William Morris Part 2

Beneath her brows the lids fall slow, The lashes a clear shadow throw Where I would wish my lips to be.

Beata mea Domina!

Her great eyes, standing far apart, Draw up some memory from her heart, And gaze out very mournfully; Beata mea Domina!

So beautiful and kind they are, But most times looking out afar, Waiting for something, not for me.

Beata mea Domina!

I wonder if the lashes long Are those that do her bright eyes wrong, For always half tears seem to be.

Beata mea Domina!

Lurking below the underlid, Darkening the place where they lie hid-- If they should rise and flow for me!

Beata mea Domina!

Her full lips being made to kiss, Curl'd up and pensive each one is; This makes me faint to stand and see.

Beata mea Domina!

It was the force of this attraction that kept Morris long at Oxford after Rossetti and Burne-Jones had returned to London, leaving the walls of the Oxford Union to their sad fate. But it was no love in idleness for him, rather a time of many beginnings. He was carving in stone, modelling in clay, making designs for stained gla.s.s windows, even "doing worsted work," in Rossetti's contemptuous phrase for his efforts at reviving the lost art of embroidery, with a frame made from an old model and wools dyed especially for him. Most of all he was writing poetry, the proper occupation of a lover so aesthetically endowed. Early in 1858 he had _The Defence of Guenevere_, a collection of thirty poems, ready to bring out.

Save for a slim little pamphlet ent.i.tled _Sir Galahad: A Christmas Mystery_, the contents of which were included in it, it was his first volume and, like Swinburne's _Rosamond_ published two years later, it was dedicated to Rossetti.

In this youthful, fantastic, emotional poetry we get the very essence of the writer's early spirit without the strange shadow of foreboding, the constant sense of swiftly pa.s.sing time, that comes into the poetry of his maturity. Technically, the poems could hardly be more picturesquely defective than they are. The one giving the volume its name is nearly unintelligible in parts, even when the reader is aware of the incidents of Guenevere's story, and prepared to interpret the hysterical ravings of a woman overcome by sorrow, shame, and love.

But no poems, except Rossetti's own, have so suggested romantic art in strange shapes and unbridled colour. They, too, like the wall-paintings of that early and unrivalled time, resemble the margins of an illuminated ma.n.u.script, reminding one of nothing in nature, but flashing the richness of mediaeval symbolism upon the imagination in more or less awkward forms.

If Morris could not "imitate Gabriel" in his pictures, he could at least imitate Gabriel's pictures in his poems. From the _Beata Beatrix_, from the _Ghirlandata_, from the _Proserpine_, from almost any of Rossetti's paintings of women, these curious and affected lines, for example, might have been gleaned:

See through my long throat how the words go up In ripples to my mouth; how in my hand The shadow lies like wine within a cup Of marvellously colour'd gold.

In _The Eve of Crecy_ we have the glitter of gold and the splendour of material things, rendered with a childish abandon, as in the prose romances:

Gold on her head and gold on her feet, And gold where the hems of her kirtle meet, And a golden girdle round my sweet;-- Ah! qu'elle est belle, La Marguerite.

Yet even now it is good to think

Of Margaret sitting glorious there, In glory of gold and glory of hair, And glory of glorious face most fair; Ah! qu'elle est belle, La Marguerite.

The full hues that had for the decorators of mediaeval missals a religious significance recur again and again in lines that have much more to do with earth than with heaven, and show less concern with the human soul than with the human heart. Damozels hold scarlet lilies such as Maiden Margaret bears "on the great church walls;" ladies walk in their gardens clad in white and scarlet; the vision of Christ appears to Galahad "with raiment half blood-red, half white as snow"; angels appear clad in white with scarlet wings; scarlet is the predominating colour throughout, if we except gold, which serves as background and ornament to everything. Next to scarlet comes green, which Morris was later to call "the workaday colour," and we find occasional patches of blue and of grey in painted boats and in hangings. The following stanza shows a favourite method of emphasising the prevailing colour of a poem:

The water slips, The red-bill'd heron dips, Sweet kisses on red lips, Alas! the red rust grips, And the blood-red dagger rips, Yet, O knight, come to me!

For pure incoherence, the quality that Rossetti discerned in Morris at their first meeting, the song from which this stanza is taken is unsurpa.s.sed. Yet an emotional effect is gained in it. What we chiefly miss in the little craft sailing under such vivid colours, is that "deep-grasping keel of reason" which, Lowell says, "alone can steady and give direction" to verse. Excitable and impatient, in pursuit of a vague ideal, gifted with the power to bring out the pictorial quality of detached scenes, but without a fine metrical sense, and averse to lucid statement, the young poet introduced himself to the world as a symbolist in the modern acceptation of the word. One of his poems, _Rapunzel_, has been said to forecast Maeterlinck's manner and spirit, and the general characteristics of the poem--a fairy tale somewhat too "grown-up" in treatment--certainly suggest the comparison. In all this work physical characteristics play an important part. Long hands with "tenderly shadowed fingers," "long lips" that "cleave" to the fingers they kiss, lips "damp with tears," that "shudder with a kiss," lips "like a curved sword," warm arms, long, fair arms, lithe arms, twining arms, broad fair eyelids, long necks, and unlimited hair, form an equipment somewhat dangerous for a poet with anything short of genius to sustain him. For themes Morris had gone chiefly to the Arthurian stories and to the chronicles of Froissart. His style, he himself thought, was more like Browning's than anyone else's, though the difference that lay between him and Browning even at the beginning forbade any essential likeness. Browning's effort was always to render an idea which was perfectly clear in his own mind. His volubility and obscurity and roughness frequently arose from his over-eagerness to express his idea in a variety of ways, leading him to break off with half statements and begin afresh, to throw out imperfect suggestions and follow them with others equally imperfect. But all his stutterings and broken sentences failed to disguise the fact that an intellectual conception underlay the turbulent method, giving substance and life to the poem however much it might lack grace and form. With Morris the intellectual conception was as weak as with Browning it was strong, and apparently existed chiefly to give an excuse for the pictures following one another in rapid succession through every poem, short or long, dramatic or lyric, of both his youth and maturity. In this early volume there was, to be sure, an obvious effort toward rendering psychological effects. Most of the longer poems are miniature dramas with a march toward some great event in the lives of the actors. The author observes the dramatic requirement of sinking himself in the ident.i.ty of his characters. Knights are slain and ladies die of love and witch-bound maidens are rescued by their princes without the sounding of a personal note on the part of their creator. And in two instances, _Sir Peter Harpdon's End_ and _The Haystack in the Floods_, there is ruddy human blood in the tortured beings whose extremity moves the reader with a genuine emotion. In these two poems the voice might indeed be the voice of Browning, though the hand is still unmistakably the hand of Morris. In the main, however, the appeal that is made is to the imagination concerned with the visible aspect of brilliantly coloured objects and with the delirious expression of overwrought feelings.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Portrait of Jane Burden (Mrs. Morris)_

_By Rossetti_]

One defect, calculated to interfere with a warm reception of the volume on the part of the general public, Morris shared with Browning, possessing even more than Browning the merit attending it. Familiarity with the art and literature of the Middle Ages made it natural for him to preserve the thin new wine of his youthful poetry in the old bottles of the defunct past, using motives and scenes and accessories alien to our modern life, and only dimly understood by the modern reader. The true spirit of that past it is hardly necessary to say he did not revive,--no writer has ever revived the true spirit of any age antecedent to his own,--and Morris, with his remarkable faculty for eliminating from his mental conceptions whatever did not please his taste, was wholly unfitted by temperament, however well fitted by his acquirements, to carry through successfully a task so tremendous.

_The Defence of Guenevere_ was received by the public without enthusiasm.

About half an edition of five hundred copies was sold and given away, and the remainder lingered for a dozen years or more until the publication of _The Earthly Paradise_ stimulated the interest of readers in the previous work of its author.

Whatever disappointment Morris may have felt must soon have given way to the excitement of the plunge he now made into a new life and the most intense personal interests. On the twenty-sixth of April, 1859, he was married to Jane Burden, and after a brief interval of travel he began to build the beautiful house which he then supposed would be his home for the rest of his days.

His personal attractiveness at this time was keenly felt by his companions. He had been "making himself," as the phrase is, since his childhood, and if Stevenson's dictum--to know what you like is the beginning of wisdom and of old age--be applied to him he can never have been wholly ignorant or a child. Knowledge of what he liked, and even more definitely of what he did not like, was his earliest as well as his most notable acquirement. But he was a boy, too, in his excessive restless vitality, and hitherto with all his enthusiasms he had been a somewhat cold boy. Just now he was beginning to "take a fancy for the human," as one of his friends put it. He was connecting his vague schemes and ambitions with a personal and practical enterprise. His ideals dropped from a region always too rare for them to an atmosphere of activities and interests in which the vast general public could breathe as easily as he.

In building his new home to his fancy he was unconsciously laying the corner-stones of the many homes throughout England into which his influence was afterward to enter. He was just twenty-five, filled with energy, generous impulse, honesty, and kindness. The bourgeois touch which his biographer declares was inherent in his nature was far from obvious as yet. Society for its own sake he liked little, and was not above getting out of unwelcome invitations by subterfuge, if fair means would not avail.

He affected a Bohemian carelessness in dress, and his hair was uniformly wild. His language was generally forcible, often violent, always expressive. He lived in the company of his intimates and cared for nothing beyond the range of his fixed interests. The remark made long after--"Do you suppose that I should see anything in Rome that I can't see in Whitechapel?"--was perfectly indicative of his mood toward everything that failed to arouse his intellectual curiosity. But the places and things that did arouse it were never tawdry or valueless, and his reasons for caring for them, of which he was always remarkably prolific, were such as appeal strongly to the mind in which homely a.s.sociations hold a constant place. It must be an out and out cla.s.sicist who fails to detect in himself a pulsation of sympathy in response to the wail which Morris once sent home from Verona: "Yes, and even in these magnificent and wonderful towns I long rather for the heap of grey stones with a grey roof that we call a house north-away."

[Ill.u.s.tration: "ACANTHUS" WALL-PAPER, "PIMPERNEL" WALL-PAPER, "AFRICAN MARIGOLD" COTTON-PRINT

WALL-PAPER AND COTTON-PRINT DESIGNS

(_Reproduced from examples obtained by courtesy of Mr. A. E. Bulkley_)]

His first house, in which he took unlimited delight, was not, however, a heap of grey stones, but a structure of brick, its name, the Red House, indicating its striking and then unusual colour. Its architect was Philip Webb, who had been an a.s.sociate of Morris during the brief period pa.s.sed in Mr. Street's office. Situated not far from London, on the outskirts of the village of Upton and in the midst of a pleasant orchard, whose trees dropped their fruit into its windows, the Red House wore an emphatically Gothic aspect. It was L-shaped, with numerous irregularities of plan, and entirely without frippery of applied ornament. Its great sloping roof, the pointed arches of its doorways, the deep simple porches, the large hall, with its long table in place of an entrance alley the open-timbered roof over the staircase, the panelled screen dividing the great hall from a lesser one,--all these were characteristic of the old English house before the day of Italian invasion, while the mobile Gothic style, adapting itself readily to individual needs, prevailed. It stood among the old and gnarled trees, only two stories in height, but with an effect of rambling s.p.a.ciousness and hospitality, and the garden that lay close to it was as individual and old-fashioned as itself. Morris prided himself, Mr. Mackail tells us, on his knowledge of gardening, and his advice to the Birmingham Society of Artists in one of the lectures of his later years shows how thoughtfully he considered the subject. As he always acted so far as he could upon his theories, we may be fairly sure that the Red House garden was planned in conformity with the ideal place sketched in this lecture, and may a.s.sume in it a profusion of single flowers mixed to avoid great ma.s.ses of colour, among them the old columbine, where the cl.u.s.tering doves are unmistakable and distinct, the old china aster, the single snowdrop, and the sunflower, these planted in little squares, divided from each other by gra.s.sy walks, and hedged in by wild rose or sweet-briar trellises. We may be sure the place contained no curiosities from the jungle or tropical waste, that everything was excluded which was not native to the English soil, and that ferns and brakes from the woodland were not enticed from the place of their origin to take away the characteristic domestic look of a spot that ought to seem "like a part of the house." "It will be a key to right thinking about gardens," says Morris, "if you consider in what kind of places a garden is most desired.

In a very beautiful country, especially if it be mountainous, we can do without it well enough, whereas in a flat and dull country we crave after it, and there it is often the very making of the homestead; while in great towns, gardens both private and public are positive necessities if the citizens are to live reasonable and healthy lives in body and mind."

Pa.s.sing from this first necessity of reasonable and healthy living through the rose-masked doorway into the Red House itself, we find it equally suggestive of its master's personal tastes and beliefs. For everything Morris had his persuasive reason. His windows had small leaded panes of gla.s.s, because the large windows found "in most decent houses or what are so called," let in a flood of light "in a haphazard and ill-considered way," which the indwellers are "forced to obscure again by shutters, blinds, curtains, screens, heavy upholsteries, and such other nuisances."

By all means, therefore, fill the window with moderate-sized panes of gla.s.s set in solid sash bars--"we shall then at all events feel as if we were indoors on a cold day"--as if we had a roof over our heads. The fact that small windows were used in mediaeval times and must therefore of necessity be superior is not brought forward in this argument, and the charm of the reasoning is not marred by any reminder of the actual conditions of which small heavily leaded windows are a survival--such as the fortress style of building belonging to a warlike time, and the great costliness of gla.s.s, and the inability to support large panes by leads.

Morris could always be trusted to support his fundamental liking for a thing by a host of a.s.surances as to its sensible merits and practical advantages, but the mere fact that he liked it was quite sufficient for his own satisfaction of mind. When one of his comrades once suggested to him that personal feeling ought not to count for too much, and that not liking a thing did not make it bad, he replied: "Oh, don't it though! What we don't like _is_ bad." And he had a fashion which must have produced an irritating effect upon some of his hearers, of declaring that the people who did not hold his ideas must be unhealthy either in body or mind or both. Certainly the aspect of the Red House suggested health within its walls. With a slight stretch of imagination one could argue from its furnishings that its master was a northerner, a middle-cla.s.s man, the admirer of a rough age, a st.u.r.dy art, a plain habit of life; that he was a worker whose dreams tormented him to speedy and vigorous action, a creature whose vitality was too great even for his strong frame and physical power. He liked a ma.s.sive chair, and well he might, for one of his amus.e.m.e.nts was to twist his legs about it in such a way that a lightly built affair must instantly succ.u.mb. He liked a floor that he could stamp on with impunity; he liked a table on which he could pound with his fists without danger to its equilibrium. In the Red House these requirements were fully met. In the lecture called _The Beauty of Life_ is an account of the fittings "necessary to the sitting-room of a healthy person."

Beside the table that will "keep steady when you work upon it," and the chairs "that you can move about," the good floor, and the small carpet "which can be bundled out of the room in two minutes," there must be "a bookcase with a great many books in it," a bench "that you can sit or lie upon," a cupboard with drawers, and, "unless either the bookcase or the cupboard be very beautiful with painting or carving," pictures or engravings on the wall, "or else the wall itself must be ornamented with some beautiful and restful pattern," then a vase or two, and fireplaces as unlike as possible to "the modern mean, miserable, and showy affairs, plastered about with wretched sham ornament, trumpery of cast iron, and bra.s.s and polished steel, and what not--offensive to look at and a nuisance to clean." To these necessaries, "unless we are musical and need a piano, in which case as far as beauty is concerned we are in a bad way,"

we can add very little without "troubling ourselves, and hindering our work, our thought, and our rest."

In accordance with these opinions, but with a fulness and richness of ornament not suggested by the simplicity of their expression, the pleasant building at Upton gradually took on great beauty and individuality. The walls were hung with embroidered fabrics worked by Mrs. Morris and her friends, or painted by Burne-Jones, who, undeterred by the Oxford episode, started an elaborate series of mural decorations in ill.u.s.tration of the wonderful adventures of Sire Degravant, the hero of an ancient romance.

Another series of scenes from the War of Troy was started for the walls of the staircase, and although both schemes were abandoned, enough was done to give an effect of splendour to the rooms. Up to the large drawing-room came the ponderous and mighty settle which had cost so many expletives in the course of its adjustment to the old room in Red Lion Square, and which was now embellished by a balcony at the top to which a stairway led up.

All minor accessories were thoughtfully considered and for the most part designed by Morris or by friends pressed into service at his eager demand.

He found little to content him in the articles of commerce on sale at the orthodox shops in the early sixties. "In looking at an old house," he says in one of his books, "we please ourselves by thinking of all the generations of men that have pa.s.sed through it, remembering how it has received their joy and borne their sorrow and not even their folly has left sourness on it; and in looking at a new house if built as it should be, we feel a pleasure in thinking how he who built it has left a piece of his soul behind him to greet the newcomers one after another, long after he is gone." Such an impress he left upon the Red House, so that no one pa.s.sing it or even hearing of it can fail to think of it as belonging to William Morris, whoever may have the fortune to live in it hereafter, and fall heir to the a.s.sociations with which he invested it.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "THE STRAWBERRY THIEF" DESIGN FOR COTTON PRINT]

During the time of building and furnishing he was exuberantly happy and wholly in his element. Turning constantly from one thing to another, yet keeping along the line of his united interests, giving his magnificent energy free scope in doing and accomplishing, seeing grow into visible form the theories and tastes so dear to his heart, letting out his enthusiasms and carrying others along on their current, setting a practical example in what he believed to be of the deepest importance by requiring for himself artistic handicraft, acting out a vigorous protest against the mechanical arts and the shams of the commercial world,--all this was meat and drink to him, and out of it grew an enterprise representing what to the public has been probably the most valuable side of his many-sided career, the establishment of a firm engaged in various forms of decorative art. At about this time he adopted, after the fashion of the master-workman of the Middle Ages, a device or legend expressive in one way or another of his aim. He chose the one used by Van Eyck, "Als ich kanne,"--if I can,--and distributed it in French translation and in English over his house, on windows and tiles and in tapestry hangings. The modesty of the words was no doubt as sincere in his case as in the case of the old Flemish painter who excelled all his contemporaries, but the extent to which he could and did in the new business on which he was about to enter has been the wonder of his followers.

CHAPTER IV.

MORRIS AND COMPANY.

The formation of the firm of "Morris, Marshall, Faulkner, & Company," as it was first called, appears to have been highly incidental in character, despite the a.s.sertion of Morris himself in a letter to his old tutor, that he had long meant to be a decorator, and to that end mainly had built his fine house. "One evening a lot of us were together," says Rossetti, in the account given by Mr. Watts-Dunton, "and we got to talking about the way in which artists did all kinds of things in olden times, designed every kind of decoration and most kinds of furniture, and someone suggested--as a joke more than anything else--that we should each put down five pounds and form a company. Fivers were blossoms of a rare growth among us in those days, and I won't swear that the table bristled with fivers. Anyhow the firm was formed, but of course there was no deed or anything of that kind.

In fact it was a mere playing at business, and Morris was elected manager, not because we ever dreamed he would turn out a man of business, but because he was the only one among us who had both time and money to spare.

We had no idea whatever of commercial success, but it succeeded almost in our own despite."

In the mind of Morris it doubtless promised to be the sort of a.s.sociation about which he was constantly dreaming; a group of intelligent craftsmen interested in making the details of daily life as full as possible of beauty, each man fitted to his task and loving it, each in his way a master-workman of the guild, counting his craft honourable and spending his best thought and labour on it. There was ground enough for faith in the artistic if not in the commercial outcome of the enterprise. The a.s.sociates, beside Morris, Rossetti, and Burne-Jones, were Madox-Brown, then an artist of established reputation, Webb, the architect of the Red House, who was also a designer of furniture and ornament; Peter Paul Marshall, to whom Mr. William Rossetti ascribes the first suggestion of the formation of the firm, a "capable artist" although an amateur; and Charles Faulkner of the Oxford group, who had followed his mates to London unable to endure the loneliness of Oxford without them. They proposed to open what Rossetti called "an actual shop," and sell whatever their united talent produced. "We are not intending to compete with ----'s costly rubbish or anything of that sort," Rossetti wrote to his friend Allingham, "but to give real good taste at the price as far as possible of ordinary furniture."

[Ill.u.s.tration: TULIP DESIGN FOR AXMINSTER CARPET]

In the Spring of 1861, premises were taken over a jeweller's shop at 8 Red Lion Square. Two floors and a part of the bas.e.m.e.nt were used by the firm, and about a dozen men and boys were presently employed. There were regular weekly meetings carried on with the boisterousness of youth and high spirits, but with thorough efficiency, nevertheless, where plans that were to modify and influence the household decoration of all England were gaily formed and put into practice.