The Life of William Morris/Chapter 9
CHAPTER IX
LOVE IS ENOUGH: PERIOD OF ILLUMINATIONS: DIS-
SOLUTION OF THE FIRM
1871-1874
As soon as he returned to England, Morris resumed the work of illuminating which had already for about a year been one of the main occupations of his leisure, and which for between three and four years more held a foremost place in his interest. During these years he produced a number of books, some completed and others not, in very various styles and all of remarkable beauty. His earliest experiments in the art of illumination, made fourteen or fifteen years before, had been already remarkable not only for an all but complete mastery of colour, but for the genius with which they reproduced the tone and spirit of the earlier mediæval work, as he had studied it first in the painted books of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries at the Bodleian Library, and afterwards in those at the British Museum. But they were full of technical defects in drawing; and their deficiency was most marked in the drawing of the letters of the text which is commonly known by the name of handwriting. Morris's own handwriting had been then, and for years afterwards continued to be, decidedly bad: while not illegible, it was slovenly, and had neither beauty nor distinction. When he took up the art of illumination in 1870, he began to study handwriting as a fine art. By practice he soon mastered it; and the texts of his painted books show a steady advance in skill of execution. The reaction on his own cursive hand was marked and immediate. The beautiful handwriting familiar to his friends for the last five and twenty years was directly due to his study and practice of the art in the period of his work as an illuminator. In the decoration of his painted books—as in everything which had to do with pattern and colour—there is also an advance in splendour of colouring and breadth of design, but the earliest are in their simpler treatment as faultless as the latest: the art of decoration seems to have been born in him and to come from his hands full-grown.
The "Book of Verses," a selection of his own lyrical poems, completed on the 26th of August, 1870, and given by him to Mrs. Burne-Jones, is the first, and though not the finest, perhaps on the whole the most beautiful, of all his painted books. In this book he broke completely away from the mediæval method. That method reappears, transformed through his own original genius, in the colour and design of the great manuscript Virgil, in which his art both as scribe and as illuminator culminates. But here there is a modernness which owes nothing to any tradition: and a freshness, a direct appeal to first principles and instincts, which (as in the case of his earliest wall-papers) charms by its simplicity and fitness even more than the later and technically finer work. If, as has been sometimes thought possible, ornamented handwriting should again take its place among the popular arts, it is in the direction indicated by this beautiful volume that its most hopeful way would seem to lie.
The book is on paper, and consists of fifty-one pages. It was not wholly executed by his own hand. One of the pictures was painted by Burne-Jones, and the remainder, including a portrait-head of the author on the first page, by Mr. Fairfax Murray; and the painted letters were coloured by Mr. George Wardle, who also drew in part of the ornament from Morris's designs. To produce a painted book in the full beauty of which it is capable, Morris considered that division of labour was advantageous: it was not likely that the scribe and the miniaturist would be found at their best in the same person, and here too, as in larger work, he found the excellence as well as the pleasure of art to lie in co-ordination of skilled workmen. Other books, however, were executed by him unaided. The next done after the "Book of Verses" was a manuscript, also on paper, of his translation of the Eyrbyggja Saga; a folio of 239 pages, slightly ornamented and without pictures. This manuscript, with the single exception, carefully noted by him upon it, of the laying on of the gold leaf on three pages, which was done by one of the workmen at Queen Square, was wholly written and ornamented by his own hand. It was finished in April, 1871; and before it was finished, he had begun a new book on vellum with continuous and elaborate ornament. This was a copy of FitzGerald's "Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám."
This manuscript, given by him to Mrs. Burne-Jones, may take rank, by its elaborate beauty, as one of his chief masterpieces. It was finished on the 16th of October, 1872, after being a year and a half in hand. On its tiny scale—twenty-three pages measuring six inches by three and a half—it is a volume of immense labour and exquisite workmanship. On eighteen of the pages the illumination is confined to a central space of less than three inches by two, with a title in gold above each. In that central space, alongside and between the verses, is a running ornament of flowers and fruits. On the other five pages the margins are completely filled with floriated design, among which are minute but beautifully drawn and coloured figures, the lower half of the last page being also filled by a design of two figures holding a scroll. The treatment of the fruit and flower work is an admirable adaptation of an almost Pre-Raphaelite naturalism to the methods and limits of ornamental design: the raspberries on page 14 and the honeysuckles on page 21 may be specially instanced as unsurpassable in their truth to nature and their decorative effect.
The fine lambskin vellum for this, as for his other manuscripts, he procured from Rome. The English lime-dressed vellum used for a few special copies of "Love is Enough" had been found disagreeable in surface and almost useless for fine work. Owing to the continuous demand for vellum at the Vatican, the tradition of its proper manufacture had been preserved more fully at Rome than elsewhere. But sometimes the orders from the Vatican absorbed the whole annual output, and no skins were to be had. When the Kelmscott Press was started, a sufficient supply of Roman vellum could not be procured for it; and an English maker, after many unsuccessful trials, at last succeeded in producing sheets of a quality nearly equal to the Roman.
Before this Omar Khayyám was finished, he had begun another copy of the same poem for Burne-Jones on paper. This was executed more in the style of the "Book of Verses," but with somewhat more profuse ornament; and in it Burne-Jones himself painted six extraordinarily beautiful pictures, each in a different scheme of colour, and showing, although each is only slightly over four inches by two in size, his finest qualities of design and invention. The floral decoration which runs down the margins and between the verses is in pale colours, green, blue, yellow, pink, and crimson, with a preponderance of green. The initial letters of the lines are alternated in gold and colours, the page always beginning with a gold letter, and one colour being used down each page. The pictures are inclosed in gold frames, unburnished; and on the pages with pictures and those facing them the whole of the illumination is enriched with burnished gold throughout. This book was given by Burne-Jones to Miss Frances Graham (Mrs. J.F. Horner), and is now in her possession.
Immediately after his return from Iceland, Morris had also begun the composition of a new poem, with the origination and completion of which his work as an illuminator is intimately connected. "Morris has been here twice since his return," Rossetti wrote to William Bell Scott from Kelmscott on the 2nd of October, "for a few days at first and just now for a week again. He is now back in London, and this place will be empty of all inmates by the end of this week, I think. Morris has set to work with a will on a sort of masque called 'Love is Enough,' which he means to print as a moderate quarto, with woodcuts by Ned Jones and borders by himself, some of which he has done really very beautifully. The poem is, I think, at a higher point of execution perhaps than anything that he has done, having a passionate lyric quality such as one found in his earliest work, and of course much more mature balance in carrying out. It will be a very fine work."
The poem in its first form was finished by the beginning of winter, but it was afterwards very much altered. It gave him more real trouble than any other of his poems. "I have come down here for a fortnight," he writes from Kelmscott on the 13th of February, 1872, "to see spring beginning, a sight I have seen little of for years, and am writing among the grey gables and rook-haunted trees, with a sense of the place being almost too beautiful to live in. I have been in trouble with my own work, which I couldn't make to march for a long time; but I think I have now brought it out of the maze of re-writing and despondency, though it is not exactly finished." For other reasons, to be mentioned presently, it was not published till the end of the year.
"Love is Enough" is probably the least familiar to most readers of Morris's longer poems; but apart from any question of purely poetical quality, it is in some technical respects much the most remarkable. It reconstitutes, under modern conditions, forms of later mediæval poetry which had long fallen into disuse. The fluctuating contest between epic and romantic treatment which is visible in "The Earthly Paradise" is here put aside; they are replaced by a dramatic form which combines qualities taken from both, but is itself of a quite distinct kind: a kind which was being gradually worked up to in England during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when the Renaissance burst in with a crash and produced the new world of the Elizabethans. The distinctively mediæval structure, with its carefully planned architectural arrangement, is resumed in a manner which dramatic poetry had abandoned for over three hundred years. In his use of receding planes of action which yet do not lie in what might be called, by an easy metaphor from another art, any real aerial perspective, he approximates dramatic poetry to the manner of treatment of those late mediæval tapestries, the finest of which were his ideal of decorative arrangement. The outer frame is given by the rustic lovers, Giles and Joan. Within this is a second plane, in which stand the Emperor and Empress. Within this again, in the central plane, is Love as the interpreter of the action, both inwards and outwards. On the fourth plane is the main action itself, the dramatic interlude of the Freeing of Pharamond: and on the last and inmost of all, subtilized out of any definite personality and charged with all the distilled emotion of the fourfold action, is "the Music," the final and interpenetrating spirit of the whole work. The detailed structure of this multiplex arrangement is worked out with an extraordinary ingenuity and elegance. Morris's best decorative designs have just such an ordered intricacy, such a free yet precisely adjusted pattern. Most notable of all is the instinctive art which keeps all these planes of action interlaced or interfused, so that the whole poem constitutes a single design. The problem was of the same kind as he had to face in designing for wall-papers or chintzes, that of so arranging the "repeat" that the pattern should flow continuously over the whole space to be filled and not fall asunder into patches. It is here further complicated by another condition, a fact of texture, as it would be called if the matter being dealt with were a textile fabric. To make the different planes of action distinct, each has its own metre. These metres are the short octosyllabic couplet, the heroic decasyllable, the alliterative unrhymed verse of the body of the play, and, for the "Music," an exquisite invention of rhymed dactylics. The way in which they are interwoven is a masterpiece of metrical device. In the two scenes of the induction (to use the appropriate term of the Renaissance dramatists) the ground is laid of the whole metrical system of the poem; in the first scene by a single phrase of the Music; in the second by a full period of the Music and a single phrase of the alliterative dialogue-metre. Thereafter follows the play itself, in five scenes, with the Music at the end of each, and before and after each the interpretation, in stately heroic metre, given by Love before the dropped curtain. But in the fourth scene, by an ingenuity the most elaborately simple, the whole of the elements of the fivefold play are interlaced. The scene has passed like the other three; the Music has followed; and Love, clad as a pilgrim, has spoken before the curtain. But now, instead of a fresh scene following, the curtain rises again on the same scene; and Love goes on to the stage, drops the heroic verse in which he has hitherto spoken, and holds a dialogue with Pharamond in the alliterative play-metre: during which, the Music, hitherto only sung between the scenes, mingles with the play from without, growing nearer and nearer till, at its last cadence, Azalais enters. And at the end of this scene, the dialogue-metre, without a check, becomes, for two couplets, the rhymed dactylic metre of the Music, as though the lovers, in the exaltation of their meeting, had become for a moment one with the central harmony of things.
The architectural instinct, the faculty of design in its highest form, which was the quality in which Morris's unique strength lay, was never applied by him with more certain and delicate a touch. And the ingenuities of the metrical treatment in which this design is worked out are almost equally striking. The rhymed iambic verse, whether of eight or of ten syllables, was his old familiar medium; nor is it used here with greater skill than he had used it in "The Earthly Paradise," though even here we may find subtle adaptations to the dramatic method. But the rhymed dactylics to which reference has been made—a metre at once one of the rarest, one of the most difficult, and if successfully used, one of the most hauntingly beautiful, which the English language uses—are a noble development of that single exquisite fragment, "Pray but One Prayer for Me," which had been one of his very earliest achievements in poetry. And the alliterative metre which he invented, or reinvented, for the body of the play deserves a more serious notice.
The fact that the whole of English poetry, from the sixteenth century downwards, is written in metres of foreign origin, only naturalized in English through the long and difficult practice of centuries, is one which, however familiar to students of mediæval literature, is little realized beyond the circle of historians and scholars. As was the case in Latin literature for a period of about the same length, the foreign metres, after a time of struggle during which the native metre produced its finest achievements, conquered it and drove it completely below the surface. But, as was the case in Latin literature, the native metre not only had a deep influence on the special development of the imported metres, but retained an affinity to the structure of the language which made it tend to reappear when the dominant metrical forms were exhausted from over-use. Here, at the present day, the parallel ceases. But if 'the argument from the Latin analogy were seriously pressed, it might be conjectured that the future forms of English poetry would be, not, indeed, the form of the mediæval English alliterative metre,—for the English language, like the Latin, has developed too widely and changed too deeply in structure to revert to its Saturnians,—but forms essentially based on the same metrical principles. Of the experiments in this direction—still no more than tentative efforts amid the overwhelming predominance of the normal rhymed iambic metres—"Love is Enough" is one of the first and the most successful.
It was not indeed from any such wide and general considerations that Morris was led to essay its use. He simply went by known facts. As he had followed the metres of Chaucer for his narrative poems, he followed the metres of the earliest English plays for this dramatic poem. In these he found the alliterative Middle English verse, freed from the rigid rules which had governed it up to the close of the fourteenth century, and adapted to the changed modulation of a language which had by that time dropped its weak vowel-endings; but at the same time cramped and slightly vulgarized by an attempt to add the foreign enrichment of rhyme. For this metre, he instinctively felt, rhyme was unsuited, unless where it was desired, for special occasions, to raise it by this additional ornament to a lyric tension. But rhyme was for the metre a purely artificial importation: the solution, then, was quite simple: do away with the rhymed endings, and there is left a verse as elastic and varied as the regular alliterative verse native to England, less difficult to write, and better adapted to modern vocabulary and intonation of speech. The experiment has remained an isolated one. He never repeated it himself; for his translation of "Beowulf," a tour de force executed for a special object, keeps as closely as possible to the original metre of early English poetry, with its rigid metrical laws, and its mouldings (if a metaphor from architecture be allowed) axe-hewn, rather than undulating under the chisel. Nor did he succeed in reconstituting the fine and flexible Middle English metre as a practical form of verse for modern poetry. Morris himself felt that this new poem was both tentative and difficult, and its failure to make any impression on a large audience was received by him with perfect equanimity. It was a thing he had done to please himself, and he thought highly of it, but he did not expect it to please other people to anything like the same degree.
Once more the attempt to produce a volume in a beautifully decorated outward form had to be abandoned. He designed, and cut on wood, borders for the pages of what would have been a very beautiful small quarto. In some copies these were to have been filled in with colours and gilding, so that it would have been another illuminated book, with the text printed, not written. Besides the borders, there were to have been pictures, to which the whole scheme of the book lends itself with special aptness. Some of the scenes are written, as it were, directly for illumination. In the first scene of the play, there is a series of ornate comparisons—Nimrod carved on the high-seat in the hall, Argo woven on the hangings of the guard-room, Mars painted in the window of the council-chamber—which are introduced with exactly the decorative effect of pictures within the great initial letters of a painted book. The transitions, too, from one part of the poem to another call out to be made through some reinforcement of either music or pictures.
"Love is Enough" bears the marks of all the varied sources of romance from which its author had drawn in earlier work, perhaps with the effect of a structure too composite for easy apprehension. The story, at least in its main outline, the theme of a king who gives up his kingdom for love in the valley, is taken from the Mabinogion, and is in feeling intimately Celtic. The names of Pharamond and Azalais—Teutonic words made musical by the speech of Central or Southern France—carry the mind back to some dim Merovingian epoch in which the ox-wagons of Frankish kings rolled through the mountain gorges of Auvergne and the vineyards of Burgundy. The representation of the play before an Emperor and Empress brings it vaguely within the central current of European art towards the close of the Middle Ages: and touches of landscape here and there show that the author's mind was still full of Iceland.
It was the last complete poem of any magnitude which Morris wrote for several years. For some time he had been feeling about for new methods of literary expression: after this poem was written he became once more absorbed in handicraft and the productions of his workshops or of his own unaided hand. Some months before, this feeling after new vehicles had led him to begin what is certainly the most singular of his writings, a novel of contemporary life. The story dealt with the love of two brothers for the same woman, and was evidently going to take a tragic turn. As far as the development of the story gives any indication, rather more than one-third of it had been written when it was abandoned. The fragment was swiftly written and never revised. But revision was, as has been already noted, at no time a thing much to his taste, or for which he had any aptitude. No further criticism need be passed on the fragment than what was said of it by Morris himself a year later. Mrs. Baldwin, to whom he had given sympathetic counsel in her own first efforts at narrative prose, had expressed a wish to see what he had done. He sent her the manuscript with the following letter:
"June 22nd, 1872.
"Dear Louie,
"Herewith I send by book-post my abortive novel: it is just a specimen of how not to do it, and there is no more to be said thereof: 'tis nothing but landscape and sentiment: which thing won't do. Since you wish to read it, I am sorry 'tis such a rough copy, which roughness sufficiently indicates my impatience at having to deal with prose. The separate parcel, paged 1 to 6, was a desperate dash at the middle of the story to try to give it life when I felt it failing: it begins with the letter of the elder brother to the younger on getting his letter telling how he was going to bid for the girl in marriage. I found it in the envelope in which I had sent it to Georgie to see if she could give me any hope: she gave me none, and I have never looked at it since. So there's an end of my novel-writing, I fancy, unless the world turns topsides under some day. Health and merry days to you, and believe me to be
"William Morris."
Henceforth, but for a few lyrics, original or adapted from Icelandic and Danish ballads, his writing was confined to translation until he began his great epic of "Sigurd the Volsung."
The workshops at Queen Square had been slowly encroaching on the living part of the house. The manager was continually appealing for more room to carry on the work, which was cramped as it was, and which Morris was always, almost without his will, extending in one direction or another by fresh inventions or experiments. "I am going with Janey to-morrow," he writes on the 25th of November, "to look at a house in Hammersmith in Theresa Terrace: it is Mason the painter's house, who died about a month ago. We must, it seems, turn out of this house next spring, for Wardle wants it all for the business." Towards the end of 1872 the family removed from Queen Square. Morris himself kept two rooms for his own private use, and the rest of the house was turned over to the use of the firm, the drawing-room being made into a much-needed show-room, and the upper floors into additional workshops. The new house was not the Hammersmith one, but another not far from it, on the high road between Hammersmith and Turnham Green, in a rambling suburb of orchards and market-gardens, and with easy access to the Thames down Chiswick Lane. Before the building of the District Railway it was a pleasant, if somewhat remote, suburb. The house itself was very small, "a very good sort of house for one person to live in, or perhaps two," as its mistress afterwards described it; but there was a large garden, and the quiet was complete. Here Morris lived for six years. The parting from Queen Square took place with little effusion of sentiment. Morris himself was too elated by the prospect of setting up a little dye-shop in the empty basement to care much about the abandonment of the house. It had never been more than a temporary home forced on him by disagreeable necessity.
On the 23rd of January, 1873, he writes, "We have cleared out of Queen Square as far as our domesticity is concerned: I keep my study and little bedroom here, and I daresay, as time goes on, I shall live here a good deal: for the rest, we have taken a little house on the Turnham Green road, about twenty minutes' walk from the Hammersmith Station; and otherwise easy to get at because of the omnibuses: it is a very little house with a pretty garden, and I think will suit Janey and the children: it is some half-hour's walk from the Grange, which makes it quite a little way for me; on the other hand, I can always see any one I want at Queen Square quite safe from interruption, so in all ways it seems an advantage—does it not? Withal I never have had any sentiment of affection for this house, though so much has happened to me while I have lived here. I have always felt myself like nothing but a lodger here. Nevertheless, there is something profoundly dismal about the empty rooms here that strikes a chill on one."
"I am going to have the little ones home," he writes the following day, "to Turnham Green to-day; 'tis a month since I have seen them. Jenny is twelve years old now: bless us, how old I'm getting. Except the work for the firm, in which I am rather busy, I am doing nothing now but translations: I should be glad to have some poem on hand, but it's no use trying to force the thing; and though the translating lacks the hope and fear that makes writing original things so absorbing, yet at any rate it is amusing and in places even exciting."
The following letter was written a few days later to Mrs. Coronio, who was then living at Athens. The friendship between her and Morris was affectionate and unbroken through life.
"Feb. 11th, 1873.
"My dear Aglaia,
"You see our letters crossed: and I'm glad I wrote to excuse myself before I got your letter taking me to task. I am in much better condition now than I was when I wrote last: I suppose the change has done me good: we are quite settled in our new house, and I find it very pleasant: my own room is particularly cheerful and pretty, and I can work in it with a much better heart than in the dingy room at Queen Square. I go most days to the Square though, and come back when I feel inclined, or not at all when I feel inclined: all this involves a good deal of walking, which, no doubt, is good for me: it seems quite a ridiculously little way to the Grange now, after the long way it used to be. Last Sunday, Ned came to breakfast with me, and we had a pleasant hour or two. I am very hard at work at one thing or another; firm's work for one thing. I should very much like to make the business quite a success, and it can't be, unless I work at it myself. I must say, though I don't call myself money-greedy, a smash on that side would be a terrible nuisance; I have so many serious troubles, pleasures, hopes and fears, that I have not time on my hands to be ruined and get really poor: above all things it would destroy my freedom of work, which is a dear delight to me. My translations go on apace, but I am doing nothing original: it can't be helped, though sometimes I begin to fear I am losing my invention. You know I very much wish not to fall off in imagination and enthusiasm as I grow older: there have been men who, once upon a time, have done things good or noteworthy, who have got worse with time and have outlived their power; I don't like that at all. On the other hand, all great men that have not died young have done some of their best work when they were getting quite old. However, it won't do to force oneself about it, and I certainly enjoy some of the work I do very much, and one of these days my Heimskringla will be an important work.
"Iceland gapes for me still this summer: I grudge very much being away from the two or three people I care for so long as I must be, but if I can only get away in some sort of hope and heart I know it will be the making of me. I am very much disappointed that you are not coming back before: I quite looked for you this month.
"Yes, truly, letters are very unsatisfactory; they would do very well if one could write them at our best times; but continually one has to sit down to them dull and cold and worried, with the thoughts all slipping away from us, till the sheet is filled up with trivialities—as this will be I fear—only there is something about the look of the writing of anyone one is fond of, that is familiar and dear and saves one from utter disappointment, and one feels that the stiff awkward sentences all about nothing or little have still something of a soul in them. Think what an excitement that day was for me when I got letters after eight weeks in the Iceland journey: lord! how my heart did go thump thump as I galloped up to the post-office at Reykjavik!
"I wonder how you will feel at the changes in the house here: Janey's room has already got the workmen's benches in it: the big room is bare and painty; there is hammering and sawing and running up and down stairs going on; and all looks strange, and as yet somewhat wretched. It doesn't touch me very much I must say though: for this long time past I have, as it were, carried my house on my back: but the little Turnham Green house is really a pleasure to me;—may all that be a good omen! Yet you must come and see me here too when you come home, if you won't be too much terrified at my housekeeper, who is like a troll-wife in an Icelandic story: with a deep bass voice, big and O so ugly!
"We have had cold weather enough lately, snow and a dreadful east wind; all of which I don't care a penny about to say the truth.
"On Saturday I am going down to Cambridge, to Magnússon, to do Icelandic: as stupid over the language as you others who are such quick linguists would think me, I am really getting on with it now: when I am down there, which has been once or twice, we all talk nothing but Icelandic together.
"Well, I had best make an end now before I get too dull. Once again forgive me for not writing to you oftener: I have really had a hard time of it: but I hope things have taken a long turn now, and that I shall be something worth as a companion when I see you again; which I look forward to very much indeed. Write soon again, please, and tell me how you are.
"Good-bye, then, with love and best wishes.
"William Morris."
With a mind still so full of his first journey to Iceland and so excited at the prospect of a second, it is not surprising that his first visit to Italy, which took place this spring, was something of an anti-climax. It was a very short one, and gave him little satisfaction. With the noble Italian art of the earlier Renaissance he had but little sympathy: for that of the later Renaissance and the academic traditions he had nothing but unmixed detestation. Some time in these years his old fellow-pupil, Mr. Bliss, then engaged on researches among the archives of the Vatican, met him in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, and pressed him to come with him to Rome. His reply was too characteristic to be forgotten. "Do you suppose," he said, "that I should see anything in Rome that I can't see in Whitechapel?"
Even the earlier and, to his mind, the far more interesting and beautiful work of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in Italy did not appeal to him in the same way as the contemporary art of England or Northern France. On this occasion he only saw Florence and Siena, and returned after a fortnight. Burne-Jones, with whom he went out, and who himself made a more prolonged stay, found him a rather exacting companion, and a little determined to make the worst of things. The interior of the Duomo at Florence depressed him with its chilly bareness: San Miniato was unfortunately in the death-agonies of a thorough restoration; and even the more unspoiled Siena failed to excite him. Indeed it was from the natural beauty of Italy, both now and on later visits, that he drew far more pleasure than from its art. The descent to Turin from the Mont Cenis "on the most beautiful of all evenings, going, still between snow-capped mountains, through a country like a garden, green grass and feathery poplars and abundance of pink-blossomed leafless peach and almond trees," roused him to real enthusiasm, as did also the passage of the Apennines between Bologna and Pistoja. In Florence, the cloisters of Santa Maria Novella were what he found most to his mind; at Siena, even the wonderful cathedral library, all as bright as a painted book, could not please him because he wanted it to have been painted by some one at least a century before Pinturicchio. The exterior of the Duomo of Florence he did indeed afterwards, a little grudgingly, admit to be the finest exterior of any building in the world.
Of the second journey to Iceland, which took place this summer, there is no need to give any detailed chronicle. Faulkner was again his companion. On board the mail steamer they found among their fellow-passengers that fine scholar and archaeologist, John Henry Middleton. The acquaintance then formed was the beginning of a long friendship. As regards mediæval art of all kinds, Middleton, with a more contracted imagination, had a knowledge equal to Morris's own: in Greek and Persian art it was even greater, and when Morris later took up the manufacture of carpets and woven stuffs as part of his business, he found much help in Middleton's great knowledge of Oriental textiles. The article on Mural Decoration jointly written by them for the "Encyclopædia Britannica," ten years afterwards, is one surviving record of a long association in taste and sympathies.
The party started early in July and were away for a little over two months, sailing and returning, as in 1871, by the "Diana." Their journey through the interior was, however, longer and more adventurous than on their first visit. After a preliminary excursion of ten days to the more or less familiar ground in the southwest of the island, they started on the 1st of August to cross the great central wilderness in a north-easterly direction. From Dettifoss, the furthest point reached, they made their way across the northern mountains to the little seaport of Akureyri on Eyjafirth, and thence back over the wilderness by a more westerly route, reaching Reykjavik at the beginning of September. It was a journey which involved great physical endurance—one day they were fifteen hours in the saddle—but no one was the worse for it in spite of much cold and rain. Except Lithend, no place famous in a Saga was visited, though from a northern mountain they saw Drángey, Grettir's island, lying below them down the long reach of Skagafirth. But the land itself, apart from the particular associations of places, had grown in his mind into a strange fascination. Even more now than two years before, the touch of Iceland was something that stirred him with an almost sacramental solemnity. "The journey," he writes of it after his return, "has deepened the impression I had of Iceland and increased my love for it. The glorious simplicity of the terrible and tragic, but beautiful land, with its well-remembered stories of brave men, killed all querulous feeling in me, and has made all the dear faces of wife and children and love and friends dearer than ever to me. I feel as if a definite space of my life had passed away now I have seen Iceland for the last time: as I looked up at Charles' Wain to-night, all my travel there seemed to come back on me, made solemn and elevated, in one moment, till my heart swelled with the wonder of it: surely I have gained a great deal, and it was no idle whim that drew me there, but a true instinct for what I needed."
In a lighter vein, but yet with a touch, at the close, of the same feeling of awe and breathlessness, he writes to Mrs. Baldwin on the 14th of September:
"Dear Louie,
"I came back safe and well last Friday, and I am sorry to say without the pony for your little lad: this was not laziness on my part, but was because I found the price of ponies gone up so much since I was last there that they are quite as dear there (for what they are) as in England: I mean that a pony of any character, and by no means first-rate, will cost from £8 to £10 there, and as it would cost ₤8 or so more to get it to Wilden, the money, say ₤17, seemed enough to buy a better beast than I could be reasonably sure of bringing you: add to this that they will probably be cheaper there next year, and that a letter from me to one or other of my friends there would be enough to get an average specimen at the current price there if you still wish it.
"The old lady (age seventy-seven) turned out to be an ungrateful and stupid old creature as ever came out of Somersetshire (her native den). Yet one may be grateful to her for the following scene.
"On the strand at Reykjavik a row of general shops fronting the sea, Mr. Tomsen's shop in the foreground.
"Enter 1st, the Lieutenant of the 'Diana,' his hands in his waistcoat pockets, and he whistling 'See the conquering Hero Comes' to keep up his spirit. 2nd, two sailors from the 'Diana' carrying the old lady's bandbox and bundle. 3rd, the skipper of the 'Diana,' arm in arm with the OLD LADY. (Costume of her: a drawn grey silk bonnet, a little white shawl, a purple chintz scanty gown beautifully flowered, white stockings, and shoes with 'sandals.') Captain a fat, red-faced, intensely good-natured old naval officer. 4th, the whole of the male population of Reykjavik who can spare time from doing nothing, looking anxious as to whether they will all be able to get into Mr. Tomsen's shop.
"Old Lady to Lieutenant as they come on to Mr. Tomsen's doorstep, who stands there (little, polite, redhaired man) looking anxious as to how many of No. 4 he can keep out of his shop:
"'Mr. Lieutenant' (says she, taking about 4d. in small Danish money out of her pocket), 'will you take this?'
"Lieutenant. 'Thank you kindly; what am I to do with it?'
"O. L. 'Please to give it to the crew.'
"L. 'What will they do with it?'
"O. L. 'I do not wish them to drink too much.'
"L. 'Shall they drink coffee with it?'
"O. L. 'O yes, Mr. Lieutenant, that would be very nice.'
"L. grins and pockets the 4d. sterling, and the whole of 1, 2, and 3 disappear into Mr. Tomsen's shop, who manages to shut out No. 4, who takes its hands out of its pockets to take snuff and then settles itself to waiting till 1, 2, and 3 come out again.
"This is literal truth: also that the old lady wanted to be Guy Fawkesed about Iceland in a chair: also that she teased Mrs. Magnússon to buy her a lamb that she might cook it herself in her own private room, and scolded her heartily because she couldn't get her one at once: also that she slept on board ship with nothing over her but a sheet, though the thermometer was nearly at freezing point: also that she would hardly pay for anything, and (till the lamb came) was like to die of starvation (she told us she had £1,000 a year) if some one hadn't given her some plovers.
"I hear she went back by the return trip of the 'Diana' and, the weather being rough, was not much seen upon deck on the voyage: I still think she was the flying Dutchwoman. And now she is out of the story.
"We had a very successful journey, did all we meant to do, and had fine weather on the whole: a great comfort, as wet weather makes daily riding little more than something to endure while it lasts, however amusing it may be to look back on, when it is well over. One day we rode through what we thought was a dust-storm mixed with drizzle, till a farmer told us that there must have been some eruption of the fire-mountains, as there was no sand thereabout, and that this was fine ashes. Skaptar Jokul has been very unquiet for years now, and the eruption in January last was a much more tremendous affair than one would have judged by the slight notice of it in our papers. One priest told me that they saw it for about a fortnight, gushes of fire ten times or so an hour, so that the long nights were quite light with it, and the short days all dark with the smoke. No one knows where the crater was among the unreachable ice of the great Jokul: the big river of Skeidara was nearly dried up by it for the time.
"Our guides were very pleasant, friendly fellows, as innocent of the great world as babies, and, apart from their daily labour, living almost entirely in the glorious past days of Iceland. One of them, Haldor by name, was born at Lithend, where Gunnar lived and died. I suppose I shall never see them again, and the days of these two journeys there have grown inexpressibly solemn to me.
"Please give my kindest remembrances to Baldwin, and believe me,
"William Morris."
Icelandic literature in one form or another still filled the first place in his mind. The notion of rewriting the epic of the Volsungs in English verse, though it was not begun till a good deal later, was already much in his thoughts, and he went on translating the smaller Sagas and executing beautifully written copies of his translations. The illuminated manuscript of the Frithiof Saga, in the possession of Mr. Fairfax Murray, and that of the three Sagas of "Hen Thorir," "The Banded Men," and "Howard the Halt," given by Morris to Mrs. Burne-Jones, both belong to this period. The decoration of the former was never completed, but both are works of remarkable delicacy and beauty.
Even the transfusion of modern sentiment into an ancient story, as had been done with the Arthurian cycle by Tennyson, was a thing that Morris instinctively disliked. But the epic of the North was a thing that lay still nearer his heart; and what he thought a false or inadequate treatment of these great legends roused him into an agony of anger. On the 12th of November, 1873, he wrote from Queen Square to Mr. Forman, who had sent him a copy of his brother's translation of Wagner's libretto for "Die Walküre":
"Many thanks for your letter and the translation of Wagner: I have not had time to read it yet: nor to say the truth am I much interested in anything Wagner does, as his theories on musical matters seem to me as an artist and non-musical man perfectly abhominable: besides I look upon it as nothing short of desecration to bring such a tremendous and world-wide subject under the gaslights of an opera: the most rococo and degraded of all forms of art—the idea of a sandy-haired German tenor tweedledeeing over the unspeakable woes of Sigurd, which even the simplest words are not typical enough to express! Excuse my heat: but I wish to see Wagner uprooted, however clever he may be, and I don't doubt he is: but he is anti-artistic, don't doubt it."
The art of Wagner, indeed, with its lack of reticence, its idealized appeal to the senses, its highly coloured and heavily charged rhetoric, was quite alien from all Morris's sympathies. Though, as he says in this letter, he was a non-musical man, the older music, the church music of the Middle Ages and that of the great English and Italian masters of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, appealed to him very deeply. Music was a thing that, on the whole, he put away from him as not belonging to his work; but from the early days of his singing plain-song at Oxford till, in the weakness of his last illness, he broke to tears over a few snatches of virginal-music, it was from no want of sensitiveness—rather perhaps the reverse—that he would not admit it into his life.
He was now preparing the volume of translations, new and older, from the Icelandic, which, for some forgotten reason, was not published till 1875. Of its contents he writes again to Mr. Forman, on the 8th of December:
"I would have answered your letter before (many thanks for it) but I had not quite made up my mind about the Stories in my translation book. It stands thus now as I intended at first: the Story of Gunnlaug the Worm-tongue, printed in the Fortnightly some years back; the Story of Frithiof the Bold, printed before in the Dark Blue; the story of Viglund the Fair, never before printed: these 'three Northern Love Stories' will give the name to the book, but to thicken it out I add three more short tales; Hroi the Fool, Hogni and Hedin, and Thorstein Staff-smitten; the first of these three a pretty edition of a 'sharper' story and the same as a tale in the Arabian Nights. The second a terrible story; a very well told, but late version of a dark and strange legend of remote times. The third simple, and not without generosity, smelling strong of the soil of Iceland, like the Gunnlaug."
He also worked a good deal at drawing from the model, "for my soul's sake chiefly," he quaintly said, "for little hope can I have ever to do anything serious in the thing." "I never," he says on the same occasion, "had the painter's memory which makes it easy to put down on paper what you think you see, nor indeed can I see any scene with a frame, as it were, round it, though in my own way I can realize things visibly enough to myself. But it seems I must needs try to make myself unhappy with doing what I find difficult, or impossible."
This unhappiness is not strange to the artistic temperament. But his practice in drawing now was not useless to him: and its effects may be seen, not indeed in any marked proficiency in drawing the human figure, but in a greater breadth and decisiveness of design in his decoration: a matter of no small importance when the designing of patterns for chintzes and woven tapestries became, as it did soon afterwards, one of his chief occupations. "I can't say that I get on with my drawing," he writes nearly a year afterwards; "but then I never expected I should: so I keep it up, dreading the model day like I used to dread Sunday when I was a little chap." At present, however, what he called the mood of idleness (his idleness was more productive than most men's work) was rather strong on him. "It is wet and wild weather," he writes one day during that winter, "but somehow I don't dislike it, and there is something touching about the real world bursting into London with these gales: it makes me feel lazy in the mornings though, and I feel as if I should like to sit in my pretty room at Turnham Green reading some hitherto unprinted Dumas, say about as good as the Three Musketeers." Another letter of a few months later shows very clearly all the strange thoughts that were revolving in his mind. He was now forty: and at this middle point of life the spreading and interlacing ways of the future rolled out before him, dark and entangled indeed, but showing clearer and clearer beyond them some goal to which they all tended.
"March 26, 1874.
"My dear Louie,
"Many thanks for your kind and friendly letter: it was very nice of you to remember my birthday, which was solemnized by my staying at home all day and looking very hard at illuminations, now my chief joy. Yesterday, however, was May's birthday, mine was on Tuesday, on which sad occasion I was forty. Yet in spite of that round number I don't feel any older than I did in that ancient time of the sunflowers. I very much long to have a spell of the country this spring, but I suppose I hardly shall. I have so many things to do in London. Monday was a day here to set one longing to get away: as warm as June: yet the air heavy as often is in England: though town looks rather shocking on such days, and then instead of the sweet scents one gets an extra smell of dirt. Surely if people lived five hundred years instead of threescore and ten they would find some better way of living than in such a sordid loathsome place, but now it seems to be nobody's business to try to better things—isn't mine, you see, in spite of all my grumbling—but look, suppose people lived in little communities among gardens and green fields, so that you could be in the country in five minutes' walk, and had few wants, almost no furniture for instance, and no servants, and studied the (difficult) arts of enjoying life, and finding out what they really wanted: then I think one might hope civilization had really begun. But as it is, the best thing one can wish for this country at least is, me seems, some great and tragical circumstances, so that if they cannot have pleasant life, which is what one means by civilization, they may at least have a history and something to think of—all of which won't happen in our time. Sad grumbling—but do you know, I have got to go to a wedding next Tuesday: and it enrages me to think that I lack courage to say, I don't care for either of you, and you neither of you care for me, and I won't waste a day out of my precious life in grinning a company grin at you two.
"And so good-bye again, with many thanks.
"William Morris."
Yet his daily work went on with seemingly unabated energy. He kept writing again and again to Fairfax Murray at Rome for supplies of the fine Roman vellum for illumination. The vellum manuscript of the Odes of Horace was begun in March, 1874: about the same time he was planning another, of his own "Cupid and Psyche," with pictures from the designs which Burne-Jones had, five years before, made for the original scheme of the illustrated "Earthly Paradise." The Virgil was begun towards the end of the year, when he had at last obtained a sufficient supply of vellum of the larger size required for a folio.
Meanwhile the dye-house at Queen Square was occupying more and more of his attention. It had long been plain to him that the art of dyeing, fallen into a deplorable condition since the introduction of the anilines, lay at the foundation of the production of all coloured stuffs, whetherprinted, woven, or embroidered. A profound study which he made this year of all that could be gathered from books on the subject, supplemented by continual experiments in his own vats, left him still unsatisfied; and in the following year he resolved to learn the art practically and thoroughly among the Staffordshire dye-works. This was the beginning of a fresh period in his life of renewed and strenuous activity. Just at present, however, he allowed himself more holiday-making than usual, often spending whole days fishing, and, besides his stays at Kelmscott, going with his family to Belgium in July, and to Mr. and Mrs. George Howard's at Naworth in August. On the 24th of July he wrote to his mother from Bruges:
"We have had but little railway travelling, only from Calais to Tournay, and from Tournay to Ghent: we found it so terribly hot on the railway that we quite gave up the idea of moving much, and so hired an omnibus at Ghent to take us here last Tuesday by road, and a very pleasant drive we had on a beautiful day, with a shower or two to lay the dust, through the ripe wheat and rye. I find Bruges scarcely changed at all; it is really a beautiful place, so clean and quiet too." A child of the party remembers that long sunshiny drive, and the halt for dinner at Eecloo, where, French and English being alike useless, Morris made a desperate effort at making himself understood by haranguing the amazed inn-keeper in Icelandic.
The visit to Naworth, on which he was accompanied by Burne-Jones, had the additional pleasure of a meeting with Dixon and a renewal of the affection and enthusiasm of Oxford days. "I saw Ted and Morris," Canon Dixon wrote to Price, "at the abode of splendour last week—slept there, and we were most jolly. Ned is in poor health I grieve to find, and a little quieter in manner, otherwise unaltered: Topsy genial, gentle, delightful; both full of affection: it was a most happy meeting."
"I would like you to understand," Morris wrote to Mrs. Howard after his visit to Naworth, "as well as my clumsy letter-writing will let you, how very happy I was these few days in the north. I hope you will let me come again some time: and that then you will think me less arrogant on the—what shall I say?—Wesleyan-tradesman-unsympathetic-with-art subjects than you seemed to think me the other day: though indeed I don't accuse myself of it either: but I think to shut one's eyes to ugliness and vulgarity is wrong, even when they show themselves in people not unhuman. Do you know, when I see a poor devil drunk and brutal I always feel, quite apart from my æsthetical perceptions, a sort of shame, as if I myself had some hand in it. Neither do I grudge the triumph that the modern mind finds in having made the world (or a small corner of it) quieter and less violent, but I think that this blindness to beauty will draw down a kind of revenge one day: who knows? Years ago men's minds were full of art and the dignified shows of life, and they had but little time for justice and peace; and the vengeance on them was not increase of the violence they did not heed, but destruction of the art they heeded. So perhaps the gods are preparing troubles and terrors for the world (or our small corner of it) again, that it may once again become beautiful and dramatic withal: for I do not believe they will have it dull and ugly for ever. Meantime, what is good enough for them must content us: though sometimes I should like to know why the story of the earth gets so unworthy."
When the autumn holiday ended, worries awaited him which lasted through the winter and were not finally adjusted—so far as any adjustment was possible—till the following spring. The formation of the firm of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. in 1861 has been already recounted: and it has sufficiently appeared how, as the years went on, the business became one in which capital, invention, and control were supplied practically by Morris alone. The business, in which he had embarked all his means, had become not only the daily work of his life, but the main source of his income; and it became necessary, now that he was a man in middle life with a growing family, to put things on a proper footing, and secure a provision in case of need for his children. On the other hand, his partners from their side saw not without uneasiness the extension of a business in whose liabilities—for the firm, formed before the passing of the Act of 1862, was not a limited company—they might at any moment find themselves seriously involved. On both sides, therefore, the dissolution and reconstitution of the firm was indicated as desirable or even necessary.
Under the original instrument, each of the seven partners had not only an equal voice in the management, but an equal interest in the assets of the firm. The profits had never, after the first year or two, been divided: partly because for years there were none to divide, partly because the legal rights of the partners had since then practically been allowed to lapse. But these legal claims now represented sums which involved intricate calculation, and which, in any case, were a formidable drain on the resources of the business, that is to say, on Morris's own fortune. It was plain that if they were insisted on, he would be placed in a position of great financial difficulty, if indeed he could continue to carry on the business at all. It will be remembered that the capital contributed by the partners at the inception of the business, in respect of which these profits were now claimable, was £20 each, and it seems uncertain whether even this was in every case actually paid. In respect of the £120 purporting to have been embarked in the firm by the whole six, they had claims on the business for some seven or eight thousand pounds.
The story is not wholly a pleasant one, but it is proper that the truth should be told. Three of the partners, Burne-Jones, Faulkner, and Webb, refused to accept any consideration in respect of their claims as partners. The other three stood on the strict letter of their legal rights. The position they took up is given in the words of Madox Brown's solicitor, at a meeting—one of many during this winter—held on the 4th of November: "that as in the inception of the firm no member invested money, nor gave any time or labour without being paid at an agreed rate, the position of the several members ought to be considered as equal in respect to their claims on the assets of the firm; and further, that he, Mr. Brown, considers that the goodwill ought to be taken at three years' purchase and ought to be included in the said assets." In other words, the terms of partnership were such that each of the other partners, who had confessedly contributed nothing beyond a trifling sum towards capital, and who had been paid at the time for any assistance they gave towards the conduct of the business, was entitled to an equal share of the value of the business which had been built up by the energy, the labour, and the money of Morris alone.
Such, however, was their legal claim if they chose to stand upon it. The calculations and negotiations were long and intricate; it was not till March, 1875, that they were complete, and the dissolution of the firm finally effected. On the 31st of March a circular was issued announcing that the firm had been dissolved and that the business would thenceforward be carried on under Morris's sole management and proprietorship. It was added that Burne-Jones and Webb, though no longer partners, would continue to help with designs for stained glass and furniture as before. The name of the business remained Morris & Co., a name which had already for some years practically superseded the longer title of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Co., under which it had been originally registered.
This transaction finally snapped the chain of attachment between Morris and Rossetti, which had, for other reasons, long been wearing thin. "They never throve together," says an intimate friend who survived them both, "after the first year or two." In the previous summer Rossetti had finally left Kelmscott and given up his share in the tenancy, to Morris's great relief. From the first almost he had been "unromantically discontented" with it: "he has all sorts of ways so unsympathetic with the sweet simple old place that I feel his presence there as a kind of slur on it." The action which, together with Madox Brown and Marshall, he now took over the dissolution of the partnership, caused Morris intense pain and mortification. With Madox Brown the breach did not remain unhealed; in his last years he was again on cordial relations with Morris, and this trouble was forgotten. But from this time forward Morris was no longer to be seen in Rossetti's house at Cheyne Walk, and the estrangement between the two powerful and self-centred personalities was final.