The Life of William Morris/Chapter 11
CHAPTER XI
THE SOCIETY FOR PROTECTION OF ANCIENT BUILDINGS:
THE EASTERN QUESTION ASSOCIATION:
PERIOD OF TEXTILES
1877-1878
Almost without knowing it, Morris was now beginning to take a part in public action and political life. From both he had hitherto, in common with the circle of artists to which he belonged, kept apart as from matters that did not concern him. As regards the arts of life, he had been content to labour in his own field, and trust to good work producing its influence, without any active attempt to inculcate first principles or to stem the tide of competition and industrialism by organized teaching. In politics, he was a passive, rather than an active Liberal; voting with his party, and even occasionally attending public meetings, but not a name known in the press or on the platform. In active civic duties, any more than in active political work, he had probably taken no share since his illness in 1864 had made him retire from his Volunteer corps. But this abstention was not natural to him, as it often is to artists and men of letters. His innate Socialism—if the word may for once be used in its natural sense and not as expressing any doctrine—was, and had been from his earliest beginnings, the quality which, more than any other, penetrated and dominated all he did. In this year it forced itself out in two different channels, which would by ordinary people be distinguished from one another as belonging to the fields of art and politics, but which to Morris himself, to whom both art and politics, except in so far as they bore directly on life, were alike meaningless, only represented two distinct points at which the defence of life against barbarism could be carried on. One of these movements he originated, or at least put into active existence, by the formation of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings. The other he aided with all his power by work and money spent in the service of the Eastern Question Association. The Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings has had a long, a quiet, and not a useless life: and has, directly or indirectly, saved many remnants of the native art of England from destruction. The Eastern Question Association was formed to meet a passing political crisis and broke up when its object had ceased. But from Morris's work on the former grew the whole of his later activity as a lecturer and instructor in the principles of art, and as founder and leader of a guild of craftsmen who exist now as the permanent result of his influence. From his work on the latter was developed, by a process of which every step can be clearly traced, his conversion to a definite and dogmatic Socialism.
The destruction of ancient buildings which, throughout the whole of Morris's life, he had seen going on almost unchecked, whether from mere careless barbarism or under the more specious and ruinous pretext of restoration, had been a thing against which it seemed hopeless for any one to fight. It had hitherto been attacked only in isolated instances, by individuals, without any clear statement of principle or any certainty of continuous action. It could only be combated with any hope of success through some permanent and organized body, to whose representations some attention would have to be paid, and who would have time and money to spend on their work. The formation of a society wholly devoted to this purpose seems first to have occurred to Morris's mind in the autumn of 1876, and in connexion with two definite instances of restoration which then came under his own eyes. One was that of Lichfield Cathedral, which he and Wardle had been visiting from Leek. The other was near Kelmscott. On the 4th of September, 1876, a party drove from Kelmscott to pay a visit of a few days to Cormell Price at Broadway. On the way, as usual, they stopped to bait in the pretty little town of Burford on the Windrush. The alterations going on in the beautiful parish church there roused his horror; and at Broadway Tower he drafted a letter urging the formation of a Society which might deal with such cases, and, if the destruction done by the restorers could not be stopped, might at all events make it clear that it was destruction and not preservation. But for some reason or other no immediate action was taken for several months after. At the beginning of March, 1877, an account of the proposed restoration of the splendid Abbey church at Tewkesbury roused him to take practical steps. Mr. F.G. Stephens had for some years been upholding the cause of ancient buildings in the Athenæum newspaper with much courage and persistency, singling out for special attack the wholesale operations carried out in so many cathedral and parochial churches by Sir Gilbert Scott. To the Athenæum Morris now turned for aid in realizing his project. On the 5th of March he wrote to it as follows:
"My eye just now caught the word 'restoration' in the morning paper, and, on looking closer, I saw that this time it is nothing less than the Minster of Tewkesbury that is to be destroyed by Sir Gilbert Scott. Is it altogether too late to do something to save it,—it and whatever else of beautiful and historical is still left us on the sites of the ancient buildings we were once so famous for? Would it not be of some use once for all, and with the least delay possible, to set on foot an association for the purpose of watching over and protecting these relics, which, scanty as they are now become, are still wonderful treasures, all the more priceless in this age of the world, when the newly-invented study of living history is the chief joy of so many of our lives?
"Your paper has so steadily and courageously opposed itself to these acts of barbarism which the modern architect, parson, and squire call 'restoration,' that it would be waste of words to enlarge here on the ruin that has been wrought by their hands; but, for the saving of what is left, I think I may write a word of encouragement, and say that you by no means stand alone in the matter, and that there are many thoughtful people who would be glad to sacrifice time, money, and comfort in defence of those ancient monuments: besides, though I admit that the architects are, with very few exceptions, hopeless, because interest, habit, and ignorance bind them, and that the clergy are hopeless, because their order, habit, and an ignorance yet grosser, bind them; still there must be many people whose ignorance is accidental rather than inveterate, whose good sense could surely be touched if it were clearly put to them that they were destroying what they, or, more surely still, their sons and sons' sons, would one day fervently long for, and which no wealth or energy could ever buy again for them.
"What I wish for, therefore, is that an association should be set on foot to keep a watch on old monuments, to protest against all 'restoration' that means more than keeping out wind and weather, and, by all means, literary and other, to awaken a feeling that our ancient buildings are not mere ecclesiastical toys, but sacred monuments of the nation's growth and hope."
The train caught fire. A fortnight after this letter appeared, the Athenæum announced that his proposal was likely to take effect, and within another fortnight the Society for Protection of Ancient Buildings had been constituted and had held its first meeting, Morris acting as secretary. The eminent men in many walks of life who at once joined it were sufficient to protect it from either contempt or ridicule; and if it has not stayed destruction, it has at all events saved much that would otherwise have been lost, and has had an immense though quiet influence in raising the standard of morality on the subject of ancient buildings throughout England. Architects and owners alike now take a wholly new and wholly beneficial sense of their responsibility. The principles of the Society are given by Morris with unsurpassed lucidity and force in the statement issued by it on its foundation.
"Within the last fifty years a new interest, almost like another sense, has arisen in these ancient monuments of art; and they have become the subject of one of the most interesting of studies, and of an enthusiasm, religious, historical, artistic, which is one of the undoubted gains of our time; yet we think that if the present treatment of them be continued, our descendants will find them useless for study and chilling to enthusiasm. We think that those last fifty years of knowledge and attention have done more for their destruction than all the foregoing centuries of revolution, violence, and contempt.
"For architecture, long decaying, died out, as a popular art at least, just as the knowledge of mediæval art was born. So that the civilized world of the nineteenth century has no style of its own amidst its wide knowledge of the styles of other centuries. From this lack and this gain arose in men's minds the strange idea of the Restoration of ancient buildings; and a strange and most fatal idea, which by its very name implies that it is possible to strip from a building this, that, and the other part of its history—of its life, that is—and then to stay the hand at some arbitrary point, and leave it still historical, living, and even as it once was.
"In early times this kind of forgery was impossible, because knowledge failed the builders, or perhaps because instinct held them back. If repairs were needed, if ambition or piety pricked on to change, that change was of necessity wrought in the unmistakable fashion of the time; a church of the eleventh century might be added to or altered in the twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth, or even the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; but every change, whatever history it destroyed, left history in the gap, and was alive with the spirit of the deeds done amidst its fashioning. The result of all this was often a building in which the many changes, though harsh and visible enough, were by their very contrast interesting and instructive, and could by no possibility mislead. But those who make the changes wrought in our day under the name of Restoration, while professing to bring back a building to the best time of its history, have no guide but each his own individual whim to point out to them what is admirable and what contemptible: while the very nature of their task compels them to destroy something, and to supply the gap by imagining what the earlier builders should or might have done. Moreover, in the course of this double process of destruction and addition, the whole surface of the building is necessarily tampered with; so that the appearance of antiquity is taken away from such old parts of the fabric as are left, and there is no laying to rest in the spectator the suspicion of what may have been lost; and in short, a feeble and lifeless forgery is the final result of all the wasted labour.
"Of all the Restorations yet undertaken the worst have meant the reckless stripping a building of some of its most interesting material features; while the best have their exact analogy in the Restoration of an old picture, where the partly perished work of the ancient craftsmaster has been made neat and smooth by the tricky hand of some unoriginal and thoughtless hack of to-day. If, for the rest, it be asked us to specify what kind or amount of art, style, or other interest in a building, makes it worth protecting, we answer, Anything which can be looked on as artistic, picturesque, historical, antique, or substantial: any work, in short, over which educated artistic people would think it worth while to argue at all.
"It is for all these buildings, therefore, of all times and styles, that we plead, and call upon those who have to deal with them, to put Protection in the place of Restoration, to stave off decay by daily care, to prop a perilous wall or mend a leaky roof by such means as are obviously meant for support or covering, and show no pretence of other art, and otherwise to resist all tampering with either the fabric or ornament of the building as it stands; if it has become inconvenient for its present use, to raise another building rather than alter or enlarge the old one; in fine, to treat our ancient buildings as monuments of a bygone art, created by bygone manners, that modern art cannot meddle with without destroying."
Among the celebrated names whom the newlyfounded Society was able to announce as members was that of Carlyle. The story of how he was induced to join it is highly characteristic: I owe it to Mr. William De Morgan, through whom, as a neighbour and friend, living in Cheyne Row a few doors off, Carlyle was approached.
"I sent the prospectus to Carlyle," Mr. De Morgan tells me, "through his niece Miss Aitken, and afterwards called by appointment to elucidate further. The philosopher didn't seem in the mood to join anything—in fact it seemed to me that the application was going to be fruitless. But fortunately Sir James Stephen was there when I called, and Carlyle passed me on to him with the suggestion that I had better make him a convert first. However, Sir James declined to be converted, on the ground that the owners or guardians of ancient buildings had more interest than any one else in preserving them, and would do it, and so forth. I replied with a case to the contrary, that of Wren's churches and the Ecclesiastical Commissioners. This brought Carlyle out with a panegyric of Wren, who was, he said, a really great man, 'of extraordinary patience with fools,' and he glared round at the company reproachfully. However, he promised to think it over, chiefly, I think, because Sir James Stephen had rather implied that the Society's object was not worth thinking over. He added one or two severe comments on the contents of space.
I heard from his niece next day that he was wavering, and that a letter from Morris might have a good effect. I asked for one, and received the following:
"'April 3.
"'My dear De Morgan,
"'I should be sorry indeed to force Mr. Carlyle's inclinations on the matter in question, but if you are seeing him I think you might point out to him that it is not only artists or students of art that we are appealing to, but thoughtful people in general. For the rest it seems to me not so much a question whether we are to have old buildings or not, as whether they are to be old or sham old: at the lowest I want to make people see that it would surely be better to wait while architecture and the arts in general are in their present experimental condition before doing what can never be undone, and may at least be ruinous to what it intends to preserve.
"'William Morris."
"Next day," Mr. De Morgan goes on, "I received from Miss Aitken a letter from Carlyle to the Society, accepting membership. It made special allusion to Wren, and spoke of his City churches as 'marvellous works, the like of which we shall never see again,' or nearly that. Morris had to read this at the first public meeting—you may imagine that he didn't relish it, and one heard it in the way he read it—I fancy he added mentally, 'And a good job too!'"
Morris's prejudice against the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was indeed carried to a pitch that amounted to pure unreasonableness: and in the work of Wren and his successors he steadily declined to acknowledge either fitness, or dignity, or elegance.
The rather lumbering title of the Society was at an early date replaced for familiar usage by the more terse and expressive name of the Anti-Scrape, a word of Morris's own invention. Two months after its formation he writes to a friend: "By the way you have not yet joined our Anti-Scrape Society: I will send you the papers of it: the subscription is only 10/6, and may save you something if people ask for subscriptions to restorations by enabling you to say, 'I am sorry, but be damned—look here.'"
Meanwhile Morris had been swept into politics by an impulse no less powerful and sincere against barbarism. If ancient buildings were all but alive to him, and he felt their ruin and defacement as a kind of physical torture, his sympathy with oppressed fellow-creatures rather gained than lost in force from this feeling. The collapse of the Turkish Government in its European provinces during the year 1876 had been accompanied by massacres and torture on a prodigious scale in Bulgaria, the news of which in England, at first received with incredulous apathy, gradually roused an overpowering horror and indignation. The armed intervention of Russia, though it did not take place till the following April, had been long foreseen; and feeling in England was torn violently asunder between traditional jealousy of Russia and sympathy with the oppressed Christian populations. For long the former feeling was predominant both in the Government and in the nation; and the group of persons who towards the end of 1876 founded the Eastern Question Association were at first a minority, trifling in number, however powerful in the justice of their cause and the strength of their convictions. Into this work Morris flung himself heart and soul: he was treasurer of the Association, and through the Russo-Turkish War, and the confused and hostile negotiations which followed, worked hard for it with tongue and pen.
On the 15th of November, when the first steps were being taken towards organizing the movement, he wrote to Faulkner at Oxford:
"I am very willing to receive you as a convert if you must needs ticket yourself so, though I don't see the need, as both your views and mine being interpreted meant declaring ourselves enemies of that den of thieves the Turkish Government. As to the Russians, all I say is this: we might have acted so that they could have had no pretext for interfering with Turkey except in accordance with the unanimous wish of Europe: we have so acted as to drive them into separate interference whatever may come: and to go to war with them for this would be a piece of outrageous injustice. Furthermore if we came victorious out of such a war, what should we do with Turkey, if we didn't wish to be damned? 'Take it ourselves,' says the bold man, 'and rule it as we rule India.' But the bold man don't live in England at present I think; and I know what the Tory trading stock-jobbing scoundrel that one calls an Englishman to-day would do with it: he would shut his eyes hard over it, get his widows and orphans to lend it money, and sell it vast quantities of bad cotton. For the rest, I know that the Russians have committed many crimes, but I cannot accuse them of behaving ill in this Turkish business at present, and I must say I think it very unfair of us, who freed our black men, to give them no credit for freeing their serfs: both deeds seem to me to be great landmarks in history. However, I repeat, to finish, that my cry and that of all that I consider really on our side is 'The Turkish Government to the Devil, and something rational and progressive in its place.' If people say that latter part is difficult, I can only say that it is difficult to make a pair of shoes, or even a poem; and yet both deeds are sometimes done;—more or less ill 'tis true."
"I do not feel very sanguine about it all," he adds, after giving details as to the action which it was proposed to take: "but since it is started and is the only thing that offers at present, and I do not wish to be anarchical, I must do the best I can with it."
Into the details of the historic controversy this is no place to enter: it is one long ago judged by time. But the manifesto which Morris issued in May, 1877, when the recent declaration of war by Russia had brought the Eastern Question into a very acute and dangerous stage, is remarkable, less for any unusual insight into what is called the political situation, than for the body to whom he addressed it, and the tone it took on political action in the largest sense. It contains his later socialist teaching as yet folded in the germ.
"To the working men of England" this manifesto is headed: and it contains this remarkable passage:
"Who are they that are leading us into war? Greedy gamblers on the Stock Exchange, idle officers of the army and navy (poor fellows!), worn-out mockers of the clubs, desperate purveyors of exciting war-news for the comfortable breakfast-tables of those who have nothing to lose by war; and lastly, in the place of honour, the Tory Rump, that we fools, weary of peace, reason, and justice, chose at the last election to represent us. Shame and double shame, if we march under such leadership as this in an unjust war against a people who are not our enemies, against Europe, against freedom, against nature, against the hope of the world.
"Working men of England, one word of warning yet: I doubt if you know the bitterness of hatred against freedom and progress that lies at the hearts of a certain part of the richer classes in this country: their newspapers veil it in a kind of decent language; but do but hear them talking among themselves, as I have often, and I know not whether scorn or anger would prevail in you at their folly and insolence. These men cannot speak of your order, of its aims, of its leaders, without a sneer or an insult: these men, if they had the power (may England perish rather!), would thwart your just aspirations, would silence you, would deliver you bound hand and foot for ever to irresponsible capital. Fellow-citizens, look to it, and if you have any wrongs to be redressed, if you cherish your most worthy hope of raising your whole order peacefully and solidly, if you thirst for leisure and knowledge, if you long to lessen these inequalities which have been our stumbling-block since the beginning of the world, then cast aside sloth and cry out against an Unjust War, and urge us of the middle classes to do no less."
Throughout this period his letters are full of the same excitement, and of the same feeling that it was to the working classes that the only useful appeal could be made. "I was at the working-men's meeting at the Cannon Street Hotel on Wednesday," he writes on the 4th of May; "it was quite a success; they seem to have advanced since last autumn. Some of them spoke very well, nor would the meeting so much as listen to George Potter on the other side. Burt (M.P. for Morpeth and who is, or was, a working man) was chairman, and spoke excellently though shortly, with a strong Northumbrian tongue: he seemed a capital fellow. Meantime the Liberal party is blown to pieces, and everything is in confusion."
As summer passed over, the shadow of imminent war lifted: but in autumn Morris was once more eagerly at work on the Committee which, under the presidency of Lord Lawrence, strove unavailingly to prevent the Afghan campaign, which was accepted by the war-party in England as an equivalent for open hostilities with Russia. At the beginning of 1878, when the Russian troops had forced the Balkans, the crisis became acute again. "This is terrible news," he writes on the 5th of January, when war seemed all but certain. "I confess I am really astounded at the folly that can play with such tremendous tools in this way; and more and more I feel how entirely right the flattest democracy is." At a meeting held in Exeter Hall on the 16th to protest against the threatening attitude of the Government, Morris appeared for the first time as a writer of political verse. "Wake, London. Lads!" a stirring ballad written by him for the occasion, was distributed in the hall and sung with much enthusiasm. Here, as in the manifesto of the previous year, the appeal is to the "political working man," as Morris calls him in a letter describing this meeting, and is made in the name of the future and its hope. When the crisis in the East was finally past, it left Morris thoroughly in touch with the Radical leaders of the working class in London, and well acquainted with the social and economic ideas which, under the influence of widening education and of the international movement among the working classes, were beginning to transform their political creed from an individualist Radicalism into a more or less definite doctrine of State Socialism.
Morris's absorption in wider interests during this period was accompanied by a fresh development of energy in his own professional work. The dyeing and calico printing industry, still mainly carried on at Leek, was now established as an important branch of the business, and the designing of patterns for chintzes and figured silks was part of his daily work. Weaving both in silk and wool had also taken its place alongside of dyeing in his own workshops. "I am dazzled," he writes in March, 1877, "at the prospect of the splendid work we might turn out in that line." A French brocade-weaver from Lyons, M. Bazin, was brought over in June to set up the first silk-loom. As to this and other work begun or projected, Morris wrote to Mr. T. Wardle on the 13th of April:
"Thank you for getting me news of the brocader. We are willing to agree to his terms of 3,000 fr. for the year, and think it would be prudent not to guarantee for longer: but if he suits us, no doubt the situation will be a permanent one for him. I think before we strike a bargain we should see his specimens of work: meantime we send a parcel of examples of cloth such as we are likely to want as far as the weaving is concerned. We shall have to find him standing-room for the loom: what space and height is wanted for this? we should by all means want it big enough to weave the widest cloth that can be done well without steam-power: and it ought to be such as could weave a design 27 inches wide. We should certainly want to weave damask. I hope that your correspondent understands that we want a really intelligent man: if he turn out such, his position with us will be good, as we should surely be wanting more looms, and he would be foreman over the others. As soon as we are agreed, he must let us know when he can come, and send us some proper paper for pointing, in order that we may get a design ready for him without delay. So much for the brocader, when I have thanked you again very much for getting me on so far, and confessed that I am prodigiously excited about him.
"The tapestry is a bright dream indeed; but it must wait till I get my carpets going; though I have had it in my head lately, because there is a great sale now on in Paris of some of the finest ever turned out: much too splendid for anybody save the biggest pots to buy. Meantime much may be done in carpets: I saw yesterday a piece of ancient Persian, time of Shah Abbas (our Elizabeth's time) that fairly threw me on my back: I had no idea that such wonders could be done in carpets.
"We met again last night and are getting on I think: are going to expostulate with Ormskirk, Halifax, and Cherry-Hinton (young Scott's this last) at once. As for the old bird, all I can say is that he is convicted out of his own mouth of having made an enormous fortune by doing what he well knows to be wrong."
Early in that summer, the premises which have since then been the sale and show rooms for the firm's work had been opened in a newly-built block of buildings at the corner of Oxford Street and North Audley Street. The expanding business and the inaccessibility of Queen Square to the ordinary purchaser forced on this step. "I can't say I am much excited about it," was Morris's own comment, "as I should be if it were a shed with a half-dozen looms in it." The Queen Square premises were now wholly set free for the manufacturing part of the business, and the increased business filled up the free space at once. It cannot be denied that Morris looked on the political situation, as he was bound to do, from the point of view of the manufacturer, as well as that of the politician and social reformer. "Picture to yourself," he writes in May, "a three years' war, and the shop in Oxford Street, and poor Smith standing at the door with his hands in his pockets!"
During this year, Morris had as secretary and general helper at Queen Square a son of his old tutor Canon Guy. In October he left in order to go to Oxford, having made up his mind to take Orders. A diary which he kept during the last few months of his employment at Queen Square has been preserved, and gives a lively picture of the common course of work there as it went on from day to day. By Mr. Guy's permission I give a few typical extracts. The multifariousness of the master's energy, and the many difficulties that had to be contended with when any new kind of work was being started, are alike noticeable.
"18 May.Mr. Morris slept last night in town, and was up on the move when I arrived. He had been downstairs and set the new dye-pot at work, ready for him to set an indigo vat in the afternoon. Kirby's man came and finished fixing the ciphering tube. G.W. and W.M. talked over Mrs. Baring's house in Devonshire: the work we have proposed to do will certainly take two or three years before all completed: we have to get our Lyons silk-weaver at work for one thing. W.M. did a little work to a piece of embroidery in his room during the morning. I went down into the dye-shop with W.M. between 1 and 2 o'clock and helped him to set his vat. He dyed some blues which he will green on Tuesday next, if all is well, for Dimarco's carpet stuff. Mr. Broadhurst called and saw W.M. about the Eastern Question.
"5 June.Mr. Wardle away at Richmond in morning. Mr. Morris came at midday: he dyed some blue silks in cochineal and madder to get purples: he has not yet learnt the real upshot of this dyeing; it is hard to get the colour on. Some of McCrea's wool was also dyed in the cochineal bath. Our clients are slow to pay their bills, this leads us into nasty difficulties. Mr. Morris spent the whole of this afternoon dyeing. Adams called about the Baptistery windows in All Saints, Putney; the two windows were ordered. Marlborough College window is ready to be sent.
"7 June.Dyeing was madder. Mr. Morris wished to get a ply of blood red such as was dyed at Leek in February last, for a hanging pattern. He used 2 lb. of madder for 2½ lb. of wool (3 hanks of weft and 2 hanks of warp). The colour in the end was not quite as deep as was wanted, owing to there being not a sufficient quantity of madder. When he was at Leek he used 80 lb. of madder for 100 lb. of wool, but you have to force the quantity a little when dyeing a small quantity of wools. In the spent bath other wools were dyed. No news from Bazin yet about the pointing. There was a meeting at 264, Oxford Street, in evening, of the Society for Protection of Ancient Buildings. The Dean of Canterbury has written a letter on the subject of restoring the Cathedral; it was rather a cut against W.M., but however he will answer it no doubt.
"21 June.A letter came from Bazin saying that he leaves Lyons to-night for England. Murray came and saw G. W. in the afternoon; he has just returned from Italy. He showed G.W. some of his sketches. While he was there, W.M. came in; he has finished his work at the South Kensington Museum, which he did not care for much: he could not say anything for the designs which were produced by the students; he considered his time as having been wasted I believe. It is quite true about our red carpet having faded. W.M. is astonished at it. We had the cards down from the window to see the results of light and air upon the reds; they really have not much effect, but still a little; but the wools have been exposed to the light nearly a year, and had moreover to stand through all that strong sun of last year, as well as that of this year: no carpet is ever exposed so much to the light. The weld greens have gone, and W.M. is very lamentable over them. There are many secrets yet to be found out about dyeing. W.M. thinks that the Indian vat is the best for silks, and perhaps he will find out that it is the best for yarns; he intends setting one again soon. The blues (yarns) seemed to have stood a good deal, and W.M. is almost inclined now to say that they are the fastest of our dyes.
"25 June.The Heckmondwike Company sent up a woven pattern of the 3-ply green tulip carpet. W.M. called it dove-like, and so it is, the colours are very nice and well toned down. Bazin and a friend made their arrival in the afternoon; W.M. did not feel as if he wished to face Froggy at first, but said to G.W. (who went to receive the weaver) that he would be up in his room, if wanted; but G.W. did not wish to exercise his French alone, but took the two new arrivals up into W.M.'s room. The Frenchmen went round to Ormond Yard with W.M. and G.W. to see what cards we have (these are the cards which we had from Lyons). Froggy says they will do for his purpose, and we shall have to set him at work at once on the silk willow pattern, using these cards. He will take some time in setting up the loom, which will give us time to get silk and to dye it perhaps.
"12 July.Mr. Lendon called about Bazin's work; he gave us some instructions about the point paper, etc. He went round to Ormond Yard and saw the loom; the carpenter finished his work at midday. W.M. dyed a few silks in cochineal. He says that he cannot get on at all with this dye: he cannot make it out, he is unable to get a deep colour on. It will dye the deepest colour in a few minutes, and after that the colour will not get deeper, no matter how long you keep your goods in the decoction. I mordanted a few hanks of wool for to-morrow's experiments, which are to be in the fustic line.
"23 July.I tried to get the Indian vat set to-day, but the indigo, which has to be ground, prevented me. I hope to do so to-morrow.
"24 July.I was hard at work with the vat and managed to get it set by 5 p.m.W.M. helped, and as he slept in town he was able to look at it before going to bed. Silks were alumed for to-morrow's dyeing (weld and walnut, also madder).
"25 July.The vat was coming round all day; she seemed to be doing well at 6.30, when I left; a coppery scum was coming on the surface.
"27 July.The vat seemed to be doing well today; a little silk dyeing was done for experiments. A brevet was given her at 5 p.m. Not very much business done.
"28 July.The hopeful Indian vat brought W.M. up to town (an unusual thing for him to do on a Saturday): the vat had come round very well by this morning; she was in a fit state for dyeing, and W.M. tried some wool in her, which proved to be successful. Still she was not quite come round to her proper form. A little cochineal dyeing was done; blues were dyed purple.
"20 Sept.Bazin began to weave, but the machinery (Jacquard) not being in very good order, he was unable to get on very far. I prepared an estimate for east end window, All Saints, Putney.
"21 Sept.Mr. Morris turned up from Kelmscott early, and as soon as he did so I went round to Ormond Yard with him, to see how Bazin had got on. He had got on better in working the machine than yesterday, but yet the (willow) pattern did not seem to be coming right, and it seemed as if the cards had got misplaced somehow or other. The cards were making an absurd pattern, and W.M. did not know what to make of it. W.M. returned to Kelmscott by the 6.30 train.
"8 Oct.W.M. had to see about his packages, which he has to take to Ireland. He started by 8.25 mail train to Holyhead from Euston. He goes to the Countess of Charleville, Tullamore, King's County, to advise her as to the doing up of her house. He had to take with him patterns of carpets, silks, chintzes, etc. He goes to Leek on his way back from Ireland, and will stay there some while, making Tom Wardle look to his dyeing, etc., helping a good deal in it too."
This was Morris's first visit to Ireland. In a letter he wrote from Leek after his return, there is the old keen eye for scenery; but there is also a new tone, that of the social observer, one might almost say of the political theorist.
"I slept on board," he says, "for about two hours, and then stirred myself to get up and look, and when I came on deck we were just well in sight of land. It was much more beautiful than I expected to see: a long rather low cliffy coast on the right with a rocky steep island in front of it; and on the left a long line of mountains rather than hills going on and turning the corner, and casting up points a long way inland: the said mountains very lovely in outline. The sky was grey and sulky, but not unfit for the scene, and a thickish mist hid all the feet of the mountains, while a cloud or two was lying on the tops of them: it looked very like Iceland and quite touched my hard heart.
"Dublin is not altogether an ugly town; the Liffey runs through the chief street much like the Seine at Paris, which is good: yet a dirty and slatternly city is Dublin, and Guinness seems the only thing of importance there. I set off at about midday for my aristocrats; the train running through a very flat country with the aforesaid Dublin mountains on the left; you pass the Curragh, where our army of occupation sits, a fine moorland swelling up toward the Dublin mountains: then you see Kildare, with a great ruined mediæval church and a tall round tower beside it. Then the Dublin mountains die away, and the Slievh Bloom hills rise up on the left of the great plain; which is to say the truth nothing but bog, reclaimed, half-reclaimed, or unreclaimed: in Elizabeth's time thick forest covered it, but the oaks and all are gone now. The villages we passed were very poor-looking, the cotters' houses in outside appearance the very poorest habitations of man I have yet seen, Iceland by no means excepted.
"Tullamore, my town, lies a little without the old Pale: my employers told me that it used to be the very centre of ribbonism; even last year a man was slain there for 'agrarian' reasons. They told me that an old man had told them how he had seen in the rebellion 20 miles of country burning in a straight line, the cabins and villages fired by the Orange yeomanry: the grandfather of the present young lady who owns the estate commanded the troops of that district in the war, and his banners hang up very little the worse for wear in the hall of the house now—and these unreasonable Irish still remember it all, so longmemoried they are!"
In November, 1877, Mrs. Morris and the two girls had gone to spend the winter at Oneglia on the Italian Riviera, where Morris himself was to join them in spring and make a tour with them through Northern Italy. His letters to Oneglia during these months give an unusually full account of his life and work during the winter. They are full of the Eastern Question, and the work of the Anti-Scrape, and the progress made by Bazin at the silk-loom in Ormond Yard, where "a poor old ex-Spitalfields weaver" had been found to help; and also of a new and at first to him very laborious employment, that of composing and delivering lectures. The first lecture he ever gave in public was on the Decorative Arts. It was delivered before the Trades Guild of Learning, in what he calls "a dismal hole near Oxford Street," on the 4th of December. It was published immediately afterwards by Messrs. Ellis and White as a pamphlet; and was reprinted, under the title of "The Lesser Arts," as the first of the collected addresses published in the volume of "Hopes and Fears for Art." The writing of prose was as yet as difficult to him as the writing of verse was easy, and he ruefully recognized that it was a thing he must work at unassisted.
"I should be glad to be out of Horrington House," he writes on the 29th of November, "'tis rather a doleful abode at present. I was thinking last Saturday of having Sarah up to read scraps of my lecture to her after the example of Molière, but refrained, lest I should kill her with surprise. I went with Wardle to the place and read 'Robinson Crusoe' to him to see if I could make my voice heard, which I found easy to be done."
"I gave my lecture on Tuesday," he continues on the 7th of December; "it went off very well, and I was not at all nervous. I have been having an afternoon with Froggy, the loom, and our Coventry 'designer' so-called: the loom was the wisest of the four of us and understood much more of what the others said than anybody else did—at least I think so."
"I am just come back from Kelmscott," a week later, "where I was two days with Webb: it was rather melancholy after our jolly time of last summer: we had two fine, but very cold days; this morning brilliant but white-frosty. The river had been much flooded, but was lower the first day, and I caught two good pike: I should like to have sent you one in a letter. The blown-down tree is that one by the causeway gate: it makes a sad gap, for it was a fine branchy tree."
From his mother's house in Hertfordshire he writes to the children on Christmas Day:
"I have been much agitated for the past week by the goings on of an August Personage and Lord Beaconsfield; but we hope to agitate others in our turn next week. On the whole our side has got weaker, and many people are sluggish and hard to move who thoroughly agree with us. The E.Q.A. met in committee yesterday and agreed to do something, though not as dramatically as I could have wished: however, we meet again next Monday, and then I hope we shall arrange to have a big meeting before Parliament. So much for politics: 'tis a fine Christmas Day to-day, though there has been a little snow. We have just had a peppering little snow-shower, item, a cock-pheasant has been on the lawn just now: these are bits of Hadham news you know, my dears."
On the 19th of January he gives an account of the Eastern Question Meeting at Exeter Hall the night before. "The evening meeting was magnificent, orderly and enthusiastic, though mind you it took some very heavy work to keep the enemies' roughs out, and the noise of them outside was like the sea roaring against a lighthouse. You will have seen about our music: wasn't it a good idea? I think Chesson suggested it first, and then they set me to write the song, which I did on the Monday night. It went down very well, and they sang it well together: they struck up while we were just ready to come on the platform, and you may imagine I felt rather excited when I heard them begin to tune up. They stopped at the end of each verse and cheered lustily."
"I am full of shame and anger," he writes to Faulkner on the 5th of February, "at the cowardice of the so-called Liberal party. A very few righteous men refuse to sit down at the bidding of these yelling scoundrels and pretend to agree with what they hate: these few are determined with the help of our workingmen allies (who all along have been both staunch and sagacious) to get up a great demonstration in London as soon as may be, which will probably be Saturday week. There will certainly be a fight, so of course you will come up if you can."
The collapse came a week later. "To-morrow I am going to Cambridge," he writes on February 20th, "to give an address at the School of Art for Colvin. As to my political career, I think it is at an end for the present; and has ended sufficiently disgustingly, after beating about the bush and trying to organize some rags of resistance to the war-party for a fortnight. After spending all one's time in committees and the like, I went to Gladstone with some of the workmen and Chesson, to talk about getting him to a meeting at the Agricultural Hall: he agreed, and was quite hot about it, and as brisk as a bee. I went off straight to the Hall, and took it for to-morrow: to work we fell, and everything got into train: but—on Monday our Parliamentaries began to quake, and they have quaked the meeting out now. The E.Q.A. was foremost in the flight, and really I must needs say they behaved ill in the matter. Gladstone was quite ready to come up to the scratch and has behaved well throughout: but I am that ashamed that I can scarcely look people in the face, though I did my best to keep the thing up. The working men are in a great rage about it, as they well may be: for I do verily believe we should have made it a success, though I don't doubt that there would have been a huge row. There was a stormy meeting of the E.Q.A. yesterday, full of wretched little personalities, but I held my tongue—I am out of it now; I mean as to bothering my head about it: I shall give up reading the papers, and shall stick to my work."
That work indeed was just then as engrossing and exciting to him as ever: and he was really glad to get back to it from the unfamiliar field of politics, work in which he took too seriously for his own comfort, and perhaps even for real effectiveness.
The project of reviving the art of high-warp tapestry-weaving, as it had been practised in its great days, was beginning to shape itself in his mind as something more than the bright dream of the previous spring. To Mr. T. Wardle, who had continued to press the matter on him as a practicable scheme, and suggested its being undertaken by them as a joint enterprise, he wrote on the 14th of November, 1877, a long and interesting letter, which not only lays down the scope and difficulties of the work, but incidentally sets forth very clearly his own principles regarding this and other branches of decorative manufacture.
"I shall probably find one letter's space," he says, "not enough for going into the whole matter of the tapestry, but I will begin. Let's clear off what you say about the possibility of establishing a non-artistic manufactory. You could do it, of course; 'tis only a matter of money and trouble: but cui bono? it would not amuse you (unless I wholly misunderstand you), and would, I am sure, not pay commercially: a cheap new article at once showy and ugly, if advertised with humbug enough, will sell, of course: but an expensive article, even with ugliness to recommend it—I don't think anything under a Duke could sell it. However, as to the commercial element of this part of the scheme, 'tis not my affair, but on the art side you must remember that, as nothing is so beautiful as fine tapestry, nothing is so ugly and base as bad: e.g., the Gobelins or the present Aubusson work: also tapestry is not fit for anything but figure-work (except now and then I shall mention wherein presently). The shuttle and loom beat it on one side, the needle on the other, in pattern-work: but for figure-work 'tis the only way of making a web into a picture: now there is only one man at present living (as far as I know) who can give you pictures at once good enough and suitable for tapestry—to wit, Burne-Jones. The exception I mentioned above would be the making of leaf and flower pieces (greeneries, des verdures), which would generally be used to eke out a set of figure-pieces: these would be within the compass of people, work-folk, who could not touch the figure-work. It would only be by doing these that you could cheapen the work at all.
"The qualifications for a person who would do successful figure-work would be these:
"1. General feeling for art, especially for its decorative side.
"2. He must be a good colourist.
"3. He must be able to draw well; i.e., he must be able to draw the human figure, especially hands and feet.
"4. Of course he must know how to use the stitch of the work.
"Unless a man has these qualities, the first two of which are rare to meet with and cannot be taught, he will turn out nothing but bungles, disgraceful to every one concerned in the matter: I have no idea where to lay my hands on such a man, and therefore I feel that whatever I do I must do chiefly with my own hands. It seems to me that tapestry cannot be made a matter of what people nowadays call manufacturing, and that even so far as it can be made so, the only possible manufacturer must be an artist for the higher kind of work: otherwise all he has to do is to find house room, provide the frame and warp, and coloured worsteds exactly as the workman bids him. In speaking thus I am speaking of the picture-work: a cleverish woman could do the greeneries no doubt. When I was talking to you at Leek I did not fully understand what an entirely individual matter it must be: it is just like wood-engraving: it is a difficult art, but there is nothing to teach that a man cannot learn in half a day, though it would take a man long practice to do it well. There are manufacturers of wood-engraving, e.g., the Dalziels, as big humbugs as any within the narrow seas. I suspect you scarcely understand what a difficult matter it is to translate a painter's design into material: I have been at it sixteen years now, and have never quite succeeded.
"In spite of all these difficulties, if in any way I can help you, I will: only you must understand fully that I intend setting up a frame and working at it myself, and I should bargain for my being taught by you what is teachable: also I see no difficulty in your doing greeneries and what patterns turned out desirable, and I would make myself responsible for the designs of such matters. With all this, I have no doubt that we shall both lose money over the work: you don't know how precious little people care for such things.
"To recapitulate: Tapestry at its highest is the painting of pictures with coloured wools on a warp: nobody but an artist can paint pictures; but a sort of half-pictures, i.e., scroll-work or leafage, could be done by most intelligent people (young girls would do) under direction.
"I am sorry if in any way I appear to have wet-blanketed you: but the matter is such an important one that it is no use avoiding the facing of the truth in all ways, and I have accordingly given you my mind without concealment."
He began to make designs for greeneries forthwith, and studied pieces of old tapestry with minute care. In March, 1878, he writes again to Wardle:
"I inclose a warp from a sixteenth-century piece of tapestry, which as you see is worsted: the pitch is 12 to the inch: nothing in tapestry need be finer than this. In setting up your work you must remember that as tapestry hangs on the wall the warps are horizontal, though of course you weave with them vertical. If you send me the space of your loom I will make a design for it.
"Thanks for sending me Arnold's lecture,"—this was the address on "Equality" delivered at the Royal Institution in the previous month and afterwards reprinted in the volume of Matthew Arnold's "Mixed Essays"—"with the main part of which of course I heartily agree: the only thing is that if he has any idea of a remedy he durstn't mention it. I think myself that no rose-water will cure us: disaster and misfortune of all kinds, I think, will be the only things that will breed a remedy: in short, nothing can be done till all rich men are made poor by common consent. I suppose he dimly sees this, but is afraid to say it, being, though naturally a courageous man, somewhat infected with the great vice of that cultivated class he was praising so much—cowardice, to wit."
The strain and excitement of the political campaign of that winter ended in a severe attack of rheumatic gout, which seized and quite crippled him when he went out to join his family in Italy towards the end of April. It prevented him from being much more than a passive participator in the long-planned and eagerly awaited Italian tour. The machinery had been taxed beyond its power: he never quite regained his old strength, and in the following year there can be traced in his letters the first shadow of advancing age: not indeed a surprising thing in a man who had accomplished work so immense in its mass and so high in its quality by the age of forty-five.
From Genoa he writes on the 27th of April to Mrs. Burne-Jones:
"We entered this ancient city yesterday evening by no means triumphantly: we had a lovely drive on Thursday morning to a hill town with an ancient stone or two in its buildings, which are now nothing but tatters of disorder: yet it was agreeable and not very dirty. Diano Castello it is called: people used to run there when the Saracen Vikings burnt Diano Marina and the shore in general: unhappily, though that drive was pleasant, and the evening wandering among the olives was pleasant, I felt the seeds of gout in me all day, and woke yesterday morning with that plant flourishing vigorously: but I didn't like to keep them stuck at Oneglia, as all preparations had been made for departure: so about midday we got away, and I found myself in a carriage somehow along with my dear Jenny, and a very pleasant ride we had to Genoa with my gout seemingly decreasing: but when we all met at the station there was a long way to go to the omnibus, and the octroi objected to the box of medicines (thinking them syrops), and I could not walk or even hop well, so I got stuck, till a chap took me up on his back: but even then I behaved so ill as this, that when he set me down against a wall (lacking nothing of Guy Fawkes but his matches and lanthorn) things began to dance before my eyes, my knees went limp, and down I went, thank you, and enjoyed a dream of some minute and a quarter I suppose, which seemed an afternoon of public meetings and the like: out of that I woke and found myself on the ground the centre of an admiring crowd, one of the members of which held a brandy bottle to my lips which I had the presence of mind to refuse and call for water. Poor May, who was with me, was very much frightened, but was very good: even then I had to be Guy Fawkesed upstairs at the Hotel, chuckling with laughter, till they landed me in this present palatial suite of rooms: so I'm not likely to be able to tell you much of Genoa, I fear. Murray, who is still with us, has taken the two girls out for a walk; I can't help thinking that they will enjoy the port and the streets of a big town after the quiet of Oneglia, though I, for my part, when I wandered among the olives above the sea the other day, felt as if I should be well contented to stay there always; it really was a most lovely spot: and it was pleasant to have the high road close by it and to hear the jingle of bells as the carts went by, though when you were among the olives you could not guess of any road near: the trees went on terrace after terrace right up to the top of the low hill: you could see nothing else: nothing can be imagined more beautiful and soothing.
"This confounded gout and Guy Fawkesing of mine has of course put off our journey to-day, but I am much better now, and I hope we shall get on to Venice to-morrow: we shan't attempt stopping at Verona, where we can easily put up on our return: you see if we were once at Venice Janey and the girls could amuse themselves in any case; and as for me 'tis clear that Venice must be the hobbler's Paradise. Can't you imagine what a time it was for me when I looked out at the window at Oneglia, and saw those three all standing together?"
On the way to Venice the first view of the Lago di Garda gave him a shock of delight more powerful than anything else he saw in Italy. "What a strange surprise it was," he says, "when it suddenly broke upon me, with such beauty as I never expected to see: for a moment I really thought I had fallen asleep and was dreaming of some strange sea where everything had grown together in perfect accord with wild stories." At Venice itself he was so lame that he could only crawl into a few churches. In his letters it is difficult to distinguish the depression of his illness from his pain at the decay, and his horror at the restorations, going on all round him: "It is sad to think," he sums the matter up, "that our children's children will not be able to see a single genuine ancient building in Europe." A visit to Torcello ("it was a great rest to be among the hedges and the green grass again, and to hear the birds singing; swifts are the only songsters in the city") he speaks of as almost his one unmixed pleasure there.
Indeed he was always uneasy away from the earth and the green grass; and when they left Venice for Padua and Verona his spirits began to rise. "What a beautiful and pleasant place it is," he writes of Padua, "with the huge hall dividing the market place, and the endless arcades everywhere: or the Arena Chapel in the midst of the beautiful garden of trellised vines, all as green as the greenest just now. Yesterday was a stormy day, and in the afternoon the girls and I were caught in a shower as we were wandering about; however, it was but wandering in an arcade till it was over, and as the pavement was clean and dry I sat down with great content with my back to the wall. A dyer's hand-cart took refuge by us with a load of blue work (cotton) just done: I was so sorry I could not talk with one of the men, who looked both good-tempered and intelligent. In the evening we went to a queer old botanic garden and heard the birds sing, and then we were driven along the road outside the walls. The rain had cleared off but left great threatening clouds that quite hid the Alps, but the small mountains to the west of Padua were quite clear and blue, and set me longing to be among them. It was a beautiful evening, but damp I doubt; but how sweet the hay smelt!"
From Verona he writes a little later: "'Tis a piping hot day, not a cloud in the sky. I have just been into Sta. Anastasia, which is hard by: a very beautiful church, but appeals less to the heart than the head, and somehow don't satisfy that: also though 'tis meant to be exceedingly Gothic and pointed, it is thoroughly neo-classical in feeling. S. Zeno is not quite what I expected: 'tis a round-arched Gothic church, just as S. Anastasia is a pointed-arched Renaissance one. I am more alive again, and really much excited at all I have seen and am seeing, though sometimes it all tumbles into a dream and I do not know where I am. Many times I think of the first time I ever went abroad, and to Rouen, and what a wonder of glory that was to me when I first came upon the front of the Cathedral rising above the flower-market. It scarcely happens to me like that now, at least not with man's work, though whiles it does with bits of the great world, like the Garda Lake the other day, or unexpected sudden sights of the mountains. Even the inside of St. Mark's gave one rather deep satisfaction, and rest for the eyes, than that strange exaltation of spirits, which I remember of old in France, and which the mountains give me yet.
"I don't think this is wholly because I am grown older, but because I really have had more sympathy with the North from the first in spite of all the faults of its work. Let me confess and be hanged: with the later work of Southern Europe I am quite out of sympathy. In spite of its magnificent power and energy I feel it as an enemy; and this much more in Italy, where there is such a mass of it, than elsewhere. Yes, and even in these magnificent and wonderful towns I long rather for the heap of grey stones with a grey roof that we call a house north-away."
Almost immediately afterwards a fresh attack of gout hurried him to the North again. "I am still plaguy lame," he writes the day after his arrival in London, "a very limpet, but am not so devil-ridden as I was. I think that came of that infernal furnace-heat we were in, the last few days of Italy: it was such a relief when the cool mountain breezes woke me out of a doze as the train laboured up the last slopes before the great tunnel: and going through that merry Burgundy country with a fine windy sunny day I got quite merry myself."
Before going out to Italy he had arranged to take a new house in London, that one in which he lived for the rest of his life, on the Upper Mall at Hammersmith. It is a large Georgian house, of a type, ugly without being mean, familiar in the older London suburbs. It is only separated from the river by a narrow roadway, planted with large elms. The river indeed was so near a neighbour that at exceptionally high tides it occasionally brimmed over the sill of the water-gate in the low river wall, crossed the roadway, and flooded the cellarage of the house. The parapet along the edge had afterwards to be made continuous to avoid this danger. On bright days the sunlight strikes off the water and flickers over the ceilings: many barges and sailing boats go by with the tide, and the curve of the river opens out two long reaches, up by Chiswick Eyot with the wooded slopes of Richmond in the background, and down through Hammersmith Bridge. Behind the house a long rambling garden, in successive stages of lawn and orchard and kitchen-garden, still preserves some flavour of the country among the encroaching mass of building which is gradually swallowing up the scattered cottages, low and roofed with weathered red tiles, that then lay between the river and the high road. The house had some little history; in its garden the inventor of the electric telegraph, Francis Ronalds, had in 1816 laid eight miles of insulated wires charged with static electricity, and worked by electrometers and synchronized rotating discs at either end. Fragments of his apparatus, the first electric communication ever practically worked, are still preserved in the South Kensington Museum. When Morris took it, it had just been vacated by Dr. George Macdonald, and was known as The Retreat; this name, as rather suggestive of a private asylum, he at once changed, and called it Kelmscott House, after his other home on the bank of the same river. The hundred and thirty miles of stream between the two houses were a real, as well as an imaginative, link between them. He liked to think that the water which ran under his windows at Hammersmith had passed the meadows and grey gables of Kelmscott; and more than once a party of summer voyagers went from one house to the other by water, embarking at their own door in London and disembarking in their own meadow at Kelmscott. "The situation," he wrote of it to his wife at Oneglia, "is certainly the prettiest in London (you may mock at this among the olives beside the Midland Sea): the house could easily be done up at a cost of money: the long drawing-room, with a touch of my art, could be made one of the prettiest in London: the garden is really most beautiful. If you come to think of it, you will find that you won't get a garden or a house with much character unless you go out about as far as the Upper Mall. I don't think that either you or I could stand a quite modern house in a street: I don't fancy going back among the bugs of Bloomsbury."
Kelmscott House was taken from Midsummer, and the Morrises moved into it at the end of October. Under his skilful hands, the long drawing-room of which he speaks above—a handsome room with a range of five windows, filling the whole width of the house and looking out through the great elms over the river—had been made into a room quite unique in the quietness and beauty of its decoration. It was sufficiently out of the London dirt to admit of being hung with his own woven tapestry. The painted settle and cabinet, which were its chief ornaments, belonged to the earliest days of Red House; the rest of the furniture and decoration was all in the same spirit, and had all the effect of making the room a mass of subdued yet glowing colour, into which the eye sank with a sort of active sense of rest. Morris's own study on the ground floor was severely undecorated. It had neither carpet nor curtains; the walls were mostly filled with plain bookshelves of unpolished oak, and a square table of unpolished oak scrubbed into snowy whiteness, with a few chairs, completed its contents. One of the first things he did after taking possession of the house was to have a tapestry-loom built in his bedroom, at which he might practise the art of weaving with his own hands. He was often up and at work at his loom with the first daylight in spring and summer mornings. Among his few fragments of diaries is one which he kept of the first complete piece he wove there. It is headed "Diary of work on Cabbage and Vine Tapestry at Kelmscott House, Hammersmith. Begun May 10th, 1879, after Campfield about a week's work getting in, also after weaving a blue list." A table of the number of hours spent daily on it follows, up to the 17th of September, when it was finished. Except for three intervals during which he was out of London, there are only two blank days on the list, and there are a good many days on which he worked at it for nine, and even for ten, hours. The total is 516 hours in the four months; and this was the work of a man who had a hundred other things to attend to, and who was never in a hurry! This tapestry-loom was for his own private use. The coach-house and stables adjoining the house were converted into a large weavingroom, the room afterwards used as the meeting-place of the Hammersmith Socialists. Carpet-looms were built there, and were soon regularly at work producing the fabrics which became known under the name of the Hammersmith carpets and rugs from this accident of their first origin.
During the winter of 1878–9, in fact, weaving in its various forms—on the Jacquard loom for figured silks, on the carpet-loom for pile carpets, and on the tapestry-loom for Arras tapestries—replaced dyeing as the chief object of Morris's interest. The regular work in examining at South Kensington, which he had begun two years before and which he continued till his last illness, had contributed to an increased interest in textiles. He had undertaken that work partly out of a feeling of gratitude for the immense service which the collections at the South Kensington Museum had been to him personally as a designer and manufacturer: "perhaps," he said incidentally in his evidence before the Royal Commission of 1882, "I have used it as much as any man living." The national collections there owe very much to him. For the last fifteen years of his life no important purchase of either textiles or embroideries was ever made without consulting him. "He never failed me," the Director of Art at South Kensington tells me, "and cheerfully put aside his own business when he knew that we had urgent need of his services. On one occasion he went with me to Paris at a few hours' notice and in very bad weather, to attend a sale, and when there offered to advance a considerable sum of money for the benefit of the Department, as in the hurry of our departure from London it had been impossible for me to get sanction for such expenditure."
The embroideries, no less than the woven stuffs, produced at Queen Square, took a fresh start from the introduction of home-dyed silks. This is a point on which all the embroiderers who worked for him lay special emphasis. "There was a peculiar beauty in his dyeing," says Mrs. Holiday, one of the most highly qualified of his later pupils in the art of embroidery, "that no one else in modern times has ever attained to. He actually did create new colours; then in his amethysts and golds and greens, they were different to anything I have ever seen; he used to get a marvellous play of colour into them. The amethyst had flushings of red; and his gold (one special sort), when spread out in the large rich hanks, looked like a sunset sky. When he got an unusually fine piece of colour he would send it off to me or keep it for me; when he ceased to dye with his own hands I soon felt the difference. The colours themselves became perfectly level, and had a monotonous prosy look; the very lustre of the silk was less beautiful. When I complained, he said, 'Yes, they have grown too clever at it—of course it means they don't love colour, or they would do it.'"
"I am writing in a whirlwind of dyeing and weaving," says a letter of March, 1879, "and even as to the latter rather excited by a new piece just out of the loom, which looks beautiful, like a flower garden." Even at Kelmscott he missed the daily fascination of his work. "Somehow I feel," he wrote from there a few months later," as if there must soon be an end for me of playing at living in the country: a town-bird I am, a master-artisan, if I may claim that latter dignity." And again that same autumn, when he was much worried by work for the Society for Protection of Ancient Buildings, "Lord bless us," he breaks out, "how nice it will be when I can get back to my little patterns and dyeing, and the dear warp and weft at Hammersmith!"