Complete Works of William Morris, page 780
It is of the four Arthurian poems which stand at the beginning of the volume that Mr. Swinburne more specially speaks; and these to many readers are no doubt the flower of the whole. One can well imagine with what hushed admiration, with what a shock and surprise of emotion, that little gathering at George Street, on the 30th of October, 1857, heard, for the first time, “King Arthur’s Tomb.” Here again Mr. Swinburne’s words are the final ones: “There is scarcely connection here, and scarcely composition. There is hardly a trace of narrative power or mechanical arrangement. There is a perceptible want of tact and practice, which leaves the poem in parts indecorous and chaotic. But where among other and older poets of his time and country is one comparable for perception and experience of tragic truth, of subtle and noble, terrible and piteous things? where a touch of passion at once so broad and so sure?”
Mr. J. W. Hoole, the son of a neighbour of the Morrises in Essex, who was then an undergraduate at Queen’s, contributes a curious remark that Morris made with regard to these Arthurian poems. “He took me across to his lodgings opposite Queen’s College and read me ‘The Defence of Guenevere,’ before it was printed. On my enquiring — with not very good taste to an original poet — in whose style the poem was written, he answered ‘More like Browning than any one else, I suppose.’” This may at first seem a lightly-uttered fancy; but the more one thinks over it, the more is one struck with its truth. The author of “The Defence of Guenevere” approaches poetry from the same side, one may so put it, as the author of “Men and Women.” What both alike aim at and attain is the realization, keen, swift, and minute, of some tragic event or situation, and the expression with absolute sincerity of that exact event or situation precisely as thus realized and no further, disregarding conventions of poetical treatment, and too eager to pause over finesse of workmanship. The affinity is perhaps closer, as it is more evident, in the other group of poems, constituting about half the volume, which are suggested more or less directly by Froissart, as the Arthurian poems are by Malory. They might aptly be headed Dramatic Lyrics and Dramatic Romances of the fourteenth century. The range is much less than Browning’s; but the intensity of realization is even greater, and it is free from the slightest trace of parade or pedantry. For to Morris the Middle Ages, out of which he sometimes seemed to have strayed by some accident into the nineteenth century, were his habitual environment: he lived in them as really and as simply as if he had been translated back to them in actual vision. The Little Tower and the Haystack in the Floods are as clearly before his eyes as if the riding of the knights had gone by but a day before: the talk of Sir Peter Harpdon and his man seems transcribed from memory. It is this amazing power of realization, when he is dealing with his own period, that gives to the masterpiece of his later years, “The Dream of John Ball,” so vivid a colour and truth; it is the want of it, when he is off that ground, that leaves him open to the accusation of being mannered or languid when he deals with a story which is either not mediæval or not treated in a frankly mediæval spirit.
Browning himself, it may not be without interest to know, was one of the earliest and the most enthusiastic admirers of this volume. “It has been my delight,” he said of it many years afterwards, “ever since I read it.” When the first volume of “The Earthly Paradise” was published, he wrote to Morris a letter of warm and finely-appreciative praise. “It is a double delight to me,” he added, “to read such poetry, and know you of all the world wrote it, — you whose songs I used to sing while galloping by Fiesole in old days,—’ Ho, is there any will ride with me?’”
Between the charm of the Malory poems and that of the Froissart poems the choice is one of personal feeling. But the part of the volume which one gathers to represent its spirit and form most intimately to many lovers of poetry, is neither of these. It consists of the poems of a wholly unbased and fantastic romance, in which any traceable poetical influence is that of Poe rather than of Browning. Their very names — such names as “The Blue Closet,” or “The Sailing of the Sword,” or “Two Red Roses across the Moon “ — are taken straight out of dreamland. It is these poems on which the unjust praise and the blame not worth heeding which the volume drew on itself were primarily spent. They lend themselves alike to the purposes of the précieux and the parodist. Never perhaps has poetry come nearer to what some theorists have laid down as its goal, the emotional effect of music, than in some of these remarkable pieces— “The Wind,” “Spellbound,” “Near Avalon.” Even now, to those to whom they have been long familiar, their faint beauty comes back, ever and again, like a fugitive and haunting scent, or the vague trouble of a dream remembered in a dream.
It was part, and a very necessary part, of the Pre-Raphaelite creed to disregard both neglect and criticism: and Morris, of all persons in the world, was one who was only happy in his own content, and over whom the opinions of others slipped without leaving much impression. For professional literary criticism, beyond all, his feeling was something between amusement and contempt. “To think of a beggar making a living by selling his opinion about other people!” he characteristically said: “and fancy any one paying him for it!” he added, in a climax of scorn. Yet an author’s first book, and more so if it be a book of poems, is a thing by itself: and it would seem that the little notice the volume met with united with other causes to make him for a time stop writing poetry. In the few months before its publication he had been producing very fast, and with a swift growth in range of manner and power of expression. The turbid quality which weakens, or even disfigures, so many of the earlier poems was daily running clearer. “King Arthur’s Tomb,” “The Eve of Crecy,” “Praise of my Lady,” all written in these months, sound a chord of imaginative beauty such as Tennyson himself, at the same age, had not surpassed. The mixed lyric and dramatic method invented by him for “Sir Peter Harpdon’s End,” with its odd and fascinating use of blank verse, had in it all kinds of possibilities. He had already planned, and begun to write, a cycle of poems in this form on subjects from the War of Troy. There are a few surviving fragments of “The Maying of Guenevere,” the opening piece of an Arthurian cycle which would have ended with “King Arthur’s Tomb,” and in which, it has been thought, he would have found his most real inspiration. Tennyson’s “Morte d’Arthur “ still stood alone, an inimitable fragment; it was not till 1859 that the first of “The Idyls of the King” were published. After that, the treatment of the story in a different, even if a simpler and sincerer manner, was almost precluded by the imposing brilliance of the Tennysonian version, and its remarkable conquest of both critical approval and popular fame. But now this, and all other poetry, was laid aside; and when Morris laid a thing aside, he did so with the same energy with which he had taken it up. “It is to be regretted,” says Canon Dixon, speaking as one who has remained faithful to the earlier aims and ideals of Morris’ art, “that he did so. He could have produced more of the same sort then. When he afterwards took up poetry again, he could not do it. His ‘Jason’ was better than his ‘Earthly Paradise,’ but the first flavour was gone from them both.”
“The Defence of Guenevere” was published in March. About the same time Burne-Jones, left much alone in Red Lion Square since the beginning of the year, had fallen rather dangerously ill, and was carried off by Mrs. Prinsep, the kind friend of all artists, to Little Holland House, to be taken care of and nursed back to health. He stayed there during a great part of the year. There was, therefore, no permanent companion for Morris in Red Lion Square; and though it remained his London lodging, much the greater part of the year was spent by him at Oxford, either in his rooms in the city or at Summertown with the Maclarens. There he went on painting hard, but with continued dissatisfaction. He even sold a picture for the considerable sum of £70 to Mr. Plint of Leeds. The negotiation was conducted by Rossetti, who loved making bargains for his friends as well as for himself. This picture, which has now, after many wanderings, returned to the possession of his family, is believed to be the only finished easel-painting by Morris certainly known to exist. It was exhibited in London at the New Gallery in January, 1898.
There was, however, a further and a stronger reason for his prolonged stay at Oxford. Towards the end of the Long Vacation of 1857, Rossetti and Burne-Jones, who had gone, after a day’s work at the Union, to the little Oxford theatre, found sitting just behind them two girls, daughters of Mr. Robert Burden, of Holywell Street. The elder attracted their attention at once by her remarkable beauty, of a type not common in England, and specially admired by Rossetti. They made her acquaintance; and after some little negotiation she was persuaded to sit to him and his friends, and continued to do so while the work at the Union was going on. With Morris the attraction went deeper, and soon after his volume of poems appeared they became engaged. Only a few flitting notices can be gathered of his life, or thoughts, or occupations, during this summer and the following winter. Sometimes there are traces of him at his mother’s new house at Leyton, sometimes in London at Red Lion Square, or at Little Holland House, drawing from a tree that overhung a pond in the garden — pond, tree, and garden now long vanished; sometimes painting in the Maclarens’ orchard at Summertown, where the holes he dug in the grass by wriggling his chair about as he sat at his easel, and the force of his language when a gust of wind blew the canvas off wet side down, were long remembered; or reading aloud interminably to the group of friends assembled there from Froissart and Monstrelet and Malory’s “Morte d’Arthur.” In August he was once more in Northern France, and rowed down the Seine from Paris — then an unusual and adventurous thing to do — with Faulkner and Webb. An Oxford boat had been sent over from Bossom’s to Paris, where it arrived with a large hole in its bottom. The mending of the boat, and the start from the Quai du Louvre amid the satire of the populace, as the three Englishmen embarked with three carpet bags and half-a-dozen bottles of wine for their luggage, were the beginnings of an almost epic voyage. During this trip the plan of building himself a house was discussed between him and Webb, and on their return there was much travelling about to look at possible sites for it. In the late autumn there are references to an illness, cheerfully attributed by his friends to his eating and drinking too much, or rather to his being quite careless (as he remained always) of what he ate and drank. In October he was in France again, “to buy old manuscripts and armour and ironwork and enamel.” The instability which he found, or thought he found, in his own character became for a time acute. The overstrain of the crowded years through which he had been passing, with all their inward revolutions, all their pangs of growth and fevers of imagination, had left him, like some lover in one of his own poems, languid and subject to strange fluctuations of mood. In a curious and illuminating phrase used by one of his friends in writing about him some little time before, “he has lately taken a strong fancy for the human.” One thing at all events became more and more certain, that the external impulse under which he had become a painter had exhausted its force. A new kind of life opened out vaguely before him, in which that “small Palace of Art of my own,” long ago recognized by him as one of his besetting dreams, was now peopled with the forms of wife and children, and contracted to the limits of some actual home, in which life and its central purposes need not be thwarted by any baseness or ugliness of immediate surroundings: an undertaking for a lifetime, and much more than a lifetime, as it turned out, but then certainly conceived as possible.
On Tuesday the 26th of April, 1859, William Morris and Jane Burden were married in the little ancient parish church of St. Michael’s in Oxford; he was then just five and twenty. Dixon, who had by this time taken Orders and was curate of St. Mary’s, Lambeth, came down to perform the ceremony; Faulkner was best man; and Burne-Jones and a few more of the old Oxford set were there. It was the last scene in the Oxford life of the Brotherhood.
CHAPTER V. RED HOUSE: FORMATION OF THE FIRM: THE FALL OF TROY. 1859-1865
AFTER a six weeks’ tour to Paris, Belgium, and the Rhine, as far as Basle, Mr. and Mrs. Morris returned to London, to furnished rooms at 41, Great Ormond Street, where they lived while their own house was being built. The establishment at Red Lion Square was finally broken up, Burne-Jones going into lodgings of his own in Charlotte Street. Webb had just left Street’s office to set up as an architect on his own account, and the building of the new house was placed in his hands. The house was to be a proving piece. In it the theories of its owner and its architects on domestic building and decoration were to be worked out in practice: and the scheme and details were the joint invention of the two. The notion of building a house after his own fancy was one which had already been in Morris’ mind for a considerable time. He wanted it not merely as a place to live in, but as a fixed centre and background for his artistic work. He hated designing in the air, without relation to a definite material and a particular purpose. While his whole work as a decorative manufacturer may be not untruly said to have sprung directly out of the building and furnishing of this house, it would be almost equally true to say that the house, first in idea and then in fact, sprung out of his devoting himself to the practice of decorative art and requiring, as one might say, a canvas to work upon. When his approaching marriage made a home of some sort, other than London or Oxford lodgings, a necessity, the building of the house followed as a matter of course
It was to be in the country, and by preference not far from London, though as to this he was really indifferent. The great network of suburban railways had then hardly begun to exist, and the spot finally fixed upon, though little more than ten miles from London by road, was about three miles from the nearest station, that at Abbey Wood on the North Kent Line. From the Plumstead marshes, along the inner edge of which this railway runs, a steep ascent leads southward through wooded slopes to a gently undulating country, intersected by the great high road from London to Dover, the ancient Watling Street. On the part of this plateau known as Bexley Heath, close to the little village of Upton, Morris had bought an orchard and meadow, and it was settled to build the house in the orchard so that it should have apple and cherry trees all round it from the first. Three or four labourers’ cottages close by were locally known as Hog’s Hole; the discovery of this name affording unspeakable and lasting satisfaction to Rossetti. The district, even when less built over than it is now, was not one of any remarkable charm: it had something of the sadness of that common English lowland country of which Morris was so fond; but was fertile, well wooded and watered, and interspersed with pleasant orchards and coppices.
What Morris required in a country was that it should be open and fertile, and have in it some central and distinguishing natural feature of hill or river. In the normal English landscape, “so rich and so limited, no big hill, no wide river to lead one’s thoughts or hopes along,” and everywhere inclosed, he felt a sense of imprisonment. The wide arid heaths of Surrey and the close rich Devonshire valleys were alike distasteful to him; he set his own plain and rather ugly Essex country far before either. But, till he went to live on the upper Thames, Kent was probably his favourite county; and he may have pleased himself with the notion of living close to the track of the Canterbury pilgrims, the vena porta of mediæval England. Just below him lay the little valley of the Cray, beaded with its string of villages; and further off, but within an easy walk, the beautiful valley of the Darenth. At Abbey Farm were the remains of an Augustinian Priory, one of those suppressed by Wolsey in order to found his great college at Oxford. The particular spot, however, was very much chosen because the orchard seemed to suit his requirements as nearly as possible. It was one of a number of places advertised for sale which he had looked at in the previous summer.
The reaction from early Victorian stucco had just begun to set in, but had not yet begun to produce any visible effect over the country. Nowadays, when the red brick of the common modern country house is to be seen on every roadside, this, the first house that Webb built, might be passed without any remark by a casual traveller. But Mr. Norman Shaw was then a clerk in Street’s office; stucco and slate still reigned supreme in all districts where stone was not the native building material; and the name of Red House given to the new building was sufficient to describe it without ambiguity to all the neighbourhood. Its planning was as original as its material. The type of house which Morris was fond of describing as a square box with a lid was completely abandoned: it was planned as an L-shaped building, two-storied, with a high-pitched roof of red tile. The beautiful oak staircase filled a bolo protection in the angle, and corridors ran from it along both the inner walls, so that the rooms on both limbs of the house faced outward on to the garden. The two other sides of this half-quadrangle were masked by rose-trellises, inclosing a square inner court, in the middle of which rose the most striking architectural feature of the building, a well-house of brickwork and oak timber, with a steep conical tiled roof. Externally the house was plain almost to severity, and depended for its effect on its solidity and fine proportion. The decorative features it possessed were constructional, not of the nature of applied ornament: the frankly emphasized relieving arches over the windows, the deep cornice moulding, the louvre in the high open roof over the staircase, and the two spacious recessed porches. Inside, its most remarkable feature was the large drawing-room, which filled the external angle of the L on the upper floor. It looked by its main end window northwards towards the road and the open country; and a projecting oriel in the western side overlooked the long bowling green, which ran, encircled with apple trees, close under the length of that wing. The decoration of this room, and of the staircase by which it was reached, was to be the work of several years for Morris and his friends: and he boldly announced that he meant to make it the most beautiful room in England. But through the whole house, inside and out, the same ideal standard was, so far as possible, to be kept up.
