The Life of William Morris/Chapter 18
CHAPTER XVIII
SIGNS OF CHANGE: THE ARTS AND CRAFTS: RETURN
TO ROMANCE
1888–1889
This group of craftsmen were drawn together from many different quarters and worked in very various methods; but each in his own sphere, all alike consciously aimed at a Renaissance of the decorative arts which should act at once through and towards more humanized conditions of life both for the workman and for those for whom he worked. There were few if any among them who would not readily have acknowledged Morris as their master. The seed sown twenty-seven years before in the little workshop in Red Lion Square had long been silently and unostentatiously bearing fruit. Of those whose practice had long been moulded by Morris's influence, there were not a few for whom the ideas which underlay the whole of his work had, when they took definite shape as a body of doctrine, added a quickened impulse and a higher enthusiasm. Socialism, less as a definite creed or a dogmatic system than as a way of looking at human life and the meaning of the arts, was widely diffused among a younger generation of artists. Among these Mr. Walter Crane, by his versatility and energy, as well as the acknowledged excellence of his artistic work, held a leading place. Mr. T.J. Cobden-Sanderson brought to the movement an energy as great, united with the gift of a copious and persuasive eloquence. Among the younger men Mr. Heywood Sumner, Mr. W.R. Lethaby, and Mr. W.A.S. Benson may be singled out as prominent members of the group. Only a few out of the whole body were, either then or subsequently, professed Socialists. Some of them were Conservative or even ultra-Conservative in politics. But they all in their special lines of work carried out ideas of which Morris was the original source. To them, and to many others, he has been, both while he lived and afterwards, an inspiring and guiding influence of the first importance.
Alongside of this movement, or rather essentially included in it, was another movement towards a reintegration of labour, a practical socialism of handicraft as applied to the arts. This movement expressed itself in two ways. On the one hand it aimed at a new organization of work within the single workshop, so that the manager, the designer, and the artificer should cease to be three distinct persons belonging to different social grades, differently educated and differently employed, working without mutual sympathy, or even each in active hostility to the others. On the other hand it expressed itself in the co-ordination of these workshops, hitherto isolated units of productive energy, whether by means of formal guilds and associations, or through more intangible links of common ideas and kindred enthusiasms, into the beginnings of a trained organism of handicraftsmen, with a mutual intercommunication, and a cumulative force of trained intelligence. What Morris himself had, in earlier days, done by the mere unassisted force of his own genius, was now being attempted on all sides with a conscious purpose. His own work in the early sixties had been based on two principles: the first, that nothing should be done in his workshops which he did not know how to do himself; and the second, that every form of decorative art could be subsumed under the single head of architecture, and had only a real life and intelligible meaning in its relation to the mistress-art, and through the mistress-art to all the other subordinate arts. Following out these principles, his pupils were now occupied, first, in learning what it was they had to deal with by actual work at the lathe, or the dye-vat, or the mason's yard, and then in forming, by the co-ordination and communication of this practical knowledge, the basis for a really popular art such as had not existed within the memory of men now living.
The sense of corporate life among this group of artists and workmen had by this time reached a point where it demanded some visible expression. There was already a sort of freemasonry among them. The Art Workers' Guild, established in March, 1884, had become a great influence towards solidarity. But now an increased motive power might, it was thought, be given to the movement by arranging for periodical public exhibitions of work done. These exhibitions were to be combined with some amount of instruction by acknowledged masters in both the theory and the practice of the various handicrafts. The beginning of this project has been dated from a correspondence which had been carried on some three years before in the Times on the subject of reform of the Royal Academy. It had long been a surprise or scandal to many that the Academy of Arts should confine itself rigidly to painting and sculpture and what may be called abstract architecture, and should ignore all the other decorative and applied arts. But public opinion could not be roused to press for the reform of this bad tradition. The attempt to do so, not for the first or last time, came to nothing: and it was then that the suggestion arose of a separate exhibition of products of applied art. So early as 1858 the question had been raised by Madox Brown in connexion with the exhibitions held by the newly-founded Hogarth Club. The committee of the club had then refused to hang his designs for furniture, as not being examples of "fine art proper." Their decision was quite in consonance with the traditions of that day. But the Pre-Raphaelites themselves were strongly represented on the committee, and even among them the proposal found little or no favour. Probably this was due to a certain excessive purism which had its legitimate and intelligible source in the desire to withdraw art from all taint or suspicion of commercialism. In any case the decision then taken had practically put the matter off for a whole generation. Perhaps the delay was not without its uses.
The first step towards carrying the scheme now once more suggested into actual working was taken by Mr. Benson, who, since he left Oxford in 1876, had been engaged first (like Morris himself) in an architect's office, and then in founding and carrying on a business as a decorative metal-worker and cabinet-maker, and had been throughout that time intimate with Morris on the side of theory and of practice alike. In concert with two or three others, he succeeded, early in 1886, in effecting the formation of a provisional committee of some five and twenty members. Nearly all of them were also members of the Art Workers' Guild; and it was the existence of the Art Workers' Guild, Mr. Benson thinks, which made the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society possible. Of less import, but not without a large result both for good and harm on the new movement, were the various associations which had sprung up in recent years under the names of Home Arts, or Cottage Arts Societies, or Village Industries. These associations had been formed chiefly by the energy or caprice of individuals. Some of them were direct attempts at following the teaching of Ruskin. Others represented a mixture of charity and patronage, and their only effect was to multiply the productions of amateur incompetency. In a few cases, according to the view taken by skilled judges, good work had been produced by them, and in a few more, a slow but steady progress towards good work was visible; but on the whole they were of little value either as productive or as educational agencies.
The newly-formed association was at first known by the name of the Combined Arts. The name of the Arts and Crafts was the invention, at a somewhat later stage, of Mr. Cobden-Sanderson. He was also in the main responsible for another of the new departures made in the first Arts and Crafts Exhibition, that of publishing the names of the designer and executant as the joint-authors of any given piece of work which was exhibited.
That such a thing should be thought of at all marked a great advance from the ideas of a generation earlier. The large firms of decorators and furnishers looked on the notion with suspicion or contempt; and several of them refused point blank to have anything to do with a scheme under which the work of art should have any name attached to it except that of the proprietor and vendor. It was contrary to their practice, and injurious, as they conceived, to their interests, that even their own "designer," the artist whom they paid to produce patterns for their workmen to execute, should be known by name, or have any substantive existence, or separate recognition, outside their workshops. As a body of designers—for such in the main they were—the members of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society were fighting for their own hand in insisting that he should be so recognized. The further doctrine that the name of the executant workman should, where possible, be given, as well as that of the designer, was no doubt in a measure due to the working of Socialistic, or at all events semi-Socialistic ideas. To Morris, who had thought the whole matter out for years, and was never the victim of phrases, the point seemed a trivial one; it was not by printing lists of names in a catalogue that the status of the workman could be raised, or the system of capitalistic commerce altered in the slightest degree. As a matter of fact, this was essentially a designers' movement: and it was as such that Morris approached it. Any elements of militant Socialism which appeared in it came from other sources; and some of those who had been his own disciples, up to the measure of their capacity, in Socialist doctrine, were surprised, and a little indignant, at the cool view which Morris took of the "responsible executants" of his own designs, and the civil contempt with which he treated the rules and regulations framed by his colleagues or pupils. Here, as always whenever it came to be a question of practical production, he understood exactly how to make the best of things as they are, and was no more the slave of new theories than of old conventions.
Towards the movement which thus took shape, the way here, as in so many other instances, had been pointed out by the far-ranging genius of Ruskin long before any steps were, or could be, taken towards its realization. The prophet had, as usual, been long before his age. The whole of the Socialism with which Morris identified himself so prominently in the eighties had been implicitly contained, and the greater part of it explicitly stated, in the pages of "Unto This Last" in 1862, when Morris had just begun the work of his life as a manufacturer. And so now, the new movement in art, which has had so powerful an effect in the succeeding decade, took a direction which had been suggested by Ruskin ten years earlier. Writing to Morris on the 3rd of December, 1878, Ruskin, after thanking him for being the only person who went "straight to the accurate point of the craftsman's question," added these striking words: "How much good might be done by the establishment of an exhibition, anywhere, in which the Right doing, instead of the Clever doing, of all that men know how to do, should be the test of acceptance!" The times were not then ripe. But now this was one main object with which the Arts and Crafts Society was founded, and this was the test which, to the best of its power and will, it attempted to apply.
The project had taken form in the latter months of 1887. Morris, though for it, as for the whole movement out of which it sprang, he was so largely the ultimate source, had no share in its origination, and was at first, with his strong common sense, inclined to lay stress on the difficulties that stood in the way.
"One thing will have to be made clear," he wrote on the last day of that year, "i.e., who is to find the money. I can't help thinking on reflection that some money will have to be dropped upon it: for I don't think (again on reflection) that you will find commercial exhibitors willing to pay rent for space, and the shillings at the door will not, I fear, come to much after the first week or two: the general public don't care one damn about the arts and crafts; and our customers can come to our shops to look at our kind of goods; and the other kind of exhibits would be some of Walter Crane's works and one or two of Burne-Jones: those would be the things worth looking at: the rest would tend to be of an amateurish nature, I fear. In short, at the risk of being considered a wet blanket, a Job, or Job's comforter, and all that sort of thing, I must say I rather dread the said exhibition: this is of course my private view of the matter, and also of course I wish it success if it comes off."
A month later he writes again: "I am convinced that the only time of the year available for the exhibition is from the middle of March to the middle of August. Any other time it would only be visited by the few who are really interested in the subject. Isn't it now too late to get the thing afoot during this period this year?"
But the scheme was already fairly afoot: and Morris seems to have under-estimated, not indeed the actual progress that had been made in the production of good work rightly done, but the amount of feeling towards such production which was stirring, and the amount of public interest which had been at last, though languidly and tardily, aroused in the difference between good and bad decorative art. When once the decision was taken, he gave the scheme his hearty support: and in this, as in the succeeding exhibitions held, his work attracted a wider and more intelligent interest than could have been counted upon. The lectures and papers which he contributed had also a real stimulative and educative value. Limited as was the number of people interested in the subject, they were to be counted by hundreds where those interested in theoretic Socialism could be reckoned on the fingers of one hand. When he resumed educational work in connexion with what was, after all, his own proper subject, on which he spoke with the ease and authority of an absolute master, he may indeed have felt that he was not striking at the root, but must also have recognized that he was not spending his blows on the air.
The echoes of the Trafalgar Square disturbances died slowly away. Popular attention in England was soon transferred to the action of the Government in Ireland under the Crimes Act of 1887: but Morris refused to be so turned off the point. "As to Blunt and his imprisonment," he wrote on the 14th of January (Mr. Wilfrid Blunt was a personal friend of his own, for whom he had a great liking), "from what I hear, the Irish prisons are better than the English. I don't see that we take it quietly specially because it is in Ireland: there are dozens of poor fellows in prison in England over the Trafalgar Square business, some of them for four or six months, for the same offence as Blunt's, and I fear little enough is said about them. However it is a bad business enough, nor do I deny that an English prison is torture, and is meant to be so. Doubtless it is bad that political prisoners like Blunt and the so-called rioters should be treated as criminals; but then the criminals are not treated as if they were human beings. The whole prison system in its folly, stupidity, and cruelty, is a disgrace to mankind; and the treatment of political prisoners is only one instance."
But though there were crowded meetings to welcome the Trafalgar Square prisoners on their release, the excitement, so far as not artificially kept up by the temporary alliance between Socialists and Irish Home-Rulers in vindication of the right of free speech in both countries, had already dwindled away. "On the whole," Morris writes again in March, "I think things will be pretty quiet till next October or November, when it will begin simmering again. I have been reading Tolstoi's 'War and Peace,' which I find I can get through with much approbation but little enjoyment, and yet (to take the horse round to the other side of the cart) with a good deal of satisfaction. There seems to be a consensus of opinion in these Russian novels as to the curious undecided turn of the intellectual persons there: Hamlet (Shakespeare's I mean, not the genuine Amloði) should have been a Russian, not a Dane. This throws some light on the determination and straightforwardness of the revolutionary heroes and heroines there; as if they said, 'Russians must be always shilly-shally, letting I dare not wait upon I would, must they? Look here then, we will throw all that aside and walk straight to death.'
"I don't think I shall tackle 'Anna Karenina'; I want something more of the nature of a stimulant when I read. I am not in a good temper with myself: I cannot shake off the feeling that I might have done much more in these recent matters than I have; though I really don't know what I could have done: but I feel beaten and humbled. Yet one ought not to be down in the mouth about matters; for I certainly never thought that things would have gone on so fast as they have in the last three years; only, again, as opinion spreads, organization does not spread with it."
"The Dream of John Ball" was published as a book that month, and was followed two months later by the volume of lectures and addresses entitled "Signs of Change." This volume once cleared out of the way, his mind reverted with full force to the romance and simplicity of a remoter past. An epoch of swift change, even were it in the nature of progress, was distasteful to his temperament. He was continually seeking refuge from it in dreams of some settled and seeming-changeless order, whether seen as a vision of the future or recreated from a tradition of the past. The old world which he had summoned up in "John Ball" was one that had none of this stability. Its period was that of the breaking up of the mediæval system, and the beginnings of times of change, destruction and unsettlement. In the new romance which he now began to write, he went back from the close of the Middle Ages to their earliest beginnings, and from a complex artificial society to the simplest of all known to history. This story, "The House of the Wolfings," was the first of a series of prose romances which he went on writing almost continuously down to the end of his life.
"I am a little dispirited over our movement in all directions," he writes to Mrs. Burne-Jones on the 29th of July. "Perhaps we Leaguers have been somewhat too stiff in our refusal of compromise. I have always felt that it was rather a matter of temperament than of principle; that some transition period was of course inevitable, I mean a transition involving State Socialism and pretty stiff at that; and also, that whatever might be said about the reception of ideal Socialism or Communism, towards this State Socialism things are certainly tending, and swiftly too. But then in all the wearisome shilly-shally of parliamentary politics I should be absolutely useless: and the immediate end to be gained, the pushing things just a trifle nearer to State Socialism, which when realized seems to me but a dull goal—all this quite sickens me. Also I know that there are a good many other idealists (if I may use that word of myself) who are in the same position, and I don't see why they should not hold together and keep out of the vestry-business, necessary as that may be. Preaching the ideal is surely always necessary. Yet on the other hand I sometimes vex myself by thinking that perhaps I am not doing the most I can merely for the sake of a piece of 'preciousness.'
"I have done another chapter to the tale, rather good I think, and shall get on with it as I can; and when finished shall set about revising before I get it into type."
The work of editing the Commonweal, which even in its first hopeful days had been unpleasant, had now in this altered frame of mind grown inexpressibly irksome. "I have been writing hard all the morning," he says on the 11th of August, "but not at what I like; have been simply pitching into Balfour and Salisbury, who will never see my scathing periods and wouldn't care if they did." The scathing periods, as they may still be found in the file of the Commonweal, make very dull reading now, as they made dull writing then. The only chances of writing what he liked that the scope of the Commonweal gave him he seized with avidity: just at this time he was in the middle of a vivid and detailed account of the Revolt of Ghent in the fourteenth century, including long passages of admirable translation from Froissart, which runs through the issues of seven weeks.
"I am prepared," he writes again a few weeks later, "to see all organized Socialism run into the sand for a while. But we shall have done something even then, as we shall have forced intelligent people to consider the matter; and then there will come some favourable conjunction of circumstances in due time which will call for our active work again. If I am alive then I shall chip in again, and one advantage I shall have, that I shall know much better what to do and what to forbear than this first time."
In this settled low content he spent not an unhappy autumn, as a series of letters in August and September sufficiently show. But before quoting from these I may be pardoned for inserting a letter of the same autumn, addressed to "the baby of the lot" who had been children together through the past twenty years, Miss Margaret Burne-Jones. She was married this year on the 4th of September,
"August 21st, 1888.
"Dearest Margery,
"I have bidden our Mr. Smith to send you an 'article' called a Hammersmith Rug (made at Merton Abbey) which Janey and I ask you to take as a small and unimportant addition to your 'hards.' If it should at any time get dirty (as is likely, since London will not be pulled down for a few months, I judge) if you send it to Merton we can wash it as good as new.
"Also with this little gift take my hearty good wishes for your happiness, which you will easily believe are not at all conventional, since you will remember how prettily and dearly you have always behaved to me since you were a dear little child, in the days when I was really a young man, but thought myself rather old. Also as the wish is not conventional, as really meaning what it says, so it is not conventional as saying something which I do not think will happen: as indeed I think you have every chance of being happy, both because of your fortunate surroundings, and your good choice, and especially because I think you have it in you to be happy, and to be all along the dear little child of those times I was reminding you of.
"I went away in a hurry last Sunday, which I was sorry for, as I should have liked to have said goodbye. But I shall hope to see you very soon after September.
"Meantime good-bye, and good luck in all senses of the word.
"William Morris."
The following are extracts from letters to his daughter Jenny at Malvern.
August 18th. "Well, my dear, as to Worcester I have only been there once, since the days when I sucked at a bottle, of which your Granny will tell you. That once was when I went to see my Aunts thirty years ago, and I was not so well informed on archaeology as I am now. But I do remember Prince Arthur's Chantry and the tombs and also the general look of the Church. The town I don't remember except as a mass of red brick broken by a few half-timber houses.
"Yesterday I went to Birmingham all by myself to see the new window: my work was over there in five minutes, for it was quite satisfactory; it was rather a long journey for so short a piece of work. Well, I must tell you about the Norwich journey, my dear. We went down rather a jolly company though the day was dull. The comrades work one pretty hard when they get hold of one in Norwich, and I left most of my voice behind me there. I spoke three times on the Sunday, twice in the market-place, once indoors, and twice in the market-place on the Monday, besides taking the chair for Mrs. Besant in the evening indoors; and being photographed (in groups) twice, and going a row (in five boats, cost 15d.) in the afternoon. However I enjoyed it all and was pleased that it was so successful: there were between seven and eight thousand people present at the meeting in the marketplace on Sunday afternoon; and all the meetings were good. After the Sunday afternoon meeting Mrs. Besant proposed a walk, and we went down towards the Close; but Lord! such a tail as we took with us, including a lot of boys who were fascinated by us, expected I think to see us hanged presently; the others except the boys mostly tailed off when we got into the Close, but not the boys; the only resource we had was to cross the ferry at the other side of the Close, which charges ½d. for the transit; this threw out our younger brethren and we got away quietly.
"The river I went on was a branch of the Wensum; it was very beautiful; the water awash with the green banks, willows nearly meeting over the water; no rushes or reeds, no weeds except some kind of long grass growing up from the bottom, no stream scarcely, and the water deep and clear as glass. All quite different from the rivers I am used to: in fact I always feel in a foreign land when I go to Norwich."
August 21st. "I suppose your mother told you we are going down to Kelmscott to-day: you see your mother doesn't like it to eat its head off, and for my part I have been rather driven lately and want to be quiet. I am taking down a piece of Oxford Street work which I must do, and I shall hope to get on with my story, perhaps nearly finish it."
August 28th. "We had a beautiful day on Sunday: we all went up the water along with Mr. Radford, who suddenly turned up on Saturday evening on a bicycle, asking for lodging, having come over from Didcot through Wantage. The morning opened most lovely; we started at eleven, and by twelve were sheltering ourselves from a driving rain under Mr. Birchall's yew tree; then it cleared a little, and we got to dinner close to where we dined so merrily, my dear, with Ellis, and lo by two the sun was hot and bright, and the day straight on most lovely. We got out at the Round House, and walked nearly a mile up the canal, which is really very pretty, the water without stream and clear and bright: it made me long for an expedition. Your mother and Crom and I went up to the Church afterwards over perilous ditch-bridges, leaving Radford and May lazing by the boat. It went to my heart on that beautiful afternoon to see the neglect and stupidity that had so marred the lovely little building: yet it still looked lovely. As we passed by Buscot, there were the Birchalls in their goat-mead, and we exchanged a few words with them, as we rather expected Walker to meet us: we had left the house quite empty of Frank and everybody, the key under the doormat and a letter pinned to the door for Walker, who duly came and walked on to meet us and fell in with us just as we were opening Buscot Lock. So we had a merry evening together, and I so wished you had been with us, my darling."
September 6th. "Yesterday the weather, which had been drizzly in the morning, clearing up somewhat in the afternoon, we set off about 2.30 to go to Rushey, thinking we might get to Bampton, which your mother has never seen, and we got down there comfortably enough: we intended coming straight back by boat, as we seemed too late to get up to Bampton and back, (it is two miles from the lock there,) but strolling up towards the town over the fields we thought we would go there and get a trap for the ladies, and that Walker and I would go back and pull the boat home: so we did this; but Mrs. Walker could only go so slow that it was quite late before we got to Bampton. However we managed to see the church, which is a very fine one, but has been shockingly restored. There is Norman work in it, and transition; and a fine decorated nave with a most beautiful western doorway. The tower and spire is very pretty; much the same date as Broadwell but handsomer. Near the church is a very pretty little house used as a grammar school, and another house called the Deanery. The town is the queerest left-behind sort of a place: when Walker and I first came into the street there were two other persons visible, a small boy and a small girl. Well, it was nearly dark when W. and I set off to walk to Rushey, and quite dark before we were well under way. I had to steer all the way, as Walker didn't like the job. It was a very dark night with drizzle now and then, and often one could barely see the bank. However we scarcely touched the bank at all, and got in about 10 o'clock. Frank had been sent out with a lantern to meet us, and we perceived the same as we came to Welly-Hole Reach, looking like a 'bright particular star.' It seems he had been nearly down to the Old Weir to look for us."
The autumn holiday lingered late. On the 8th of October he wrote to Ellis, who had been staying with him at Kelmscott;
"I am really surprised at your not liking 'Tom Sawyer,' especially as it so very like Shakespeare, not to say Shelley.
"I went out in the afternoon of Saturday, and a most grim and stormy afternoon it was: I caught nothing except that just as I was going away a ½ lb. chub took my gudgeon and insisted on being caught. Saturday night was as cold as need be; but yesterday was better, and to-day is a mild beautiful morning: unhappily there is no river for me to-day, as we are all going to Fairford.
"I wish you had been here instead of the new comer, whose shortcomings I am not used to like I am to yours and mine; so that we have no standing cause of quarrel; which I think is a necessity to a really good understanding."
At the end of October, when "the river has grown small and bright and the fish won't bite," he regretfully left Kelmscott. On the 1st of November he lectured on Tapestry-weaving at the first Exhibition of the Arts and Crafts Society, to the catalogue of which he had already contributed a short paper on Textiles. Three Arras tapestries from the Merton Abbey looms were among the objects exhibited. The great series of tapestries from the Morte d'Arthur now hung at Stanmore Hall were then being put in hand. "The House of the Wolfings," too, had been finished during the autumn, and was through the press early in December.
Apart from other reasons this book has a special interest as marking the beginning of Morris's practical dealings with the art of typography. Hitherto he had been content to let his books be printed in the common way, without any special attention to matters of type or arrangement of page. His attention had been lately turned to the matter through an increasing intimacy with his neighbour at Hammersmith, Mr. Emery Walker, whose enthusiasm for fine printing was accompanied by a thorough practical acquaintance with it as a modern handicraft. The early printed books, which Morris had hitherto collected and prized mainly for their woodcuts, now took a fresh interest and value to him as specimens of beauty in type. In consultation with Mr. Walker he fixed on a fount of type belonging to Messrs. Whittingham for the new book. It had been cast as an experiment about half a century before, and was modelled on an old Basel fount; and it had already been used in some of the trial pages of the illustrated "Earthly Paradise" which had been set up in 1868. "It will be a pretty piece of typography for modern times," Morris said of the book before it appeared; and so pleased was he with it, that he could not bear for a while to hear any adverse criticism even on the demerits of the type, especially on an over-conspicuous e of the lower case which he silently altered in his next book, "The Roots of the Mountains."
The story itself well deserved the words "your delightful and wonderful book," with which it was hailed by Mr. Swinburne. For the first time since "The Earthly Paradise" had been completed, Morris was writing with complete enjoyment and perfect ease. The life of the Germanic tribes of Central Europe in the second or third century was one which was at once sufficiently known to allow of copious and detailed description and sufficiently undetermined to give full scope to a romantic imagination. The use, as the vehicle of the story, of a mixed mode of prose and verse, was a device not perhaps suited for frequent repetition, but excellently adapted for this particular purpose. It was suggested by the Icelandic Sagas, but used in a fresh and quite delightful way. By the use of prose for the main narrative, he avoided the languor which is almost inseparable from verse as a medium of continuous narration; and in speeches and ornate passages, where prose in its turn would flag, the rolling verse—that of "Sigurd the Volsung" revived in much of its first freshness—seems the natural medium of the heightened emotion.
Like "The Roots of the Mountains," it belongs to what may be called the epic or Icelandic side of the author's imagination. In the later prose tales he reverted to a softer and sweeter world, that of a vaguely mediæval life, with churches in it and houses of monks, and a faint air of the thirteenth century, the world of his own earlier masterpiece in the story of "The Man Born to be King." This primitive Gothic world of older gods and more heroic men was less fully his own. In "The Roots of the Mountains," though the supposed date of the story can hardly be later than the seventh century, he tends to slip back now and then into the later romantic world, full of beautifully forged armour and grey carved stone, and gardens standing thick with pinks and lavender. But here all the sensuous ornament of mediæval romance is as strictly excluded as it is from the stories of Sigurd and of the dwellers in Laxdale. Even when the hero makes pictures for himself of some golden life that is to be when fighting is over, it is no such world of cloistered green places, "faint with the scent of the overworn roses and the honey-sweetness of the lilies," to which his dreams turn, but the hard open life of the earlier world. "There he was between the ploughstilts in the acres of the kindred when the west wind was blowing over the promise of early spring; or smiting down the ripe wheat in the hot afternoon amidst the laughter and merry talk of man and maid; or far away over Mirkwood-water watching the edges of the wood against the prowling wolf and lynx, the stars just beginning to shine over his head; or wending the windless woods in the first frosts before the snow came, the hunter's bow or javelin in hand; or coming back from the wood with the quarry on the sledge across the snow, when winter was deep, through the biting icy wind and the whirl of the drifting snow, to the lights and music of the Great Roof, and the merry talk therein and the smiling of the faces glad to see the hunting-carles come back; and the full draughts of mead, and the sweet rest a night-tide when the north wind was moaning round the ancient home."
His first satisfaction in the appearance of the book was soon replaced by a keener desire to improve upon it. "I am very glad that you like the new book," he writes to Ellis a few days after it was published. "I quite agree with you about the type; they have managed to knock the guts out of it somehow. Also I am beginning to learn something about the art of type-setting; and I now see what a lot of difference there is between the work of the conceited numskulls of to-day and that of the 15th and 16th century printers merely in the arrangement of the words, I mean the spacing out: it makes all the difference in the beauty of a page of print. If ever I print another book I shall enter into the conflict on this side also. However this is all grief that comes of fresh knowledge and I am pretty well pleased with the book as to its personal appearance."
On the 10th of January he writes to his daughter:
"Dearest own Jenny,
"I came back yesterday from Hadham; Auntie was pretty well, and the Granny in very good spirits but very deaf. She went a walk with me to the Church in the morning: they are 'restoring' the nave; a wanton piece of stupidity, as there was really nothing to do with it. However there was no excuse for touching the roof, which is quite sound; so they left that alone: in short the only harm is the new plaister, and the new modern glass, but that is considerable. They have found one or two bits of painting, which they have left: one a good patch of that imitation of patterned stuff such as we know at Fairford and Burford, but not so elaborate; a rough bold good pattern. I went to see the Berrys with them; and thought the house very nice; it is really a 16th century building much faked up: but the rooms with that pleasantness of an old house: some of them with that regular old panelling in them where the mouldings are not 'mitred,' but the horizontal ones die off before they meet the vertical. I was there two nights and played backgammon both with Auntie and Granny: the latter beat me one night (to her great delight), but they, and especially Auntie, played with the utmost recklessness.
"This is a bad business of the burning of Clouds, isn't it? When I saw it (the year before last I think) it looked so solid that one could not think of its being destroyed. I was at the Grange this morning and Aunt Georgie read me a letter to Margaret from one of the daughters which gave a really good account of the scene. It was touch and go for some of them. I saw Webb yesterday, and he made light of it, as he would be likely to do. It seems it will be rebuilt, which is a good thing; but there is a certain feeling of weariness in the proceeding, isn't there, dear? Webb says that some of the walls may be all right, especially as they are mostly built of sandstone, not limestone: the lower rooms, or some of them, were not burnt. The walls were 3 feet thick. One of Uncle Ned's cartoons that he did for the church in Rome was there and was burnt; but that is the only important unreplaceable thing I have heard of. Our long carpet was, I imagine, saved.
"The weather changed on Tuesday and yesterday, which was a bright beautiful day: but to-day is cold; rainy, sleety, but not frosty. I think I should care mighty little about it (in January) if I were at Kelmscott, but bad weather, especially fog, does make London wretched: indeed I feel very like not going out in it this evening; but I think I must, as it is a Ways and Means evening at the League.
" Well, darling Jenny, good-bye with this not very brilliant letter. By the way you will be glad to hear that Faulkner shows signs of mending. Good-bye, my dearest child.
"William Morris."
Charles Faulkner, the constant friend of so many years, had been struck down by paralysis in the previous October. He lingered in a state of living death for upwards of three years, with just so much intelligence left as allowed of his being amused a little by the company of his friends. Through all that period, his sister, Miss Kate Faulkner, was his devoted and unweariable nurse; and next to her, his old companions, Webb and Morris, were the most constant in their attention. Between Morris and Faulkner the intimacy and affection was perhaps the stronger that it was founded on a deeper and subtler bond than community of tastes or even association in work. A fine mathematician and a man of high proficiency in the mixed mathematics of engineering, Faulkner had no native bent towards art, and no apparent creative power. He had, however, qualities at least as attaching: unconquerable courage, transparent honesty, and deep-rooted affection; and his devotion to Morris knew no limit. He had followed him into the Socialist League as he had followed him into the firm of Red Lion Square, and lectured on Socialism for him as he had painted tiles and cut wood-blocks five and twenty years earlier, with perfect simplicity and sincerity. The work and all the load of toil and obloquy it involved had almost been too much even for Morris's immense energy and abounding vitality: on the weaker constitution of Faulkner it would seem to have acted with dangerous and finally fatal result.
"The Roots of the Mountains" had been begun as soon as "The House of the Wolfings" was through the press. "Did I tell you in my last," he writes to his daughter on the 29th of January, "that I had begun a new tale? I don't know whether it will come to anything, but I have written about twenty pages in the rough. This time I don't think I shall 'drop into poetry,' at least not systematically. For one thing the condition of the people I am telling of is later (whatever their date may be) than that of the Wolfings. They are people living in a place near the Great Mountains. I don't think it is worth while telling you anything more of it till you hear some of it done, as the telling the plot of a story in cold blood falls very flat."
Though he still lectured regularly for the Socialist League, addresses on Art, principally given to the students of Art Schools, were taking a more and more prominent place in his activity. The way in which the two kinds of work were at present combined is well illustrated by a letter of this February. "I go tomorrow, Saturday," he writes from Hammersmith, "by night train to Glasgow, and lecture for the branch on Sunday evening. On the Monday I lecture to certain art students on Gothic Architecture, which I daresay will be rather a new subject to them, and will a good deal surprise them. On the Tuesday I give an address at the School of Art on Arts and Crafts. On Wednesday I go to Edinburgh and lecture for the branch there: on Thursday I go to Macclesfield and lecture (Arts and Crafts) to the School of Art there: Friday I come home, with pretty well enough of it."
On this visit to Glasgow, "I went," he says, "to Professor Nichol to guest: he is a 'literary man,' not with a wooden leg; but there is something crippled about his mind all the same; a very clever and able man, but soured and disappointed; mainly I think because his capacity is second- and his ambition first-rate. He is talkative and amusing, and was very cordial with me. That day I lectured on Gothic Architecture to an Institute of students! I am afraid that they did not know much about the subject, so that my matter was rather over their heads. Lecture over, I underwent a bore—to wit dining at a solemn dinner at the Arts Club: Lord Provost (i.e., Mayor) present, also professors and big-wigs. The business of the evening to make speeches; toasts and thanks for them. I had to return thanks for Music and Literature, curious conjuncture! which I turned the flank of by alluding to the Scotch Ballads and their old tunes. Tuesday I had to address the art-school after a sort of private public dinner; the place was full, although J. Chamberlain was speaking to a big meeting elsewhere, and the folk seemed pleased."
Through all the wear and tear of this work "The Roots of the Mountains" was making steady progress. At Kelmscott in March, "the rooks and the lambs both singing around me," he writes that "I have been writing out my rough copy of my story and have done a good deal of it. I am half inclined not to kill my Bride, but to make her marry the brother: it would be a very good alliance for the Burgdalers and the Silverdalers both, and I don't think sentiment ought to stand in the way."
On Easter Monday he writes again from Kelmscott to Mrs. Burne-Jones:
"As I have been away some time I will hereby bestow some of my tediousness on you. I only got here on Thursday and feel as if I had been staying here a long time; not that I have been bored with it, as I have enough to do what with my story, what with other work which I ought to do and don't. The country is about six weeks backward; more backward by a good deal than it was last year, though that was late: neither the big trees (except the chestnuts) nor the apple trees show any sign of life yet. The garden is very pretty, though there are scarce any flowers in blossom except the primroses; but there are such beautiful promises of buds and things just out of the ground that it makes amends for all. The buds of the wild tulip, which is one of the beautifullest flowers there is, just at point to open. Jenny and I went up into Buscot wood this morning: it is such a change from our river plain that it is like going into another country; yet I don't much care about a wood unless it is a very big one; and Buscot is scarcely more than a coppice; but the blue distance between the trunks was very delightful. As to the weather, bearing in mind that things are so much behindhand, it is not bad. To-day has been March all over; rain-showers, hail, wind, dead calm, thunder, finishing with a calm frosty evening sky. The birds are amusing, especially the starlings, whereof there are many: but some damned fool has been bullying our rooks so much that they have only got six nests, so that we haven't got the proper volume of sound from them.
"One grief, the sort of thing that is alway happening in the spring: there were some beautiful willows at Eaton Hastings which to my certain knowledge had not been polled during the whole 17 years that we have been here; and now the idiot Parson has polled them into wretched stumps. I should like to cut off the beggar's legs and have wooden ones made for him out of the willow timber, the value of which is about 7s. 6d.
"I am so very sorry to hear of poor Kate's misfortune, and am not a little uneasy about it. I didn't see her last Wednesday, though I called. She was poorly then, having had some bad nights with poor dear Charley. It is such a grievous business altogether that, rightly or wrongly, I try not to think of it too much lest I should give way altogether, and make an end of what small use there may be in my life."
The following beautiful description of a visit to western Wiltshire on business of the Society for Protection of Ancient Buildings is also from a letter to Mrs. Burne-Jones written on the 13th of May:
"Thursday afternoon was grey and stormy: the lightning twinkled over the White Horse as we passed by, and just at Swindon down came the rain in floods. However I had rather a pleasant journey to Westbury, as the rain didn't last long, and every field corner was lovely. Some way off I saw the downs rise mountainous above the town, and remembered them by token of a modern White Horse which somewhat spoils the lovely headland they push into the plain. The town is little and, as I expected, dull, dull, dull: no old houses, a great big church much spoiled by restoration, and my dull, but not ugly inn close to it. I got in about seven, so had a longish time before bed, which I partly got rid of by going a little way up the down after my dinner: so you see gout was not rampant. The resources of the Lopes Arms were not great; but they (with all civility) provided me for breakfast with what to me has been of late a rarity; to wit, a genuine addled egg. However their hearts were in the right places if their eggs were not. Next morning I drove to Edington along the feet of the Downs, which are very fine: also the villages push up right into their buttresses with cottages and trees, so that it is lovely; the building being tolerable: so came I to Edington, which was like one of my dream-churches, so big and splendid: the whole population of Edington and its two neighbours could easily go to church in one of its transepts. Beside it a beautiful little fifteenth-century house with pretty garden, and beyond, the Abbey gardens and fish-ponds and a village green on the other side: except that the parson is a lubber-fiend and that the people are as poor as may be, nothing need be better. So back to Westbury, and in early afternoon to Bradford. Quite a pretty town and as gay as gay; away from the downs in a steep little valley built all up the southern-looking slope; all up and down with steps and queer nooks: of stone every house, most of them old, a good many mediæval. The bridge fifteenth century, with a queer little toll-house on it. The church a very big and fine one, but scraped to death by G. Scott, the (happily) dead dog. Close by, the Saxon chapel, a very beautiful little building, but shamefully vulgarized by restoration, cast iron railings, and sixpence a head. Out in the meadow, awkwardly near the Railway Station, Barton Farm with old house and farm buildings, the big fourteenth-century barn one of them. It is very fine, but I think Great Coxwell is bigger, and I like it better."
At Kelmscott again on Midsummer day "haymaking is going on like a house afire; I should think such a hay-time has seldom been; heavy crop and wonderful weather to get it in. For the rest the country is one big nosegay, the scents wonderful, really that is the word; the life to us holiday-makers luxurious to the extent of making one feel wicked, at least in the old sense of bewitched.
"We went to Great Coxwell yesterday, and also to Little Coxwell, where there is a funny little church with a 14th-century wooden roof over the nave, the church much smaller than Kelmscott. We were delighted with the barn again. The farmer turned up and seemed a nice sort of chap; he said his family had been there for hundreds of years. William Morris was, it seems, lord of the manor there: we saw his brass again, it is really a very pretty one. The harvest being now out of the barn, we saw the corbels that support the wall pieces: they are certainly not later than 1250, so the barn is much earlier than I thought. The building of the walls and buttresses is remarkably good and solid.
"The roses are not at their best, yet I shall bring you a good bunch. The pink martagon lilies have been very fine. Raspberries any amount, but none to eat for a fortnight at least: no strawberries yet."
In July Morris was one of the English delegates to an international Congress of Socialists held in Paris to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the fall of the Bastille. The proceedings there did not re-inspire him with confidence in the prospects of the cause or the wisdom of its leaders. He left Paris before the sittings of the Congress were concluded, and so escaped the final scenes of confused recrimination among the various sects which ended in the violent expulsion of the dissentient minority. The great London dock strike of the following August and September was hailed by him with a greater hope: for here at least there was an instance of labour organizing itself for a definite end, and being supported in the struggle by a powerful minority, if not an actual preponderance, of educated opinion. The end in question was indeed a particular one, yet it involved issues of immense width. Almost for the first time in the social history of England the organized trades took their part definitely on the side of unskilled and unorganized labour, and the principle of a minimum payment for human work began to emerge. The "docker's tanner" of 1889 was the germ more fully developed in the famous "living wage" of 1893.
Morris was at Kelmscott when the strike began; but on returning to London he at once realized its importance. "I went straight to the League," he writes on the 31st of August, "and found our people there in a great state of excitement about the strike, the importance of which I had not at all understood in the country: only you see we are two days late for news at Kelmscott. However I thought that perhaps our folk a little exaggerated the importance of it, as to some of them it seemed that now at last the revolution was beginning. Whereas indeed it began before the Mammoth ended, and is now only going on. Yet I don't want to belittle the strike, which is of much importance, chiefly as showing such a good spirit on the part of the men. They will, I fear, be beaten; and perhaps their yesterday's manifesto will not do them good as mere strikers. On the other hand it was a step which they were sure to take, if the masters held out; as in spite of the assertions of the daily press the tendency has been Socialistic; and I am very glad that they have taken it, since as aforesaid the real point of the strike is the sense of combination which it is giving to the men, and their winning or losing matters little, especially as what they ask for is so small. That the capitalistic press should turn against them for the said manifesto, is a matter of course, so after this hint at a general strike (it can be no more than a hint) it is clear that there is a feeling abroad wider than a mere attack on these muddling dock directors. I am told, and believe it, that the attack is on sweating in general. Our people have been very active; the Hammersmith branch alone having collected (mostly on Sunday and Monday last) nearly £20; a large sum for Socialists to handle."
"I went on Wednesday to Yarmouth," says a letter of the same date, "and had many thoughts of Peggotty. It really is a jolly old ramshackle place: the country about curious and fascinating: sand banks very low, all covered with heather and ling and bracken, so that if you were lying there you would expect to see highland crags above you; instead of which, two feet below spread out miles upon miles of alluvial meadows with slow rivers running through them, as you judge by the great sails moving over the pastures. The great church has been woefully restored, indeed almost ruined outside; I believe by John Seddon: but inside there is a good deal to see: a huge spacious church without any clerestory anywhere; exhilarating to behold after the modern shabbiness."
The Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society held a second exhibition at the New Gallery in autumn, of which a selection of Morris's woven stuffs and printed cottons was a prominent feature. To the catalogue he contributed a charming and luminous essay on the art of dyeing; and he opened the series of lectures given in the rooms of the exhibition by an introductory address on Gothic Architecture, which expressed within brief compass and in simple words the whole knowledge and enthusiasm of a lifetime.
He was also one of the leading speakers at an Art Congress held in Edinburgh in November, which was only conspicuous for a curious attempt, made by a section of its promoters, to capture it for Socialism after having sacrificed to decorum by meeting under the presidency of the Marquis of Lome. Before he went, Morris frankly called his journey a fool's errand. When it was finished he wrote home: "It was rather a dull job, and imagine one in the chair hour after hour listening to men teaching their grandmother to suck eggs, and I on my good behaviour too! I am very tired of it; but since the Tory evening paper here declares that Crane and I have spoiled the Congress, you may imagine we have not let all go by default. In point of fact, with the exception of Richmond, who gave a good address yesterday, there was nothing of any interest said except by Crane and me; and my lecture on dyeing to the workmen was really a success."
This lecture was one of a series given to working men by experts on the principles and practice of their crafts. The others were given by Mr. Crane, Mr. Emery Walker, and Mr. Cobden-Sanderson, all of them either declared Socialists or in full sympathy with Socialism. "On the whole the working men were good and attentive," Morris says, "and stood our Socialism well, in fact seemed to relish it."
"I have finished my book (last night)," he writes to Kelmscott on the 10th of October, "and there will not be many more proofs I think. I have a mind to begin a short story again soon; but shall say no more about it till it is under way. I have been to Oxford Street and Merton, and find business good: the girls were hard at work on the yellow carpet, but had not done very much to it yet. I was busy at pointing all the day. The tapestry is going on well, though not very fast. We have sold the 'Peace' exhibited at the Arts and Crafts for £160, which I am glad of. As for the Exhibition, I think it will be a success: the rooms look very pretty; and there are a good many interesting works there. The visitors come pretty well: these first three days they have taken more than double than they did in the same time last year; so this looks good."
"The Roots of the Mountains" was published in the middle of November. The study of typography as a fine art, which had been begun in "The House of the Wolfings," was here carried out much more fully, and the result was a page of great beauty. "I am so pleased with my book," Morris said soon after it was published, "—typography, binding, and must I say it, literary matter—that I am any day to be seen huggling it up, and am become a spectacle to Gods and men because of it." As to the "literary matter," he said afterwards that this of all his books was the one which had given him the greatest pleasure in writing. For combination and balance of his qualities it may perhaps be ranked first among his prose romances. It has not the strength of its predecessor, "The House of the Wolfings," nor the fairy charm of its successor, "The Wood beyond the World." But in its union of the gravity of the Saga with the delicate and profuse ornament of the romance it may perhaps take the first place among the three as a work of art.
The binding which pleased him so much was one of his own chintzes, used for a small number of copies of the book printed on hand-made paper. His own cooler judgment recognized that it had defects for this use both in pattern and texture, and the experiment was not repeated. But his interest in the production of printed books was now fully aroused on all its sides; and he was already beginning to plan out the printing and production of such books himself.
"I think before my next book comes out," he wrote to Ellis on the 21st of November, "I shall design a chintz for bookbinding, and if I do I shall get it calendered so as to keep the dirt off—what do you think? As to the printing, the difficulty of getting it really well done shows us the old story again. It seems it is no easy matter to get good hand-press men, so little work is done by the hand-press: that accounts for some defects in the book, caused by want of care in distributing the ink. I really am thinking of turning printer myself in a small way; the first step to that would be getting a new fount cut. Walker and I both think Jenson's the best model, taking all things into consideration. What do you think again? Did you ever have his Pliny? I have a vivid recollection of the vellum copy at the Bodleian."
Such was the first inception of the Kelmscott Press. In December Mr. Emery Walker was asked by Morris to go into partnership with him as a printer. He was unable to accept the offer; but the starting of a printing press was nevertheless definitely resolved on, and the latest great interest of Morris's life begins from this point.
The last letter of the year is as follows:
"Dec. 24th, 1889.
"Dearest Mother,
"Thank you very much for your kind letter, and for sending me the paper knife. We are all well; and as for me I rather like the weather for winter-weather. Yesterday morning was indeed beautiful, and Jenny went with a friend to the Chiswick Horticultural Gardens, which are still in existence though sadly built up. I remember as clearly as if it were yesterday going with father there when I was quite a little boy, and have never been inside the place since. How the neighbourhood must have altered since then! Indeed it has altered very much, and that for the worse, since we first came to Turnham Green.
"I have been so very busy lately with the work at Oxford Street and Merton, that I have had no time to turn round, or I should have come down and seen you. I will do so shortly after Christmas. Janey and I remembered that you liked that champagne which I sent you last year, and I'm sure it will do you good to drink a glass now and then; so we are sending you a little more, which ought to reach you before the New Year. I hope you will like it, dearest Mother.
"I shall be writing to Henrietta as well as you, but give her my best love, which I send her, and to you, my dearest mother, my best of love and good wishes.
"The paper knife has not come yet or I would tell you what I think of it.
"Your most affectionate son,
"William Morris."