generation; certainly he was the only individual whose influence was
ever capable of dominating Morris and drawing him to a course of action
which he would not have chosen for himself. Rossetti's tragic collapse
after his wife's death, and the pictures which he painted in his later
life, have obscured the true portrait of this virile and attractive
character. Burne-Jones fell completely under his spell, and he tells us
how for many years his chief anxiety, over each successive work of art
that he finished, was 'what Gabriel would have thought of it'. So
decisive was his judgement, so dominating his personality.
Morris's period of hesitation ended in 1861, when the first firm of
decorators was started among the friends. Of the old Oxford set it
included Burne-Jones and Faulkner; new elements were introduced by
Philip Webb the architect and Madox Brown the painter. The leadership in
ideas might still perhaps belong to Rossetti; but in execution William
Morris proved himself at once the captain. The actual work which he
contributed in the first year was more than equal to that produced by
his six partners, and future years told the same tale.
In the early part of his married life Morris lived in Kent, at Upton,
some twelve miles from Charing Cross, in a house built for him by his
friend Webb. The house was of red brick, simple but unconventional in
character, built to be the home of one who detested stucco and all other
shams, and wished things to seem what they were. Its decoration was to
be the work of its owner and his friends.
Here we see Morris in the strength of early manhood and in all the
exuberance of his rich vigorous nature, surrounded by friends for whom
he kept open house, in high contentment with life, eager to respond to
all the claims upon his energy. Here came artists and poets, in the
pleasant summer days, jesting, dreaming, discussing, indulging in bouts
of single-stick or game of bowls in the garden, walking through the
country-side, quoting poets old and new, and scheming to cover the walls
and cupboards of the rooms with the legends of mediaeval romance.
Visitors of the conventional aesthetic type would have many a surprise
and many a shock. The jests often took the form of practical jokes, of
which Morris, from his explosive temper, was chosen to be the butt, but
which in the end he always shared and enjoyed. Rossetti, Burne-Jones,
and Faulkner would conspire to lay booby traps on the doors for him,
would insult him with lively caricatures, and with relentless humour
would send him to 'Coventry' for the duration of a dinner. Or he would
have a sudden tempestuous outbreak in which chairs would collapse and
door panels be kicked in and violent expletives would resound through
the hall. In all, Morris was the central figure, impatient, boisterous,
with his thick-set figure, unkempt hair, and untidy clothing, but with
the keenest appreciation and sympathy for any manifestation of beauty in
literature or in art. But this idyll was short-lived. Ill-health in the
Burne-Jones family was followed by an illness which befell Morris
himself; and the demand of the growing business and the need for the
master to be nearer at hand forced him to leave Upton. The Red House was
sold in 1865; and first Bloomsbury and later Hammersmith furnished him
with a home more conveniently placed.
The period of his return to London coincided with the most fruitful
period of his poetic work. Already at Oxford he had written some pieces
of verse which had found favour with his friends. He soon found that his
taste and his talent was for narrative poetry; and in 1856 he made
acquaintance with his two supreme favourites, Chaucer and Malory. It is
to them that he owes most in all that he produced in poetry or in prose,
and notably in the _Earthly Paradise_, which he published between 1868
and 1870. This consists of a collection of stories drawn chiefly from
Greek sources, but supposed to be told by a band of wanderers in the
fourteenth century. Thus the classic legends are seen through a veil of
mediaeval romance. He had no wish to step back, in the spirit of a
modern scholar, across the ages of ignorance or mist, and to pick up
the classic stones clear-cut and cold as the Greeks left them. To him
the legends had a continuous history up to the Renaissance; as they were
retold by Romans, Italians, or Provençals, they were as a plant growing
in our gardens, still putting out fresh shoots, not an embalmed corpse
such as later scholars have taught us to exhume and to study in the
chill atmosphere of our libraries and museums. This mediaevalism of his
was much misunderstood, both in literature and in art; people would talk
to him as if he were imitating the windows or tapestries of the Middle
Ages, whereas what he wanted was to recapture the technical secrets
which the true craftsmen had known and then to use these methods in a
live spirit to carry on the work to fresh developments in the future.
If the French tales of the fourteenth century were an inspiration to him
in his earliest poems, a second influence no less potent was that of the
Icelandic Sagas. He began to study them in 1869, and a little later,
with the aid of Professor Magnusson, he was translating some of them
into English. He made two journeys to Iceland, and was deeply moved by
the wild grandeur of the scenes in which these heroic tales were set.
For many successive days he rode across grim solitary wastes with more
enthusiasm than he could give to the wonted pilgrimages to Florence and
Venice. When he was once under the spell, only the geysers with their
suggestion of modern text-books and _Mangnall's Questions_[51] could
bore him; all else was magical and entrancing. This enthusiasm bore
fruit in _Sigurd the Volsung_, the most powerful of his epic poems,
written in an old English metre, which Morris, with true feeling for
craftsmanship, revived and adapted to his theme. His poetry in general,
less rich than that of Tennyson, less intense than that of Rossetti,
had certain qualities of its own, and owed its popularity chiefly to his
gift for telling a story swiftly, naturally and easily, and in such a
way as to carry his reader along with him.
[Note 51: Letter quoted in _Life of Morris_, by J. W. Mackail, vol.
i, p. 257 (Longmans, Green & Co., 1911).]
His fame was growing in London, which was ready enough in the nineteenth
century to make the most of its poets. In Society, if he had allowed it
to entertain him, he would have been a picturesque figure, though hardly
such as was expected by admirers of his poetry and his art. To some his
dress suggested only the prosperous British workman; to one who knew him
later he seemed like 'the purser of a Dutch brig' in his blue tweed
sailor-cut suit. This was his Socialist colleague Mr. Hyndman, who
describes 'his imposing forehead and clear grey eyes with the powerful
nose and slightly florid cheeks', and tells us how, when he was talking,
'every hair of his head and his rough shaggy beard appeared to enter
into the subject as a living part of himself.' Elsewhere he speaks of
Morris's 'quick, sharp manner, his impulsive gestures, his hearty
laughter and vehement anger'. At times Morris could be bluff beyond
measure. Stopford Brooke, who afterwards became one of his friends,
recounts his first meeting with Morris in 1867. 'He didn't care for
parsons, and he glared at me when I said something about good manners.
Leaning over the table with his eyes set and his fist clenched he
shouted at me, "I am a boor and the son of a boor".' So ready as he was
to challenge anything which smacked of conventionality or pretension, he
was not quite a safe poet to lionize or to ask into mixed company.
But it was less in literature than in art that he influenced his
generation, and we must return to the history of the firm. From small
beginnings it had established itself in the favourable esteem of the
few, and, thanks to exhibitions, its fame was spreading. Though as many
as twelve branches are mentioned in a single copy of its prospectus,
there was generally one department which for the moment occupied most of
the creative energy of the chief.
Painted glass is named first on the prospectus, and was one of the
earlier successes of the firm. As it was employed for churches more
often than for private houses, it is familiar to many who do not know
Morris's work in their homes; but it is hardly the most characteristic
of his activities. For one thing, the material, the 'pot glass', was
purchased, not made on the premises. Morris's skill lay in selecting the
best colours available rather than in creating them himself. For
another, he knew that his own education in figure-drawing was
incomplete, and he left this to other artists. Most of the figures were
designed by Burne-Jones, and some of the best-known examples of his
windows are at St. Philip's, Birmingham, near the artist's birthplace,
and at St. Margaret's, Rottingdean, where he died.[52] But no cartoon,
by Burne-Jones or any one else, was executed till Morris had supervised
the colour scheme; and he often designed backgrounds of foliage or
landscape.
[Note 52: Other easily accessible examples are in Christ Church
Cathedral, Oxford, and Jesus College Chapel, Cambridge.]
To those people of limited means who cannot afford tapestries and
embroidery (which follow painted glass on the firm's list), yet who wish
to beautify their homes, interest centres in the chintzes and
wall-papers. These show the distinctive gifts by which Morris most
widely influenced the Victorian traditions. It is not easy to explain
why one design stirs our curiosity and quickens our delight, while
another has the opposite effect. Critics can prate about natural and
conventional art without helping us to understand; but a passage from
Mr. Clutton-Brock seems worth quoting as simply and clearly phrased.[53]
'Morris would start', he says, 'with a pattern in his mind and from the
first saw everything as a factor in that pattern. But in these early
wall-papers he showed a power of pattern-making that has never been
equalled in modern times. For though everything is subject to the
pattern, yet the pattern itself expresses a keen delight in the objects
of which it is composed. So they are like the poems in which the words
keep a precise and homely sense and yet in their combination make a
music expressive of their sense.' Beginning with the design of the
rose-trellis in 1862, Morris laid under contribution many of the most
familiar flowers and trees. The daisy, the honeysuckle, the willow
branch, are but a few of the best known: each bears the stamp of his
inventive fancy and his cunning hand: each flower claims recognition for
itself, and reveals new charms in its appointed setting. Of these papers
we hear that Morris himself designed between seventy and eighty, and
when we add chintzes, tapestry, and other articles we may well be
astonished at the fertility of his brain.
[Note 53: _William Morris_, by A. Clutton-Brock (Williams and
Norgate, 1914).]
Even so, much must have depended on his workmen as the firm's operations
extended.
Mr. Mackail tells us of the faith which Morris had in the artistic
powers of the average Englishman, if rightly trained. He was ready to
take and train the boy whom he found nearest to hand, and he often
achieved surprising results. His own belief was that a good tradition
once established in the workshops, by which the workman was allowed to
develop his intelligence, would of itself produce good work: others
believed that the successes would have been impossible without the
unique gifts of the master, one of which was that he could intuitively
select the right man for each job.
The material as well as the workers needed this selective power. The
factories of the day had accustomed the public to second-rate material
and second-rate colour, and Morris was determined to set a higher
standard. In 1875 he was absorbed in the production of vegetable dyes,
which he insisted on having pure and rich in tone. Though madder and
weld might supply the reds and yellows which he needed, blue was more
troublesome. For a time he accepted prussian blue, but he knew that
indigo was the right material, and to indigo he gave days of
concentrated work, preparing and watching the vats, dipping the wool
with his own hands (which often bore the stain of work for longer than
he wished), superintending the minutest detail and refusing to be
content with anything short of the best. But these two qualities of
industry and of aiming at a high standard would not have carried him so
far if he had not added exceptional gifts of nature. With him hand and
eye worked together as in few craftsmen of any age; and thus he could
carry his experiments to a successful end, choosing his material, mixing
his colours, and timing his work with exact felicity. And when he had
found the right way he had the rare skill to communicate his knowledge
to others and thus to train them for the work.
Queen Square, Bloomsbury, was the first scene of his labours; but as the
firm prospered and the demands for their work grew, Morris found the
premises too small. At one time he had hopes of finding a suitable spot
near the old cloth-working towns at the foot of the Cotswolds, where
pure air and clear water were to be found; but the conditions of trade
made it necessary for him to be nearer to London. In 1881 he bought an
old silk-weaving mill at Merton near Wimbledon, on the banks of the
Wandle, and this is still the centre of the work.
To study special industries, or to execute a special commission, he was
often obliged to make long journeys to the north of England or
elsewhere; but the routine of his life consisted in daily travelling
between his house at Hammersmith and the mills at Merton, which was
more tiresome than it is to-day owing to the absence of direct connexion
between these districts. But his energy overbore these obstacles; and,
except when illness prevented him, he remained punctual in his
attendance to business and in close touch with all his workers. Towards
them Morris was habitually generous. The weaker men were kept on and
paid by time, long after they had ceased to produce remunerative work,
while the more capable were in course of time admitted as profit-sharers
into the business. Every man who worked under him had to be prepared for
occasional outbursts of impatient temper, when Morris spoke, we are
told, rather as a good workman scornful of bad work, than as an employer
finding fault with his men; but in the long run all were sure to receive
fair and friendly treatment.
Such was William Morris at his Merton works, a master craftsman worthy
of the best traditions of the Middle Ages, fit to hold his place with
the masons of Chartres, the weavers of Bruges, and the wood-carvers of
Nuremberg. As a manager of a modern industrial firm competing with
others for profit he was less successful. The purchasing of the best
material, the succession of costly experiments, the 'scrapping' of all
imperfect work, meant a heavy drain on the capital. Also the society had
been hurriedly formed without proper safeguards for fairly recompensing
the various members according to their work; and when in 1875 it was
found necessary to reconstitute it, that Morris might legally hold the
position which he had from the outset won by his exertions, this could
not be effected without loss, nor without a certain friction between the
partners. So, however prosperous the business might seem to be through
its monopoly of certain wares, it was difficult even for a skilful
financier to make on each year a profit which was in any way
proportionate to the fame of the work produced. But in 1865 Morris was
fortunate in finding a friend ready to undertake the keeping of the
books, who sympathized with his aims and whose gifts supplemented his
own; and, for the rest, he had read and digested the work of Ruskin, and
had learnt from him that the function of the true merchant was to
produce goods of the best quality, and only secondarily to produce a
profitable balance-sheet.
How it was that from being the head of an industrial business Morris
came to be an ardent advocate of Socialism is the central problem of his
life. The root of the matter lay in his love of art and of the Middle
Ages. He had studied the centuries productive of the best art known to
him, and he believed that he understood the conditions under which it
was produced. The one essential was that the workers found pleasure in
their work. They were not benumbed by that Division of Labour which set
the artisan laboriously repeating the same mechanical task; they worked
at the bidding of no master jealously measuring time, material, and
price against his competitors; they passed on from one generation to
another the tradition of work well done for its own sake. He knew there
was another side to the picture, and that in many ways the freedom of
the mediaeval craftsman had been curtailed. He did not ask history to
run backwards, but he felt that the nineteenth century was advancing on
the wrong line of progress. To him there seemed to be three types of
social framework. The feudal or Tory type was past and obsolete; for the
richer classes of to-day had neither the power nor the will to renew it.
The Whig or Manchester ideal held the field, the rich employer regarding
his workmen as so many hands capable of producing so much work and so
much profit, and believing that free bargaining between free men must
yield the best economic results for all classes, and that beyond
economic and political liberty the State had no more to give, and a man
must be left to himself. Against this doctrine emphatic protests had
been uttered in widely differing forms by Carlyle and Disraeli, by
Ruskin and Dickens; but it was slow to die.
The third ideal was that of the Socialist; and to Morris this meant that
the State should appropriate the means of production and should so
arrange that every worker was assured of the means of livelihood and of
sufficient leisure to enjoy the fruits of what he had made. He who could
live so simply himself thought more of the unjust distribution of
happiness than of wealth, as may be seen in his _News from Nowhere_,
where he gives a Utopian picture of England as it was to be after the
establishment of Socialism. Here rather than in polemical speeches or
pamphlets can we find the true reflection of his attitude and the way in
which he thought about reform.
It was not easy for him to embark on such a crusade. In his early
manhood, except for his volunteering in the war scare of 1859, he had
taken no part in public life. The first cause which led to his appearing
at meetings was wrath at the ill-considered restoration of old
buildings. In 1877, when a society was formed for their protection,
Morris was one of the leaders, and took his stand by Ruskin, who had
already stated the principles to be observed. They believed that the
presentation of nineteenth-century masonry in the guise of mediaeval
work was a fraud on the public, that it obscured the true lessons of the
past, and that, under the pretence of reviving the original design, it
marred the development which had naturally gone forward through the
centuries. It was from his respect for work and the workman that Morris
denounced this pedantry, from his love of stones rightly hewn and laid,
of carving which the artist had executed unconsciously in the spirit of
his time, and which was now being replaced by lifeless imitation to the
order of a bookish antiquary. Against this he was ready to protest at
all times, and references to meetings of 'Antiscrape', as he calls the
society, are frequent in his letters. He also was rigid in declining all
orders to the firm where his own decorations might seem to disturb the
relics of the past.
His next step was still more difficult. The plunge of a famous poet and
artist into agitation, of a capitalist and employer into Socialism,
provoked much wonder and many indignant protests. His severer critics
seized on any pamphlet of his in which they could detect logical
fallacies and scornfully asked whether this was fit work for the author
of the _Earthly Paradise_. Many liberal-minded people indeed regretted
the diversion of his activities, but the question whether he was wasting
them is one that needs consideration; and to judge him fairly we must
look at the problem from his side and postulate that Socialism (whether
he interpreted its theories aright or not) did pursue practical ideals.
If Aeschylus was more proud of fighting at Marathon than of writing
tragedies--if Socrates claimed respect as much for his firmness as a
juryman as for his philosophic method--surely Morris might believe that
his duty to his countrymen called him to leave his study and his
workshop to take an active part in public affairs. He might be more
prone to error than those who had trained themselves to political life,
but he faced the problems honestly and sacrificed his comfort for the
common good.
Criticism took a still more personal turn in the hands of those who
pointed out that Morris himself occupied the position of a capitalist
employer, and who asked him to live up to his creed by divesting himself
of his property and taking his place in the ranks of the proletariat.
This argument is dealt with by Mr. Mackail,[54] who describes the steps
which Morris took to admit his foremen to sharing the profits of the
business, and defends him against the charge of inconsistency. Morris
may not have thought out the question in all its aspects, but much of
the criticism passed upon him was even more illogical and depended on
far too narrow and illiterate a use of the word Socialism. He knew as
well as his critics that no new millennium could be introduced by merely
taking the wealth of the rich and dividing it into equal portions among
the poor.
[Note 54: _Life of Morris_, by J. W. Mackail, vol. ii, pp. 133-9.]
However reluctant Morris might be to leave his own work for public
agitation, he plunged into the Socialist campaign with characteristic
energy. For two or three years he was constantly devoting his Sundays to
open-air speech-making, his evenings to thinly-attended meetings in
stuffy rooms in all the poorer parts of London; and, at the call of
comrades, he often travelled into the provinces, and even as far as
Scotland, to lend a hand. And he spent time and money prodigally in
supporting journals which were to spread the special doctrines of his
form of Socialism. Nor was it only the indifference and the hostility of
those outside which he had to meet; quarrels within the party were
frequent and bitter, though Morris himself, despite his impetuous
temper, showed a wonderful spirit of brotherliness and conciliation. For
two years his work lay with the Socialist Democratic Federation, till
differences of opinion with Mr. Hyndman drove him to resign; in 1885 he
founded the Socialist League, and for this he toiled, writing, speaking,
and attending committees, till 1889, when the control was captured by a
knot of anarchists, in spite of all his efforts. After this he ceased to
be a 'militant'; but in no way did he abandon his principles or despair
of the ultimate triumph of the cause. The result of his efforts must
remain unknown. If the numbers of his audiences were often
insignificant, and the visible outcome discouraging to a degree, yet in
estimating the value of personal example no outward test can satisfy us.
He gave of his best with the same thoroughness as in all his crafts, and
no man can do more. But, looking at the matter from a regard to his
special gifts and to his personal happiness, we may be glad that his
active connexion with Socialism ceased in 1889, and that he was granted
seven years of peace before the end.