William Morris Part 6

"Bind the red rings, O Sigurd! for the ways go green below, Go green to the dwelling of Kings, and the halls that the Queen-folk know.

"Bind the red rings, O Sigurd! for what is there bides by the way, Save the joy of folk to awaken, and the dawn of the merry day?

"Bind the red rings, O Sigurd! for the strife awaits thine hand And a plenteous war-field's reaping, and the praise of many a land.

"Bind the red rings, O Sigurd! but how shall storehouse hold That glory of thy winning and the tidings to be told?"

Now the moon was dead and the star-worlds were great on the heavenly plain, When the steed was fully laden; then Sigurd taketh the rein And turns to the ruined rock-wall that the lair was built beneath, For there he deemed was the gate and the door of the Glittering Heath, But not a whit moved Greyfell for aught that the King might do; Then Sigurd pondered awhile, till the heart of the beast he knew, And clad in all his war-gear he leaped to the saddle-stead, And with pride and mirth neighed Greyfell and tossed aloft his head, And sprang unspurred o'er the waste, and light and swift he went, And breasted the broken rampart, the stony tumbled bent; And over the brow he clomb, and there beyond was the world, A place of many mountains and great crags together hurled.

So down to the west he wendeth, and goeth swift and light, And the stars are beginning to wane, and the day is mingled with night; For full fain was the sun to arise and look on the Gold set free, And the Dwarf-wrought rings of the Treasure and the gifts from the floor of the sea.

Beautiful and full of poetic spirit and suggestion as this phraseology is, a reader may be forgiven if it recalls the reply of Hamlet when asked by Polonius what it is he reads. Compared with the swift dramatic method employed by Wagner to make the heroes and heroines of this same saga live for our time, it must be admitted that the latter drives home with the greater energy and conviction. Morris himself, however, was "not much interested" in anything Wagner did, looking 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."

To the group of translations and adaptations already described must be added one other ambitious effort which belongs to it, properly speaking, although separated from it in time by more than ten years. In 1887 Morris published a translation of the _Odyssey_, written in anapaestic couplets, and rendered as literally as by the prose crib of which he made frank use.

Mr. Watts-Dunton finds in this translation the Homeric eagerness, although the Homeric dignity is lacking. The majority of competent critics were against it, however, nor is a high degree of cla.s.sical training necessary to perceive in it an incoherence and clumsiness of diction impossible to a.s.sociate with the lucid images of the Greeks. Compare, for example, Morris's account of the recognition of Ulysses by Argus with Bryant's limpid rendering of the same episode, and the tortured style of the former is obvious at once. Bryant's translation reads:

There lay Argus, devoured with vermin. As he saw Ulysses drawing near, he wagged his tail And dropped his ears, but found that he could come No nearer to his master. Seeing this Ulysses wiped away a tear unmark'd By the good swineherd whom he questioned thus: "Eumaeus, this I marvel at,--this dog That lies upon the dunghill, beautiful In form, but whether in the chase as fleet As he is fairly shaped I cannot tell.

Worthless, perchance, as house-dogs often are Whose masters keep them for the sake of show."

And thus, Eumaeus, thou didst make reply:

"The dog belongs to one who died afar.

Had he the power of limb which once he had For feats of hunting when Ulysses sailed For Troy and left him, thou wouldst be amazed Both at his swiftness and his strength. No beast In the thick forest depths which once he saw, Or even tracked by footprints, could escape.

And now he is a sufferer, since his lord Has perished far from his own land. No more The careless women heed the creature's wants; For, when the master is no longer near, The servants cease from their appointed tasks, And on the day that one becomes a slave The Thunderer, Jove takes half his worth away."

He spake, and, entering that fair dwelling-place, Pa.s.sed through to where the ill.u.s.trious suitors sat, While over Argus the black night of death Came suddenly as soon as he had seen Ulysses, absent now for twenty years.

And here is the description by Morris of the infinitely touching scene:

There then did the woodhound Argus all full of ticks abide; But now so soon as he noted Odysseus drawing anear He wagged his tail, and fawning he laid down either ear, But had no might to drag him nigher from where he lay To his master, who beheld him and wiped a tear away That he lightly hid from Eumaeus, unto whom he spake and said:

"Eumaeus, much I marvel at the dog on the dung-heap laid; Fair-shapen is his body, but nought I know indeed If unto this his fairness he hath good running speed, Or is but like unto some--men's table-dogs I mean, Which but because of their fairness lords cherish to be seen."

Then thou, O swineherd Eumaeus, didst speak and answer thus:

"Yea, this is the hound of the man that hath died aloof from us; And if yet to do and to look on he were even such an one As Odysseus left behind him when to Troy he gat him gone Then wouldest thou wonder beholding his speed and hardihood, For no monster that he followed through the depths of the tangled wood Would he blench from, and well he wotted of their trail and where it led.

But now ill he hath, since his master in an alien land is dead, And no care of him have the women, that are heedless here and light; Since thralls whenso they are missing their masters' rule and might.

No longer are they willing to do the thing that should be; For Zeus, the loud-voiced, taketh half a man's valiancy Whenso the day of thralldom hath hold of him at last."

So saying into the homestead of the happy place he pa.s.sed And straight to the hall he wended 'mid the Wooers overbold.

But the murky doom of the death-day of Argus now took hold When he had looked on Odysseus in this the twentieth year.

The decade between the publication of _The Earthly Paradise_ and _Sigurd the Volsung_ had been one of sustained literary effort varied, as we have seen, but hardly interrupted by the work in decoration. The latter Morris called his "bread-and-cheese work," the former his "pleasure work of books." The time had not yet come for a complete union between the two, although it was foreshadowed by the illuminated ma.n.u.scripts made for friends during these years. A selection from his own poems, a translation of the _Eyrbyggja Saga_, a copy of Fitzgerald's _Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam_, and the _aeneid_ of Virgil were among the works that Morris undertook to transcribe with his own hand on vellum, with decorative margins with results of great beauty. He had now long been happy in work calling out all this enthusiasm, but the world was going on without, to use his own words, "beautiful and strange and dreadful and worshipful."

He was approaching the time when his conscience would no longer let him rest in the thought that he was "not born to set the crooked straight."

CHAPTER VII.

PUBLIC LIFE AND SOCIALISM.

In the autumn of 1876, just after the publication of _Sigurd the Volsung_, Morris took his first dip in the ocean of public affairs, the waves of which were presently almost to submerge him. He was forty-two years of age, and had thus far managed to keep well within the range of his individual interests and away from the political and social questions that none the less stirred in his mind from time to time, and p.r.i.c.ked him to random a.s.sertions that he would have nothing to do with them, that his business was with dreams, and that he would remain "the idle singer of an empty day." He was roused to action, however, by the barbarous ma.s.sacre on the part of the Mussulman soldiery of men, women, and children in Bulgaria, the news of which moved the heart of England to a frenzy of indignation. When Russia intervened, the possibility that England might take up arms on the side of Turkey in order to erect a barrier against Russian aggression was intolerable to him, and he wrote to the _Daily News_ in eloquent protestation. "I who am writing this," he said, with a just appreciation of his ordinary att.i.tude toward political matters, "am one of a large cla.s.s of men--quiet men, who usually go about their own business, heeding public matters less than they ought, and afraid to speak in such a huge concourse as the English nation, however much they may feel, but who are now stung into bitterness by thinking how helpless they are in a public matter that touches them so closely." "I appeal," he continued, "to the workingmen, and pray them to look to it that if this shame falls upon them they will certainly remember it and be burdened by it when their day clears for them and they attain all and more than all they are now striving for." Again in the spring of 1877, when war seemed imminent, Morris appealed "to the workingmen of England," issuing a manifesto which was practically his first Socialist doc.u.ment and heralded the long series of lectures and addresses, poems, articles, and treatises, presently to take the place of romances and epics in his literary life.

After declaring that the people who were bringing on the war were "greedy gamblers on the Stock Exchange, idle officers of the army and navy (poor fellows!), worn-out mockers of the clubs, desperate purveyors of exciting war-news for the comfortable breakfast-tables of those who have nothing to lose by war, and lastly, in the place of honour, the Tory Rump, that we fools, weary of peace, reason, and justice, chose at the last election to represent us," he added a pa.s.sage that reads like the outcome of many a heated discussion with brethren of his own social cla.s.s.

"Workingmen of England, one word of warning yet," he said: "I doubt if you know the bitterness of hatred against freedom and progress that lies at the hearts of a certain part of the richer cla.s.ses in this country; their newspapers veil it in a kind of decent language, but do but hear them talking amongst themselves, as I have often, and I know not whether scorn or anger would prevail in you at their folly and insolence. These men cannot speak of your order, of its aims, of its leaders, without a sneer or an insult; these men, if they had the power (may England perish rather!) would thwart your just aspirations, would silence you, would deliver you bound hand and foot forever to irresponsible capital.

Fellow-citizens, look to it, and if you have any wrongs to be redressed, if you cherish your most worthy hope of raising your whole order peacefully and solidly, if you thirst for leisure and knowledge, if you long to lessen these inequalities which have been our stumbling-block since the beginning of the world, then cast aside sloth and cry out against an Unjust War, and urge us of the middle cla.s.ses to do no less."

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Picture by Rossetti in which the Children's Faces are Portraits of May Morris_]

By this time he was treasurer of the Eastern Question a.s.sociation, and working with all his might against the principles of the war party in England, contributing to the general agitation the political ballad called _Wake, London Lads!_ which was sung with much enthusiasm at one of the meetings to the appropriate air, _The Hardy Norseman's Home of Yore_, and was afterwards freely distributed in the form of a leaflet among the mechanics of London. It was during this period of political activity that J. R. Green wrote of him to E. A. Freeman: "I rejoiced to see the poet Morris--whom Oliphant setteth even above you for his un-Latinisms--brought to grief by being prayed to draw up a circular on certain Eastern matters, and gravelled to find 'English words.' I insidiously persuaded him that the literary committee had fixed on him to write one of a series of pamphlets which Gladstone wants brought out for the public enlightenment, and that the subject a.s.signed him was 'The Results of the Incidence of Direct Taxation on the Christian Rayah,' but that he was forbidden to speak of the 'onfall of straight geld,' or other such 'English' forms. I left him musing and miserable." Musing and miserable he may well have been at finding that his duty, as he conceived it, was leading him into such unlovely paths, but the English of his polemical writings was unmistakable enough and unconfused by any affectations, Saxon or Latin. In declining to stand for the Professorship of Poetry at Oxford on the occasion of Matthew Arnold's withdrawal from it, he had confessed to a peculiar inapt.i.tude for expressing himself except in the one way in which his gift lay, and it was true that his mind was singularly inept outside its natural course. He had not a reasoning mind. His opinions, dictated as they were chiefly by sentiment, were not worked out by the careful processes dear to genuine thinkers. But he was before all things a believer. No man was ever more certain of the absolute rect.i.tude of his views, and by this sincerity of conviction they were driven home to his public. He was so eager to make others feel as he felt that he spent his utmost skill upon the delivery of his message, using the simple and downright phrases that could be understood by the least cultivated of his hearers. It was impossible to listen to him, says one of his friends, not a convert to his views, without for the time at least agreeing with him. Thus he conquered the "peculiar inapt.i.tude" of which he speaks by the force of his great integrity, and although he complained that "the cursed words" went to water between his fingers, they accomplished their object.

"When the crisis in the East was past," says Mr. Mackail, "it left Morris thoroughly in touch with the Radical leaders of the working cla.s.s in London, and well acquainted with the social and economic ideas which, under the influence of widening education and of the international movement among the working cla.s.ses, were beginning to transform their political creed from an individualist Radicalism into a more or less definite doctrine of State Socialism." This contact was sufficient to kindle into activity the ideas implanted in his own mind during his college days. Carlyle had then thundered forth his amazing anathemas against modern civilisation and had declaimed that Gurth born thrall of Cedric, with a bra.s.s collar round his neck, was happy in comparison with the poor of to-day enjoying their "liberty to die by starvation," no displeasing gospel to a young mediaevalist; while Ruskin had preached with vociferous eloquence the doctrine that happiness in labour is the end and aim of life. From the beginning of his work in decorative art Morris had shown the influence of these beliefs in peace. He was now to let them lead him into war.

Before he wrote himself down a Socialist, however, he set on foot a movement not so important in the eyes of the public, but much more characteristic of his personal mission in the world of life and art. He had long before learned from Ruskin that the so-called restoration of public monuments meant "the most total destruction which a building can suffer: a destruction out of which no remnants can be gathered: a destruction accompanied with false description of the thing destroyed."

Whatever his feeling may have been concerning the destructive restoration, of which he must have seen manifold examples before this period of his middle age, he seems to have awakened rather suddenly to the necessity of taking some active measure to check the ravages of the restorer. Goaded, finally, by the sight of alterations going on in one of the beautiful parish churches near Kelmscott, he conceived the idea of forming a society of protest. Early in 1877 the impending fate of the Abbey Church at Tewkesbury, under the devastating hands of Sir Gilbert Scott, prompted him to put the idea at once before the public, and he wrote to the _Athenaeum_ a letter in which he went straight to the heart of his subject with clearness and simplicity.

"My eye just now caught the word 'restoration' in the morning paper," he wrote, "and on looking closer, I saw that this time it is nothing less than the Minster of Tewkesbury that is to be destroyed by Sir Gilbert Scott. Is it altogether too late to do something to save it,--it and whatever else of beautiful and historical is still left us on the sites of the ancient buildings we were once so famous for? Would it not be of some use once for all, and with the least delay possible, to set on foot an a.s.sociation for the purpose of watching over and protecting these relics which, scanty as they are now become, are still wonderful treasures, all the more priceless in this age of the world, when the newly-invented study of living history is the chief joy of so many of our lives?

"Your paper has so steadily and courageously opposed itself to these acts of barbarism which the modern architect, parson, and squire call 'restoration,' that it would be waste of words here to enlarge on the ruin that has been wrought by their hands; but, for the saving of what is left, I think I may write you a word of encouragement, and say that you by no means stand alone in the matter, and that there are many thoughtful people who would be glad to sacrifice time, money, and comfort in defence of those ancient monuments; besides, though I admit that the architects are, with very few exceptions, hopeless, because interest, habit, and an ignorance yet grosser, bind them; still there must be many people whose ignorance is accidental rather than inveterate, whose good sense could surely be touched if it were clearly put to them that they were destroying what they, or more surely still, their sons and sons' sons would one day fervently long for, and which no wealth or energy could ever buy again for them.

"What I wish for, therefore, is that an a.s.sociation should be set on foot to keep a watch on old monuments, to protest against all 'restoration'

that means more than keeping out wind and weather, and, by all means, literary and other, to awaken a feeling that our ancient buildings are not mere ecclesiastical toys, but sacred monuments of the nation's growth and hope."

In less than a month the a.s.sociation was formed under the t.i.tle of the "Society for Protection of Ancient Buildings," abbreviated by Morris to the "Anti-Sc.r.a.pe Society," in cheerful reference to the pernicious sc.r.a.ping and pointing indulged in by the restorers. Morris was made secretary of the Society, and, as long as he lived, worked loyally in its behalf, giving, in addition to time and money, the labour, which to him was grievous, of lecturing for it. He wrote a prospectus that was translated into French, German, Italian, and Dutch, and among the more important of his protests were those against the demolition of some of the most beautiful portions of St. Mark's at Venice, and the "bedizening" of the interior of Westminster Abbey.

For the sentiment which inspired him, the inextinguishable love in his heart toward every example however humble of the art he reverenced, we may turn to one of the most eloquently reasonable pa.s.sages of his numerous lectures. Closing his account of pattern designing with a reference to the creation of modern or Gothic art, he says: "Never until the time of that death or cataleptic sleep of the so-called Renaissance did it forget its origin, or fail altogether in fulfilling its mission of turning the ancient curse of labour into something more like a blessing."

"As to the way in which it did its work," he continues, "as I have no time, so also I have but little need to speak, since there is none of us but has seen and felt some portion of the glory which it left behind, but has shared some portion of that most kind gift it gave the world; for even in this our turbulent island, the home of rough and homely men, so far away from the centres of art and thought which I have been speaking of, did simple folk labour for those that shall come after them. Here in the land we yet love they built their homes and temples; if not so majestically as many peoples have done, yet in such sweet accord with the familiar nature amidst which they dwelt, that when by some happy chance we come across the work they wrought, untouched by any but natural change, it fills us with a satisfying untroubled happiness that few things else could bring us. Must our necessities destroy, must our restless ambition mar, the sources of this innocent pleasure, which rich and poor may share alike--this communion with the very hearts of the departed men? Must we sweep away these touching memories of our stout forefathers and their troublous days that won our present peace and liberties?

"If our necessities compel us to it, I say we are an unhappy people; if our vanity lure us into it, I say we are a foolish and light-minded people, who have not the wits to take a little trouble to avoid spoiling our own goods. Our own goods? Yes, the goods of the people of England, now and in time to come: we who are now alive are but life-renters of them.

Any of us who pretend to any culture know well that in destroying or injuring one of these buildings we are destroying the pleasure, the culture--in a word, the humanity--of unborn generations. It is speaking very mildly to say that we have no right to do this for our temporary convenience. It is speaking too mildly. I say any such destruction is an act of brutal dishonesty.... It is in the interest of living art and living history that I oppose 'restoration.' What history can there be in a building bedaubed with ornament, which cannot at best be anything but a hopeless and lifeless imitation of the hope and vigour of the earlier world? As to the art that is concerned in it, a strange folly it seems to me for us who live among these bricken ma.s.ses of hideousness, to waste the energies of our short lives in feebly trying to add new beauty to what is already beautiful. Is that all the surgery we have for the curing of England's spreading sore? Don't let us vex ourselves to cure the antepenultimate blunders of the world, but fall to on our own blunders.

Let us leave the dead alone, and, ourselves living, build for the living and those that shall live. Meantime, my plea for our Society is this, that since it is disputed whether restoration be good or not, and since we are confessedly living in a time when architecture has come on the one hand to Jerry building, and on the other to experimental designing (good, very good experiments some of them), let us take breath and wait; let us sedulously repair our ancient buildings, and watch every stone of them as if they were built of jewels (as indeed they are), but otherwise let the dispute rest till we have once more learned architecture, till we once more have among us a reasonable, n.o.ble, and universally used style. Then let the dispute be settled. I am not afraid of the issue. If that day ever comes, we shall know what beauty, romance, and history mean, and the technical meaning of the word 'restoration' will be forgotten.

"Is not this a reasonable plea? It means prudence. If the buildings are not worth anything they are not worth restoring; if they are worth anything they are at least worth treating with common sense and prudence.

"Come now, I invite you to support the most prudent Society in all England."

It is easy to understand from such examples as this how Morris gained his popularity as a lecturer. In the printed sentences you read the eager, persuasive accent, so convincing because so convinced. On the platform he stood, say his friends, like a conqueror, stalwart and st.u.r.dy, his good grey eyes flashing or twinkling, his voice deepening with feeling, his gesture and speech sudden and spontaneous, his aspect that of an insurgent, a fighter against custom and orthodoxy.

It was not long after the formation of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings that he began to show himself a rebel in more than words against existing social laws. The steps by which he reached his membership in the Democratic Federation in the year 1883 are not very easily traced.

Comments on the distressing gulf between rich and poor and on the conditions under which the modern workingman did his task became more frequent in his letters and addresses. His mind seemed to be gradually adjusting itself to the thought that the only hope for obtaining ideal conditions in which--this was always the ultimate goal--art might be constantly a.s.sociated with handicraft, was perhaps to let art go for the time being, and upset society and all its conventions in preparation for a new earth. "Art must go under," he wrote in one of his private letters "where or however it may come up again." But it was always the fate of art that concerned him. He never really understood what Socialism technically and economically speaking meant. He read its books with labour and sorrow, and struggled with its theories in support of his antagonism to the commercial methods of modern business, but he gained no firm grasp of any underlying political principle. In most of his later addresses he talked pure sentiment concerning social questions, characteristically declaring it to be the purest reason. His avowed belief was that "workmen should be artists and artists workmen," and this, he felt, could only be attained under the freest conditions. A workman should not be clothed in shabby garments, should not be wretchedly housed, overworked, or underfed. But neither will it profit him much if he wear good clothes, and keep short hours, and eat wholesome food, and contribute to the ugliness of the wares turned out by commerce. The idea that a man works only to earn leisure in which he does no work was shocking to him as it had been to Ruskin.

Pleasant work to do, leisure for other work of a different pleasantness, this was what the workingman really wanted if only he knew it. It was clear to Morris that he himself worked "not the least in the world for the sake of earning leisure by it," but "partly driven by the fear of starvation and disgrace," and partly because he loved the work itself; and while he was ready to confess that he spent a part of his leisure "as a dog does" in contemplation, and liked it well enough, he also spent part of it in work which gave him as much pleasure as his bread-earning work, neither more nor less. Obviously if there are men with whom such is not the case it is because they have not the right kind of work to do, and are not doing it in the right way, and it is equally obvious that the wrong work and the wrong way of doing it are forced upon them. Left to themselves they are bound to do what pleases them and what will please others of right minds. The ideal handicraftsman developing under an ideal social order "shall put his own individual intelligence and enthusiasm into the goods he fashions. So far from his labour being 'divided,' which is the technical phrase for his always doing one minute piece of work and never being allowed to think of any other, so far from that, he must know all about the ware he is making and its relation to similar wares; he must have a natural apt.i.tude for his work so strong that no education can force him away from his special bent. He must be allowed to think of what he is doing and to vary his work as the circ.u.mstances of it vary, and his own moods. He must be forever stirring to make the piece he is at work at better than the last. He must refuse at anybody's bidding to turn out, I won't say a bad, but even an indifferent piece of work, whatever the public want or think they want. He must have a voice, and a voice worth listening to in the whole affair."

This att.i.tude is almost identical with that of Ruskin. To see how the theories of master and pupil coincide one has only to read _The Stones of Venice_ and compare with the pa.s.sage quoted above the famous chapter on _The Nature of the Gothic_.

"It is verily this degradation of the operative into a machine," says Ruskin, "which, more than any other evil of the times, is leading the ma.s.s of the nations everywhere into vain, incoherent, destructive struggling for a freedom of which they cannot explain the nature to themselves. Their universal outcry against wealth and against n.o.bility is not forced from them either by the pressure of famine or the sting of mortified pride.

These do much, and have done much in all ages; but the foundations of society were never yet shaken as they are at this day. It is not that men are ill-fed, but that they have no pleasure in the work by which they make their bread, and therefore look to wealth as the only means of pleasure.