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HOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARY 
 OF MODERN KNOWLEDGE 
 
 WILLIAM MORRIS: 
 HIS WORK AND INFLUENCE 
 
 BY A. CLUTTON-BROCK 
 
 LONDON 
 WILLIAMS & NORGATE 
 
 HENRY HOLT & Co., NEW YORK 
 CANADA : WM. BRTGGS, TORONTO 
 INDIA : R. & T. WASHBOURNE, LTD 
 
HOME 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 MODERN KNOWLEDGE 
 
 Editor* i 
 
 HERBERT FISHER, M.A., F.B.A , LL.D. 
 Por. GILBERT MURRAY, D.Lm., 
 LL.D., F.B.A. 
 
 PBOF. J. ARTHUR THOMSON, M.A., 
 
 LL.D. 
 PtOF. WILLIAM T. BREWSTER, M.A. 
 
 (Columbia University, U.S.A.) 
 
 
 
 NEW 
 
 HENRY HOLT 
 
 YORK 
 
 AND COMPANY 
 
 
 - 
 
WILLIAM MORRIS: 
 
 HIS WORK AND 
 
 INFLUENCE 
 
 BY 
 
 A. CLUTTON-BROCK 
 
 AUTHOR OF 
 "SHELLEY: THE MAN AND THE POET" 
 
 
 [ 
 
 LONDON 
 
 WILM4MS AND 
 
 NORGATE 
 
 
 
 CS 
 
 5/2 4/ 
 
Pint Printed April 10U 
 
PREFACE 
 
 IT would be impossible to write any book 
 about William Morris without making use 
 of Mr. Mackail's life of him. My object in 
 this book has not been to write a shorter 
 life of Morris, but to explain his importance 
 to his own time and to ours. I have been, 
 however, under many obligations to Mr. 
 Mackail, which I gratefully acknowledge. 
 I have also made use of Miss May Morris's 
 introduction to the collected edition of her 
 father's works, for which I have to thank 
 her; and I am indebted to Lady Burne- 
 Jones's life of her husband for a few facts 
 and for more general impressions. 
 
 A. CLUTTON-BROCK. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAP. PAGE 
 
 PREFACE ....... V 
 
 I INTRODUCTION 9 
 
 II CHILDHOOD AXD YOUTH .... 28 
 
 III THE INFLUENCE OF ROSSETTI . . 44 
 
 IV THE FOUNDING OF THE FIRM ... 58 
 V MORRIS AS A ROMANTIC POET . . .79 
 
 VI THE REVIVAL OF ARTS AND CRAFTS . . 97 
 
 VII THE SAGAS AND ' SIGURD ' . . .118 
 
 VIII MORRIS AS A SOCIALIST . . . .136 
 
 IX THE PROSE ROMANCES AND LATER POEMS . 178 
 
 X LAST YEARS AND CHARACTER . . 200 
 
 XI THE IDEAS OF WILLIAM MORRIS. . 218 
 
 NOTE ON BOOKS ..... 254 
 
 INDEX ....... 255 
 
 vii 
 
- 
 
 Among the volumes of kindred interest already published 
 in thit series are the following : 
 
 43. English Literature : Mediaeval. By Prof. W. P. Ker. 
 
 27. English Literature : Modern. By G. H. Mair. 
 
 77. Shelley, Godwin, and their Circle. By H. N. Brailsford. 
 
 70. The Victorian Ago in Literature. By G. K. Chesterton. 
 
 63. Painters and Painting. By Sir F. Wedmore. 
 (Illustrated) 
 
 10. The Socialist Movement. By J. Ramsay Macdonakl, 
 M.P. 
 
WILLIAM MORRIS: 
 HIS WORK AND INFLUENCE 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 FROM the middle of the nineteenth century 
 up to the present day we have been passing 
 through a period of aesthetic discontent which 
 still continues and which, so far as we know, 
 is distinct from the many kinds of discontent 
 by which men have been troubled in former 
 ages. No doubt aesthetic discontent has 
 existed before; men have often complained 
 that the art of their own time was inferior 
 to the art of the past; but they have never 
 before been so conscious of this inferiority 
 or felt that it was a reproach to their civiliza- 
 tion and a symptom of some disease affecting 
 the whole of their society. We, powerful 
 in many things beyond any past generation 
 of men, feel that in this one respect we are 
 
10 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 more impotent than many tribes of savages. 
 We can make things such as men have never 
 made before; but we cannot express any 
 feelings of our own in the making of them, 
 and the vast new world of cities which we 
 have made and are making so rapidly, seems 
 to us, compared with the little slow-built 
 cities of the past, either blankly inexpressive 
 or pompously expressive of something which 
 we would rather not have expressed. That 
 is what we mean when we complain of the 
 ugliness of most modern things made by men. 
 They say nothing to us or they say what we 
 do not want to hear, and therefore we should 
 prefer a world without them. 
 
 For us there is a violent contrast between 
 the beauty of nature and the ugliness of 
 man's work which most past ages have felt 
 little or not at all. We think of a town as 
 spoiling the country, and even of a single 
 modern house as a blot on the face of the 
 earth. But in the past, until the eighteenth 
 century, men have thought that their own 
 handiwork heightened the beauty of nature 
 or was, at least, in perfect harmony with it. 
 And we are aware of this harmony in a 
 village church or an old manor house or a 
 thatched cottage, however plain these may 
 
INTRODUCTION II 
 
 be; and wonder at it as a secret which we 
 have lost. 
 
 Indeed, it is a secret which was lost quite 
 definitely in a period of about forty years 
 between 1790 and 1830. Before that period 
 elaborate works of art had often been ugly 
 enough ; but then everything began to be ugly, 
 not through perverse elaboration only but 
 through bad workmanship, bad material, and 
 a loss of all designing power. In the middle 
 of the eighteenth century foolish furniture, 
 not meant to be used, was made for the rich 
 both in France and in England, but the 
 furniture that was meant to be used was 
 simple, well made and well proportioned. 
 Palaces might be pompous and irrational, 
 but plain houses still had the merits of plain 
 furniture. Indeed, whatever men made, with- 
 out trying to be artistic, they made well; 
 and their work had a quiet unconscious beauty 
 which passed unnoticed until the secret of it 
 was lost. When the catastrophe came, it 
 affected less those arts such as painting, 
 which are supported by the conscious 
 patronage of the rich, than those more uni- 
 versal and necessary arts which are main- 
 tained by a general and unconscious liking 
 for good workmanship and rational design. 
 
12 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 There were still painters like Turner and 
 Constable, but soon neither rich nor poor could 
 buy new furniture or any kind of domestic 
 implement that was not hideous. Every new 
 building was vulgar or mean, or both. Every- 
 where the ugliness of irrelevant ornament 
 was combined with the meanness of grudged 
 material and bad workmanship. 
 
 At the time no one seems to have noticed 
 this change. None of the great poets of the 
 Romantic movement, except perhaps Blake, 
 gives a hint of it. They turned with an 
 unconscious disgust from the works of man 
 to nature; and if they speak of art at all 
 it is the art of the Middle Ages, which they 
 enjoyed because it belonged to the past. 
 Indeed the Romantic movement, so far as it 
 affected the arts at all, only afflicted them 
 with a new disease. The Gothic revival, 
 which was a part of the Romantic movement, 
 expressed nothing but a vague dislike of the 
 present with all its associations and a vague 
 desire to conjure up the associations of the 
 past as they were conjured up in Romantic 
 poetry. Pinnacles, pointed arches and stained 
 glass windows were symbols, like that blessed 
 word Mesopotamia; and they were used 
 without propriety or understanding. In fact, 
 
INTRODUCTION 13 
 
 the revival meant nothing except that the 
 public was sick of the native ugliness of its 
 own time and wished to make an excursion 
 into the past as if for change of air and scene. 
 But this weariness was at first quite un- 
 conscious. Men were not aware that the 
 art of their time was afflicted with a disease, 
 still less had they any notion that that 
 disease was social. They had lost a joy in 
 life, but they did not know it until Ruskin 
 came to tell them that they had lost it and 
 why. In him aesthetic discontent first be- 
 came conscious and scientific. For he saw 
 that the prevailing ugliness was not caused 
 merely by the loss of one particular faculty, 
 that the artistic powers of men were not 
 isolated from all their other powers. He was 
 the first to judge works of art as if they were 
 human actions, having moral and intellectual 
 qualities as well as aesthetic; and he saw 
 their total effect as the result of all those 
 qualities and of the condition of the society 
 in which they were produced. So his criti- 
 cism gave a new importance to works of 
 art, as being the clearest expression of men's 
 minds which they can leave to future ages; 
 and in particular it gave a new importance 
 to architecture and all the applied arts,. 
 
14 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 since, being produced by co-operation and 
 for purposes of use, they express the general 
 state of mind better than those arts, such as 
 painting, which are altogether the work of 
 individual artists. All this Ruskin saw ; and 
 he saw that the building and applied art of 
 his own time were bad as they had never 
 been before. And this badness troubled him 
 as if it were something corrupt and sinister in 
 the manners of men and women about him. 
 It was not merely that he missed a pleasure 
 which other ages enjoyed ; he also was aware of 
 a positive evil from which they had been free. 
 Art for him was not a mere superfluity that 
 men could have or not as they chose ; it was 
 a quality of all things made by men, which 
 must be good or bad, and which expressed 
 some goodness or badness in them. So, from 
 being a critic of art, he became a critic of 
 society, and, after writing about old buildings 
 and modern painters, he wrote about political 
 economy, about the order and disorder of 
 that society which produced all the ugliness 
 of his own time. 
 
 Now many men before him had denounced 
 the evils of their day; but he was the first 
 to be turned into a prophet by aesthetic 
 discontent, and the fact that he was so 
 
INTRODUCTION 15 
 
 turned was one of great significance. He 
 was a man of genius who scented a new danger 
 to the life of man and who expressed a new 
 uneasiness which was spreading among the 
 mass of men, though he alone was conscious 
 of it. But he was and remained a critic, 
 one who experienced and reasoned about 
 his experiences rather than one who created. 
 His rebellion was one of thought rather than 
 of action, and the discoveries that he made 
 had still to be confirmed by actual experiment. 
 It was possible for men to say of him that 
 he was a pure theorist ; and indeed he often 
 theorized rashly and wilfully and made many 
 glaring errors of fact. He had the intuition 
 of genius but not the knowledge of practice ; 
 and so he seemed often to speak with more 
 eloquence than authority. 
 
 But he was followed in his rebellion by 
 another man of genius who was by nature 
 not a critic but an artist, that is to say, a 
 man whose chief desire was to make things 
 and to express his own values in the making 
 of them. As Ruskin turned from the criticism 
 of works of art to the criticism of society, so 
 William Morris turned from the making of 
 works of art to the effort to remake society. 
 Mr. Mackail has said of him that he devoted 
 
16 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 the whole of his extraordinary powers towards 
 no less an object than the reconstitution of 
 the civilized life of mankind. That is true, 
 and it had never been true of any artist before 
 him; at least no artist had ever been turned 
 from his art to politics because he was an 
 artist. Morris was so turned; and for that 
 reason he is the chief representative of that 
 aesthetic discontent which is peculiar to our 
 time. 
 
 One might have expected that he would be 
 the last man to feel it ; since he could himself 
 make whatever beautiful things he wanted. 
 Not only could he express his desire for beauty 
 in poetry, but he could also express his own 
 ideas of beauty in all the work of his hands. 
 However ugly the world outside him might 
 be, he could make an earthly Paradise for 
 himself, and could enjoy all the happiness of 
 the artist in doing so. There are some men 
 of great gifts who can never be content with 
 their exercise; but Morris was as happy in 
 making any of the hundred different things 
 that he made so well as a child is happy at 
 play. He knew early in life what he wanted 
 to do; and he was as free as any man could 
 be to do it. At the age of twenty-one he 
 became his own master, with a comfortable 
 
INTRODUCTION 17 
 
 fortune. His father was dead; and, though 
 his mother had cherished the hope that he 
 would become a bishop, she suffered her dis- 
 appointment quietly. He began at once to 
 practise several arts, and satisfied both him- 
 self and the public in his practice of them. 
 So he had no quarrel with the world so far as 
 his own well-being was concerned; indeed 
 he can be compared, for universal good 
 fortune, only with his famous contemporary 
 Leo Tolstoy. And he was like Tolstoy too 
 in this, that his private happiness could 
 neither enervate nor satisfy him. Some men 
 rebel against society because they are un- 
 happy; but Tolstoy and Morris put away 
 their happiness to rebel. Each of them in 
 his own earthly Paradise heard the voice of 
 unhappiness outside it; each saw evil in the 
 world which made his own good intolerable 
 to him. 
 
 They rebelled for different reasons; and 
 to many they have both seemed irrational 
 in their rebellion, for they were both drawn 
 from work for which they had genius to work 
 for which they had none. Tolstoy was not 
 born to be a saint, nor was Morris born 
 to be a revolutionary, and the world has 
 lamented the perverse waste of natural powers 
 
18 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 which their rebellion caused. Indeed, in the 
 case of Morris it has seemed to many that 
 he quarrelled with the world on a trivial 
 point. To them art is a pleasant ornament 
 of life ; but if, for some reason, it is one that 
 society at present cannot excel in, they are 
 well content to do without it, much more 
 content than they would be to do without 
 golf or sport. To them Morris is merely 
 a man who made a great fuss about his own 
 particular line of business. Naturally there 
 was nothing like leather to him ; but men in 
 another line of business cannot be expected 
 to pay much heed to him. 
 
 Morris, himself, however, held that art is 
 everybody's business, whether they are them- 
 selves artists or not. And by art he, like 
 Ruskin, did not mean merely pictures or 
 statues. Indeed, he thought little of these 
 compared with all the work of men's hands 
 that used to be beautiful in the past and now is 
 ugly. The ugliness of houses, tables and chairs, 
 clothes, cups and saucers, in fact of everything 
 that men made, whether they tried to make 
 it beautiful or were content that it should be 
 ugly this universal ugliness at first troubled 
 him like a physical discomfort without his 
 knowing why. And at first he, being himself 
 
INTRODUCTION 19 
 
 a man of action and an artist, merely tried to 
 make beautiful things for himself and others. 
 But gradually he came to see that this 
 single artistic effort of his would avail nothing 
 in a world of ugliness, that all the conditions 
 of our society favoured ugliness and thwarted 
 beauty. He saw, too, from his own experi- 
 ence, that beauty was a symptom of happy 
 work and ugliness of unhappy; and so he 
 became aware that our society was troubled 
 by a new kind of unhappiness which it ex- 
 pressed in the ugliness of all that it made. 
 
 This he knew, as no one else knew it. from 
 his own happiness in his work and the beauty 
 through which he expressed it. If he had 
 been a poet alone, he might never have 
 known it except as a theory of Ruskin's ; but 
 being a worker in twenty different crafts he 
 knew it more surely than Ruskin himself; 
 and the knowledge became intolerable to 
 him, so that he seemed to himself to be a 
 mere idler while he was only doing his own 
 work and enjoying his own happiness in it. 
 He could not rest until he had tried to show 
 other men the happiness they had lost, 
 whether they were rich or poor, whether 
 they were toiling without joy themselves or 
 living on the joyless labour of others. Many 
 
20 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 men have rebelled against society and have 
 preached rebellion because of the fearful 
 contrast between riches and poverty; but 
 it was not poverty that made Morris rebel 
 so much as the nature of the work which 
 in our time most poor men have to do. He 
 believed that their work was joyless as it 
 never had been before ; and that, not poverty, 
 was to him the peculiar evil of our time 
 against which, as a workman himself, he 
 rebelled and wished the poor to rebel. They 
 knew, of course, that they were poor, but they 
 were not aware of this peculiar penalty of 
 their poverty; and he was determined to 
 make both them and the rich aware of it. 
 He would open men's eyes to the meaning 
 of This prevailing ugliness. He would make 
 the rich see that they too were poorer than 
 a peasant of the thirteenth century, in that 
 there was no beauty of their own time in 
 which they could take delight as if it were 
 a general happiness, but only an ugliness 
 that must dispirit them like a general 
 unhappiness. 
 
 So he turned away from his art to preach 
 to men like a Hebrew prophet; but the 
 value of his preaching lay in the fact that 
 he was attacking a new evil that had grown 
 

 INTRODUCTION 21 
 
 up while men were unaware of it. And be- 
 cause the evil was new, they paid little heed 
 to him at first; for men are as conservative 
 in their discontents as in other things, and 
 civilization is always being threatened by 
 new dangers while they are thinking of the 
 old. To Morris the chief danger of our 
 civilization seemed to be the growth of a 
 barbarism caused by joyless labour and of 
 a discontent that did not know its cause. 
 He feared lest the great mass of men should 
 gradually come to believe that our society 
 was not worth the sacrifices that were made 
 for it; indeed, he sometimes hoped that it 
 would be destroyed by this belief. Yet he 
 was determined to do his best to save it, if 
 it could be saved and transformed. For, as 
 Mr. Mackail puts it, he believed that it 
 could not be saved except by a reconstitution 
 of the civilized life of mankind. The rich 
 must learn to love art more than riches, and 
 the poor to hate joyless work more than 
 poverty. There must be a change in values 
 that would mean a change of heart; and 
 Morris did not despair of that change. Yet 
 he knew that he was alone in his efforts to 
 bring it about; for though he consorted and 
 worked with other Socialists, his desires and 
 
22 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 
 
 hopes, and therefore his methods, were differ- 
 ent from theirs. They were, many of them, 
 able and devoted men who hoped by means of 
 organization to change the economic structure 
 of society so that there should be no more 
 very rich or very poor. Among these he 
 was like a saint among ecclesiastics; for he 
 desired something far beyond a more equal 
 distribution of wealth, and he would not have 
 been at all content with a world in which 
 men lived and worked as they do now but 
 without extreme poverty or riches. Other 
 Socialists protested against the present waste 
 of our superfluous energy; but he told men 
 what they might do with their superfluous 
 energy when they had ceased to waste it. 
 There is a common notion, favoured by the 
 books of writers like Bellamy, that a Socialist 
 state would be very dull, with every one 
 living as people live now in a prosperous 
 middle-class suburb. Indeed, Bellamy tells 
 us with prophetic rapture that in his Utopia 
 there will be no need of umbrellas since there 
 will be porticos over all the side-ways in every 
 town. But Morris wanted something more 
 in a reorganized society than a municipal 
 substitute for umbrellas. It is one of the 
 worst failures of our society that it has 
 

 INTRODUCTION 23 
 
 forgotten pleasure for comfort ; that it thinks 
 more of the armchair than of the dance. 
 Morris tried to make men wish, like himself, 
 for pleasure more than for comfort, and in 
 the Utopia that he dreamt of, there were 
 armchairs for the old, no doubt, but dancing 
 for the young. Indeed, in his ideal state all 
 life and all labour would be a kind of dance 
 rather than a comfortable and torpid repose. 
 That is to say, every activity of man would 
 be made delightful by the superiluous energy 
 of a civilized fellowship. We should enjoy 
 our common work, as the craftsmen of the 
 thirteenth century must have enjoyed build- 
 ing a great cathedral together; and our 
 enjoyment would manifest itself in the beauty 
 of all that we made. That was what Socialism 
 meant to him, and all its machinery was only 
 a means to that end. 
 
 It is easy to call him a visionary; but 
 visionaries are necessary to every great 
 movement, because they alone can give it 
 direction, and they alone can make men 
 desire the goal towards which it moves. 
 It is not enough to preach peace by talking 
 of the horrors of war; for men are so made 
 that they prefer horrors to dulness. You 
 must persuade them that peace means a 
 
24 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 fuller and more glorious life than war, if 
 you would make them desire it passionately. 
 Morris said that our present society was in 
 a state of economic war, and that for that 
 reason it was anxious, joyless and impotent, 
 like the life of a savage tribe engaged in 
 incessant vendettas. The economic peace 
 which he desired was one in which men would 
 have leisure and power to do all that was 
 best worth doing; and he hoped to bring 
 that peace about by filling them with his 
 own desire to do what was best worth doing. 
 And as the saint affects men more by his 
 vision of Heaven than the ecclesiastics affect 
 them with all their organization and discipline, 
 so, it may be, Morris has done more for 
 Socialism than all the scientific Socialists. 
 For he knew quite clearly what he wanted 
 in life and no one can say that he wanted 
 what was not desirable. The world distrusts 
 philanthropists and reformers of all kinds 
 because they do not in their own lives con- 
 vince the world that they are good judges of 
 happiness. If they want us all to be like 
 themselves, we look at them and decide that 
 we do not want to be like them. But no 
 one could know Morris or his way of life 
 without wanting to be like him. No one 
 
INTRODUCTION 25 
 
 could say that he set out to reform the world 
 without having first made a good business 
 of life himself. When he tells us how to be 
 happy and why we miss happiness he speaks 
 with authority and not as the philanthropists ; 
 indeed, his ideas of what life should be 
 commend themselves to us even without 
 his authority, and there are many now who 
 share them without knowing their origin. 
 
 For at the present moment the world is 
 more interested in Morris's ideas than in 
 Morris himself, and his influence is greater 
 than his name. In his art he affected the art 
 of all Europe so profoundly that what he 
 did by himself seems to be only the product 
 of his age. As a poet he is commonly thought 
 of as the last and most extreme of the 
 romantics; but his later poetry, at least, 
 is quite free from the romantic despair of 
 reality and nearly all of it is free from the 
 romantic vagueness. When Morris described 
 the world that is not, he was, as it were, 
 making plans of the world as he wished it to 
 be; and he was always concerned with the 
 future even when he seemed most absorbed 
 in the past. In that respect he differed from 
 all the other romantic poets, and in his most 
 visionary poetry he tells us constantly what 
 
26 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 he valued in reality, what is best worth doing 
 and being in life. All that he wrote, in verse 
 or prose romance, is a tale of his own great 
 adventure through a world that he wished 
 to change ; and we cannot yet tell how great 
 a change he has worked or will work upon it. 
 But we know already that he was one of the 
 greatest men of the nineteenth century and, 
 with Tolstoy, the most lonely and distinct 
 of them all. In this book I have tried to 
 give some description of his greatness rather 
 than to write his life, for that has been well 
 done by Mr. Mackail already. He is the 
 subject of a volume in this series, not because 
 he was a poet or an artist, but because the 
 minds of men would have been different from 
 what they are if he had never been born. 
 Yet his art and his poetry were a great part 
 of his action; indeed he was artist and poet 
 before he had any conscious intention of 
 changing the world, and the world has 
 listened to his advice because he was an artist 
 and a poet. 
 
 He was also, I believe, a greater and far 
 more various poet than most people think. 
 He is commonly known as a spinner of agree- 
 able but shadowy romances, both in verse 
 and in prose. I have therefore written at 
 
INTRODUCTION 27 
 
 some length in the effort to show that he 
 was far more than that. There are small men 
 who have a specific gift for literature or art 
 and whose work pleases us because of this 
 gift, and in spite of their smallness. But 
 Morris was a great man, great in intelligence, 
 in will, and in passion ; and the better one 
 knows his work, the more one sees that great- 
 ness in all of it. All those who knew him 
 well recognized it, even if they cared nothing 
 for poetry or art ; they fell under his influence 
 as men fell under the influence of Napoleon, 
 and that although he had none of Napoleon's 
 love of power. This book is written by one 
 who did not know him, and it is an attempt 
 to show the nature of his influence and of 
 his greatness in his works. He did so many 
 things that it is impossible to speak of them 
 all in a volume of this length; and he was 
 never the centre of a circle like Doctor 
 Johnson or Rossetti. Only all those who had 
 to do with him felt that he made the issues 
 of life and of art clearer to them ; and that, 
 we may be sure, he will continue to do for 
 many generations yet unborn. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH 
 
 WILLIAM MORRIS was born at Walthamstow 
 on March 24, 1834. There was nothing in 
 the circumstances of his childhood to make 
 him unlike other men of his class. His father 
 was partner in a prosperous firm of bill- 
 brokers and the family remained well-to-do 
 after his death in 1847. Morris's childhood 
 was happy but not remarkable. He gave 
 no special proofs of genius, but showed the 
 same character and tastes as in later years. 
 He liked to wander about Epping Forest and 
 knew the names of birds, learned what- 
 ever he wished to learn easily and remem- 
 bered it exactly, and was both passionate and 
 good-natured. 
 
 One story is told of him which shows what 
 he wished to learn and how well he remem- 
 bered it. At the age of eight he saw the 
 Church of Minster in Thanet, and fifty years 
 afterwards, not having seen it since, he was 
 28 
 
29 
 
 able to describe it in detail. This is one 
 proof, among many, that he understood 
 Gothic art as the child Mozart understood 
 music, seeming to recognize in it a language 
 which he knew by nature. This process of 
 recognition continued all through his youth. 
 It was the chief part of his education ; it was 
 what distinguished him from other youths 
 of his time ; and it was, as we can see now, 
 a sign of his strong natural character and a 
 preparation for the whole of his after life. 
 
 A Gothic building was not to Morris merely 
 something beautiful or romantic or strange. 
 He did not enjoy it only as most of us enjoy 
 a beautiful tune. It had for him that more 
 precise meaning which music had for the 
 young Mozart. He saw not only that it 
 was the kind of art which he liked, but also 
 why he liked it. For it expressed to him, 
 more clearly than words, a state of being which 
 he felt to be desirable. It was as if the men 
 who had made it were before him in the 
 flesh and he saw them and loved them. 
 Indeed he had that passionate liking for the 
 whole society in which the great works of 
 Gothic art were produced which some of us 
 have for our favourite poets or musicians. 
 And he missed Gothic art from the present 
 
80 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 as if it were the voice of some one loved and 
 dead. Church after church, as he first saw 
 them in his youth, was remembered as if it 
 were the first meeting with a dear friend; 
 and it was fixed in his mind, not only because 
 he enjoyed its beauty, but because it expressed 
 for him that state of being which he loved 
 in it. It was like a face vividly remembered 
 through affection, and all its details were 
 connected with each other in his mind as if 
 they were features. 
 
 We must understand this if we are to 
 understand Morris's early passion for the 
 Middle Ages and all their works. It was 
 not the dry passion of the mere archaeologist 
 who studies the past because it is dead. 
 Moms studied it because he saw it alive. 
 The churches for him were not old, but just 
 built. It was the later buildings of what he 
 called the age of ignorance that seemed to 
 him to be obsolete, for they expressed nothing 
 that he wanted. Just as the minds of the 
 great artists of the Renaissance leapt back 
 over an intervening time to classical art, so 
 his mind leapt back to the Gothic and found 
 in it the new world that he wished to create. 
 
 At the age of thirteen he was sent to 
 Marlborough College, then a new school and 
 
CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH 31 
 
 very lax in its discipline. This was a piece 
 of good fortune for him, for he did not need 
 to be set either to work or to play. He was 
 not an aimless idler, to be kept out of mischief 
 by compulsory games. At Marlborough he 
 had another forest to roam through and a 
 library of books to read. He had not been 
 taught any craft in childhood ; but his fingers 
 were as busy as his mind; and for want of 
 some better employment he exercised them 
 in endless netting, as he exercised his mind 
 by telling endless tales of adventure to his 
 school-fellows. At Marlborough he became 
 aware of the High Church Movement and 
 was drawn into it, so that when he left the 
 school knowing, as he said, most of what was 
 to be known about English Gothic, he went 
 to Exeter College, Oxford with the intention 
 of taking Orders. 
 
 This was in the Lent term of 1853; and 
 while at Oxford he continued to educate himself 
 much as he had done at school. At Exeter, 
 we are told, there was then neither teaching 
 nor discipline. Morris's tutor described him 
 as a rather rough unpolished youth who 
 exhibited no special literary tastes nor 
 capacity; from which we may guess that 
 they were not close friends. Indeed Morris 
 
32 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 all his life used the word don as a term of 
 abuse more severe than many strong-sounding 
 words at his command. But Oxford itself, 
 still unspoilt in its beauty, delighted him; 
 and he got from it his first notion of what 
 a city should be. Yet it seemed to him a 
 misused treasure of the past; for already he 
 was desiring a present capable of expressing 
 itself with the same energy and beauty. 
 The present of Oxford seemed to him a mere 
 barbarism, frivolous and pedantic; and, but 
 for one friend whom he made in his first 
 term, he might have lived a lonely life there. 
 This friend was Edward Burne-Jones, a 
 freshman from King Edward's Grammar 
 School, Birmingham, who already promised 
 much as an artist, but who, like Morris, meant 
 to take Orders. Neither of them cared much 
 for the undergraduates of Exeter; but there 
 were some of Burne-Jones's school-fellows at 
 Pembroke to whom he introduced Morris, 
 and among whom Morris got the society he 
 needed. Canon Dixon, the poet, who was 
 one of these, tells us that at first they regarded 
 Morris simply as a very pleasant boy who 
 was fond of talking, which he did in a husky 
 shout. " He was very fond of sailing a 
 boat. He was also exceedingly fond of 
 
CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH 33 
 
 single-stick and a good fencer. . . . But his 
 mental qualities, his intellect also, began to 
 be perceived and acknowledged. I remember 
 Faulkner 1 remarking to me, k How Morris 
 seems to know things, doesn't he ? ' And 
 then it struck me that it was so. I observed 
 how decisive he was : how accurate, without 
 any effort or formality. What an extra- 
 ordinary power of observation lay at the 
 base of his casual or incidental remarks, and 
 how many things he knew that were quite 
 out of our way, as, e. g. architecture." 
 
 In this new world of people and things 
 and ideas Morris was not bewildered or mis- 
 led by momentary influences. Then, as after- 
 wards, he seemed to know by instinct what 
 he wanted to learn and where he could find 
 it. He had a scent for his own future, little 
 as he knew yet what it was to be ; and whatever 
 he did or read was a preparation for it. 
 Already there had begun in England that 
 reaction against all the ideas of our industrial 
 civilization which Morris himself was to carry 
 further than any one. But the ideas were 
 
 1 The Faulkner mentioned here was a fine mathema- 
 tician who afterwards became a partner in the firm of 
 Morris & Co., and who remained one of Morris's most 
 intimate friends. 
 C 
 
34 
 
 still predominant and were commonly sup- 
 posed to have a scientific consistency and 
 truth against which only wilfulness could 
 rebel. Yet there was this curious inconsistency 
 in them that, while they recommended a 
 certain course of action to society which it 
 was to adopt of its own free will, they prom- 
 ised as the mechanical result of that action 
 a state of moral and material well-being to 
 which society would attain without further 
 effort. The will was to make its choice at 
 the start; and then no further choice would 
 be required of it. But this inconsistency was 
 also based upon certain assumptions that do 
 not now seem to us beyond dispute. It was 
 assumed, for instance, that the main end 
 of every society was to become rich; and 
 that it would become rich if individuals were 
 allowed to acquire riches by any means they 
 chose to employ. This licence was called 
 freedom; and indeed it meant a complete 
 freedom for those who were rich already, 
 but a freedom merely nominal and legal for 
 those who were poor. They were free to be 
 rich if they could ; but the great mass of them 
 could not, and remained in extreme poverty, 
 in spite or rather because of the riches of the 
 few. Thus the national well-being promised 
 
CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH 35 
 
 did not come about, although great fortunes 
 were made; and the moral well-being also 
 failed to equal expectations. Indeed there 
 was an inconsistency between the morality 
 of the individual and the morality of society 
 which was bad for both. The morality of 
 the individual was still supposed to be 
 Christian, except when he was making money. 
 But as soon as he began to do that he was 
 regarded as a member of a society whose 
 aim only was to make money. Then his 
 Christian morality was superseded by an 
 economic law against which it was merely 
 sentimental to rebel. This kind of inconsist- 
 ency has always existed ; but it has never 
 been so glaring or produced so much moral 
 and intellectual confusion as in England in 
 the nineteenth century. Then it was that 
 we established our reputation as a nation of 
 hypocrites and were confirmed in our national 
 dislike of logic. The great mass of Englishmen 
 wished to be good, according to the Christian 
 pattern ; but they also wished to make money 
 and they acquired a notion, implied in their 
 laws and in their habits of thought if never 
 openly stated, that money was the material 
 reward of goodness. But this notion was 
 always proving itself to be untrue. The rich 
 
36 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 were not identical with the good according 
 to any system of morality known to man, 
 least of all according to the Christian. Yet 
 they were favoured and encouraged by all 
 the laws, and by all the anarchy, of the State. 
 If any one pointed out this inconsistency, he 
 was told that the State, having made its 
 wise choice in favour of riches, had no further 
 choice in the matter. Scientific laws were 
 now operating in favour of the rich and against 
 the poor, and they were no more to be resisted 
 than the law of gravity. 
 
 But meanwhile there were certain people 
 who asked themselves how they liked this 
 society which was thus settling down into 
 a second state of nature ; and they found that 
 they did not like it at all. Carlyle, for instance, 
 disliked it as much as Jonah disliked Nineveh. 
 In particular he disliked the rich because they 
 were sheltered against reality by the whole 
 structure of society, and because in their 
 shelter they talked and thought about unreal 
 things. He was as sure as Jonah that God 
 in his wrath would some day blow all their 
 comfort away from them; but he had no 
 notion of a civilization to take the place of that 
 which he wished to destroy, nor of a peace 
 of mind to succeed the complacent torpor 
 
CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH 37 
 
 against which he raged. His aim was to 
 reduce the minds of men to the first stage of 
 conversion, to that utter humiliation in which 
 they might hear the sudden voice of God. 
 We are used to his denunciations ; but to 
 Morris they were new and they assured him 
 that he was right in his own instinctive dislike 
 of all that Carlyle denounced. 
 
 Ruskin's rebellion was, as I have said, at 
 first aesthetic; and it was a rebellion not 
 merely against the art of his own time, but 
 against all the art of the Renaissance and the 
 ideas expressed in that art. The Stones of 
 Venice was published in Morris's first year 
 at Oxford; and from the chapter on the 
 Nature of Gothic he learned that there was 
 reason in his own love of Gothic and dislike 
 of Renaissance architecture. Ruskin points 
 out that in Gothic every workman had a 
 chance of expressing himself, whereas in 
 Renaissance, and in all architecture since, 
 the workman only did exactly what the 
 architect told him to do. Thus Gothic 
 missed the arrogant and determined per- 
 fection of Renaissance, but it had an eager 
 life and growth of its own, like that of a 
 State which recognizes the human rights 
 of all its members. There were, of course, 
 
88 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 different tasks for all the workmen according 
 to their ability, but each to some extent 
 expressed his own will in what he did. To 
 Morris this chapter was a gospel and all his 
 own ideas about art grew out of it; indeed 
 he was unjust to the art of the Renaissance, 
 not merely through a caprice of personal 
 taste, but because it seemed to him that at 
 the Renaissance the whole society of Europe 
 took a wrong turning, by following which it 
 had arrived at the dull follies of the industrial 
 age. He knew, of course, that there were 
 great artists at the Renaissance, but in their 
 work he saw a foreboding of what was to 
 come of it. For him it expressed, however 
 splendidly, a state of mind which seemed 
 to him wrong; and he refused to be dazzled 
 by the triumphs of Michelangelo, as by the 
 victories of Napoleon. 
 
 If he had been a critic, this prejudice of his 
 against the Renaissance would have been 
 a mere prejudice harmful to his work; but 
 he was to be an artist, and afterwards a 
 revolutionary, that is to say a man of action 
 in both stages. Therefore he rightly and 
 naturally judged all art and all ideas by their 
 practical value to himself. And even when he 
 was an undergraduate at Oxford he saw what 
 
CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH 39 
 
 would be of practical value to him. He knew 
 already what he wanted both in life and in 
 art and he had only to learn how to do and 
 to get what he wanted. 
 
 In the long vacation of 1854 he went abroad, 
 for the first time, to Northern France and 
 Belgium, where he saw the greatest works of 
 Gothic architecture and the paintings of the 
 Van Eycks and Memling. He said long 
 afterwards that the first sight of Rouen was 
 the greatest pleasure he had ever known; 
 and Van Eyck and Memling remained always 
 his favourite painters, no doubt because 
 their art was still the art of the Middle Ages 
 practised with a new craft and subtlety. 
 
 In the same year he came of age and 
 inherited an income of 900 a year. Thus 
 he was already his own master and his freedom 
 only determined him to make the best possible 
 use of it. In the next year he and Burne- 
 Jones finally resolved to be artists not clergy- 
 men. Morris had been drawn into the High 
 Church Movement, no doubt because it was 
 part of the general reaction against modern 
 materialism and ugliness. But the beliefs 
 which were forming in his mind were not 
 religious, however harmonious with the true 
 Christian faith. He changed his purpose not 
 
40 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 in any violent reaction against it, but because 
 he had a stronger desire to do something else. 
 He had already begun to write poetry, which 
 he did quite suddenly and with immediate 
 success. Canon Dixon tells how he went one 
 evening to Exeter and found Morris with 
 Burne-Jones. As soon as he entered the 
 room " Burne-Jones exclaimed wildly, ' He's 
 a great poet.' ' Who is ? * asked we. ' Why, 
 Topsy.' " * Then Morris read them " The 
 Willow and the Red Cliff," the first poem 
 he had ever written in his life. Dixon ex- 
 pressed his admiration and Morris replied, 
 " Well, if this is poetry, it is very easy to 
 write." " From that time onward," says 
 Dixon, "for a term or two, he came to 
 my rooms almost every day with a new 
 poem." 
 
 Morris destroyed many of his early poems, 
 but some pieces and fragments remain of 
 them and they are, as Dixon thought when 
 he first heard them, quite unlike any other 
 poetry. We can believe, too, that they were 
 easy to write, for they sound as if they had 
 come into his mind as tunes come into the 
 minds of musicians 
 
 1 Morris was called Topsy after the child in Uncle 
 Tonta Cabin, because of his mop of curly hair. 
 
CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH 41 
 
 " Christ keep the Hollow Land 
 
 All the summer- tide ; 
 Still we cannot understand 
 
 Where the waters glide; 
 Only dimly seeing them 
 
 Coldly slipping through 
 Many green-lipped cavern-mouths, 
 
 Where the hills are blue." 
 
 Morris afterwards became the best story- 
 teller of all our modern poets; but because 
 he had this power of making verse that was 
 almost music, verse that needed no context 
 or preparation but cast an instant spell upon 
 the mind through the ear, he was always a 
 poet as well as a story-teller. In his life as 
 in his poetry there was the same contrast 
 and yet harmony of the visionary and the 
 practical, and the same power of making the 
 one serve the other. At this time in his 
 poetry he was a pure visionary. Things that 
 delighted his eyes or his mind came into his 
 verse as such things come into dreams. He 
 might, no doubt, have cultivated this poetry 
 of the sub-consciousness; but he was not 
 long content to be only a visionary either in 
 life or in art. It may be that the prose 
 romances, which he began to write in 1855, 
 
42 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 gave him a disgust of this kind of writing. 
 They too are unlike anything else in English 
 literature, but far inferior to the poems. 
 For that vagueness of sense, which in the 
 verse is combined with a curious intensity 
 of sound, bewilders and disappoints in a 
 prose story, the more so because the style is 
 uncertain and not always suited to the matter. 
 Indeed at this time Morris wrote prose as 
 minor poets write verse, seeming now and then 
 to adopt a sentimental character not his own 
 and to express what he wanted to feel rather 
 than what he did feel. Thirty years later, 
 when he began to write prose again, he was 
 complete master of it; but in 1855 he first 
 read Chaucer and was so turned back from 
 prose to verse, and to verse about definite 
 subjects which he chose consciously. 
 
 But now he and his friends had a young 
 and generous desire to work some great 
 change upon the world. They had vague 
 notions of founding a brotherhood, they saw 
 that the condition of the poor was horrible, 
 they wanted to do something at once; and, 
 not knowing precisely what they wanted to 
 do, they naturally determined to start a 
 magazine. Dixon first proposed it to Morris 
 in 1855 and the whole set were delighted with 
 
CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH 43 
 
 the idea. Since they had friends at Cambridge 
 they determined that these too should write 
 for it ; and so, when it came into being, it was 
 called the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, 
 though it was nearly all written by Oxford 
 men. The first number appeared on January 
 1, 1856, and it lasted for twelve numbers, 
 each appearing monthly. Morris paid for it, 
 and wrote for it eighteen poems, romances 
 and articles. No other contributor came 
 near him in merit except Dante Gabriel 
 Rossetti, whom Burne-Jones had met at the 
 end of 1855 and who already admired Morris's 
 poetry. Both Tennyson and Ruskin praised 
 the magazine; but it was little bought, con- 
 firming the fears of Ruskin, who said that 
 he had never known an honest journal get 
 on yet. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 THE INFLUENCE OF ROSSETTI 
 
 IN 1855 Morris took his degree, and in 
 January 1856 he was articled to George 
 Edmund Street, one of the chief architects 
 of the Gothic Revival and the designer of 
 the Law Courts. He was, as Morris said, 
 " a good architect as things go now " ; but 
 he produced imitation Gothic under con- 
 ditions utterly different from those in which 
 the real Gothic had grown, and it was im- 
 possible that Morris should be satisfied with 
 the work he did or should wish to do work 
 like it. Morris became his pupil, no doubt, 
 because he was more interested in architecture 
 than in any other art ; but he was not born to 
 be an architect, at least under modern con- 
 ditions. This he soon discovered; but in 
 Street's office he learnt some useful things 
 and met Philip Webb, who was afterwards 
 the chief figure, not in the Gothic Revival, 
 but in the revival of architecture. Webb 
 44 
 
THE INFLUENCE OF ROSSETTI 45 
 
 became one of his closest friends and they 
 co-operated in many works of art. 
 
 Nowadays we have art-students instead of 
 apprentices ; and there is always a danger 
 that the student, even if he is articled to an 
 architect, will spend too long in learning 
 instead of doing. Morris from the first was 
 not content to be a mere student. Besides 
 working hard in his office he began to model 
 in clay, to carve in wood and stone, and 
 to illuminate, on his own account. And 
 though he was his own teacher in these arts 
 and in many others, he seemed to know by 
 instinct the right way of practising them 
 and wasted no time in mistaken experiments. 
 This instinctive Tightness, which was a kind 
 of natural sagacity applied to the arts, was 
 the secret of his versatility. He might vary 
 in the quality of his work, but it was never 
 wrong in intention; and therefore he never 
 had to unlearn what he had learnt. 
 
 Hitherto Morris had never met a great 
 man and had gone his own way unaffected 
 by any strong personal influence; but in 
 London he met Rossetti, who was teaching 
 Burne-Jones to paint, and of the many men 
 who fell under Rossetti's spell he, perhaps, 
 was the most completely subdued by it. 
 
46 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 We can admire Rossetti's poetry and pictures ; 
 but to those who knew him he seemed far 
 greater than anything that he did. Or rather 
 they saw in his works all that magic of the 
 man himself which is dead to us. He could 
 tell of what he wanted to do in such a way 
 that it seemed to be done and also seemed to 
 be the only thing worth doing in the world. 
 When Morris and Burne-Jones first knew him 
 he was at the height of his powers. His 
 ambition was to do for the art of painting 
 what the Romantic poets had done for 
 poetry, that is to say, to quicken it with passion 
 and with the beauty that comes of passion 
 clearly expressed. While in France the 
 impressionist painters were trying to represent 
 a new order of facts, Rossetti in England was 
 trying to express in painting a new state 
 of mind. He was not content with poetic 
 subjects, like the dull illustrators of the time ; 
 he wished also to treat them poetically like 
 the great Italian primitives. To Burne-Jones 
 and Morris he seemed to be transforming the 
 art of painting, giving to it that purpose and 
 intensity which, they hoped, were soon to 
 quicken the whole of society. They lived 
 in the expectation that great things were 
 about to happen in the world; and here 
 
THE INFLUENCE OF ROSSETTI 47 
 
 already they were happening in art. What 
 Ruskin taught, Rossetti did and made others 
 do; and, as Morris and Burne-Jones cared 
 more for art than for anything else, he seemed 
 to them a Messiah who could show them, and 
 the world if it would listen, the way to 
 salvation. Eager youth both desires and 
 believes that the problems of life may be 
 made quite simple for it ; and it will therefore 
 submit itself utterly to a hero who seems 
 to simplify them. Rossetti. who cared for 
 nothing but art, offered the promise of 
 simplification; and for some years Morris 
 was, as it were, in love with him. When 
 Burne-Jones said that he feared to become 
 a mere imitator of Rossetti, Morris replied : 
 " I have got beyond that. I want to imitate 
 Gabriel as much as I can." 
 
 Rossetti wished every one to be a painter. 
 " If a man has any poetry in him," he said, 
 " he should paint, for it has all been said and 
 written and they have scarcely begun to 
 paint it." Therefore, though he admired 
 Morris's poetry, he told him that he too must 
 be a painter. " Rossetti says I ought to 
 paint," Morris wrote in a letter. " He says 
 I shall be able ; now as he is a very great man 
 and speaks with authority and not as the 
 
48 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 Scribes, I must try ... so I am going to 
 try, not giving up architecture, but trying if 
 it is possible to get six hours a day for drawing 
 besides office work." And he adds, " I can't 
 enter into politico-social subjects with any 
 interest, for on the whole I see that things 
 are in a muddle, and I have no power or 
 vocation to set them right in ever so little 
 a degree. My work is the embodiment of 
 dreams in one form or another." 
 
 Here he says in prose just what he was still 
 saying twelve years later in verse 
 
 " Dreamer of dreams, born out of my due time, 
 Why should I strive to set the crooked 
 straight ? " 
 
 But even in this determination to forget 
 the evils of the world and in this very insist- 
 ence that he is a dreamer, we can see the first 
 beginnings of the conflict that was to shake his 
 life. Rossetti did not call himself a dreamer ; 
 for to him art was the chief reality. Morris 
 now was trying to make it the chief reality 
 for himself, but he could not separate it from 
 other things ; and in the end it was art, and 
 his hopes and fears for it, that drew him out 
 of his shadowy isle of bliss. 
 
THE INFLUENCE OF ROSSETTI 49 
 
 At present, however, Rossetti's word was 
 law; and since Rossetti told him to be a 
 painter he became one. He finished little, 
 but his " Queen Guenevere," also called " La 
 Belle Iseult," is one of the finest of all Pre- 
 Raphaelite pictures and equal in merit to his 
 poem, the " Defence of Guenevere." Yet 
 he said that the frame of a picture always 
 bothered him, and this saying expresses the 
 whole difference between him and Rossetti. 
 For Rossetti art was always in a frame and 
 made more intense by its very isolation. 
 It was something into which you escaped from 
 life; but Morris rather wanted to turn all 
 life into art and enjoyed the triumph of art 
 most when it glorified things of use. For 
 him, though he soon gave up the purpose of 
 being an architect, the great art was always 
 architecture; for in that he saw use made 
 beautiful and the needs of men ennobled 
 by their manner of satisfying them. And 
 all the art which he most loved, at first by 
 instinct and afterwards on principle, was of 
 the same nature as architecture and dis- 
 tinguished by the same kind of excellence. 
 What we call decorative art was more than 
 decoration to him. It pleased him like a 
 smile of happiness, for he felt in it the well- 
 D 
 
50 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 being both of the artist and of those for whom 
 he worked. To Rossetti art was the expres- 
 sion of the artist's more peculiar emotions ; 
 and this he found most intense and complete 
 in isolated works of art such as pictures. But 
 Morris always saw in a work of art the relation 
 between the artist and his public; and it 
 was for him a social business that could not 
 be well practised except in a healthy society. 
 This view of art was not a mere theory for 
 him; it came to him through his own ex- 
 perience and he made a theory of it because 
 his reason confirmed his instinct. He began 
 by loving all Gothic art because of its noble 
 submission to architecture; and he could 
 not feel the same love for the art of the 
 Renaissance when it became independent of 
 architecture. There was an egotism in it 
 that displeased him and which seemed to 
 him, when he came to reason about it, a 
 symptom of all the egotistical heresies of the 
 modern world. With all his passion for art 
 he was not inclined to glorify the artist or 
 to conceive of him as a superman producing 
 masterpieces in his lonely pride. He thought 
 of him rather as a workman who gave more 
 than was asked of him from love of his work. 
 He knew well enough, of course, that Michel- 
 
THE INFLUENCE OF ROSSETTI 51 
 
 angelo and Velasquez were great men; but 
 he judged the art of an age rather by its 
 cottages and its cups and saucers than by its 
 great pictures, as he judged the prosperity 
 of a state by the condition of its poor rather 
 than of its rich. 
 
 Thus it was certain that Rossetti would not 
 remain master of his mind; but for the 
 moment Morris obeyed him with the joy of 
 one for whom all the problems of life are 
 made easy by absolute obedience. He took 
 rooms with Burne- Jones at 17, Red Lion 
 Square, where Rossetti had lived before; 
 and there they lived together a life about 
 which many stories are told, working and 
 playing with equal vigour and always under 
 the spell of Rossetti. Yet already Morris 
 began to do something on his own account 
 which showed the natural bent of his mind. 
 Their rooms were to be furnished and Morris 
 could not find in any shop a single new table 
 or chair that he could endure. This was not 
 mere fastidiousness. To him vulgarity in 
 furniture was, like vulgarity of manners, the 
 expression of a wrong state of mind; and if 
 his own furniture had been vulgar, he would 
 have felt responsible for it as for his own 
 manners. Therefore he designed furniture 
 
52 
 
 to please himself, making drawings that were 
 carried out by a carpenter. Thus simply 
 and naturally he begun his business of "poetic 
 upholsterer." Not being able to get what he 
 wanted from the minds of others, he got it 
 from his own mind. This was his way all 
 his life and the reason why he practised so 
 many arts in turn. He found them all either 
 dead or corrupted; and, instead of com- 
 plaining that the times were out of joint, he 
 did what he could to set them right. From 
 the first he was not only an artist, but one 
 who tried to make the world what he wished 
 it to be; and beginning with armchairs he 
 ended with society. 
 
 In the summer of 1857 Rossetti conceived 
 the project of painting the new Debating 
 Hall of the Oxford Union ; and obtained leave 
 to do so with the help of other artists of his 
 own choosing. There were to be ten paintings 
 in tempera, all of subjects from the Morte 
 d'Arthur; and the ceiling above them was to 
 be decorated. Returning to London he told 
 Burne-Jones and Morris that they were to 
 start on the work at once. Other artists 
 chosen were Arthur Hughes, Spencer Stan- 
 hope, Val Prinsep and Hungerford Pollen, 
 all young men who would do whatever 
 
THE INFLUENCE OF ROSSETTI 53 
 
 Rossetti commanded. None of them knew 
 anything about mural painting, and some 
 were only painters because Rossetti had 
 ordered them to paint. The new walls were 
 damp and not prepared in any way to receive 
 colour; but no one had any misgivings. 
 Morris, of course, would much rather paint a 
 wall than a canvas; and he was in Oxford 
 and had begun his picture before the others 
 had made their designs. His subject was 
 " How Sir Palomydes loved la belle Iseult 
 with exceeding great love out of measure, 
 and how she loved not him again, but rather 
 Sir Tristram." He filled the foreground with 
 .' i nflowers, and Rossetti, who chaffed him as 
 much as he admired him, suggested that he 
 should fill the foreground of another picture 
 with scarlet-runners. Perhaps Morris remem- 
 bered Blake's poem, " O Sunflower, weary of 
 time," with its " youth pined away with 
 desire." At any rate this was the beginning 
 of the sunflower's artistic career ; and Morris 
 himself, no doubt, was heartily sick of it as 
 an aesthetic symbol twenty-five years later. 
 He was the first to finish as he had been to 
 begin; and at once set to work to paint the 
 roof. In this he was helped by his old Oxford 
 friends Faulkner Price and Dixon. For 
 
54 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 Rossetti believed that any one, when he 
 liked, could paint, and indeed he could com- 
 municate talent to his disciples, as a great 
 general can communicate courage to his 
 soldiers. The roof was finished in November ; 
 but Rossetti's painting, " Lancelot's vision 
 of the Sangrail," was never finished. To 
 judge from the drawing it must have been the 
 finest work he ever did; but it and all the 
 other paintings soon mouldered away, and 
 less remains of them now than of Leonardo's 
 " Last Supper." The roof was redecorated 
 by Morris in 1875. 
 
 The failure of this spirited adventure must 
 have made Morris feel the contrast between the 
 science and organization of the great ages of 
 art and the ignorance and indiscipline of his 
 own time. All Rossetti's genius and leader- 
 ship were wasted upon the walls of the Union 
 because he knew nothing of the craft of wall- 
 painting. Morris learnt himself, and taught 
 others, to regard every art as a craft with 
 technical secrets that must be learned before 
 it could be well practised. And already he 
 was teaching himself the secrets of craft after 
 craft. 
 
 " In all illumination and work of that 
 kind," Rossetti said of him, " he is quite 
 
THE INFLUENCE OF ROSSETTI 55 
 
 unrivalled by anything modern that I know." 
 Illuminating was never an archaistic fad for 
 him, but an exercise of his talent more 
 natural than picture painting. How natural, 
 we can see from a verse which he wrote long 
 afterwards lamenting how all the arts of the 
 world were unknown to the poor of great 
 towns. 
 
 " The singers have sung and the builders have 
 
 builded, 
 The painters have fashioned their tales of 
 
 delight ; 
 For what and for whom hath the world's book 
 
 been gilded, 
 
 When all is for these but the blackness 
 of night?" 
 
 But the painting at the Oxford Union must 
 also have given him a taste of the delights of 
 a great age of art, the heightened powers of 
 companionship, the happy rivalry free from 
 the rancour and cares of competition. There 
 wore wonderful evenings after their work, 
 Rossetti still predominating ; and among the 
 undergraduates who visited them was Swin- 
 burne of Balliol. Val Prinsep has told of his 
 first dinner with Rossetti, where he was 
 
56 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 introduced to Morris who spoke little. After 
 dinner Rossetti said to Morris, " Top, read us 
 one of your grinds." Morris refused at first, 
 but Rossetti insisted ; and, says Prinsep, "the 
 effect produced on my mind was so strong 
 that to this day, forty years after, I can still 
 recall the scene. Rossetti on the sofa, with 
 large melancholy eyes fixed on Morris, the 
 poet at the table reading and ever fidgeting 
 with his watch-chain, and Burne-Jones working 
 at a pen-and-ink drawing 
 
 " ' Gold on her hair 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,' 
 
 still seems to haunt me, and this other stanza 
 
 " ' " Swerve to the left, son Roger," he said, 
 " When you catch his eyes through the 
 
 helmet slit. 
 
 Swerve to the left, then out at his head, 
 And the Lord God give you joy of it." ' 
 
 " I confess I returned to the Mitre with my 
 brain in a whirl." 
 These verses are from two poems, the " Eve 
 
THE INFLUENCE OF ROSSETTI 57 
 
 of Crecy" and "The Judgment of God," 
 both of which were printed in the volume 
 called the " Defence of Guenevere and other 
 Poems," which Morris published early in 1858. 
 But of this I shall speak in a later chapter. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE FOUNDING OF THE FIRM 
 
 MORRIS was now about to enter upon the 
 happiest period of his life, a period in which 
 every circumstance, as well as his own gifts 
 and character, conspired to bring him felicity, 
 and in which he achieved fame by doing what 
 he most desired to do. There was no outward 
 reason why this happiness should not have 
 lasted all his life; but, like Tolstoy, he was 
 too great to remain content with it, and, like 
 him he was driven by his own mind beyond 
 happiness to a harder and lonelier task. 
 
 Morris, while painting at Oxford, had made 
 the acquaintance of a Miss Jane Burden, 
 whom, because of her great beauty, he and 
 Rossetti wished to paint. She sat to both of 
 them, and Morris fell in love with her and 
 became engaged to her soon after the "De- 
 fence of Guenevere " was published. They 
 were married in Oxford in April 1859; and 
 then Morris began to look for a house that 
 58 
 
THE FOUNDING OF THE FIRM 59 
 
 would satisfy him. He wished for a house 
 and everything in it according to his own 
 taste. An old house and old furniture would 
 not content him, because he desired an art 
 of his own time and was eager to produce 
 it himself. He therefore bought a piece of 
 orchard and meadow on Bexley Heath in 
 Kent, above the valley of the Cray; and 
 there Philip Webb, who had just set up as an 
 architect on his own account, built a house 
 for him. 
 
 The arts are not very flourishing now, 
 but it is difficult to remember or imagine 
 their desperate condition in 1860. In our 
 present architecture, for instance, there are 
 hundreds of absurd experiments, but still 
 they are experiments. There are flagrant 
 vulgarities, but they are often frankly vulgar ; 
 there are artistic extravagances, but they 
 are only carrying some one sound principle 
 too far. In 1860 nearly all building was 
 subject to a single principle; and that was 
 as wrong as it could be, for it was the principle 
 of disguise. If a house was built of brick it 
 was covered with stucco so that it might look 
 like stone. Every one, of course, knew stucco 
 from stone; but the mere effort at disguise 
 was considered creditable and a sign of 
 
60 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 gentility. No one, of course, can have thought 
 stucco, used thus, a beautiful material; but 
 no one ever considered the question of its 
 beauty or ugliness. It was chosen for its 
 decency and for social, not aesthetic, reasons. 
 And there was the same principle of choice 
 in all the applied arts. Towards the end of 
 the Italian Renaissance these arts had been 
 used by the great to express their power, 
 pride and wealth. And since these were 
 realities, the arts themselves had often a real 
 splendour and vigour. One can see that a 
 Renaissance Palace was built for a great 
 prince who, at least, knew how to enjoy himself 
 magnificently. In the palace, in its furniture 
 and in its gardens, there is the expression of 
 a certain state of being with which those 
 who enjoyed it were content. They had lost 
 the high passion for a celestial glory which 
 expressed itself in the great churches of the 
 Middle Ages and were determined to make 
 for themselves private Heavens here and 
 now; and they did succeed in making them 
 so far as they could be made out of material 
 things. This tradition of Renaissance 
 splendour still dominated all the arts in 
 1860; but they expressed then a splendour 
 and a pride which no longer existed. There 
 
THE FOUNDING OF THE FIRM 61 
 
 were, of course, rich people, but they did not 
 know, like the Princes of the Renaissance, 
 how to enjoy their riches; and the art which 
 was provided for them was nothing but an 
 advertisement of their wealth. They liked 
 furniture upon which much time and labour 
 had evidently been spent, because it was 
 costly; but they never asked themselves 
 whether the time and labour had been spent 
 in making the furniture ugly, for they did 
 not wish to enjoy the furniture but only their 
 consciousness that they were able to pay for 
 it. And by those who were not rich art was 
 employed to give the illusion that they were 
 rich. Machinery had made it possible to 
 produce cheap imitations of costly ornament, 
 uglier even than the originals. No one can 
 ever have enjoyed these with their natural 
 senses ; what they enjoyed, or tried to enjoy, 
 was merely the illusion of riches produced by 
 them. The sense of beauty, in itself quite a 
 simple instinctive thing, had not entirely 
 disappeared, as one might suppose; it had 
 been degraded into a sense of propriety, so 
 that people called those things beautiful 
 which seemed to them proper to their social 
 station. As for art, except in pictures, few 
 were conscious of its existence Most people 
 
62 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 thought of it as an obsolete activity which 
 modern civilization had outgrown. They 
 could not see that, being thus purposeless 
 and ignored, it still persisted, not consciously 
 expressing anything that was worth expres- 
 sion, but merely betraying all the meannesses 
 and failures and impotent unrest of the in- 
 dustrial age. And even the most intelligent 
 allowed this purposeless tell-tale art to be 
 imposed upon them, just as good men, in evil 
 times, submit to a morality of cowardice and 
 cruel habits. 
 
 But Morris saw what this bad art meant 
 just as if he were a being come from another 
 planet. It was not merely that he disliked 
 it with his senses; he had a moral dislike 
 for it as an expression of evil things, and 
 to him its ugliness was of the same kind 
 as the ugliness of manners servile and pre- 
 tentious. He, after Ruskin, was the first to 
 have a scientific understanding of his own 
 likes and dislikes in art. Philosophers have 
 talked about the arts for ages, but they have 
 isolated them from other activities. Ruskin 
 and Morris looked rather for their connection 
 with other activities, and with the whole 
 mind of the society that produces them. 
 They saw that people whose values are wrong 
 
THE FOUNDING OF THE FIRM 63 
 
 will betray the fact in their art, that a society 
 which worships riches will express its idolatry 
 even in its table-legs and chandeliers. But 
 Morris, being a man of action, was deter- 
 mined not to express an idolatry which he 
 hated in his table-legs or in any detail of 
 his house. He meant that house to express 
 the kind of life that he wished to lead, a life 
 orderly, busy, free from pretence, free too 
 from aimless rebellions, and devoted to a 
 high purpose. 
 
 When Lord Grimthorpe called him a poetic 
 upholsterer he meant to express his contempt 
 for a man who could take upholstery so 
 seriously. Morris himself liked the phrase 
 and thought it just. He thought upholstering 
 and all the furniture of a house ought to be 
 as expressive as poetry : and he began with 
 his own home. If he had ended there, his 
 enterprise would have had little importance ; 
 and at the time, no doubt, he did not see 
 where it would lead him. But it was the 
 beginning of a revolt which is still only in its 
 beginning, and the end of which no man can 
 foresee. 
 
 The house which Philip Webb built for 
 Morris aimed at no beauties, exquisite or 
 palatial, beyond the power of the builders 
 
64 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 of that time. It was unlike other houses of 
 the period chiefly in its plainness and in the 
 quality of its material. It was built of red 
 brick and roofed with red tiles, L shaped, and 
 two storeys high. It stood among apple and 
 cherry trees, and was so placed that hardly 
 a tree had to be cut down. Indeed, Mr. 
 Mackail tell us, apples fell in at the windows 
 as they stood open on hot August nights. 
 The garden was planned as carefully as the 
 house, being an outdoor continuation of it 
 rather than a wilderness or a flower-show. 
 A rose-trellis made a quadrangle with the two 
 sides of the building; and in the midst of 
 this was a well-house of brick and oak with 
 a round tiled roof like a low spire. Morris 
 knew about gardening as about other domestic 
 arts; and for him it was always a domestic 
 art, not a horticultural game. 
 
 When the house was built Morris set to 
 work to furnish it himself, and the difficulty 
 of getting things made according to his own 
 designs or the designs of his friends was the 
 immediate cause of the foundation of the 
 firm of Morris & Co. It is not certain who 
 first proposed the enterprise, though it had 
 long been in Morris's mind, but Rossetti, 
 Madox Brown the painter, Burne- Jones and 
 
THE FOUNDING OF THE FIRM 65 
 
 Webb were all parties to it. To them were 
 added Faulkner, Morris's old College friend, 
 and Peter Paul Marshall, a friend of Madox 
 Brown, and a sanitary engineer. He never 
 did much for the firm, but Faulkner worked 
 hard for it, both as a man of business, and, 
 to the best of his ability, as a craftsman. 
 
 The circular of the firm, which is headed 
 Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co., insists upon 
 the need of co-operation in all decorative art 
 and upon the continual supervision of the 
 artist. This, indeed, was what distinguished 
 the firm from ordinary commercial enter- 
 prises. They may employ an artist to make 
 designs, but they seldom employ him to 
 supervise the execution of them. The result 
 is that the designer usually produces what 
 will suit the workman instead of the workman 
 working to satisfy the artist. When execu- 
 tion and design are thus estranged, execution 
 inevitably tends to deteriorate. For it is the 
 spur of design, especially when the designer 
 is himself the workman, that makes the work- 
 man do better than his former best. New 
 tasks are set to him, as they are set to execut- 
 ants in music ; and the artist at his elbow, or 
 the artist in himself, urges him to perform 
 them. But when the designer never sees 
 
 
 
66 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 the workman, and has no control over his work, 
 his designs are often so unsuited to the 
 material that the workmen get the habit of 
 doing what they will with them. And in a 
 purely commercial business the employer is 
 content if the result sells well. He, being a 
 man of business and probably knowing little 
 about art, demands from artists designs which 
 he thinks are likely to sell. He prefers an 
 artist who follows the fashion to one who 
 follows his own bent. We cannot blame him 
 but only the public which expects such a 
 system to supply them with works of art. 
 
 Morris's aim was as far as possible to put 
 an end to this estrangement between design 
 and execution. He was determined that his 
 design should be executed just as he wished; 
 and further, he was determined to design as 
 if he had the object designed already before 
 him. He knew that an artist who designs 
 in the abstract without any knowledge of 
 his material can never follow his own bent, 
 for it is knowledge of the material that pro- 
 vokes real invention in design. And he meant 
 to follow his own bent and then see if the 
 public would not buy his goods. The taste 
 consulted in the ordinary decorator's business 
 is nobody's taste; it is merely what some 
 
THE FOUNDING OF THE FIRM 67 
 
 man of business thinks may be the taste of 
 the public. Morris meant to consult his 
 own taste; for he knew that only by doing 
 that can an artist produce works of art. 
 
 The circular gave the following account of 
 work which the firm proposed to do 
 
 I. Mural decoration, either in pictures or 
 in pattern work, or merely in the arrangement 
 of colours, as applied to dwelling-houses, 
 churches or public buildings. 
 
 II. Carving generally as applied to archi- 
 tecture. 
 
 III. Stained-glass, especially with reference 
 to its harmony with mural decoration. 
 
 IV. Metal work in all its branches, including 
 jewellery. 
 
 V. Furniture, either depending for its 
 beauty on its own design, on the application 
 of materials hitherto overlooked, or on its 
 conjunction with figure and pattern painting. 
 
 Under this head is included embroidery of 
 all kinds, stamped leather and ornamental 
 work in other such materials, besides every 
 article necessary for domestic use. 
 
 In this document Mr. Mackail detects " the 
 slashing hand and imperious accent of 
 Rossetti," who never had any doubts about 
 what he or any of his friends could do. But 
 
68 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 the wonder is that in course of time Morris 
 did perform most of what was promised. 
 Madox Brown and Burne-Jones designed 
 stained-glass and Webb, furniture. Albert 
 Moore, William de Morgan and Simeon Solo- 
 mon also helped. But the great mass of the 
 designing was done by Morris himself, and he 
 organized and supervised all the production. 
 His way always was to set every one to work 
 that he could lay hands on; and he had a 
 wonderful power of making them do good 
 work. Faulkner and his two sisters painted 
 tiles and pottery; Mrs. Morris and her sister 
 embroidered; and the foreman's wife helped 
 to make altar-cloths. Premises were taken in 
 Red Lion Square, Holborn, and the boys 
 needed for the work were got from a boys' 
 home. They were not chosen as possessing 
 any special gifts, but many of them became 
 good craftsmen under Morris. The first 
 capital of the firm was 7 (l from each 
 partner) and a loan of 100 from Morris's 
 mother. The next year (1862) each partner 
 contributed 19, and this capital was not 
 increased until the dissolution of the partner- 
 ship in 1874, though Morris and his mother 
 lent a few hundred pounds more. Thus the 
 finances of the firm were never well established 
 
THE FOUNDING OF THE FIRM 69 
 
 or even defined; and its business was ham- 
 pered until a capital grew out of the profits. 
 
 The firm is best known for its wall-papers 
 and chintzes, and Morris began to design 
 wall-papers as soon as it was founded. His 
 first, the rose-trellis, was designed in 1862. 
 The birds in it were drawn by Webb; for 
 Morris, rightly or wrongly, thought that he 
 could not draw animals and human beings 
 well enough. Perhaps on this one point he 
 was lazy, for every one is lazy about some- 
 thing. Yet he used to draw from the model, 
 as he said, " for his soul's good " ; and he 
 may have done that to cure his laziness. 
 Certainly he had not that curiosity about 
 form which leads a draughtsman like Rem- 
 brandt to pursue all the subtleties of form; 
 just as in his writings he had not the curiosity 
 about character which led Shakespeare to 
 draw Hamlet or Tolstoy to draw Levin. 
 Rembrandt drew houses and trees as if they 
 were human beings ; but Morris was inclined 
 to draw human beings as if they were flowers. 
 He would start with a pattern in his mind 
 and from the first saw everything as a factor 
 in that pattern. But in these early wall- 
 papers he showed a power of pattern-making 
 that has never been equalled in modern times. 
 
70 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 For though everything is subject to the 
 pattern, yet the pattern itself expresses a 
 keen delight in the objects of which it is 
 composed. So they are like poems in which 
 the words keep a precise and homely sense 
 and yet in their combination make a music 
 expressive of their sense. Others, perhaps, 
 have shown an equal skill in spinning patterns ; 
 but their patterns have not seemed thus to 
 grow naturally out of their subject-matter. 
 Morris never spoilt the beauty of his patterns 
 by making them too pictorial ; but they have 
 a pictorial interest and their design seems 
 as unforced and as appropriate as the com- 
 position of a good picture. 
 
 Yet Morris only applied his genius for design 
 to wall-papers because, if his firm was to 
 survive, he had to produce objects for which 
 there was a demand. He knew that we have 
 too many patterns in our houses and that 
 all the arts of design have suffered from the 
 ease with which patterns can be multiplied 
 by mechanical processes. His own papers 
 were printed by hand from wood blocks, and 
 by that means were kept far closer to the 
 original designs both in form and in colour 
 than any mechanically printed papers could 
 be. But even with hand-printing, whether 
 
THE FOUNDING OF THE FIRM 71 
 
 of papers or of chintzes, a designer is not so 
 much controlled and inspired by his material 
 as when the execution of the design consists 
 in a difficult manipulation of the material. 
 Patterns are so easily produced by printing, 
 even by hand-printing, on paper or linen, 
 that the designer is tempted to think more 
 of the beauty of his pattern than of the 
 character of the material on which it is to be 
 stamped. And Morris himself in his later 
 work, when designing came very easy to him 
 from constant practice, produced patterns 
 which are too abstract and elaborate. They 
 cover a given space and repeat themselves 
 with wonderful skill, but they have less 
 character and sense than his earliest patterns. 
 They are vastly superior to the many imita- 
 tions of them, but they are not, like the rose- 
 trellis or daisy papers, inimitable. 
 
 Even Morris suffered in his art from the 
 evil conditions of his time, but he could not 
 change them all at a stroke when he started 
 his business. It has been supposed that his 
 one aim was to do this, and he has been 
 blamed for falling into compromise incon- 
 sistent with that aim. But he was an artist 
 as well as a reformer of art, and he had the 
 artist's proper and natural desire to practise 
 
72 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 his art, which he could only do to any purpose 
 by producing in answer to a demand. A 
 painter nowadays might well think that 
 mural painting was the highest and most 
 rational form of his art. Believing that his 
 art had suffered much through its complete 
 divorce from decoration, he might make it 
 the political object of his life to revive mural 
 painting. Yet, if there were no walls for him 
 to paint, he would not therefore give up 
 painting altogether, but would paint easel 
 pictures both to get a living and because he 
 could not otherwise practise his art. 
 
 Because Morris was an artist and a re- 
 former, he has been misjudged as both. If 
 he had been only an artist, his art, in all its 
 different forms, would have been accepted 
 on its merits. Because he wished to change 
 the conditions in which art is produced, he 
 has been blamed for producing art subject to 
 conditions as they are. But since he was 
 artist as well as reformer, since, indeed, he 
 only became a reformer because he was an 
 artist, his problem, as an artist, was to do 
 the best he could in existing conditions. 
 Again, as a social reformer, he has been 
 blamed because he produced expensive art 
 for rich people. But, apart from the fact 
 
THE FOUNDING OF THE FIRM 73 
 
 that when the firm was started, he had not 
 yet become a social reformer, he had to pro- 
 duce art, if he was to produce it at all, for 
 those who could buy it. He could not 
 produce his art cheaply, because he had to 
 learn, and to teach, most of the processes of 
 its production. He revived art after art and 
 process after process by his own private and 
 personal efforts, and these efforts would have 
 been futile if he had not found a market for 
 his wares. He might have been reproached 
 justly, perhaps, if he had made a great 
 fortune by his labours; but he did not do 
 so. The profits of the firm were for the most 
 part used in extending its experiments. 
 Morris himself was paid for his work; but 
 the pay was less than a man of ordinary 
 powers and ordinary industry could make as 
 a barrister or a stock-broker; and Morris 
 had powers and industry as great as those of 
 any other man of his time. His aim, in 
 founding his firm, was to do the work that he 
 wished to do, not to get money or power. If 
 he had wished to practise only the art of 
 painting or of poetry, he could have done so 
 alone and without any business organization. 
 But he wished to practise other arts in which 
 he needed the help of fellow-artists and crafts- 
 
74 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 men; and, since these arts were costly to 
 revive and practise, he needed a business 
 organization if he was to succeed with them. 
 A painter need not keep his own shop; he 
 can live by selling a few pictures a year and 
 he can show them in galleries belonging to 
 middlemen. But Morris, with his far greater 
 and more diverse production and with his 
 need for a far greater sale, required a shop 
 like any other tradesman. Indeed, he wished 
 the artist to be a tradesman, as he was in 
 Italy in the fifteenth century; and he saw 
 no reason why the tradesman should not be 
 an artist. He was both himself, and for that 
 reason he had a practical success which 
 influenced the art of all Europe. Keats told 
 Shelley that the artist must serve both God 
 and Mammon, and Samuel Butler remarked 
 that it is not easy to do that but that nothing 
 worth doing ever is easy. Morris succeeded 
 in doing it; but in the only way in which it 
 can be done. That is to say, he served Mam- 
 mon so that he might the better be able to 
 serve God, and he was indifferent to the 
 reproaches of those who serve neither. 
 
 Morris at the Red House was not only 
 happy himself but the cause of happiness in 
 others. Multitudes of friends visited him, 
 
THE FOUNDING OF THE FIRM 75 
 
 among them Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Swin- 
 burne, Madox Brown, Philip Webb, and 
 Arthur Hughes. They played bowls, and 
 romped, and drove about the country in a 
 leather-curtained carriage of Morris's own 
 design. " It was the most beautiful sight 
 in the world," says one of these friends, " to 
 see Morris coming up from the cellar before 
 dinner, beaming with joy, with his hands full 
 of bottles of wine and others tucked under 
 his arms." When his first daughter was 
 christened in 1861, the house was so full 
 that beds were strewn about the drawing- 
 room and Swinburne slept on a sofa. Faulkner 
 remarks on Morris's tranquillity at this time : 
 " I grieve to say he has only kicked one 
 panel out of a door for this twelvemonth 
 past." 
 
 Morris was one of those men who are 
 chaffed the more they are admired and loved. 
 His friends knew that he was a great man, 
 but did not treat him as one. Indeed, he 
 never gave himself the airs of a great man, 
 and preferred companionship to admiration. 
 No one resented his furies, because he himself 
 laughed at them when they were over, and 
 never used them to enforce his predominance. 
 He was intolerant of certain opinions; but 
 
76 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 when he flew into a rage it was the opinion that 
 made him angry, not the person who expressed 
 it. It cannot be said that he suffered fools 
 gladly; but he had no cold contempt for 
 them, and grew angry with trying to make 
 them less foolish. One can see from the 
 accounts of his friends that he forgot himself 
 utterly in whatever he was doing at the 
 moment ; and it was, perhaps, the incongruity 
 between their general idea of him and his 
 appearance when absorbed in some trivial 
 task, which made them laugh at him. Morris, 
 coming up from the cellar with his hands and 
 arms full of bottles, was the very picture of 
 a jolly host out of Dickens. No one would 
 have laughed at him if he had been nothing 
 else. But he was the very picture of a 
 hundred different things, great and small, 
 in one day, and always unconsciously. So 
 his friends laughed to see the essential Morris 
 passing through all those changes and venting 
 the same fury upon a door panel as upon a 
 social iniquity. But they laughed because 
 they were at ease in loving him. 
 
 This happy life did not last long. Morris 
 fell ill of rheumatic fever, and after it was 
 not strong enough to make the frequent 
 journeys to London which the growing 
 
THE FOUNDING OF THE FIRM 77 
 
 business of the firm demanded. For this 
 and other reasons he resolved to leave the 
 Red House before he had finished decorating 
 it. In 1865 he took an old house in Queen 
 Square, Bloomsbury, and in the autumn he 
 moved both his family and his business 
 thither, selling the Red House, which he never 
 saw again. Living in London, he had more 
 time to spare both because he was saved a 
 long journey to his work and because he had 
 found a good manager for his business. His 
 choice of this manager was a proof of his 
 adventurous sagacity. George Warrington 
 Taylor was a man of good family and educa- 
 tion, who had lost all his money and fallen 
 to be a check-taker at a theatre. Though he 
 had mismanaged his own affairs, Morris set 
 him to manage the business and it prospered 
 steadily under him. Having thus more leisure, 
 Morris turned to writing poetry again, and 
 produced a prodigious amount in a very short 
 time. " The Life and Death of Jason " was 
 published in 1867, the first and second parts of 
 " The Earthly Paradise " together in 1868 ; the 
 third and fourth separately in 1870. In spite 
 of their length all these volumes had a great 
 and immediate success, and Morris from that 
 time ranked with Rossetti and Swinburne as 
 
78 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 a chief of the new generation of Romantic 
 poets. But even " The Earthly Paradise " did 
 not end this burst of poetic energy, and in 
 1872 he wrote " Love is Enough," the last of 
 his longer romantic poems. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 MORRIS AS A ROMANTIC POET 
 
 THE word Romantic, as applied to a certain 
 movement in art, has been used vaguely and in 
 different senses. We know better who the 
 Romantic poets are than why we call them 
 Romantic. But if we examine their works, 
 and especially those which any one would 
 choose as being peculiarly romantic, we shall 
 find that they have this in common namely, 
 that they interest us through their unlike- 
 ness, rather than through their likeness, to 
 our own experience. In poems like Keats's 
 " Eve of St. Agnes " and " La Belle Dame sans 
 Merci," or like Coleridge's " Christabel " and 
 " The Ancient Mariner," there is a continual 
 insistence upon the strangeness of the cir- 
 cumstances. It is not merely that the story 
 belongs to the past; most stories told by 
 poets do. But Homer and Chaucer do not 
 incessantly remind us that their stories 
 belong to the past, whereas Keats and 
 79 
 
80 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 Coleridge do. Homer and Chaucer tell a 
 story because they think it a good one; but 
 Coleridge in " Christabel " and Keats in the 
 " Eve of St. Agnes " have very little story to 
 tell. The aim of these poems is to carry us 
 into a strange world and its strangeness is 
 more important than what happens in it. 
 Wordsworth, again, in his poems about 
 peasants, though he does not carry us into the 
 past, does carry us into a world different from 
 our own, and he is always insisting upon the 
 difference. Indeed, many of his incidents 
 are chosen to illustrate the difference between 
 his peasants and the people for whom he 
 writes. In fact, the Romantic movement 
 expressed a general dissatisfaction with the 
 circumstances and surroundings of the life 
 of the Romantic poets. It was not merely 
 an attempt to enrich the subject-matter of 
 poetry or to deliver it from the prosaic 
 methods of the eighteenth century. It was 
 rather a revolt against the whole urban 
 civilization of that century ; and the Romantic 
 poets ranged the past because they were 
 sick of the present. Some of them were 
 liberal in their politics, others were conserva- 
 tive; but Scott, the most conservative of 
 them all, did not like the urban civilization 
 
MORRIS AS A ROMANTIC POET 81 
 
 of his time well enough to write about it. 
 He, too, not only found his stories in the 
 past, but enjoyed it because it was unlike 
 the present; and whenever he draws a char- 
 acter well from life it is a countryman sharply 
 distinguished from the run of educated and 
 well-to-do townspeople of the day. Shake- 
 speare took Hamlet from a primitive Danish 
 story and turned him into a gentleman of 
 his own time. A Romantic poet would have 
 made him even more primitive than he was 
 in the original story; for he would have 
 chosen that story as a way of escape from the 
 present, and would have peopled it with 
 strange, not with familiar, characters. 
 
 Now of all the Romantic poets Morris, in 
 his early poetry was the most romantic; for 
 he was more consciously discontented with 
 the circumstances of his own time than any 
 of them. At the very beginning of the 
 Romantic movement the Middle Ages had 
 been discovered; that is to say, they had 
 become interesting instead of being merely 
 dull and barbarous. Horace Walpole built 
 himself what he took to be a Gothic villa at 
 Strawberry Hill, and wrote what he thought 
 was a mediaeval romance in the " Castle of 
 Otranto." At first this interest in the Middle 
 
82 
 
 Ages was merely a new fashion, like the earlier 
 fashion which produced Pastoral poetry, and 
 it had results just as absurd. But it was 
 a fashion that lasted, and people went on 
 being interested in the Middle Ages without 
 quite knowing why. To Keats and Coleridge 
 they were full of a strange inexplicable 
 beauty, well expressed in these lines from 
 " Christabel "- 
 
 " The moon shines dim in the open air, 
 And not a moonbeam enters here. 
 But they without its light can see 
 The chamber carved so curiously, 
 Carved with figures strange and sweet, 
 All made out of the carver's brain, 
 For a lady's chamber meet : 
 The lamp with twofold silver chain 
 Is fastened to an angel's feet." 
 
 Then came Ruskin, who explained the causes 
 and conditions of this beauty and why it 
 could not be imitated now; and for Morris, 
 who had learnt from Ruskin, and who studied 
 the Middle Ages with the passion of an artist 
 and of a man of science, their beauty was no 
 longer fantastic or inexplicable. For him 
 their art was as normal and rational as 
 
classical art seemed to the masters of the 
 High Renaissance in Italy. It was the art 
 of his own people and his own country, which 
 had been for a time ousted by a foreign art, 
 just as the southern art of Italy was for a 
 time ousted by the Gothic. 
 
 But still it was not the art which he saw being 
 produced about him. The tradition of it 
 had been lost and would have to be recovered ; 
 and that could not be done by mere imitation. 
 Meanwhile, however, he felt himself, as he 
 said in the Introduction to " The Earthly 
 Paradise," to be born out of his due time. 
 This feeling was not the result of a vague 
 dislike of reality, but of a very clear liking 
 for a reality different from that in which 
 he found himself. And in his first volume 
 of poems we see him trying to throw himself 
 back into that reality, and describing it as 
 if it were something he remembered from his 
 own childhood. The detail of poems such as 
 " The Defence of Guenevere " or " King 
 Arthur's Tomb " is not the vague detail of 
 earlier poets. It is all precise, and described 
 as if the poet were telling of what he had 
 seen with his own eyes. But he insists 
 continually on it because he wishes, not only 
 to tell a story or express a passion, but also 
 
84 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 to describe a world different from that in 
 which he lives. He is not entirely occupied 
 with strange circumstance; for Guenevere 
 and Lancelot and all the people of the " Morte 
 d' Arthur " were real people to him ; but they 
 were more real than the people he met in 
 the street just because he thought of them 
 as living in this world of his desires. So he 
 could not bring them to life without also 
 bringing that world to life; and "The 
 Defence of Guenevere " and " King Arthur's 
 Tomb " are troubled and confused with this 
 twofold task. Morris has too much to say 
 in them; he is like a child trying to tell a 
 story and at the same time to express its 
 own delighted interest in every detail of the 
 story; and he becomes both breathless and 
 rambling in the effort. He is full of strange 
 news about wonderful people in a wonderful 
 world of his own discovery; and he tells it 
 all as news, making no distinction of emphasis 
 between one fact and another. Tennyson 
 writes of the Court of King Arthur as if it 
 were an old tale worth exploiting by a modern 
 civilized poet. For him it is a story of no 
 time or place; but for Morris it is a story 
 of a time better than his own, not, of course, 
 the real legendary time of King Arthur, but 
 
MORRIS AS A ROMANTIC POET 85 
 
 the Middle Ages still familiar to Mallory. 
 And whereas Tennyson's treatment of cir- 
 cumstance is like the vague treatment of 
 some idealist eighteenth-century painter, 
 Morris reminds us of Mantegna in his mixture 
 of living passion and detail drawn from the 
 past. For Mantegna looked back to the 
 Roman past just as Morris looked back to 
 the past of the Middle Ages, and he too 
 expressed his desire for another state of 
 being in his art with a passion that freed his 
 detail from pedantry. 1 
 
 " The Defence of Guenevere " contains one 
 or two of Morris's earliest poems, such as 
 the beautiful " Summer Dawn," in which 
 he seems to dream without energy. In the 
 later and mediaeval poems he is still dreaming, 
 but with an energy too fierce for a pure 
 dreamer such as he still took himself to be. 
 And it is this dreaming energy which makes 
 those poems unlike other romantic poetry. 
 The romantic game had been played in verse 
 often enough, but here it is played in deadly 
 earnest. Morris does not make use of the 
 Middle Ages for artistic purposes; he writes 
 about them as a poet writes of love when he 
 is in love himself. In poems like " The 
 
 1 See Mr. Borenson's interesting essay on Mantegna. 
 
86 
 
 Haystack in the Floods " we can see that he 
 has taken his method from Browning. He 
 tells a great deal of his story by means of 
 allusion, and by the same means manages to 
 introduce detail without labour or digression. 
 But whereas Browning used this method to 
 express his curiosity about many past ages, 
 Morris used it to express his passion for one. 
 He writes not like a curious traveller through 
 all the past, but like one who has travelled 
 to find what he wants and has found it. No 
 one, perhaps, could see at the time that there 
 was more than dreaming in those poems, 
 but we can see now that they were written by 
 a man who would try to make his dreams 
 come true. 
 
 In " The Defence of Guenevere " volume 
 there is one poem, " Sir Peter Harpdon's 
 End," in blank verse and dramatic in form. 
 After the publication of that volume Morris 
 started to write a series of " Scenes from the 
 Fall of Troy," also dramatic and in blank 
 verse. He never finished them, partly be- 
 cause at the time he was too busy with the 
 firm and partly because his mind was being 
 drawn more and more to narrative. It 
 was contrary to his practical nature to write 
 drama that was not completely a play and 
 
MORRIS AS A ROMANTIC POET 87 
 
 that was not meant to be acted. He showed 
 in these experiments that he had more 
 dramatic power than most modern poets, 
 both in his invention and in the style of his 
 blank verse, which is poetry yet sounds like 
 natural speech; but he never developed this 
 dramatic power for want of a theatre and 
 actors. The tale of Troy, like the tale of 
 King Arthur, was to him a story of the Middle 
 Ages, but one which the Middle Ages had 
 got from a past already far remote. He 
 saw it, whereas most modern writers only 
 think of it; but he saw it faint in an infinite 
 distance and through a transforming mist. 
 He always felt the sadness " of old unhappy 
 far-off things and battles long ago"; but 
 this sadness is heavier in the Troy scenes 
 than in any other work of his. The people 
 all seem like ghosts, acting their past faintly 
 over again with a fore-knowledge of its 
 futile end. It is as if he had evoked them 
 and then soon dismissed them out of pity; 
 but in these fragments, there is a real evoca- 
 tion and, however pale the ghosts may be, 
 we believe at least that they are ghosts. 
 
 After this Morris wrote little verse for six 
 or seven years, and when he began again 
 in London he made no more experiments. 
 
88 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 Then he set to work upon narrative poetry, 
 knowing exactly what he meant to do and 
 well able to do it. He was lucky in that he 
 had a great natural talent for a kind of 
 poetry that has not often been written well 
 in England. Since the Canterbury Tales most 
 of our narrative poems that have been poetical 
 have not told a story well ; and most of those 
 which have told a story well have been 
 either prosaic or poetic only by artifice. 
 Morris told his stories naturally in verse 
 because he could conceive them as poems; 
 and at this time he was content to be a poetic 
 teller of old stories. Chaucer was his master 
 in this art and from him he seems to have 
 learnt, without practice on his own account, 
 all that can be learnt of it ; and in particular 
 how to make the poetry issue naturally out 
 of the story instead of using the story as 
 a pretext for irrelevant poetry. And, like 
 Chaucer in the Canterbury Tales, Morris in 
 his " Earthly Paradise " devises circumstances 
 that provide a plausible reason for story- 
 telling. But, whereas Chaucer's pilgrims tell 
 stories fitted to their own individual characters, 
 the narrators of "The Earthly Paradise " tell 
 each a story of his own race or country. 
 Since, then, his stories were half Greek and 
 
MORRIS AS A ROMANTIC POET 89 
 
 half from other sources, he had to contrive 
 a setting in which Greeks surviving from the 
 ancient world meet with men of the Middle 
 Ages and of many different countries. Hence 
 the Prologue, a fine story in itself, in 
 which, in the time of Edward III, a crew of 
 sailors set out to find the Earthly Paradise, 
 and after many adventures and disappoint- 
 ments come to an island where there are 
 Greeks still keeping their old way of life 
 unknown to the rest of mankind. Thus this 
 great exchange of tales is made possible. 
 
 But Morris, for all his love of a story, could 
 not tell one as Chaucer could. Chaucer often 
 thought he was relating history and, like a 
 good historian, put all his knowledge of 
 living men into it. Morris knew that he was 
 simply telling stories ; and in " The Earthly 
 Paradise " he tells most of them as if he knew 
 they were mere stories and as if he were 
 passing them on as best he could. He set 
 himself a task and performed it at a great 
 pace. But no man who ever lived could tell 
 all these diverse stories so as to express his 
 own experience through them. Morris when 
 he wrote " The Earthly Paradise " had still 
 the romantic conception of poetry, namely, 
 that it should interest by its unlikeness 
 
00 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 rather than by its likeness to our experience. 
 Therefore he lays his stress upon the wonderful 
 events in his tales and upon their strangeness 
 of circumstance rather than upon those 
 passions and characters that are constant 
 to men. It is events and circumstances that 
 we remember rather than people. The 
 poetry of " The Earthly Paradise " has been 
 rather foolishly compared to the design of 
 his wall-papers and chintzes; but it is true 
 that Morris often gives as faint an image of 
 reality in a story as in a pattern, and that 
 he relies on the story, as on the pattern, to 
 justify the faintness. No modern English 
 poet had written a long poem of any kind 
 so easy to read. Begin one of the tales of 
 " The Earthly Paradise " and you find that 
 it draws you along with its own current. 
 Begin Swinburne's "Tristram," and you find 
 that after each splendid lyrical passage you 
 have to set yourself to the story with an 
 effort. All the best of it is digression; but 
 there are no digressions in "The Man born to 
 be King," and, as it is all poetry, this is high 
 praise. But I, for one, can never feel quite 
 satisfied with " The Earthly Paradise," and 
 
 1 even feel that its popularity has injured 
 Morris's fame. A great deal of it is merely 
 
MORRIS AS A ROMANTIC POET 91 
 
 pleasure-giving poetry, and if he had written 
 nothing else he would indeed have been the 
 idle singer of an empty day. Perhaps, being 
 at this time a little bewildered by life and 
 the state of the world, seeing that things 
 were wrong and not having got any clear 
 determination to right them, he set himself 
 a task and tried to satisfy his enormous energy 
 with that. He liked to think of poetry as 
 a craft; and he had mastered the craft of 
 story-telling so that it was almost too easy 
 to him, and so that he could practise it without 
 giving the whole of his mind to it. Indeed, 
 one feels a kind of absence of mind in many of 
 these stories, as if the writer knew them so 
 well that he could think of something else 
 while he was telling them; and for that 
 reason he often seems to be telling us some- 
 thing to amuse us rather than because he 
 must tell it. 
 
 He had meant " The Life and Death of 
 Jason " to be part of " The Earthly Para- 
 dise " ; but as he wrote it, it grew too large 
 to take its place there. It is a poem of pure 
 romance, told for its wonder and very well told ; 
 until near the end when Medea, from having 
 been only a wonderful enchantress, becomes 
 a mother, and has to subdue the tenderness 
 
92 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 common to all mothers before she can slay 
 her children. Then Morris surprises us with 
 a power like Chaucer's of expressing passion 
 in the simplest words. There is the same 
 power in " The Lovers of Gudrun," which 
 comes at the end of the third part of " The 
 Earthly Paradise." Two years before it was 
 published Morris had begun to learn Icelandic, 
 and he soon read through most of the sagas. 
 He enjoyed all good stories; but these were 
 to him among the stories of the world what 
 Gothic was among all the different kinds of 
 architecture; and he put the whole force 
 of his mind into " The Lovers of Gudrun," 
 telling it not merely for its strangeness, but 
 because he loved the men and women in it. 
 But of this change in his poetry I will speak 
 in another chapter. Two years after " The 
 Earthly Paradise " was finished he made 
 another dramatic experiment. " Love is 
 Enough " is more remote from reality than 
 any of his poems. Mr. Mackail has given 
 a lucid account of its peculiar form with its 
 receding planes of action, five in all ; the aim 
 of which is, starting from a representation of 
 the outer world and particular persons, to 
 reach in the furthest plane an expression, 
 almost in pure music, of that passion which 
 
MORRIS AS A ROMANTIC POET 93 
 
 possesses the chief character of the play. 
 For success in such a design, a very sharp 
 contrast would be needed between the nearer 
 and the more distant planes ; and the contrast 
 in the poem is not sharp. The rustics in the 
 nearest plane are as faint as any persons in 
 " The Earthly Paradise " and all the other 
 characters are shadows ; so that the lyrics of 
 the furthest plane seem nearer to us than 
 anything else in the poem. " Love is Enough " 
 seems a shadowy romance; but it is really 
 a religious play, a confession of faith made 
 almost unconsciously. The love of which 
 the lyrics tell is not the love of one human 
 being for another, though that may be a 
 preparation for it. It is rather a state of 
 mind which, to those who know it, is better 
 than happiness, indeed the best that man 
 can attain to in this life. 
 
 But Morris can express it better than I 
 can explain it 
 
 " Ye know not how void is your hope and 
 
 your living : 
 Depart with your helping lest yet ye undo 
 
 me. 
 Ye know not that at nightfall she draweth 
 
 near to me, 
 
94 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 There is soft speech between us and words 
 
 of forgiving, 
 Till in dead of the midnight her kisses 
 
 thrill through me. 
 Pass by me, and hearken, and waken me 
 
 not." 
 
 The language of that is recognized at once 
 by any one who has an ear for it. It is the 
 language of religious ecstasy, expressing a 
 desire so strong that it can use the terms of 
 earthly love, and so sweet to those who feel 
 it that it has in it also the delight of earthly 
 love. Morris, like all great men of his kind, 
 was unworldly, not so much from contempt 
 of the world, certainly not from contempt 
 of the earth, as because there was something 
 desired by his soul compared with which 
 things of the world seemed to him of little 
 account. As a rule he acted upon this desire 
 more than he thought about it. He was not 
 by nature speculative, and shared the scepti- 
 cism of his time about all supernatural things. 
 He set himself so many tasks that he was 
 more concerned with performing them than 
 with asking himself why he did so. But 
 sometimes that high passion, which was the 
 motive force of his life, expressed itself 
 
MORRIS AS A ROMANTIC POET 95 
 
 suddenly in his poetry so that it seems to 
 tell a secret of which he was hardly aware 
 himself, a secret only to be understood by 
 those who know it already. In ordinary 
 speech Morris, though very frank, told no 
 secrets about himself; and all his friends 
 knew that there was a part of him which he 
 shared with no one. Here he reveals it in 
 his art, telling all the world that there is 
 a source outside him from which he gets his 
 strength and purpose; and then he turns 
 proudly on the world as if he had told it too 
 much 
 
 " Wherewith will ye buy it, ye rich who behold 
 
 me? 
 Draw out from your coffers your rest and 
 
 your laughter, 
 And the fair gilded hope of the dawn 
 
 coming after. 
 Nay, this I sell not though ye bought me 
 
 and sold me 
 For your house stored with such things 
 
 from threshold to rafter, 
 Pass by me. I hearken, and think of 
 
 you not." 
 
 When he wrote this he was still, like an 
 eremite, half afraid of the world, and with- 
 
96 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 drawing from it to listen to the whispers 
 of his familiar. But these very whispers 
 were to send him into the world again so that 
 he might labour to change what he hated. 
 
 " Love is Enough " is half a failure as a 
 romantic poem because Morris could no longer 
 soothe his disgust of reality by writing of 
 strange things. The romantic part of it per- 
 sists from mere habit and has become as faint 
 as a fading memory. Indeed, the music of the 
 lyrics makes us forget it altogether, and they 
 break through it as if the poet himself had 
 forgotten it. In them we hear no longer 
 the idle singer of an empty day but one 
 whose music is making itself out of his own 
 experience. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE REVIVAL OF ARTS AND CRAFTS 
 
 FOR some years Morris was still mainly 
 occupied with his different arts and his 
 business, and still tried to live like an artist 
 unconcerned with other matters. In 1871 
 he took with Rossetti a beautiful old house 
 on the Upper Thames called Kelmscott 
 Manor House, which he has described in 
 " News from Nowhere." He meant it to be 
 a happy refuge from the world; but the 
 contrast between it and most houses of our 
 own time, especially the houses of the poor, 
 troubled him more and more, so that he could 
 not rest content with its bygone excellence. 
 More and more, as he lived there, the quiet 
 waters of the river at his garden end drew his 
 thoughts with them down to the city hi which 
 the present was making so blind a preparation 
 for the future 
 
 G 97 
 
98 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 " Hark, the wind in the elm-boughs ! from 
 
 London it bloweth, 
 And telleth of gold, and of hope and 
 
 unrest ; 
 Of power that helps not, of wisdom that 
 
 knoweth, 
 
 But teacheth not aught of the worst and 
 the best." 
 
 So he wrote at a later time when, go where he 
 would, he could not escape from the noise of 
 London and the questions it put to him. 
 At this time he wrote now and again about the 
 state of society as if it were a matter that 
 troubled him through his work like a dis- 
 tracting noise that could not be stopped. " It 
 seems to be nobody's business," he says, in 
 a letter written in 1874, " to try to do better 
 things isn't mine, you see, in spite of all my 
 grumbling but look, suppose people lived 
 in little communities among gardens and 
 green fields, so that they could be in the 
 country in five minutes' walk, and had few 
 wants, almost no furniture, for instance, 
 and no servants, and studied the (difficult) 
 arts of enjoying life, and finding out what 
 they really wanted; then I think we might 
 hope civilization had really begun." He had 
 already a clear notion of the way of life 
 
REVIVAL OF ARTS AND CRAFTS 99 
 
 which seemed to him best for the whole of 
 society; and in this he was unlike many 
 revolutionaries whose aim is to change the 
 machinery of society without having ever 
 asked themselves what they want to do 
 with it when they have changed it. But 
 the machinery itself puzzled Morris so that 
 he was not anxious to start meddling with 
 it. After " Love is Enough," he wrote nothing 
 original for some time. " Sometimes," he 
 wrote in a letter, " I begin to fear I am 
 losing my invention. You know I very much 
 wish not to fall off in imagination and enthu- 
 siasm as I grow older." Yet the best of his 
 life both in action and in literature was yet 
 to be; and the slack time only meant that 
 he was being pulled different ways. It would 
 not have been a slack time for any one else. 
 He went on translating sagas, and in 1875 he 
 published a translation of Virgil's "^Eneid." 
 In this work, because of the merits and 
 defects of the original, Morris showed clearly 
 what were his own shortcomings in poetry. 
 The ".^Eneid," though a narrative poem, was 
 not written for the story and is not read 
 for it. It has every merit except that mo- 
 mentum which only a great story-teller can 
 give to narrative. The mind of the reader 
 
100 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 rests on the beautiful passages and is not 
 drawn through them by a desire to discover 
 what will happen next. Virgil is a poet who 
 broods over his theme; thought, not action, 
 is the stuff of his poetry; and his language, 
 though not obscure, is complicated and 
 enriched with thought. But Morris was a 
 story-teller by nature, and his language, 
 compared with Virgil's, is thin and quick and 
 fluent. So when he translated the " ^Eneid," 
 he rendered it too closely to make a good story 
 of it, while he could find no equivalent in his 
 own language for the profound and subtle 
 beauties of the original. Mr, Mackail says 
 that he turned the " ^Eneid " into a romantic 
 poem; it seems to me that he tried to turn 
 it into a purely narrative poem and failed, 
 as he would have failed with " Paradise Lost," 
 if it had been written in a foreign tongue 
 and he had translated it into English. 
 Morris's translation can be read with pleasure ; 
 but it is like some of the vaguer stories of 
 " The Earthly Paradise," and the " jEneid " is 
 not like these at all. 
 
 In 1875 the partnership of Morris & Co. 
 was dissolved, and Morris's friendship with 
 Rossetti came to a final end. There was a 
 dispute about the terms of dissolution between 
 
REVIVAL OF ARTS AND CRAFTS 101 
 
 Morris on the one hand and Rossetti, Madox 
 Brown and Marshall on the other. Morris 
 made friends again with Brown, but never 
 with Rossetti, who was sick in mind and 
 body. But this dispute about the firm was 
 only the final occasion of their quarrel. 
 Morris had once been Rossetti's happy slave ; 
 now he was his equal with different desires 
 and different values. " I can't say," he 
 wrote in a letter after Rossetti's death, 
 " how it was that Rossetti took no interest 
 in politics. . . . The truth is he cared for 
 nothing but individual and personal matters ; 
 chiefly of course in relation to art and litera- 
 ture; but he would take abundant trouble 
 to help any one person who was in distress 
 of mind or body; but the evils of any mass 
 of people he couldn't bring his mind to bear 
 upon. I suppose, in short, it needs a person 
 of hopeful mind to take disinterested notice 
 of politics, and Rossetti was certainly not 
 hopeful." 
 
 Here Morris states very clearly the differ- 
 ence between Rossetti and himself. For he 
 himself was always more concerned about 
 general evils than about the troubles of 
 individuals, and in that respect he belonged 
 peculiarly to his own age. People often talk 
 
102 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 of Morris as if he was a man of the Middle 
 Ages, born, as he said himself, out of due 
 time. But the very comparisons which he 
 made between one age and another would 
 never have been made by any mediaeval 
 mind. He saw past and present in the mass, 
 and he saw individual things as symptoms 
 of a general state of being. This tendency 
 of his mind is the modern scientific tendency, 
 the power of which we may judge from the 
 fact that it became a habit in one who was 
 so little interested in science. Morris might 
 have been a greater artist if he had been 
 more passionately concerned with particular 
 people and things, if they had not all seemed to 
 him representative of certain conceptions in 
 his own mind. For even his energy, and with 
 it his interests, had limits. He understood 
 types of character very well, and could 
 draw them firmly and justly; nor was he at 
 all a doctrinaire in his judgments of men 
 and things. But they remained generic for 
 him, and in his art he presents them as typical 
 of what he likes and dislikes. As an artist, 
 in fact, he is a generalizer of a new kind; 
 for he uses his generalizations to express 
 likes and dislikes that are not merely in- 
 stinctive but also the results of his general 
 
REVIVAL OF ARTS AND CRAFTS 103 
 
 conceptions of what is good and bad. And 
 yet he differs from all those who have em- 
 ployed art for ulterior ends, who have written 
 novels with a purpose, or pictures with a 
 moral, in that art is for him always simply a 
 means of expression. He does not try to 
 prove anything by it any more than Shake- 
 speare or Rembrandt; but, unlike them, he 
 expresses an interest, a peculiarly modern 
 interest, in states of being rather than in 
 men and women. 
 
 But the scientific tendency affected him in 
 another and more definite way; for it made 
 him an eager inquirer into methods and 
 processes of art. He soon became aware that 
 many of the arts and crafts which he practised 
 were in the dark ages of ignorance; and he 
 made it his business to recover past knowledge 
 about them as eagerly as the men of the 
 Renaissance tried to recover the knowledge 
 of the ancient world. Dyeing was one of 
 these arts; for he found that, when he had 
 designed a pattern, its colours could not be 
 reproduced with the dyes of the time, and 
 further that, until he himself had some know- 
 ledge of dyeing, he could not design dyed 
 stuffs with any freedom or precision of in 
 vention. At first he did the best he could 
 
104 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 with things as they were. " His skill as a 
 colourist," says his foreman, Mr. George 
 Wardle, " was shown in combining colours 
 which, separately, were of but very mediocre 
 character; this system of colour, which may 
 be called provisional, marks very distinctly 
 what may be called the first period of the 
 history of the firm, when Mr. Morris had not 
 yet got a dye-house. The peacock-blues, 
 rusty reds, and olive-greens of that period 
 were not by any means his ideals, but the 
 best he could get done." The colours of this 
 provisional period became fashionable, and 
 were thought peculiarly " artistic " by people 
 of timid taste. Indeed, they still persist as 
 " art " colours ; but Morris himself was soon 
 sick of them and of the reputation they 
 brought him. Once when a customer, 
 shocked by the brightness of the later 
 Hammersmith carpets, remarked, " But I 
 thought your colours were subdued?" 
 Morris dealt with him firmly : "If you want 
 dirt," he said, " you can find that in the 
 street." 
 
 Before he had his own dye-house he was 
 continually disappointed by the bad work of 
 those he employed to dye for him both in 
 England and in France. But he could not 
 
REVIVAL OF ARTS AND CRAFTS 105 
 
 set up his own dye-house until he had taught 
 himself to dye ; and he had to learn the secrets 
 of vegetable-dyeing mainly from old books, 
 for there were few living men who knew 
 anything about it. He studied French works 
 of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, 
 Herbals, and even Philemon Holland's trans- 
 lation of Pliny, as ardently as if he were 
 Browning's Grammarian labouring at the 
 Greek language. " I was at Kelmscott the 
 other day," he writes in 1876, " and betwixt 
 the fishing, I cut a handful of poplar twigs 
 and boiled them, and dyed a lock of wool 
 a very good yellow." He had the power of 
 understanding w r hat he read in books so well 
 that he could put it in practice at once. He 
 made his first experiments with his own hands 
 and " so well had he prepared himself," 
 says Mr. Wardle, " that I do not think a 
 single dyeing went wrong." He also learned 
 what he could from Mr. Thomas Wardle, 
 the brother of his foreman, who was a 
 practical dyer at Leek and who remembered 
 something of the old vegetable-dyeing as it 
 was practised in his own boyhood. It was 
 at Leek that he revived indigo-dyeing, which, 
 because of its difficulty, had been superseded 
 by Prussian blue. " It requires," he said 
 
106 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 " more experience than any dyeing process " ; 
 and for that reason, and because no substitute 
 could satisfy him, he worked at it as if he 
 had nothing else in the world to do. " I 
 must say I should like not to look such a 
 beast," he wrote after dyeing in the indigo 
 vat, " and not to feel as if I wanted pegs to 
 keep my fingers one from the other." 
 
 But dyeing was only one of the arts that 
 he revived by the simple but arduous process 
 of learning how to practise them himself. 
 He was for a time hampered by want of 
 space ; but in 1881 he moved his works from 
 London to Merton Abbey. There he found 
 some disused print-works close to the River 
 Wandle, the water of which was suitable to 
 his dyeing, and with the works seven acres 
 of land including a meadow, an orchard, and 
 a garden. 
 
 Here is a list of the different kinds of work 
 executed at Merton Abbey, which Mr. Mackail 
 gives in his Life 
 
 1. Painted glass windows. 
 
 2. Arras tapestry woven in the high- 
 warp loom. 
 
 3. Carpets. 
 
 4. Embroidery. 
 
REVIVAL OF ARTS AND CRAFTS 107 
 
 5. Tiles. 
 
 6. Furniture. 
 
 7. General house decoration. 
 
 8. Printed cotton goods. 
 
 9. Paper-hangings. 
 
 10. Figured woven stuffs. 
 
 11. Velvets and cloths. 
 
 12. Upholstery. 
 
 For most of those Morris made designs 
 himself and at Merton he was able to watch 
 over the execution of all of them. His 
 revival of tapestry was one of his last com- 
 mercial ventures, and he was drawn into it 
 simply by his love of the beautiful tapestries 
 of the Middle Ages. Tapestries have been 
 woven both on the high-warp and on the 
 low-warp loom for thousands of years; and 
 they are still woven on the high-warp loom 
 at the Gobelins works where Morris went to 
 see the process. But there, though the 
 process was right enough, it was employed 
 merely to make copies of paintings, so that 
 all the beauties peculiar to tapestry were 
 lost in the vain imitation of another art. 
 Morris wished to revive not only the right 
 process, extinct in England, but also the 
 right principles of design. And to do this 
 
108 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 it was necessary for him to understand 
 thoroughly the process for which the design 
 was to be made, to be both artist and crafts- 
 man himself. Only the high-warp process 
 could content him; for with the low-warp, 
 where the frames are placed horizontally 
 with the ground, the face of the tapestry 
 looks downwards and the workman only 
 sees the back of it. Thus he can only copy 
 his design mechanically, matching colours 
 as close as he can get them. But with the 
 high-warp loom the frame stands vertically 
 and the front of the tapestry is reflected to 
 the workman in a mirror, so that he sees 
 what he is doing and can translate his design 
 into tapestry, making the picture in the 
 material and suiting it to all the qualities of 
 the material. In 1878 Morris began to think 
 of practising the art, and he said that what- 
 ever he did he must do chiefly with his own 
 hands. " -Tapestry at its highest," he said, 
 *' is the painting of pictures with coloured 
 wools on a warp. Nobody but an artist can 
 paint pictures." It was in the same year 
 that he went to live in Hammersmith in a 
 house so close to the river, that he could go 
 by water from it to his other house at Kelms- 
 cott. There he had a tapestry loom set up 
 
REVIVAL OF ARTS AND CRAFTS 109 
 
 in his bedroom and could work upon it for 
 hours before breakfast. Sometimes he would 
 give ten hours a day to it, and even when 
 at Kelmscott he longed to get back to his 
 weaving. 
 
 Having learnt all he could at home, he set 
 up a loom at his works at Queen Square. 
 Then he began to teach what he knew to his 
 workmen, and he found that boys learnt 
 most easily. Three of them were taught 
 at Queen Square, and, though they were 
 chosen almost at random, they soon became 
 expert and carried on the work on a larger 
 scale in the greater space at Merton; and 
 there were produced the finest tapestries of 
 modern times, many of them, such as the 
 Adoration of the Magi, from designs by Burne- 
 Jones. In many of these tapestries the work- 
 man himself invented most of the colour and 
 a good deal of the detail; and this would 
 have been impossible with the low-warp 
 tapestry in which the workman, since he 
 cannot see his work, must be a mere copyist. 
 Thus, while designers like Burne-Jones and 
 craftsmen like Mr. Dearie, who was the first 
 boy trained by Morris, all played a great part 
 in the revival of the art of tapestry weaving, 
 they would never have had a chance of 
 
110 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 accomplishing anything in it if Morris had 
 not first taught himself what he afterwards 
 taught to others. All his fertility of design, 
 and he designed nearly six hundred patterns 
 of different kinds, would have been useless if 
 he had not brought the artist and the crafts- 
 man once more together in his own person. 
 He it was who discovered that to separate 
 them is to deprive the artist of his art and 
 the craftsman of his craft; and, having dis- 
 covered the disease, he proceeded at once to 
 prove, by his own example, what was the cure. 
 This alone would have been a great work for 
 one man's life, even if he had revived a single 
 art ; but Morris, besides all his other labours, 
 went on from one art to another. 
 
 It was many years afterwards that he took 
 up the art of printing, but I may as well 
 speak here of what he did for it. 
 
 It may be said that the art of printing 
 began to decline soon after it was first estab- 
 lished. The earliest printed books are the 
 finest because their type was based upon 
 beautiful writing, as it was practised when 
 calligraphy was an art. Printing killed calli- 
 graphy and soon began to suffer from the 
 death of that art. There was beautiful type, 
 of course, for many generations, but by the 
 
REVIVAL OF ARTS AND CRAFTS 111 
 
 middle of the nineteenth century it had 
 ceased to exist, and there was merely com- 
 mercial printing as we have it to-day, ugly, 
 mean, and not so easy to read as it looks. 
 Morris did not like his own books to be 
 printed in this way, and in 1888 he resolved 
 that he would do something better with his 
 prose romance, " The House of the Wolfings." 
 He consulted his friend Mr. Emery Walker, 
 and they chose a type about fifty years old, 
 belonging to Messrs. Whittingham, which 
 was modelled on an old Basel fount. He 
 used the same type for "The Roots of the 
 Mountains," published in 1889 ; and the next 
 year he resolved to set up a printing press of 
 his own with type designed by himself. He 
 was himself a calligraphist, and the writing of 
 his illuminated manuscripts, if not so skilful 
 as that of the great illuminators, was both 
 beautiful and original. He could therefore 
 design, like the first designers of type, with 
 the art of the calligraphist, and he has told us 
 what his aims were in a note upon the Kelms- 
 cott Press. il I have always been a great 
 admirer," he says, " of the calligraphy of 
 the Middle Ages and of the earlier printing 
 which took its place." It was the essence of 
 his undertaking, he added, to produce books 
 
112 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 which it would be a pleasure to look upon 
 as pieces of printing and arrangement of 
 type; and he had to consider chiefly the 
 following things : the paper, the form of the 
 type, the relative spacing of the letters, the 
 words, and the lines; and lastly the position 
 of the printed matter on the page. 
 
 As to the type, he wanted " letter pure in 
 form; severe, without needless excrescences; 
 solid, without the thickening and thinning 
 of the line, which is the essential fault of 
 the ordinary modern type, and which makes 
 it difficult to read ; and not compressed 
 laterally as all later type has grown to be 
 owing to commercial exigencies." His models 
 for this kind of type were " the works of 
 the great Venetian printers of the fifteenth 
 century, of whom Nicholas Jenson produced 
 the completest and most Roman characters 
 from 1470 to 1476." This type, he tells us, 
 he studied with much care, " getting it photo- 
 graphed to a big scale, and drawing it over 
 many times before I began designing my own 
 letter ; so that, though I think I mastered the 
 essence of it, I did not copy it servilely." 
 
 So he made his first type, Roman in char- 
 acter, which is called the Golden type. Miss 
 May Morris tells us that he used to carry 
 
REVIVAL OF ARTS AND CRAFTS 113 
 
 about with him proofs of the type in match- 
 boxes and that sometimes, as he sat and 
 talked, he would draw a match-box out and 
 thoughtfully eye the small scraps of paper 
 inside it. He said that of all the designing 
 he had ever done, nothing had ever given 
 him so much trouble as this Roman type; 
 and yet any one looking at it who knew nothing 
 about type would only notice that it was 
 easy to read and pleasant to the eye. It has 
 no archaic peculiarities; indeed, there is 
 more common sense in it, perhaps, than in 
 any of the fine modern types that have since 
 been produced. 
 
 " After a while," Morris says in his note, 
 " I felt that I must have a Gothic as well as 
 a Roman fount; and herein the task I set 
 myself was to redeem the Gothic character from 
 the charge of unreadableness that is com- 
 monly brought against it." So, he continues, 
 " I designed a black-letter type which, I 
 think, I may claim to be as readable as a 
 Roman one, and to say the truth, I prefer 
 it to the Roman." This Gothic type in its 
 larger form was called the Troy type. His 
 Chaucer, with its double columns, was printed 
 in a smaller form called the Chaucer type. 
 
 I, for one, do not find the Gothic type so 
 H 
 
114 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 easy to read as the Roman ; but Morris was so 
 used to black letter, and so fond of it, that it 
 gave no trouble to his eye. He felt that he 
 must have a Gothic fount, no doubt because 
 of his love of everything Gothic. And yet 
 even the finest Gothic lettering is neither so 
 beautiful nor so rational as the lettering, 
 which we may call Romanesque, of earlier 
 manuscripts. In this matter Morris followed 
 his own private taste and was a little whim- 
 sical; but at any rate he made his type as 
 readable as any Gothic could be. It has not 
 had as much influence on printing as his 
 Roman type ; but he pleased himself with it, 
 and, in the larger form especially, it is very 
 beautiful. 
 
 The few details I have given show what 
 pains Morris was ready to take with any art, 
 and how humbly he learnt from past masters. 
 He took just as much pains over everything 
 connected with the press, especially with the 
 paper; and in everything he had the help of 
 Mr. Emery Walker, without whom Miss May 
 Morris tells us, the press could not have 
 existed. Through all the later years of his 
 life, from 1891 until the end, he gave more 
 attention to printing than to any other art; 
 and this fact proves how practical he was in 
 
REVIVAL OF ARTS AND CRAFTS 115 
 
 all his artistic projects. For, since more 
 books are read now than ever before, there is 
 no art more constantly practised than that 
 of printing. But we are so little used to 
 associate the arts with our common needs and 
 habits that we do not regard it as an art at 
 all. Pictures are art and poetry is art, but 
 the type in which poetry is printed is, for 
 most of us, merely a means of multiplying 
 copies of it. There are many rich people 
 who would give thousands of pounds for a 
 picture, but who would never think of giving 
 even one pound for a well-printed edition of 
 a favourite poet. They have not learned to 
 look for pleasure in type; and yet there is a 
 beauty in a well-printed page which, when it 
 is once seen, will heighten the beauty of any 
 verse or prose. Morris felt this beauty when 
 hardly any one else felt it ; and he was drawn 
 to fine printing just because it added the 
 beauty of art to a useful process. He could 
 not endure a badly printed book as tidy 
 people cannot endure untidiness. It was 
 to him merely something badly done that 
 might be well done, something like slovenly 
 speech or bad grammar. Therefore, since there 
 was no good printing in his time, he set to 
 work to print well himself. And by doing so 
 
116 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 he opened the eyes of many people to the 
 beauty of good printing, and created a demand 
 for it which continues and which, we may 
 hope, will increase. And so it was with all 
 the arts that he revived or reformed. Ruskin 
 had been the first scientific critic. He had 
 shown what were the causes of Tightness in 
 art and what were the causes of wrongness. 
 He had done his best to deliver men from 
 that paralyzing belief, afterwards so viva- 
 ciously expressed by Whistler, that " art 
 happens." Art does not happen, he con- 
 tended, any more than good government 
 happens. It is merely something that may 
 be well or ill done like anything else. Morris 
 put this doctrine quite simply in practice. 
 Seeing many arts ill done all about him, he 
 set to work to discover how they could be 
 well done, and he learnt from the past just 
 as a wise statesman will learn from other 
 nations. He knew that talent in the indi- 
 vidual artist cannot be secured, but that a 
 right method can, and in every art that he 
 practised he laboured to discover the right 
 method, seeing that, when that was dis- 
 covered, men of talent would use it and so 
 make the most of their powers. The common 
 notion is that the arts will be best encouraged 
 
REVIVAL OF ARTS AND CRAFTS 117 
 
 by the discovery and patronage of men of 
 talent. Morris never looked about for these. 
 He taught himself an art and then taught it 
 to any man or boy who was willing to learn. 
 He knew from his profound study of the arts 
 of the past that their well-being depended, 
 not on the chance appearance of a few men 
 of genius, but on the proper training of the 
 ordinary workman. And that, in its turn, 
 depended upon the public demand for good 
 work. Therefore he tried to make a public 
 demand for good work by producing it. And 
 it was this effort of his, and the manner in 
 which he found it constantly hampered by 
 the social conditions of his time, which led 
 him from art into politics. He, as an artist 
 and workman, made trial of the social con- 
 ditions of his time and found them wanting; 
 and just as he had set to work quite simply to 
 improve the practice of the arts, so he set 
 to work, no less simply, to improve social 
 conditions. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE SAGAS AND ' SIGURD ' 
 
 IT was in 1860 that Morris first began to 
 learn Icelandic with Eirikr Magnusson for 
 his teacher, so that he might read the sagas 
 in the original ; and in the next year he was 
 already translating sagas with Magnusson. 
 We can best understand why he loved them 
 more than any other literature in the world 
 from a statement which he made some years 
 later of the religion of the Norsemen 
 
 " It may be that the world shall worsen, 
 that men shall grow afraid to ' change their 
 life,' that the world shall be weary of itself 
 and sicken, and none but faint hearts be left 
 who knows? So at any rate comes the 
 end at last, and the evil, bound for a while, 
 is loose, and all nameless merciless horrors 
 that on earth we figure by fire and earth- 
 quake and venom and ravin. So comes the 
 
 great strife; and like the kings and heroes 
 118 
 
THE SAGAS AND 'SIGURD' 119 
 
 that they have loved, here also must the gods 
 die, the gods who made that strifeful imperfect 
 earth, not blindly indeed, yet foredoomed. 
 One by one they extinguish for ever some 
 dread and misery that all this time has 
 brooded over life, and one by one, their work 
 accomplished, they die : till at last the great 
 destruction breaks out over all things, and 
 the old earth and heavens are gone, and then 
 a new heaven and earth. What goes on 
 there ? Who shall say, of us who know only 
 of rest and peace by toil and strife? And 
 what shall be our share in it? Well, some- 
 times we must needs think that we shall 
 live again. Yet if that were not, would it 
 not be enough that we helped to make this 
 unnameable glory, and lived not altogether 
 deedless? Think of the joy we have in 
 praising great men, and how we turn their 
 stories over and over, and fashion their lives 
 for our joy. And this also we ourselves may 
 give to the world." 
 
 To this statement of the northern faith he 
 adds : "I think one would be a happy man 
 if one could hold it, in spite of the wild dreams 
 and dreadful imaginings that hang about it 
 now and then." 
 
 We may wonder how a man so fortunate, 
 
120 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 with such a capacity for happiness and such 
 an experience of it, could wish for such a 
 faith as this; but in some verses to a saga- 
 teller he lets us know 
 
 " Tale-teller, who 'twixt fire and sword 
 And heart to turn about and show 
 With faint half-smile things great and small 
 That in thy fearful land did fall, 
 Thou and thy brethren sure did gain 
 That thing for which I long in vain, 
 The spell, whereby the mist of fear 
 Was melted, and your ears might hear 
 Earth's voices as they are indeed. 
 Well ye have helped me at my need." 
 
 Here and elsewhere Morris tells us that, 
 brave as he was, he suffered from that fear 
 which darkens all sceptical and artificial 
 societies, a fear so general that it becomes a 
 mood and often can hardly name its object. 
 It may be a fear of death, or of the sudden 
 breakdown of the delicate machinery of 
 civilization, or of something sinister in the 
 whole order of the universe. Fierce material- 
 ism, the determined belief that everything 
 we take an emotional joy in is illusion, is only 
 a courageous form of it. But whatever form 
 it takes, the more men labour and contrive 
 
THE SAGAS AND 'SIGURD' 121 
 
 for their own security, the more it haunts 
 them. But in the sagas Morris read of men 
 who, with no kind of security, were free from 
 that fear. Courage, not merely in particular 
 actions, but as a state of mind, courage in 
 facing the unknown as well as the known, 
 was their chief virtue; and it shows itself 
 not only in the deeds of which the sagas tell 
 but also in their manner of telling them. 
 This courage Morris himself desired so much 
 that he was ready to sacrifice everything for 
 it and for the art which seemed to him a 
 symptom of it. 
 
 " Perhaps," he said, " the gods are pre- 
 paring troubles and terrors for the world 
 (or our small corner of it) again, that it may 
 once again become beautiful and dramatic 
 withal : for I do not believe they will have 
 it dark and ugly for ever." This, one might 
 think, was only that common impatience of 
 the monotony of civilized life which turns 
 some men into gamblers and makes others 
 spend all their time in games and sport. 
 But to Morris his own life was never monoton- 
 ous. The dulness and ugliness that he saw 
 were in the lives of others ; and it was their 
 failures that left him unsatisfied. We know, 
 from many things he said, that the spectacle 
 
122 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 of our industrial society made him feel that 
 there was something sinister in the order of 
 the universe. The blind desire for life, which 
 drives men to forego all that makes life worth 
 living, seemed to him an evil thing which the 
 men of the sagas had put away from them 
 with all its attendant ignominy and fear. 
 When he read the sagas he passed into a 
 world where it did not exist, where it had 
 never even been heard of. Whatever evil 
 was done in them, and whatever sorrow was 
 endured, was like the storm and grief of music 
 that passes through all its changes to a glorious 
 and intended close. But in the great mass 
 of life as he saw it about him there seemed 
 to be no intention either of God or of man. 
 Men did what was not worth doing so that 
 they might live ; and lived so that they might 
 do what was not worth doing. From all this 
 spectacle of futility he had turned away to 
 his own happy work ; to dreams out of which 
 he made his art. But he was ceasing to be 
 content with dreams alone, and in the sagas 
 he found as he had never found in any other 
 stories a harmony and connection between 
 dreams and reality. For in them nothing of 
 reality is extenuated or set down in malice. 
 Life is not made out to be better than it is, 
 
THE SAGAS AND 'SIGURD' 123 
 
 but it is faced so bravely and simply that it 
 has all the glory of dreams. There is the 
 same bravery, no doubt, in tragedies such as 
 the " Agamemnon " and " King Lear " ; but in 
 them it is conscious. In the sagas it is un- 
 conscious both in the author and in all his 
 characters. They never have to persuade 
 themselves that life is worth living. That is 
 implied in the very story; and, if they are 
 subject to fate, it is rather a force within 
 them, in which they exult, than a power that 
 drives them before it. Reading the sagas 
 Morris lost that youthful sense of the sharp 
 division between the heart's desire and the 
 routine of life which makes all purely romantic 
 art and poetry. He began to feel that life 
 itself might be like a saga to him, momentous 
 even when it was sad ; and he was drawn into 
 it as the heroes of the sagas were drawn into 
 battle. 
 
 One instance will show how completely 
 the sagas possessed his imagination. At the 
 end of his poem, " Iceland first Seen," he 
 rises into one of his moods of religious exalta- 
 tion; and it is through a northern myth, 
 though with a sudden personal rapture, that 
 he expresses man's everlasting hope of a 
 blessed state to be 
 
124 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 " Ah ! when thy Balder comes back 
 
 And bears from the heart of the sun 
 Peace and the healing of pain, 
 
 And the wisdom that waiteth no more ; 
 And the lilies are laid on thy brow 
 
 'Mid the crown of the deeds thou hast 
 
 done; 
 And the roses spring up by thy feet 
 
 That the rocks of the wilderness wore. 
 Ah ! when thy Balder comes back 
 
 And we gather the gains he hath won, 
 Shall we not linger a little 
 
 To talk of thy sweetness of old, 
 Yea turn back awhile to thy travail 
 
 Whence the Gods stood aloof to behold ? " 
 
 This is addressed to Iceland, and we can 
 understand from it why Iceland was to him 
 what Greece is to some men. It was the 
 country of mighty ghosts which drew him 
 northward as other ghosts draw men south- 
 ward. 
 
 It was in 1871 that he first went there, and 
 beforehand he took a pleasure in practising 
 out-door cookery with children as a prepara- 
 tion for his long journeys in the wilderness. 
 In his journals, published for the first time 
 in the new collected edition of his works, 
 
THE SAGAS AND 'SIGURD' 125 
 
 we can read how he enjoyed the fun and 
 adventure of these journeys; but the poems 
 " Iceland first Seen " and " Gunnar's Howe" 
 tell us why it seemed a second home to 
 him. By nature he loved quiet, prosperous 
 country best, with well-built farmhouses and 
 cottages, and with all the signs of modest 
 well being. The mountainous wilderness of 
 Iceland appalled him; but it was so 
 glorified by the stories told about it that 
 it seemed to him the counterpart of those 
 stories in nature. He loved its poverty and 
 bleakness because the spirit of man had 
 taken on among them a fierce pure beauty 
 like the beauty of mountain flowers. In- 
 deed, he had the capacity, often found in 
 men of genius, of admiring and absorbing 
 qualities opposite to their own. His natural 
 taste was for a dreamy richness and for 
 things done, not slothfully, but with ease and 
 luxuriance. If was his will, reacting against 
 this natural taste, that made him love Iceland 
 and all its stories and drove him at last into 
 a struggle in which he did nothing easily and 
 won no immediate success. 
 
 After Iceland he went to Italy for the first 
 time in the spring of 1873 ; but he was already 
 then hungering for another journey to the 
 
126 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 north ; and Italy was too full of the works of 
 the Renaissance and the Roman Empire to 
 please him. " Do you suppose," he once said 
 to a friend, " that I should see anything in 
 Rome that I can't see in Whitechapel? '' 
 By that question he expressed his hatred for 
 the Roman Empire and all its works; and 
 his belief that its civilization had taken a 
 wrong turning like our own. To him the 
 barbarians of the north were deliverers; and 
 all their art, whether buildings or sagas, 
 expressed the return of a right state of being, 
 which might return for us also by means 
 equally violent. So after Italy he went to 
 Iceland again with joy and relief, and this 
 time travelled still further into the wilder- 
 ness. " It was no idle whim that drew me 
 there," he said, " but a true instinct for what 
 I needed." 
 
 Morris translated the Volsunga saga with 
 Magnusson in 1870; and in the preface to 
 their translation they speak of the " nature 
 and beauty " with which the saga is filled. 
 " We cannot doubt," they say, " that the 
 reader will be intensely touched by finding, 
 amidst all its wildness and remoteness, such 
 startling realism, such subtilty, such close 
 sympathy with all the passions that may move 
 
THE SAGAS AND 'SIGURD' 127 
 
 himself to-day." So Morris himself was 
 drawn to it by its likeness, amid all unlike- 
 ness of circumstance, to reality as he saw 
 it. And he thought it the finest story in 
 the world, not because it was exciting or well 
 constructed nor because it was romantically 
 strange, but because in its very construction 
 it seemed to him to express and reveal the 
 great conflicting forces of life. 
 
 Thus "Sigurd the Volsung," which was 
 published in 1876, is a poem different in 
 kind from most of the poems of " The Earthly 
 Paradise." He tells the story because of 
 its likeness, not because of its unlikeness, 
 to his own experience; and he creates it 
 afresh in his own telling of it as if he 
 were speaking of what he himself had seen 
 and known. 
 
 He had done this to a less extent in " The 
 Lovers of Gudrun " ; but in that beautiful 
 poem he used an old form of verse too light 
 and too monotonous for his matter. For 
 "Sigurd" he created a new metre which has 
 all the momentum and variety that he needs. 
 We have only to contrast the opening of the 
 two poems to see the difference in their effect 
 upon the ear and mind. 
 
 " The Lovers of Gudrun " begins thus 
 
123 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 "Herdholt my tale names for the stead. 
 
 where erst 
 
 Olaf the Peacock dwelt, nowise the worst 
 Among the great men of a noble day : 
 Upon a knoll amid a vale it lay, 
 Nigh where Laxriver meets the western sea, 
 And in that day it nourished plenteously 
 Great wealth of sheep and cattle." 
 
 Here are the first lines of "Sigurd " 
 
 " There was a dwelling of Kings ere the world 
 
 was waxen old ; 
 Dukes were the door-wards there, and the 
 
 roofs were thatched with gold ; 
 Earls were the wrights that wrought it, and 
 
 silver nailed its doors ; 
 Earl's wives were the weaving-women, 
 
 queen's daughters strewed its floors. 
 And the masters of its song-craft were the 
 
 mightiest men that cast 
 The sails of the storm of battle adown the 
 
 bickering blast." 
 
 The first is a metre which only poetic 
 matter can lift above prose; the second has 
 power of its own to exalt the matter. 
 
 There is no English metre perfectly suited, 
 
THE SAGAS AND 'SIGURD' 129 
 
 like the Greek hexameter, to all the ups and 
 downs of epic poetry. Blank verse has not 
 enough momentum for narrative and can 
 only be distinguished from prose in more 
 prosaic passages by elaborate artifices of 
 language which impede the movement of the 
 story. Rhymed ten-syllabled verse also lacks 
 momentum and usually becomes rhetorical 
 when it attempts grandeur, though it is well 
 suited for romantic narrative; while story- 
 telling in every kind of stanza is a kind of 
 obstacle race, for there is an arbitrary check 
 to the movement of the story at the end of 
 every stanza. The metre of " Sigurd " is de- 
 veloped out of the ancient and beautiful 
 Saturnian metre 
 
 "The Queen was in her parlour eating bread 
 and honey." 
 
 Like that metre it has six stresses, but there 
 is a less obvious break in the middle of the 
 line; there are often more syllables to each 
 stress; and the rhymes are single instead of 
 double. All these changes are made to secure 
 that continuity of sound so necessary to 
 narrative poetry; and the metre in Morris's 
 hands is capable of great variety. The type 
 is a line such as this 
 
130 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 " But Gunnar looked and considered and wise 
 and wary he grew." 
 
 Here there is a break after considered, but 
 it is not very marked because of the extra 
 syllable before as well as after the central 
 word. Sometimes the extra syllables are so 
 evenly distributed that the break almost 
 disappears 
 
 " Then he fondled its wail as it faded, and 
 orderly over the strings." 
 
 Here the line becomes simply a six foot ana- 
 paest. But this variation is employed by 
 Morris only in the more lyrical passages 
 where he wishes to give the effect of an 
 irresistible impetus overcoming all obstacles. 
 This effect he could not obtain if the reader's 
 ear did not expect a break in the middle of 
 the line. 
 
 The defect of the metre is that it seems to 
 express more excitement than can be sustained 
 in a long narrative poem. It is not suited, 
 like the Greek hexameter, to passages of 
 noble calm or to matter-of-fact statement. 
 But it has a wider range than any other English 
 metre that has been applied to epic; and 
 Morris was able to invent it and use it 
 
THE SAGAS AND 'SIGURD' 131 
 
 epically, because his mind stayed at an 
 epic height all through the poem. "Sigurd " 
 falls far short of " Paradise Lost " in lofty 
 contemplation, and there are no isolated 
 passages in it to compare with the finest in 
 that poem. But we read "Sigurd," as we do 
 not read " Paradise Lost," for the story, 
 which is perhaps the grandest ever conceived 
 by the mind of man ; and we never feel that 
 the treatment is unequal to the theme. 
 Indeed, Morris tells the tale as if he had made 
 it out of his own experience, not as if he had 
 raked it up out of the past as a pretext for 
 writing poetry. And he was able to do this 
 because his own conception of life was heroic 
 like the conception of the saga. Indeed, the 
 prophesy made over the new-born Sigurd 
 might have been made of Morris himself 
 could any one have foreseen his future when 
 he was a child 
 " But there rose up a man most ancient, and 
 
 he cried : ' Hail, Dawn of the Day ! 
 How many things shalt thou quicken, how 
 
 many shalt thou slay ! 
 How many things shalt thou waken, how 
 
 many lull to sleep ! 
 How many shalt thou scatter, how many 
 
 gather and keep ! 
 
132 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 O me, how thy love shall cherish, how thine 
 
 hate shall wither and burn ! 
 How the hope shall be sped from thy right 
 
 hand, nor the fear to thy left return ! 
 O thy deeds that men shall sing of ! O thy 
 
 deeds that the gods shall see ! 
 O Sigurd, son of the Volsungs, O Victory 
 
 yet to be ! ' " 
 
 In the saga itself we are told simply that 
 " Hjordis brought forth a man-child, who 
 was straightly borne before King Hjalprek, 
 and then was the King glad thereof, when he 
 saw the keen eyes in the head of him, and he 
 said that few men would be equal to him or 
 like unto him in any wise." This is only one 
 instance out of many of the manner in which 
 Morris drew poetry out of the story rather 
 than embroidered it with versified ornament. 
 He never adds to it anything incongruous 
 with its nature, yet he never puts an archaic 
 restraint upon himself. He moves as freely 
 in it as Tolstoy in " War and Peace " ; and the 
 battles of which he tells do not seem to be 
 old, unhappy, far-off things, but to result from 
 the same conflict of forces that produces the 
 strife of our own time. Yet there is no allegory 
 in "Sigurd." The characters have their 
 
THE SAGAS AND 'SIGURD' 133 
 
 own life; and Regin the smith only speaks 
 like Morris himself because in all ages the 
 artist has the same joys and labours 
 
 " And to me, the least and the youngest, 
 
 what gift for the slaying of ease ? 
 Save the grief that remembers the past, and 
 
 the fear that the future sees ; 
 And the hammer and fashioning-iron, and 
 
 the living coal of fire; 
 And the craft that createth a semblance, and 
 
 fails of the heart's desire ; 
 And the toil that each dawning quickens 
 
 and the task that is never done; 
 And the heart that longeth ever, nor will 
 
 look to the deed that is won." 
 
 It is easy to see and to name the faults of 
 " Sigurd." Morris wrote it, as he wrote nearly 
 everything, too quickly. There are rough 
 lines in it and vague passages. There are 
 catch-words and phrases, and sometimes the 
 style and metre both seem mechanical. We 
 cannot but wish that he had spent ten years 
 on it instead of one, labouring at those 
 passages in which his inspiration failed him, 
 for it is by such labour that an artist learns 
 to correct his faults and acquires unexpected 
 powers. 
 
134 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 But "Sigurd," with all its faults, is an epic 
 poem to be read for its story. Its excellence 
 is in the whole, not in detachable parts, in 
 design, not in ornament. It has a cumulative 
 power possessed by no other modern narrative 
 poem in English. It was grandly conceived 
 before it was written ; and its defects of detail 
 do not obscure the conception. Nothing but 
 the modern passion for realistic illusion could 
 have made the public blind to the reality of 
 "Sigurd." That passion makes the reader's 
 interest dependent on circumstance, and 
 " Sigurd " is about people and things unlike 
 those we read about in the newspaper. It is 
 not even a romantic poem interesting for the 
 strangeness of its circumstance. To Morris 
 himself the story is not outlandish. He said 
 that it ought to be to the peoples of the north 
 what the Tale of Troy was to the Greeks. 
 We may say that it was to him what the finest 
 of our Bible stories are to most of us. He was 
 so familiar with it, it had sunk into his mind 
 so thoroughly, that he no more thought of 
 treating it romantically or of heightening 
 its interest with " local colour " than Fra 
 Angelico thought of introducing local colour 
 into his sacred paintings. And as Fra 
 Angelico painted for a public familiar with his 
 
THE SAGAS AND 'SIGURD' 135 
 
 subjects, so Morris wrote as if the public were 
 equally familiar with his story. This, 
 probably, is the reason why it has never been 
 read or admired as much as it deserves. But 
 unless our world loses its love of poetry 
 altogether it will meet with its deserts at 
 last. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 MORRIS AS A SOCIALIST 
 
 MORRIS was first drawn into public life 
 almost against his will and not by any sudden 
 conviction that he ought to take part in it. 
 Up to the year 1877, when he was forty-four 
 years of age, he had concerned himself with 
 politics, and, indeed, with any kind of public 
 action, less than most men of his class. He had 
 not the superior person's contempt of political 
 parties, but they and their behaviour, and 
 the excitement which they aroused, puzzled 
 him as men who do not hunt or shoot are 
 puzzled by the ardour of those who do. He 
 had no natural liking for public meetings 
 or political discussions; indeed, he had a 
 natural dislike for them ; and he needed to be 
 powerfully moved by some particular event 
 before he could be induced to take part in 
 any kind of public action. One of the first 
 events which so moved him was not political 
 at all. But the action which it provoked was 
 
 important, not only for its immediate results, 
 136 
 
MORRIS AS A SOCIALIST 137 
 
 but because it introduced him into public 
 life and made him aware that he could do 
 some good by means of appeals to the public. 
 
 In 1876 he was moved to indignation by the 
 restoration of Lichfield Cathedral and of the 
 parish church at Burford, a beautiful village 
 near his own Kelmscott. Then, in the spring 
 of 1877, hearing that Tewkesbury Abbey was 
 also threatened with restoration, he wrote a 
 letter to the " Athenaeum " proposing that '* an 
 association 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 others, to awaken a 
 feeling that our ancient buildings are not mere 
 ecclesiastical toys, but sacred monuments of 
 the nation's growth and hope." 
 
 About a month after this letter was pub- 
 lished, the Society for the Protection of 
 Ancient Buildings was founded. Morris him- 
 self became secretary of it, and wrote a state- 
 ment of the principles which it was founded to 
 uphold. It was for the protection, he said, 
 of any building " that could be looked upon 
 as artistic, picturesque, historical, antique or 
 substantial : any work, in short, over which 
 educated artistic people would think it worth 
 
138 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 while to argue at all." Its principle was " to 
 put Protection in the place of Restoration, 
 to stave off decay by daily care, to prop a 
 perilous wall or mend a leaking roof by such 
 means as were obviously meant for support 
 or covering, and showed no pretence of other 
 art; and otherwise to resist all tampering 
 with either the fabric or ornament of the 
 building as it stands." 
 
 Morris gave much time and trouble to the 
 business of the society for the rest of his life, 
 though after a time Mr. Thackeray Turner 
 became secretary. To the devoted labours 
 of those two men we chiefly owe it that many 
 of our beautiful old buildings have not been 
 turned into dull new ones. They became the 
 terror of evil-designing architects all over 
 the country ; and, more important even than 
 that, by pointing out the absurdity of copying 
 old buildings, they made architects and the 
 public alike understand better how to obtain 
 the qualities they desired in new buildings. 
 
 It was in 1876 that Morris first took any 
 part in politics; and then he was concerned 
 with the action of our statesmen, not at home, 
 but abroad. In that year a society called the 
 Eastern Question Association was founded 
 to protest against the indifference of the 
 
MORRIS AS A SOCIALIST 139 
 
 Conservative Government to the Bulgarian 
 Atrocities. Russia, whatever her motive, 
 wished to prevent the Turks from continuing 
 those atrocities, and the British Government 
 was supporting Turkey against Russia. 
 Morris became treasurer of the Association, 
 and in a letter to his friend Faulkner he gave 
 his reasons for doing so 
 
 " As to the Russians, all I say is this : we 
 might have acted so that they could have had 
 no pretext for interfering with Turkey except 
 in accordance with the unanimous wish of 
 Europe : we have so acted as to drive them 
 into separate interference whatever may 
 come : and to go to war with them for this 
 would be a piece of outrageous injustice. 
 Furthermore, if we came victorious out of 
 such a war, what should we do with Turkey, 
 if we did not wish to be damned ? ' Take it 
 ourselves,' says the bold man, ' and rule it as 
 we rule India.' But the bold man don't live 
 in England at present, I think; and I know 
 what the Tory trading stock- jobbing scoundrel 
 that one calls an Englishman to-day would 
 do with it ; he would shut his eyes hard over 
 it, get his widows and orphans to lend it 
 money, and sell it vast quantities of bad 
 cotton." 
 
140 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 This letter shows that Morris was already 
 despising and distrusting the English govern- 
 ing classes; and he openly showed his con- 
 tempt and distrust of them in a manifesto 
 which he addressed to the working men of 
 England, in May 1877 after Russia had 
 declared war on Turkey. 
 
 " Who are they who are leading us into 
 war? " he asked. " 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 goes on to tell them that 
 they do not know " the bitterness of hatred 
 against freedom and progress that lies at the 
 hearts of a certain part of the richer classes in 
 this country." Those men, he says, " If they 
 had the power (may England perish rather!) 
 would thwart your just aspirations, would 
 silence you, would deliver you bound hand 
 and foot for ever to irresponsible capital." 
 
 Thus, while to most Liberals the Eastern 
 Question was one of foreign politics to be 
 
MORRIS AS A SOCIALIST 141 
 
 settled by the ordinary political means, to 
 Morris it was only the symptom of a much 
 larger social question. He saw the policy of 
 the government as the sin of the governing 
 classes, and he appealed from them to the 
 governed. The Association was, in the main, 
 a society of Liberals, many of whom wished to 
 use it as a party instrument. Thus, as war 
 became more and more popular with the 
 mob, the Association's opposition to it weak- 
 ened. At last, in February 1878, it refused 
 to hold a meeting at which Gladstone had 
 consented to speak. This was one of the 
 first of those ominous examples of the 
 cowardice of a minority in face of a noisy 
 majority, of which we have since seen so 
 many in England; and it disgusted Morris 
 with party politics altogether. " I am out 
 of it now," he said, " I mean as to bothering 
 my head about it. I shall give up reading the 
 papers and shall stick to my work." 
 
 But he was not out of it for good, as he 
 was soon to discover, and meanwhile this 
 short experience of politics had the important 
 result that it gave him some experience of the 
 radical working man. When war with Russia 
 was threatened at the beginning of 1878, he 
 wrote that he was astonished at the folly 
 
142 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 that could play with such tremendous tools, 
 and he meant the folly of the governing 
 classes. " More and more I feel," he says, 
 " how entirely right the flattest democracy 
 is." Morris, though born a member of the 
 middle classes, had long ceased to be one of 
 them. That is to say he had not their hopes 
 or fears, their sense of propriety or their 
 scale of values. He was himself a workman 
 and naturally more at ease with workmen 
 than with professors. To his own workmen 
 he was masterful enough at times, but as 
 their foreman not as their social superior. 
 He lost his temper with them sometimes, 
 but always as man with man, and they 
 recognized one of themselves when he did so. 
 It was through being a workman himself that 
 he became aware of the evils which prevented 
 men from doing good work or taking pleasure 
 in it; and it was not mere sentimentality 
 which led him to believe that other workmen 
 must also be more aware of those evils and 
 more anxious to end them than the upper and 
 middle classes. 
 
 Yet he still called himself a Liberal and 
 was treasurer of the National Liberal League, 
 a body composed mainly of radical working 
 men, until 1881. But when the Liberals 
 
MORRIS AS A SOCIALIST 143 
 
 came into power and proceeded to pass the 
 Irish Coercion Bill it seemed to him that 
 their name was only a label. The National 
 Liberal League ceased to exist, and Morris 
 said that everything was as vague in politics 
 as in art. It was this vagueness that troubled 
 him even more than the evils that so plainly 
 needed a remedy. " I am in rather a dis- 
 couraged mood," he wrote in 1880, " and the 
 whole thing seems almost too tangled to see 
 through and too heavy to move. Happily 
 though, I am not bound either to see through 
 it or move it but a very little way : meanwhile 
 I do know what I love and what I hate, and 
 believe that neither the love nor the hatred 
 are matters of accident or of whim." 
 
 That certainty of his own loves and hatreds 
 was the foundation of all his future beliefs, 
 and it was a surer foundation than many 
 practical statesmen, who do not know what 
 they themselves want in life, ever find for 
 their politics. Thus a year later he writes 
 with less bewilderment : " My mind is very 
 full of the great change which I hope is slowly 
 coming over the world, and of which surely 
 this new year will be one of the landmarks." 
 And six months later he says that thinking 
 people are being driven from all interest in 
 
144 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 politics save in revolutionary politics : " which 
 I must say seems like to be my case." " All 
 political change," he writes, " seems to me 
 useful now as making it possible to get the 
 social one." 
 
 All through the years 1881 and 1882 he 
 was thinking about social questions by himself, 
 and now and again saying something of what 
 he thought in a letter. " I feel a lonely kind 
 of chap," he said, as if aware that none of his 
 friends could help him in this growing trouble 
 of his mind. Indeed, no two of his friends, 
 Mr. Mackail tells us, are agreed in their view 
 of the steps by which he became a Socialist. 
 In those two years he seems to have experi- 
 enced that kind of conversion which has driven 
 some men into monasteries and has sent 
 others to preach to the heathen. He must 
 have seen his future beliefs before him and 
 must have known that, if they became his, 
 they would distract him from the work that 
 he loved. For he was one of those men to 
 whom belief always means action and who 
 cannot hold opinions as intellectual luxuries. 
 It is quite easy to hold revolutionary opinions 
 if they make no difference to your conduct. 
 But Morris had kept out of politics for many 
 years because he knew that, if he went into 
 
MORRIS AS A SOCIALIST 145 
 
 them, they would make a difference to his 
 conduct. Indeed, he was like those men 
 who avoid religion because they are afraid of 
 what it would do with them. And just as 
 they feel that it is always lying in wait for 
 them until at last they give all their souls up 
 to it, so his mind was beset by thoughts 
 about the state of the world which at last he 
 could no longer withstand. Of his own work 
 he wrote in 1882 : " It does sometimes seem 
 to me a strange thing that a man should be 
 driven to work with energy and even with 
 pleasure and enthusiasm at work which he 
 knows will serve no end but amusing himself ; 
 am I doing nothing but make-believe, then, 
 like Louis XVI's lock-making? " And he 
 had the same feeling about the art of other 
 men. He could not read Swinburne's 
 *' Tristram of Lyonesse," he said. " Nothing 
 could lay hold of me at all." And he goes on, 
 thinking no doubt of himself just as much as 
 of Swinburne, and speaking as if he were 
 Tolstoy : "In these days when all the arts, 
 even poetry, are like to be overwhelmed 
 under the mass of material riches which 
 civilization has made and is making more 
 and more hastily every day ; riches which the 
 
 world has made indeed, but cannot use to any 
 K 
 
146 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 good purpose : in these days the issue between 
 art, that is, the godlike part of man, and 
 mere bestiality, is so momentous, and the 
 surroundings of life are so stern and unplayful, 
 that nothing can take serious hold of people, 
 or should do so, but that which is rooted 
 deepest in reality and is quite at first hand; 
 there is no room for anything which is not 
 forced out of a man of deep feeling because 
 of its innate strength and vision." Hence- 
 forward, indeed, nearly all his own art and 
 poetry was to seem a kind of stolen pleasure 
 to him, and he could hardly have produced it 
 at all if he had not been able to do in his 
 leisure as much as other great artists can 
 do in their working hours. 
 
 For years there had been growing upon him 
 the sense that something momentous was 
 happening in the minds of men. That 
 change which was slowly working in his own 
 mind seemed to him a turning-point in the 
 history of our civilization, and indeed, it was 
 a symptom of great moment. 14 The con- 
 sciousness of revolution stirring," he said, 
 " prevented me, luckier than many others of 
 artistic perceptions, from crystallizing into 
 a mere railer against progress on the one 
 hand, and on the other from wasting time and 
 
MORRIS AS A SOCIALIST 147 
 
 energy in any of the numerous schemes by 
 which the quasi-artistic of the middle classes 
 hope to make art grow when it has no longer 
 any root." The revolution was mainly in 
 his own mind at that time; and it has not 
 yet happened as he expected it any more 
 than the millennium happened as it was 
 expected by the early Christians. But they 
 worked a vast change upon the world of 
 which their expectation was itself a symptom ; 
 and so Morris's expectation was the symptom 
 of a change that is even now only beginning 
 to work upon us. He saw that society, as it 
 was constituted, could not provide the kind 
 of life that he wished to live, except for a 
 few fortunate individuals; and that even 
 they could not stay untroubled in their 
 earthly Paradise except by shutting their 
 eyes to everything outside it. With him the 
 immense complacency of the Victorians came 
 to an end. There had always, of course, been 
 discontent among the poor; but Morris, 
 with all his prosperity, came to feel that 
 discontent as if he were one of them. He 
 no longer believed that they were merely the 
 inevitable waste of the best system that could 
 be devised, any more than they believed it. 
 He judged the system by its effects upon 
 
148 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 them; and with a fiercer condemnation 
 because he knew, by his own experience, the 
 difference between their lives and life as it 
 might be. And it was this power in him, of 
 seeing things as if he were himself one of those 
 whom he pitied, that made him a revolutionary 
 Socialist. 
 
 Morris felt the difference between an ad- 
 vanced Radical and a revolutionary Socialist 
 to be quite sharp and clear. Radicalism 
 ceased to satisfy him because, he thought, it 
 was mainly concerned with political machinery. 
 Its implied axiom, as it seemed to him, was 
 that, if political machinery is put right, 
 economic conditions will also right themselves, 
 so far as they can be righted by the will of 
 man. He had taken little interest hitherto 
 in political machinery because, in the hands 
 of Liberals and Conservatives alike, it seemed 
 to him to produce no effects of any value. 
 For a time, therefore, he believed that nothing 
 could be done with it and that a man like 
 himself must leave the parties to play their 
 own game. But when he became a Socialist 
 he believed that political machinery should 
 be directly employed to improve economic 
 conditions, and that, if it were so used, 
 it would improve them. Political freedom 
 
MORRIS AS A SOCIALIST 149 
 
 and equality might satisfy the Radical; 
 but Morris held that they were only a 
 means to the end of economic equality, and 
 that without it they were valueless. The 
 Radical believes that all the reform which he 
 desires can be carried by purely constitutional 
 means ; and in England at any rate, there is 
 little fear nowadays that any purely political 
 change, demanded by a majority of the 
 electors, will promote civil war. But Morris, 
 when he became a Socialist, wished for 
 economic changes which, he expected, would 
 provoke a civil war. The rich, he thought, 
 would submit to political changes because 
 they knew that no purely political change 
 would destroy their economic power, and 
 because they knew also that economic power 
 always means political power, whatever form 
 a constitution may take. He wished to 
 destroy their economic power; and, if neces- 
 sary, he was prepared to do that by means 
 of revolution and civil war. 
 
 About this part of his creed there is no 
 doubt whatever. Indeed, it was his hope that 
 a new and better society might be made by 
 revolution which turned him into a Socialist. 
 If he had not had that hope he could never 
 have taken any interest in politics after he 
 
150 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 lost all faith in the Liberal party. He saw 
 society as a class war already existing, but 
 only conscious on the part of the rich and 
 concealed by them under the unrealities of 
 the party conflict. His aim was to make the 
 poor conscious of this war, to show them what 
 evils they had to fight against, and to con- 
 vince them that by fighting they could end 
 them. He never made any concealment of 
 this aim, and we cannot doubt that, if the 
 revolution which he hoped for had come in 
 his time, he would have been a revolutionary 
 leader ; or that, if it had failed, he would have 
 been put to death by the victors. He might 
 also, if it had degenerated into a terror, have 
 been put to death by the victors of his own 
 side. But even then, we may be sure, he 
 would have died with courage and without 
 despair. 
 
 It was on the 17th of January, 1883, that 
 he declared himself a Socialist by becoming 
 a member of the Democratic Federation; 
 and in doing so he enlisted as a private who 
 was ready to obey orders. " I put some 
 conscience," he said, " into trying to learn 
 the economical side of Socialism, and even 
 tackled Marx, though I suffered agonies of 
 confusion of the brain over reading the 
 
MORRIS AS A SOCIALIST 151 
 
 economics of that work." People have sup- 
 posed from confessions of this kind that 
 Morris was muddle-headed. Many sayings 
 of his own, and, indeed, the mass of his 
 writings about art, prove that he was most 
 clear-headed about any subject in which he 
 took an interest. But he took little interest 
 in economics; and, as Mr. Mackail says, his 
 Socialism " was not the outcome of abstract 
 economic reasoning." It was the outcome 
 of a belief that men can, by collective action, 
 obtain what they desire, if they know clearly 
 what it is and if it is in itself desirable. He 
 himself knew very clearly what kind of life 
 he desired and he knew that his task as a 
 Socialist was to communicate that desire and 
 to make it clear to others. In political 
 movements, as in everything else, there must 
 be division of labour, as the labourers them- 
 selves have different powers. The theorist 
 may not be a good organizer or the organizer 
 an eloquent speaker. Morris had been learn- 
 ing all his life what is best worth having in 
 life ; and he had come to the conclusion that 
 it was incompatible with the present state 
 of society. He had not been learning to 
 speak or to organize or to prove economic 
 propositions. He brought his own con- 
 
152 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 tribution to Socialism and it was a contribution 
 of the greatest value ; for he made Socialism 
 seem to thousands a thing desirable in itself, 
 because he showed them the kind of civiliza- 
 tion it should aim at. 
 
 Meanwhile he was ready to do what his 
 leaders told him to do, although from the 
 first he was too wise to expect any perfection 
 of wisdom in them. A few months after he 
 had joined the Democratic Federation he 
 became a member of its executive. " I don't 
 like belonging to a body without knowing 
 what they are doing," he wrote. " Without 
 feeling very sanguine about their doings, 
 they seem certainly to mean something. 
 Money is chiefly lacking, as usual." He 
 himself supplied as much of the money as he 
 could, selling most of his valuable books for 
 the purpose. He began to write Socialist 
 songs, to lecture on Socialism, and, what he 
 disliked most, to speak at street corners. 
 " I am sure it is right," he wrote in a letter, 
 " whatever the apparent consequences may 
 be, to stir up the lower classes (damn the word) 
 to demand a higher standard of life for them- 
 selves, not merely for themselves or for the 
 sake of the national comfort it will bring, but 
 for the good of the whole world and the 
 
MORRIS AS A SOCIALIST 153 
 
 regeneration of the conscience of man." So 
 he set to work to stir them up by the most 
 direct means as he had set to work to learn 
 arts when he wished to revive them. " Our 
 business is to make Socialists," he said; and 
 through all disappointments and bewilderments 
 he continued to say this and to act upon it. 
 
 The Democratic Federation changed its 
 name to the Social Democratic Federation 
 so that there should be no doubt about its 
 Socialism. On January 4, 1884, appeared 
 the first number of its weekly paper " Justice," 
 to which Morris contributed both money and 
 writing; but the Federation had already 
 begun to suffer from those discords which 
 are common to all revolutionary bodies with- 
 out political power. Practical politics may 
 be demoralizing, but they train men to act 
 together. They impose a kind of military 
 discipline which may lead to sacrifice of 
 principle, but which also suppresses egotism. 
 The Federation lacked this discipline; it 
 was an Association of revolutionaries, many 
 of whom had nothing in common except that 
 they wanted a revolution, and who soon begun 
 to quarrel among themselves. Mr. Hyndman, 
 the leader of one party in the Federation, 
 was, and still is, a Marxite, and to him the 
 
154 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 whole body of Marx's doctrine is the Socialist 
 orthodoxy. He has maintained it with 
 admirable persistency all his life; and his 
 aim was to make and keep the Federation a 
 Marxite body. He wished it to be as unani- 
 mous as a Cabinet always pretends to be; 
 but to Morris, since it was not a cabinet, this 
 unanimity seemed unnecessary. He wished 
 it to be a propagandist rather than a political 
 body, and he was ready to work with any one 
 who in the main desired what he desired. 
 Thus he was impatient of the strict orthodoxy 
 of Mr. Hyndman and, because of his reputa- 
 tion, was forced unwillingly to become Hynd- 
 man's chief opponent in the Federation. 
 " Practically," he wrote in August 1884, 
 " it comes to a contest between him and me. 
 If I don't come up to the scratch I shall 
 disappoint those who, I believe, have their 
 hearts in the cause and are quite disinterested, 
 many of them simple and worthy people. 
 I don't think intrigue and ambition are 
 amongst my many faults; but here I am 
 driven to thrust myself forward and making 
 a party within a party." 
 
 Mr. Hyndman is by nature a practical 
 politician. Morris was not, and from first 
 to last he believed that the time had not yet 
 
MORRIS AS A SOCIALIST 155 
 
 come for Socialists to take part in practical 
 politics. " Our business," he said, " is the 
 making of Socialists, i. e. convincing people 
 that Socialism is good for them and is possible. 
 When we have brought people to that way 
 of thinking, they will find out what action 
 is necessary for putting their principles in 
 practice. Therefore, I say, make Socialists. 
 We Socialists can do nothing else that is 
 useful." 
 
 Sometimes he hoped for a social revolution 
 soon; sometimes he saw that it was far off; 
 but he always said that there were not yet 
 enough Socialists to make a powerful political 
 party; and therefore he did not wish them 
 to imitate the organization of a political 
 party or to aim at its practical unanimity. 
 He also believed that, so long as Socialists 
 were few, they would only dilute their 
 principles if they tried to enforce them in 
 practical politics. There were not yet enough 
 of them to leaven the whole mass; and if 
 any of them succeeded in getting into Parlia- 
 ment they would find themselves subdued to 
 what they worked in. Whatever society he 
 belonged to he wished to be propagandist 
 rather than political, and the real cause of 
 his difference with Mr. Hyndman was that 
 
156 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 Mr. Hyndman wished the Federation to be 
 political as well as propagandist. 
 
 But the quarrel came to a head on a point 
 of detail now of no interest. There was a 
 meeting in December 1884, which lasted for 
 four hours and a half; and at the end of it 
 Morris and his party, who were in a majority, 
 resigned to form another body, which they 
 called the Socialist League. Morris had no 
 open quarrel with the remaining members of 
 the Federation, and afterwards occasionally 
 wrote for "Justice." Mr. Hyndman, who 
 makes no pretence of loving his enemies, has 
 acknowledged Morris's generosity and praised 
 him with equal generosity. 
 
 " This morning," Morris wrote on the 28th 
 of December, " I hired very humble quarters 
 for the Socialist League. ... So there I am, 
 really once more like a young bear with all 
 my troubles before me." There he spoke 
 even more truly, perhaps, than he knew ; for 
 he was to have as much trouble with the new 
 League as with the old Federation. There 
 were the same causes of discord in it, the 
 same struggles between opportunists and ex- 
 tremists ; and in this case the extremists won 
 and at last drove Morris out of the League 
 after he had endured much at their hands. 
 
MORRIS AS A SOCIALIST 157 
 
 The organ of the League was called the 
 "Commonweal," and the first number of it 
 appeared in February 1885. Morris was 
 editor and also treasurer of the League, 
 himself supplying most of the money that he 
 treasured. Much of the prose that he wrote 
 for it is no better, either in spirit or in execu- 
 tion, than the stuff ordinarily produced by 
 political hacks for a living ; but in the March 
 number appeared the " Message of the March 
 Wind," the first part of a narrative poem, 
 " The Pilgrims of Hope," which was pub- 
 lished by instalments in the paper, and which 
 contains, perhaps, the finest passages of poetry 
 that he ever wrote. 
 
 From this time for some years he worked 
 desperately hard, preaching Socialism and 
 writing about it. Yet he was under no 
 illusions about the present importance of his 
 League or the stir it was likely to make in 
 the world. He spoke of " the petty skirmish 
 of outposts, the fight of a corporal's guard 
 in which I am immediately concerned " ; 
 but, he adds, " I have more faith than a 
 grain of mustard seed in the future history 
 of ' civilization,' which I know now is doomed 
 to destruction, and probably before very 
 long. ... I used really to despair once 
 
158 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 because I thought what the idiots of our day 
 used to call progress would go on perfecting 
 itself : happily I know now that all that will 
 have a sudden check sudden in appearance 
 I mean ' as it was in the days of Noe.' ' 
 Here he talks like Carlyle; and, indeed, he 
 was enjoying all the delight of a fierce reaction 
 against those notions of a mechanical progress 
 by means of which so many good men of his 
 time managed to content themselves with 
 society as it was. That progress had been 
 a nightmare of optimism to him, and he had 
 woken out of it into the daylight of his own 
 eager pessimism, in which at least he could ex- 
 ercise his will, as a man fighting with other men. 
 " On Sunday," he writes in May 1885, 
 " I went a-preaching Stepney way. . . . You 
 would perhaps have smiled at my congrega- 
 tion; some twenty people in a little room 
 as dirty as convenient and stinking a good 
 deal. It took the fire out of my fine periods, 
 I can tell you ; it is a great drawback that I 
 can't talk to them roughly and unaffectedly. 
 Also I would like to know what amount of 
 real feeling underlies their bombastic revolu- 
 tionary talk when they get to that. I don't 
 seem to have got at them yet. You see this 
 great class gulf lies between us." 
 
MORRIS AS A SOCIALIST 159 
 
 Morris did not like speaking and had little 
 natural gift for it. That is why he found it 
 so difficult to talk to his audiences, for only 
 a born speaker can do that. He learnt in 
 time to say what he wanted to say; but 
 speaking never became one of the many arts 
 that he practised for the love of them. He 
 always breakfasted with the Burne-Jones 
 family on Sunday; and often, Lady Burne- 
 Jones tells us, he would leave in the middle of 
 the morning for his street preaching. " The 
 simplicity with which he did this was fine 
 to see. Consider what it must have meant for 
 him to leave the Grange unsped by sympathy, 
 and to speak, as he frequently did, either at 
 a street corner near his own house where he 
 was but a prophet in his own country or 
 perhaps miles away at Ball's Pond, where he 
 was not of as much importance in the neigh- 
 bourhood as a cheap- jack." Every man who 
 does certain things very well and has won fame 
 by doing them, has a natural dislike of 
 attempting other things, which he does in- 
 differently, among people who are indifferent 
 to him. But Morris was as free from vanity 
 as any man can be, and he did not even pity 
 himself. " I am not over-inclined for my 
 morning preachment at Walham Green," he 
 
160 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 wrote, '* but go I must, as also to Victoria 
 Park in the afternoon. I had a sort of 
 dastardly hope that it might rain. Mind 
 you, I don't pretend to say I don't like it in 
 some way or other ; like it when I am on my 
 legs, if I flow." 
 
 But it was not his proper business and he 
 forced himself to do it, well knowing that. 
 Indeed, fiercely as he talked and felt, he did 
 not wish to be fierce, and was angry with 
 things because they stirred an unwelcome 
 anger in him. " I do not love contention," 
 he wrote; "I even shrink from it with 
 indifferent persons. Indeed, I know that 
 all my faults lie on the other side : love of 
 ease, dreaminess, sloth, sloppy good-nature, 
 are what I chiefly accuse myself of. All 
 those could not have been hurt by my being 
 a ' moderate Socialist ' ; nor need I have 
 forfeited a good share of the satisfaction of 
 vainglory : for in such a party I could easily 
 have been a leader, nay, perhaps the leader, 
 whereas amidst our rough work I can scarcely 
 be a leader at all, and certainly do not care 
 to be." 
 
 But he was not merely mortifying himself 
 in the hope that he might find peace and 
 salvation for his troubled soul. He believed 
 
MORRIS AS A SOCIALIST 161 
 
 that he could do no good by patronizing the 
 Socialist movement as if he were a royal 
 personage opening a charity bazaar. What- 
 ever the waste of his own powers, he was 
 determined to fight for it, as French artists 
 and poets fought for their country in the siege 
 of Paris. And he never pitied himself for 
 this waste; indeed, he felt rather that he 
 could not do or give enough. There is a 
 passage in the " Pilgrims of Hope " where he 
 speaks his own thoughts through the mouth 
 of the hero, contrasting the lot of the rich 
 and the poor rebel 
 
 ; ' When the poor man thinks and rebels, 
 
 the whip lies ready anear ; 
 But he who is rebel and rich may live safe 
 
 for many a year, 
 While he warms his heart with pictures of 
 
 all the glory to come. 
 There's the storm of the press and the critics 
 
 maybe, but sweet is his home. 
 There is meat in the noon and the even and 
 
 rest when the day is done, 
 All is fair and orderly there as the rising and 
 
 setting sun." 
 
 So he was very patient of the quarrels and 
 
 absurdities of the League. It was a body, 
 L 
 
162 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 Miss May Morris tells us, " made up of the 
 most varied elements, and the wonder is, 
 not so much that divergencies became evident 
 once more as time went on, but that we ever 
 held together at all : there were members of 
 the Radical working men's clubs, members of 
 the old International, old men who remem- 
 bered the times written of in the ' Communist 
 Manifesto ' of 1847 . . . there was the drift 
 from early Socialist bodies Owenites, Chart- 
 ists, Co-operators; there were some pro- 
 fessional and literary men and the Uni- 
 versities were represented. . . . There was 
 a foreign spy or two and a sprinkling of 
 wastrels who made one's heart ache for their 
 uselessness and the knowledge that none of 
 their life was in their own hands to make or 
 mar." 
 
 Morris himself had no illusions about the 
 League, yet he made the best of it. " Even 
 such things as this," he wrote, " the army 
 setting off to conquer all the world, turning 
 back to burn Jack's pig-sty, and tumbling 
 drunk into the fire. Even this don't shake 
 me; means we must use the best we can 
 get; but one thing I won't do, wait for ever 
 till perfect means are made for very im- 
 perfect me to work with." 
 
MORRIS AS A SOCIALIST 163 
 
 Having the gift of expression he was able 
 to ease his disgust with a phrase ; having the 
 power of thought he was able to establish and 
 define his own attitude to all those trouble- 
 some people ; but they themselves could do 
 none of those things, and therefore he pitied 
 them and bore with them as being less fortu- 
 nate than himself. The main quarrel, he 
 tells us, was again between the two sections, 
 parliamentary and anti-parliamentary, "which 
 are pretty much commensurate with the 
 Collectivists and Anarchists." He tried to 
 compose this quarrel because, he said, "there 
 are a good many who would join the Anarchist 
 side who are not really Anarchists, and who 
 would be useful to us : indeed, I doubt, if 
 except one or two Germans, etc., we have any 
 real Anarchists amongst us; and I don't 
 want to see a lot of enthusiastic men who are 
 not very deep in Socialist doctrines driven 
 off for a fad of the more pedantic part of the 
 Collectivist section." He himself could side 
 with neither party, for he was not an Anarchist 
 nor a parliamentarian. Some day, he said, 
 it might be necessary for Socialists to go into 
 Parliament, " but that could only be when 
 we are very much more advanced than we are 
 now; in short, on the verge of a revolution; 
 
164 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 so that we might either capture the army or 
 shake their confidence in the legality of their 
 position." He also says that it is a mistake 
 to play at revolt. " It is but poor propaganda 
 to behave like a dog sniffing at a red hot 
 poker, and being obliged to draw his nose back 
 in a hurry for fear of being burnt." So, he 
 repeats, " our sole business is to make 
 Socialists." 
 
 In 1888, two years before he was driven out 
 of the League, he wrote to Mr. Bruce Glasier, 
 a Scotch Socialist friend, denning his position 
 
 " 1st. Under no circumstances will I give 
 up active propaganda. 2nd. I will make 
 every effort to keep the League together. 
 3rd. We should treat Parliament as a repre- 
 sentative of the enemy. 4th. We might for 
 some definite purpose be forced to send 
 members to Parliament as rebels. 5th. But 
 under no circumstances to help to carry on 
 their government of the country. 6th. And 
 therefore we ought not to put forward pallia- 
 tive measures to be carried through Parlia- 
 ment, for that would be helping them to 
 govern us. 7th. If the League declares for 
 the latter step it ceases to be what I thought 
 it was, and I must try to do what I can out- 
 side it. 8th. But short of that I will work 
 
MORRIS AS A SOCIALIST 165 
 
 inside it." Soon after this the quarrel came 
 to a head and the Parliamentarians left 
 the League. Of those who remained Morris 
 said : " One or two are vainglorious humbugs : 
 a good many are men who, poor fellows, owing 
 to their position, cannot argue, and have only 
 impulsive feelings based on no sort of logic, 
 emotional or otherwise, and fall back when 
 there is nothing exciting going on, since they 
 have never had any real grasp of the subject. 
 Many also are so desperately poor that they 
 cannot work much for us. . . . With all this 
 the worst of them are no worse than other 
 people; mostly they are better; so that 
 supposing we broke up the band, any new 
 band we got together would be composed of 
 just the same elements." 
 
 Unfortunately, however, Morris now found 
 himself alone with the Anarchists. " The 
 Anarchist element in us seems determined 
 to drive things to extremity and break us up 
 if we do not declare for Anarchy ; which I for 
 one will not do." 
 
 In 1900, the year of the final quarrel, he 
 writes to Mr. Glasier : " Between you and me 
 the League don't get on except like a cow's 
 tail downwards. Up here there is now a 
 great deal of quarrelling (in which I take no 
 
166 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 part), the basis of which is that some of them 
 want the paper made ' more revolutionary,' 
 i. e. they want to write the articles themselves 
 (which they can't do), and do a little blood 
 and thunder without any meaning, which 
 might get me into trouble, but couldn't hurt 
 them. ... I am now paying for the League 
 (including paper) at the rate of 500 a year, 
 and I cannot stand it." But all this, he says, 
 does not trouble him much. " Socialism is 
 spreading, I suppose on the only lines on 
 which it could spread, and the League is 
 moribund simply because we are outside 
 these lines, as I for one must always be; 
 but I shall be able to do just as much 
 work in the movement when the League is 
 gone as I do now. The main cause of the 
 failure is that you cannot keep a body to- 
 gether without giving it something to do in 
 the present." 
 
 At last he was deposed from the editor- 
 ship of the " Commonweal " and in November 
 1890 he wrote for the last time in it, speaking 
 of the Socialist movement with a sincerity 
 free from all bitterness and a hope free from 
 all illusions. 
 
 " Consider," he says, " the quality of those 
 who began and carried on this business of 
 
MORRIS AS A SOCIALIST 167 
 
 reversing the basis of modern society. A few 
 working men, less successful even in the 
 wretched life of labour than their fellows; a 
 sprinkling of the intellectual proletariat, whose 
 keen pushing of Socialism must have seemed 
 pretty certain to extinguish their limited 
 chances of prosperity; one or two outsiders 
 in the game political; a few refugees from 
 the bureaucratic tyranny of foreign govern- 
 ments; and here and there an unpractical, 
 half -cracked artist or author." 
 
 Here in the last sentence he was no doubt 
 thinking of himself, half expressing his own 
 opinion, half repeating what others said of 
 him. He knew that he was unpractical to 
 this extent, that he could not give his mind 
 to the business of politics as he had given 
 it to the business of the arts. All his prac- 
 tical work in Socialist agitation had been 
 done against the grain, and done there- 
 fore, with only a part of himself. A man 
 cannot be master of any subject unless 
 he gives the whole of himself to it; 
 and Morris had mastered art after art 
 because he had the power of throwing the 
 whole of himself into each of them, even 
 when he was practising several at the same 
 time. What he had learnt in one helped him 
 
168 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 in another; but when he came to politics 
 all that he had learnt about the arts was a 
 hindrance rather than a help, for the artist 
 works at his art for its own sake without 
 a thought of further consequences; but the 
 politician and this is the very secret of his 
 craft always has further consequences in 
 his mind. However disinterested he may be 
 in his general aims, he cannot have the artist's 
 peculiar disinterestedness. He cannot do a 
 job for its own sake and think of nothing 
 but doing it as well as possible. If he does 
 that, he may be a fine orator or a brilliant 
 writer, but he will be a bad politician. Morris 
 knew this well enough; for it was part of his 
 sagacity to understand at once the first 
 principles of any work he undertook. But 
 although he knew it he could not practise 
 it with any joy. He could refrain from 
 insisting upon his own opinion, but he felt 
 ashamed even as he did so. In the article 
 from which I have quoted he says : " Quarrels 
 more than enough we have had; and some- 
 times also weak assent for fear of quarrels 
 to what we did not agree with." To him 
 all the contrivance and compromise of the 
 politician seemed weak assent to what he did 
 not agree with ; and he felt guilty even while 
 
MORRIS AS A SOCIALIST 169 
 
 he practised it from a sense of duty. Indeed, 
 in all his political activity he suffered from a 
 conflict between his sense of duty and the 
 finest of his natural instincts, which proved 
 that he was not born to be a politician. For 
 when a man does what he is born to do his 
 sense of duty is in harmony with the finest 
 of his natural instincts and because of this 
 harmony he can throw the whole of himself 
 into his work. Morris, all through this last 
 statement in the "Commonweal " expresses a 
 hope which is never affected, but it is really 
 a hope that others will succeed just where he 
 feels that he himself has failed. " When I 
 first joined the movement," he says, " I 
 hoped that some working-man leader, or 
 rather leaders, would turn up, who would 
 push aside all middle-class help, and become 
 great historical figures. I might still hope 
 for that, if it seemed likely to happen, for 
 indeed I long for it enough; but to speak 
 plainly it does not seem so at present." 
 
 There he spoke with perfect honesty, for 
 he had never wished himself to be a leader. 
 His desire had been to obey the orders of 
 some leader that he could trust; and un- 
 willingly he had found himself forced into 
 a kind of leadership from the lack of the 
 
170 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 great man of the working-classes whom he 
 had wished to follow. 
 
 Again, he spoke of himself and his own 
 ideas in the following passage 
 
 '* When we first began to work together, 
 there was little said about anything save the 
 great ideals of Socialism; and so far off did 
 we seem from the realization of these, that 
 we could hardly think of any means for their 
 realization, save great dramatic events which 
 would make our lives tragic indeed, but 
 would take us out of the sordidness of the 
 so-called ' peace ' of civilization. With the 
 great extension of Socialism this also is 
 changed. Our very success has dimmed the 
 great ideals that first led us on ; for the hope 
 of the partial and, so to say, vulgarized 
 realization of Socialism is now pressing on 
 us. . . . Methods of realization, therefore, 
 are now more before our eyes than ideals : 
 but it is of 110 use talking about methods 
 which are not, in part at least, immediately 
 feasible, and it is of the nature of such partial 
 methods to be sordid and discouraging, though 
 they may be necessary." 
 
 That phrase " the vulgarized realization of 
 Socialism " betrays the artist in politics 
 against his will. He knew that the realization 
 
MORRIS AS A SOCIALIST 171 
 
 must be inferior to the idea; but the true 
 politician, however high-minded, sacrifices 
 something of the idea with joy for the sake 
 of the realization. The artist cannot do this. 
 He judges politics as if they were art, and in 
 speaking of vulgarized realization he uses 
 an artistic metaphor to describe what would 
 be a failure in art though it may be a success 
 in politics. 
 
 That was why Morris felt that he himself 
 must always be outside the lines on which 
 Socialism could be realized ; but his experience 
 had not disgusted him either with himself 
 or with other Socialists. It had only made 
 him see more clearly how he could best work 
 for Socialism. He had done his duty as a 
 private; he had spoken at street corners; 
 he had been in conflict with the police and 
 had learnt from the riots of 1886 and 1887, 
 if he needed to learn it, that a revolution at 
 present was impossible, and that even if the 
 impossible happened the rebels would not 
 know what to do with their success. Hence- 
 forward he continued to work hard, but 
 without the feverish earnestness of one who 
 felt something must be done at once to save 
 the world. From the patient endurance of 
 disappointments and injustice he had acquired 
 
172 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 a more tranquil faith, in its nature like the 
 faith of those who believe that the process 
 of the Universe will justify itself in a future 
 state. At first, with no belief of his own in 
 a life after death, he had fought against present 
 evils fiercely and wildly like a rat in a corner ; 
 but the fever was cured by the very process 
 of fighting; and, though his dogmatic beliefs 
 may not have changed, he obtained the 
 spiritual rest of one who has done his duty. 
 He had not laboured to obtain it, but it came 
 to him like a happy physical weariness in the 
 evening of his life. 
 
 Morris and those who left the League with 
 him formed another society of their own 
 called the Hammersmith Socialist Society. 
 " I feel twice the man since I have spoken 
 out," he wrote. " I dread a quarrel above 
 all things, and I have had this one on my 
 mind for a year or more. But I am glad it 
 is over at last ; for in good truth I would about 
 as soon join a White Rose Society as an 
 Anarchist one; such nonsense as I deem 
 the latter." The new society had evening 
 lectures every Sunday in a lecture-hall that 
 had once been the stable of Kelmscott House. 
 They were given by men such as Stepniak, 
 Mr. John Burns, Mr. Bernard Shaw, Lord 
 
MORRIS AS A SOCIALIST 173 
 
 Haldane, Mr. Sidney Webb, and Mr. Walter 
 Crane. Morris himself would take the chair 
 and sit at a plain wooden table taking notes 
 or decorating the paper with flowers and 
 lettering. " When the meeting was over," 
 Miss May Morris tells us, " Mr. Walker, or 
 one of us, would often go to the chairman's 
 table just to see what the little drawings 
 were, left on paper or blotting-pad. Such 
 drawings dream-roses and twining garlands 
 that formed themselves unbidden; at times, 
 maybe, a mechanical aid through certain 
 moments of weariness when some member 
 of the audience is dealing with a misappre- 
 hended aspect of economics with which he 
 bores the others almost to tears." 
 
 Morris still continued to speak out of doors 
 on Sunday mornings at Hammersmith or in 
 other places about London, and he grew more 
 hopeful of a general enlightenment and a 
 general spread of Socialist ideas even among 
 those who were not Socialists. " The L.C.C.," 
 he wrote, " so far has, to my own experience, 
 shown itself an amazing improvement on the 
 old red-tape public bodies. ... Of course I 
 don't think much of gas and water Socialism, 
 or indeed of any mere mechanical accessories 
 to Socialism : but I can see that the spirit 
 
174 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 of the thing is bettering, and in spite of all 
 disappointments I am very hopeful." 
 
 In 1893 a united Socialist Committee was 
 formed to publish a manifesto in which the 
 Social Democratic Federation, the Fabian 
 Society, and the Hammersmith Socialist 
 Society all joined. Mr. Shaw says that the 
 draft was written by Morris, but that Mr. 
 Hyndman and he, Mr. Shaw, could only agree 
 upon the platitudes of the movement. " The 
 result," he adds, " was, I believe, a complete 
 agreement between the three of us, though 
 we did not formally express it, that the 
 manifesto was beneath contempt." Nothing 
 much came of it ; and as Morris had expected 
 nothing he was not disappointed. This was 
 his last public act of any importance; for 
 two years before he had had a serious illness 
 and after it he had to take care of himself 
 for the five years of life that remained to 
 him. So he passed gradually and quietly 
 out of public life, though he remained the 
 chief of English Socialists, honoured by all, 
 however much they might differ among 
 themselves. 
 
 To some this chapter may seem a record of 
 waste and failure, waste of an artist and 
 failure of a politician. Well, as a politician 
 
MORRIS AS A SOCIALIST 175 
 
 Morris's aim was to persuade the world that 
 what he desired was indeed desirable; and 
 the world is not to be persuaded of such things 
 merely by argument or poetry. It can only be 
 convinced that a man does indeed desire 
 what he preaches by the sacrifices which he 
 makes for it. Morris did not make sacrifices 
 to prove the strength of his desire; but the 
 strength of his desire forced him to make 
 them. He was driven into action in politics 
 as in art because he could not rest content 
 with mere opinion; and the very fact that 
 he was less gifted as a politician than as an 
 artist only proved the force of his passion. 
 He may not have been very persuasive to 
 the crowds that gathered at street corners 
 to hear him preach ; but his writings are 
 more persuasive because he did so. His 
 business was not so much to argue as to 
 bear witness; and his sacrifice was part of 
 his testimony. 
 
 Many who admire him as an artist think 
 that when he became a politician he was a 
 dreamer walking in his sleep and walking in 
 dangerous places. But whatever he may have 
 dreamt about the future of men, he had no 
 illusions about their present state. He did 
 not think that the poor were all good or the 
 
176 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 rich all bad; for if he had thought that he 
 would never have been fool enough to attempt 
 to change the condition of the poor. How- 
 ever fiercely he might talk in moments of 
 exasperation, he was always on the side of 
 reason and order and peace, and Matthew 
 Arnold himself never pleaded so well for 
 sweetness and light as Morris did in the 
 speech which he delivered over the grave of 
 a poor boy who had been killed in the riots 
 of Bloody Sunday in 1887. 
 
 " Our friend who lies here," he said, " has 
 had a hard life, and met with a hard death; 
 and if society had been differently constituted 
 his life might have been a delightful, a 
 beautiful, and a happy one. It is our business, 
 to begin to organize for the purpose of seeing 
 that such things shall not happen; to try 
 to make this earth a beautiful and happy 
 place." 
 
 Every one now, except the very stupid, 
 knows that this world is less beautiful and 
 happy than it might be. We have all lost 
 the Victorian complacency which was so like 
 despair. We do not believe in the mechanical 
 action of progress or that our civilization 
 has been freed for ever from the peril and 
 beauty of the past; we know that it can 
 
MORRIS AS A SOCIALIST 177 
 
 only be preserved from peril and restored 
 to beauty by the constant exercise of our 
 own wills; we have both a conviction of sin 
 and a hope of salvation; and we owe both 
 to William Morris more than to any other 
 single man. 
 
 M 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 THE PROSE ROMANCES AND LATER POEMS 
 
 ONLY two of Morris's prose romances are as 
 well known as they deserve to be, the " Dream 
 of John Ball " and " News from Nowhere " ; 
 and they are well known because of their 
 political purpose. They tell us directly and 
 eloquently what Morris most valued in life ; 
 and the " Dream of John Ball " is also a vivid 
 picture of a time which he knew almost as 
 well as if he had lived in it. 
 
 His other romances have no political 
 purpose, though he began to write them 
 when he was still fiercely occupied with 
 politics. The first of them, " The House of 
 the Wolfings," was begun early in 1888; and 
 it was followed the next year by " The Roots of 
 the Mountains." These two have more contact 
 with reality than the five later romances, in that 
 they are on the borderland of history. " The 
 House of the Wolfings " is a story of Goths 
 in conflict with the Romans when the Roman 
 178 
 
THE PROSE ROMANCES 179 
 
 power was first beginning to decline. But 
 the Romans appear in it much as they appear 
 in the story of Cymbeline. It is a legend 
 told as if one of the Goths were telling it. 
 " The Roots of the Mountains " is a tale of the 
 same people but later in date; for now they 
 are fighting with the Huns, not the Romans ; 
 at least we may guess the Dusky Men, whom 
 they overcome, to be the Huns. We may 
 also guess that in writing those two tales 
 Morris was stealing a holiday from his political 
 work and yet remembering it. The Goths 
 in both are the people that he loves, the 
 people who made the art of the Middle Ages 
 and who destroyed that Roman Power which 
 he detested. In each book they fight a 
 simple fight with baser enemies; and no 
 doubt, as he wrote, Morris wished that his 
 own fight was as simple. He said that he 
 enjoyed writing " The Roots of the Mountains " 
 more than any other of his books; and he 
 took a pleasure in describing the ritual and 
 custom of the people which some readers 
 may not share. But the book contains one 
 of the finest fights in literature; and it is 
 not merely a battle of two barbarous tribes, 
 but a conflict between promise and mere 
 destruction. 
 
180 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 Morris wrote of it not because he loved 
 blood but because he knew that such a 
 conflict is always waging in the world, whether 
 open or suppressed ; and he makes his readers 
 feel that it is a fight as momentous as Marathon 
 and a victory as glorious. The truth of 
 history was never made so romantic in any 
 historical novel as it is here in the first signs 
 and threats of the Dusky men. For the story 
 is told, not as a modern historian might tell 
 it, but as it might have been experienced in 
 the ignorance and uncertainty of the time. 
 Morris threw himself back into the past 
 not merely to make a story, but because he 
 enjoyed living in it, because he had the 
 power thus to take a holiday from the 
 present. 
 
 *' The House of the Wolfings " is less coherent 
 than " The Roots of the Mountains," and the 
 mixture of prose and poetry makes it less 
 easy to read for those who would have their 
 reading made very easy. Yet there is poetry 
 in it that alone ought to make it famous; 
 and this poetry, and with it the prose, is 
 most beautiful where the story has magic 
 in it like that of the later romances. Here 
 is the Speech of the Wood-Sun, a kind of 
 Undine, to her earthly lover Thiodolf 
 
THE PROSE ROMANCES 181 
 
 " Thou sayest it : I am outcast ; for a god that 
 
 lacketh mirth 
 Hath no more place in Godhome and never 
 
 a place on earth. 
 A man grieves, and he gladdens, or he dies 
 
 and his grief is gone; 
 But what of the grief of the gods, and the 
 
 sorrow never undone? 
 Yea verily I am the outcast. When first in 
 
 thine arms I lay, 
 On the blossoms of the woodland my godhead 
 
 passed away.'* 
 
 This has the music which Morris alone of 
 our modern poets has made, the music of 
 folksong enriched but not robbed of its 
 freshness, as if it were transferred from a 
 lonely flute to all instruments without suffering 
 by the change. 
 
 The rest of the romances were published 
 in the following order : " The Glittering Plain," 
 " The Wood beyond the World," " The Well at 
 the World'sEnd," "The Waterof the Wondrous 
 Isles," and "The Sundering Flood." Morris 
 seems to have written them as he told tales 
 in his boyhood, purely for the pleasure of it. 
 They belong to no time or place and are like no 
 other tales in English literature. He began 
 
182 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 one or two of them in verse and then gave 
 it up, perhaps because his energy had slackened 
 with all his labours. Indeed, he wrote them, 
 as Shakespeare wrote his last romances, with 
 all the ease of mastery but more lazily than 
 " Sigurd." And yet they seem to me more 
 imaginative than most of the stories of " The 
 Earthly Paradise, "for in all of them he writes 
 as if he knew the strange world that he 
 describes down to the smallest particular. 
 They have been called vague; and yet one 
 of their chief merits is the clearness of every 
 detail described. They are remote, but they 
 are not unreal; for Morris himself lived in 
 them as he wrote them. They may be im- 
 possible, but they are not incredible: for 
 Morris, though he did not believe in actual 
 magic, could write of it as if he did, and his 
 enchantresses seem to be, not mere beautiful 
 bogies, but symbols of the real mystery of 
 alluring evil. And his characters, however 
 simply drawn, are living men and women. 
 Indeed, now and again he draws them with 
 a subtlety which will surprise those who think 
 that he took no interest in human beings. He 
 had himself a strong turn for introspection, 
 but seems to have regarded it as a bad habit ; 
 at least he often cut introspective passages 
 
THE PROSE ROMANCES 183 
 
 out of his poetry; and sometimes he reveals 
 in these romances what introspection had 
 taught him. It is easy enough for any one 
 who has never read them to enumerate their 
 defects; and in theory perhaps they ought 
 to be as empty as they are said to be. But 
 in practice they are not empty at all, for in 
 the first place the story in each of them is 
 enthralling: and in the second it happens in 
 a world made vividly real and beautiful. No 
 one ever described country better than Morris 
 or weaved descriptions more artfully into a 
 story. Thus the desert in " The Glittering 
 Plain " is drawn from Iceland, and the country 
 of " The Well at the World's End " from the 
 hills and meadows round Kelmscott Manor. 
 There are journeys in all these stories as in all 
 good romances ; and, whatever strange adven- 
 tures may happen on them, they pass through 
 a country which we almost see with our own 
 eyes. And when Morris brings the hero to 
 a city, it is always a city of the Middle Ages, 
 which he makes as wonderful and delightful 
 to us as it is to himself. But the Middle Ages 
 as he describes them are not fantastic; they 
 are hardly even romantic, as the word is 
 commonly used. Rather they are classical; 
 for their art was the classical art to Morris, 
 
184 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 and he makes us feel that we could live in 
 those cities without finding them strange or 
 barbarous or even feverishly beautiful. 
 
 One charge has been brought against him 
 more often than any other, namely that he 
 wrote Wardour Street English. This implies 
 that his romances were forgeries of some old 
 style like the buildings of the Gothic revival. 
 Now it is true that Morris had a taste for a 
 few obsolete words and constructions. That 
 was one of his whims; but he used these 
 words and constructions because he liked 
 them, not because he was trying to imitate any 
 old writings. His language, like his stories, is 
 not an imitation of anything ; and, except for 
 a very few words, it is far more easy to 
 understand, because it has a far more precise 
 meaning, than most leading articles. Any one 
 who cannot read these romances, because now 
 and again he comes upon a word like braithty 
 or kenspeckle or yea-said, must be like the 
 princess who could not sleep a wink because 
 there was a pea under the forty mattresses of 
 her bed. If Morris had been an affected 
 writer he would have betrayed his affec- 
 tation in his whole style; whereas, except 
 for these few whims, he is the simplest writer 
 of his time. Indeed, his strangest construe- 
 
THE PROSE ROMANCES 185 
 
 tions are only more simple than those to 
 which we are accustomed ; and I am, perhaps, 
 unjust to him when I speak of them as whims. 
 He was so used to them himself that he may 
 not have known that they would sound strange 
 to his readers. He may have used them and 
 his outlandish words merely because he was 
 trying to write as well as he could, and 
 therefore used every means that he could find, 
 out of his vast knowledge of English new 
 and old, to express his meaning as simply as 
 possible. It is true that he does not use 
 these words or constructions in his lectures; 
 but every writer varies to some extent with 
 his subject-matter; and Morris only varied 
 more than most, because he had a greater 
 mastery and knowledge of English. The 
 main objection to the use of strange words 
 or constructions is that it distracts the 
 reader's attention from the sense to the 
 manner in which it is expressed. But one 
 very soon gets used to Morris's oddities, 
 whereas the oddities of affectation can never 
 be ignored, since they are assumed to attract 
 notice. 
 
 Stevenson once wrote a letter to Morris, 
 which he never sent, protesting against his use 
 of " whereas " for " where." But he protested 
 
186 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 as an admirer who did not wish to have his 
 admiration lessened by any trifle. " For the 
 love of God," he wrote; "my dear and 
 honoured Morris, use where, and let us know 
 whereas we are, wherefore our gratitude shall 
 grow, whereby you shall be the more honoured 
 wherever men use clear language, whereas 
 now, although we honour, we are troubled." 
 But those who accuse Morris of writing 
 Wardour Street English do not honour him, 
 and betray their ignorance not only of his 
 genius but also of his character. Living as 
 he did, when the great mass of men thought 
 art a thing of no importance, and desiring 
 above all things to make them see that it 
 was important, he was inclined in his own 
 work to be too consciously artistic, as good 
 men in a time of general immorality are 
 inclined to be too consciously moral. Just 
 as he saw machine-made ornament every- 
 where around him, so he saw the English 
 language in newspapers and books used 
 without simplicity or beauty or precision. 
 So when he used it himself, and especially 
 when he used it in his prose romances, he was 
 anxious to purify it of all that pompous and 
 stale ugliness which it had acquired through 
 misuse. He even had a dislike, not quite 
 
THE PROSE ROMANCES 187 
 
 reasonable, for the rhetoric, very like 
 Renaissance floridity of ornament, which the 
 Elizabethans introduced into our literature. 
 For him Chaucer was the perfect master of 
 style in poetry, and in his prose romances he 
 tried to write like a prose Chaucer, not 
 slavishly imitating him, but consciously 
 avoiding the more vague and laboured beau- 
 ties of later English. He did this without 
 difficulty, for his own mind, when untroubled, 
 worked as easily and simply as the mind of 
 any mediaeval story-teller, and his own natural 
 interests were mediaeval rather than modern. 
 That was what he meant when he said that 
 he was born out of due time. 
 
 But, unlike Chaucer, he had to avoid many 
 literary habits of his own time; and he 
 found he could do this most easily by estab- 
 lishing a prose convention of his own. In 
 his early prose stories he had not yet estab- 
 lished it, and the style in them is often 
 incongruous with the matter. But in the 
 later romances it has become natural to him, 
 so natural that he is never hampered by it, 
 and indeed hardly conscious of it. It is not 
 a style in which the greatest things could be 
 said; but these romances do not aim at the 
 greatest things. Yet we do not feel the want 
 
188 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 of the greatest things in them, nor do we ever 
 feel that the writer has attempted more than 
 he could do. The style itself helps to make 
 that beautiful world so complete, so far from 
 the reality of our experience. It is not so 
 much archaic as romantic; it is a language 
 freed, as the stories themselves are freed, 
 from all associations of modern ugliness. 
 
 In fact Morris in those stories was giving 
 himself his last romantic holiday; and we 
 too can take a romantic holiday in reading 
 them, if we are content to enjoy their sweet- 
 ness without longing for modern spices. 
 They are stories for grown-up children, such 
 as Morris himself remained through all the 
 labours and troubles of his later years. These 
 gave him wisdom and a new passion of 
 thought; but they did not destroy his sim- 
 plicity or that purity of palate, like a child's, 
 for which the primitive pleasures of life 
 remained the best. 
 
 Morris wrote little poetry in his later years ; 
 but in the " Commonweal " he published a 
 narrative poem of modern life called " The 
 Pilgrims of Hope," which has been privately 
 reprinted in England and published in a 
 pirated edition in America. Morris himself 
 only included three numbers of it, " The 
 
THE PROSE ROMANCES 189 
 
 Message of the March Wind," " Mother and 
 Son," and " The Half of Life Gone," in the 
 collection of his later poems which he pub- 
 lished in 1891 under the title " Poems by the 
 Way." These are his masterpieces of lyrical 
 poetry; but the rest of the poem, though 
 unequal, is as exciting to read as any novel, 
 and often rises to extreme beauty. It is 
 easy to find weak lines in it ; but the weakest 
 usually lead to some passage of sudden glory 
 that would be less glorious if it were not so 
 led up to. Most of the poem is in the metre 
 of "Sigurd," and Morris could not lower the 
 excitement of that metre to suit his more 
 prosaic passages. These sometimes sound, 
 therefore, like reciter's poetry; but they are 
 far better verse than the prosaic passages of 
 Maud; and, however weak in themselves, 
 they all help to tell the story. 
 
 As a whole the poem is a lonely triumph 
 in our modern literature, in that it has all 
 the thrill of new ideas and fresh experience, 
 and yet is for the most part high poetry. It 
 is the story of a man and a woman who love 
 each other and become Socialists; and in 
 " The Message of the March Wind," the man 
 speaks to the woman in the first happiness of 
 their love 
 
190 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 " From township to township, o'er down and 
 
 by tillage, 
 Far, 1 far have we wandered and long was 
 
 the day, 
 But now cometh eve at the end of the 
 
 village, 
 
 Where over the gray wall the church riseth 
 gray." 
 
 The rest and beauty of the hour possess 
 them, but their happiness makes them feel 
 all the more sharply the misery of the 
 London poor 
 
 " This land we have loved in our love and our 
 
 leisure 
 For them hangs in heaven, high out of 
 
 their reach; 
 The wide hills o'er the sea-plain for them 
 
 have no pleasure, 
 
 The gray homes of their fathers no story 
 to teach." 
 
 There Morris is speaking for himself, 
 speaking as if his own new pity were height- 
 
 1 This word is printed " fair " in every edition, but one 
 has only to read it so to be sure that Morris wrote or 
 meant to writ " far."' He was always careless with 
 proofs. 
 
THE PROSE ROMANCES 191 
 
 ened by youth and the glory of first love; 
 and indeed it is the greatest triumph of the 
 poet to recover his youth in the art of his 
 later years and to present the lessons of 
 experience as if he had learnt them as he 
 once learnt to love. 
 
 So the hope of love and the hope of the 
 world become almost one to the mind of this 
 lover and he makes one music out of them 
 both 
 
 " Like the seed of midwinter, unheeded, un- 
 
 perished, 
 Like the autumn-sown wheat 'neath the 
 
 snow lying green, 
 Like the love that o'crtook us, unawares and 
 
 uncherished, 
 
 Like the babe 'neath thy girdle that 
 groweth unseen ; 
 
 " So the hope of the people now buddeth and 
 
 groweth, 
 Rest fadeth before it, and blindness and 
 
 fear; 
 It biddeth us learn all the wisdom it 
 
 knoweth ; 
 
 It hath found us, and held us, and 
 biddeth us hear." 
 
192 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 In " Mother and Son " the babe is born, 
 and the mother talks to it alone in London 
 by night of its father and herself, and of how 
 they came to love each other, and of the 
 faith he has taught her. Tolstoy himself 
 could not have made her tell more of the 
 secrets of her heart; but Morris makes her 
 tell them in poetry that is like a folk-song of 
 our own time 
 
 " Lo, amidst London I lift thee, 
 
 And how little and light thou art, 
 And thou without hope or fear 
 
 Thou fear and hope of my heart ! 
 Lo, here thy body beginning, 
 
 O son, and thy soul and thy life; 
 But how will it be if thou livest, 
 
 And enterest into the strife, 
 And in love we dwell together 
 
 When the man is grown in thee, 
 When thy sweet speech I shall hearken, 
 
 And yet 'twixt thee and me 
 Shall rise that wall of distance, 
 
 That round each one doth grow, 
 And maketh it hard and bitter 
 
 Each other's thought to know." 
 
 She tells him what kind of woman she is 
 and 'how she has lived and grown to beauty, 
 
THE PROSE ROMANCES 193 
 
 and all in language as simple as the simplest 
 prose, which makes its own music as if it 
 were the first poetry ever written 
 
 Now to thee alone will I tell it 
 
 That thy mother's body is fair, 
 In the guise of the country maidens 
 
 Who play with the sun and the air ; 
 Who have stood in the row of the reapers 
 
 In the August afternoon, 
 Who have sat by the frozen water 
 
 In the high day of the moon, 
 When the lights of the Christmas feasting 
 
 Were dead in the house on the hill, 
 And the wild geese gone to the saltmarsh 
 
 Had left the winter still." 
 
 Through all that long practice of verse and 
 story-telling, through all that love of old 
 romance, Morris at last had attained to this, 
 that he could make a new story as beautiful 
 as an old one and a new music which seems 
 to be only a happy chance of the words falling 
 together. Here the woman tells how she left 
 her home in the early morning 
 
 " All things I saw at a glance ; 
 
 The quickening fire-tongues leapt 
 
 N 
 
194 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 Through the crackling heap of sticks, 
 
 And the sweet smoke up from it crept, 
 And close to the very hearth 
 
 The low sun flooded the floor, 
 And the cat and her kittens played 
 
 In the sun by the open door. 
 The garden was fair in the morning, 
 
 And there in the road he stood 
 Beyond the crimson daisies 
 
 And the bush of southernwood." 
 
 Then she is proud of their love and she tells 
 her son, the fruit of it, all that she hopes for 
 him and for the future 
 
 " But sure from the wise and the simple 
 
 Shall the mighty come to birth ; 
 And fair were my fate, beloved, 
 
 If I be yet on the earth 
 When the world is awaken at last, 
 
 And from mouth to mouth they tell 
 Of thy love and thy deeds and thy valour, 
 
 And thy hope that nought can quell." 
 
 In " The Half of Life Gone " she is dead, 
 and the man remembers her as he watches 
 the haymaking and speaks as if with her 
 music 
 
THE PROSE ROMANCES 195 
 
 " Lo now ! the woman that stoops 
 
 And kisses the face of the lad, 
 And puts a rake in his hand 
 
 And laughs with his laughing face. 
 Whose is the voice that laughs 
 
 In the old familiar place ? 
 Whose should it be but my love's, 
 
 If my love were yet on the earth ? 
 Could she refrain from the fields 
 
 Where my joy and her joy had birth ? " 
 
 He falls into grief at the memory, but checks 
 it with a pride in his own past joy and even 
 in the sharpness of his present sorrow 
 
 " O fool, what words are these? 
 
 Thou hast a sorrow to nurse, 
 And thou hast been bold and happy; 
 
 But these if they utter a curse, 
 No sting it has and no meaning, 
 
 It is empty sound on the air. 
 Thy life is full of mourning, 
 
 And theirs so empty and bare, 
 That they have no words of complain- 
 ing; 
 
 Nor so happy have they been 
 That they may measure sorrow 
 
 Or tell what grief may mean." 
 
196 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 There Morris himself speaks again, though 
 he had never known the grief of which he 
 speaks. He thought, no doubt, of his own 
 good fortune as a mere chance; and he was 
 so concerned with the well-being of all the 
 world that he could not be satisfied with 
 that chance happiness and tried to think how 
 he would face life without it. It is out of 
 such thoughts that poets make tragedies, even 
 when they themselves have all the happiness 
 that life can give. They are not discontented 
 with their happiness, but they cannot lose 
 themselves in it because it is not part of the 
 common lot of men or inevitable like birth 
 and death. In thought, at any rate, they 
 must make trial of that unhappiness which 
 is no less common. And the sense of this 
 grows on them with years so that they become 
 not merely individuals but every man with 
 all human experiences of joy and sorrow. 
 So Morris, when he wrote "The Half of Life 
 Gone," was speaking for himself as well as 
 for his hero; and the same faculty which 
 enabled him to speak thus of another man's 
 grief as if it were his own made him also feel 
 the wretchedness of the poor as if it were his 
 own. He became a revolutionary because he 
 was a poet and felt his own prosperity to be 
 
THE PROSE ROMANCES 197 
 
 a mere chance in our present state of society ; 
 just as much as the absence of death in his 
 family. On this point his imagination worked 
 further than any poet's had worked before, 
 but it was still the poetic imagination, in 
 this case driven into politics because he 
 believed that poverty, unlike death, could be 
 abolished by the will of man. 
 
 Thus he was able sometimes in his Socialist 
 poems to rise above the level of spirited 
 propagandist verse, as Cowper sometimes rose 
 in his hymns above the level of Hymns 
 Ancient and Modern. " The Day is Coming " 
 begins well enough, but many competent 
 versifiers could have written the first part of 
 it. Then follow verses which only Morris 
 could have written 
 
 " But what wealth then shall be left us 
 
 When none shall gather gold 
 To buy his friend in the market, 
 And pinch and pine the sold ? 
 
 Nay, what save the lovely city, 
 And the little house on the hill, 
 
 And the wastes and the woodland beauty, 
 And the happy fields we till; 
 
198 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 And the homes of ancient stories, 
 The tombs of the mighty dead; 
 
 And the wise men seeking out marvels, 
 And the poet's teeming head ; 
 
 And the painter's hand of wonder ; 
 
 And the marvellous fiddle-bow, 
 And the banded choirs of music : 
 
 All those that do and know." 
 
 That music, so clear, so sudden, trans- 
 forming the words the moment he begins to 
 speak of what he loves, reveals to us the 
 poet in the politician and shows us that it 
 was the poet's desire which turned him to 
 politics so that he might, if he could, create 
 what he desired. 
 
 These poems of his last volume are not 
 much known ; but the best of them seem to me, 
 even when I remember "Sigurd," to prove 
 that he never did in poetry all that he might 
 have done. That great effort of his later 
 years, to be the poet in action, to remould 
 the world itself nearer to his heart's desire, 
 overtaxed even his strength. For a moment, 
 in " Mother and Son," he was able to make 
 a saga out of the present, to see the conflict 
 of his own time as if it were a war of gods 
 
THE PROSE ROMANCES 199 
 
 and giants. But he had not energy enough 
 to do this for more than a moment. His 
 body, though not his genius, was growing 
 old. The great inspiration of his life came 
 too late; and when he turned away from 
 politics he took his rest in labours that would 
 have been heavy for any other man, but for 
 him were only a pastime. 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 LAST YEARS AND CHARACTER 
 
 IN the spring of 1891, when Morris was 
 fifty-seven years old, his body began to warn 
 him that he had overtaxed it. He fell ill 
 of the gout, complicated by weakness of the 
 kidneys. " My hand seems lead and my wrist 
 string," he wrote to a friend ; and he was told 
 that in future he must always take great 
 care of himself. After this illness he lived 
 more than five years and they were crowded 
 with various labours; but the chief work of 
 his life was done and every year he was a 
 little weaker. Yet his autumn was a season 
 of mellow fruitfulness and he seems to be 
 writing of it in that poem which he made 
 to be embroidered on the hanging of his bed. 
 
 ' The wind's on the wold 
 And the night is acold, 
 And Thames runs chill 
 'Twixt mead and hill. 
 
 200 
 
LAST YEARS AND CHARACTER 201 
 
 But kind and dear 
 
 Is the old house here 
 
 And my heart is warm 
 
 Midst winter's harm. 
 
 Rest then and rest, 
 
 And think of the best 
 
 'Twixt summer and spring, 
 
 When all birds sing 
 
 In the leaves of the tree, 
 
 And ye lie in me 
 
 And scarce dare move, 
 
 Lest earth and its love 
 
 Should fade away 
 
 E'er the full of the day. 
 
 I am old and have seen 
 
 Many things that have been ; 
 
 Both grief and peace 
 
 And wane and increase. 
 
 No fate I tell 
 
 Of ill or well, 
 
 But this I say, 
 
 Night treadeth on day, 
 
 And for worst and best 
 
 Right good is rest." 
 
 It was before this illness that he made his 
 translation of the " Odyssey " ; but it may be 
 spoken of here as one of the labours of his 
 
202 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 later years. Like the prose romances it has 
 never had the fame it deserves because of the 
 outlandish words he sometimes uses in it. 
 But he succeeded with it far better than with 
 the " ^Eneid," because Homer, unlike Virgil, 
 was a great story-teller, and Morris, whatever 
 else he has lost, has kept the momentum and 
 excitement of the story better than any other 
 translator. His translation is rough and odd 
 at times. He himself said that it was too 
 like Homer for the public to take to it but 
 it reads as if it were an original poem written 
 for the sake of the story; and it is always 
 best in the great places. Here, for instance, 
 is the passage at the end of the twenty-first 
 book where Odysseus bends the bow 
 
 " Then straight, as a man well learned in the 
 
 lyre and the song 
 On a new pin tightly stretcheth the cord and 
 
 maketh fast 
 
 From side to side the sheep-gut well- 
 twined and overcast : 
 So the mighty bow he bendeth with no 
 
 whit of labouring, 
 And caught it up in his right hand, and 
 
 fell to try the string, 
 
 That 'neath his hand sang lovely as a 
 swallow's voice is fair." 
 
LAST YEARS AND CHARACTER 203 
 
 Here, as elsewhere, Morris deals with the 
 technical details as if he knew what he was 
 talking about, not as if he were a scholar 
 painfully doing his best with them; and 
 since the " Odyssey " is full of technical 
 details and Homer clearly took great delight 
 in them, Morris's power of treating them like 
 a craftsman gives to his translation a reality 
 which is not to be found in any other. It is 
 not " a pretty poem," perhaps, but it is as 
 near to Homer as we are likely to get in 
 English until another master of narrative 
 poetry as great as Morris chooses to spend 
 some years of his life upon a translation. 
 
 To Morris himself the " Odyssey " was only 
 one of many books that he wished to translate. 
 Greek art and literature had not for him the 
 pre-eminence which they have for many 
 artists and men of letters. He would admit 
 that the Greeks had a greater power of execu- 
 tion than any other people known to us ; but, 
 he would have said, they never conceived a 
 building like St. Sophia or a story like that of 
 the " Volsunga " saga. He saw all their works 
 naked of the enormous prestige which they 
 have in the modern world and enjoyed them in 
 his own way and as if he had discovered them 
 for himself. So he turned from the " Odyssey " 
 
204 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 to the translation of Early French romances 
 and to a metrical version of Beowulf; 
 and he enjoyed printing these things at his 
 press as much as he enjoyed translating them. 
 Indeed, he worked at the press as if he were a 
 young man just starting upon business, and 
 the letters of his last years are full of hopes 
 and fears about the great Kelmscott Chaucer 
 which was published a few months before he 
 died. He was very angry with the holidays 
 of the last Easter he lived through, because 
 they delayed the printing of the Chaucer. 
 " Four mouldy Sundays in a mouldy row," 
 he wrote, " the press shut and Chaucer at a 
 standstill." But, though he still lectured and 
 did much work for the Society for the Pro- 
 tection of Ancient Buildings and wrote his 
 prose romances, he was, by comparison with 
 his own past, gradually withdrawing from 
 active life. In 1895 he said to Burne-Jones : 
 " The best way of lengthening out the rest 
 of our days now is to finish our old things." 
 A change had been coming over him for some 
 time, Lady Burne-Jones says, " which we 
 tried to think was nothing beyond the usual 
 effect of time." At the beginning of 1896 
 Burne-Jones began to be seriously troubled 
 by signs of weakness in him and the nature 
 
LAST YEARS AND CHARACTER 205 
 
 of these signs is enough to show us what his 
 vitality had been. " Last Sunday," Burne- 
 Jones writes, " in the very middle of breakfast, 
 Morris began leaning his forehead on his hand, 
 as he does so often now. It is a thing I have 
 never seen him do before in all the years I 
 have known him." In 1895 he had begun to 
 suffer from sleeplessness and when he could 
 not sleep he would get up and work at " The 
 Sundering Flood." In January 1896 he went 
 to a meeting of the Society for the Protection 
 of Ancient Buildings for the last time. A 
 friend, walking away from it with him, 
 noticed his weakness and said that it was 
 the worst time of the year. " No it ain't," 
 replied Morris, " it's a very fine time of the 
 year indeed. I'm getting old, that's what it 
 is." After this he grew weaker very quickly. 
 He was sent to Folkestone for change and, 
 since he got no good by it, his doctor ordered 
 him to take a sea voyage to Norway. This 
 was worse than useless, since he was dying 
 and should have been allowed to die in peace. 
 He was unhappy on the voyage and returned 
 on the 18th of August longing for the quiet of 
 Kelmscott. But he was too ill to go there 
 and never saw that home again. His last 
 days were spent in his London house, and 
 
206 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 there on the 8th of September he dictated the 
 last lines of " The Sundering Flood," which 
 came to an end without betraying any of the 
 weakness that was overcoming him. In this 
 weakness he was easily moved to tears and 
 wept once when Lady Burne-Jones spoke of 
 the hardships of the poor. Mr. Dolmetsch 
 played him some old English music on the 
 virginals, but it moved him so much that he 
 could only endure to hear a little of it. He 
 was nursed at the end by Mr. Emery Walker 
 and died on the 3rd of October. His disease, 
 a doctor said, "was simply being William 
 Morris, and having done more work than 
 most ten men." 
 
 His body was taken to Kelmscott and there 
 buried on the 6th of October. The coffin was 
 carried on a farm waggon from Lechlade 
 station in a storm of wind and rain and was 
 followed by mourners of all classes, both old 
 and young, some of them the friends of his 
 youth, some later followers and admirers. 
 Famous as he was, his death did not make 
 a very great stir in the world. At that time 
 only those who knew him knew what posterity 
 would think of him. 
 
 Burne-Jones once said of him : " There's 
 Morris : the larger half of that wonderful 
 
LAST YEARS AND CHARACTER 207 
 
 personality will perish when he dies. I've 
 tried to put down or repeat some of his rare 
 sayings, but somehow it always seemed 
 flattish the day after, with all the savour 
 gone out. There is no giving the singularity 
 and the independence of his remarks from 
 anything that went before. What never can 
 be put down are his actions and ways 
 perpetually walking about a room while he 
 is talking, and his manner of putting his 
 fist out to explain the thing to you. When 
 I first knew him at college it was just what 
 it is now." 
 
 There are still some of his old and intimate 
 friends alive and only they could preserve the 
 legend of him. It is useless for one who never 
 saw him to attempt it or to repeat the old 
 stories of his fits of passion and relentings, of 
 the contrasts between his violence of language 
 and patience of conduct, between his common 
 sense and his dreams. But every one who 
 knew him well has noticed how full of contrasts 
 he was ; and yet these contrasts are certainly 
 not the symptoms of any weakening conflict in 
 his character. Morris was a man who had all 
 the prosaic virtues ; on one side he might have 
 been the hero of " Tom Brown's School-days," 
 except that he did not care much for games ; 
 
208 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 on the other he was a visionary who wrote 
 the lyrics of " Love is Enough " and " Think 
 but One Thought of me up in the Stars." 
 Yet these two parts of his nature worked 
 together and none of his friends ever saw any 
 incongruity between them. Perhaps this kind 
 of character is rare in our time only because 
 craftsmen are rare; for the craftsman, if he 
 is to excel, must be both industrious and a 
 visionary, as Morris was. He must have 
 honesty and common sense as well as inven- 
 tion; and his work develops and harmonizes 
 both sets of qualities. We shall understand 
 Morris best if we think of him as a craftsman 
 rather than as a poet, as one who could never 
 see raw material without wishing to make 
 something out of it and who at last saw 
 society itself as a very raw material which 
 set his fingers itching. 
 
 Being thus so completely a craftsman he 
 was not, like many poets, absorbed in the 
 intense experience of life nor filled with a 
 devouring curiosity about it. He observed 
 people and things incessantly, but rather as 
 if he knew what could be made out of them 
 than as if he were on a voyage of discovery 
 through life. The world itself was a rough 
 material about which he had made up his 
 
LAST YEARS AND CHARACTER 209 
 
 mind and, though it might delight or enrage 
 him, it did not greatly surprise him. Thus 
 he made his jokes about it in conversation 
 and in letters, and he had his own peculiar 
 vein of humour ; but it was only a pastime to 
 him. He was never enough surprised by 
 life to be humorous in his art. He would 
 criticize people and pass very acute judgments 
 upon them, but always by the way. He was 
 not profoundly interested in them any more 
 than in himself. His greatest friends were 
 those with whom he did things, his fellow- 
 workmen like Burne-Jones and Mr. Webb and 
 Mr. Emery Walker. Indeed, friendship to him 
 meant companionship in work rather than 
 any great intimacy of mind, because he was 
 always working or thinking of his work. He 
 was dependent on nobody, as Burne-Jones 
 remarked, not from any cold-heartedness, but 
 because he always gave more than he received. 
 When he was in a passive mood, he became 
 mysterious, enriching his mind not from 
 other minds but from some source of which 
 he speaks now and again in his poetry. Then 
 he was like a musician listening to melodies 
 that no one else could hear ; and all his friends 
 were aware of these withdrawals, more aware, 
 perhaps, than he was himself. To all of them 
 o 
 
210 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 Morris was a man with a secret of his own 
 which he shared with no one; yet he himself 
 made no mystery about his art or about 
 anything else in his life. He would allow 
 friends to interrupt him in his writing of 
 poetry if he liked to talk with them, knowing 
 that he could go on with his work as soon as 
 the conversation was over. He always talked 
 about art in the most matter-of-fact way, as 
 if it were a job like any other ; but there was 
 a kind of reticence in this as in his manner of 
 announcing the birth of his first child to 
 Madox Brown : " Kid having appeared, Mrs. 
 Brown kindly says she will stay till Monday." 
 Most men who are absorbed in some pursuit 
 like to share their enthusiasm with others; 
 but Morris was quite content with his own 
 enthusiasm and needed no support in that 
 or in anything else. No one was ever less 
 swayed by opinion. If any man can be with- 
 out vanity, he was without it. He never had 
 any public manners and behaved always as 
 if the world were his workshop and people 
 were there to help or hinder him in his work. 
 His sudden rages were like seizures and they 
 did not affect his intercourse with those who 
 provoked them. If they were signs of hatred 
 at all, it was hatred of ideas or things rather 
 
LAST YEARS AND CHARACTER 211 
 
 than people, and usually of something that 
 hindered him in his work. Indeed, we may 
 say that when he lost his temper with a human 
 being, that human being had become merely 
 a provoking thing to him, and that, as soon 
 as he recognized the human being again, the 
 rage was over. 
 
 He had not the slightest desire to be a 
 gentleman; and the world consisted for him 
 of two classes, those who could make things 
 and those who could not. Among the latter 
 were money-makers and middlemen of all 
 kinds, including the great mass of the pro- 
 fessional classes; and these he despised and 
 pitied much as a good-natured athletic school- 
 boy will despise and pity those of his school- 
 fellows who are no good at games. Morris 
 became angry with them, and expressed his 
 anger in strong language, only when he found 
 that they had power over those who could 
 make things. Then he called them smoke- 
 dried swindlers and other things; but he 
 would have been quite kind to them, as he was 
 kind to all the incompetent, if they had been 
 in their proper places. He knew, of course, 
 that he himself had extraordinary powers, 
 but he was no more proud of them than a 
 well-bred nobleman is proud of his rank. He 
 
212 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 did not think of himself as a privileged person 
 at all, and, if he snubbed any one, it was 
 because he was angry, not to assert his own 
 dignity. Mr. Mackail tells us that one of 
 his intimate friends spoke of his " childlike 
 shamelessness " as his deepest quality ; and 
 one may say, in Whitman's phrase, that he 
 had the " aplomb of animals " and seemed 
 to do everything by instinct and without the 
 misgivings of reason. So his friends could 
 sometimes laugh at him as if he were a delight- 
 ful and friendly animal a little puzzled by 
 the criticism of human laughter. 
 
 But all this will not explain why his friends 
 loved him or why many who never knew him 
 think of him as if they had known and loved 
 him. And the effort to explain this brings 
 us to the strongest and deepest contrast in 
 his nature. It has been said that there are 
 two classes of men, the once-born and the 
 twice-born. The once-born are those who 
 seem from first to last at ease with themselves 
 and free from that sense of discord which we 
 call conviction of sin. At their best they 
 give delight to every one with the simplicity 
 and security of their own natures, but there 
 is always some disappointment in their delight. 
 They do all things well, but seem to do them 
 
LAST YEARS AND CHARACTER 213 
 
 a little too easily and as if there were no 
 possibilities in them beyond their achieve- 
 ment. If one tries to learn their secret of 
 them they can tell it no more than if they 
 were animals or flowers. Their well-being 
 seems to be negative as well as positive and 
 the result of a refusal to experience more than 
 will agree with their own temperaments ; and 
 because of this refusal they are more delightful 
 in youth than in later years, when they often 
 seem to be superannuated young men and 
 affect us like beautiful women who have 
 never married and keep their virgin beauty a 
 little faded. The twice-born, on the other 
 hand, are not at ease and their youth is 
 often unpleasing because they are full of a 
 sense of discord in themselves. They do 
 not know what they want to be or what 
 they would make of life, and they are rest- 
 less, imitative and affected. But life is a 
 process of discovery for them and they refuse 
 no experience. They are always in process 
 of making. Sometimes this process is gradual, 
 sometimes it is all concentrated in that sudden 
 rebirth which we call conversion. In any 
 case, if they are not wrecked by early inex- 
 perience, they improve with years ; their very 
 faults change into virtues and they profit by 
 
214 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 their worst errors. And this happy change 
 in them makes us feel that life is not merely 
 something that happens and is done with, 
 giving good to some and evil to others; but 
 that it is an experience, with a purpose 
 beyond itself, by which the least gifted may 
 profit through their very defects. 
 
 Now Morris was a man who seemed to have 
 all the simplicity and security of the once- 
 born, and who did everything so easily that 
 he could not be provoked to further effort by 
 his own incompetence. In his earlier years 
 there was nothing to trouble his life of happy 
 activity except the thought that it must 
 some day come to an end. From the first 
 he was afflicted by a pagan fear of death, or 
 rather by the feeling that death, sure to come 
 at last and possible at any moment, made life 
 seem meaningless. He writes of it, now and 
 again in his poetry, like an animal cursed with 
 foreknowledge; it was a fact that he could 
 neither explain nor forget, and he would 
 never allow himself to cherish any hope of a 
 future life. So there was always this dark 
 shadow to the sunlight of his labours; and, 
 however easily he might live, he could not 
 be at ease when he thought of dying. On 
 this point alone he was weaker and less happy 
 
LAST YEARS AND CHARACTER 215 
 
 than most men ; but it was this weakness that 
 saved him from the dangerous contentment 
 of the once-born. How hard he fought against 
 it, we may see from his statement of the 
 northern faith which I have quoted, and from 
 his saying that a man would be happy if he 
 could hold it and be freed by it from the mist 
 of fear. By the mist of fear he meant that 
 sense of the meaninglessness of life which 
 haunted his own labours; and he could only 
 regard these as a game to pass the time while 
 life had no meaning for him. 
 
 Some men in his case would try to find a 
 meaning in it by thought ; but that was not his 
 way, as it was not the way of the northerners 
 whose faith he envied. He could not be 
 persuaded that life had any meaning unless 
 he made it mean something to himself. He 
 could only deliver himself by action; and 
 since society seemed to him to be meaningless 
 and aimless, and so confirmed his fears about 
 life, he fought against these fears by attempting 
 to give society a meaning and an aim. 
 
 Now it was the contrast between the once- 
 born, happy Morris, and the Morris born again 
 in this mighty effort, which has turned men's 
 admiration into love. But for that contrast 
 he would have seemed aloof in his good 
 
216 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 fortune ; and other men would have regarded 
 him as the poor regard the rich, envying and 
 at the same time a little despising them for 
 their ignorance of the hard facts of life. As 
 it is, we can pity Morris besides admiring him ; 
 and, if we are stupid, we can even smile at 
 him as a visionary. He learnt to suffer and 
 to fail like the weakest of us; but suffering 
 and failure came to him not in the ordinary 
 business of life, but when he taxed his strength 
 and wisdom upon a higher business that he 
 chose for himself. Then he, who had won 
 success in so many arts with so much certainty 
 and ease, turned from one hope to another 
 like a bewildered child. He learnt humbly 
 from every disappointment as if he were a 
 clumsy beginner at some poor trade; but 
 whatever else he learnt he would not learn 
 to despair. It seemed to him always that 
 he was doing very little. He never thought 
 of himself as a strong man condescending to 
 work for the weak; and when we read of his 
 labours we too cease to think of him as a 
 great man, as a poet far removed from us in 
 the immortality of fame. He is one of our- 
 selves when he preaches at street corners with 
 all the music gone from his speech. But it is 
 when we think of him so that we love him; 
 
LAST YEARS AND CHARACTER 217 
 
 and then he becomes great for us again in 
 the music of those later days, made after he 
 had conquered the fear of death and by his 
 sacrifice had assured himself of the meaning 
 of life. 
 

 CHAPTER XI 
 
 THE IDEAS OF WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 MORRIS expressed his ideas very clearly in 
 three books of lectures and essays, " Hopes 
 and Fears for Art," " Architecture, Industry 
 and Wealth," and " Signs of Change " ; and 
 less directly in his "News from Nowhere." 
 " News from Nowhere " has always been 
 popular; but the other books are less read 
 than they deserve to be. Morris said 
 that he wrote his lectures with unwilling 
 labour. He did not enjoy the process of 
 thought, but that was not because he could 
 not think clearly. Indeed, no one has ever 
 written more clearly upon art or upon its 
 relation to the structure of society. It was 
 Ruskin who first taught him to think about 
 this relation; but he had more practical 
 experience of the arts than Ruskin and spoke 
 with a precision and authority due to that 
 experience. In his way, too, he was almost 
 
 as great a master of prose; and there are 
 218 
 
passages of eloquence in these books which 
 move us the more because they are so plain 
 in language and so closely connected with 
 his argument. 
 
 In nearly all his lectures Morris insists upon 
 this relation between art and the structure 
 of society; and art for him does not mean 
 merely painting and sculpture, but all those 
 works of man in which the workman does 
 better than he is forced to do by his material 
 needs. Art is man's expression of his joy in 
 labour, he said; and he believed this joy in 
 labour to be the thing best worth having in 
 life. Born into an age of destructive scepti- 
 cism and himself without belief in any religious 
 dogma, he found in art, in this everlasting effort 
 of man to do better than he need, the most 
 exhilarating mystery of life. The humblest 
 work of art was to him a sign of divinity, a 
 promise of something that he hardly dared 
 believe; and he was moved by it as other 
 men are moved by noble, unexpected actions. 
 For art to him always remained a surprising 
 product of the troubled and laborious life of 
 man, a song of prisoners, as it were, which 
 touched him the more if it was rude and 
 simple. 
 
220 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 He loved all works of true art not only 
 for the delight they gave him, but also because 
 they seemed to him symptoms of happiness; 
 and he judged of the happiness of a society 
 by the nature of its art, particularly of the 
 humbler, less conscious, art which beautifies 
 things of ordinary use. He himself began by 
 missing this kind of art in his own time where 
 no one but Ruskin had missed it before. 
 Other men, however less happy they might 
 be for the lack of it, were not aware of its 
 absence, as a man deaf from his birth would 
 be unaware of the pleasure of music; but 
 he from the first was ill at ease, and, when 
 he saw the art of the Middle Ages, he knew 
 what it was that his own day lacked. Then, 
 becoming an artist himself and experiencing 
 the pleasure of art, he saw that in his own day 
 the great mass of men worked without any 
 of that pleasure and that what they made 
 was ugly because it was made without plea- 
 sure, or uglier still if with ornament it tried 
 to imitate the happy work of the past. He 
 hated machine-made ornament for its own 
 ugliness, but still more because by its failure 
 it reminded him of what it failed to do. To 
 him it was as sinister as joyless laughter and 
 
its prevalence showed that men had forgotten 
 everywhere the very meaning of art, the very 
 desire for that happiness which, he thought, 
 was the best they could have in this life. 
 
 Of that happiness he often spoke well, but 
 best perhaps in the lecture upon Art under 
 Plutocracy. 1 " The pleasure," he says, 
 " which ought to go with the making of 
 every piece of handicraft has for its basis 
 the keen interest which every healthy man 
 takes in healthy life, and is compounded, it 
 seems to me, chiefly of three elements, variety, 
 hope of creation, and the self-respect which 
 comes of a sense of usefulness; to which 
 must be added that mysterious bodily plea- 
 sure which goes with the deft exercise of the 
 bodily powers." Again, addressing an audi- 
 ence of artists, he speaks of it more personally 
 in his lecture on the Beauty of Life. 2 " Your 
 pleasure is always with you," he says, " nor 
 can you be intemperate in the enjoyment of 
 it, and as you use it, it does not lessen, but 
 grows : if you are by chance weary of it at 
 night, you get up in the morning eager for 
 it; or if perhaps in the morning it seems 
 
 1 Published in "Architecture, Industry and Wealth." 
 
 2 In " Hopes and Fears for Art." 
 
222 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 folly to you for a while, yet presently, when 
 your hand has been moving a little in its 
 wonted way, fresh hope has sprung up be- 
 neath it and you are happy again. While 
 others are getting through the day like plants 
 thrust into the earth, which cannot turn this 
 way or that, but as the wind blows them, 
 you know what you want, and your will is 
 on the alert to find it, and you, whatever 
 happens, whether it be joy or grief, are at 
 least alive." 
 
 There he spoke out of his own experience; 
 and he could not endure that so few men in 
 our tune should share that experience with 
 him. To others the change, through which 
 the mass of men had lost all the happiness 
 of art, seemed as inevitable as a process of 
 nature; but not so to Morris. He believed 
 that the Industrial Revolution had taken 
 men by surprise, that this great power of 
 machinery had come into their hands only to 
 be misused through inexperience. He be- 
 lieved, too, that a body of false doctrine had 
 grown up to justify that misuse, a kind of 
 religion that denied the will of man and 
 represented civilization as a mechanical pro- 
 cess in which greed of riches was a necessary 
 
THE IDEAS OF WILLIAM MORRIS 223 
 
 force. To him civilization was made by the 
 will of man and greed was a barbaric obstruc- 
 tion to it. Men might will to be rich or they 
 might will to do good work ; and there was no 
 irresistible pressure of circumstances to make 
 them choose riches. In " Art under Pluto- 
 cracy " he shows how the art of the Middle 
 Ages flourished because the craftsman's main 
 object was to do good work ; and how gradually 
 the capitalist system grew up and took away 
 from him the power of working for his own 
 customers. He had to work for the capitalist 
 and the capitalist's aim was, not that he should 
 do good work, but that he should make a 
 profit for the capitalist. In the eighteenth 
 century, Morris says, " the idea that the 
 essential aim of manufacture is the making 
 of goods still struggled with a newer idea 
 which has since obtained complete victory, 
 namely, that it is carried on for the sake of 
 making a profit for the manufacturer on the 
 one hand, and on the other for the employ- 
 ment of the working classes." In fact, as he 
 puts it, we think of commerce as an end in 
 itself and not as a means. That is our great 
 error, and it is one which we have chosen 
 to make for ourselves and need not make any 
 
224 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 longer. There is nothing inevitable in the 
 capitalist with his tyranny over both producer 
 and consumer; that is merely one of the 
 many tyrannies to which men have submitted, 
 and it will seem as absurd to future ages as 
 any oriental despotism seems to us. 
 
 But all these tyrannies are submitted to 
 because the mass of men take them for 
 granted; and they are first threatened when 
 some man refuses to take them for granted 
 and sees that they exist merely because men 
 submit to them. Morris was such a man. 
 He, with his great knowledge of the past, 
 saw that this tyranny of the capitalist was a 
 new thing, an unhappy accident of our time ; 
 and long before he became a Socialist he began 
 his rebellion against it. His own aim from 
 the first was to be a free workman, to find 
 his own customers and to do good work for 
 them. He saw clearly enough that he could 
 never have had this freedom if he had not 
 been himself a capitalist. Without his fortune 
 he would have had to obey some capitalist 
 or starve. The only craftsmen, of his time 
 or ours, who keep the craftsman's freedom 
 are painters and sculptors; and that is the 
 reason why nearly all men who wish to be 
 artists become painters or sculptors, and why 
 
THE IDEAS OF WILLIAM MORRIS 225 
 
 there are far too many pictures and works of 
 sculpture produced. Morris, then, made use 
 of his capital to purchase his freedom; but 
 his wish was that all men should be free-born. 
 His own motive, as a capitalist, was, not to 
 make goods for a profit, but to do good work 
 and to find buyers of it; and, having this 
 motive, he cannot be reproached as being 
 himself that which he denounced. Indeed, 
 those who reproach him so take no account 
 of the history of his mind. He began merely 
 with a desire for his own freedom, which he 
 obtained by the only means possible to him; 
 and it was his experience of the blessings of 
 this freedom which made him so ardently 
 desire it for others. 
 
 He proved, by the success of his own 
 firm, that there was still a public which 
 desired good work; and the proof was the 
 foundation of his hope that a right relation 
 might again be established between producer 
 and consumer. We cannot understand the 
 growth of his ideas unless we realize that they 
 all grew out of his own experience as a work- 
 man. He was never a theorist and he was 
 not accustomed to think in terms of political 
 economy. For him the social problem was 
 not one of the distribution of wealth. It was 
 p 
 
226 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 always a problem of the relations between 
 producer and consumer. There was, he held, 
 a natural desire in man to do good work and 
 a desire, equally natural, to obtain it. In a 
 well-ordered society both these desires would 
 be fulfilled and every one would profit by them 
 both. In his own society he found that they 
 were commonly not fulfilled because of the 
 interference of the capitalist, who made the 
 producer work for his profit and who forced 
 goods, made for profit, on the consumer. 
 Thus to him the capitalist was merely a 
 nuisance who prevented the producer from 
 making what he wanted to make and the 
 consumer from buying what he wanted to 
 buy; he was a man who had perverted 
 the energies of mankind to serve his own 
 ends. 
 
 If this was not so, why, he asked, had the 
 enormous increase in productive power so 
 little increased the general prosperity ? " Why 
 have our natural hopes been so disappointed ? 
 Surely because in these latter days, in which 
 as a matter of fact machinery has been in- 
 vented, it was by no means invented with the 
 aim of saving the pain of labour. The phrase 
 labour-saving machinery is elliptical, and 
 
THE IDEAS OF WILLIAM MORRIS 227 
 
 means machinery which saves the cost of 
 labour, not the labour itself, which will be 
 expended, when saved, on tending other 
 machines." In fact, machinery is used for 
 the profit of the man who owns it, that is to 
 say the capitalist; and for that reason it is 
 constantly misused. Morris himself had no 
 blind hatred of machinery. Rightly used, he 
 saw that it would make the burden of neces- 
 sary drudgery so much lighter that men 
 would have more leisure than they have ever 
 had for the work in which they can take a 
 pleasure. That is what we might expect to 
 happen in an age of great mechanical advance. 
 But it has not happened because we do not 
 use machinery to lighten the burden of 
 labour. It is not a power in the hands of 
 society at all, but a power in the hands of 
 the capitalist, by means of which he makes 
 a profit out of society. 
 
 All this cannot be denied ; the only question 
 is whether it is inevitable; and Morris could 
 not believe that it was inevitable. He thought 
 that a society could organize itself to obtain 
 what it wanted, and that the prevalence of 
 high or base desires determined its structure. 
 Here, like Ruskin, he was in direct opposition 
 
228 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 to the orthodox political economists of his 
 time, who held that the social structure, 
 unlike the political, was imposed upon men 
 by circumstances and in particular by what 
 they called the laws of supply and demand. 
 In answer to that Morris said that men would 
 demand what they wanted ; and that, if they 
 demanded it bravely enough, they could get 
 it. The present structure of society existed 
 because they demanded riches without know- 
 ing clearly what they wished to do with them. 
 This demand was not in the least inevitable; 
 it was merely the result of stupidity and fear. 
 If only men could be brought to see that 
 riches in our present state of society can 
 purchase little that is worth having, if only 
 they could be brought to see what is worth 
 having, the nature of their demand will 
 change, and with it the supply. 
 
 Now Morris himself, by reason of his own 
 great gifts and of the experience which he 
 had got from the exercise of them, knew 
 very well what was worth having in life ; and 
 his real object, in all his political activities, 
 was to communicate this knowledge to other 
 men. If they desired what he desired, they 
 would demand what he demanded; and the 
 
THE IDEAS OF WILLIAM MORRIS 229 
 
 structure of society would change in accord- 
 ance with their demand. This was not mere 
 imperious egotism on his part. He knew that 
 he himself had been fortunate in his gifts and 
 in the fact that he was born rich enough to 
 exercise them freely; but he believed that 
 nearly all men could enjoy the happiness 
 which he had got from their exercise, if only 
 they had the chance to do so. And he went 
 among them to tell them what this nat- 
 ural and wholesome happiness was, and by 
 what means they were prevented from experi- 
 encing it. 
 
 His lecture on " Art and Socialism " is in the 
 main a description of men's present slavery 
 to commerce, and an exhortation to them to 
 free themselves from it. The present famine 
 of art, as he calls it, is only one effect of that 
 slavery, but it was the effect which he him- 
 self felt most bitterly and which seemed to 
 hun most significant. For art, he said, is the 
 natural solace of men's labour; 1 "a solace 
 which they once had, and always should have ; 
 the opportunity of expressing their own 
 thoughts to their fellows by means of that 
 very labour, by means of that daily work 
 1 In " Architecture, Industry and Wealth." 
 
230 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 which nature, or long custom and second 
 nature, does indeed require of them, but 
 without meaning that it shall be an unre- 
 warded or repulsive burden." The fact that 
 the mass of men had no experience of this 
 solace and made no demand for it appalled 
 him who knew its value so well. He saw 
 the poor often discontented ; but it seemed to 
 him that their discontent was ignorant, and 
 he wished to give it knowledge. Their wages 
 might be raised and the condition of their 
 labour improved; but they could not there- 
 fore be happy so long as their labour itself 
 was without joy. They must have a clear 
 and conscious discontent with the whole 
 commercial system, with its aim and motives, 
 if their discontent was to produce the change 
 that he desired; and he preached the same 
 discontent to the middle classes and the rich. 
 Under the present system, he told them, they 
 too missed the happiness of art. They could 
 not buy it with their money, for it did not 
 exist. They could buy luxury; but that he 
 called the supplanter and changeling of art. 
 " By those who know of nothing better it 
 has even been taken for art, the divine solace 
 of human labour, the romance of each day's 
 
THE IDEAS OF WILLIAM MORRIS 231 
 
 hard practice of the difficult art of living. 
 But I say art cannot live beside it, nor self- 
 respect in any class of life. Effeminacy and 
 brutality are its companions on the right hand 
 and the left." 
 
 It is to be noted that Morris had no Puritan 
 hatred of luxury and no envy of the rich man's 
 enjoyment of it. He hated luxury because it 
 could not be really enjoyed and he despised 
 the luxurious because they did not know 
 what real pleasure was. To him it meant 
 waste of life for rich as well as for poor. It 
 was as if men spent their time in playing a 
 foolish game in which none of them took 
 pleasure. The first claim he made for men. 
 was that they should have work to do that 
 was worth doing. " Think what a change," 
 he cried, " that would make in the world 1 
 I tell you I feel dazed at the thought of the 
 immensity of work which is undergone for 
 the making of useless things. It would be 
 an instructive day's work for any one of us 
 who is strong enough, to walk through two 
 or three of the principal streets of London 
 on a week-day, and take accurate note of 
 everything in the shop windows which is 
 embarrassing or superfluous to the daily life 
 
232 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 of a serious man. Nay, the most of these 
 things no one, serious or unserious, wants at 
 all; only a foolish habit makes even the 
 lightest-minded of us suppose that he wants 
 them, and to many people, even of those 
 who buy them, they are obvious encumbrances 
 to real work, thought and pleasure." 
 
 But it was as a workman that he looked at 
 all this rubbish and as a workman he grew 
 indignant when he thought of all the labour 
 wasted upon it. "I beg you to think of the 
 enormous mass of men who are occupied with 
 this miserable trumpery," he cried, " men 
 who might be occupied with work pleasant 
 to themselves and valuable for others." For 
 all trash must of necessity be the product of 
 superfluous energy, and it is because we spend 
 so much of that energy upon trash that we 
 have so little to spare for the practice of art. 
 
 There were many people who believed, 
 when Morris was young, that art was becoming 
 obsolete and that man in the future would 
 have no need of it. But Morris insisted, and 
 the facts bore him out, that we must have 
 art and that the only question was whether 
 we would have it good or bad. ' I must ask 
 you to believe," he said ; " that every one 
 
THE IDEAS OF WILLIAM MORRIS 233 
 
 of the things that goes to make up the sur- 
 roundings among which we live must be 
 either beautiful or ugly, either elevating or 
 degrading to us, either a torment and burden 
 to the maker of it to make, or a pleasure and 
 a solace to him." He himself looked at all 
 the work of man's hands with the under- 
 standing of a workman, and he saw, as other 
 men did not see, whether the maker of it 
 had had any pleasure in making it. He 
 brought his own new workman's test to the 
 judgment of our society and condemned it by 
 that test. But unlike most of those who rail 
 at society he had his own positive notion 
 what it should be. The value of his " News 
 from Nowhere " lies, not in his account of 
 the process by which men attain to happiness, 
 but in his account of that happiness when 
 attained. In speaking of the process Morris 
 attempted to prophesy without any special 
 knowledge; but when he spoke of the happi- 
 ness itself he did so with the authority of an 
 expert. The life which he describes is in the 
 main a life which he had led himself and 
 which he had given up only so that he might 
 help others to it. Thus his Utopia has this 
 great superiority over most other Utopias, 
 
234 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 that we feel we should indeed like to live 
 in it. It may be, mankind will never be able 
 so to order their affairs that this kind of 
 happiness shall be shared by all; but at any 
 rate it is a credible kind of happiness, agreeable 
 to human nature and free from that ennui 
 which would afflict most men in Paradise 
 if they did not change their natures when 
 they entered it. For in his Utopia there is 
 not an end of labour but only labour for all 
 men such as he himself knew and enjoyed. 
 In a noble passage he says : " When all is 
 gained that we so long for, what shall we do 
 then ? That great change that we are working 
 for, each in his own way, will come like other 
 changes, as a thief in the night, and will be 
 with us before we know it ; but let us imagine 
 that it has come suddenly and dramatically, 
 acknowledged and hailed by all right-minded 
 people; and what shall we do then lest we 
 begin once more to heap up fresh corruption 
 for the woeful labour of ages once again ? I 
 say, as we turn away from the flagstaff where 
 the new banner has been just run up, as we 
 depart, our ears yet ringing with the blare 
 of the heralds' trumpets that have proclaimed 
 the new order of things, what shall we turn 
 
THE IDEAS OF WILLIAM MORRIS 235 
 
 to then, what must we turn to then? To 
 what else save to our work, our daily labour ? " 
 In " News from Nowhere " the change does 
 come suddenly and dramatically and seems 
 to free men from most of the vices and 
 weaknesses which express themselves in our 
 present society. That is the defect of the 
 book, for we know that no change could do 
 that and we expect even a romance of the 
 future to be based upon what we know about 
 ourselves. But in the passage I have just 
 quoted Morris shows that he does not expect 
 this sudden and dramatic change. His real 
 point, both here and in " News from No- 
 where," is that we have missed the way to 
 happiness, and to a possible happiness which 
 has been enjoyed in the past and may be 
 enjoyed more fully in the future. We are 
 now wandering lost, he thought, and we shall 
 not long be content to do that. That change, 
 of which he spoke as coming like a thief 
 in the night, meant that men would regain 
 their sense of direction. They would have a 
 scent for the happiness that was possible to 
 them ; and, when once they had found that, 
 they could not be kept from it by any of the 
 institutions and current ideas of the time. 
 
236 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 He expected a vast revolution in the minds 
 of all men such as had already happened in 
 his own mind; and because it had happened 
 to him he thought it might happen as quickly 
 and consciously to others. Here, no doubt, 
 he was mistaken. Changes such as he hoped 
 for, changes which give a new direction to a 
 whole society, do not happen in ten years or 
 twenty; but they do happen. One of them 
 happened when the society of the ancient 
 world began to desire a new faith more than 
 it desired to preserve its existing civilization. 
 That change meant the end of the ancient 
 world; and Morris, in his dislike of our 
 present society, was ready to see it destroyed 
 like the ancient world, if there was no other 
 way of bringing about the change that he 
 desired. But he hoped and laboured for a 
 revolution less longdrawn and less disastrous. 
 His belief was that, if men could be made to 
 understand clearly what kind of life was 
 desirable, they would desire it strongly 
 enough to obtain it, not without fighting 
 perhaps, but without another complete sacri- 
 fice of all the gains of the past. He had no 
 blind hatred of science. Like Euripides in the 
 "Bacchae," he said, "And science we have 
 
THE IDEAS OF WILLIAM MORRIS 237 
 
 loved her well, and followed her diligently, 
 what will she do? I fear she is so much in 
 the pay of the counting-house and the drill- 
 sergeant, that she is too busy and will for 
 the present do nothing." He wished to give 
 science a new business, to make use of all 
 that we have learnt since the Renaissance, 
 but to make use of it so that we can obtain 
 what we desire as a society, and not what a 
 few rich men wish to force upon us. 
 
 " What we desire as a society." He believed 
 that societies had desires, could be made 
 conscious of them, and could achieve them. 
 For that reason he was a Socialist, and for 
 that reason he thought that the western 
 world had taken a wrong turn at the Renaiss- 
 ance. For the Renaissance, with its new 
 delight in knowledge, power and splendour, 
 in all the possibilities which life suddenly 
 opened to the fortunate individual, gave up 
 the conception of a society with a common 
 desire to be realized, that conception which 
 made the glory of the early Middle Ages with 
 all their imperfection of practice. With the 
 Renaissance, in art and in life the individual 
 triumphed and the notion prevailed that 
 society existed to produce splendid indi- 
 
238 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 viduals, that it was a state of war in which 
 some men might prove the possibilities of 
 human nature by conquering the rest. Morris 
 himself was a splendid individual, but he 
 had no wish to be a conqueror. He believed, 
 indeed, that the conquerors in such a society 
 might be splendid at first but that afterwards 
 they would be hard and mean and little. 
 He saw the American millionaire as the 
 successor of the Renaissance despot, just as 
 Domitian was the successor of Julius Caesar; 
 and in art he saw the modern academician 
 as the successor of Michaelangelo. " When 
 the great masters of the Renaissance were 
 gone," he said ; " they, who, stung by the 
 desire of doing something new, turned their 
 mighty hands to the work of destroying the 
 last remains of living popular art, putting 
 in its place for a while the results of their 
 own wonderful individuality; when these 
 great men were dead, and lesser men of the 
 ordinary type were masquerading in their 
 garments, then at last it was seen what the 
 new birth really was ; then we could see that 
 it was the fever of the strong man yearn- 
 ing to accomplish something before his 
 death, not the simple hope of the child, who 
 
THE IDEAS OF WILLIAM MORRIS 239 
 
 has long years of life and growth before 
 him." 
 
 And as it was with art, so, he thought, it 
 was with society. The desire of the indi- 
 vidual, the competitive desire for predomin- 
 ance, is feverish, blind and unhappy. The 
 desire of a society is a long and patient hope 
 which the individual can share without expect- 
 ing to accomplish it all himself and in his own 
 day; and yet he can get happiness from his 
 own little accomplishment. It was in art 
 that Morris saw most clearly the proof of 
 this. The great cathedrals of the Middle 
 Ages were not built by the heroes of art, 
 indeed many of them are unconnected with 
 the name of a single artist they were built 
 by societies of workmen, each one of whom 
 must have taken delight in his own little 
 task. And Morris believed that we can 
 build a civilization as those workmen built a 
 cathedral. To the worshipper of the strong 
 man he, himself a strong man, would have 
 made answer by pointing to the churches of 
 Bourges or Chartres. If there is an activity 
 in which the man of genius can triumph, 
 he would have said, it is art, the activity 
 of expression. Yet here are the greatest 
 
240 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 triumphs of art, and they are not triumphs 
 of a single man of genius, but of a society 
 of workmen. And they are triumphs because 
 in them the powers of every individual were 
 heightened by the common aim. There was 
 not a conflict among them as to which should 
 master the rest or take another man's work 
 from him. Their labour meant peace, for it 
 was done to fulfil a conception that grew in 
 the minds of all. 
 
 Morris may never have heard of the doctrine 
 of the Overman; but if he had heard of it 
 we can guess what he would have thought 
 of it. He would have seen in it a last feverish 
 attempt to revive the glory of the Renaissance, 
 to forget the experience of the last four 
 hundred years, and to think as if we were 
 once again just emerging from the failure of 
 the later Middle Ages. That doctrine of the 
 Overman was tried then in art and in life, 
 and it failed because neither the Overmen 
 themselves nor their admirers knew what 
 they wanted to do with their predominance. 
 Power, pleasure, glory these are only words 
 expressing vague general conceptions. If any 
 man takes them for an end they tell him 
 nothing of the means by which that end 
 
THE IDEAS OF WILLIAM MORRIS 241 
 
 can be accomplished. But that happiness 
 of daily work which Morris knew himself and 
 desired for all men, that is something at once 
 precise and infinitely diverse; it is an end 
 which suggests to every man, according to 
 his natural bent, the means by which it may 
 be accomplished. 
 
 Since the Renaissance, philosophers and 
 statesmen, whatever they have devised or 
 accomplished, have never had any clear 
 notion of a society in which the ordinary 
 man should make the most of his natural 
 gifts and should attain to happiness by doing 
 so. Even those democrats who have most 
 ardently desired the well-being of the people 
 have conceived for them a negative rather 
 than a positive happiness. They have wished 
 to give them freedom, security and good 
 wages; and it has always seemed that they 
 could only obtain those at the expense of the 
 rich and powerful. Against this negative 
 democratic ideal aristocratic philosophers like 
 Nietzsche have raged, seeing no alternative 
 to the predominance of the great except the 
 dull tyranny of mediocrity. Morris believed 
 that a society could make a third choice. 
 He believed that all political theories of 
 Q 
 
242 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 modern times had been spun in minds that 
 had never experienced the best kind of 
 happiness and could not, therefore, conceive 
 of a society in which that happiness prevailed. 
 The alternative of a splendid aristocracy and 
 a dull democracy did not exist for him, for 
 he himself was neither a splendid aristocrat 
 nor a dull democrat. He was a craftsman, 
 and the first of his kind, to consider politics 
 as a craftsman. He saw that in the modern 
 world the craftsman is everywhere subordi- 
 nate, indeed that he was ceasing to exist; 
 and that was the reason, he believed, why 
 the ordinary man, robbed of his chance of 
 creation, had become mediocre. Every man, 
 he held, ought to be creative according to his 
 natural powers; and, even for the ablest, to 
 think without making means unhappiness 
 and intellectual error. His desire, therefore, 
 was for a society in which the craftsman 
 should be esteemed and powerful ; in which 
 the mass of men should wish to be craftsmen, 
 and should look for happiness in the practice 
 of some craft rather than in domination or 
 in pleasure pursued for its own sake. 
 
 He saw no impossibility in this,f or machinery 
 has now so much increased our power of 
 
THE IDEAS OF WILLIAM MORRIS 243 
 
 production that, if society were well organized, 
 we should have a great deal of energy to spare 
 after we had produced all that we could 
 reasonably want in the way of necessaries. 
 Indeed, as it is, we have a great deal of energy 
 to spare, but we waste it on activities that 
 bring no one much happiness and indeed 
 cause want where there should be plenty. 
 This waste has often been denounced ; but 
 Morris saw that there is no remedy for it 
 except a change of heart in civilized mankind. 
 Men must desire something different from 
 what they do desire; they must have new 
 values and new standards. They must see 
 that even the richest and most powerful of 
 them have missed the way to happiness and 
 missed it because they have thought rather 
 of means than of ends. Therefore he came 
 forward, as an expert in happiness, to tell 
 them what happiness was; and this, behind 
 all his anger and denunciation, remained 
 always his real purpose. 
 
 In the main his morality was the Christian 
 morality, so little understood in our time; 
 but he gave it a new application to satisfy 
 a new want. He applied it to work, as others 
 had applied it to conduct generally, because 
 
244 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 he saw that it had been most perverted and 
 forgotten with regard to work. The essence 
 of the Christian morality, and indeed of the 
 unchanging orthodox morality of all ages, 
 is the belief, as Morris put it in the " Dream 
 of John Ball," that fellowship is life and the 
 lack of fellowship is death. It is not by 
 competition that men are forced to do the 
 best they can do; for that only drives them 
 into furious and blind labours. Rivalry 
 seems sometimes to be forced upon men by 
 the conditions of life; but they only attain 
 to freedom when they rise above it; and to 
 glorify this rivalry as a means of progress 
 is to worship, like a savage, a hideous and 
 bloodstained idol. Great men show their 
 greatness, not by conquest but by service. 
 There are not two races of men, the eminent 
 and the abject, but only one race, differing 
 among themselves in power, but all capable 
 of some kind of excellence if all will work 
 together in fellowship. Morris, I have said, 
 applied this morality to work ; for he believed, 
 both from his study of past ages and from 
 his own experience, that all men were capable 
 of happiness and of excellence in their work 
 if only they were not set to vain and hopeless 
 
THE IDEAS OF WILLIAM MORRIS 245 
 
 drudgery by their masters. He saw that in 
 all there was a spirit which could be suppressed 
 or encouraged, and that the whole of society 
 was made poorer by its suppression. Every- 
 where he saw the lack of it in the work of 
 his own time, the work, as he said, of labour- 
 slaves, not of free craftsmen; work which 
 men were set to do because they were thought 
 to be capable of nothing better, because they 
 were regarded as cheap machines working for 
 the profit of their masters. To him there was 
 something sacred in all the work of men, as 
 to the Christian there is something sacred in 
 men themselves ; and the waste of work that 
 he saw in all the ugliness and vain luxury 
 about him was the waste of men's lives. 
 
 Most of us are as indifferent to all this 
 ugliness and vain luxury as a Roman noble 
 of the Republic was indifferent to the slaves 
 toiling on his land. As they were not human 
 beings to him so these ugly and useless things 
 are not the work of human beings to us. 
 They happen and we are used to them; but 
 Morris laboured to make us see in them 
 symptoms of the unhappy drudgery of men 
 as capable of doing better as we are ourselves. 
 " If I could only persuade you of this," he said 
 
246 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 in one of his lectures, " that the chief duty of 
 the civilized world to-day is to set about 
 making labour happy for all, to do its utmost 
 to minimize the amount of unhappy labour 
 nay, if I could only persuade some two or 
 three of you here present I should have made 
 a good night's work of it." 
 
 " To set about making labour happy for 
 all." That sounds a wild impossibility per- 
 haps, but so does everything for which the 
 heroes of the world have laboured. An 
 American critic tells us that Morris " more 
 than almost any other man of his age had 
 the romantic indifference to the law of cause 
 and effect which locks events together in a 
 kind of static system, and the bondage of 
 logic he never suffered." That is true of 
 him and also of all the men that we most 
 admire. They have believed more in the 
 will of man and in his power to change his 
 life than in this intimidating law of cause and 
 effect which locks events together in a kind 
 of static system; and their belief has been 
 justified by results or we should not admire 
 them. It may not be possible to make 
 labour happy for all; but the effort to do it 
 will make labour a great deal less unhappy 
 
THE IDEAS OF WILLIAM MORRIS 247 
 
 for many. For it is such an effort that 
 changes the minds of men, making them 
 value what they once despised and despise 
 what they once valued. Such changes may 
 themselves be examples of the law of cause 
 and effect ; but they would never happen unless 
 there were men like Morris who did not 
 suffer the bondage of logic. In fact Morris 
 was himself an originating cause, if we care to 
 describe him in that kind of jargon; he was 
 something that happened and that is likely 
 to have many important results. For he has 
 changed the minds of many of us and imposed 
 his own values upon us, not by some spell 
 but by an appeal to reason and commonsense. 
 Yet this appeal, perhaps because of its very 
 simplicity, puzzles the same clever American 
 critic. " There is nothing immoral in Morris's 
 work," he says, " but of morality in it we 
 do not think at all, save as another term to 
 distinguish the beautiful from the ugly." It 
 would rather be true to say that for Morris 
 beauty was another term to distinguish good 
 from evil. He did not restrict morality but 
 extended it. He was aware of good where 
 others saw only beauty and of evil where 
 others saw only ugliness. Whistler has told 
 
248 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 us that " art happens " and in saying that 
 he was only expressing the belief of the 
 ordinary Philistine. Morris insisted that art 
 did not happen any more than the British 
 Constitution happened, for to him art meant, 
 not the work of a few men of genius but all 
 work in which men express the pleasure of 
 work. He himself could turn working-men, 
 chosen at a venture, into artists ; and therefore 
 he believed that society could do the same. 
 
 So far from having a romantic indifference 
 to the law of cause and effect, he saw a connec- 
 tion of cause and effect that no one had seen 
 before him. So far from caring nothing for 
 morality, he preached a new doctrine of morals 
 where the world before him had seen nothing 
 but chance beauty or chance ugliness. He 
 himself, clear of purpose and strong of will, 
 laboured to make the purpose of society more 
 clear, and its will more powerful. He was a 
 visionary but not a sentimentalist; an artist 
 who was not hostile to science, for he did not 
 believe that real science could be hostile or 
 indifferent to art. Just as Leonardo da Vinci, 
 the master of many arts, turned in the prime 
 of the Renaissance to the new science of his 
 time lured by its infinite promise, so Morris, 
 
also master of many arts, turned to a new 
 science of his own time, lured by its still more 
 infinite promise. But the science to which 
 he turned was one which art had taught him ; 
 for it was the science by means of which men 
 might become conscious of, and acquire, the 
 art of life. That was not for him an art of 
 living beautifully, but one of making wonder- 
 ful and beautiful things ; and, because he him- 
 self had the power of excelling in so many 
 crafts, it might be thought that he was not a 
 good judge of the ordinary man's capacity for 
 happiness. But he would have said that in our 
 present society men were forced to be ignorant 
 of their own capacities. Some of them were 
 specialized so that they used their brains 
 more than was good for them; the rest were 
 specialized so that they did not use them in 
 their work at all. 
 
 However clever we may be, we talk bril- 
 liantly rather than think clearly, because we 
 do not know surely what we most value in 
 life. Morris did not expect men to be all 
 clever indeed, he himself was apt to be a 
 little frightened or suspicious of obviously 
 clever men ; but he believed that the mass of 
 men could attain to his own kind of sagacity, 
 
250 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 his own clear sense of values, if they could 
 do work that would exercise their hands and 
 brains alike. And he further believed that 
 no society could be stable, unless the mass 
 of men did attain to this sagacity, unless they 
 had a profound contentment with their lives 
 founded on contentment with their work. 
 
 There are many reformers of the present 
 time who think that the life of the poor ought 
 to be brightened by amusements and excur- 
 sions. Morris would never have been satisfied 
 with such palliatives any more than with 
 " gas and water Socialism." He wanted all 
 men, rich and poor, to enjoy themselves in 
 their workshops ; and then, he believed, they 
 would have no trouble in enjoying themselves 
 outside them. Nearly all the amusements of 
 rich and poor alike are now passive. He 
 believed that a man must be something of 
 an artist in his work, if he is to be anything 
 of an artist in his play. With us the gramo- 
 phone has taken the place of the folk-song; 
 but the poor would not endure gramophones 
 or any other mechanical substitute for art, 
 if they knew what art was from their own 
 practice of it. 
 
 Most people think of Morris as a man who 
 
THE IDEAS OF WILLIAM MORRIS 251 
 
 tried to change the taste of his time; and, 
 since taste is to them an arbitrary thing, 
 Morris for them is merely the poetic up- 
 holsterer that Lord Grimthorpe called him. 
 He set a new fashion in patterns and furniture 
 and now it is superseded by other fashions. 
 Well, Morris was more concerned with matters 
 of taste than any great man before him; but 
 that was because he saw the relation between 
 taste and morals and reason. His effort was, 
 not to exalt taste above everything else, but 
 to show its connection with the other faculties 
 of man. He grew angry with the vulgarities 
 of the art of his time, not merely because 
 they displeased his senses, but because he, 
 as a workman, knew what effect they must 
 have on the workmen who produced them. 
 And he insisted upon the importance of good 
 taste, because he knew that it could only be 
 acquired by those who had learnt to feel the 
 workman behind his work. We know that 
 that is true of the arts of painting and sculpture 
 and poetry. He insisted that it is true of 
 everything. He laboured to make us feel the 
 workman behind everything that is produced 
 by man. Everything so produced cannot, of 
 course, be art ; but at present hardly anything 
 
252 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
 is art, because we never feel the workman 
 behind his work and have no desire to feel 
 him. To us most of the things made by man 
 are merely an uglier kind of nature; we 
 expect in them the finish and precision of a 
 natural process, but not its beauty. If we 
 could acquire Morris's sense of the workman 
 behind the work, we should not expect this 
 finish and precision in it indeed, we should 
 dislike them because they hid the workman 
 from us. We might accept them when they 
 could not be avoided ; but the whole pressure 
 of our demand would be in favour of work in 
 which the workman was not hidden ; and this 
 change of demand must inevitably produce 
 a great change in supply. But the change 
 of taste which Morris desired cannot come 
 without a moral change ; it is not enough to 
 like rough-looking work merely as a matter 
 of fashion. You can do that without feeling 
 the workman behind his work at all ; and 
 commerce will at once meet your demand 
 with objects that are merely worse made than 
 the old ones. What we want is not commerce 
 doing its worst but the workman doing his 
 best; and we must learn to regard him as a 
 human being through his work before we can 
 
THE IDEAS OF WILLIAM MORRIS 253 
 
 feel in that work the pleasure that he feels 
 in putting his best into it. 
 
 That is what taste meant to Morris ; and 
 that was why he saw a new connection be- 
 tween the art and the science and morals of 
 life. As the great mystics have seen the 
 mind of God working in all things of nature, 
 so he saw the mind of man working in all 
 things made by man ; and he saw when it was 
 working well or ill, when the work expressed 
 the disinterested passion of the workman, 
 and when it expressed only his employer's 
 desire for gain. The Renaissance, with all 
 its triumphs of art, started the decline of 
 art and of taste, because it was then that men 
 began to lose their sense of the workman 
 behind his work in all the humbler arts of 
 life and even in the great art of architecture. 
 What Morris desired was a new Renaissance 
 based upon a return of this sense, and he saw 
 that, if it came, it would mean nothing less 
 than " a reconstitution of the civilized life of 
 mankind." Whether it will come or not is 
 still most uncertain ; but if it does come, and 
 if it gives to society the power which the old 
 Renaissance gave to the individual, then men 
 will not consider that there was any waste 
 in the political activities of William Morris. 
 
NOTE ON BOOKS 
 
 THB beat and most complete edition of Morris's works is the 
 Collected Works, edited by Miss May Morris in twenty-four 
 volumes, of which twenty have now (November 1913) been 
 issued. When completed it will include matter never published 
 before, and the introductions by Miss May Morris are a valuable 
 addition to Mr. Mackail's Biography. 
 
 Most of Morris's works have now also been published in cheap 
 editions, but there is not yet any uniform cheap edition of 
 them. 
 
 Mr. Mackail's Life is the standard and official biography ; 
 and it is valuable, not only for its facts, but also for its criticism, 
 being far more impartial than most official biographies. 
 
 Lady Burne-Jones's Memorials of Edward Burne~Jones gives 
 a vivid impression of Morris as he appeared to his most intimate 
 friends, and it should be read by all who wish to understand 
 his character. 
 
 Critical works have also been published by Mr. Holbrook 
 Jackson, Mr. Aylmer Vallance, Mr. Edward Noyes, and 
 Mr. John Drinkwater. The first two of these are mainly 
 concerned with his art ; the third, in the English Men of 
 Letters Series, with his writings ; and the last with his ideas. 
 
 254 
 
INDEX 
 
 ANCIENT Buildings, Society for 
 Protection of, 137-8, 205 
 
 Bellamy, his Looting Backward, 
 
 22 
 Bexley Heath, Morris's house at, 
 
 59, 63-4 
 Brown, Madox, 64, 68, 75, 101, 
 
 210 
 
 Bruce Glasier, Mr., 164-5 
 Burue-Jones, E., meets Morris 
 
 at Oxford, 32; becomes pupil 
 
 of Rossetti, 45, 51, 64, 68, 
 
 75, 109, 205 
 Burne- Jones, Lady, quoted, 159, 
 
 204 
 Butler, Samuel, quoted, 74 
 
 Carlyle, T., 36 
 
 Chaucer compared with Morris, 
 
 88-9 
 
 Coleridge, his " Christabel," 82 
 " Commonweal," the, 157, 166 
 
 Dixon, Canon, quoted, 32, 40, 
 42, 53 
 
 Eastern Question Association, 
 138, 141 
 
 Faulkner, C. J., 33, 53, 65 
 
 Gothic Revival, the, 12 
 Grimthorpe, Lord, and Morris, 63 
 
 Hammersmith Socialist Society, 
 
 172 
 High Church Movement and 
 
 Morris, 31, 39 
 Hughes, Arthur, 52, 75 
 Hyndman, Mr., 153-4, 156, 174 
 
 Kelmscott Manor House, 87 
 
 Mackail, Mr. J. W., Life of Morris 
 quoted, 15, 21, 64, 67, 92, 100, 
 144, 151, 212 
 
 Magnusson, E., 118, 128 
 
 Mautegna, 85 
 
 Marshall, P. P., 65, 101 
 
 Merton Abbey, Morris's works t 
 106-7 
 
 Morgan, W. de, 68 
 
 Morris, Miss May, quoted, 162, 
 173 
 
 Morris, W., his good fortune, 17; 
 and Gothic architecture, 29; 
 at Marlborough, 31 ; friendship 
 with Burne-Jones, 32; goes to 
 France and Belgium, 39 ; comes 
 of age, 39; his first poems, 40; 
 his first prose romances, 41-2; 
 resolves to be a painter, 47-8 ; 
 compared witli Rossetti, 49-50 ; 
 his view of furniture, 51 ; his 
 paintings at the Oxford Union, 
 53; his illuminations, 55; his 
 gardening, 64 ; his patterns, 
 69-72; moves to Queen's 
 Square, 77 ; his mysticism, 94 ; 
 his scientific tendency, 102; 
 his dyeing, 103-6 ; his tapestry, 
 107-9; his printing, 110-16; 
 his statement of the " Northern 
 Faith," 118-1 9; goes to Iceland, 
 124, 126; goes to Italy, 125; 
 his view of the Eastern 
 Question, 139-40; his public 
 speaking, 158-9 ; as a politician, 
 168-70; his opinion of the 
 L.C.C., 173 ; his " Wardour 
 Street English," 184-5; his 
 opinion of the Greeks, 203 ; his 
 fearof death, 214-15 ;on science, 
 236 
 
 National Liberal League, 142 3 
 Nietzsche, F., 241 
 
 255 
 
256 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, 
 
 42, 43 
 Oxford Union, the painting of 
 
 the, 52-5 
 
 "Pilgrims of Hope, The," 157- 
 
 61, 188-9 
 Pollen, H., 52 
 Price, C., 53 
 
 Prinsep, Val, 52; quoted, 56 
 
 Eossetti, D. G., contributes to 
 Oxford and Cambridge Maga- 
 zine, 43; his influence over 
 Morris, 45-8, 51 ; and the 
 painting of the Oxford Union, 
 52-3; partner iu the firm, 64, 
 65, 75 ; his quarrel with Morris, 
 100-1 
 
 lluskin, his aesthetic revolt, 13 
 15; Stonet of Venice, 37 43, 
 
 62, 82 
 
 Shaw, Mr. G. B., 172, 174 
 
 Social Democratic Federation, 
 
 150753 
 
 Socialist League, 156, 162 
 Solomon, Simeon, 68 
 Stanhope, Spencer, 52 
 Stevenson, R. L., quoted, 185-6 
 Street, G. E., 44 
 Swinburne, A. C., 55, 75; his 
 
 " Tristram of Lyonesse," 145 
 
 Taylor, G. W., Morris's manager, 
 
 77 
 Tennyson, 43; his " Idylls of th 
 
 King," 84 
 Tolstoy compared with Morris, 
 
 17, 58 
 Turner, Mr. Thackeray, 138 
 
 Walker, Mr. Emery, 111, 114, 206 
 Wardle, Mr. G., quoted, 104 
 Webb, Mr. P., 44; builds Morris's 
 
 house, 59, 63-4, 65, 69, 76 
 Webb, Mr. Sidney, 172 
 Whistler J. McN., 11 
 
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 " Sensible in its teaching, and not over -rigidly conventional in its manner." 
 Manchester Guardian. 
 
 75. ANCIENT ART AND RITUAL. 
 
 By JANE E. HARRISON, LL.D., D.Litt. " Charming in style and learned in 
 manner." Daily fieu's. 
 
 3 
 
76. EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE 
 
 By GILBERT MURRAY, D.Litt., LL.D., F.B.A., Regius Professor of Greek at 
 Oxford. " A beautiful piece of work. . . . Just in the fulness of time, and 
 exactly in the right place. . . . Euripides has come into his own." The Nation. 
 
 Science 
 
 7. MODERN GEOGRAPHY 
 
 By Dr MARION NEWBIGIN. (Illustrated.) " Geography, again : what a dull, 
 tedious study that was wont to be 1 ... But Miss Marion Newbigin in vests its 
 dry bones with the flesh and blood of romantic interest." Daily Telegraph, 
 
 9. THE EVOLUTION OF PLANTS 
 
 By Dr D. H. SCOTT, M.A., F.R.S., late Hon. Keeper of the Jodrell Laboratory, 
 Kew. (Fully illustrated.) "The information is as trustworthy as first-hand 
 knowledge can make it. ... Dr Scott's candid and familiar style makes the 
 difficult subject both fascinating and easy." Gardeners' Chronicle. 
 
 17. HEALTH AND DISEASE 
 
 By W. LESLIE MACKENZIE, M.D., Local Government Board, Edinburgh. 
 " Dr Mackenzie adds to a thorough grasp of the problems an illuminating style, 
 and an arresting manner of treating a subject often dull and sometimes 
 unsavoury." Economist. 
 
 1 8. INTRODUCTION TO MATHEMATICS 
 
 By A. N. WHITEHEAD, Sc.D., F.R.S. (With Diagrams.) "Mr Whitehead 
 has discharged with conspicuous success the task he is so exceptionally qualified 
 to undertake. For he is one of our great authorities upon the foundations of 
 the science." Westminster Gazette. 
 
 19. THE ANIMAL WORLD 
 
 By Professor F. W. GAMBLE, D.Sc., F.R.S. With Introduction by Sir Oliver 
 Lodge. (Many Illustrations.) " A delightful and instructive epitome of animal 
 (and vegetable) life. ... A fascinating and suggestive survey. "Morning Post. 
 
 20. EVOLUTION 
 
 By Professor J. ARTHUR THOMSON and Professor PATRICK GEDDES. "A 
 many-coloured and romantic panorama, opening up, like no other book we 
 know, a rational vision of world-development." Belfast News-Letter. 
 
 22. CRIME AND INSANITY 
 
 By Dr C. A. MERCIER. " Furnishes much valuable information from one 
 occupying the highest position among medico-legal psychologists." Asylum 
 News. 
 
 28. PSYCHICAL RESEARCH 
 
 By Sir W. F. BARRETT, F.R.S., Professor of Physics, Royal College of 
 Science, Dublin, 1873-1910. "What he has to say on thought-reading, 
 hypnotism, telepathy, crystal-vision, spiritualism, divinings, and so on, will be 
 read with avidity." Dundee Courier. 
 
 31. ASTRONOMY 
 
 By A. R. HINKS, M.A., Chief Assistant, Cambridge Observatory. " Original 
 in thought, eclectic in substance, and critical in treatment . . . No better 
 little book is available." School World. 
 
32. INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE 
 
 By J. ARTHUR THOMSON, M.A., Regius Professor of Natural History, Aberdeen 
 University. "Professor Thomson's delightful literary style is well known ; and 
 here he discourses freshly and easily on the methods of science and its relations 
 with philosophy, art, religion, and practical life." Aberdeen Journal. 
 
 36. CLIMATE AND WEATHER 
 
 By Prof. H. N. DICKSON, D.Sc.pxon., M.A., F.R.S.E., President of the 
 Royal Meteorological Society. (With Diagrams.) " The author has succeeded 
 in presenting in a very lucid and agreeable manner the causes of the movements 
 of the atmosphere and of the more stable winds." Manchester Guardian. 
 
 41. ANTHROPOLOGY 
 
 By R. R. MARETT, M.A., Reader in Social Anthropology in Oxford University. 
 "An absolutely perfect handbook, so clear that a child could understand it, so 
 fascinating and human that it beats fiction ' to a frazzle.'" Morning Leader. 
 
 44. THE PRINCIPLES OF PHYSIOLOGY 
 
 By Prof. J. G. MCK.ENDRICK, M.D. "It is a delightful and wonderfully 
 comprehensive handling of a subject which, while of importance to all, does 
 not readily lend itself to untechnical explanation. . . . Upon very page of it 
 is stamped the impress of a creative imagination." Glasgow Herald. 
 
 46. MATTER AND ENERGY 
 
 By F. SODDY, M.A., F.R.S. "Prof. Soddy has successfully accomplished 
 the very difficult task of making physics of absorbing interest on popular 
 
 ^PSYCHOLOGY, THE STUDY OF BEHAVIOUR 
 
 By Prof. W. McDouGAi.L, F.R.S., M.B. "A happy example of the non- 
 technical handling of an unwieldy science, suggesting rather than dogmatising. 
 It should whet appetites for deeper study." Christian World. 
 
 53. THE MAKING OF THE EARTH 
 
 By Prof. J. W. GREGORY, F.R.S. (With 38 Maps and Figures.) "A 
 fascinating little volume. . . . Among the many good things contained in the 
 series this takes a high place." The Athenaum. 
 
 57. THE HUMAN BODY 
 
 By A. KEITH, M.D., LL.D., Conservator of Museum and Hunterian Professor, 
 Royal College of Surgeons. (Illustrated.) " It literally makes the 'dry bones' 
 to live. It will certainly take a high place among the classics of popular 
 science." Manchester Guardian. 
 
 58. ELECTRICITY 
 
 By GISBERT KAPP, D.Eng., Professor of Electrical Engineering in the Univer- 
 sity of Birmingham. (Illustrated.) " It will be appreciated greatly by learners 
 and by the great number of amateurs who are interested in what is one of the 
 most fascinating of scientific studies." Glasgow Herald. 
 
 62. THE ORIGIN AND NATURE OF LIFE 
 
 By Dr BENJAMIN MOOKE, Professor of Bio-Chemistry, University College, 
 Liverpool. "Stimulating, learned, lucid." Liverpool Courier. 
 
 67. CHEMISTRY 
 
 By RAPHAEL MKLDOLA, F.R.S., Professor of Chemistry in Finsbury Technical 
 College, London. Presents clearly, without the detail demanded by the 
 expert, the way in which chemical science has developed, and the stage it has 
 reached. 
 
 72. PLANT LIFE 
 
 By Prof. J. B. FARMER, D.Sc., F.R.S. (Illustrated.) " Professor Farmer has 
 contrived to convey all the most vital facts of plant physiology, and also to 
 present a pood many of the chief problems which confront investigators to-dy 
 in the realms of morphology and of heredity." Morning Post. 
 
;8. THE OCEAN 
 
 A General Account of the Science of the Sea. By Sir JOHN MURRAY, K.C.B., 
 F.R.S. (Illus.) "A life's experience is crowded into this volume. A very use- 
 ful feature is the ten pages of illustrations and coloured maps at the end." 
 Gloucester fournal. 
 
 79- NERVES 
 
 By Prof. D. FRASER HARRIS, M.D., D.Sc. (Illustrated.) A description, in 
 non-technical language, of the nervous system, its intricate mechanism and the 
 strange phenomena of energy and fatigue, with some practical reflections. 
 
 Philosophy and "Religion 
 
 15. MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 By Prof. D. S. MARGOLIOUTH, M.A., D.Litt. "This generous shilling's 
 worth of wisdom. ... A delicate, humorous, and most responsible tractate 
 by an illuminative professor." Daily Mail. 
 
 40. THE PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 
 
 By the Hon. BERTRAND RUSSELL, F.R.S. "A book that the 'man in the 
 street ' will recognise at once to be a boon. . . . Consistently lucid and non- 
 technical throughout." Christian World. 
 
 47. BUDDHISM 
 
 By Mrs RHYS DAVIDS, M.A. " The author presents very attractively as well 
 as very learnedly the philosophy of Buddhism as the greatest scholars of the 
 day interpret it." Daily News. 
 
 So. NONCONFORMITY: Its ORIGIN and PROGRESS 
 
 By Principal W. B. SELBIE, M.A. "The historical part is brilliant in its 
 insight, clarity, and proportion ; and in the later chapters Dr Selbie proves him- 
 self to be an ideal exponent of sound and moderate views." Christian World. 
 
 54. ETHICS 
 
 By G. E. MOORE, M.A., Lecturer in Moral Science in Cambridge University. 
 "A very lucid though closely reasoned outline of the logic of good conduct." 
 Christian World. 
 
 56. THE MAKING OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 
 
 60. MISSIONS: THEIR RISE and DEVELOPMENT 
 
 By Mrs CREIGHTON. "Very interestingly done. ... Its style is simple, 
 direct, unhackneyed, and should find appreciation where a more fervently 
 pious style of writing repels." Methodist Recordtr. 
 
 68. COMPARATIVE RELIGION 
 
 By Prof. J.EsTLiNCARPENTER,D.Litt.,Principalof Manchester College,Oxford. 
 " Puts into the reader's hand a wealth of learning and independent thought." 
 Christian World, 
 
 74. A HISTORY OF FREEDOM OF THOUGHT 
 
 ByJ. B. BURY, Litt.D., LL.D., Regius Professor of Modern History at 
 Cambridge. "A little masterpiece, which every thinking man will enjoy." 
 Tht Observer. 
 
 84. LITERATURE OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 
 
 By Prof. GEORGE MOORE, D.D., LL.D., of Harvard. A detailed examination 
 of the books of the Old Testament in the light of the most recent research. 
 
 6 
 
Social Science 
 
 i. PARLIAMENT 
 
 Its History, Constitution, and Practice. By Sir COURTENAY P. ILBERT, 
 G.C.B., K. C.S.I., Clerk of the House of Commons. " The best book on the 
 history and practice of the House of Commons since Bagehot's 'Constitution.' " 
 Yorkshire Post. 
 
 5. THE STOCK EXCHANGE 
 
 By F. W. HIRST, Editor of " The Economist." " To an unfinancial mind must 
 be a revelation. . . . The book is as clear, vigorous, and sane as Bagehot's ' Lom- 
 bard Street,' than which there is no higher compliment." Morning Leader. 
 
 6. IRISH NATIONALITY 
 
 By Mrs J. R. GREEN. " As glowing as it is learned. No book could be more 
 timely." Daily News. 
 
 10. THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT 
 
 By J. RAMSAY MACDONALD, M.P. " Admirably adapted for the purpose of 
 exposition." The Times. 
 
 11. CONSERVATISM 
 
 By LORD HUGH CECIL, M.A., M.P. "One of those great little books which 
 seldom appear more than once in a generation." Morning Pest. 
 
 1 6. THE SCIENCE OF WEALTH 
 
 By J. A. HOBSON, M.A. " Mr J. A. Hobson holds an unique position among 
 living economists. . . . Original, reasonable, and illuminating.' The Nation. 
 
 21. LIBERALISM 
 
 By L. T. HOBHOUSE, M.A. .Professor of Sociology in the University of London. 
 "A book of rare quality. . . . \Vehavenothingbutpraisefprtherapidand 
 masterly summaries of the arguments from first principles which form a large 
 part of this book." Westminster Gazette. 
 
 24. THE EVOLUTION OF INDUSTRY 
 
 ByD. H. MACGRKGOR, M.A., Professor of Political Economy in the University 
 of Leeds. " A volume so dispassionate in terms may be read with profit by all 
 interested in the present state of unrest." A berdeen Journal. 
 
 26. AGRICULTURE 
 
 By Prof. W. SOMERVILI.E, F.L.S. " It makes the results of laboratory work 
 at the University accessible to the practical farmer." Athtntrvm. 
 
 30. ELEMENTS OF ENGLISH LA W 
 
 By W. M. GELDART, M.A., B.C.L., Vinerian Professor of English Law at 
 Oxford. " Contains a very clear account of the elementary principles under- 
 lying the rules of English Law." Scots Law Times. 
 
 38. THE SCHO^OL: An Introduction to the Study of Education. 
 By J. ]. FINDI.AY, M.A., Ph.D., Professor of Education in Manchester 
 University. " An amazingly comprehensive volume. .. It is a remarkable 
 performance, distinguished in its crisp, striking phraseology as well as its 
 inclusiveness of subject-matter." Morning Post. 
 
 59. ELEMENTS OF POLITICAL ECONOMY 
 
 By S. J. CHAPMAN, M.A., Professor of Political Economy in Manchester 
 University. " Its importance is not to be measured by its price. Probably 
 the best recent critical exposition of the analytical method in economic 
 science." Glasgow Herald. 
 
 7 
 
60. THE NEWSPAPER By G. BINNEY DIBBLKE, M.A. (Illus- 
 - - trated.) The best account extant of the 
 organisation of the newspaper press, at home and abroad. 
 
 77. SHELLEY, GODWIN, AND THEIR CIRCLE 
 
 By H. N. BRAILSFORD, M.A. "Mr Brailsford sketches vividly the influence of 
 the French Revolution on Shelley 'sand Godwin's England; and the charm and 
 strength of his style make his book an authentic contribution to literature." 
 The Bookman. 
 
 80. CO-PARTNERSHIP AND PROFIT-SHARING 
 
 By ANEURIN WILLIAMS, M.A. " A judicious but enthusiastic history, with much 
 interesting speculation on the future of Co-partnership." Christian World. 
 
 81. PROBLEMS OF VILLAGE LIFE 
 
 By E. N. BENNETT, M.A. Discusses the leading aspects of the British land 
 problem, including housing, small holdings, rural credit, and the minimum wage. 
 
 83. COMMON-SENSE IN LA W By Prof. P. VINOGRADOFF, 
 
 1 i - i ii n 
 
 85. UNEMPLOYMENT By Prof. A. C PIGOU, M. A. 
 
 IN PREPARATION 
 
 ANCIENT EGYPT. By F. LL. GRIFFITH, M.A. 
 
 THE ANCIENT EAST. By D. G. HOGARTH, M.A., F.B.A. 
 
 A SHOR T HISTOR Y OF EUROPE. By HERBERT FISHER, LL.D. 
 
 THE BYZANTINE EMPIRE. By NORMAN H. BAYNES. 
 
 THE REFORM A TION. By President LINDSAY, LL.D. 
 
 A SHORT HISTORY OF RUSSIA. By Prof. MILYOUKOV. 
 
 MODERN TURKEY. By D. G. HOGARTH, M.A. 
 
 FRANCE OF TO-DAY. By ALBERT THOMAS. 
 
 HISTORY OF SCOTLAND. By Prof. R. S. RAIT, M.A. 
 
 LA TIN A ME RICA . By Prof. W. R. SHEPHERD. 
 
 HISTORY AND LITERATURE OF SPAIN. By J. FITZMAURICE- 
 
 KELLY, F.B.A., Litt.D. 
 
 LA TIN LITER A TURE. By Prof. J. S. PHILLIMORB. 
 THE RENAISSANCE. By Miss EDITH SICHEL. 
 ITALIAN ART OF THE RENAISSANCE. By ROGER E. FRY. 
 LITERARY TASTE. By THOMAS SECCOMBB. 
 CHA UCER AND HIS TIME. By Miss G. E. HADOW. 
 WILLIAM MORRIS AND HIS CIRCLE. By A. GLUTTON BROCK. 
 SCANDINA VI AN HISTORY & LITER A TURE. By T. C. SNOW. 
 THE MINERAL WORLD. By Sir T. H. HOLLAND, K.C.I. E., D.Sc. 
 SEX. By Prof. J. A. THOMSON and Prof. PATRICK GEDDES. 
 THE GROWTH OF EUROPE. By Prof. GRENVILLB COLE. 
 BETWEEN THE OLD AND NEW TESTAMENTS. By Canon 
 
 R. H. CHARLES, D.D. 
 
 A HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY. By CLEMENT WEBB, M.A. 
 POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND: From Bacon to Locke. 
 
 By G. P. GOOCH, M.A. 
 POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND: From Bentham to J. S. 
 
 Mill. By Prof. W. L. DAVIDSON. 
 POLITICAL THOUGHT IN ENGLAND: From Herbert Spencer 
 
 to To-day. By ERNEST BARKER, M.A. 
 
 THE CRIMINAL A ND THE COMMUNITY. By Viscount ST. CVRES, 
 THE CIVIL SERVICE. By GRAHAM WALLAS, M.A. 
 THE SOCIAL SETTLEMENT. By JANE ADDAMS and R. A. WOODS. 
 GREA T INVENTIONS. By Prof. J. L. MYRES, M.A., F.S. A. 
 TOWN PLANNING. By RAYMOND UNWIN. 
 
 London: WILLIAMS AND NORGATE 
 
 And of all Bookshops and Bookstalls. 
 
/\UG 2 1985 
 
 DATE DUE 
 
 rINTCDINU 
 
000560731 2