Complete Works of William Morris, page 773
The loss of the poems thus committed to the flames in 1858 is one never wholly to be replaced. Like the poems in “The Defence of Guenevere,” and in some cases even more strongly, they appear to have had that evanescent and intangible grace of a new beginning in art, the keen scent and frail beauty of the first blossoms of spring, which is more moving and more penetrating than even the full flower of a mature summer. Such, in their time, had been the troubled and piercing charm of the Virgilian Eclogues, of the early Florentine or Sienese paintings, of Tennyson’s marvellous volumes of 1830 and 1832. Since the “old Butcher’s Book torn up in Spedding’s rooms in 1842 when the Press went to work with, I think, the last of old Alfred’s best,” so long and so vainly lamented by FitzGerald, there has perhaps not been a loss more to be deplored. One fragment is preserved by a precious chance in a letter written from home to Cormell Price, the youngest and the best-beloved among the brotherhood, in the Easter Vacation of 1855.
“Clay Street,
“Walthamstow, Essex.
“Tuesday in Holy Week.
“My dearest Crom,
“Yes, it’s quite true, I ought to be ashamed of myself, I am ashamed of myself: I won’t make any excuses: please forgive me. As the train went away from the station, I saw you standing in your scholar’s gown, and looking for me. If I hadn’t been on the other side, I think I should have got out of the window to say good-bye again . . . Ted will shew something to criticize, or stop, I may as well write it for you myself; it is exceedingly seedy. Here it is.
’Twas in Church on Palm Sunday,
Listening what the priest did say
Of the kiss that did betray,
That the thought did come to me,
How the olives used to be
Growing in Gethsemane.
That the thoughts upon me came
Of the lantern’s steady flame,
Of the softly whispered name.
Of how kiss and words did sound
While the olives stood around,
While the robe lay on the ground.
Then the words the Lord did speak
And that kiss in Holy Week
Dreams of many a kiss did make:
Lover’s kiss beneath the moon,
With it sorrow cometh soon:
Juliet’s within the tomb:
Angelico’s in quiet light
‘Mid the aureoles very bright
God is looking from the height.
There the monk his love doth meet:
Once he fell before her feet
Ere within the Abbey sweet
He, while music rose alway
From the Church, to God did pray
That his life might pass away.
There between the angel rows
With the light flame on his brows,
With his friend, the deacon goes:
Hand in hand they go together,
Loving hearts they go together
Where the Presence shineth ever.
Kiss upon the death-bed given,
Kiss on dying forehead given
When the soul goes up to Heaven.
Many thoughts beneath the sun
Thought together; Life is done,
Yet for ever love doth run.
Willow standing ‘gainst the blue,
Where the light clouds come and go,
Mindeth me of kiss untrue.
Christ, thine awful cross is thrown
Round the whole world, and thy Sun
Woful kisses looks upon.
Eastward slope the shadows now,
Very light the wind does blow,
Scarce it lifts the laurels low;
I cannot say the things I would,
I cannot think the things I would,
How the Cross at evening stood.
Very blue the sky above,
Very sweet the faint clouds move,
Yet I cannot think of love.”
There, dear, perhaps I ought to be ashamed of it, don’t spare me. I have begun a good many other things, I don’t know if I shall ever finish them, I shall have to show them to Ted and to you first: you know my failing. I have been in a horrible state of mind about my writing; for I seem to get more and more imbecile as I go on. Do you know, I don’t know what to write to you about; there are no facts here to write about; I have no one to talk to, except to ask for things to eat and drink and clothe myself withal; I have read no new books since I saw you, in fact no books at all.
“The other day I went ‘a-brassing ‘ near the Thames on the Essex side; I got two remarkable brasses and three or four others that were not remarkable: one was a Flemish brass of a knight, date 1370, very small; another a brass (very small, with the legend gone) of a priest in his shroud; I think there are only two other shrouded brasses in England. The Church that this last brass came from was I think one of the prettiest Churches (for a small village Church) that I have ever seen; the consecration crosses (some of them) were visible, red in a red circle; and there was some very pretty colouring on a corbel, in very good preservation: the parson of the parish shewed us over this Church; he was very civil and very, very dirty and snuffy, inexpressibly so, I can’t give you an idea of his dirt and snuffiness.”
[The rest of the letter is lost.]
A week later he writes again, with reference to some criticism which Price had made on the poem.
“It was not at sermon-time that I thought of the ‘Kisses,’ but as the second lesson was being read: you know the second lesson for Palm Sunday has in it the history of the Betrayal. I say, isn’t tomb a very fair rhyme for soon by the way? the rhymes you call shady, I should like to be able to defend: I think I could do it viva voce but can’t by letter. . . . It is very foolish, but I have a tenderness for that thing, I was so happy writing it, which I did on Good Friday: it was a lovely day, with a soft warm wind instead of the bitter north east wind we had had for so long. For those bad rhymes, I don’t like them, though perhaps I don’t feel them hurt me so much as they seem to do you; they are makeshifts, dear Crom: it is incompetency; you see I must lose the thought, or sacrifice the rhyme to it, I had rather do the latter and take my chance about the music of it; perhaps I may be able in the course of time to rhyme better, if my stock of thoughts are not exhausted, and I sometimes think they mayn’t all be gone for some time.
“I have read a little Shelley since I saw you last; I like it very much what I have read; ‘The Skylark ‘ was one: WHAT a gorgeous thing it is! utterly different to anything else I ever read: it makes one feel so different from anything else: I hope I shall be able to make you understand what I mean, for I am a sad muddlehead: I mean that most beautiful poetry, and indeed almost all beautiful writing makes one feel sad, or indignant, or — do you understand, for I can’t make it any clearer; but ‘The Skylark’ makes one feel happy only; I suppose because it is nearly all music, and that it doesn’t bring up any thoughts of humanity: but I don’t know either.
“I am going a-brassing again some time soon: to Rochester and thereabouts, also to Stoke D’Abernon in Surrey.”
With the letter from which these extracts are given were sent two other newly-written poems, mainly noticeable as showing an influence that might not be otherwise suspected in him, that of Mrs. Browning. She was then at the height of her popularity, and ranked by many critics as the first of living English poets. That noble passion for truth, purity, and freedom which burns through all her writings, which even now lightens and kindles the tangled wildernesses of “Aurora Leigh,” was enough then to excuse all her shortcomings. It even threw a positive fascination over her extraordinary mannerisms and floundering technique. Less than a month before his death, when talking of early days, Morris said that his first poems were imitations of Mrs. Browning. This was, perhaps, a little over-stated, but it expressed a real truth. The slovenly rhymes of his earlier poetry may probably be traced to her influence: and it was through her poetry that he became acquainted a little later with that of her husband, to whom he frankly owned his obligations, and of whom in succeeding years he wrote as “high among the poets of all time, and I scarce know whether first or second in our own.”
One other unpublished poem of this year survives. It is of a higher technical quality than those just mentioned, and of the same delicate and refined spiritual beauty. It is here transcribed textually from his own manuscript: in the second line of the first stanza the word leaves is obviously a slip of the pen for some other word, probably ground.
BLANCHE. Broad leaves that I do not know
Grow upon the leaves full low
Over them the wind does blow.
Hemlock leaves I know full well
And about me is the smell
That doth in the spring woods dwell.
And the finch sings cheerily,
And the wren sings merrily,
But the lark sings trancedly.
Silv’ry birch-trunks rise in air
And beneath the birch-tree there
Grows a yellow flower fair.
Many flowers grow around
And about me is the sound
Of the dead leaves on the ground.
Yea, I fell asleep last night
When the moon at her full height
Was a lovely, lovely sight.
I have had a troubled dream
As I lay there in the beam
Of the moon a sudden gleam
Of a white dress shot by me
Yea the white dress frighted me
Flitting by the aspen tree.
Suddenly it turned round
With a weary moaning sound
Lay the white dress on the ground
There she knelt upon her knees
There, between the aspen trees
O! the dream right dreary is.
With her sweet face turned to me
Low she moaned unto me
That she might forgiven be.
O! my lost love moaned there
And her low moans in the air
Sleepy startled birds did hear
O! my dream it makes me weep,
That drear dream I had in sleep
At the thought my pulses leap
For she lay there moaning low
While the solemn wind did sough
While the clouds did over go
Then I lifted up her head
And I softly to her said
Blanche, we twain will soon be dead
Let us pray that we may die
Let us pray that we may lie
Where the softening wind does sigh
That in heaven amid the bliss
Of the blessed where God is
Mid the angels we may kiss.
We may stand with joined hands
Face to face with angel bands
They too stand with joined hands.
Yea, she said, but kiss me now
Ere my sinning spirit go
To the place no man doth know.
There I kissed her as she lay
O! her spirit passed away
‘Mid the flowers her body lay.
What a dream is this of mine
I am almost like to pine
For this dreary dream of mine.
O dead love thy hand is here
O dead Blanche thy golden hair
Lies along the flowers fair.
I am all aweary love
Of the bright blue sky above
I will lie beside thee love.
So over them over them ever
The long long wind swept on
And lovingly lovingly ever
The birds sang on their song.
Such were the first beginnings. But his discovery that he could write prose came hard on the heels of his discovery that he could write poetry, and for some little time prose was the vehicle in which he could express his thoughts and imaginations with greater freedom. The prose romances which he began to write in the summer of 1855, and went on writing for about a year, are as remarkable as his early poetry, and have a strength and beauty which is quite as rare. But during this year he and Burne-Jones read through Chaucer. He found, in the poet whom he afterwards took for his special master, not merely the wider and sweeter view of life which was needed to correct the harsh or mystical elements of his own mediævalism, but the conquest of English verse as a medium boundless in its range and perfect in its flexibility. Thenceforth prose was abandoned, and, with the exception of one curious and unsuccessful experiment, verse remained for thirty years the single form of his production in pure literature.
The secularization of mind, the widening of interest and outlook beyond the limits prescribed by Anglo-Catholic ideals, towards which the influence of Chaucer and Browning, like two great windows letting in the air and the day, contributed so potently, was coming fast over him in this third year at Oxford — the time in the lives of so many men which is decisive of their whole future. Art and literature were no longer thought of as handmaids to religion, but as ends to be pursued for their own sake, not indeed as a means of gaining livelihood, but as a means of realizing life. More and more it became evident that the taking of Orders, with a direct view to which both Morris and Burne-Jones had gone up to Oxford, was irreconcilable with such a life as they now proposed to themselves. And the idea of common organized effort by the whole group towards a higher life, which for long had been eagerly planned, gradually shifted from the form of a monastic to that of a social brotherhood.
There was a time, early in Morris’ undergraduate days, when he had seriously thought of devoting the whole of his fortune to the foundation of a monastery. Such ideas were widely in the air. The community at Littlemore was a centre of influence and a place of pilgrimage, as familiar to all Oxford as the spire of St. Mary’s. Similar communities had sprung up in other parts of the country. Some seven years before, Street, the great architect of the revived Gothic, then a young man of twenty-six, had been deeply engaged with a scheme for the foundation of an institution, combining the characters of a college, a monastery, and a workshop, for students of the theory and practice of religious art. Such a community had been actually founded in Rome, a generation earlier, by the German painters Cornelius and Overbeck. That group of religious artists, a curious anticipation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, had lived in a Roman palace under a sort of monastic rule; and though the community had ceased to exist about the time when the Tractarian movement in England began, some tradition of it survived to kindle the imagination of younger men. Street had been living in Oxford since 1852 as architect to the diocese, had restored many of the Oxford churches, and was building the great church of SS. Philip and James in the northern outskirts of the city, one of the earliest and purest examples of a return to the architecture of the thirteenth century. Morris did not yet know him personally: but this early project of his, and similar schemes of others, had obtained a large currency.
The earliest distinct allusion to the scheme which, never realized in its original intention, bore fruit of unexpected growth in the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine and the firm of Morris & Company, comes in a letter from Burne-Jones, dated 1st of May, 1853, to a schoolfellow still in Birmingham, but preparing to go up to Oxford. The time-honoured observances which still make May-Day morning hideous in Oxford with the blare of countless whistles and horns seem then to have been resumed with added spirit in the evening, and wound up in scenes resembling those of the Fifth of November. “Ten o’clock, evening,” he writes. “I have just been pouring basons of water on the crowd below from Dixon’s garret — such fun, by Jove: “ and then goes on, “I have set my heart on our founding a Brotherhood. Learn ‘Sir Galahad’ by heart; he is to be the patron of our Order. I have enlisted one in the project up here, heart and soul.” A few months later he writes again, “We must enlist you in this Crusade and Holy Warfare against the age;” the crusade then definitely including celibacy and conventual life.
The last allusion to this scheme in its original conception is in another letter written by Burne-Jones to the same correspondent from Birmingham on the 16th of October, 1854, at the end of the Long Vacation. Term had been postponed for a week on account of the cholera epidemic. “You were surprised no doubt,” he writes, “at the postponement of term. It made me very angry, for I was sick of home and idleness and longed with an ardent longing to be back with Morris and his glorious little company of martyrs — the monastery stands a fairer chance than ever of being founded; I know that it will be some day.”
But this assurance lacks its old ring of conviction. By the end of that year the religious struggle which seemed for a while likely to land both Morris and Burne-Jones in the Roman Church was practically over, and with this clearing of the air social ideals rose to a more important place, and the monastic element began to fade away from the ideas of the Brotherhood. Price and Faulkner brought to Oxford actual knowledge of the inhuman conditions of human life in the great industrial areas; their special enthusiams were for sanitation, for Factory Acts, for the bare elements of a possible life among the mass of their fellow-citizens. “Things were at their worst,” the former writes, “in the forties and fifties. There was no protection for the mill-hand or miner — no amusements but prize-fighting, dog-fighting, cock-fighting, and drinking. When a little boy I saw many prize-fights, bestial scenes: at one a combatant was killed. The country was going to hell apace. At Birmingham School a considerable section of the upper boys were quite awake to the crying evils of the period; social reform was a common topic of conversation. We were nearly all day-boys, and we could not make short cuts to school without passing through slums of shocking squalor and misery, and often coming across incredible scenes of debauchery and brutality. I remember one Saturday night walking five miles from Birmingham into the Black Country, and in the last three miles I counted more than thirty lying dead drunk on the ground, nearly half of them women.” Such surroundings impressed indelibly on those who lived in them the ground truth that all true freedom, all living art, all real morality, even among the limited class who are raised out of the common level by wealth or circumstance, finally depend upon the physical and social conditions of life which exist for the mass of their fellow-creatures. It was not till long afterwards that this view of the matter took full hold of Morris, the country-bred boy, the easy liver and born aristocrat. But its influence was already sufficient to insure him against the belief that salvation lay in dreams of the past or in isolation from the common life of the world.
