875, he repainted it, but most of the
art of this merry period has receded into complete oblivion. The stay in
Oxford lengthened into months as complications increased, and finally the
enterprise was abandoned with the work unfinished. It had led, however, to
an event of paramount importance to Morris, and of considerable importance
to Rossetti--the meeting with Miss Burden, who was to figure in so many of
Rossetti's symbolic pictures, and who became the wife of Morris. Her
remarkable beauty had attracted the attention of the young men one night
at the little Oxford theatre. "My brother was the first to observe her,"
writes William Rossetti; "her face was at once tragic, mystic, passionate,
calm, beautiful, and gracious--a face for a sculptor and a face for a
painter--a face solitary in England, and not at all like that of an
English woman, but rather of an Ionian Greek." In Rossetti's portrait of
her at eighteen, painted shortly after this meeting, we see the grave,
unusual features almost precisely as they are drawn with words in a poem
by Morris, entitled _Praise of My Lady_, which Mr. Mackail says was
written during a visit to the Manchester Exhibition of 1857, but which
assuredly is no earlier than the date of his acquaintance with Jane
Burden. The description, Pre-Raphaelite in its detail, runs through the
first half of the poem:
My Lady seems of ivory
Forehead, straight nose, and cheeks that be
Hollow'd a little mournfully.
Beata mea Domina!
Her forehead, overshadow'd much
By bows of hair, has a wave such
As God was good to make for me.
Beata mea Domina!
Not greatly long my lady's hair,
Nor yet with yellow color fair,
But thick and crisped wonderfully;
Beata mea Domina!
Heavy to make the pale face sad,
And dark, but dead as though it had
Been forged by God most wonderfully;
Beata mea Domina!
Of some strange metal, thread by thread,
To stand out from my lady's head,
Not moving much to tangle me.
Beata mea Domina!
Beneath her brows the lids fall slow,
The lashes a clear shadow throw
Where I would wish my lips to be.
Beata mea Domina!
Her great eyes, standing far apart,
Draw up some memory from her heart,
And gaze out very mournfully;
Beata mea Domina!
So beautiful and kind they are,
But most times looking out afar,
Waiting for something, not for me.
Beata mea Domina!
I wonder if the lashes long
Are those that do her bright eyes wrong,
For always half tears seem to be.
Beata mea Domina!
Lurking below the underlid,
Darkening the place where they lie hid--
If they should rise and flow for me!
Beata mea Domina!
Her full lips being made to kiss,
Curl'd up and pensive each one is;
This makes me faint to stand and see.
Beata mea Domina!
It was the force of this attraction that kept Morris long at Oxford after
Rossetti and Burne-Jones had returned to London, leaving the walls of the
Oxford Union to their sad fate. But it was no love in idleness for him,
rather a time of many beginnings. He was carving in stone, modelling in
clay, making designs for stained glass windows, even "doing worsted
work," in Rossetti's contemptuous phrase for his efforts at reviving the
lost art of embroidery, with a frame made from an old model and wools dyed
especially for him. Most of all he was writing poetry, the proper
occupation of a lover so aesthetically endowed. Early in 1858 he had _The
Defence of Guenevere_, a collection of thirty poems, ready to bring out.
Save for a slim little pamphlet entitled _Sir Galahad: A Christmas
Mystery_, the contents of which were included in it, it was his first
volume and, like Swinburne's _Rosamond_ published two years later, it was
dedicated to Rossetti.
In this youthful, fantastic, emotional poetry we get the very essence of
the writer's early spirit without the strange shadow of foreboding, the
constant sense of swiftly passing time, that comes into the poetry of his
maturity. Technically, the poems could hardly be more picturesquely
defective than they are. The one giving the volume its name is nearly
unintelligible in parts, even when the reader is aware of the incidents of
Guenevere's story, and prepared to interpret the hysterical ravings of a
woman overcome by sorrow, shame, and love.
But no poems, except Rossetti's own, have so suggested romantic art in
strange shapes and unbridled colour. They, too, like the wall-paintings of
that early and unrivalled time, resemble the margins of an illuminated
manuscript, reminding one of nothing in nature, but flashing the richness
of mediaeval symbolism upon the imagination in more or less awkward forms.
If Morris could not "imitate Gabriel" in his pictures, he could at least
imitate Gabriel's pictures in his poems. From the _Beata Beatrix_, from
the _Ghirlandata_, from the _Proserpine_, from almost any of Rossetti's
paintings of women, these curious and affected lines, for example, might
have been gleaned:
See through my long throat how the words go up
In ripples to my mouth; how in my hand
The shadow lies like wine within a cup
Of marvellously colour'd gold.
In _The Eve of Crecy_ we have the glitter of gold and the splendour of
material things, rendered with a childish abandon, as in the prose
romances:
Gold on her head and gold on her feet,
And gold where the hems of her kirtle meet,
And a golden girdle round my sweet;--
Ah! qu'elle est belle, La Marguerite.
Yet even now it is good to think
* * * * *
Of Margaret sitting glorious there,
In glory of gold and glory of hair,
And glory of glorious face most fair;
Ah! qu'elle est belle, La Marguerite.
The full hues that had for the decorators of mediaeval missals a religious
significance recur again and again in lines that have much more to do with
earth than with heaven, and show less concern with the human soul than
with the human heart. Damozels hold scarlet lilies such as Maiden
Margaret bears "on the great church walls;" ladies walk in their gardens
clad in white and scarlet; the vision of Christ appears to Galahad "with
raiment half blood-red, half white as snow"; angels appear clad in white
with scarlet wings; scarlet is the predominating colour throughout, if we
except gold, which serves as background and ornament to everything. Next
to scarlet comes green, which Morris was later to call "the workaday
colour," and we find occasional patches of blue and of grey in painted
boats and in hangings. The following stanza shows a favourite method of
emphasising the prevailing colour of a poem:
The water slips,
The red-bill'd heron dips,
Sweet kisses on red lips,
Alas! the red rust grips,
And the blood-red dagger rips,
Yet, O knight, come to me!
For pure incoherence, the quality that Rossetti discerned in Morris at
their first meeting, the song from which this stanza is taken is
unsurpassed. Yet an emotional effect is gained in it. What we chiefly miss
in the little craft sailing under such vivid colours, is that
"deep-grasping keel of reason" which, Lowell says, "alone can steady and
give direction" to verse. Excitable and impatient, in pursuit of a vague
ideal, gifted with the power to bring out the pictorial quality of
detached scenes, but without a fine metrical sense, and averse to lucid
statement, the young poet introduced himself to the world as a symbolist
in the modern acceptation of the word. One of his poems, _Rapunzel_, has
been said to forecast Maeterlinck's manner and spirit, and the general
characteristics of the poem--a fairy tale somewhat too "grown-up" in
treatment--certainly suggest the comparison. In all this work physical
characteristics play an important part. Long hands with "tenderly shadowed
fingers," "long lips" that "cleave" to the fingers they kiss, lips "damp
with tears," that "shudder with a kiss," lips "like a curved sword," warm
arms, long, fair arms, lithe arms, twining arms, broad fair eyelids, long
necks, and unlimited hair, form an equipment somewhat dangerous for a poet
with anything short of genius to sustain him. For themes Morris had gone
chiefly to the Arthurian stories and to the chronicles of Froissart. His
style, he himself thought, was more like Browning's than anyone else's,
though the difference that lay between him and Browning even at the
beginning forbade any essential likeness. Browning's effort was always to
render an idea which was perfectly clear in his own mind. His volubility
and obscurity and roughness frequently arose from his over-eagerness to
express his idea in a variety of ways, leading him to break off with half
statements and begin afresh, to throw out imperfect suggestions and follow
them with others equally imperfect. But all his stutterings and broken
sentences failed to disguise the fact that an intellectual conception
underlay the turbulent method, giving substance and life to the poem
however much it might lack grace and form. With Morris the intellectual
conception was as weak as with Browning it was strong, and apparently
existed chiefly to give an excuse for the pictures following one another
in rapid succession through every poem, short or long, dramatic or lyric,
of both his youth and maturity. In this early volume there was, to be
sure, an obvious effort toward rendering psychological effects. Most of
the longer poems are miniature dramas with a march toward some great event
in the lives of the actors. The author observes the dramatic requirement
of sinking himself in the identity of his characters. Knights are slain
and ladies die of love and witch-bound maidens are rescued by their
princes without the sounding of a personal note on the part of their
creator. And in two instances, _Sir Peter Harpdon's End_ and _The Haystack
in the Floods_, there is ruddy human blood in the tortured beings whose
extremity moves the reader with a genuine emotion. In these two poems the
voice might indeed be the voice of Browning, though the hand is still
unmistakably the hand of Morris. In the main, however, the appeal that is
made is to the imagination concerned with the visible aspect of
brilliantly coloured objects and with the delirious expression of
overwrought feelings.
[Illustration: _Portrait of Jane Burden (Mrs. Morris)_
_By Rossetti_]
One defect, calculated to interfere with a warm reception of the volume on
the part of the general public, Morris shared with Browning, possessing
even more than Browning the merit attending it. Familiarity with the
art and literature of the Middle Ages made it natural for him to preserve
the thin new wine of his youthful poetry in the old bottles of the defunct
past, using motives and scenes and accessories alien to our modern life,
and only dimly understood by the modern reader. The true spirit of that
past it is hardly necessary to say he did not revive,--no writer has ever
revived the true spirit of any age antecedent to his own,--and Morris,
with his remarkable faculty for eliminating from his mental conceptions
whatever did not please his taste, was wholly unfitted by temperament,
however well fitted by his acquirements, to carry through successfully a
task so tremendous.
_The Defence of Guenevere_ was received by the public without enthusiasm.
About half an edition of five hundred copies was sold and given away, and
the remainder lingered for a dozen years or more until the publication of
_The Earthly Paradise_ stimulated the interest of readers in the previous
work of its author.
Whatever disappointment Morris may have felt must soon have given way to
the excitement of the plunge he now made into a new life and the most
intense personal interests. On the twenty-sixth of April, 1859, he was
married to Jane Burden, and after a brief interval of travel he began to
build the beautiful house which he then supposed would be his home for the
rest of his days.
His personal attractiveness at this time was keenly felt by his
companions. He had been "making himself," as the phrase is, since his
childhood, and if Stevenson's dictum--to know what you like is the
beginning of wisdom and of old age--be applied to him he can never have
been wholly ignorant or a child. Knowledge of what he liked, and even more
definitely of what he did not like, was his earliest as well as his most
notable acquirement. But he was a boy, too, in his excessive restless
vitality, and hitherto with all his enthusiasms he had been a somewhat
cold boy. Just now he was beginning to "take a fancy for the human," as
one of his friends put it. He was connecting his vague schemes and
ambitions with a personal and practical enterprise. His ideals dropped
from a region always too rare for them to an atmosphere of activities and
interests in which the vast general public could breathe as easily as he.
In building his new home to his fancy he was unconsciously laying the
corner-stones of the many homes throughout England into which his
influence was afterward to enter. He was just twenty-five, filled with
energy, generous impulse, honesty, and kindness. The bourgeois touch which
his biographer declares was inherent in his nature was far from obvious as
yet. Society for its own sake he liked little, and was not above getting
out of unwelcome invitations by subterfuge, if fair means would not avail.
He affected a Bohemian carelessness in dress, and his hair was uniformly
wild. His language was generally forcible, often violent, always
expressive. He lived in the company of his intimates and cared for nothing
beyond the range of his fixed interests. The remark made long after--"Do
you suppose that I should see anything in Rome that I can't see in
Whitechapel?"--was perfectly indicative of his mood toward everything that
failed to arouse his intellectual curiosity. But the places and things
that did arouse it were never tawdry or valueless, and his reasons for
caring for them, of which he was always remarkably prolific, were such as
appeal strongly to the mind in which homely associations hold a constant
place. It must be an out and out classicist who fails to detect in himself
a pulsation of sympathy in response to the wail which Morris once sent
home from Verona: "Yes, and even in these magnificent and wonderful towns
I long rather for the heap of grey stones with a grey roof that we call a
house north-away."
[Illustration: "ACANTHUS" WALL-PAPER, "PIMPERNEL" WALL-PAPER, "AFRICAN
MARIGOLD" COTTON-PRINT
WALL-PAPER AND COTTON-PRINT DESIGNS
(_Reproduced from examples obtained by courtesy of Mr. A. E. Bulkley_)]
His first house, in which he took unlimited delight, was not, however, a
heap of grey stones, but a structure of brick, its name, the Red House,
indicating its striking and then unusual colour. Its architect was Philip
Webb, who had been an associate of Morris during the brief period passed
in Mr. Street's office. Situated not far from London, on the outskirts of
the village of Upton and in the midst of a pleasant orchard, whose trees
dropped their fruit into its windows, the Red House wore an emphatically
Gothic aspect. It was L-shaped, with numerous irregularities of plan, and
entirely without frippery of applied ornament. Its great sloping roof, the
pointed arches of its doorways, the deep simple porches, the large hall,
with its long table in place of an entrance alley the open-timbered roof
over the staircase, the panelled screen dividing the great hall from a
lesser one,--all these were characteristic of the old English house before
the day of Italian invasion, while the mobile Gothic style, adapting
itself readily to individual needs, prevailed. It stood among the old and
gnarled trees, only two stories in height, but with an effect of rambling
spaciousness and hospitality, and the garden that lay close to it was as
individual and old-fashioned as itself. Morris prided himself, Mr. Mackail
tells us, on his knowledge of gardening, and his advice to the Birmingham
Society of Artists in one of the lectures of his later years shows how
thoughtfully he considered the subject. As he always acted so far as he
could upon his theories, we may be fairly sure that the Red House garden
was planned in conformity with the ideal place sketched in this lecture,
and may assume in it a profusion of single flowers mixed to avoid great
masses of colour, among them the old columbine, where the clustering doves
are unmistakable and distinct, the old china aster, the single snowdrop,
and the sunflower, these planted in little squares, divided from each
other by grassy walks, and hedged in by wild rose or sweet-briar
trellises. We may be sure the place contained no curiosities from the
jungle or tropical waste, that everything was excluded which was not
native to the English soil, and that ferns and brakes from the woodland
were not enticed from the place of their origin to take away the
characteristic domestic look of a spot that ought to seem "like a part of
the house." "It will be a key to right thinking about gardens," says
Morris, "if you consider in what kind of places a garden is most desired.
In a very beautiful country, especially if it be mountainous, we can do
without it well enough, whereas in a flat and dull country we crave after
it, and there it is often the very making of the homestead; while in great
towns, gardens both private and public are positive necessities if the
citizens are to live reasonable and healthy lives in body and mind."
Passing from this first necessity of reasonable and healthy living through
the rose-masked doorway into the Red House itself, we find it equally
suggestive of its master's personal tastes and beliefs. For everything
Morris had his persuasive reason. His windows had small leaded panes of
glass, because the large windows found "in most decent houses or what are
so called," let in a flood of light "in a haphazard and ill-considered
way," which the indwellers are "forced to obscure again by shutters,
blinds, curtains, screens, heavy upholsteries, and such other nuisances."
By all means, therefore, fill the window with moderate-sized panes of
glass set in solid sash bars--"we shall then at all events feel as if we
were indoors on a cold day"--as if we had a roof over our heads. The fact
that small windows were used in mediaeval times and must therefore of
necessity be superior is not brought forward in this argument, and the
charm of the reasoning is not marred by any reminder of the actual
conditions of which small heavily leaded windows are a survival--such as
the fortress style of building belonging to a warlike time, and the great
costliness of glass, and the inability to support large panes by leads.
Morris could always be trusted to support his fundamental liking for a
thing by a host of assurances as to its sensible merits and practical
advantages, but the mere fact that he liked it was quite sufficient for
his own satisfaction of mind. When one of his comrades once suggested to
him that personal feeling ought not to count for too much, and that not
liking a thing did not make it bad, he replied: "Oh, don't it though! What
we don't like _is_ bad." And he had a fashion which must have produced an
irritating effect upon some of his hearers, of declaring that the people
who did not hold his ideas must be unhealthy either in body or mind or
both. Certainly the aspect of the Red House suggested health within its
walls. With a slight stretch of imagination one could argue from its
furnishings that its master was a northerner, a middle-class man, the
admirer of a rough age, a sturdy art, a plain habit of life; that he was a
worker whose dreams tormented him to speedy and vigorous action, a
creature whose vitality was too great even for his strong frame and
physical power. He liked a massive chair, and well he might, for one of
his amusements was to twist his legs about it in such a way that a lightly
built affair must instantly succumb. He liked a floor that he could stamp
on with impunity; he liked a table on which he could pound with his fists
without danger to its equilibrium. In the Red House these requirements
were fully met. In the lecture called _The Beauty of Life_ is an account
of the fittings "necessary to the sitting-room of a healthy person."
Beside the table that will "keep steady when you work upon it," and the
chairs "that you can move about," the good floor, and the small carpet
"which can be bundled out of the room in two minutes," there must be "a
bookcase with a great many books in it," a bench "that you can sit or lie
upon," a cupboard with drawers, and, "unless either the bookcase or the
cupboard be very beautiful with painting or carving," pictures or
engravings on the wall, "or else the wall itself must be ornamented with
some beautiful and restful pattern," then a vase or two, and fireplaces as
unlike as possible to "the modern mean, miserable, and showy affairs,
plastered about with wretched sham ornament, trumpery of cast iron, and
brass and polished steel, and what not--offensive to look at and a
nuisance to clean." To these necessaries, "unless we are musical and need
a piano, in which case as far as beauty is concerned we are in a bad way,"
we can add very little without "troubling ourselves, and hindering our
work, our thought, and our rest."
In accordance with these opinions, but with a fulness and richness of
ornament not suggested by the simplicity of their expression, the pleasant
building at Upton gradually took on great beauty and individuality. The
walls were hung with embroidered fabrics worked by Mrs. Morris and her
friends, or painted by Burne-Jones, who, undeterred by the Oxford episode,
started an elaborate series of mural decorations in illustration of the
wonderful adventures of Sire Degravant, the hero of an ancient romance.
Another series of scenes from the War of Troy was started for the walls of
the staircase, and although both schemes were abandoned, enough was done
to give an effect of splendour to the rooms. Up to the large drawing-room
came the ponderous and mighty settle which had cost so many expletives in
the course of its adjustment to the old room in Red Lion Square, and which
was now embellished by a balcony at the top to which a stairway led up.
All minor accessories were thoughtfully considered and for the most part
designed by Morris or by friends pressed into service at his eager demand.
He found little to content him in the articles of commerce on sale at the
orthodox shops in the early sixties. "In looking at an old house," he says
in one of his books, "we please ourselves by thinking of all the
generations of men that have passed through it, remembering how it has
received their joy and borne their sorrow and not even their folly has
left sourness on it; and in looking at a new house if built as it
should be, we feel a pleasure in thinking how he who built it has left a
piece of his soul behind him to greet the newcomers one after another,
long after he is gone." Such an impress he left upon the Red House, so
that no one passing it or even hearing of it can fail to think of it as
belonging to William Morris, whoever may have the fortune to live in it
hereafter, and fall heir to the associations with which he invested it.
[Illustration: "THE STRAWBERRY THIEF" DESIGN FOR COTTON PRINT]
During the time of building and furnishing he was exuberantly happy and
wholly in his element. Turning constantly from one thing to another, yet
keeping along the line of his united interests, giving his magnificent
energy free scope in doing and accomplishing, seeing grow into visible
form the theories and tastes so dear to his heart, letting out his
enthusiasms and carrying others along on their current, setting a
practical example in what he believed to be of the deepest importance by
requiring for himself artistic handicraft, acting out a vigorous protest
against the mechanical arts and the shams of the commercial world,--all
this was meat and drink to him, and out of it grew an enterprise
representing what to the public has been probably the most valuable side
of his many-sided career, the establishment of a firm engaged in various
forms of decorative art. At about this time he adopted, after the fashion
of the master-workman of the Middle Ages, a device or legend expressive in
one way or another of his aim. He chose the one used by Van Eyck, "Als
ich kanne,"--if I can,--and distributed it in French translation and in
English over his house, on windows and tiles and in tapestry hangings. The
modesty of the words was no doubt as sincere in his case as in the case of
the old Flemish painter who excelled all his contemporaries, but the
extent to which he could and did in the new business on which he was about
to enter has been the wonder of his followers.