MORRIS AND COMPANY.
The formation of the firm of "Morris, Marshall, Faulkner, & Company," as
it was first called, appears to have been highly incidental in character,
despite the assertion of Morris himself in a letter to his old tutor, that
he had long meant to be a decorator, and to that end mainly had built his
fine house. "One evening a lot of us were together," says Rossetti, in the
account given by Mr. Watts-Dunton, "and we got to 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 someone 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."
In the mind of Morris it doubtless promised to be the sort of association
about which he was constantly dreaming; a group of intelligent craftsmen
interested in making the details of daily life as full as possible of
beauty, each man fitted to his task and loving it, each in his way a
master-workman of the guild, counting his craft honourable and spending
his best thought and labour on it. There was ground enough for faith in
the artistic if not in the commercial outcome of the enterprise. The
associates, beside Morris, Rossetti, and Burne-Jones, were Madox-Brown,
then an artist of established reputation, Webb, the architect of the Red
House, who was also a designer of furniture and ornament; Peter Paul
Marshall, to whom Mr. William Rossetti ascribes the first suggestion of
the formation of the firm, a "capable artist" although an amateur; and
Charles Faulkner of the Oxford group, who had followed his mates to London
unable to endure the loneliness of Oxford without them. They proposed to
open what Rossetti called "an actual shop," and sell whatever their united
talent produced. "We are not intending to compete with ----'s costly
rubbish or anything of that sort," Rossetti wrote to his friend Allingham,
"but to give real good taste at the price as far as possible of ordinary
furniture."
[Illustration: TULIP DESIGN FOR AXMINSTER CARPET]
In the Spring of 1861, premises were taken over a jeweller's shop at 8 Red
Lion Square. Two floors and a part of the basement were used by the firm,
and about a dozen men and boys were presently employed. There were regular
weekly meetings carried on with the boisterousness of youth and high
spirits, but with thorough efficiency, nevertheless, where plans that were
to modify and influence the household decoration of all England were gaily
formed and put into practice.
The prospectus, in which Mr. Mackail discerns Rossetti's "slashing hand
and imperious accent," was not entirely calculated to mollify rival
decorators, calling attention to the fact that attempts at decorative art
up to that time had been crude and fragmentary, and emphasising the want
of some one place where work of "a genuine and beautiful character could
be obtained." The new firm pledged itself to execute in a business-like
manner:
"I. Mural Decoration, either in Pictures or in Pattern Work, or merely in
the arrangement of Colours, as applied to dwelling-houses, churches, or
public buildings.
"II. Carving generally, as applied to Architecture.
"III. Stained Glass, especially with reference to its harmony with Mural
Decoration.
"IV. Metal Work in all its branches, including jewellery.
"V. Furniture, either depending for its beauty on its own design, on the
application of materials hitherto overlooked, or on its conjunction with
Figure and Pattern Painting. Under this head is included Embroidery of all
kinds, Stamped Leather, and ornamental work in other such materials,
besides every article necessary for domestic use."
Clearly this was not the usual thing, nor was the business conducted in
the usual way. According to Mr. William Rossetti, the young reformers
adopted a tone of "something very like dictatorial irony" toward their
customers, permitting no compromise, and laying down the law without
concession to individual taste or want of taste. You could have things
such as the firm chose them to be or you could go without them.
The finance of the company began, Mr. Mackail says, with a call of one
pound per share and a loan of a hundred pounds from Mrs. Morris of Leyton.
In 1862 a further call of nineteen pounds a share was made on the
partners, raising the paid-up capital to one hundred and forty pounds,
which "was never increased until the dissolution of the firm in 1874." A
few hundred pounds additional were loaned by Morris and his mother. Each
piece of work contributed by any member of the firm was paid for at the
time, and Morris as general manager received a salary of a hundred and
fifty pounds a year.
[Illustration: PEACOCK DESIGN FOR COARSE WOOL HANGINGS]
It is obvious that with this slender financial basis the business required
the utmost energy, industry, skill, and talent to keep it from being
promptly wrecked on the very uncertain coast of public opinion. During
the first year all the members of the firm were active, although even at
the first Morris led the rest. A stimulus was provided by the
International Exhibition of 1862, whither they sent examples of their
work, at the cost, wrote Faulkner, of "more tribulation and swearing to
Topsy than three exhibitions will be worth." The exhibits attracted
attention, and were awarded medals, in the case of the stained glass, "for
artistic qualities of colour and design," and in the case of the
furniture, hangings, and so forth, for the "closeness with which the style
of the Middle Ages was rendered." It happened that the chief work in
stained glass in the exhibit of the firm consisted of a set of windows
designed by Rossetti, and giving, according to a Belgian critic, "an
impression of colour, dazzling and magnificent, velvety and harmonious,
resembling the Flemish stained glass windows decorating the Gothic
cathedrals." Thus, fortunately, the first appearance of the firm was
distinguished by the splendour which Rossetti alone among the group of
workers could achieve, but his interest and activity shortly flagged and
were absorbed in his individual work outside the company.
At first, despite the lordly prospectus, there were occasional blunders.
Dr. Birkbeck Hill tells of a study table and an arm-chair, neither one of
which was so thorough a piece of workmanship as the firm would have turned
out later on, and Mr. Hughes remembers a sofa with a long bar beneath
projecting six inches at each end so that it tripped up anyone who
hastily went round it. These, however, were blunders of a kind soon
remedied by experience. So long as the associates kept up their enthusiasm
there were among them ample skill to grapple with technicalities, and
ample artistic faculty to defy all ordinary competition. Whoever dropped
behind from time to time in this most essential quality of enthusiasm it
was never Morris, and all accounts agree in attributing to his energy and
industry and unutterable zest the success of the novel and interesting
experiment. "He is the only man I have known," said Rossetti once, "who
beats every other man at his own game." The men he had to beat at this
game of decoration were for the most part unworthy foes. Decorative art
was at a low ebb in the early Victorian age, the age of antimacassars,
stucco, and veneer. From this cheap vulgarity and pretentiousness Morris
turned back--as he was wont to do on every occasion that offered
excuse--to the thirteenth century as the purest fount of English
tradition, where, if anywhere, could be found models showing logical
principles of construction and genuine workmanship. His companions either
caught from him the infection of the mediaeval attitude or were already in
sympathy with it, and the work of the firm took on an emphatically Gothic
aspect from the beginning. How great or how important a part each member
played in the sum of the production is very difficult to estimate owing to
the cooeperative plan by which several artists frequently united in
executing one and the same piece of work. Sometimes Burne-Jones would
draw the figures, Webb the birds, and Morris the foliage for a piece of
drapery or wall-paper. Again portions of separate designs would be used
over and over in different combinations for different places. This free
cooeperation, this moving about within the limits of a general plan, suited
the restless spirit of Morris, and chimed also with his profound
admiration for the way in which the mediaeval works of art were brought
about, no one man standing high above the others or trying to preserve his
name and the fame of his performance. Working for the pleasure of the work
was of the very essence of his philosophy, and nothing could be more
unjust than the sneers from time to time launched at him because his
venture proved a commercial triumph. Perhaps it would be going too far to
say that money-getting was never in his mind, but there is no question
that it was never first in his mind, and never in the slightest degree
crowded his desire to put forth sincere, fine work, worth its price to the
last detail, and worthy of praise and liking without regard to its price.
There was not the slightest suggestion of pose or sham of any kind in his
thought when he wrote, as he often did, against the greed of gain and in
praise of the kind of labour that may be delighted in without regard to
pounds and pence. He could say quite faithfully that he shared the
humility of the early craftsmen, of whom he speaks with reverence.
"In most sober earnest," he says in one of his lectures, "when we hear it
said, as it often is said, that extra money payment is necessary under all
circumstances to produce great works of art, and that men of special
talent will not use those talents without being bribed by mere gross
material advantages, we, I say, shall know what to reply. We can appeal to
the witness of those lovely works still left to us, whose unknown, unnamed
creators were content to give them to the world, with little more extra
wages than what their pleasure in their work and their sense of usefulness
in it might bestow on them." There is no room for doubt that he approached
his work in precisely the spirit here described by him. He was willing to
exercise his faculties on the humblest undertakings, with no other aim
than to make a common thing pleasant to look upon and agreeable to use.
Half a century ago "craft" was not the fashionable word for the kind of
work with which the firm chiefly concerned itself, and in doing the
greater part of what he did Morris was merely writing himself down, in the
language of the general public, an artisan. Conforming to the truest of
principles he raised his work by getting under it. Nothing was too
laborious or too lowly for him. Pride of position was unknown to him in
any sense that would prevent him from indulging in manual labour. His real
pride lay in making something which he considered beautiful take the place
of something ugly in the world. If it were a fabric to be made lovely with
long disused or unfamiliar dyes, his hands were in the vat. If tapestry
were to be woven, he was at the loom by dawn. In his workman's blouse,
steeped in indigo, and with his hair outstanding wildly, he was in the
habit of presenting himself cheerfully at the houses of his friends,
relying upon his native dignity to save appearances, or, to speak more
truly, not thinking of appearances at all, but entirely happy in his role
of workman, though frankly desirous that the business should prosper
beyond all danger of the "smash" that would, he owned, "be a terrible
nuisance." "I have not time on my hands," he said, "to be ruined and get
really poor." It was to the peculiar union of the ideal and the practical
in his nature that his success in the fields on which he ventured is due.
[Illustration: PAINTED WALL DECORATION DESIGNED BY MORRIS]
It must be admitted, however, that while his soul and vigour found vent in
his designing and in the journeyman work--"delightful work, hard for the
body and easy for the mind"--at which he was so ready to lend a hand, his
artistic product lacked somewhat in the qualities that come from the
exercise of the higher intellectual gifts. It was more than an attempt to
revive old Gothic forms; it was an adoption of old forms with an infusion
of modern spirit; but it missed the native and personal character of work
growing out of contemporaneous conditions and tastes. Imaginative
craftsman as he was, Morris was never quite an artist in the strict sense
of the word. He had a fine sense of colour and, within certain limits, a
right feeling for pattern; but his invention was too exuberant for
repose, and he displayed in the greater part of his work an ornamental
luxuriance that destroyed dignity and simplicity of effect. He did not
like the restraints of art, and he seems to have been incapable of
entering the sphere of abstract thought in which the principles governing
great art are found. "No schools of art," he says with his superbly
inaccurate generalisation, "have ever been contented to use abstract lines
and forms and colours--that is, lines and so forth without any meaning."
Such ornament he deemed "outlandish." He wanted his patterns, especially
his wall-paper patterns, to remind people of pleasant scenes: "of the
close vine trellis that keeps out the sun by the Nile side; or of the wild
woods and their streams with the dogs panting beside them; or of the
swallows sweeping above the garden boughs toward the house eaves where
their nestlings are, while the sun breaks the clouds on them; or of the
many-flowered summer meadows of Picardy,"--all very charming things to
think about, but as really pertinent to wall-paper designing as the
pleasant memory of a hard road with a fast horse speeding over it would be
to the designing of a carpet. He preached the closest observation of
nature and the most delicate understanding of it before attempting
conventionalisation, but he did not hesitate to break all the laws of
nature in his designs when he happened to want to do so. He did not
hesitate, as Mr. Day has said, to make an acorn grow from two stalks or to
give a lily five petals. Fitness in ornament was one of his fundamental
principles, and he made his designs for the place in which they were to be
seen and with direct reference to the limitations of opportunities of that
place. It was never his way to turn a wall-paper loose on the market for
any chance purchaser. He must know, if possible, something of the walls to
which the design was to be applied and of the room in which it was to
live, and he then adapted his design to his idea of what was required.
This idea, however, was commonly much influenced by certain pre-conceived
theories. He believed, for example, that there should be a sense of
mystery in every pattern designed. This mystery he tried to get, not by
masking the geometrical structure upon which a recurring pattern must be
based, but by covering the ground equably and richly, so that the observer
may not "be able to read the whole thing at once." Thus many of his
designs are so over-elaborated as to give the effect of restlessness,
whereas "rest" was the word oftenest on his lips in connection with
domestic art. In common with most designers who derive their ideals from
mediaeval sources, he was less impressed by the tranquillity gained from
calm clean spaces, the measure, order, and stateliness brought about by
the simple relation of abstract lines, the repose of the rhythmical play
of mass in perfect proportion, undisturbed by decorative detail, than by
the charm of highly vitalised imagery. But though he erred on the side of
luxuriance--while preaching simplicity--he never allowed his design to
sink into vulgarity or petty picturesqueness. He might be intricate but he
was not vague. "Run any risk of failure rather than involve yourself in a
tangle of poor weak lines that people can't make out," he says. "Definite
form bounded by firm outline is a necessity for all ornament. You ought
always to go for positive patterns when they may be had." They might
always be had from him. And it is due to his positive quality, his
uncompromising certainty of the rightness of the thing that he is doing,
that even when he is most imitative he gives an impression of originality,
and is in fact original in the sense that he has thought out for himself
the methods and motives of the ancient art by which he is consciously and
intentionally influenced.
[Illustration: PAINTED WALL DECORATION DESIGNED BY MORRIS]
Finish, it need hardly be said, was not prized by him. It was one of his
assumptions that "the better is the enemy of the good," and he preferred
the roughness of incompleteness to the suavity of perfect workmanship. He
dreaded the suggestion of the machine that lurks in the polished surface
and the perfect curve. Nor did he at any time believe in the subdivision
of labour by which a workman learns to do one thing with the utmost
efficiency, holding that no workman could enjoy such specialised work, and
therefore, of course, could not through it give pleasure to others. The
following is the creed which, according to his "compact with himself,"
he made it a duty to repeat when he and his fellow-men came together to
discuss art:
"We ought to get to understand the value of intelligent work, the work of
men's hands guided by their brains, and to take that, though it be rough,
rather than the unintelligent work of machines or slaves though it be
delicate; to refuse altogether to use machine-made work unless where the
nature of the thing compels it, or where the machine does what mere human
suffering would otherwise have to do; to have a high standard of
excellence in wares and not to accept make-shifts for the real thing, but
rather to go without--to have no ornament merely for fashion's sake, but
only because we really think it beautiful, otherwise to go without it; not
to live in an ugly and squalid place (such as London) for the sake of mere
excitement or the like, but only because our duties bind us to it--to
treat the natural beauty of the earth as a holy thing not to be rashly
dealt with for any consideration; to treat with the utmost care whatever
of architecture and the like is left us of the times of art."
[Illustration: DESIGN FOR ST. JAMES'S PALACE WALL-PAPER
(_Reproduced by courtesy of Mr. Bulkley_)]
Wall-papers were among the earliest staple products of the firm in Red
Lion Square, although Morris always regarded them in the light of a
compromise; an altogether unsatisfactory substitute for the hand-painting,
or tapestry or silk or printed cotton hangings, which he considered the
proper covering for the bare walls which, of course, no one not in "an
unhealthy state of mind and probably of body also" could endure to leave
bare. The first to be designed, the _Trellis_ paper, was the combined work
of Morris and Webb, the former being responsible for the rose-trellis
intended, we may suppose, to bring with it pleasant recollections of
gardens in June and inspired by his own sweet garden at Upton, the latter
for the birds that cling to the lattice or dart upward among the heavily
thorned stems. In the early papers the designs were very simple and
direct, often more quaint than beautiful, as in the case of the well-known
_Daisy_ paper, and depending greatly on the colouring for the
attractiveness they possessed. Later came such intricate patterns as the
_Pimpernel_, the _Acanthus_, so elaborate as to require a double set of
blocks and no less than thirty-two printings, and the paper designed for
St. James's Palace, as large and magnificent as the environment in which
it was to be placed demanded. It is quite obvious from these designs that
Morris did not regard his wall-hangings as backgrounds but as decorations
in themselves. As a matter of fact he did not fancy pictures for his
walls. After his early burst of enthusiasm over Rossetti's paintings he
bought few pictures if any, and they do not seem ever to have entered into
his schemes of decoration. The wall of a room was always important to him,
and despite his discontent with paper coverings for it, he was anxious to
have such coverings as ornamental as possible, admitting them to be useful
"as things go," and treating them in considerable detail in his lectures
on the decorative arts. He advised making up for the poverty of the
material by great thoughtfulness in the design: "The more and the more
mysteriously you interweave your sprays and stems, the better for your
purpose, as the whole thing has to be pasted flat upon a wall and the cost
of all this intricacy will but come out of your own brain and hand."
Concerning colour he was equally specific. In his lecture
characteristically called _Making the Best of It_, in which with an accent
of discouragement he endeavours to show his audience how at the time of
his speaking to make a middle-class home "endurable," he lays down certain
rules which indicate at one and the same time his mastery of his subject
and the incommunicability of right taste in this direction, although many
of his ideas may be pondered to great advantage by even the mind untrained
in colour schemes. He begins with his usual preliminary statement as to
the health of those who disagree with him. "Though we may each have our
special preferences," he says, "among the main colours, which we shall do
quite right to indulge, it is a sign of disease in an artist to have a
prejudice against any particular colour, though such prejudices are common
and violent enough among people imperfectly educated in art, or with
naturally dull perceptions of it. Still colours have their ways in
decoration, so to say, both positively in themselves, and relatively to
each man's way of using them. So I may be excused for setting down some
things I seem to have noticed about these ways." After thus establishing
friendly relations with his audience, he instructs them that yellow is a
colour to be used sparingly and in connection with "gleaming materials"
such as silk; that red to be at its finest must be deep and full and
between crimson and scarlet; that purple no one in his senses would think
of using bright and in masses, and that the best shade of it tends toward
russet; green, he continues, must seldom be used both bright and strong.
"On the other hand," he adds, "do not fall into the trap of a dingy,
bilious-looking yellow-green, a colour to which I have a special and
personal hatred, because (if you will excuse my mentioning personal
matters) I have been supposed to have somewhat brought it into vogue."
Dingy colours were abhorred by him in all cases, and his patience with
those customers who demanded them was extremely limited. Blue was his
"holiday colour," and "if you duly guard against getting it cold if it
tend toward red, or rank if it tends toward green," you "need not be much
afraid of its brightness."
[Illustration: EARLY DESIGN FOR MORRIS WALL-PAPER "DAISY AND COLUMBINE"]
[Illustration: CHRYSANTHEMUM DESIGN FOR WALL-PAPER]
From his hatred of mechanical methods grew his preferences among the
lesser arts. He once complained that he never could see any scene "with a
frame as it were around it," and the less necessity there was for bounding
and limiting his design the happier he was in making it. Embroidery he
loved, for here the worker had an almost absolutely free hand. There was
no "excuse" in embroidery for anything short of striking beauty. "It is
not worth doing," he said, "unless it is either very copious and rich,
or very delicate--or both. For such an art nothing patchy or scrappy, or
half-starved should be done." Tapestry-weaving stood next in freedom of
method, and this was not only a favourite art with him, but one which he
carried to an extraordinary degree of perfection, he and Burne-Jones
combining their designs to produce results coming nearer to the old Arras
effects than to the work of modern weavers. In tapestry-weaving Morris
used the _haute lisse_ or "high loom," the weaver holding apart with his
left hand the threads of the warp which stands upright before him as with
his right hand he works his bobbins in and out, seeing the picture he is
making in a mirror placed on the other side of the loom. The interest of
Morris in the weaving craft is said to have been first awakened by the
sight of a man in the street selling toy models of weaving machines, one
of which he promptly bought for experimental purposes. It was many years
before he could find a full-sized loom of the kind he wanted, which had
become obsolete or nearly so, and which was the only style of loom he
would consider using as it was most like the looms on which the splendid
fabrics of mediaeval times had been woven. By such difficulties he was
rarely baffled. In the case of his tapestries the method he proposed to
revive had died out in Cromwell's time and there was no working model
which could be used as a guide. But there was an old French official
handbook that came in his way, from which he was able to pick up the
details of the craft and this sufficed. His personal familiarity with his
process is apparent in his various discussions of it. He speaks with the
authority of a workman whose hand has held the tool. This practical and
positive knowledge saved him from the sentimentalism into which his
theories might otherwise have led him. He designed his patterns fully
aware of the way in which they were going to behave in the process of
application. When in 1882 he was called upon to give evidence before the
Royal Commission appointed to inquire into the subject of technical
instruction, he urged the necessity of this working-knowledge on the part
of every designer. "I think it essential," he said, "that a designer
should learn the practical way of carrying out the work for which he
designs; he ought to be able to weave himself." In all his talk about art
he tried to tell people how to do only the things he himself had done, in
which he differed widely and wholesomely from his master Ruskin whose
teachings were so often on his lips. The activity of his hand was a needed
and to a great extent an effective check upon the activity of his
sentiment. But--like Ruskin here--he found it hard to stay long away from
the moral or emotional significance of the art he was discussing. The art
that speaks to the mind he did not completely understand. The art that
speaks to the senses he abundantly explained. The amazingly ingenious
point of view from which he defends his preoccupation with what he has
named "the lesser arts" is displayed in the following passage, beginning
with the almost inevitable formula:
"A healthy and sane person being asked with what kind of art he would
clothe his walls, might well answer, 'with the best art,' and so end the
question. Yet out on it! So complex is human life, that even this
seemingly most reasonable answer may turn out to be little better than an
evasion. For I suppose the best art to be the pictured representation of
men's imaginings: what they have thought has happened to the world before
their time, or what they deem they have seen with the eyes of the body or
the soul; and the imaginings thus represented are always beautiful indeed,
but oftenest stirring to men's passions and aspirations and not seldom
sorrowful or even terrible.
"Stories that tell of men's aspirations for more than material life can
give them, their struggle for the future welfare of the race, their
unselfish love, their unrequited service; things like this are the
subjects for the best art; in such subjects there is hope surely, yet the
aspect of them is likely to be sorrowful enough: defeat, the seed of
victory, and death, the seed of life, will be shown on the face of most of
them.
"Take note, too, that in the best art all these solemn and awful things
are expressed clearly and without any vagueness, with such life and power
that they impress the beholder so deeply that he is brought face to face
with the very scenes, and lives among them for a time: so raising his life
above the daily tangle of small things that wearies him to the level of
the heroism which they represent. This is the best art, and who can deny
that it is good for us all that it should be at hand to stir the emotions;
yet its very greatness makes it a thing to be handled carefully, for we
cannot always be having our emotions deeply stirred: that wearies us body
and soul; and man, an animal that longs for rest like other animals,
defends himself against that weariness by hardening his heart and refusing
to be moved every hour of the day by tragic emotions,--nay, even by beauty
that claims his attention overmuch. Such callousness is bad, both for the
arts and our own selves, and therefore it is not so good to have the best
art forever under our eyes, though it is abundantly good that we should be
able to get at it from time to time.
"Meantime, I cannot allow that it is good for any hour of the day to be
wholly stripped of life and beauty, therefore we must provide ourselves
with lesser (I will not say worse) art with which to surround our common
work-a-day or restful times; and for those times I think it will be enough
for us to clothe our daily and domestic walls with ornament that reminds
us of the outward face of the earth, of the innocent love of animals, or
man passing his days between work and rest as he does. I say with ornament
that reminds us of these things and sets our minds and memories at work
easily creating them; because scientific representation of them would
again involve us in the problems of hard fact and the troubles of life,
and so once more destroy our rest for us."
[Illustration: ANEMONE PATTERN FOR SILK AND WOOL CURTAIN MATERIAL]
Was ever a craftsman of the ancient guilds so at pains to make clear the
propriety and usefulness of his wood-carving or enamelling or niello! Like
the early workman, however, he moved with marvellous facility from one
branch of his art to another. From wall-papers it was but a step to cotton
prints which in a way were the playthings of a mind at leisure. They might
be as gay as one chose to make them, and "could not well go wrong so long
as they avoided commonplace and kept somewhat on the daylight side of
nightmare." From the weaving of hangings to the weaving of carpets was a
step as easily taken, and when the impulse seized him to carry on the
great but dying art of Persia in this direction, Morris so effectively
applied himself to mastering the conditions under which the beautiful
Eastern carpets were brought to their perfection as to produce at least
one example--that called _The Buller's Wood Carpet_--that fairly competes
with the splendour of its prototypes. Stained glass for a time baffled
him. "His was not the temperament," says one of his critics, "patiently to
study the chemistry of glass colour; or to prove by long experiment the
dependence to be placed upon a flux." Although many windows were made by
the firm, the larger number of them designed by Burne-Jones, Morris being
responsible for the colour, he never seemed to forget that he had come
near to being worsted in his fight with the technical difficulties of this
most difficult art, and economised his enthusiasm for it accordingly.
Hand-painted tiles, however, which he was the first to introduce into
England, were favourites with him, and in them he perpetuated some of his
attempts at drawing the human figure. Furniture, though an important
feature of the work undertaken by the firm, did not appeal to him, and he
left it to his associates. His experiments in vegetable dyes produced
interesting results, although here also his technical knowledge was not
entirely adequate to his task. In connection with his textile work he
early felt the imperative necessity of having finer colours than the
market offered. To get them as he wanted them he was obliged to go back as
far as Pliny, but this was a small matter to one whose mind was always
ready to provide him with an Aladdin's carpet. Back to Pliny he went to
learn old methods, and in addition he called to his aid ancient herbals
and French books of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, finally
setting up his own vats and becks and very literally plunging in. At first
he complained of "looking such a beast," but his enthusiasm soon overcame
this rather remarkable display of concern for his personal appearance, and
he wrote most joyously of working in sabots and blouse in the dye-house
"pretty much all day long." Out of his vats came the blue of his
indigo, the red of his madder, the yellow of weld or Persian berry, the
rich brown of walnut juice, making beautiful combinations, which, when
they faded, changed into paler tints of the same colour and were not
unpleasant to look upon. The aniline dyes, which in 1860 were the latest
wonder of science, and in a very crude stage of their development, called
out his most picturesque invective. Each colour was hideous in itself,
crude, livid, cheap, and loathed by every person of taste, the "foul blot
of the capitalist dyer." In brief, the invention supposed to be for the
benefit of an art "the very existence of which depends upon its producing
beauty" was "on the road; and very far advanced on it, towards destroying
all beauty in the art." The only thing to do was to turn one's back on the
chemical dyes, relegate them to a museum of scientific curiosities, and go
back "if not to the days of the Pharaohs yet at least to those of
Tintoret." It was highly characteristic of him that he chose the remedy of
"going back" in place of progressing with the new material as far as
possible.
[Illustration: PORTION OF HAMMERSMITH CARPET]
His work with silks and with wools was naturally greatly enriched by his
use of his own full, soft and brilliant colours, and his personal
attention to the art of dyeing counted for so much that one of his most
accomplished pupils in embroidery is quoted by Mr. Mackail as saying that
she promptly felt the difference when Morris ceased to dye with his own
hands, that the colours became more monotonous and prosy and the very
lustre of the silk was less beautiful. It is, however, difficult to
impress yourself upon the public precisely as you are, whatever vigour
your personality may have. Morris, with his intense love of bright full
hues, has come down as the promoter of the so-called "aesthetic" dulness of
colour, and his name has been especially associated with the peacock blue
and the "sage-green" to which he had an especial aversion. It was one of
his doctrines that a room should be kept cheerful in tone, and how happily
he could carry out this doctrine is seen in more than one of the rooms
decorated by the firm. A visitor to Stanmore Hall, for example, has noted
the delicate tones of the painted ceilings as looking like embroidery on
old white silk, giving a bright yet light and aerial effect, and forming
with the woodwork of untouched oak an impression of delightful gayety.
That Morris made himself a master of so many crafts and grappled even so
successfully as he did with the technical difficulties involved would be
somewhat remarkable had he attempted none of the other undertakings in
which he gained for himself a name to be remembered. His eagerness to
express his ideals in a practical form led him on indefinitely. To the
very last a new world to conquer roused his spirit and made him tingle to
be off. For a man with the trace of the plodder in him such a career would
have been an impossible one, but Morris went blithely from craft to craft
by a series of leaps and bounds. He stayed with each just long enough to
understand its working principles and to make himself efficient to teach
others its peculiar virtues and demands, and he then passed on. "Each
separate enterprise on which he entered," says one of his biographers,
"seems for a time to have moved him to extraordinary energy. He thought it
out, installed it, set it going, designed for it, trained men and women in
the work to be done, and then by degrees, as the work began to run
smoothly and could be trusted to go on without him, his interest became
less active: a new idea generated in his mind, or an old one burst into
bud, and his energies burst out afresh in some new doing." As time went on
he had less and less practically to do with the firm of which he was the
head and of which he continued to the end to be the consulting adviser. He
gathered about him cooeperators who not only were sympathetic with his
methods but absorbed his style. His distinction as a designer was neither
so great nor so personal that it could not to a considerable degree be
communicated, and this accounts for the enduring quality of his influence
which has been handed down to us through others without too much
subtracted from it, with many of the characteristics most to be cherished
still present. Greater decorators have existed, indeed, but it may be
questioned if anyone has been quite so inspiriting; has had the matter
quite so much at heart. He persuaded the multitude from the intensity of
his own conviction, and he persuaded them on the whole toward good things
and toward beauty. He made other men's ideas his own but he adopted them
body and soul. He followed his own fashion, inveighing with vigour and
frequently with logic against nearly all the fashions of his time. It is
not surprising that he himself became the great fashion of the nineteenth
century in matters of decoration. And this certainly was what he wanted,
in the sense of wanting everyone in England to see as he did the
possibilities of household art and to share in furthering them by turning
their backs upon the sham art with which the commercial world was largely
occupied. But he made no effort toward gaining the patronage of those
unwilling to admit that what he disliked was intolerable. His was never a
conciliatory policy. The following passage from his lecture on _The Lesser
Arts_ reveals his attitude in his own phrasing:
"People say to me often enough: If you want to make your art succeed and
flourish, you must make it the fashion: a phrase which I confess annoys
me: for they mean by it that I should spend one day over my work to two
days in trying to convince rich, and supposed influential people, that
they care very much for what they really do not care in the least, so that
it may happen according to the proverb: _Bell-wether took the leap and we
all went over_; well, such advisers are right if they are content with the
thing lasting but a little while: say till you can make a little money, if
you don't get pinched by the door shutting too quickly: otherwise they are
wrong: the people they are thinking of have too many strings to their
bow, and can turn their backs too easily on a thing that fails, for it to
be safe work trusting to their whims: it is not their fault, they cannot
help it, but they have no chance of spending time enough over the arts to
know anything practical of them, and they must of necessity be in the
hands of those who spend their time in pushing fashion this way and that
for their own advantage.
[Illustration: SOFA DESIGNED BY THE MORRIS CO.
(_Reproduced by courtesy of Mr. Bulkley_)]
[Illustration: SECRETARY DESIGNED BY THE MORRIS CO.
(_Reproduced by courtesy of Mr. Bulkley_)]
"Sirs, there is no help to be got out of these latter, or those who let
themselves be led by them: the only real help for the decorative arts must
come from those who work in them: nor must they be led, they must lead.
"You whose hands make those things that should be works of art, you must
all be artists, and good artists too, before the public at large can take
real interest in such things; and when you have become so, I promise you
that you shall lead the fashion; fashion shall follow your hands
obediently enough."