1 Rashtrapati Bhavan Library

1 RASHTRAPATI BHAVAN LIBRARY

Reg. No______691W;fj

Clas. No.VfTf -

THE LIFE OF WILLIAM MORRIS

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THE LIFE OF

WILLIAM MORRIS

J. W. MAC KAIL

VOLUME II

' *7

LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO LONDON, NEW YORK & BOMBAY 1899

CONTENTS

PAGE

CHAPTER XIX

Passive Socialism : Foundation of the Kelmscott

CHAPTER XX

Printing, Romance-writing, Translation, and Criticism: Final Attitude towards Art and History: 1891-1893 267

CHAPTER XXI

Last Years: The Kelmscott Chaucer: 1894-1896299

Press: 1890-1891

230

CHAPTER XXII

Ilicet

327

Index

353

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS VOLUME II

TO FACE PAGE

William Morris, set. 53. From a photograph by F. HollyerFrontispiece

The Manor House, Kelmscott, from the Kitchen-

garden. From a drawing by E. H. New .18

The Mill Pond, with the Weaving and Printing Sheds, Merton Abbey. From a drawing by E. H. New 34

The Glass-painting Sheds, Merton Abbey, from the Dye-house. From a drawing by E. H.

New...... 42

The Chintz-printing Room,Merton Abbey.

From a drawing by E. H.New ....56

Part of the Drawing-room, Kelmscott House, Hammersmith. From a drawing by E. H.

New...... 86

The Manor House, Kelmscott,from the Garden.

From a drawing by E. H.New ....222

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

TO FACE PAGE

William Morris’s Bedroom at the Manor House, Kelmscott, from the Tapestry-room. From a drawing by E. H. New 268

William Morris’s Study, Kelmscott House, Hammersmith. From a drawing by E. H. New 322

The Manor House, Kelmscott, from the Home-

mead. From a drawing by E. H. New .350

THE LIFE OF WILLIAM MORRIS

CHAPTER XII

LONDON AND KELMSCOTT: THEORIES OF ART AND LIFE

1879-1881

But work among his dye-pots and looms, interesting and fascinating as he found it, could not fill up the whole of his mind. In spite of the variable excitement and the more settled rest of this daily work, voices from an outer world kept calling him more and more imperiously. For a time he tried to think that it was the voice of poetry that was calling, but the fancy brought no real convidtion. cf As to poetry,” he writes in Odtober, 1879,cc I don’t know, and I don’t know. The verse would come easy enough if I had only a subjedt which would fill my heart and mind : but to write verse for the sake of writing is a crime in a man of my years and experience.” He had in fadfc produced his poetry: the instindts of creation and invention had to find new outlets ; and gradually the fabric of social life itself became the field which, as he had done with specific arts already, he tried to redeem from commercialism and ugliness, and to reinstate on a sounder basis. He recognized the gravity of the enterprise ; yet it did not then seem to him a desperate one.

“ I have seen a many wonders, and have a good memory * for them; and in spite of all grumblings have a hope ; that civilized people will grow weary of their worst follies * II. B

THE LIFE OF

and try to live a less muddled and unreasonable life ; not of course that we shall see much of that change in the remnant that is left of our days.”

In this hope, and for work at anything that might lead towards its accomplishment, he was willing to give up ease and leisure, and much of what made life desirable. And one can trace the convi&ion growing in him very slowly, that towards forwarding the work some renunciation was necessary—it might be, he thought with a sudden pang, the giving up of Kelmscott. “ I am sitting now, io p.m.,” he writes from there in late autumn, ct in the tapestry-room, the moon rising red through the east-wind haze, and a cow lowing over the fields. I have been feeling chastened by many thoughts, and the beauty and quietness of the surroundings, which latter, as I hinted, I am, as it were, beginning to take leave of. That leave-taking will, I must confess, though you may think it fantastic, seem a long step towards saying goodnight to the world.”

His ease, his leisure, in effe<5t we may say his life, he did give up for the sake of this hope: but the giving up of Kelmscott was a pang that was spared to him. Nor would it be right to think of him as habitually occupied by these somewhat sombre broodings. When he did throw off work, his enjoyment remained that of a child. “ All right,” runs a note of this year to Ellis arranging for a couple of days’ fishing, “ I think that is best. I am writing to Mrs. Comely to say positively that we will; so begone dull care: don’t forget the worms.” Another letter gives a description of his arrival with Webb at Kelmscott through the floods of that wet August. They had been at Salisbury, and he had seen Stonehenge for the first time. “ I was much impressed by it,” he wrote: * ‘ though the earth and sky nearly met, and the rain poured continuously, nothing could spoil the great stretches of

at. 46] WILLIAM MORRIS

the Plain, and the mysterious monument that nobody knows anything about—except Fergusson who knows less than nothing.” From Amesbury they drove north across the Wiltshire downs.

“We went right up the Avon valley, and very beautiful it was; then, as the river narrowed, we turned off towards a little scrubby town called Pewsey that lies in the valley between the Salisbury and the Marlborough downs: it was all very fine and characteristic country, especially where we had to climb the Marlborough downs at a place that I remembered coming on as a boy with wonder and pleasure: Oare Hill they call it. We got early in the afternoon to Marlborough and walked out to see the College, and so strolled away to the Devil’s Den, and back in the dusk. The next morning we set out early for Avebury, in weather at first much like the day before; however it cleared before we reached Silbury, and was quite fine while we were thereabout for two hours, after which we drove on towards Swindon, intending Lechlade and Kelmscott that evening. The downs end at a village called Wroughton, and we could see a large piece of England from the slope of it, Faringdon clump not at all in the background. We got another trap at Swindon, where they warned us that we should have to go through the waters to get to Lechlade: we went through Highworth, a queer old village on a hill, and sure enough we could see waters out from thence, though they turned out to be only from the little river Cole: at Highworth we found that they were mending the bridge into Lechlade town, and that it would be closed ; so at Inglesham we had to turn aside to strike the road that leads over St. John’s Bridge: sure enough in a few yards we were in deep water enough, right over the axles of the wheels: the driver lost his presence of mind, not being used to floods you see, and pretty nearly spilt us in the

4|THELIFEOF[x88o

ditch, but we just saved the carriage, and after some trouble got into the high road by Buscot Parsonage; though even there for some time the said road was also a river: so over St. John’s Bridge and safe to Kelmscott. But opening the gate there, lo, the water all over the little front garden: in short, I have never seen so high a flood there : there was a smart shower when we got in and then a bright clear evening: the next day was bright and clear between strong showers with a stifF southwest gale : of course we could do nothing but sail and paddle about the floods.”

During the following winter the manufacture of the Hammersmith rugs and carpets went busily^on at Kelmscott House. By May enough specimens had been successfully produced to allow of a public exhibition of them. The circular written by Morris and issued by the firm on that occasion states the fads very clearly. This new branch of the business was “ an attempt to make England independent of the East for carpets which may claim to be considered works of art.”

cc We believe,” the circular goes on, <c that the time has come for some one or other to make that attempt, unless the civilized world is prepared to do without the art of Carpet-making at its best: for it is a lamentable faCt that, just when we of the West are beginning to understand and admire the art of the East, that art is fading away, nor in any branch has the deterioration been more marked than in Carpet-making.

cc All beauty of colour has now (and for long) disappeared from the manufactures of the Levant—the once harmonious and lovely Turkey Carpets. The traditions of excellence of the Indian Carpets are only kept up by a few tasteful and energetic providers in England with infinite trouble and at a great expense, while the mass of the goods are already inferior in many respeCts to what

at. 47]WILLIAM MORRIS

can be turned out mechanically from the looms of Glasgow or Kidderminster.

“As for Persia, the mother of this beautiful art, nothing could mark the contrast between the past and the present clearer than the Carpets, doubtless picked for excellence of manufacture, given to the South Kensington Museum by His Majesty the Schah, compared with the rough work of the tribes done within the last hundred years, which the Directors of the Museum have judiciously hung near them.

“ In short, the art of Carpet-making, in common with the other special arts of the East, is either dead or dying fast; and it is clear to everyone that, whatever future is in store for those countries where it once flourished, they will, in time to come, receive all influence from, rather than give any to, the West.

“ It seems to us, therefore, that, for the future, we people of the West must make our own hand-made Carpets, if we are to have any worth the labour and money such things cost; and that these, while they should equal the Eastern ones as nearly as may be in materials and durability, should by no means imitate them in design, but show themselves obviously to be the outcome of modern and Western ideas, guided by those principles that underlie all architectural art in common.”

Besides this labour of the loom, the year had been crowded with other more public work. Sweeping restorations were proposed and already in progress at St. Mark’s, Venice ; and Morris was the soul of the movement of protest, which, though conducted in some quarters with more zeal than discretion in its attitude towards Italy and the Italian Government, at least had a powerful influence in preventing the proposed demolition and rebuilding of the western facade. In support of the

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movement, which was headed by the Society for Protection of Ancient Buildings, he spoke and wrote untiringly, not only in London, but in Birmingham and. Oxford. The Oxford meeting in the Sheldonian Theatre was the first occasion on which he appeared at his own University in any public capacity. In his ardour he even succeeded in prevailing on Burne-Jones to make there, for the first and last time on record^ a speech in public.

When he had been at Venice the year before, he had been too ill to take much apparent pleasure in St. Mark’s. But his eye had taken it all in, and the impression it made on him rather grew than weakened as time went on. “Always beautiful,” he now wrote of it, “ but from the first meant to grow more beautiful by the lapse of time, it has now become a work of art, a monument of history, and a piece of nature. Surely I need not enlarge on the pre-eminence of St. Mark’s in all these characters; for no one who even pretends to care about art, history, or nature, would call it in question; but I will assert that, strongly as I may have seemed to express myself, my words but feebly represent the feelings of a large body of cultivated men who will feel real grief at the loss that seems imminent—a loss which may be slurred over, but which will not be forgotten, and which will be felt ever deeper as cultivation spreads. That the outward aspeCt of the world should grow uglier day by day in spite of the aspirations of civilization, nay, partly because of its triumphs, is a grievous puzzle to some of us who are not lacking in sympathy for those aspirations and triumphs, artists and craftsmen as we are. So grievous it is that sometimes we are tempted to say, ‘ Let them make a clean sweep of it all then ; let us forget it all and muddle on as best we may, unencumbered with either history or hope! ’ But such despair is, we well know, a treason to the cause of civilization and the arts,

jet.47] WILLIAM MORRIS

and we do our best to overcome it, and to strengthen ourselves in the belief that even a small minority will at last be listened to and its reasonable opinions be accepted.”

He was also a regular visitor and adviser at the South Kensington Museum and at the Royal School of Art Needlework. And alongside of all the rest, he carried on, until the General Election of 1880, vigorous political work in London. In 1879 he was treasurer of the National Liberal League, an association formed to a large extent from the representatives of that working-class London Radicalism which had organized itself in opposition to the Eastern policy of the Government in 1876. At the meetings of this League he made his first essays in the practice of extempore speech. It was a thing which, partly from constitutional shyness and partly from the pressure of thought behind his language, came to him, so far as it did come at all, with great difficulty. “ When he spoke off-hand,” a colleague of his at this time notes—and the description is highly characteristic —“ he had a knack at times of hammering away at his point until he had said exactly what he wanted to say in exaCtly the words he wished to use, rocking to and fro the while from one foot to the other.”

After the elections of 18 80 had replaced a Liberal Government in power, his political partisanship rapidly fell away from him. Like the wave of popular feeling which turned those elections, it had been roused on particular issues, and was kept alive rather by hostility to Lord Beaconsfield’s policy than by any great affeCtion for the Cabinet which replacedhis. The enthusiasm of x 88obarely lived out the year. The Irish Coercion Bill of 18 8 x finally destroyed it. In the November following, Morris took an actively joyful part in winding up the affairs of the National Liberal League. The social reforms which he had

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at heart he saw disappearing amid an ocean of Whiggery, which he no more loved than he did Toryism. “I think some raison d’etre might be found for us,” he wrote in handing over the accounts when he resigned the treasurer- ship, “ if we had definite work to do: I do so hate—this in spite of my accounts—everything vague in politics as well as in art.” But definite work of the kind he meant was not then in the programme of the Liberal party. Very soon Morris’s attitude towards current politics became one of mere irritation and contempt. “ Toryism, a system of common robbery, is nevertheless far better than Whiggism—a compound of petty larceny, popular instrudtion, and receiving of stolen goods”: so runs a well-known passage in “The Romany Rye”; and Morris’s way of regarding politics had much in common with Borrow’s. Gradually but inevitably he became one of a party to whom Canning’sfamous phrase took a new meaning ; and who resolved, if it were possible, to call a new world into existence, not to redress, but to destroy, that balance of the old in which they saw nothing but a door turning back and forward on its hinges.

Butthis changetooktime; and itwas gradually wrought out through many doubts and even despondencies.

In the summer of 1880 the long-planned voyage of the whole family from Hammersmith to Kelmscott by water actually took place. Price, William De Morgan, and the Hon. Richard Grosvenor were the remainder of the party. All cares were put aside for it, and the lightheartedness of fifteen years before resumed its sway for a happy week.

“ Litde things please little minds,” he writes on the 10th of August; “therefore my mind must be little, so pleased am I this morning. That is not logic, though I suspect the conclusion to be true: but again I doubt if the * Ark,’ which is veritably the name of our ship, can

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be considered a little thing, except relatively: item, it is scarcely a little thing that the sky is one sheet of pale warm blue, and that the earth is sucking up the sun rejoicing.