William Morris Part 10

When we read his prose romances, their framework gives many a clue to their ancestry, but it is an ancestry so remote from the interest of the general reader as to puzzle more than charm in its influence upon the modern product. In _The House of the Wolfings_, _The Roots of the Mountains_, and especially _The Glittering Plain_, we have more or less modernised sagas, obviously derived from the Icelandic literature of which he had been drinking deep. The hero of _The Glittering Plain_ is as valorous a youth and as given to brave adventures as the great Sigurd, the environment is Norse, and so are the names of the characters--Sea-eagle, Long-h.o.a.ry, Grey Goose of the Ravagers, and Puny Fox. Other words and phrases also drawn from the "word-h.o.a.rd" of the Icelandic tongue are sprinkled over the pages. We find "nithing-stake" and byrny, and bight, spoke-shave and ness and watchet, sley and ashlar and ghyll, used as expressions of familiar parlance. The characters give each other "the sele of the day," retire to shut-beds at night, and look "sorry and sad and fell" when fortune goes against them. They wander in garths and call each other faring-fellow and they yea-say and nay-say and wot and wend. It is not altogether surprising to find some of Morris's most loyal followers admitting that they can make nothing of books written in this archaic prose.

In the subsequent romances the comparative st.u.r.diness imparted by the writings of the North gives place to a mildness and grace suggestive of those early French romances the charm of which Morris had always keenly felt. We still have much the same vocabulary and more or less use of the same magic arts, "skin-changing" holding its own as a favourite method of overcoming otherwise insuperable difficulties; but we have more of the love motive and a clearer endeavour to portray the relations of the characters to each other. In all, however, the French and Scandinavian influences are so mingled with each other and with the element provided by Morris alone, and so fused by his fluent prolix style, as to produce a result somewhat different from anything else in literature, with a character and interest personal to itself, and difficult to imitate in essence, although wofully lending itself to parody. The subject never seems important. There is no sense that the writer was spurred to expression by the pressure of an irresistible message or sentiment. We feel that anything may have started this copious flow of words, and that there is no logical end to them. The t.i.tle of _The Well at the World's End_ was taken from an old Scottish ballad called by that name which Morris had never read, but the t.i.tle of which struck his fancy, and the book reads as though it had grown without plan from the fanciful, meaningless t.i.tle.

Of these later romances, _The Glittering Plain_ is the most saga-like, and _The Water of the Wondrous Isles_ is most permeated by the romantic spirit of the Arthurian legends and their kin. Despite all defects, the latter has a bright bejewelled aspect that pleases the fancy although it does not deeply enlist the imagination. The story is leisurely and wandering. The heroine, Birdalone, some of whose characteristics have already been mentioned, is stolen in her infancy from her home near a town called Utterhay, by a witch-wife who brings her up on the edge of a wood called Evilshaw and teaches her to milk and plough and sow and reap and bake and shoot deer in the forest. When she is seventeen years of age she meets in the forest Habundia, a fairy woman, who gives her a magic ring by which she may make herself invisible and a lock of hair by burning a bit of which she may summon her in time of need. Birdalone soon after escapes from the witch-wife in a magic boat, and pa.s.ses through fabulous scenes to enchanted islands, where she finds friends and enemies. Three maidens, Atra, Viridis, and Aurea, save her from the latter, and send her forth to find for them their lovers. While on her quest she travels to various isles,--the Isle of the Young and the Old, the Isle of the Queens, the Isle of the Kings, and the Isle of Nothing,--which afford opportunity for strange pictures and quaint conceits but have nothing to do with the narrative. When Birdalone finds the lovers of her friends, the Golden Knight, the Green Knight, and Arthur the Black Squire, called the Three Champions, they are charmed by her beauty and friendliness, and she immediately falls in love with the Black Squire, betrothed of Atra.[3] The Black Squire returns her prompt affection, but has grace to show himself moody and downcast at the thought of breaking faith with his lady.

Presently the Three Champions go their ways to find the three maidens who were kind to Birdalone and who are kept on the Isle of Increase Unsought by a witch, sister to Birdalone's early guardian, and Birdalone, weary of waiting for their return, fares forth to meet adventures and lovers in plenty. To all the brave knights and youths who take their turn at wooing her she is pitiful and gentle after her fashion, and thanks them kindly, and praises them and suffers them to kiss her for their comfort, and deems them "fair and lovely and sweet," but keeps her preference for the Black Squire. Now, when the Three Champions come back with their ladies and find Birdalone fled there is much distress among them, and the knights set forth to find her. Meeting with her, they are set upon by the bad Red Knight, into whose custody she has recently been thrown, and Baudoin, the Golden Knight, is killed. Returning with this bad news to the three ladies, the two remaining knights, who have rescued Birdalone and killed the Red Knight, decide to ride back into the latter's domain and make war upon his followers. In the meantime Atra has learned that the Black Squire has transferred his affections from her to Birdalone, and does not attempt to dissemble her grief thereat, none of Morris's characters being gifted in the art of dissimulation, particularly where love is concerned.

Birdalone, departing from the course which Morris elsewhere is most inclined to sanction, decides to renounce in Atra's favour, and betakes herself to the town of Greenford, where she is received into the broiderers' guild and works with a woman who turns out to be her own mother, from whom she was stolen by the witch. With her she lives for five years, when sickness slays Audrey, the mother, and Birdalone can no longer resist the temptation to seek her love, the Black Squire, again. So she makes her way once more through marvellous adventures into the old forest of Evilshaw, where she comes again upon her fairy friend Habundia, by whose aid she finds the Black Squire. The latter has met with misfortunes and is lost in the forest, where he falls ill. Birdalone nurses him back to health, and they decide that whether Atra be dead or alive they will have no more parting from one another. They are soon to be put to the test, as in the wood they come upon Atra and their other friends, who have set out to seek them, being anxious for their welfare, and who have been overcome by caitiffs and bound and held prisoners.

Arthur and Birdalone rescue them, and all these friends make up their minds to go together and dwell in Utterhay for the rest of their lives.

Aurea finds another lover in place of the Golden Knight she has lost, but Atra is faithful in heart to the Black Squire, though able to bear with philosophy his union with Birdalone. Thus they live happily ever after.

Upon this skeleton of mingled reality and dream Morris built his general idea of happy love. The tale might easily be twisted into an allegory, since all the creatures of his imagination stand for either the satisfactions or dissatisfactions of the visible world, but nothing is more certain than that he meant no such interpretations to be put upon it.

When one of his critics a.s.sumed an allegorical intention in the story called _The Wood Beyond the World_, he was moved to public refutation, writing to the _Spectator_: "It is meant to be a tale pure and simple, with nothing didactic about it. If I have to write or speak on social problems, I always try to be as direct as I possibly can." The truth of this is best known by those who most faithfully have followed his writings, and it is entirely vain to try to squeeze from his "tales" any ethical virtue beyond their frank expression of his singularly simple temperament. Nevertheless, like the rest of his work, they reveal in some degree his way of regarding the moral world. As we have seen, Birdalone has her impulse toward renunciation, and for a brief interval one feels that the story possibly may be allowed to run along the conventional lines laid down by the civilised human race for the greatest good of the greatest number. This, however, would have been wholly alien to the writer's temper, and there is no shock to those familiar with this temper in finding that in the end the hero and heroine eat their cake and have it. Renunciation on the side of the unbeloved is effected with grace and n.o.bility, but it is made clear that it is a question of accepting the inevitable in as lofty a spirit as possible. It is perhaps the most obvious moral characteristic of Morris's types in general, that they are no more p.r.o.ne than children to do what they dislike unless circ.u.mstance forces them to it. If we were to argue from his romances alone we could almost imagine him contending that what one dislikes in conduct is wrong, just as he did contend that what one dislikes in art is bad. But if his men and women do not willingly renounce, at least they do not exult. The sight of unhappiness pains them. For stern self-denial he subst.i.tutes the softer virtues of amiability and sweetness of temper. A high level of kindliness and tenderness takes the place of more compelling and formidable emotions. "Kind," indeed, is one of the adjectives of which one soonest wearies when confined to his vocabulary, and "dear," is another.

We read of "dear feet and legs," of dear and kind kisses, of kind wheedling looks, of kind and dear maidens, and dear and kind lads, and everyone is kind and dear who is not evil and cruel. What Morris's romances preach, if they preach anything, is: that we should get from life all the enjoyment possible, hurting others as little as may be consistent with our own happiness, but claiming the satisfaction of all honest desires; that, in thus satisfying ourselves, we should keep toward those about us a kind and pleasant countenance and a consideration for their pain even when our duty toward ourselves forces us to inflict it. It is a narrow and exclusive teaching, and ill adapted to foster freedom of mind and spirit. It is a teaching that provides no breastplate for the buffets of fortune, and sets before one no ideal of intellectual or spiritual life the attainment of which would bring pleasure austere and exquisite. There is no stimulus and no sting in the love depicted. Even its ardour is checked and wasted by its dallying with the external charms that seem to veil rather than to reveal the spirit within the flesh. It is the essence of immaturity. But while we gain from the observation of Morris's childlike characters, playing in a world that knows no conventions and consequently no shame, a foreboding of the weariness that would attend such a life as he plans for them, we are conscious also that he is trying characteristically, to go back to the beginning, and to start humanity aright and afresh; to show us fine and healthy sons of Adam and daughters of Eve, "living," to use his own words, "in the enjoyment of animal life at least, happy therefore, and beautiful according to the beauty of their race." He sets them among the surroundings he loves, gives them the education he values, and leaves them with us--the blithe children of a new world, whose maturity he is content not to forecast. With such health of body, he seems to say, and such innocence of heart, what n.o.ble commonwealth may not arise, what glory may not enter into civilisation?

CHAPTER XII.

THE END.

The end with Morris seemed to come suddenly, although for months and even for years there had been warnings of its approach. He had enjoyed--and greatly enjoyed--unusual strength and vitality up to almost his sixtieth year. The seeds of gout were in his const.i.tution, and from attacks of this disease he occasionally suffered, but not until the one occurring in the spring of 1891, just as the Kelmscott Press was getting under way, did they give reason for alarm. At that time other complications were discovered and he was told that he must consider himself an invalid. After this, as we have seen, he plunged with rapture into new undertakings involving the use of all his faculties, and carried them on with no apparent lessening of intellectual vigour. But he had too long overtaxed his physical frame by his extraordinary labours, and especially by his activity in the cause of Socialism, which had led him out in all weathers and under the most adverse conditions. By the beginning of 1895 he began to show plainly the weakness that had been gaining on him, and to admit it, though still keeping busy at his various occupations. His increasing illness brought home to him the thought of that final check upon his activities which he had always found so difficult to conceive. "If," he said, "it merely means that I am to be laid up for a little while, it doesn't so much matter, you know; but if I am to be caged up here for months, and then it is to be the end of all things, I shouldn't like it at all. This has been a jolly world to me and I find plenty to do in it."

As the folio _Chaucer_ advanced through the Press, he grew impatient, no doubt fearing that he would not see its completion, and it is pleasant to read of his gratification when a completed copy reached him, bound in the cover designed by himself. Late in July, 1896, by the recommendation of his physician he took a sea voyage, going to Norway for the bracing influences of its air and a.s.sociations. No benefit was gained, however, and on his return a congestion of one lung set in that proved unyielding, while his general weakness was such that he was unable to cross the threshold of his room. We find him responding to an old friend who had urged him to try the effect of the pure air of Swainslow, that this was the case and he could not come, but was "absolutely delighted to find another beautiful place which is still in its untouched loveliness." Up to the last he did a little work, dictating the final pa.s.sage of _The Sundering Flood_ less than a month before his death, which occurred in his home at Hammersmith on the morning of the 3rd of October, 1896. He died without apparent suffering, and surrounded by his friends. He had lived almost sixty-three years in the "jolly world" wherein he had found so much to do, but he left the impression of having been cut down in the flower of his life.

His burial was in keeping with those tastes and preferences that had meant so much to him. The strong oak coffin in which he was laid was of an ancient, simple shape, with handles of wrought iron, and the pall that covered it was a strip of rich Anatolian velvet from his own collection of textiles. He was carried from Lechlade station to the little Kelmscott church in an open hay-cart, cheerful in colour, with bright red wheels, and festooned with vines, alder, and bulrushes. The bearers and the drivers of the country waggons in which his friends followed him to his grave were farmers of the neighbourhood clad in their moleskins, people who had lost, said one of them, "a dear good friend in Master Morris." The hea.r.s.e, with its bright decorations and the little group of mourners wound their way along pleasant country roads, beaten upon by a storm of unusual fury. "The north-west wind bent trees and bushes," writes one of those who were present, "turning the leaves of the bird maples back upon their footstalks, making them look like poplars, and the rain beat on the straggling hedges, the lurid fruit, such as only grows in rural England,--the fruit of privet with ripe hips and haws; the foliage of the Guelder roses hung on the bushes; along the road a line of slabs of stone extended, reminding one of Portugal; ragweed and loosestrife, with rank hemp agrimony, were standing dry and dead, like reeds beside a lake, and in the rain and wind the yokels stood at the cross-roads, or at the openings of the bridle-paths."

In _News from Nowhere_ Morris describes Kelmscott Church, with its little aisle divided from the nave by three round arches, its windows, "mostly of the graceful Oxfordshire fourteenth-century type," and the interior trimmed with flowers for a village merrymaking. On the day of his burial, by a curious coincidence it was trimmed with fruits of the harvest in preparation for the autumn festival. The service was read by an old schoolfellow and friend, and Morris was left to his rest "from patience and from pain" in the place he had best loved and to which in his final weakness he had longed to return.

In regarding Morris through the medium of his work it is difficult to gain a coherent impression. He turned one side and another to the world with such rapidity of succession as to give a sense of kaleidoscopic change.

What new combination of colour and form his activities would take was always impossible to forecast. And the thing that he was doing seemed to him at the time the one thing in the world that was worth doing, the one thing that "a reasonable and healthy man" would make it his pleasure to do. Yet, as we have seen, all these pursuits taken up by him with so much zest and laid down by him with such suddenness, fitted harmoniously and accurately into the plan of his life, which, with the decade of militant Socialism deducted, presented a smooth and even surface, unbroken by any violent change of circ.u.mstance or method or motive. He has been described by nearly all who have written of him as "a rebel," and a rebel he was in the true Quixotic sense, his lance in rest to charge at any moment against any windmill of convention that might offend him. A friend who was once talking with him about a forthcoming election to the London School Board, expressing a hope that the progressive party would win,--"Well," said Morris, striding up and down, "I am not sure that a clerical victory would not be a good thing. I was educated at Marlborough under clerical masters, and I naturally rebelled against them. Had they been advanced men, my spirit of rebellion would probably have led me to conservatism merely as a protest. One naturally defies authority, and it may be well that the London School Board should be controlled by Anglican parsons, in order that the young rebels in the schools may grow up to defy and hate church authority." His own "natural" defiance of authority entailed what seems to the ordinary toiler in harness a waste of his extraordinary gifts. His work was most of it in the experimental stage when he left it. He was too content to point the road without following to the end his own direction.

"He did not learn a trade in the natural way, from those who knew, and seek then to better the teaching of his masters," says one of his fellow-workers in arts and crafts, "but, acknowledging no master, except perhaps the ancients, he would worry it out always for himself. He had a wonderful knack of learning that way."[4] He had a wonderful knack also of persuading himself that there was no other to learn, and Goldsmith's criticism of Burke--that he spent much of his time "cutting blocks with a razor"--has been happily applied to him. But it is doubtful whether he would have made as strong an impression on his generation as he did if he had devoted his time to one branch of art and worked along conventional lines. His greatest gift was not so much the ability to produce art, artistic though he was in faculty and feeling, as it was the ability to make people see the difference between the kind of beauty to which his eyes were open and the ugliness commonly preferred to it. Nothing is so convincing as to see a man accomplish with his own hands what he has declared possible for anyone to accomplish. Morris's continual ill.u.s.tration of his theories was perhaps more useful in awakening interest in just the matters which he had at heart than any more patient pursuit of an ideal less readily achieved. He had the habit when listening to questions and criticisms after his lectures of tracing charming rapid designs on paper. On a large scale that is what he did throughout his life: lecture people about the way to make things, and by way of proving his point, turn off delightful examples of the things he describes. "It is very easy" he seems to say; "watch me for a moment, and we will then pa.s.s on."

Considered superficially, he appeared the very prince of paradox. Art was a word continually on his lips, the future and fortunes of art were constantly in his mind, yet for the greatest art of the world he had few words, and the most pa.s.sing interest. The names of Raphael and Leonardo, Giotto, Durer, Rembrandt, Velasquez, were seldom if ever on his lips. Art had for him an almost single meaning, namely, the beauty produced by humble workers as an every-day occurrence and for every day's enjoyment, art by the people and for the people. So individual that he will never be forgotten by those who have once seen him and heard his voice raised in its inevitable protest, he nevertheless preached a kind of communism in which any high degree of individuality must have been submerged.

His preferences among books, as might be a.s.sumed, were clearly marked, and a list of his favourite authors contains many contrasts. Once asked to contribute to the _Pall Mall Gazette_ his opinions on "the best hundred books," he complied by naming those which, he said, had most profoundly impressed him, excluding all which he considered merely as tools and not as works of art. True to himself, he starts the list with books "of the kind Mazzini calls Bibles," books which are "in no sense the work of individuals, but have grown up from the very hearts of the people." Among these are "the Hebrew Bible (excluding some twice-done parts and some pieces of mere Jewish ecclesiasticism), _Homer_, _Hesiod_, _The Edda_ (including some of the other early old Norse romantic genealogical poems), _Beowulf_, _Kalevale_, _Shahnameh_, _Mahabharata_, collections of folk tales headed by Grimm and the Norse ones, Irish and Welsh traditional poems."

After these "Bibles" follow the "_real_ ancient imaginative works: _Herodotus_, _Plato_, _aeschylus_, _Sophocles_, _Aristophanes_, _Theocritus_, _Lucretius_, _Catullus_." The greater part of the Latins were esteemed "_sham_ cla.s.sics." "I suppose," says Morris in his character of reasonable man, "that they have some good literary qualities; but I cannot help thinking that it is difficult to find out how much. I suspect superst.i.tion and authority have influenced our estimate of them till it has become a mere matter of convention. Of course I admit the archaeological value of some of them, especially _Virgil_ and _Ovid_."

Next in importance to the Latin masterpieces he puts mediaeval poetry, Anglo-Saxon lyrical pieces (like the _Ruin_ and the _Exile_), Dante, Chaucer, _Piers Plowman_, _Nibelungenlied_, the Danish and Scotch-English Border Ballads, _Omar Khayyam_, "though I don't know how much of the charm of this lovely poem," he says, "is due to Fitzgerald, the translator"; other Arab and Persian poetry, _Reynard the Fox_, and a few of the best rhymed romances. Mediaeval story books follow, the _Morte d'Arthur_, _The Thousand and One Nights_, Boccaccio's _Decameron_, and the _Mabinogion_.

After these, "modern poets" up to his own generation, "Shakespeare, Blake (the part of him which a mortal can understand), Coleridge, Sh.e.l.ley, Keats, Byron." German he could not read, so he left out German masterpieces. Milton he left out on account of his union of "cold cla.s.sicalism with Puritanism" ("the two things which I hate most in the world," he said).

_Pilgrim's Progress_ heads the department of modern fiction, in which is also included _Robinson Crusoe_, _Moll Flanders_, _Colonel Jack_, _Captain Singleton_, _Voyage Round the World_, Scott's novels, "except the one or two which he wrote when he was hardly alive," the novels of the elder Dumas (the "good" ones), Victor Hugo, d.i.c.kens, and George Borrow. The list concludes with certain uncla.s.sified works, Ruskin, Carlyle, the _Utopia_, and Grimm's _Teutonic Mythology_. It may safely be a.s.sumed that no other list sent in by the "best judges" who responded to Mr. Stead's request in the least resembled this one, which was compiled with high sincerity and represented Morris quite fairly on the bookish side of his mind. Mr.

Mackail mentions also among the volumes oftenest in his hands and "imposed upon his friends unflinchingly" Surtees's famous _Mr. Jorrocks_, and records that he considered _Huckleberry Finn_ America's masterpiece. For the Uncle Remus stories he had also a peculiar fondness, and for one of his cotton prints he designed what he called a "Brer Rabbit pattern."

The perversity that one marks in Morris beneath--or, perhaps, on the surface of--his essential seriousness, the tendency to whim and paradox so freely noted by his critics, may be attributed to his extraordinarily childlike spirit. His lack of restraint, his dislike of subtlety, his love of spontaneity, his inability to conform to conventions, his hatred of gloom, austerity, and introspection, his readiness to throw himself into enjoyment of the smallest subject that happened to come within the range of his interest, his unflagging vigour, his unjaded humour, all qualities copiously commented upon by his friends, testify to the youthfulness of his temperament, which was like that of a child, also in a certain apparently unpremeditated reticence, an inability to reveal itself fully or satisfactorily to even his closest intimates. What is most attractive and appealing in him is doubtless due to his freedom from artificialities and from the sophistries that ordinarily come with age, but what is n.o.blest in him, and most impressive in the effect produced by his accomplishment, is due to a quality of which a child is and should be ignorant, a sense of personal responsibility. Without this he would have been a pitiful figure, disoriented, and inharmonious with the world into which he was born. It was his persistent unwearying effort to set the crooked straight by example as well as by precept, and in defiance of a certain paradoxical mental languor that flowed by the side of his energy and impulse, which made him an influence to be counted with among the many conflicting influences of his generation. While he counselled he produced, while he preached he laboured. Declaring that work could and should be lovely, he demonstrated in his own life how intensely one man loved it. He fought for the principle of art with the ardour other men have shown in fighting for the principle of political liberty. He held himself bound to justify his theories in his own action, and while it would be absurd to claim for him complete consistency and freedom from error in even this, it certainly guided him safely past the quicksands of empty and inflated rhetoric by which the expressed philosophy of his own great masters is marred. It will be remembered by those who share his admiration for d.i.c.kens that when the proprietor of Dotheboys Hall wished to teach his pupils to spell "window" he had them clean one. The effectiveness of such a method is deeper than the satire, and Morris was its most convincing exponent. What he learned out of books he tried at once to put into practice. He had the highest ideal of service:

How crown ye excellence of worth?

With leave to serve all men on earth,

and nothing deflected him from his efforts thus to serve in his own person the most crying needs of humanity as he conceived them.

Pretentiousness was his least defect. No priggish sense of virtue interfered with his consecration to what he believed were the highest interests of his fellow-men. The cant of the moralist was absolutely unused by him, and he was innocent of any intention to improve the morals of his companions. Get them happy, he thought, with a faith little less than magnificent, get them happy and they will be good. Nor was he guilty of aesthetic priggishness. Art was the concern of his mind and the desire of his heart, but it was by no means his meat and drink. He liked good food, and was proud of his connoisseurship in matters of cookery, and wines. Few things pleased him better than himself to take the cook's place and prove his practical skill. When asked for his opinions on the subject of temperance, he replied that so far as his own experience went he found his victuals dull without something to drink, and that tea and coffee were not fit liquors to be taken with food. He smoked his briarwood pipe with much satisfaction. In his daily habits he was thoroughly, aggressively human, and in nothing more so than in his candid admiration of the work of his own hands, a feeling in which there was no fatuity.

His biographer comments on the singular element of impersonality in his nature, speaking of him as moving among men and women "isolated, self-centred, almost empty of love or hatred," and quotes his most intimate friend's extreme statement that he lived "absolutely without the need of man or woman." In this idea of him those who knew him best seemed to agree, but from his own letters as represented in the biography, a stranger to him gains a different impression. His letters to his invalid daughter are in themselves sufficient to evoke in the mind of the reader an image of unlimited and poignant tenderness impossible to a.s.sociate with the aloofness and lack of keen personal sympathy said to be characteristic of him. He did not give himself readily or rashly to intense feelings; but he seemed to feel within himself capacity for emotions of force so violent as to be destructive. When his friend Faulkner was stricken with paralysis and other trouble came upon the family, we find him writing: "It is such a grievous business altogether that, rightly or wrongly, I try not to think of it too much lest I should give way altogether, and make an end of what small use there may be in my life." Leaving out the case of Rossetti, there is no record of his having relinquished any friendship of importance, nor did he weary of constant intercourse with his friends. His habit of breakfasting with Burne-Jones on Sunday mornings and dining with him on Wednesdays was unbroken for many years. "The last three Sundays of his life," says this oldest and closest friend, "I went to him."

Loyalty, sincerity, simplicity, and earnestness, these are the qualities conspicuous in the fabric of his life. His influence upon his generation, so far as it may now be observed, has been definite but diffused. It may be doubted whether he would not have been best pleased to have it so, to know that his name will live chiefly as that of one who stimulated others toward art production of and interest in beautiful handiwork. But the last word to be said about him is that he was greater than his work.

BIBLIOGRAPHY[5]

1. _The Story of the Glittering Plain. Which has been also called The Land of Living Men or The Acre of the Undying._ Written by WILLIAM MORRIS.

Small 4to. Golden type. Border 1. 200 paper copies at two guineas, and 6 on vellum. Dated April 4, issued May 8, 1891. Sold by Reeves & Turner.

Bound in stiff vellum with wash leather ties.[6]

This book was set up from Nos. 81-84 of _The English Ill.u.s.trated Magazine_, in which it first appeared; some of the chapter headings were rearranged, and a few small corrections were made in the text. A trial page, the first printed at the Kelmscott Press, was struck off on January 31, 1891, but the first sheet was not printed until about a month later.[7] The border was designed in January of the same year, and engraved by W. H. Hooper. Mr. Morris had four of the vellum copies bound in green vellum, three of which he gave to friends. Only two copies on vellum were sold, at twelve and fifteen guineas. This was the only book with wash leather ties. All the other vellum bound books have silk ties, except _Sh.e.l.ley's Poems_ and _Hand and Soul_, which have no ties.

2. _Poems by the Way._ Written by WILLIAM MORRIS. Small 4to. Golden type.

In black and red. Border 1. 300 paper copies at two guineas, thirteen on vellum at about twelve guineas. Dated September 24, issued October 20, 1891. Sold by Reeves & Turner. Bound in stiff vellum.

This was the first book printed at the Kelmscott Press in two colours, and the first book in which the smaller printer's mark appeared. After _The Glittering Plain_ was finished, at the beginning of April, no printing was done until May 11th. In the meanwhile the compositors were busy setting up the early sheets of _The Golden Legend_. The printing of _Poems by the Way_, which its author first thought of calling _Flores Atramenti_, was not begun until July. The poems in it were written at various times. In the ma.n.u.script, _Hafburg and Signy_ is dated February 4, 1870; _Hildebrand and Hillilel_, March 1, 1871; and _Love's Reward_, Kelmscott, April 21, 1871. _Meeting in Winter_ is a song from _The Story of Orpheus_ an unpublished poem intended for the _Earthly Paradise_. The last poem in the book, _Goldilocks and Goldilooks_, was written on May 20, 1891, for the purpose of adding to the bulk of the volume, which was then being prepared. A few of the vellum covers were stained at Merton red, yellow, indigo, and dark green, but the experiment was not successful.[8]

3. _The Love-Lyrics and Songs of Proteus, by Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, with the Love Sonnets of Proteus, by the same author, now reprinted in their full text with many sonnets omitted from the earlier editions._ London, MDCCCXCII. Small 4to. Golden type. In black and red. Border 1. 300 paper copies at two guineas, none on vellum. Dated January 26, issued February 27, 1892. Sold by Reeves & Turner. Bound in stiff vellum.

This is the only book in which the initials are printed in red. This was done by the author's wish.

4. _The Nature of Gothic, a Chapter of the Stones of Venice._ By JOHN RUSKIN. With a preface by William Morris. Small 4to. Golden type. Border 1. Diagrams in text. 500 paper copies at thirty shillings, none on vellum.

Dated in preface, February 15, issued March 22, 1892. Published by George Allen. Bound in stiff vellum.

This chapter of the Stones of Venice, which Ruskin always considered the most important in the book, was first printed separately, in 1854, as a sixpenny pamphlet. Mr. Morris paid more than one tribute to it in _Hopes and Fears for Art_. Of him Ruskin said, in 1887, "Morris is beaten gold."

5. _The Defence of Guenevere, and Other Poems._ By WILLIAM MORRIS. Small 4to. Golden type. In black and red. Borders 2 and 1. 300 paper copies at two guineas, 10 on vellum at about twelve guineas. Dated April 2, issued May 19, 1892. Sold by Reeves & Turner. Bound in limp vellum.

This book was set up from a copy of the edition published by Reeves & Turner in 1880, the only alteration, except a few corrections, being in the eleventh line of _Summer Dawn_.[9] It is divided into three parts, the poems suggested by Malory's _Morte d'Arthur_, the poems inspired by Froissart's _Chronicles_, and poems on various subjects.

The two first sections have borders, and the last has a half border.

The first sheet was printed on February 17, 1892. It was the first book bound in limp vellum, and the only one of which the t.i.tle was inscribed by hand on the back.

6. _A Dream of John Ball and a King's Lesson._ By WILLIAM MORRIS. Small 4to. Golden type. In black and red. Borders 3a, 4, and 2. With a woodcut designed by Sir E. Burne-Jones. 300 paper copies at thirty shillings, 11 on vellum at ten guineas. Dated May 13, issued September 24, 1892. Sold by Reeves & Turner. Bound in limp vellum.

This was set up with a few alterations from a copy of Reeves & Turner's third edition, and the printing was begun on April 4, 1892.

The frontispiece was redrawn from that to the first edition, and engraved on wood by W. H. Hooper, who engraved all Sir E.

Burne-Jones's designs for the Kelmscott Press, except those for _The Wood Beyond the World_ and _The Life and Death of Jason_. The inscription below the figures,[10] and the narrow border, were designed by Mr. Morris and engraved with the picture on one block, which was afterwards used on a leaflet printed for the Ancoats Brotherhood in February, 1894.

7. _The Golden Legend._ By JACOBUS DE VORAGINE. Translated by William Caxton. Edited by F. S. Ellis. 3 vols. Large 4to. Golden type. Borders 5a, 5, 6a and 7. Woodcut t.i.tle and two woodcuts designed by Sir E.

Burne-Jones. 500 copies at five guineas, none on vellum. Dated September 12, issued November 3, 1892. Published by Bernard Quaritch. Bound in half Holland, with paper labels printed in the Troy type.

In July, 1890, when only a few letters of the Golden type had been cut, Mr. Morris bought a copy of this book, printed by Wynkyn de Worde in 1527. He soon afterwards determined to print it, and on September 11th entered into a formal agreement with Mr. Quaritch for its publication. It was only an unforeseen difficulty about the size of the first stock of paper that led to _The Golden Legend_ not being the first book put in hand. It was set up from a transcript of Caxton's first edition, lent by the Syndics of the Cambridge University Library for the purpose. A trial page was got out in March, 1891, and fifty pages were in type by May 11th, the day on which the first sheet was printed. The first volume was finished, with the exception of the ill.u.s.trations and the preliminary matter, in October, 1891. The two ill.u.s.trations and the t.i.tle (which was the first woodcut t.i.tle designed by Mr. Morris) were not engraved until June and August, 1892, when the third volume was approaching completion. About half a dozen impressions of the ill.u.s.trations were pulled on vellum. A slip asking owners of the book not to have it bound with pressure, nor to have the edges cut instead of merely trimmed, was inserted in each copy.