The Life of William Morris/Chapter 20

by John William Mackail

 

CHAPTER XX

PRINTING, ROMANCE-WRITING, TRANSLATION, AND
CRITICISM: FINAL ATTITUDE TOWARDS
ART AND HISTORY

1891-1893

 

The life of Morris from that autumn until his last illness was one of placid continuity of production, with little variety of external incident. From the illness of the spring of 1891 he never fully recovered; and though he enjoyed several years more of fair health, his bodily powers became gradually less able to respond to the calls of his unflagging intellectual energy. The amount of work he had already done, in literature, in art, in politics, in handicraft, was enough to fill not one, but many lives; and the machinery which had been working at continuous high pressure for so long began to show signs of permanent weakening. But in these latter years his whole personality ripened and softened. The outbursts of temper so familiar to his earlier friends ceased. The impatience born of intense craving for sympathy and understanding died away. The training of the years of co-operation with impracticable colleagues in the Socialist party had not been lost. Mr. Selwyn Image, speaking from intimate acquaintance as a colleague on the executive committee of the Arts and Crafts Society and in the Art Workers' Guild, records, as the deepest impression made on him, that of Morris's extraordinary patience and conciliatoriness: and the same testimony is borne by others who worked along with him. "O how I long to keep the world from narrowing me, and to look at things bigly and kindly!" Thus he had written, in a letter of more than usually intimate self-revelation, nearly twenty years before: and the prayer had been heard. Like the southern autumn of Virgil, the year remained fruitful in its mellow decline:

—dant arbuta silvæ,
Et varios ponit fetus auctumnus, et alte
Mitis in apricis coquitur vindemia saxis.

The Kelmscott Press remained until towards the end of these years his engrossing preoccupation. Next to it in his interest were his own romances. He had practically ceased to write original poetry. As to one of these tales indeed, that entitled "Child Christopher and Goldilind the Fair," he wavered for some time whether he should write it in verse or prose, and actually began it in verse, but quickly gave it up. He announced this decision to Burne-Jones the next time they met, observing at the same time, in what is perhaps the most sweeping of all his generalizations, that poetry was tommy rot. But the prose romances all contain snatches of lyric verse, and besides his metrical rendering of "Beowulf," other verse, original and translated, was written by him now and again. Foremost perhaps in beauty among these lyrics of later summer, and deserving to be reclaimed here from the obscure pages of the Catalogue of the fourth Exhibition of the Arts and Crafts Society, are the verses which he wrote for an embroidered hanging, designed and worked by his daughter May for his own bed, a fine piece of carved oak of the seventeenth century, in the Manor House at Kelmscott.

The wind's on the wold
And the night is a-cold,
And Thames runs chill
'Twixt mead and hill.
But kind and dear
Is the old house here
And my heart is warm
'Midst winter's harm.
Rest then and rest,
And think of the best
'Twixt summer and spring,
When all birds sing
In the town of the tree,
And ye lie in me
And scarce dare move,
Lest earth and its love
Should fade away
Ere the full of the day.
I am old and have seen
Many things that have been;
Both grief and peace
And wane and increase.
No tale I tell
Of ill or well,
But this I say,
Night treadeth on day,
And for worst and best
Right good is rest.

Besides his own story-writing, he continued the pleasant labour of translating from the Icelandic and mediæval French. He lectured, when time and strength permitted, on the arts of life, more especially now on printing and its kindred arts. He remained active in the service of the Society for Protection of Ancient Buildings. Whether in the defence of ancient buildings like Westminster Abbey and Peterborough Cathedral against the injuries of the restorer, or in the protection of the natural beauties of England, as in Epping Forest or on the upper Thames, against the inroads of planned ugliness or inconsiderate change, his voice and pen were always active when called upon. Nor did he decline from the unobtrusive work of education towards the growth of a future Socialism. It is to these last years that some of his noblest and most significant utterances on the ideals of human life belong—notably among them the preface to Ruskin's chapter "On the Nature of Gothic," and the letter of November, 1893, on the Miners' Question, his latest and most carefully-worded confession of faith.

In October, 1891, an exhibition of pictures of the Pre-Raphaelite School was held in the Municipal Art Gallery at Birmingham, and Morris was asked to open it with an address on the Pre-Raphaelite painters. The speech which he then made represents the most formal discourse he had yet given on the art of painting, as one distinct from, yet in the closest relation to, the arts which he himself practised. It perhaps expresses his views not the less exactly because it was spoken on the spur of the moment, and was the imperfect but immediate utterance of his habitual feelings. The curiously halting sentences and inconclusive termination are accounted for very simply. He had meant to think out what he would say on the journey down to Birmingham, but fell asleep in the train and arrived with nothing prepared.

Professing himself a humble member of the school, he stated as his deliberate conviction that its principal masters, Rossetti, Millais, Holman Hunt, and Burne-Jones, were names that ranked alongside of the very greatest in the great times of art: then, not labouring this point, he commended their example to all artists, not primarily for any technical quality, but for the virtues of patience, diligence, and courage. These were the qualities that went to make great men; and great men might be trusted to do great work.

As regards the technique of painting, Morris had, from his own early practice of the art as well as from the insight of his immense genius, a knowledge that was not less great because he seldom showed it. But the art of painting always took its place in his mind as one of the arts subordinate to architecture, though it might be the first of these. The inflexible naturalism and minute finish of the early Pre-Raphaelites, he held, were necessary at the time to startle men out of the lethargy of a long convention, but they hardly represented the permanent method in which the painter's art should employ itself. His own artistic intelligence had been as a matter of fact first awakened by that militant and, one might almost say, aggressive type of picture. "I remember distinctly myself," he said in this address when speaking of the Pre-Raphaelite revolt against an outworn academic tradition, "as a boy, that when I had pictures offered to my notice I could not understand what they were about at all. I said 'Oh well, that is all right: it has got the sort of thing in it which there ought to be in a picture: there is nothing to be said against it, no doubt. I cannot say I would have had it other than that, because it is clearly the proper thing to do.' But really I took very little interest in it." For a short period he had been as profound an admirer of the earlier work of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood as any of the school, and had himself worked hard at being a painter in the Pre-Raphaelite manner. When this temporary enthusiasm passed over, pictures took a place in his mind among the various methods of decorating surfaces. Except for his unbroken and almost daily intimacy with Burne-Jones, he did not see much of painters as such, nor was he a frequenter of studios or picture galleries. When he did see a picture he saw what there was in it at a single glance; his eye for both design and colour was here, as elsewhere, infallible, and his memory portentous. But easel-pictures seem, as a rule, to have given him the uneasy feeling of decoration disproportionate in labour and finish to its decorative object. With a painted book he had not this feeling; nor with the gem-like masterpieces of the Flemish and early Italian schools which approximate in method and finish to the pictures in a painted book. But for pictures on a larger scale and in a broader manner he would have preferred frescoes or even tapestries. Sir Edward Burne-Jones told me that Morris would have liked the faces in his pictures less highly finished, and less charged with the concentrated meaning or emotion of the painting. As with the artists of Greece and of the Middle Ages, the human face was to him merely a part, though no doubt a very important part, of the human body. In speaking of the qualifications required from tapestry-weavers, it was on their skill in rendering the feet and hands, not the faces, of the figures, that he laid special stress. He was quite satisfied with the simple and almost abstract types of expression that can be produced in tapestry; and he thought that the dramatic and emotional interest of a picture ought to be diffused throughout it as equally as possible. Such too was his own practice in the cognate art of poetry: and this is one reason why his poetry affords so few memorable single lines, and lends itself so little to quotation. Either quality would have been a merely incidental merit, and perhaps even a defect, in the view of his art which he himself held.

With the National Gallery indeed, or at least with those rooms in it which contained the works which were after his own heart, he was intimately familiar. Angelico, Van Eyck, and Holbein, his three greatest admirations among the painters of past ages, he admired as profoundly as he did any artist whatever. In one of the later numbers of the Commonweal, while discussing in a fragmentary and parenthetic way what the art of the future under realized Socialism might be like, he makes some remarks on the pictures in the National Gallery which incidentally open up his whole mind on the subject of pictorial art. "Perhaps," he says, "mankind will regain their eyesight, which they have lost to a great extent; people have largely ceased to take in mental impressions through the eyes, whereas in times past the eyes were the great feeders of the fancy and imagination. I am in the habit when I go to an exhibition or a picture gallery of noticing their behaviour there; and as a rule I note that they seem very much bored, and their eyes wander vacantly over the various objects exhibited to them. If ordinary people go to our National Gallery, the thing which they want to see is the Blenheim Raphael, which, though well done, is a very dull picture to any one not an artist. While, when Holbein shows them the Danish princess of the sixteenth century yet living on the canvas, the demure half-smile not yet faded from her eyes; when Van Eyck opens a window for them into Bruges of the fourteenth century; when Botticelli shows them Heaven as it lived in the hearts of men before theology was dead, these things produce no impression on them, not so much even as to stimulate their curiosity and make them ask what 'tis all about; because these things were done to be looked at, and to make the eyes tell the mind tales of the past, the present, and0 the future." Yet deeply as Morris admired these pictures, he scarcely loved them with his deepest love; he would willingly at any time have exchanged the National Gallery and all its contents for the cases of painted books in the British Museum. A man may be known by his company, inanimate as well as human; and while Morris had a small but choice collection of painted books among his chief treasures, and gladly paid large sums to secure one, his house was, with a few exceptions for which there were special reasons, pictureless, and he never bought a picture after the early days when he had ceased trying to paint them.

From this brief excursion into art criticism he returned to the work of his printing-press. In November he was discussing the printing of all his own works, meaning then to begin with the "Sigurd." A second and larger press had been bought, and a new pressman and two new compositors engaged; and the printing of the Interminable, as "The Golden Legend" had come to be called, was making rapid progress. Before the end of the year he was discussing the form of the great Chaucer which it was his ambition to print. The Troy type, the first of his two Gothic founts, had been cut and was then being cast: but "it is so big that it is no use thinking of printing the Chaucer in double columns with it unless the book were to be as big as Eggestein's Gratian's Decretum,"—a leviathan among printed books, of which an uncut copy measures twenty inches by fifteen and weighs nearly thirty pounds. Before the end of the year he had determined on having another fount cut smaller from the same designs; and these two, with the original Roman or "Golden" fount, were the only three that he actually produced and printed from, though in the course of the year 1892 he partially designed another. "I am at work at my story and other trifles," he writes to Ellis just before Christmas. But he was so busy now with the Press that even story-telling had to be dropped. This was one of several romances which he began in these years, and discontinued either because he was not satisfied with them or from mere lack of time. "The Wood beyond the World," his next published romance, was not completed till quite two years later.

The small printing-press had been occupied during the earlier part of the winter of 1891–2 in turning out the third of the Kelmscott Press books, the volume of poems by Mr. Wilfrid Blunt. As soon as that volume was finished, it was set to work upon a reprint of Ruskin's celebrated chapter "On the Nature of Gothic" from "The Stones of Venice." It was the first thing that, when Morris met with it long ago at Oxford, had set fire to his enthusiasm, and kindled the beliefs of his whole life. In the preface to this reprint, dated 15th February, 1892, he states briefly and clearly the effect which Ruskin's teaching had had on himself, and the permanent value which he still conceived it to possess. "To my mind," he says, this chapter "is one of the most important things written by the author, and in future days will be considered as one of the very few necessary and inevitable utterances of the century. To some of us when we first read it"—in those dawn-golden days at Oxford—"now many years ago, it seemed to point out a new road on which the world should travel. The lesson which Ruskin here teaches us is that art is the expression of man's pleasure in labour; that it is possible for man to rejoice in his work, for, strange as it may seem to us to-day, there have been times when he did rejoice in it."

Even more: in this chapter, and in the subsequent teaching which did little more than expand and enforce it, Ruskin had laid, once for all, the basis for a true Socialism. For without art Socialism would remain as sterile as the other forms of social organization; it would not meet the real and perpetual wants of mankind. The social doctrines of the thinkers and theorists who had preceded Ruskin, like those of the others who, coming after him, had ignored or denied this essential element in his doctrine, would in practice "certainly lighten the burden of labour, but would not procure for it the element of sensuous pleasure which is the essence of all true art." Of themselves they could go no further in their utmost success than create a world in which art would be possible: but that world would be a body still waiting, numb, joyless, and lifeless, for the entrance of the quickening spirit.

This preface was no sooner written, than Morris followed it by another utterance which has had little public circulation, but which gives his best literary qualities—his power of lucid statement, his immense and easily-wielded knowledge of architecture and history, his earnestness, his humour, and his mastery of biting phrase—with a perfection that is hardly equalled elsewhere. This was the paper on Westminster Abbey written by him for the Society for Protection of Ancient Buildings and finished on the 7th of March. Its immediate occasion was a proposal then being discussed for the "complete restoration" of the interior of the Abbey, and the addition to it, by public munificence or private enterprise, of some kind of annex which might give room for further monuments to distinguished men. That such a consummate monument of the noblest style and period of European architecture should be turned, as it long had been, into a "registration office for notorieties" was felt by him as wanton and inexcusable sacrilege: and this proposal not only to continue and extend that degrading usage, but to mutilate the Abbey still further under such a pretext by remodelling or enlargement, was one the mere mention of which roused him into fury. As regards the church itself, each fresh piece of restoration was in his deliberate judgment more scandalous and more ruinous than its predecessors. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it had indeed suffered heavily, but its worst sufferings had been reserved for modern times. "Being situated in the centre of government," he bitterly writes, "it has not enjoyed the advantages of boorish neglect, which have left so much of interest in remoter parts of the country." On the work of Wren and his successors down to Wyatt, the architects of "the ignorance," to use that Arabian phrase which Morris was so fond of quoting, he touches with a light scorn, gibbeting their work as "the Bible and Prayer-book style of the period," "the queer style of driven-into-a-corner Classic." With Wyatt and the first period of Gothic knowledge, whose architects were far more destructive than those of the Gothic ignorance, worse changes began. Wyatt "managed to take all the romance out of the exterior of the most romantic work of the late Middle Ages," Henry VII.'s Chapel. Blore, followed by Gilbert Scott, "completely destroyed all trace of the handwork of the mediæval masons" in the north aisle. Scott, when he was made architect of the Abbey and the second period of Gothic knowledge had arrived, "carefully restored the Chapter House, that is, he made it a modern building." Finally Mr. Pearson, "driven by the necessity of making some structural repairs," carried out the idea of making a conjectural restoration of the north transept. The façade of the eighteenth century, a time when architects "had not learned how to forge, and put some of their own thought, poor as that was, into it," was accordingly destroyed. It was replaced by "dead-alive office work," covered with "what is called ecclesiastical sculpture—so utterly without life or interest that nobody who passes under the portal of the church on which it is plastered treats it as a work of art any more than he does the clergyman's surplice," "a joyless, putty-like imitation, that had better have been a plaster-cast." As for the "pieces of undertakers' upholstery" within the church, all that could be done with them was to let them alone. "The burden of their ugliness must be endured, at any rate until the folly of restoration has died out; for the greater part of them have been built into the fabric, and their removal would leave gaps, not so unsightly indeed as those stupid masses of marble, but tempting to the restorer, who would make them excuses for further introduction of modern work."

"It may seem strange," Morris adds, rising into the higher plane of his habitual thoughts, "that whereas we can give some distinguished name as the author of almost every injury it has received, the authors of this great epic itself have left no names behind them. For indeed it is the work of no one man, but of the people of south-eastern England. It was the work of the inseparable will of a body of men, who worked, as they lived, because they could do no otherwise, and unless you can bring these men back from the dead, you cannot 'restore' one verse of their epic. Rewrite the lost trilogies of Æschylus, put a beginning and an end to the Fight at Finsbury, finish the Squire's Tale for Chaucer, and if you can succeed in that, you may then 'restore' Westminster Abbey."

By this time the smaller Gothic fount was being cut for the Kelmscott Chaucer, after a momentary hesitation caused by his having seen for the first time the earlier or semi-Gothic type ("what asses they were to change it for the Roman type" is his characteristic comment) used by Sweynheym and Pannartz for the Subiaco Lactantius. Much of the immense vitality of earlier years still survived, though more and more fitfully: on the 9th of April, "happening to be awake at 6 a.m. I went and got my book and wrote several pages of story." In May he was beginning to see daylight at last with "The Golden Legend." The two magnificent drawings by Burne-Jones of the Earthly and Heavenly Paradises had been completed, and the first was now being cut on the wood. Both were touched up for the wood-engraver by Mr. Fairfax Murray in a photographic copy. The last sheet of the text was read by Morris in proof on the 31st of May. The large printer's mark with a picture of the house at Kelmscott in it, which Morris then meant to design for his colophon, was not executed, and was replaced in the book as it appeared by the device which had already appeared in several of the smaller books, a small design with the words "Kelmscott" and "William Morris" in Gothic lettering on a floriated background and border.

Meanwhile Morris sought consolation for any occasional qualms that he may have had as to the artistic limitations of the finest printed books in a more and more impassioned devotion to thirteenth-century manuscripts. At the sale of the Lawrence collection this month he spent £250 on three of those, a little Psalter and little Book of Hours and the fragment of a folio Bible. Nearly all summer through he stayed in London by his Press, though with wistful thoughts now and again of haymaking going on fast in the big meadow, and of the hollyhocks in the garden at Kelmscott. Burne-Jones was beginning the series of drawings for Chaucer, and the form and detail of the great folio was taking definite shape in Morris's mind. By the middle of September the printing of the Interminable was done, the two great full-page woodcuts being the last part, as they were the most anxious, to print. On the 16th it went off, in two cartloads, in joyful procession to the binders. To celebrate the auspicious and long-awaited event Morris bought a vellum copy of Jenson's "Clementis Constitutiones" of 1476, and then took himself off to Kelmscott.

Once the Press was released from "The Golden Legend," the production of smaller books went on through the winter of 1892–3 with accelerated and almost reckless speed. The reprint of Caxton's "Historyes of Troye," the first book issued in the large Gothic type which Morris had designed in 1891, as the famous original had been, more than four hundred years before, the first book printed in English, is dated the 14th of October. It was rapidly succeeded by the "Biblia Innocentium," dated 22nd October; "News from Nowhere," dated 22nd November; and the reprint of Caxton's "Reynard the Foxe" of 1481, dated 15th December. This last Morris accounted far and away the best of all Caxton's books in its literary quality: "he has the true smell and smile." Then followed the "Poems of William Shakespeare," dated 17th January, 1893; and after it, the reprint of Caxton's "Order of Chivalry" of 1484, dated 10th November, 1892, but held back in order to be issued in a single volume together with another little book. This was the text and Morris's own verse translation of "L'Ordene de Chevalerie," a French poem of the thirteenth century which has been thought to be the original of the fourteenth-century prose treatise translated and printed by Caxton. It is dated 24th of February, 1893. The translation had first been made in prose by Ellis. But Morris one day suddenly remembered the fact that the Press, like the firm of thirty years back, "kept a poet of its own," and turned him on for the purpose. Finally, to make up the production of that remarkable winter, appeared Cavendish's "Life of Wolsey," dated 30th March; and the reprint of Caxton's "Godefrey of Boloyne" of 1481, dated 27th April. In the "Order of Chivalry," and in parts of the "Historyes of Troye," the smaller Gothic type which had been cut and cast for the Chaucer made its first appearance. After this continuous torrent of production the Press for a time slackened off a little. Morris was advised that this rapid output of his books would depreciate the value of those already issued, and might end in the new books becoming unsaleable at their fair value. But for these warnings he did not greatly care: "the Kelmscott Press is humming" was his exultant comment, and he felt sure that his work was good enough to command a market. "I shall print that Froissart" was all his reply to an argument that it could only be printed as he designed it at a heavy loss. But the Froissart, which was to have taken the next place after the Chaucer among his most rich and elaborate productions, was little more than begun when the Press ceased after the death of its founder.

By the end of 1892 Morris had made up his mind to add the trade of a publisher to that of a printer. "There is really no risk in it," he said in summing up the situation: "I shall get more money; and the public will have to pay less." The reprint of Caxton's "Reynard the Foxe," then just finished, was in fact the last of his large books that he issued through a publisher, though with the smaller books the old practice was for some time continued. But the reprint of Caxton's "Godefrey of Boloyne," issued in the following May, bore on it for the first time the words "Published by William Morris at the Kelmscott Press": the "Utopia" of the following September was the last Kelmscott book issued through Messrs. Reeves & Turner; and thenceforth, except in a few cases of special arrangement (as when Tennyson's "Maud" was published by Messrs. Macmillan, and the two volumes of Rossetti's poems by Messrs. Ellis & Elvey), Morris published all Kelmscott Press books himself. Once more, as in so many previous ventures, he trusted to the existence of a market for excellence and was not disappointed. The Kelmscott Press was not carried on to make money: at first he would have been content if it had not cost him more than he could afford to spend, and even afterwards it was worked, and the prices fixed for its products, only with the view of making its receipts meet its expenditure. No expense was spared in getting everything connected with it as near his ideal as could be produced; yet in fact it brought in a profit which represented a fairly adequate salary for his own incessant work and oversight, and relieved him from the necessity of economizing on any expense which would really add to the excellence and beauty of his printed books.

In the immense detail of carrying on the work of the Press, which was beyond a single person's management unless he could give up the whole of his time to it, Morris was already being assisted by Mr. S.C. Cockerell, who was formally engaged as secretary to the Press in July, 1894. It is only due to Mr. Cockerell to say that these last years of Morris's life were greatly lightened by his diligence and devotion. For the first time in his life his papers were kept in order: the labour of correspondence, which had always been irksome to him, and was one of the few things that he felt as really hard work, was relieved: his library was catalogued; and the conduct, not only of the Press, but of his whole business, was made as easy to him as the nature of the case admitted. The relations between them grew to be of great intimacy and confidence, and added much to the happiness of both.

At the beginning of 1893 the beautiful little series of translations from thirteenth-century French prose romances which were printed by Morris in this and the following year began to be projected. "There is a little book," he wrote in January, "of the Librairie Elzévirienne hight Contes et Nouvelles de la XIIIme Siècle: two of these are amongst the most beautiful works of the Middle Ages, and I intend translating them, and printing in a nice little book in Chaucer type. Probably I shall design some two-coloured letters for it."

The work of which he misquotes the title with his characteristic carelessness when he was writing a letter, "Nouvelles Françoises en prose du XIIIme Siècle," a little book published in 1856, had for thirty years been one of the treasures of literature to him. Together with the "Violier des Histoires Romaines," which appeared in the same series two years later, it had been among the first sources of his knowledge of the French romance of the Middle Ages. In thanking Morris for a copy of the last of the three little Kelmscott volumes, Mr. Swinburne recalls their delight in reading the French "in the days when we first foregathered at Oxford" nearly forty years before. On two of the stories in the French volume, "Le Conte de l'Empereur Coustant" and "L'Amitié d'Amis et d'Amile," he had based two of the stories for "The Earthly Paradise"; the former appears in the work under the title of "The Man Born to be King"; the latter was the never published poem of "Amis and Amillion." He now translated and printed these and two others. The fifth, the famous pastoral romance of Aucassin and Nicolete, he left untouched, as it was already well known in two English versions. The first of the stories which Morris published, a translation of the romance entitled "Le Conte du Roi Flore et de la Belle Jehanne," was issued under the title of "The Tale of King Florus and the Fair Jehane" at the end of this year. It is dated 16th of December, 1893. "Amis and Amile" succeeded it in April, 1894: "the Amis and Amile I translated in one day and a quarter, it was very easy: a most beautiful little book"; and "The Tale of the Emperor Coustans," with which was included a fourth story, "L'Histoire d'Outre-Mer," entitled in the English "The History of Over Sea," in the following September. The project of two-colour letters printed from double blocks was never carried out by him in these or any other of the Kelmscott Press books, though several designs in red and blue were made by him for that purpose.

"I am very busy all round, and ought to be busier, but can't be," he cheerfully writes in March. He had set to work on designing the ornament for the Kelmscott Chaucer. That for the first page was just finished to his complete satisfaction. "My eyes! how good it is!" was his own criticism on it. He had also begun his metrical version of "Beowulf." That great fragment of the earliest English epic he had hitherto only admired from a distance. He was not an Anglo-Saxon scholar, and to help him in following the original he used the aid of a prose translation made for him by Mr. A.J. Wyatt, of Christ's College, Cambridge, with whom he also read through the original. The plan of their joint labours had been settled in the autumn of 1892. Mr. Wyatt began to supply Morris with his prose paraphrase in February, 1893, and he at once began to "rhyme up," as he said, "very eager to be at it, finding it the most delightful work." He was working at it all through the year, and used to read it to Burne-Jones regularly on Sunday mornings in summer. It was not fully finished till the end of 1894, and was published in February, 1895. It would seem on the whole, in spite of the love and labour Morris had bestowed on it, to be one of his few failures. Anglo-Saxon scholars do not regard it as a satisfactory rendering of the original; and still less do ordinary readers find it a book that can be read with pleasure for its own sake. For the language of his version Morris for once felt it necessary to make an apology. Except a few words, he said, the words he used in it were such as he would not hesitate to use in an original poem of his own. He did not add, however, that their effect, if slipped sparingly in amid his own pellucid construction and facile narrative method, would be very different from their habitual use in a translation which must in any case, if it were faithful to the original, be often both harsh and obscure. In his desire to reproduce the early English manner he allowed himself a harshness of construction and a strangeness of vocabulary that in many passages go near to making his version unintelligible. A poem which professes to be modern and yet requires a glossary fails of one of its primary objects. The obscurity of many parts of the original, made more obscure by gaps and corruptions in the text, cannot be got over in any translation which Morris would have regarded, or which it is possible fairly to regard, as faithful: but this means that the only translation practicable is a paraphrase, an "interpretation," as it was called in the old editions of the classics, which shall not profess to reproduce the original, but confine itself to the humbler use of being printed below the original to make it easier of comprehension. As the work advanced, he seems to have felt this himself, and his pleasure in the doing of it fell off. Between this, and the slow progress of the Chaucer, which was chiefly owing to the great difficulty of getting Burne-Jones's designs satisfactorily rendered upon wood—"we shall be twenty years at this rate in getting it out," he writes rather dolefully in May—he was not in the best of spirits that summer about his printing, and began to think that some caution in restricting his output might be not undesirable.

Another matter which seriously vexed him was the total defeat in Convocation, in June, 1893, of his attempt to save the mediæval statuary on the spire of St. Mary's, Oxford, from the hands of the restorer. Those images were much decayed and loosened by past neglect, and were as they stood admittedly unsafe: the question, therefore, became one in which Morris's principles as regards restoration came into the sharpest conflict with those of the ordinary architect. Stated briefly, the question was one of sacrificing truth and history on the one hand, or appearance on the other. "Jackson took me up on the spire," Morris writes after his return from Oxford, "and I had a good look at the images and fought Jackson at every point. The fact is, he would now willingly keep the images, if he could do so without visibly banding and tying them, but this he funks. This was my chief point; as I refused to be led into a discussion as to whether they could be tied up to look neat, but stuck to it that even if they had to be covered with a cage of bars it should be done rather than removing them"—and replacing them, it is to be understood, by copies professing to be originals.

The twelve statues grouped round the base of that magnificent spire, still in spite of all restorations and reconstructions the "eye of Oxford," the central crown of all her architecture, were among the noblest surviving examples of English sculpture of the early fourteenth century. Time and neglect had seriously impaired several of them; and in the first restoration of the spire, carried out by the architect Buckler according to the ideas of that "second period of Gothic knowledge" which Morris held in such profound contempt, just at the time when Morris himself went up to Exeter as an undergraduate, two had been wholly removed and replaced, and some of the others had been largely repaired. When the second restoration was decided upon and placed in the hands of Mr. T.G. Jackson, the ten ancient statues were the only important features of the spire which had not been already tampered with, and their importance was thus doubled. Mr. Jackson's first report was that they were all so much perished that it was not safe to allow even their ruins to remain. Owing to the decay of the holdfasts certain heads and hands were so loose that they could be lifted off. But the surface of the stone had weathered to such hardness that it resisted the point of a knife; and the bodies, which were solid set into the wall behind them, had actually to be sawn from their settings before they could be taken down. The noble figures of the Virgin, of St. Edward the Confessor, and of St. John the Baptist, as they now lie stored in the basement of the Convocation House, may be specially cited as examples, apart from any question of historic interest, of the purest feeling and most consummate artistic excellence. Of the copies by which they have been replaced on the base of the now doubly and triply reconstructed mass of pinnacles from which the central spire springs into the sunlight, it may be left to future generations to judge. But the judgment will be—so Morris insisted—upon works of the nineteenth century which profess to be, and are not, works of nearly six hundred years earlier.

The death of Tennyson in October, 1892, had left vacant the titular primacy of English poetry, which he had held for forty-two years. When the question of appointing a new Poet Laureate was opened, the name of Morris, as by amount and quality of actual work produced undoubtedly among the foremost of living English poets, was one of those which could not be ignored. His political creed would indeed have assorted but strangely with the holding of an orifice in the Royal Household; nor could any one who knew him, however slightly, think without a smile of his writing official odes, or posing as the eulogist of the existing order and the triumphs of the Victorian age. As regards his personal views on the matter, Mr. Gladstone, who had then just become for the fourth time Prime Minister, kept his own counsel: and it is matter of common knowledge that no recommendation was ever made by him to the Queen, and that the office remained unfilled for three years during his Government and the administration which succeeded it. But after this lapse of time it may not be indiscreet to say that Morris was sounded by a member of the Cabinet, with Mr. Gladstone's knowledge and approval, to ascertain whether he would accept the office in the event of its being offered to him. His answer was unhesitating. He was frankly pleased that he had been thought of, and did not undervalue the implied honour: but it was one which his principles and his tastes alike made it impossible for him to accept. The matter went no further. In private conversation Morris always held that the proper function of a Poet Laureate was that of a ceremonial writer of official verse, and that in this particular case the Marquis of Lorne was the person pointed out for the office—should the office be thought one worth keeping up under modern conditions—by position and acquirements.

While the Socialist organizations had been dwindling as active forces, the permeation of public opinion by Socialistic ideas had continued to make slow but noticeable progress. Taught by bitter experience, the more thoughtful Socialists no longer held haughtily aloof from the means at their hand by which they might take part in the work of local government. The old idea of obstructing reform in order to precipitate revolution did not now hold its place except among a few extremists. Work directed towards common objects began to make the differences on which the party had divided and subdivided itself fall back into something nearer their true proportion: and in 1893 efforts began to be made towards re-uniting the party. In these efforts Morris cordially joined, though he no longer accepted the position of a leader, or allowed the work he contributed towards this object to encroach largely on his time and energy. He defined the work to be done as the promotion of common ideals based on the teaching of history. Towards that object, he this year carefully revised the series of articles which he had written for the Commonweal between 1886 and 1888, in collaboration with Mr. E.B. Bax, and issued them as a volume under the title of "Socialism, its Growth and Outcome."

On the 1st of May—the anniversary which, under the name of Labour Day, it had been sought to constitute as an international festival of the working classes both in Europe and America—he joined with Mr. Hyndman and Mr. G.B. Shaw, as the representatives of the principal associations in England holding Socialist doctrines, in drawing up and issuing a new irenicon under the title of the "Manifesto of English Socialists."

In this manifesto the common principles of the movement were once more stated, and a last appeal made towards the sinking of differences and the reinstatement of harmonious working on different methods towards common ends. It is signed by the fifteen members of a joint Committee which had been appointed for this purpose by the Social Democratic Federation, the Fabian Society, and the Hammersmith Socialist Society, and was issued with the authority of all three bodies.

The manifesto bears the traces of a joint authorship in which the hand of Mr. Shaw and the inspiration of Mr. Sidney Webb are more plainly visible than those of Morris. But it fairly represents the moderate and practical views which Morris held in the last years of his life. By a brief review of the facts it is shown that some constructive social theory is absolutely needed. Of these there are really only three. Two of the three must be rejected: the Feudal or Tory theory, which is incompatible with modern conditions and the fact of democracy; and the Manchester or Whig theory, which has completely broken down in practice. The third is Socialism. No amount of moralization of the conditions of a capitalist society based on private property can do away with the necessity for abolishing it, as a step towards the creation of the new social order. Legislative readjustments of industry and administration, while they may be desirable as temporary expedients, will not be permanently useful unless the whole state is merged into an organized commonwealth. For the realization of the new order, the whole community must possess complete ownership and control of the means for creating and distributing wealth; it must put an end to the wage-system; it must sweep away all distinctions of class, and finally establish national and international Communism. Anarchism, whether as a doctrine or a system of tactics, is formally repudiated in all its forms. The ameliorative measures which, under the heightened sensitiveness of the public conscience, are within the scope of practical politics, are not to be opposed, but supported and welcomed. The more that such measures give, either to individuals or to whole bodies of the working class, of leisure for thought and freedom from anxiety, the more will that working class be able to turn their attention and exert their powers towards the introduction of a new social order based on equality of condition. There is therefore no reason why Socialists should not constitute themselves into a distinct party with definite immediate aims. Among these are mentioned an Eight Hours Act, an adequate minimum or living wage for all working men or women employed either in the Government service or in monopolies under partial state-control, the suppression of sub-contracting and sweating, and universal suffrage. Ten years had elapsed since a theory and a programme not unlike this had induced Morris to join the newly-founded Democratic Federation. The wheel might seem to have come full circle. But the experience, the thought, the labour of ten years had given to all the terms employed, and to all the measures advocated, an enlarged and deepened meaning. There had been much disappointment, much disillusion, much wreckage of unverified beliefs and extravagant hopes. The work had been tried by fire and tempest; over and over again had the superstructure crumbled or been consumed away down to the foundations. But these foundations, such was Morris's permanent conviction, were in the rock, and imperishable.

Any later expressions of his mind with regard to the immediate duties which lay before Socialists are in complete consonance with the manifesto of 1893. One of the most significant of these occurs in an address on Art and Labour which he delivered to the Guild of Lithographic Artists in February, 1894. "The new birth of art," he said there, "will be brought about noiselessly, gradually, and without violent change. We already see springing up round us the germs of this new life, the outward signs of which are trades-unionism, socialism, and co-operation." Such at least were his reported words. Whether or not he actually employed the singular collocation of the last sentence, the fact remains that Socialism as a practical movement, though not as an ultimate ideal, had come in his mind to occupy a place alongside of other movements, all of which were incomplete manifestations of a single spirit. It no longer anathematized whatever lay outside of its own specific body of doctrine. From extreme intransigeance it had swung back to something approaching opportunism. He that is not against us is on our part was rapidly becoming its test of orthodoxy.

Thus the formal organization of a united Socialist party was a matter which, though he was willing to co-operate towards its realization, he did not think of the first importance. On the 25th of October, 1894, he wrote on behalf of the Hammersmith Socialist Society to Mr. R. Blatchford, who had been urging this point in the Clarion newspaper. In that letter he expressed his conviction that the union, if attainable, might and should be effected without any interference with the existing organizations. But he was equally clear that all minor differences among these organizations should be sunk in view of a general assent in the aim of nationalizing the means of production. A declaration of agreement in this aim would, he thought, be sufficient as a test of membership in a united Socialist party.

It may not be irrelevant to add here the last pronouncement on the subject which Morris made before his death. In answer to an American correspondent who had asked whether he had altered his views as to Socialism, he replied on the 9th of January, 1896:

"I have not changed my mind on Socialism. My view on the point of relation between Art and Socialism is as follows: Society (so-called) at present is organized entirely for the benefit of a privileged class; the working class being only considered in the arrangement as so much machinery. This involves perpetual and enormous waste, and the organization for the production of genuine utilities is only a secondary consideration. This waste lands the whole civilized world in a position, of artificial poverty, which again debars men of all classes from satisfying their rational desires. Rich men are in slavery to Philistinism, poor men to penury. We can none of us have what we want, except (partially only) by making prodigious sacrifices, which very few men can ever do. Before therefore we can so much as hope for any art, we must be free from this artificial poverty. When we are thus free, in my opinion, the natural instincts of mankind toward beauty and incident will take their due place: we shall want art, and since we shall be really wealthy, we shall be able to have what we want."

But in truth, as Morris well knew, the work of the Socialist party as a separate organization, whether acting as a united body or in detached and conflicting fragments, was for the time being already done. While Socialists were busy over their friendly or embittered contests as to methods, the course of events had already decided the question, and the policy of permeation had slowly become not so much an accepted theory as a realized fact. The great lock-out in the English coal industry, which was the most important social event of the autumn and winter months of 1893, came at once as a result and a symbol of a new spirit; and the ideas that underlay it, now formally expressed in the celebrated phrase, of the "living wage," were the first large outward manifestation of the beginnings of a new order of things, a new theory of human life. Almost for the first time, the cardinal doctrine began to take shape and assume consistence that the industrial and commercial system, no less than the political system of the country, was a means and not an end: and that the true end, for the sake of which alone these systems had any claim to respect or any right to existence, was the well-being of the nation, the humanization of human life. Such a humanized life, in which comfort and happiness should be alike within the reach of all, and in which all alike, rich and poor, should share, until the names rich and poor might finally become alike obsolete in a common condition of civic and national well-being, had been from the first what Morris had striven after. He had joined the Socialist movement as a means, however indirect or uncertain, towards bringing about that end: and neither in the State Socialism of his earlier, nor in the Communal Socialism of his later theory, did he see anything beyond stages towards the birth of a final order. That final order might be described, for want of other terms, as the reorganization of the world under Socialism: but its actual nature, or the actual steps by which it was to be brought about, he perpetually insisted that it was impossible to lay out beforehand, or to forecast except by instinctive conjecture, and the imaginings of a prophet or a poet. As in Plato, the last words of philosophy were only to be expressed in the terms of a more or less conscious mythology. As in the days of the Hebrew prophets, the practical foundation of a kingdom of God on earth was to be wrought out by aid of that diffused imaginative ardour in which young men should see visions, and old men dream dreams. The visions of his own boyhood, the dreams of his own more advanced age, were but means towards expressing, and influences towards stimulating, the human movement itself, in which, through all doubts and discouragements, he had a permanent and a growing faith. No one insisted more strongly than he on the futility of any attempt to organize the future, or to lay down what would actually happen either in the progress towards the new age or in the final epoch of its attainment. In "The Dream of John Ball" he had shadowed out, in an allegorical setting of subtle and intricate beauty, the birth of a new world, seen, for one hour of intense spiritual exaltation, when the mediæval rebel and mystic and the modern Socialist joined hands over the white poppy-flower in the doubtful dusk between moonset and dawn. In such a vision, the prophetic soul of the world, dreaming on things to come, ranges disembodied and unconfined. The dreams which the present may have of an elusive or dimly-conjectured future, no less than those which the past may once have had of a future that is not the present, must be no rational human forecast, but a tale told, like the Vision of Er in Plato's "Republic," by one neither alive nor dead. In "News from Nowhere" he had, with a reversion to a simpler and less august sphere of imagination, clothed his own dream of a new age in the innocent draperies of a romantic pastoral. But the dreamer of dreams, the poet and romance-writer who habitually moved in a strange world of his own, was also a man of keen-sighted practical intelligence. When called on for action, he could dismiss all that world of dreams, or only retain from it that deeper insight and that wider outlook which is forbidden to men not endowed with the more than human gift of imaginative insight. The letter to the Daily Chronicle on the Miners' Question,^[1] his last and most profound public utterance on the future of human society and the meaning of human life, is the voice of one who had lived both in Plato's cave and in the upper air, and who could adjust his eye to both. From that upper world of ideal art and creative imagination—of real things, as Plato would say—he could turn to the confused and perplexing movement of shadows in the cavern spoken and thought of by men as the actual world, and see breaking over the darkness no mere fluctuating glow from a fire behind the prisoners, but the glimmer of actual day.

This letter, headed "The Deeper Meaning of the Struggle," and written on the 9th of November, ran as follows:

"May I be allowed to say a word in supplement to your paragraph about my opinion on the future of the fine arts? You rather imply that I am a pessimist on this matter. This is not the case; but I am anxious that there should be no illusions as to the future of art. I do not believe in the possibility of keeping art vigorously alive by the action, however energetic, of a few groups of specially gifted men and their small circle of admirers amidst a general public incapable of understanding and enjoying their work. I hold firmly to the opinion that all worthy schools of art must be in the future, as they have been in the past, the outcome of the aspirations of the people towards the beauty and true pleasure of life. And further, that now that democracy is building up a new order, which is slowly emerging from the confusion of the commercial period, these aspirations of the people towards beauty can only be born from a condition of practical equality of economical condition amongst the whole population. Lastly, I am so confident that this equality will be gained, that I am prepared to accept as a consequence of the process of that gain, the seeming disappearance of what art is now left us; because I am sure that that will be but a temporary loss, to be followed by a genuine new birth of art, which will be the spontaneous expression of the pleasure of life innate in the whole people.

"This, I say, is the art which I look forward to, not as a vague dream, but as a practical certainty, founded on the general well-being of the people. It is true that the blossom of it I shall not see; therefore I may be excused if, in common with other artists, I try to express myself through the art of to-day, which seems to us to be only a survival of the organic art of the past, in which the people shared, whatever the other drawbacks of their condition might have been. For the feeling for art in us artists is genuine, though we have to work in the midst of the ignorance of those whose whole life ought to be spent in the production of works of art (the makers of wares to wit) and of the fatuous pretence of those who, making no utilities, are driven to 'make-believe.'

"Yet if we shall not (those of us who are as old as I am) see the New Art, the expression of the general pleasure of life, we are even now seeing the seed of it beginning to germinate. For if genuine art be impossible without the help of the useful classes, how can these turn their attention to it if they are living amidst sordid cares which press upon them day in, day out? The first step, therefore, towards the new birth of art must be a definite rise in the condition of the workers; their livelihood must (to say the least of it) be less niggardly and less precarious, and their hours of labour shorter; and this improvement must be a general one, and confirmed against the chances of the market by legislation. But again this change for the better can only be realized by the efforts of the workers themselves. 'By us, and not for us,' must be their motto. That they are now finding this out for themselves and acting on it makes this year a memorable one indeed, small as is the actual gain which they are claiming. So I not only 'admit,' but joyfully insist on the fact 'that the miners are laying the foundation of something better.' The struggle against the terrible power of the profit-grinder is now practically proclaimed by them a matter of principle, and no longer a mere chance-hap business dispute, and though the importance of this is acknowledged here and there, I think it is even yet underrated. For my part I look upon the swift progress towards equality as now certain; what these staunch miners have been doing in the face of such tremendous odds, other workmen can and will do; and when life is easier and fuller of pleasure, people will have time to look around them and find out what they desire in the matter of art, and will also have power to compass their desires. No one can tell now what form that art will take; but as it is certain that it will not depend on the whim of a few persons, but on the will of all, so it may be hoped that it will at last not lag behind that of past ages, but will outgo the art of the past in the degree that life will be more pleasurable from the absence of bygone violence and tyranny, in spite and not because of which our forefathers produced the wonders of popular art, some few of which time has left us."

 

1. See: 'The Deeper Meaning of the Struggle' (Wikisource-ed.)