I had been at Fairford that still, fresh, April morning, and had enjoyed
the sunny little piazza, with its pretty characteristic varieties of
pleasant stone-built houses, solid Georgian fronts interspersed with
mullioned gables. But the church! That is a marvellous place; its
massive lantern-tower, with solid, softly-moulded outlines--for the
sandy oolite admits little fineness of detail--all weathered to a
beautiful orange-grey tint, has a mild dignity of its own. Inside it is
a treasure of mediaevalism. The screens, the woodwork, the monuments,
all rich, dignified, and spacious. And the glass! Next to King's College
Chapel, I suppose, it is the noblest series of windows in England, and
the colour of it is incomparable. Azure and crimson, green and orange,
yet all with a firm economy of effect, the robes of the saints set and
imbedded in a fine intricacy of white tabernacle-work. As to the design,
I hardly knew whether to smile or weep. The splendid, ugly faces of the
saints, depicted, whether designedly or artlessly I cannot guess, as men
of simple passions and homely experience, moved me greatly, so unlike
the mild, polite, porcelain visages of even the best modern glass. But
the windows are as thick with demons as a hive with bees; and oh! the
irresponsible levity displayed in these merry, grotesque, long-nosed
creatures, some flame-coloured and long-tailed, some green and scaly,
some plated like the armadillo, all going about their merciless work
with infinite gusto and glee! Here one picked at the white breast of a
languid, tortured woman who lay bathed in flame; one with a glowing
hook thrust a lamentable big-paunched wretch down into a bath of molten
liquor; one with pleased intentness turned the handle of a churn, from
the top of which protruded the head of a fair-haired boy, all distorted
with pain and terror. What could have been in the mind of the designer
of these hateful scenes? It is impossible to acquit him of a strong
sense of the humorous. Did he believe that such things were actually in
progress in some infernal cavern, seven times heated? I fear it may have
been so. And what of the effect upon the minds of the village folk
who saw them day by day? It would have depressed, one would think, an
imaginative girl or boy into madness, to dream of such things as being
countenanced by God for the heathen and the unbaptized, as well as for
the cruel and sinful. If the vile work had been represented as being
done by cloudy, sombre, relentless creatures, it would have been more
tolerable. But these fantastic imps, as lively as grigs and full to
the brim of wicked laughter, are certainly enjoying themselves with an
extremity of delight of which no trace is to be seen in the mournful
and heavily lined faces of the faithful. Autres temps, autres moeurs!
Perhaps the simple, coarse mental palates of the village folk were none
the worse for this realistic treatment of sin. One wonders what the
saintly and refined Keble, who spent many years of his life as his
father's curate here, thought of it all. Probably his submissive and
deferential mind accepted it as in some ecclesiastical sense symbolical
of the merciless hatred of God for the desperate corruption of humanity.
It gave me little pleasure to connect the personality of Keble with the
place, patient, sweet-natured, mystical, serviceable as he was. It seems
hard to breathe in the austere air of a mind like Keble's, where the
wind of the spirit blows chill down the narrow path, fenced in by the
high, uncompromising walls of ecclesiastical tradition on the one hand,
and stern Puritanism on the other. An artificial type, one is tempted to
say!--and yet one ought never, I suppose, so to describe any flower that
has blossomed fragrantly upon the human stock; any system that seems to
extend a natural and instinctive appeal to certain definite classes of
human temperament.
I sped pleasantly enough along the low, rich pastures, thick with
hedgerow elms, to Lechlade, another pretty town with an infinite variety
of habitations. Here again is a fine ancient church with a comely spire,
"a pretty pyramis of stone," as the old Itinerary says, overlooking a
charming gabled house, among walled and terraced gardens, with stone
balls on the corner-posts and a quaint pavilion, the river running
below; and so on to a bridge over the yet slender Thames, where the
river water spouted clear and fragrant into a wide pool; and across the
flat meadows, bright with kingcups, the spire of Lechlade towered over
the clustered house-roofs to the west.
Then further still by a lonely ill-laid road. And thus, with a mind
pleasantly attuned to beauty and a quickening pulse, I drew near to
Kelmscott. The great alluvial flat, broadening on either hand, with low
wooded heights, "not ill-designed," as Morris said, to the south. Then
came a winding cross-track, and presently I drew near to a straggling
village, every house of which had some charm and quality of style, with
here and there a high gabled dovecot, and its wooden cupola, standing up
among solid barns and stacks. Here was a tiny and inconspicuous church,
with a small stone belfry; and then the road pushed on, to die away
among the fields. But there, at the very end of the village, stood the
house of which we were in search; and it was with a touch of awe, with a
quickening heart, that I drew near to a place of such sweet and gracious
memories, a place so dear to more than one of the heroes of art.
One comes to the goal of an artistic pilgrimage with a certain sacred
terror; either the place is disappointing, or it is utterly unlike what
one anticipates. I knew Kelmscott so well from Rossetti's letters, from
Morris's own splendid and loving description, from pictures, from the
tales of other pilgrims, that I felt I could not be disappointed; and I
was not. It was not only just like what I had pictured it to be, but
it had a delicate and natural grace of its own as well. The house was
larger and more beautiful, the garden smaller and not less beautiful,
than I had imagined. I had not thought it was so shy, so rustic a place.
It is very difficult to get any clear view of the Manor. By the road are
cottages, and a big building, half storehouse, half wheelwright's shop,
to serve the homely needs of the farm. Through the open door one could
see a bench with tools; and planks, staves, spokes, waggon-tilts,
faggots, were all stacked in a pleasant confusion. Then came a walled
kitchen-garden, with some big shrubs, bay and laurustinus, rising
plumply within; beyond which the grey house, spread thin with plaster,
held up its gables and chimneys over a stone-tiled roof. To the left,
big barns and byres--a farm-man leading in a young bull with a pole at
the nose-ring; beyond that, open fields, with a dyke and a flood-wall of
earth, grown over with nettles, withered sedges in the watercourse,
and elms in which the rooks were clamorously building. We met with the
ready, simple Berkshire courtesy; we were referred to a gardener who was
in charge. To speak with him, we walked round to the other side of the
house, to an open space of grass, where the fowls picked merrily, and
the old farm-lumber, broken coops, disused ploughs, lay comfortably
about. "How I love tidiness!" wrote Morris once. Yet I did not feel that
he would have done other than love all this natural and simple litter of
the busy farmstead.
Here the venerable house appeared more stately still. Through an open
door in a wall we caught a sight of the old standards of an orchard, and
borders with the spikes of spring-flowers pushing through the mould. The
gardener was digging in the gravelly soil. He received us with a grave
and kindly air; but when we asked if we could look into the house,
he said, with a sturdy faithfulness, that his orders were that no one
should see it, and continued his digging without heeding us further.
Somewhat abashed we retraced our steps; we got one glimpse of the fine
indented front, with its shapely wings and projections. I should like
to have seen the great parlour, and the tapestry-room with the story of
Samson that bothered Rossetti so over his work. I should like to have
seen the big oak bed, with its hangings embroidered with one of Morris's
sweetest lyrics:
"The wind's on the wold,
And the night is a-cold."
I should like to have seen the tapestry-chamber, and the room where
Morris, who so frankly relished the healthy savour of meat and drink,
ate his joyful meals, and the peacock yew-tree that he found in his days
of failing strength too hard a task to clip. I should like to have
seen all this, I say; and yet I am not sure that tables and chairs,
upholsteries and pictures, would not have come in between me and the
sacred spirit of the place.
So I turned to the church. Plain and homely as its exterior is, inside
it is touched with the true mediaeval spirit, like the "old febel
chapel" of the Mort d'Arthur. Its bare walls, its half-obliterated
frescoes, its sturdy pillars, gave it an ancient, simple air. But I did
not, to my grief, see the grave of Morris, though I saw in fancy the
coffin brought from Lechlade in the bright farm-waggon, on that day of
pitiless rain. For there was going on in the churchyard the only thing I
saw that day that seemed to me to strike a false note; a silly posing
of village girls, self-conscious and overdressed, before the camera of a
photographer--a playing at aesthetics, bringing into the village life
a touch of unwholesome vanity and the vulgar affectation of the world.
That is the ugly shadow of fame; it makes conventional people curious
about the details of a great man's life and surroundings, without
initiating them into any sympathy with his ideals and motives. The price
that the real worshippers pay for their inspiration is the slavering
idolatry of the unintelligent; and I withdrew in a mournful wonder from
the place, wishing I could set an invisible fence round the scene, a
fence which none should pass but the few who had the secret and the key
in their hearts.
And here, for the pleasure of copying the sweet words, let me transcribe
a few sentences from Morris's own description of the house itself:
"A house that I love with a reasonable love, I think; for though my
words may give you no idea of any special charm about it, yet I assure
you that the charm is there; so much has the old house grown up out of
the soil and the lives of those that lived on it: 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--this, I think, was
what went to the making of the old house."
And again:
"My feet moved 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 before
us a grey stone barn and a wall partly overgrown with ivy, over which
a few grey gables showed. The village road ended in the shallow of the
backwater. We crossed the road, and 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. 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 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 whirring about the gables. And the house
itself was a fit guardian for all the beauty of this heart of summer.
"O me! O me! How I love the earth, and the seasons, and weather, and
all things that deal with it, and all that grows out of it--as this has
done! The earth and the growth of it and the life of it! If I could but
say or show how I love it!"
The pure lyrical beauty of these passages makes one out of conceit
with one's own clumsy sentences. But still, I will say how all that
afternoon, among the quiet fields, with the white clouds rolling up
over the lip of the wolds, I was haunted with the thought of that burly
figure; the great head with its curly hair and beard; the eyes that
seemed so guarded and unobservant, and that yet saw and noted every
smallest detail; the big clumsy hands, apt for such delicacy of work; to
see him in his rough blue suit, his easy rolling gait, wandering about,
stooping to look at the flowers in the beds, or glancing up at the
sky, or sauntering off to fish in the stream, or writing swiftly in
the parlour, or working at his loom; so bluff, so kindly, so blunt in
address, so unaffected, loving all that he saw, the tide of full-blooded
and restless life running so vigorously in his veins; or, further
back, Rossetti, with his wide eyes, half bright, half languorous,
pale, haunted with impossible dreams, pacing, rapt in feverish thought,
through the lonely fields. The ghosts of heroes! And whether it was that
my own memories and affections and visions stirred my brain, or that
some tide of the spirit still sets from the undiscovered shores to the
scenes of life and love, I know not, but the place seemed thronged with
unseen presences and viewless mysteries of hope. Doubtless, loving as
we do the precise forms of earthly beauty, the wide green pastures, the
tender grace of age on gable and wall, the springing of sweet flowers,
the clear gush of the stream, we are really in love with some deeper
and holier thing; yet even about the symbols themselves there lingers a
consecrating power; and that influence was present with me to-day, as
I went homewards in the westering light, with the shadows of house and
tree lengthening across the grass in the still afternoon.
Heroes, I said? Well, I will not here speak of Rossetti, though his
impassioned heart and wayward dreams were made holy, I think, through
suffering: he has purged his fault. But I cannot deny the name of hero
to Morris. Let me put into words what was happening to him at the very
time at which he had made this sweet place his home. He had already
done as much in those early years as many men do in a lifetime. He
had written great poems, he had loved and wedded, he had made abundant
friends, his wealth was growing fast; he loved every detail of his
work, designing, weaving, dyeing; he had a band of devoted workers and
craftsmen under him. He could defy the world; he cared nothing at all
for society or honours. He had magnificent vitality, a physique which
afforded him every kind of wholesome momentary enjoyment.
In the middle of all this happy activity a cloud came over his mind,
blotting out the sunshine. Partly, perhaps, private sorrows had
something to do with it; partly, perhaps, a weakening of physical fibre,
after a life of enormous productivity and restless energy, made itself
felt. But these were only incidental causes. What began to weigh upon
him was the thought of all the toiling thousands of humanity, whose
lives of labour precluded them from the enjoyment of all or nearly all
of the beautiful things that were to him the very essence of life;
and, what was worse still, he perceived that the very faculty of higher
enjoyment was lacking, the instinct for beauty having been atrophied
and almost eradicated by sad inheritance, He saw that not only did the
workers not feel the joyful love of art and natural beauty, but that
they could not have enjoyed such pleasures, even if they were to be
brought near to them; and then came the further and darker thought, that
modern art was, after all, a hollow and a soulless thing. He saw around
him beautiful old houses like his own, old churches which spoke of a
high natural instinct for fineness of form and detail. These things
seemed to stand for a widespread and lively joy in simple beauty which
seemed to have vanished out of the world. In ancient times it was
natural to the old builders if they had, say, a barn to build, to make
it strong and seemly and graceful; to buttress it with stone, to bestow
care and thought upon coign and window-ledge and dripstone, to prop the
roof on firm and shapely beams, and to cover it with honest stone tiles,
each one of which had an individuality of its own. But now he saw that
if people built naturally, they ran up flimsy walls of brick, tied them
together with iron rods, and put a curved roof of galvanised iron on the
top. It was bad enough that it should be built so, but what was worse
still was that no one saw or heeded the difference; they thought the
new style was more convenient, and the question of beauty never entered
their minds at all. They remorselessly pulled down, or patched meanly
and sordidly, the old work. And thus he began to feel that modern
art was an essentially artificial thing, a luxury existing for a few
leisurely people, and no longer based on a deep universal instinct.
He thought that art was wounded to death by competition and hurry and
vulgarity and materialism, and that it must die down altogether before a
sweet natural product could arise from the stump.
Then, too, Morris was not an individualist; he cared, one may think,
about things more than people. A friend of his once complained that, if
he were to die, Morris would no doubt grieve for him and even miss him,
but that it would make no gap in his life, nor interrupt his energy of
work. He cared for movements, for classes, for groups of men, more than
he cared for persons. And thus the idea came to him, in a mournful year
of reflection, that it was not only a mistake, but of the nature of sin,
to isolate himself in a little Paradise of art of his own making, and to
allow the great noisy, ugly, bewildered world to go on its way. It was
a noble grief. The thought of the bare, uncheered, hopeless lives of the
poor came to weigh on him like an obsession, and he began to turn over
in his mind what he could do to unravel the knotted skein.
"I am rather in a discouraged mood," he wrote on New Year's Day 1880,
"and the whole thing seems almost too tangled to see through and too
heavy to move." And again:
"I have of late been somewhat melancholy (rather too strong a word, but
I don't know another); not so much so as not to enjoy life in a way, but
just so much as a man of middle age who has met with rubs (though less
than his share of them) may sometimes be allowed to be. When one is just
so much subdued one is apt to turn more specially from thinking of one's
own affairs to more worthy matters; and my mind is very full of the
great change which I hope is slowly coming over the world."
And so he plunged into Socialism. He gave up his poetry and much of his
congenial work. He attended meetings and committees; he wrote leaflets
and pamphlets; he lavished money; he took to giving lectures and
addresses; he exposed himself to misunderstandings and insults. He spoke
in rain at street corners to indifferent loungers; he pushed a little
cart about the squares selling Socialist literature; he had collisions
with the police; he was summoned before magistrates: the "poetic
upholsterer," as he was called, became an object of bewildered contempt
to friends and foes alike. The work was not congenial to him, but he
did it well, developing infinite tolerance and good-humour, and even
tactfulness, in his relations with other men. The exposure to the
weather, the strain, the neglect of his own physical needs, brought on,
undoubtedly, the illness of which he eventually died; and worst of all
was the growing shadow of discouragement, which made him gradually aware
that the times were not ripe, and that even if the people could seize
the power they desired, they could not use it. He became aware that the
worker's idea of rising in the social scale was not the idea of gaining
security, leisure, independence, and love of honest work, but the hope
of migrating to the middle class, and becoming a capitalist on a small
scale. That was the last thing that Morris desired. Most of all he felt
the charge of inconsistency that was dinned into his ears. It was held
ridiculous that a wealthy capitalist and a large employer of labour,
living, if not in luxury, at least in considerable stateliness, should
profess Socialist ideas without attempting to disencumber himself of his
wealth. He wrote in answer to a loving remonstrance:
"You see, my dear, I can't help it. The ideas which have taken hold of
me will not let me rest; nor can I see anything else worth thinking
of. How can it be otherwise, when to me society, which to many seems
an orderly arrangement for allowing decent people to get through their
lives creditably and with some pleasure, seems mere cannibalism; nay,
worse (for there ought to be hope in that), is grown so corrupt, so
steeped in hypocrisy and lies, that one turns from one stratum of it to
another with hopeless loathing.... Meantime, what a little ruffles me
is this, that if I do a little fail in my duty some of my friends will
praise me for failing instead of blaming me."
And then at last, after every sordid circumstance of intrigue and
squabble and jealousy, one after another of the organisations he joined
broke down. Half gratefully and half mournfully he disengaged himself,
not because he did not believe in his principles, but because he saw
that the difficulties were insuperable. He came back to the old life; he
flung himself with renewed ardour into art and craftsmanship. He began
to write the beautiful and romantic prose tales, with their enchanting
titles, which are, perhaps, his most characteristic work. He learnt by
slow degrees that a clean sweep of an evil system cannot be made in a
period or a lifetime by an individual, however serious or strenuous
he may be; he began to perceive that, if society is to put ideas in
practice, the ideas must first be there, clearly defined and widely
apprehended; and that it is useless to urge men to a life of which they
have no conception and for which they have no desire. He had always
held it to be a sacred duty for people to live, if possible, in whatever
simplicity, among beautiful things; and it may be said that no one man
in one generation has ever effected so much in this direction. He
has, indeed, leavened and educated taste; he has destroyed a vile and
hypocritical tradition of domestic art; by his writings he has opened a
door for countless minds into a remote and fragrant region of unspoilt
romance; and, still more than this, he remains an example of one who
made a great and triumphant resignation of all that he held most
dear, for the sake of doing what he thought to be right. He was not an
ascetic, giving up what is half an incumbrance and half a terror; nor
was he naturally a melancholy and detached person; but he gave up
work which he loved passionately, and a life which he lived in a
full-blooded, generous way, that he might try to share his blessings
with others, out of a supreme pity for those less richly endowed than
himself.
How, then, should not this corner of the world, which he loved so
dearly, speak to the spirit with a voice and an accent far louder and
more urgent than its own tranquil habit of sunny peace and green-shaded
sweetness! "You know my faith," wrote Morris from Kelmscott in a
bewildered hour, "and how I feel I have no sort of right to revenge
myself for any of my private troubles on the kind earth; and here I feel
her kindness very specially, and am bound not to meet it with a long
face." Noble and high-hearted words! for he of all men seemed made by
nature to enjoy security and beauty and the joys of living, if ever man
was so made. His very lack of personal sensitiveness, his unaptness to
be moved by the pathetic appeal of the individual, might have been made
a shield for his own peace; but he laid that shield down, and bared
his breast to the sharp arrows; and in his noble madness to redress the
wrongs of the world he was, perhaps, more like one of his great generous
knights than he himself ever suspected.
This, then, I think is the reason why this place--a grey grange at the
end of a country lane, among water meadows--has so ample a call for the
spirit. A place of which Morris wrote, "The scale of everything of the
smallest, but so sweet, so unusual even; it was like the background
of an innocent fairy-story." Yes, it might have been that! Many of the
simplest and quietest of lives had been lived there, no doubt, before
Morris came that way. But with him came a realisation of its virtues, a
perception that in its smallness and sweetness it yet held imprisoned,
like the gem that sits on the smallest finger of a hand, an ocean of
light and colour. The two things that lend strength to life are, in the
first place, an appreciation of its quality, a perception of its intense
and awful significance--the thought that we here hold in our hands,
if we could but piece it all together, the elements and portions of a
mighty, an overwhelming problem. The fragments of that mighty mystery
are sorrow, sin, suffering, joy, hope, life, death. Things of their
nature sharply opposed, and yet that are, doubtless, somehow and
somewhere, united and composed and reconciled. It is at this sad point
that many men and most artists stop short. They see what they love and
desire; they emphasise this and rest upon it; and when the surge of
suffering buffets them away, they drown, bewildered, struggling for
breath, complaining.
But for the true man it is otherwise. He is penetrated with the desire
that all should share his joy and be emboldened by it. It casts a cold
shadow over the sunshine, it mars the scent of the roses, it wails
across the cooing of the doves--the sense that others suffer and toil
unhelped; and still more grievous to him is the thought that, were these
duller natures set free from the galling yoke, their mirth would be evil
and hideous, they would have no inkling of the sweeter and the purer
joy. And then, if he be wise, he tries his hardest, in slow and wearied
hours, to comfort, to interpret, to explain; in much heaviness and
dejection he labours, while all the time, though he knows it not, the
sweet ripple of his thoughts spreads across the stagnant pool. He may be
flouted, contemned, insulted, but he heeds it not; while all the strands
of the great mystery, dark and bright alike, work themselves, delicately
and surely, into the picture of his life, and the picture of other lives
as well. Larger and richer grows the great design, till it is set in
some wide hall or corridor of the House of Life; and the figure of
the toil-worn knight, with armour dinted and brow dimmed with dust
and sweat, kneeling at the shrine, makes the very silence of the place
beautiful; while those that go to and fro rejoice, not in the suffering
and weariness, not in the worn face and the thin, sun-browned hands, but
in the thought that he loved all things well; that his joy was pure and
high, that his clear eyes pierced the dull mist that wreathed cold field
and dripping wood, and that, when he sank, outworn and languid after the
day's long toil, the jocund trumpets broke out from the high-walled town
in a triumphant concert, because he had done worthily, and should now
see greater things than these.