The Life of William Morris/Chapter 21
CHAPTER XXI
LAST YEARS: THE KELMSCOTT CHAUCER
1894-1896
For about a year from the date of this remarkable letter Morris's life was so quietly busy from day to day that it has left almost no noticeable records. At the end of 1893 he had written to his mother the last letter of the long series which begins when he was an undergraduate at Oxford.
"Dec. 23rd, 1893.
"My dearest Mother,
"If I do not write now I shall not be in time for Christmas Day, so please consider this as Christmas Eve. I asked Henny to get you some pocket-handkerchiefs when she was in town. I hope you found them nice. The weather here is very fine this morning; I hope the sun is shining in on your room as it is on mine, as I suppose it is, for I think they both look nearly south. Jenny (the younger) is sitting with me reading a paper, and we are both enjoying the fine day.
"I got a letter from Henny yesterday inclosing a nice neck-kerchief for me; that will be good for me to wear when the weather takes one of the sudden changes to cold, which come so often now. Thank you very much for it.
"Also, dearest mother, thank you very much for the handsome stands and dishes you were so kind as to send me; and the beautiful Dresden cups which I have always so much admired. And they are so pleasant to drink out of.
"We are all very well at present, and have pretty much got over our colds. I am looking forward to this Christmas as a quiet time, when there will be a lull in business matters: as I am hard at work, which I like very much.
"Dearest own mother, I send you my very best love and am
"William Morris."
Mrs. Morris died in the following winter in her ninetieth year. "Tuesday I went to bury my mother," he wrote a few days afterwards: "a pleasant winter day with gleams of sun. She was laid in earth in the churchyard close by the house, a very pretty place among the great wych-elms, which, if it were of no use to her, was softening to us. Altogether my old and callous heart was touched by the absence of what had been so kind to me and fond of me. She was eighty-nine, and had been ill for nearly four years."
All that year Morris had been working hard at his press. But at Whitsuntide he took a holiday, and spent it in his favourite haunts of Northern France. He renewed there his delight in the indestructibly beautiful country, and the still lovely towns which seem as if they had grown out of the country like the fruit on a tree. The spring, too, was one of exceptional beauty; the countryside was one flame of flowers, and "the nightingales," as Morris put it to Burne-Jones after he came back, "O my wig, they were peppering into it." The effect of the visit may be clearly traced in an address which he gave, soon after his return to England, to the Ancoats Brotherhood at Manchester. The subject he chose to speak upon was "Town and Country." The greater part of the address was delivered without notes, and of that portion no trustworthy record has been preserved. But for the earlier portion a few pages of manuscript had been carefully written out: and the fragment is notable for the clearness of its historical view, and for the temperate practical ideal, which, not without reasonable hope, it sets up for a near future. It has also a direct autobiographic value from its personal touches, not only in the allusion to the Oxford of his own youth, but where he speaks of the havoc wrought in country villages by the wasteful neglect, or still worse by the destructive attention, of the modern landowner. In both cases he had in his mind actual instances in his own neighbourhood on the upper Thames. But beyond all, it sums up, with the ripeness of long experience, the instincts and beliefs which guided him in his view of what kind of human life was desirable, and possible, and a duty, in a naturally beautiful world.
"Town and country are generally put in a kind of contrast, but we will see what kind of a contrast there has been, is, and may be between them; how far that contrast is desirable or necessary, or whether it may not be possible in the long run to make the town a part of the country and the country a part of the towns. I think I may assume that, on the one hand, there is nobody here so abnormally made as not to take a pleasure in green fields, and trees, and rivers, and mountains, the beings, human and otherwise, that inhabit those scenes, and in a word, the general beauty and incident of nature: and that, on the other, we all of us find human intercourse necessary to us, and even the excitement of those forms of it which can only be had where large bodies of men live together.
"In the Roman times of the Empire, when the lands were cultivated almost wholly by well-organized slave labour with its necessary concomitant of brigandage and piracy in out-of-the-way places, I can't think that the countrysides were very pleasant places to live in; whereas the Roman city with its handsome buildings and gardens, its public baths, and other institutions of almost complete 'municipal socialism,' must have been very pleasant to well-to-do people, and perhaps, under the Empire at least, not quite intolerable to the proletarian, whose form of pauper relief did not include the prison system of the modern workhouse. In those days the town decidedly 'scores'; all the more as manufacture was, as its name implies, wholly a matter of handicraft. But the Roman city-system was pretty much swept away by the barbarism which took the place of the Empire. In this country, and wherever the people were not completely Romanized, the town was almost always merely the development of the agricultural district; it was the aggregation of the cultivators of the soil, and its freemen were always landowners, though mostly collective ones. In fact, for a long time after the Teutonic invasion which made this country England, there were no towns at all: the English clans lived in scattered homesteads along the side of the sea, or some river, or in clearings of the wild wood, as their Anglish, Jutish, or Saxon forefathers had done, and when they took a Romano- British town they had nothing better to do with it than to burn it and let it be: though, when they got more civilized, the long extinct glories of Rome took some revenge for this destruction, by the impression which they made on the descendants of the destroyers: e.g., an Anglo-Saxon poet of about the time of Athelstane wrote a poem on the ruins of an old Roman city which is as pathetic and beautiful as any lyric extant in any language, and you may, if you please, look on it as a forecast of the glories of the cities that were yet to come.
"Gradually, as civilization grew, the population thickened in certain places where the protection of the feudal lord—Baron, Bishop, or Abbot—made a market possible; and in short the growth of such places made our mediæval towns; though, as was like to be, where an old Roman town like York or London was still in existence, it was used as such a centre. But doubtless our mediæval towns were very small, smaller than our imagination of them pictures them to us; while on the other hand, the country villages were in many cases much larger than they are now. In fact in those days it was not so much the houses that made the town, as the constitution, the freemen and the guilds, which gradually grew into the Corporation. My familiarity with Oxford makes it easy to me to see a mediæval town of the more important kind: a place of some extent within its ancient walls, but the houses much broken by gardens and open spaces within the walls, and without them, a small estate it may be called, the communal property of the freemen. On the whole, then, the towns of the Middle Ages, in this country at least, were a part of the countrysides where they stood.
"In the Middle Ages even London was no more of a centre than Bristol or York, or indeed other places now become almost extinct. But in the eighteenth century London was become very decidedly the centre of England, and now the distinction was not between the towns and the countrysides, but between London and the rest of the country, towns and all. And here properly begins the opposition of town to country. The only further development of this was the work of the Great Industries which created the big manufacturing town, a thing so entirely modern that even London, with all its enormity, has more relation to the cities of the past than these manufacturing towns have.
"On considering further the contrast between town and country we must be careful not to forget this special quality in London. For now we see that we have three things to deal with: London, the external beastliness and sordidness of which is in some degree compensated by its intellectual life; the commercial centres, which have no such compensation, and even in externals are far more horrible than London; and the country, which, instead of being the due fellow and helpmate of the towns and the Town, is a troublesome appendage, an awkward incident of town life, which, commercial or intellectual, is the real life of our epoch.
"The result of all this is the usual make-shift jumble which oppresses all our life in this epoch of strange and rapid change, when we have fallen into such grievous want of reasonable organization. Even London, though far better than the commercial towns, is sordidly vulgar in its rich quarters, noisome and squalid beyond word in its poor quarters. And the country—at this end of May I am not going to say that it is not beautiful—beautiful everywhere more or less where there are not many modern houses in sight. But I know the country well: and even for a rich man, a wellto-do one at least, it shares in the make-shift stupidity of the epoch. Amongst all the superabundant beauty of leaf and flower, all the wealth of meadow, and acre, and hillside, it is stingy, O so stingy! In an ordinary way not an hour's work will be spent in taking away an ugly dead tree, in mending a shattered wall, setting a tottering vane straight (even if it be pulling down the roof-beam it is fastened to), in short in mending any defacement caused by wind and weather. Not a moment's consideration will be given as to whether the sightly material shall be used, if the unsightly one be a fraction cheaper for the time being. You can scarce have milk unless you keep a cow: you can't have vegetables unless you grow them yourself. I say this is the ordinary rule: it is true that when there is a rich squire, he does sometimes take some pains in beautifying his cottages, restoring his church, and so forth—with the result in all cases, that the village he has so dealt with has become as vulgar as Bays water. Nor can I leave this subject of the outward aspect of the country without reminding you that through forty years of my life I have diligently and affectionately noticed the countryside in its smallest detail, and that the change for the worse in its aspect has been steady, and, especially within the last twenty years, startlingly rapid. Indeed, sometimes I feel selfishly glad to think that I shall not live to see the worst of it. Now you may well say that all this suffering to men who are in the habit of taking in impressions through the eyes is a due reward for our living on other people's earnings; for our suffering the human live-stock of the country to live such a wretched scanty existence as they do. True, and over true; but then why should we of the nineteenth century be so extra punished, when our forefathers were involved in the same sin? "I take it that after all this is the case, that we feel it because it is at last tending to change—that we at last can do something to alter it. For this is what I want done in this matter of town and country: I want neither the towns to be appendages of the country, nor the country of the town; I want the town to be impregnated with the beauty of the country, and the country with the intelligence and vivid life of the town. I want every homestead to be clean, orderly, and tidy; a lovely house surrounded by acres and acres of garden. On the other hand, I want the town to be clean, orderly, and tidy; in short, a garden with beautiful houses in it. Clearly, if I don't wish this, I must be a fool or a dullard; but I do more—I claim it as the due heritage of the latter ages of the world which have subdued nature, and can have for the asking."
The great work of the Kelmscott Chaucer, which had been so long in preparation, was now fairly begun.
"Chaucer getting on well; such lovely designs," is a note made by him in early spring. At the end of June he writes that he hopes to begin the actual printing within a month, and that, in about three months more, all the pictures, and nearly all the borders, will be ready for the whole of the Canterbury Tales. His delight in the growing row of volumes from his own press was unabated; and almost as great was his delight in giving copies to his more intimate friends. To Mr. Philip Webb, who had made some remonstrance against the extent of his generosity, he replied in the following letter:
"August 27th, '94.
"My dear Fellow,
"A traveller once entered a western hotel in America and went up to the clerk in his box (as the custom is in that country) and ordered chicken for his dinner: the clerk, without any trouble in his face, put his hand into his desk, and drew out a derringer, wherewith he covered the newcomer and said in a calm historic voice: Stranger, you will not have chicken, you will have hash.
"This story you seem to have forgotten. So 1 will apply it, and say that you will have the Kelmscott books as they come out. In short you will have hash because it would upset me very much if you did not have a share in my 'larx.'
"As to the Olaf Saga, I had forgotten what you had had; chiefly I think because I did not prize the big-paper copies much. They were done in the days of ignorance, before the Kelmscott Press was, though hard on the time when it began.
"You see as to all these matters I do the books mainly for you and one or two others; the public does not really care about them a damn—which is stale. But I tell you I want you to have them, and finally you shall.
"William Morris."
The autumn at Kelmscott was unusually quiet and happy. A certain degree of physical feebleness had now become his normal condition; he was seldom able to take long walks, or to spend whole days fishing; but he delighted in driving among the beautiful and familiar villages, and in shorter walks near home. It was on one of these walks, at the end of September, that when his companions perched on a gate to rest he sat down on the roadside with his legs straight out in front of him, saying, "I shall sit on the world."
It would be difficult to convey to any one who did not know him well the sense of mingled oddness and pathos that the words gave. Two days later, on a Sunday morning in Buscot Wood, he talked for some two hours on end on the principles of conducting business, with all his old keen insight and fertility of illustration. It was noticeable how he seemed to speak of the whole matter as, for himself, a past experience. One of the visitors at Kelmscott that week was Sir Edward Burne-Jones's little grandson, in whose favour Morris discarded any prejudices which he might have against children other than his own; for outside of his own family he was not a lover of children, and seldom took any notice of them. "As to Denis, he is the dearest little chap," he writes on the 3rd of October, "and as merry as the day is long—all that a gentleman of his age should be: everybody paid him the attention which he deserves." The Kelmscott holiday—during which, however, he was steadily at work designing borders and initials for the Chaucer—was prolonged till the beginning of November.
Soon after he returned to London the first elections were being held under the Local Government Act of 1894, which had been the latest and the most important achievement of Mr. Gladstone's administration. Morris was at once too preoccupied with his own work, and too disillusioned by his own experience, to feel any very deep interest in the matter. He did not go to Kelmscott to attend the inaugural parish meeting: in London he voted, but did no more. It was claimed for the Act by some enthusiasts that it reconstituted a framework of administration which was essentially that of the Middle Ages, and indeed went back in some points even beyond them. But to him it seemed too artificial, and too much encumbered with those checks and balances which he hated, to be a source of any great hope. To Lady Burne-Jones, who was standing for election to the Parish Council at Rottingdean, he wrote on the 14th of December:
"Well now, I hope you will come in at the head of the poll; and I hope we shall beat our Bumbles. No one here can even guess how it will go. I daresay you think me rather lukewarm about the affair; but I am so depressed with the pettiness and timidity of the bill and the checks and counterchecks with which such an obvious measure has been hedged about, that all I can hope is that people will be able to keep up the excitement about it till they have got it altered somewhat. However, I shall go and vote for my twelve to-morrow morning, but I am lethargic and faint-hearted."
A week later he wrote again: "Many thanks for your book"—a brief, but admirably lucid printed address to the electors, explaining the scope of the Act and the nature of their rights and duties under it—"which is as good as the subject admits of, and for the first time makes me know something about the parish councils. Could you let me have two or three more? Now I congratulate you on the election, and I am really quite pleased that you beat the Bumbles. Here they beat us properly; though I didn't think, all things considered, that it was so bad, as we polled about half of what they did. You see all through London the middle class voted solid against us; which I think extremely stupid of them, as they might as well have got credit for supporting an improved administration. But you see they have an instinct, which they can't resist, against any progress in any direction. Item, they are very fearful lest the rates should be raised on them; as they certainly will be, whoever is in. We did better with the Guardians' election, getting eight out of twelve."
At the beginning of 1895 Morris was carrying on all his multifarious occupations with unimpaired activity. Two presses were at work upon the Chaucer, and a third on smaller books. He was designing new paper-hangings; he was going on daily with the writing of new romances; he was completing, in collaboration with Mr. Magnusson, the translation of the Heimskringla which they had begun some three and twenty years before, and seeing it through the press for the Saga Library; and he was busily increasing the collection of illuminated manuscripts, chiefly of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, which towards the end of his life became his chief treasures and gave him extraordinary delight. With the two presses at work it now seemed possible to finish the Chaucer in a year, and the panics into which he sometimes fell over its slow progress were greatly allayed. Among the smaller books which the third printing-press was turning out was the volume of selected poems of Coleridge. As to that book the following interesting passage occurs in a letter to Ellis when the contents were under discussion:
"As to the Coleridge-Keats question, you don't quite understand the position I think. Keats was a great poet who sometimes nodded: we don't want to make a selection of his works. Coleridge was a muddle-brained metaphysician, who by some strange freak of fortune turned out a few real poems amongst the dreary flood of inanity which was his wont. It is these real poems only that must be selected, or we burden the world with another useless book. Christabel only just comes in because the detail is fine; but nothing a hair's breadth worse must be admitted. There is absolutely no difficulty in choosing, because the difference between his poetry and his drivel is so striking.
"I have been through the poems, and find that the only ones that have any interest for me are—1. Ancient Mariner, 2. Christabel, 3. Kubla Khan, and 4. the poem called Love. This would make a very little book, about 60 pages. There is one other which at least has some character, though rather tainted with Wordsworthianism; it is called The Three Graves, and is about as cheerful as the influenza. But then it is copyright; and at the best it would rather water down the good ones."
This volume, which finally included thirteen of Coleridge's poems, was the last of the series of reprints of modern poetry issued from the Kelmscott Press. It was not printed till a year later, having been postponed to another volume of selected poems of Herrick, for whom Morris had only a modified liking. "I like him better than I thought I should: I daresay we shall make a pretty book of it," was all he would say after looking through the "Hesperides" and "Noble Numbers" when the Kelmscott edition was in preparation.
In March he was buying manuscripts of Messrs. Quaritch and Leighton, and also at sales at Sotheby's and Christie's, and hungering after more, though indignant at the prices which were asked for them. "I bought," he writes to Ellis on the 19th, "for ₤15 10s. (much too dear) a Guldin Bibel (Augsburg, Hohenwang, circa 1470), a very interesting book which I much wanted. Also I bought for ₤25 (much too dear) a handsome 13th century French MS., but with little ornament, because it looked so handsome I hadn't the heart to send it back. The Mentelin Bible Quaritch bought for himself: 'tis a very fine book, and I lust after it, but can't afford it. The prices were preposterous. There is a sale at Sotheby's this week, and I am just going up there, though I don't expect much in my way. I expect to meet Mr. James there with the two leaves from the Fitzwilliam."
On the 23rd he continues: "As the history of sales seems to interest you, hear a tale of the Phillips sale, of which to-day is the third day. Two books I bid for. A 13th century Aristotelian book with three very pretty initials, but imperfect top and tail; I put ₤15 on this with many misgivings as to my folly—hi! it fetched £50!! A really pretty little book, Gregory's Decretals, with four or five very tiny illuminations; I took a fancy to it and put ₤40 on it, expecting to get it for ₤25—ho!! it fetched ₤96!!! Rejoice with me that I have got 82 MSS., as clearly I shall never get another. I have duly got my two leaves, and beauties they are."
The two leaves mentioned in these letters have an interesting history attached to them. In the previous July Morris had bought for upwards of ₤400—the highest price he had ever then paid for a book—an English Book of Hours written about 1300 in East Anglia, and containing the arms of Grey and Clifford. It was subsequently found that two missing leaves from this manuscript were in the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge. After long negotiations, it was agreed that Morris should sell his book to the museum for ₤200, and in return have the possession of it and of the two leaves belonging to it for his own lifetime. He had the leaves inserted in their places, and the manuscript remained one of his chief treasures. After his death it went to Cambridge, where it is now.
Notwithstanding the great rise in prices, a tine painted book was always worth more to Morris than it cost: and within the next two months he had added two of the first rank to his collection. One of these was the so-called Huntingfield Psalter, a superb book of the end of the twelfth century. The other was the Tiptoft Missal, a work of the early fourteenth century, with illuminated borders throughout, of which the best are of unsurpassed beauty.
At the beginning of April he went down to Kelmscott. The Manor House, of which his tenure had hitherto been precarious, had, by an arrangement made the month before, passed practically, though not formally, into his ownership.
"It is just a month," he wrote to his daughter on his arrival, "since I was here, and there is a great change in the grass, which shows green everywhere and looks beautiful. As to the flowers, there are not many of them actually out. The snowdrops nearly but not quite gone; a few purple crocuses, but of course not open this sunless day. The daphne very full of blossom. Many daffodils nearly out, but only two or three quite. The beautiful hepatica, which I used to love so when I was a quite little boy, in full bloom, both pink and blue: the hyacinths not out yet, but more advanced than our London (outdoor) ones. Several of the crown imperials show for bloom; but are not due yet, nor are the yellow tulips. There are a few primroses, but not many; but the garden with all its springing green looks lovely.
"As to birds, I have heard very little singing except the rooks, who are all agog: I suppose the cold weather has belated the breeding season.
"Giles has patched up the punt, and is sanguine about its holding water: so am I; but think the water may be rather inside than out—however we shall see. There has been a little flood since I was here; which will do good. The house is as clean as a new pin."
By the end of the month he had cleared off long arrears of translation and romance-writing by finishing his Heimskringla and the romance of "The Water of the Wondrous Isles," and was working harder than ever for the Society for Protection of Ancient Buildings. The main object of their defence at the moment was Peterborough Cathedral.
It was one of the churches which had been his earliest admirations ; he had known it in his boyhood, and felt towards it as though he had been one of its own builders. One of the most brilliant pieces of imaginative description in "The Earthly Paradise" is put in the mouth of a wanderer who had seen that magnificent western front rising. It occurs in the introductory verses to the tale of "The Proud King."
—I, who have seen
So many lands, and midst such marvels been,
Clearer than these abodes of outland men
Can see above the green and unburnt fen
The little houses of an English town,
Cross-timbered, thatched with fen-reeds coarse and brown,
And high o'er these, three gables, great and fair,
That slender rods of columns do upbear
Over the minster doors, and imagery
Of kings, and flowers no summer field doth see,
Wrought on those gables. Yea, I heard withal
In the fresh morning air, the trowels fall
Upon the stone, a thin noise far away;
For high up wrought the masons on that day,
Since to the monks that house seemed scarcely well
Till they had set a spire or pinnacle
Each side the great porch.... I am now grown old,
Yet is it still the tale I then heard told
Within the guest-house of that minster-close
Whose walls, like cliffs new-made, before us rose.
A long and bitter controversy was carried on between the Dean and Chapter on one side and the Society for Protection of Ancient Buildings on the other. It ended inconclusively; and the work proposed by Mr. Pearson has in the main been carried out. But here as elsewhere the real result of the Society's action is to be sought, not so much in what they failed to prevent, as in the effect which their vigilant and jealous criticism had on the manner in which the work was carried out.
Equally strong was Morris's feeling in another matter on which that same spring he helped to excite public interest, that of the injuries done to Epping Forest, the playground of his own childhood, by the Conservators. Alarm had been aroused by the amount of "restoration" that had been carried out in it for some years by lopping and felling, as well as by changes which smoothed down the characteristic wildness of the Forest. The strangely romantic aspect of the dense hornbeam thickets, the plashy dells, and the rough cattle-tracks winding among the hollies and beeches of the upper ground, had been already impaired and was in further danger: and Morris was roused to alarm and indignation by the prospect of seeing one of the last fragments of ancient England turned into a modern park. On the 7th of May he spent a long day in walking through the Forest with a party of four or five friends. He was relieved to find that the evil had been exaggerated. Here and there damage had undoubtedly been done; but whole tracts of the Forest remained as wild and beautiful as ever; and he drew little but pleasure from the visit to the glades and coppices, every yard of which had been familiar to him as a boy.
His anxieties about the Kelmscott Chaucer were not yet over. At the end of May the discovery was made that a number of the printed sheets had become discoloured, owing to some failure in the exact preparation of the ink. Fortunately it proved that the yellow stain was fugitive, and could be removed by careful bleaching in sunlight without affecting the colour of the ink. But it was not till late in the autumn that he could fully satisfy himself that the stain had been permanently removed, and might not reappear.
"The check of the Chaucer flattens life for me somewhat," he writes on the 19th of July, "but I am going hard into the matter, and have found out the real expert in the matter of inks and oils, and in about a fortnight hope to know the worst of it.
"On Wednesday I went a journey into Suffolk for the S.P.A.B., a pretty journey all through my native Essex. The upland pastures were all burnt up, and were cocoa-nut matting; but the corn did not look bad: they were cutting oats in many places, which should not be ready till the end of August. Blythborough was what we went to see; once a good town in the Middle Ages, now a poor remnant of a village with the ruins of a small religious house and a huge 15th century church built of flint after that country manner: a very beautiful church, full of interest, with fine wood-work galore, a lovely painted roof, and some stained glass; the restorations not much noticeable from the inside: floor of various bricks, a few seats in the nave, all ancient, similar ones in the chancel, and the rest open space. We were cumbered of course with the parson, since we came to advise him, but I much enjoyed myself and sat about while Turner did his measurings, etc. The place is close to Southwold on the little tidal river Bly at the end of the marshland valley, where they were busy with their second hay crop. Little spits of the sandy low upland covered with heather and bracken run down to the marsh, and make a strange landscape of it; a mournful place, but full of character. I was there some twenty-five years ago; and found I remembered it perfectly.
"By the way, there was a review of the Wood"—his romance of "The Wood beyond the World," which had been issued from the Kelmscott Press the year before, and of which an ordinary edition had recently been published—"in last week's Spectator, which was kind and polite, but amused me very much by assuming that it was a Socialist allegory of Capital and Labour! It was written with such an air of cock-certainty that I thought people might think that I had told the reviewer myself; so I wrote a note to explain that he was wrong."
During this summer the gradual failure of Morris's strength became clearly noticeable. Languor insensibly stole over him. "It is sad," Sir Edward Burne-Jones wrote in autumn, "to see his enormous vitality diminishing." He was less ready' for any active expeditions, and began to suffer from sleeplessness. In summer mornings it had long been a luxury with him to be awakened at dawn by the first birds and then fall asleep again; but now that first waking was not always succeeded by a second sleep, and he often, even when summer passed into winter, got up at three or four o'clock and sat down to write at one of his prose tales in order to pass the time. He found that the clipping of a yew dragon which had been for some years in progress under the gable of the tapestry-room at Kelmscott was too fatiguing a task for him. His country walks became shorter in their range, and fishing was almost given up. "Ellis was with us for three days," he writes at the beginning of August, "and took me fishing every day: I did not much want to go, but I daresay it did me good." Even writing began to be a fatiguing task. "I am worn out," he says on the 13th of August, "with writing a long letter to the Athenæum about the tapestry at South Kensington Museum, and so cannot attempt to fill up this sheet." A week later, however, he was well enough to make his annual expedition to the White Horse. Lady Burne-Jones, who was staying at Kelmscott, was of the party. "Topsy looks very happy, and is so sweet down here," she wrote home.
"The garden is enchanting with flowers, one mass of them, and all kept in beautiful order. The trees and bushes are of course grown in the last nine years, and the whole place is leafier; otherwise I feel as if I had been here last week, the place is so little changed—but I feel the added years in Janey and Topsy and me, so that it seems like visiting something that is not quite real."
"The garden looks rich and pleasant," Morris himself had written at the beginning of the month, "though the autumn flowers (for we are practically in autumn now) are so much less delightful than those of spring and early summer. One pleasant walk is cut off from us at present, the one up to Buscot Wood. It is guarded by a dragon; i.e., a savage Bull; we (Jenny and I) on Friday last were just going into the first Berkshire field when the lock-keeper stopped us and told us awesome stories about the said beast; so we abstained. We, safe on the other side of the river, saw the gentleman afterwards, as he walked away from his harem, sometimes throwing up his head and bellowing, sometimes faring along with that expressive half inward growl, which is so interesting to hear when you are on the other side of the Thames. We were both of us compelled to admit that he was a gallant-looking neat—red-roan of colour."
The lock-keeper's cottage, a pretty but tumble-down building of grey stone, walls and roof, was about to be rebuilt by the Thames Conservancy; and one of the last instances in which Morris was able to ward off encroachments on the beauty of the riverside was when he now prevented, by a temperate and dignified expostulation, the replacement of the old silver-grey roof which lay in sight of his own house by one of blue Welsh slate. At his urgent instances, too, the Conservators consented to give instructions that the men who cut the weeds on the river should spare the flowering plants on the banks as much as possible. But beyond his own immediate reach he had to confess with despondency that it seemed useless to struggle against the pervading flood of evil change in that lovely region. "I was thinking just now," he writes from Kelmscott at the end of August, "how I have wasted the many times when I have been 'hurt' and (especially of late years) have made no sign, but swallowed down my sorrow and anger, and nothing done! Whereas if I had but gone to bed and stayed there for a month or two and declined taking any part in life, as indeed on such occasions I have felt very much disinclined to do, I can't help thinking that it might have been very effective. Perhaps you remember that this game was tried by some of my Icelandic heroes, and seemingly with great success. But I admit that it wants to be done well.
"It was a most lovely afternoon when I came down here, and I was prepared to enjoy the journey from Oxford to Lechlade very much: and so I did; but woe's me! when we passed by the once lovely little garth near Black Bourton, I saw all my worst fears realized; for there was the little barn we saw being mended, the wall cut down and finished with a zinked iron roof. It quite sickened me when I saw it. That's the way all things are going now. In twenty years everything will be gone in this countryside, which twenty years ago was so rich in beautiful building: and we can do nothing to help it or mend it. The world had better say, 'Let us be through with it and see what will come after it!' In the meantime I can do nothing but a little bit of Anti-Scrape—sweet to eye while seen. Now that I am grown old and see that nothing is to be done, I half wish that I had not been born with a sense of romance and beauty in this accursed age."
But a week afterwards he had so far rallied from this fit of depression as to be in great excitement over the new scheme for the folio edition of his own "Sigurd the Volsung," for which Burne-Jones had just agreed to design at least five and twenty pictures. "I am afire to see the new designs," he wrote to Burne-Jones, "which I have no doubt will do—and as to the age, that be blowed!"
During the winter he still went on lecturing from time to time as his strength allowed. On the 30th of October, at the request of Mr. Hines, a Radical and Socialist chimney-sweep in Oxford, with whom he had a longstanding acquaintance, dating from the early days of the Socialist movement, he gave an address to inaugurate the newly-founded Oxford Socialist Union. A month later he spoke—"to the point and impressively," a hearer says—at the funeral of Sergius Stepniak, in the foggy drizzle outside Waterloo Station. During December he lectured twice in London, on English architecture and on Gothic illustrations to printed books. The latter lecture, delivered at the Bolt Court Technical School, was the last he gave with his old vigour. On the 3rd of January he attended the New Year's meeting of the Social Democratic Federation at the Holborn Town Hall, and made there a short, but noble and touching speech on behalf of unity. Two days afterwards, he gave the last of his Sunday evening lectures at Kelmscott House. The subject of the lecture was "One Socialist Party." "Could not sleep at night," he writes in his diary the next day; "got up and worked from 1 to 4 at Sundering Flood."
On the 31st of January he attended a meeting, at the Society of Arts, of the Society for Checking the Abuses of Public Advertising, and made a brief speech in support of the first resolution moved. He never spoke in public again after this. On the day before, he had been for the last time at the weekly meeting of the Society for Protection of Ancient Buildings. As he walked up Buckingham Street after the meeting, a friend ventured to observe, noting his obvious weakness, that it was the worst time of the year. 'No, it ain't," he returned, "it's a very fine time of the year indeed: I'm getting old, that's what it is."
On the 27th of November he had written from Rottingdean, where he had gone for a few days by himself, to Lady Burne-Jones:
"To-day has been quite mild, and I started out at ten and went to a mountain with some barns on the top, and a chalk pit near (where you took me one hot evening in September, you remember), and I walked on thence a good way, and should have gone further, but prudence rather than weariness turned me back. They were ploughing a field in the bottom with no less than ten teams of great big horses: they were knocking off for their bever just as I came on them, and seemed very jolly, and my heart went out to them, both men and horses.
"I brought my University book"—this was Mr. Rashdall's "Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages," a work for which he expressed the highest respect and admiration—"down with me, but deserted it yesterday afternoon for Jane Austen's 'Pride and Prejudice,' which I have just finished. I am getting better here, but was better on Sunday for the matter of that. The doctor called on Monday, and told me it was good for me not to be victimized by bores, and that I had better not be: this seems to me such very good advice, that I pass it on to you; but am just struck with fear that you may begin the practice of it on me. Anyhow I will be cautious enough of it not to make this letter longer."
In December the Chaucer was making such good progress that he began to design a binding for it. Even here he was confronted by the difficulty of obtaining sound material. "Leather is not good now," he said in talking about this matter; "what used to take nine months to cure is done in three. They used to say, what's longest in the tanyard stays least time in the market: but that no longer holds good. People don't know how to buy now; they'll take anything." The truth in this last sentence goes very deep. The manufacturer—so Morris perpetually urged—is but the servant of the public, and the buyer is equally responsible with the seller (each, he would add, doing their best to cheat the other) for a state of things which floods all markets with cheap dishonest work.
As the Chaucer approached completion, Morris became nervous about anything which threatened, however remotely, to delay it. "I'd like it finished to-morrow," he answered, when asked how early a date would satisfy him for its appearance: "every day beyond to-morrow that it isn't done is one too many." In his own library one day before Christmas, a visitor looking over the sheets that were lying on the table remarked on the added beauty of those sheets following the Canterbury Tales where picturepages face one another in pairs. Morris took alarm.
"Now don't you go saying that to Burne-Jones," he said, "or he'll be wanting to do the first part over again; and the worst of that would be, that he'd want to do all the rest over again, because the other would be so much better, and then we should never get done, but always be going round and round in a circle."
The last of the eighty-seven pictures was finished two days after Christmas. In the same week Morris had begun to write the story of "The Sundering Flood," the last of his prose romances. During that December he had enriched his collection of manuscripts by two splendid examples of the thirteenth century, for which he paid upwards of a thousand pounds; one a folio Bible, in three volumes, of French work of the end of the century, and the other a Psalter of slightly earlier date, variously ascribed to Rouen or Beauvais, and richly adorned with miniatures in the finest manner of that fine period.
With the turn of the year the weakness that had been gaining on him for some months became much more pronounced. He now suffered from an exhausting cough; he was losing flesh noticeably, and sleeplessness became a regular feature of his nights. He wrote a little of "The Sundering Flood" every day, and did work nearly every day for initials and borders for the Kelmscott Press editions of "The Well at the World's End" and "The Earthly Paradise." But his working hours became shorter and shorter. In February another visit to Rottingdean was tried, but he was languid and made no improvement. On his return he was induced to consult Sir William Broadbent. The existence of diabetes and other complications was confirmed, but not to a degree which implied immediate danger. There were fluctuations and slight improvements followed by relapses, but on the whole he was now steadily losing ground, and as his weakness increased, losing heart. "I don't feel any better: so weak," is a pathetic note in his diary of work at the end of February: and a journey round his garden at Hammersmith was now sufficient to tire him. The daily progress of the Chaucer was the one thing that kept up his interest. It was now within sight of completion. The last three of the wood-blocks had been brought him on the 21st of March. The Easter holidays in April, "four mouldy Sundays in a mouldy row, the press shut and Chaucer at a standstill," were almost more than he could bear. But his eagerness over the acquisition of fresh manuscripts was unabated. In March he had bought from Mr. W.A.S. Benson a fine folio Testament of the twelfth century, which he discovered, to his great delight, had belonged to the same religious house near Dijon as a Josephus which he had acquired a few months before. Towards the end of April he was roused to great excitement by news of a splendid twelfth-century English Bestiary, containing one hundred and six miniatures, which was offered for sale by Mr. Rosenthal of Munich. He at once began to negotiate for it: as Mr. Rosenthal would not take the risk of sending it on approval, Mr. Cockerell went to Stuttgart, where the book was, with full powers. It turned out to be even finer than had been expected; even the British Museum possessed nothing in Bestiaries equal to it. A contemporary note in the book itself recorded that it had been given in the year 1187 to Worksop Priory, together with other books, by one Philip, Canon of Lincoln. Both writing and miniatures, with which it is profusely illustrated, were of the best and most characteristic English style of the period. Mr. Cockerell bought it for ₤900, and brought it back with him to Kelmscott, where Morris had gone for what turned out to be his last visit. He was delighted with it beyond measure. From Kelmscott he wrote, during this visit, to Lady Burne-Jones;
"I cannot say that I think I am better since I saw you a week ago; and I hope I am no worse; only you see down in this deep quiet, away from the excitements of business, and callers, and doctors, one is rather apt to brood, and I fear that I have made myself very disagreeable at times.
"However, I am going on with my work, both drawing and writing, though but little of the latter, as Walker was with me Saturday and Sunday, to my great comfort. Ellis comes on Saturday, and will stay till I go back. Here everything is as beautiful as it can be: up to now the season is a fine one, the grass well grown and well coloured; the apple-blossom plentifuller than we have ever had it here. The weather with lots of sun, though I should have preferred that alternated with a few warm showers instead of the veil of cold cloud which has no promise of rain in it (like Hud's dry cloud that hung over the city of Sheddad, the son of Ad the Greater) and withering wind with it.
"However I have enjoyed the garden very much, and should never be bored by walking about and about in it. And though you think I don't like music, I assure you that the rooks and the blackbirds have been a great consolation to me. We are still between the flowers, for nothing stirs this beastly weather. The thing that was the pleasingest surprise was the raspberry-canes, which Giles has trellised up neatly, so that they look like a mediæval garden: they are thriving splendidly.
"Moreover Hobbs has been re-thatching a lot of his sheds and barns, which sorely needed it, and used to keep me in a fever of terror of galvanized iron: so that this time at least there is some improvement in the village."
At Kelmscott he had written the last of his contributions to the literature of Socialism, a brief article for the May-Day number of "Justice." When he returned to London on the 6th of May he found that all the picture sheets of the Chaucer had been printed off, and the block of the title-page was ready for approval. The printing was completed two days later. At the end of May he went for a few days to Mr. Wilfrid Blunt at Newbuildings Place; he was then too weak to work, but could enjoy the beautiful West Sussex country. He returned to London on the 30th: and on the 2nd of June the first two copies of the Chaucer came from the binder, one for himself and the other for Burne -Jones. Morris's own copy is now in the library of Exeter College. The other was given on the 3rd of June by Sir Edward Burne-Jones to his daughter for her birthday. "I want particularly to draw your attention," Burne-Jones wrote of the volume when complete, and the feeling is one which Morris himself fully and cordially shared, "to the fact that there is no preface to Chaucer, and no introduction, and no essay on his position as a poet, and no notes, and no glossary; so that all is prepared for you to enjoy him thoroughly."
Thus the work which had been for just five years in project, and for three years and four months in actual preparation and execution, was brought to a conclusion. The printing had occupied a year and nine months. Besides Burne-Jones's eighty-seven pictures, itcontains a full-page woodcut title, fourteen large borders, eighteen borders or frames for the pictures, and twenty-six large initial words. All of these, besides the ornamented initial letters large and small, were designed by Morris himself, as was the white pigskin binding with silver clasps, executed at Mr. Cobden-Sanderson's bindery by Mr. Douglas Cockerell, in which the Kelmscott Chaucer receives its complete form.