FROM THE RED HOUSE TO KELMSCOTT.
While Morris was developing the industries of the firm with essential
steadiness, despite the rapid transitions from one pursuit to another, he
was going through a variety of personal experiences, some of which
involved his disappointment in deeply cherished plans. For one thing, and
this perhaps the most grievous, he was obliged to give up the Red House
upon which so much joyous labour had been spent. Several causes
contributed to the unhappy necessity, chief among them an attack of
rheumatic fever that made him sensitive to the bleak winds which the
exposed situation of the building invited. The distance between London and
Upton became also a serious matter after his illness, as he found it
almost impossible to make the daily journeys required by his attention to
the business. Several compromises were thought of, the most enticing being
the removal of the works from Red Lion Square to Upton, and the addition
of a wing to the Red House for Burne-Jones and his family; but in the end
the beautiful house was sold, Morris, after leaving it, never again
setting eyes upon it.
[Illustration: ILLUSTRATION BY BURNE-JONES FOR PROJECTED EDITION OF "THE
EARTHLY PARADISE," CUT ON WOOD BY MORRIS HIMSELF]
The first move was to Queen Square, London, where Morris and the business
became house-mates in the autumn of 1865, remaining together there, with
more or less interruption, for seven years. Queen Square is in Bloomsbury,
not far from the British Museum, and a part of the ugly London
middle-class region for which Morris had so little liking, but as a place
to carry on the rapidly increasing work of the firm it possessed great
advantages. The number of the house was 26, and adjacent buildings and
grounds were used for the workshops. At this time Mr. George Warrington
Taylor was made business manager for the company, and Morris gained by his
accession much valuable time, not only for designing and experimenting,
but for the literary work that again began to claim his attention. He was
still, however, a familiar figure in "the shop," acting as salesman,
showman, designer, or manual labourer. His aspect as he strode along the
streets of the dull neighbourhood must have been refreshing. Those who
knew him have repeatedly described him as the image of a sea-captain in
general appearance. He wore habitually a suit of navy-blue serge cut in
nautical fashion, and his manner was bluff and hearty as that of the
proverbial seaman. Mr. Mackail gives a breezy picture of him in his
workman's blouse, hatless, with his ruddy complexion and rocking walk,
bound for the Faulkners' house where once upon a time a new maid took him
for the butcher. To have seen him in these days was to have seen one of
his own ideal workmen out of _News from Nowhere_. As a master of men he
seems to have been singularly successful, despite the temper which led him
at times to commit acts of positive violence. His splendid zest for work
must have been stimulating and to a degree contagious. Merely to be in the
company of one who thought hearty manual labour so interesting and so
pleasant and so heartily to be desired by everyone, must have had its
vivifying effect. He was stating the simple truth when he said that he
should die of despair and weariness if his daily work were taken from him
unless he could at once make something else his daily work, and he is
constantly drawing persuasive pictures of the charm of the various
handicrafts--that of weaving for example, his description of which would
invite the most discontented mind. He does not call the weaver's craft a
dull one: "If he be set to doing things which are worth doing--to watch
the web growing day by day almost magically, in anticipation of the time
when it is to be taken out and one can see it on the right side in all its
well-schemed beauty--to make something beautiful that will last out of a
few threads of silk and wool, seems to me not an unpleasant way of earning
one's livelihood, so long only as one lives and works in a pleasant place,
with work-day not too long, and a book or two to be got at." His own
weavers were some of them boys trained in the shop from a condition of
absolute ignorance of drawing and of the craft to such an efficiency as
enabled them to weave the Stanmore tapestry, one panel of which took two
years to the making, and which was of the utmost elaboration and
magnificence of design. The exigencies of the business presently made it
necessary to devote the whole of the premises in Queen Square to the work
going on there, and the Morris family removed in 1872 to a small house
between Hammersmith and Turnham Green, near Chiswick Lane, Morris
retaining a couple of rooms in the Queen Square house for his use when
busy there. Even the extended quarters soon proved insufficient, however,
and in 1877 rooms were taken in Oxford Street for showing and selling the
work of the firm, the manufacturing departments being still ensconced in
Queen Square. In 1881 these also were transferred to more suitable
premises. The dyeing and cotton-printing demanded workshops by the side of
some stream of clear water "fit to dye with," and after much search Morris
found an ideal situation on the banks of the little Wandle River, near
Wimbledon. There were the ruins of Merton Abbey where the Barons once gave
their famous answer "Nolumus leges Angliae mutari," and there manufactures
had been carried on for centuries. In the long low-roofed worksheds on the
river's bank his workmen could move about in ample space, practising
ancient methods of dyeing, printing, and weaving, seven miles from Charing
Cross. It is anything but a typical manufactory that has been depicted by
visitors to the Merton Abbey works. We read of an old walled garden gay
with old-fashioned flowers and shrubs, of the swift little Wandle River
rushing along between the buildings, its trout leaping under the windows,
a water-wheel revolving at ease, hanks of yarn, fresh from the vats,
drying in the pure air, calico lying "clearing" on the meadow grass in an
enclosure made by young poplar trees, a sunlit picture of peaceful work
carried on by unharried workers among surroundings of fresh and wholesome
charm. Women and men were both employed, some of them old and not all of
them competent, but none of them overworked or underpaid. Though Morris
had somewhat scant courtesy of manner toward those who worked for and with
him, he had at least the undeviating desire to promote their welfare. If
he expected work of his work-people, as certainly he did, he expected it
only under the most healthful and agreeable conditions. Judging others by
himself, he could not conceive anyone as happy in idleness, but neither
did he expect anyone to be happy without leisure. In his own business he
proved what the nineteenth century found hard to believe, that honest,
thorough, and artistic workmanship, accomplished under reasonable
exactions by people enjoying their occupation, could be combined with
commercial prosperity. That the products of such labour could not be
bought by the poorer classes was due, he argued, to a social order wrong
at the root. The time when art could be made "by the people and for the
people, as a happiness to the maker and the user," was a far-off dream.
[Illustration: _Kelmscott Manor House_]
Shortly before Morris abandoned Queen Square as a place of residence, he
discovered for himself a "heaven on earth," in which he could spend his
vacations from town, and free himself from the contamination of London
streets. This was Kelmscott Manor House, which he rented--at first jointly
with Rossetti--in 1871, and in which he took infinite satisfaction for the
remainder of his life. The beautiful old place was in its way as
characteristic of him and of his tastes as the Red House had been, and has
become intimately associated with him in the minds of all who knew him
during his later years, his passion for places investing those for which
he cared with a sentiment not to be ignored or slighted in making up the
sum of his interests. For a couple of years Rossetti was an inmate of
Kelmscott Manor, and through his letters many vivid glimpses of it are
obtained. The village of Kelmscott was at the time no more than a hamlet
containing a hundred and seventeen people, and situated two and a half
miles from the nearest town, Lechlade, to whose churchyard Shelley lent
distinction by writing a poem there. The nearest station-town was
Farringdon, so far off that the carrier who brought railway parcels to the
occupants of the Manor charged six shillings and sixpence for each trip.
"Thus," writes Rossetti, who was chronically short of money, "a good deal
of inconvenience tempers the attractions of the place." Nothing, however,
unless the presence of Rossetti, who was "unromantically discontented"
there, tempered them for Morris. In an article for _The Quest_ for
November, 1895, he describes the house in the most minute detail,
accentuating its charms with a touch of comment for each that falls like a
caress. The roofs are covered with the beautiful stone slates of the
district, "the most lovely covering which a roof can have." The
"battering" or leaning back of the walls is by no means a defect but a
beauty, "taking from the building a rigidity which otherwise would mar
it," and the stout studded partitions of the entrance passage are "very
agreeable to anyone who does not want cabinet work to supplant carpentry."
To the building of it all must have gone, he thinks, "some thin thread of
tradition, a half-anxious sense of the delight of meadow and acre and wood
and river, a certain amount (not too much, let us hope) of common-sense, a
liking for making materials serve one's turn, and perhaps at bottom some
little grain of sentiment." And from Rossetti we hear of the primitive
Kelmscott church "looking just as one fancies chapels in the _Mort
d'Arthur_," of clouds of starlings sinking in the copses "clamourous like
mill-waters at wild play," of "mustering rooks innumerable," of a
"delicious" garden and meadows leading to the river brink, of apple
blossoms and marigolds and arrow-heads and white lilies "divinely
lovely," of an island by the boat-house rich in wild periwinkles, and of
many another exquisite aspect of a place whose unvexed quietness was
nevertheless powerless to soothe the turmoil of that tormented soul.
[Illustration: _Kelmscott Manor House_]
To realise fully how Morris himself felt toward it, one must turn to his
description in _News from Nowhere_. There he is supposed to see it through
the kindly mist of time, returning to it from a regenerate and beautified
world, and his problem is to write of it with the penetrating eloquence
and melancholy associated with remembered happiness. It is supremely
characteristic of him that he could perfectly strike this note while still
living in hale activity upon the spot he is to praise with the tenderness
of reminiscence. The great virtue of his temperament lay in this peculiar
intensity of realisation. He needed neither loss nor change to spur his
sensibility and awaken his recognition of the worth or special quality of
what he loved. Vital as few men are, he seems, nevertheless, always to
have dwelt in sight of death and to have grasped life as though the next
moment he was to be torn from it. The burden of the song which Ogier the
Dane hears on a fair May morning:
Kiss me love! for who knoweth
What thing cometh after death?
so often quoted in evidence of his fainting and dejected spirit, embodies
indeed the sentiment of his attitude toward the pleasures and
satisfactions to be drawn from the visible and perishable world, but does
not hint at the energy with which he seized those pleasures, the
sturdiness with which he filled himself with those satisfactions. When
_News from Nowhere_ was written, Morris had lived the better part of
twenty years in close relation with the Kelmscott house, but custom had
not staled for him its infinite variety. This is what he writes of it and
of its surroundings in his romance of _An Epoch of Rest_: He and his
companions have approached it by way of the river.
"Presently we saw before us a bank of elm trees, which told us of a house
amidst them. In a few minutes we had passed through a deep eddying pool
into the sharp stream that ran from the ford, and beached our craft on a
tiny strand of limestone gravel, and stepped ashore.
"Mounting on the cart-road that ran along the river some feet above the
water, I looked round about me. The river came down through a wide meadow
on my left, which was grey now with the ripened seeding grasses; the
gleaming water was lost presently by a turn of the bank, but over the
meadow I could see the gables of a building where I knew the lock must be.
A low wooded ridge bounded the river-plain to the south and south-east,
whence we had come, and a few low houses lay about its feet and up its
slope. I turned a little to my right and through the hawthorn sprays and
long shoots of the wild roses could see the flat country spreading out
far away under the sun of the calm evening, till something that might be
called hills with a look of sheep pastures about them bounded it with a
soft blue line. Before one, the elm boughs still hid most of what houses
there might be in this river-side dwelling of men; but to the right of the
cart-road a few grey buildings of the simplest kind showed here and there.
"I had a mind to say that I did not know the way thither, and that the
river-side dwellers should lead: but almost without my will my feet moved
on along the road they knew. The raised way led us into a little field
bounded by a backwater of the river on one side: on the right hand we
could see a cluster of small houses and barns and a wall partly overgrown
with ivy, over which a few grey gables showed. The village road ended in
the shallow of the aforesaid backwater. We crossed the road, and again
almost without my will my hand raised the latch of a door in the wall, and
we stood presently on a stone path which led up to the old house to which
fate in the shape of Dick had so strangely brought me in this world of
men. My companion gave a sigh of pleased surprise and enjoyment, nor did I
wonder, for the garden between the wall and the house was redolent of the
June flowers, and the roses were rolling over one another with that
delicious superabundance of small well-tended gardens which at first sight
takes away all thought from the beholder save that of beauty. The
blackbirds were singing their loudest, the doves were cooing on the
roof-ridge, the rooks in the high elm trees beyond were garrulous among
the young leaves, and the swifts wheeled, whining, about the gables. And
the house itself was a fit guardian for all the beauty of this heart of
summer.
"Once again Ellen echoed my thoughts as she said: 'Yes, friend, this is
what I came out to see; this many-gabled old house built by the simple
country-folk of the long-past times, regardless of all the turmoil that
was going on in cities and courts, is lovely still amidst all the beauty
which these latter days have created; and I do not wonder at our friends
'tending it so carefully and making much of it. It seems to me as if it
had waited for these happy days, and held in it the gathered crumbs of
happiness of the confused and turbulent past.'
"She led me up close to the house and laid her shapely sun-browned hand
and arm upon the lichened wall as if to embrace it, and cried out: 'O me!
O me! How I love the earth and the seasons and weather, and all the things
that deal with it and all that grows out of it,--as this has done!'
"We went in and found no soul in any room as we wandered from room to
room--from the rose-covered porch to the strange and quaint garrets
amongst the great timbers of the roof, where of old time the tillers and
herdsmen of the manor slept, but which a-nights seemed now, by the small
size of the beds, and the litter of useless and disregarded
matters--bunches of dying flowers, feathers of birds, shells of
starling's eggs, caddis worms in mugs and the like,--seemed to be
inhabited for the time by children.
"Everywhere there was but little furniture, and that only the most
necessary, and of the simplest forms. The extravagant love of ornament
which I had noted in this people elsewhere, seemed here to have given
place to the feeling that the house itself and its associations was the
ornament of the country life amidst which it had been left stranded from
old times, and that to reornament it would but take away its use as a
piece of natural beauty.
"We sat down at last in a room over the wall which Ellen had caressed, and
which was still hung with old tapestry, originally of no artistic value,
but now faded into pleasant grey tones which harmonised thoroughly well
with the quiet of the place, and which would have been ill supplanted by
brighter and more striking decoration.
"I asked a few questions of Ellen as we sat there, but scarcely listened
to her answers, and presently became silent, and then scarce conscious of
anything but that I was there in that old room, the doves crooning from
the roofs of the barn and dovecot beyond the window opposite."
* * * * *
In 1878 Morris took a London house on the Upper Mall, Hammersmith, which
he occupied alternately with Kelmscott Manor. This place, which Mr.
Mackail describes as "ugly without being mean," was also on the banks of
the river, and Morris gained much satisfaction from the thought that the
water flowing by it had come in its due course past the beloved Kelmscott
garden. A somewhat inconvenient touch of sentiment caused him to give his
Hammersmith home the name of "Kelmscott House" in compliment to the home
actually situated at Kelmscott, the latter being distinguished by the
title of "Manor," a title that seems to belong to it by courtesy alone.
From the great fondness felt by Morris for these places on which he
lavished his art until they spoke more eloquently than his words of the
aims and theories so dear to him, the domesticity of his life would
naturally be inferred. Nor was he an eager traveller judged by modern
standards. Nevertheless, he managed to find time for some extended trips
just as he found time for everything that came in his way with an appeal
to his liking. The most important of these was a voyage to Iceland, made
in company with Faulkner and two other friends during the summer of 1871,
just after the acquisition of Kelmscott Manor, in which he left Rossetti.
His mind was ripe for the experience. He had already published
translations from the Icelandic sagas made in collaboration with Mr.
Magnusson, and his interest in the bracing Northern literature was
reaching its height. Long years after, Rossetti said of him, "There goes
the last of the Vikings!" and his mood in visiting Iceland was not unlike
that of a modernised Viking returning to his home. Thoughts of the
country's great past were constantly with him. The boiling geysers, the
conventional attraction for tourists who "never heard the names of Sigurd
and Brunhild, of Njal, or Gunnar, or Grettir, or Gisli, or Gudrun," were a
source of irritation to him. His pilgrimages to the homes of the ancient
traditions were the episodes of his journey worth thinking about, and
about them he thought much and vigorously, seeing in imagination the
figures of the old heroes going about summer and winter, attending to
their haymaking and fishing and live stock, eating almost the same food
and living on the same ground as the less imposing Norsemen of the
present. "Lord!" he writes, "what littleness and helplessness has taken
the place of the old passion and violence that had place here once--and
all is unforgotten; so that one has no power to pass it by unnoticed." His
two months spent among the scenes of the greater sagas left him with an
intense impression of a land stern and terrible, of toothed rocks and
black slopes and desolate green, a land that intensified his melancholy by
its suggestion of short-lived glory and early death, and intensified also
his enjoyment of life by the sense of adventure, the rugged riding, and
the fresh keen air. One of the important events of the trip was the
exploration of the great cave at Surts-hellir, and twenty years after,
many of its incidents were embodied in the book called _The Story of the
Glittering Plain_, wherein Hallblithe and the three Seekers make their
way through the stony tangle of the wilderness seeing "nought save the wan
rocks under the sun."
Two years later he made a still more adventurous journey across the arid
tableland occupying the central portion of Iceland and across the northern
mountains to the sea. It was highly characteristic of him that for the
time he yielded himself utterly to the influence of the strange and awful
land upon his imagination, and that for years afterward his writing was
flooded by the impressions that continually swept back upon his mind as he
reverted to these experiences. Mr. Mackail gives an amusing instance of
the way in which the interest uppermost with him became an obsession
leading to the most childlike extravagances. During a holiday tour in
Belgium he came to a place where neither French nor English was spoken. He
therefore "made a desperate effort at making himself understood by
haranguing the amazed inn-keeper in Icelandic." His first visit to Italy,
made between the first and second visits to Iceland, took faint hold upon
him, nor was the second Italian journey, made some years later, and marked
by a troublesome attack of gout, notably successful. He was a man of the
North as surely as Rossetti was a man of the South, and it would have been
a renaissance indeed that could have turned him into a Florentine or a
Venetian.
[Illustration: DESIGN BY ROSSETTI FOR WINDOW EXECUTED BY MORRIS & CO.
(_THE PARABLE OF THE VINEYARD_)]
[Illustration: DESIGN BY ROSSETTI FOR STAINED-GLASS WINDOW EXECUTED BY THE
MORRIS CO. (_THE PARABLE OF THE VINEYARD_)]
During this middle period of his life, at the height of his great
activity, an event occurred involving the element of tragedy, if the
breaking of friendships be accounted tragic. In 1875 the firm was
dissolved. Following Mr. Mackail's account of the circumstances that led
to the dissolution, we find that the business had become one in which
Morris supplied practically all the capital, invention, and control. It
was also the chief source of his income. On the other hand, his partners
might find themselves at any time seriously involved in the liabilities of
a business which was rapidly extending. Hence the desirability of the
dissolution and reconstitution of the firm. But in connection with this
step an embarrassing situation arose. Under the original instrument, each
partner had equal rights in the assets of the firm. After the first year
or two the profits had never been divided, and the six partners of Morris,
for the hundred and twenty pounds by which they were represented in the
contributed capital at the beginning, had now claims on the business for
some seven or eight thousand pounds. If these claims were insisted upon,
Morris would be placed in a position of considerable financial difficulty.
Burne-Jones, Webb, and Faulkner refused to accept any consideration. "The
other three," says Mr. Mackail, "stood on the strict letter of their legal
rights." Naturally the relations between Morris and the latter became
grievously strained, and with Rossetti the break was absolute and
irremediable. In passing out of Morris's life, as he then did, he
certainly left it more serene, but with him went also the vivifying
influence of his genius. In considering the very unfortunate part played
by him in the conflict among the members of the firm, it is fair to give a
certain weight to details emphasised in Mr. William Rossetti's account as
modifying--to a slight degree, it is true, but still modifying--the sordid
aspect of Rossetti's action. Madox Brown, who was one of the partners
wishing not to forego their legal rights, was getting on in years and was
a comparatively poor man. He had always counted on the firm "as an
important eventual accession to his professional earnings." No one
familiar with Rossetti's character can doubt that a desire to stand by his
old friend and teacher in such a matter would have a strong influence with
him. To his brother's mind, his attitude was throughout "one of
conciliation," with the wish "to adjust contending claims had that but
been possible." "He himself," says Mr. William Rossetti, "retired from the
firm without desiring any compensation for his own benefit. A sum was,
however, assigned to him. He laid it apart for the eventual advantage of a
member of the Morris family, but, ere his death, circumstances had induced
him to trench upon it not a little." It is easy to imagine circumstances
trenching upon any sum of money under Rossetti's direct control, and in
the absence of any testimony the reader acquainted with his prodigal
disposition may very well be pardoned for doubting whether any member of
the Morris family became appreciably the richer for his impulse.
Nevertheless, it is a reasonable conclusion that he was not actuated by a
sordid motive in opposing the essentially just claim made by Morris, but
was to his own mind acting in accordance with the demands of a friendship
older and closer than that between him and Morris. It must be noted,
however, that a reconciliation was effected in the course of time between
Morris and Madox Brown, while in Rossetti's case the wound never healed.
The outcome of the negotiations was that Madox Brown was bought out,
"receiving a handsome sum," says Mr. William Rossetti, and the business
went on under the sole management and proprietorship of Morris.
In addition to the annoyance and real trouble of mind caused Morris by
these transactions, he had the further anxiety at about this time of a
breakdown of a serious and permanent nature in the health of his eldest
daughter. This he took deeply to heart, losing spirits to a marked degree,
but nothing human had power to stay his fertile brain and busy hand.