Complete Works of William Morris, page 787
Besides the abandoned “Aristomenes,” several other stories were written for “The Earthly Paradise” which remain unpublished. Three at least of these are complete: two of them, “Orpheus and Eurydice” and “St. Dorothea,” belonging to the plan of contents at first drawn out. The third, “The Wooing of Swanhild,” though written on the whole in the earlier or romantic manner, may be inferred from its subject, which is one taken from the last chapters of the Volsunga Saga, to belong to the later period of distinct Icelandic influence. A number of others were destroyed by their author. Of “The Fortunes of Gyges” only two pages have been preserved by some accident. The tales of “The King’s Treasure House” (the famous Herodotean story of Rhampsinitus) and of “The Dolphins and the Lovers,” a strangely romantic story given in bare outline by Plutarch in the work entitled “The Banquet of the Seven Sages,” have wholly disappeared; nor can any trace be discovered of the poem founded on the beautiful thirteenth-century French romance of “Amis and Amile.” It is a rather curious fact that Morris was dissatisfied with “The Death of Paris,” and meant to rewrite it. Tennyson’s “Oenone” was a poem for which he had a boundless admiration; and in “The Death of Paris” he seems to have had an uneasy feeling that the subject was one on which the last word had been already said.
Meanwhile his unresting activity was striking into fresh channels. The “Grettis Saga” of 1869 was followed by the “Volsunga Saga” of 1870. This translation also was executed in collaboration with Mr. Magnússon, and was published in May. In the previous month he had been sitting to Watts for the well-known portrait which represents him in the full prime of his life and vigour. But even before then he had found that “The Earthly Paradise” was practically off his hands, and had turned to the relaxation of changed employment. He thought of taking up painting again, and drew from the model for a while in Mr. C. F. Murray’s studio. From painting he soon diverged to illumination. In February the beautiful illuminated book of his own poems, given by him to Mrs. Burne-Jones, had been begun. It was the first of a series of illuminated manuscripts on which he was much occupied for several years.
“I have been hard at work,” he writes to Mrs. Morris on the 14th of March, “but have not done much except the translations, as they are rather pressing now, and I want to get all my Volsung work done this week: then I shall set to work about Gabriel’s review, which I must say rather terrifies me. Ned came to see me on Sunday; I read him my stanzas for the Volsunga and he thought them good. I did hope to be able to give you the news of my hair being cut this morning, but I had to stay in fair-copying for Strangeways.”
The article on Rossetti’s “Poems” here alluded to appeared in the Academy, a journal then just founded, on the 14the of May. Rossetti’s strange fancy of a literary conspiracy against him, and his elaborate attempts to inspire favourable notices of the volume, are matter of common knowledge. Morris, with other friends, had been dragged into the business; and his article bears all the traces of a task, for once, executed against his will. It is stiff and laboured, and as nearly colourless as anything of his writing well could be.
His translation and illumination were not enough to fill his thoughts; and he wavered for a while between an instinct to break new ground in poetry and a reaction from the immense production of the last three years. The Arthurian legend once more attracted him, not now filling his mind, but making in it something of a counterpoise to the Northern Sagas. But on its mystical and religious side the cycle of the Sangreal was a subject from which, like Tennyson, though for different reasons, he instinctively shrank: and the long narrative poem on the story of Tristram, and the other on that of Balin and Balan, which were much in his mind this summer, never came to birth. In this year, too, the suggestion was made to him that he should translate the Odyssey; but neither had the time come for that.
Before the end of 1870, the last sheets of “The Earthly Paradise” had left his hands. “I feel rather lost at having done my book,” he writes on the 25th of November; “I find now I liked working at it better than I thought. I must try to get something serious to do as soon as may be.” And again a few days lateri: “I confess I am dull now my book is done; one doesn’t know sometimes how much service a thing has done us till it is gone: however one has time yet; and perhaps something else of importance will turn up soon.”
The pity with which he clung to it, and the forlornness in which it left him when the two had to sever company, he has written down with absolute truth and sweetness in the words of the Epilogue. Shy and reserved in life, as to many matters that lay near his heart, he had all the instinct of the born man of letters for laying himself open in his books, and having no concealments from the widest circle of all. In the verses that frame the stories of “The Earthly Paradise” there is an autobiography so delicate and so outspoken that it must needs be left to speak for itself: and the final words which he puts in the mouth of his book, when he sends it forth to seek a place with Chaucer, are the plain truth about his own life so far as he understood it, as well as his deepest thought on the mystery of things.
“For this he ever said, who sent me forth
To seek a place amid thy company;
That howsoever little was my worth,
Yet was he worth e’en just so much as I;
He said that rhyme hath little skill to lie;
Nor feigned to cast his worser part away
In idle singing for an empty day.
“I have beheld him tremble oft enough
At things he could not choose but trust to me,
Although he knew the world was wise and rough:
And never did he fail to let me see
His love, — his folly and faithlessness, maybe;
And still in turn I gave him voice to pray
Such prayers as cling about an empty day.
“Thou, keen-eyed, reading me, mayst read him through,
For surely little is there left behind;
No power great deeds unnameable to do;
No knowledge for which words he may not find,
No love of things as vague as autumn wind —
Earth of the earth lies hidden by my clay,
The idle singer of an empty day!
“Children we twain are, saith he, late made wise,
In love, but in all else most childish still,
And seeking still the pleasure of our eyes,
And what our ears with sweetest sounds may fill;
Not fearing Love, lest these things he should kill;
Howe’er his pain by pleasure doth he lay,
Making a strange tale of an empty day.
“Death have we hated, knowing not what it meant;
Life have we loved, through green leaf and through sere,
Though still the less we knew of its intent:
The Earth and Heaven through countless year on year,
Slow changing, were to us but curtains fair,
Hung round about a little room, where play
Weeping and laughter of man’s empty day.”
“I don’t think,” he writes within a few days of the date of these verses, “people really want to die because of mental pain, that is, if they are imaginative people; they want to live to see the play played out fairly.” Such at all events was his own feeling. People who have not this imaginative instinct often wonder how a poet can bear to lay open his inmost feelings, and uncover the weaknesses of which man is made: still oftener the self-revelation passes clean over the heads of his audience, and so far are they from wondering that they do not even notice. It is the knowledge, no doubt, that all of his innermost heart, his love and hope and sorrow, which he pours into his verses is to the unsympathetic reader simply meaningless, which allows a poet to write fearlessly what, being a poet, he must write in any case. Sorge nie dass ich verrathe! so true still are Heine’s bitter words: sorge nie! diese Welt glaubt nicht an Flammen, und sie nimmt’s für Poesie.
CHAPTER VII. MORRIS AND KELMSCOTT
AT the age of thirty-six, in the full prime of vigour and in the rising light of fame which had not yet drawn after it its inevitable shadows of imitation and detraction, Morris occupied a position in some ways as enviable as could have been devised for him by his own imaginings. Watts’s great portrait is the memorial which represents him at this stage of his life most fully if not most intimately. From it looks out the “powerful and beautiful face” which impressed itself unforgettably even on those who saw it but once. The massive head with its thickly clustering dark curls; the vague inexpressive eyes; the sensitive mouth, a little overweighted by the broad frank brows, are recorded in it with the felicity of genius. One sees in it the dreamer of dreams, as he described himself in a much quoted phrase, who is at the same time the man of action, overflowing with practical energy, and as eager as he had been in the days of his earliest enthusiasm, not only “to do and say and see so many things,” but to carry out “things I have thought of for the bettering of the world as far as lies in me.”
Of Morris as a poet and as an artist, the truest record is to be found in his actual work. In both cases alike he gave his best to the world quite simply, without ostentation, and without concealment; and with the world, as a still living influence, what was permanent in it remains. But of the personality behind it, that work, without the actual living speech and gesture and movement of the man, gives only partial glimpses: nor does it bear any trace at all of what made his personality most unique, that “rum and indescribable deportment” which was a perpetual fascination to all his acquaintance.
By some indefinable mixture of blood, the romantic element which was so powerful in his nature, and which made one side of his inner life one long dream, was united with that natural piety, that steady and almost stolid dutifulness, which has been the saving strength of his nation. Nor upon that side of his nature was he merely a typical Englishman; he was also a typical Londoner of the middle class, though the force of his genius transformed all the habits and thoughts and acts of his class into something quite individual. In this there was a striking resemblance between him and his great master. Among all his townsmen who have before our own day been eminent as men of letters or artists, it is to Chaucer that one would turn by the first instinct for a parallel. The resemblance even extended to physical features: the corpulent person, the demure smile, the “close silent eye.” In his devotion to angling beyond all other pastimes, and his delight in all the simplest rural pleasures — the joy of the townsman taking a day in the country — he had something in common with Izaak Walton, the scholar and man of letters who sold chintzes and brocades in Fleet Street. With the most famous of all later Londoners there was in certain aspects even a closer analogy, which became more marked in the later years of Morris’ life. None of his friends could fail to notice how his potent and imperious personality recalled that of Samuel Johnson. The delight in contradiction and paradox under which there lay a fundamental integrity of intellect; the sanity and strong practical sense; the haunting fear of death, to a degree which would be called morbid in any less imaginative nature; even the slovenliness in dress and the inveterate habit of tea drinking, were as marked in the one as in the other.
The combination or the dreaminess which habitually lives in a world of its own creation with a hot and passionate temper is one which is perhaps not rare, but which seldom exists in so intense a form as itdid in Morris. When “The Earthly Paradise” was being published “the men at the shop thought a great deal of it”: but if they had been inclined to think meanly of him as a poet, they would in any case have respected and admired the employer whose language was so forcible and copious when things were not going to his mind. In one of his tempers he was capable of almost anything. Once at Red Lion Square he hurled a fifteenth-century folio, which in ordinary circumstances he would hardly have allowed any one but himself to touch, at the head of an offending workman. It missed the workman and drove a panel out of the workshop door. His “tempestuous and exacting company,” in the phrase of one of his most intimate friends, had something of the quality of an overwhelming natural force; like the north wind, it braced and buffeted in almost equal measure. He had the incessant restlessness of a wild creature. One of his friends describes him, on the occasion of their first meeting in 1871, as pacing up and down the room like a caged lion. Even at work or at meals he could not sit still for long, but must be continually shifting and fidgeting, getting up to cross the room or look out of the window and then sitting down again. This restless movement was a necessity to him as a means of working off his great bodily strength and superabundant vitality. In his gusts of temper he seemed insensible to pain and almost superhuman in his strength: he has been known to drive his head against a wall so as to make a deep dent in the plaster, and bite almost through the woodwork of a window frame. He could lift the heaviest weight in his teeth with apparent ease. Once when describing how he had seen passengers staggering off a Channel steamer loaded with luggage, he illustrated his point to the amusement and horror of his audience by getting a chair under each arm and then stooping and lifting the coal-scuttle in his teeth. His eyes, the most quick-sighted among all his acquaintance, had the filmed unobservant look of an eagle’s. “When he was young,” Sir Edward Burne-Jones says, “he was very handsome, and yet even then his eyes were the most inexpressive I ever saw. They say nothing to you, nor much look at you, but are so swift, they have taken in everything there is to be seen while you are wondering when they will open. If you saw him, he wouldn’t look at you, but would know everything you had on, and all your expression, without being seen to look.” The only expressive feature of the face was his firm, mobile, and delicately modelled mouth.
The familiar figure of more recent years had altered but little, except for the inevitable changes of age, from that of his prime. His dress always seemed full of his individuality. Certain youthful indiscretions in the way of purple trousers are remembered as having belonged to the time of the Oxford Brotherhood. But his ordinary dress had no special quality except great simplicity and untidiness. In 1871 he accepted a place on the directorate of the mining company from which a large portion of the income of his mother and sisters as well as his own was derived. For the purpose of attending directors’ meetings he kept a tall hat, which he hardly wore on any other occasion, and which caused him untold discomfort. His daughter May remembers, when a little child, finding this strange object in the house, and asking her mother first what it was, and then whether Papa wore it. Morris himself once said with perfect simplicity to a friend, “You see, one can’t go about London in a top hat, it looks so devilish odd.” And this was the mere truth in his case; for it was only in conventional dress that he looked really peculiar. When he resigned his directorship four years afterwards he came home from the last meeting he had attended and solemnly sat down upon his tall hat, which was never replaced. In his suit of blue serge and soft felt hat, he had something of the look of a working engineer and something of that of a sailor. He was walking down Kensington High Street one morning when a fireman from the brigade station stopped him and said, “Beg pardon, sir, but were you ever captain of the Sea Swallow?” Indeed a stranger might very well, not only from his clothing, but from his rocking walk and ruddy complexion, have taken him for a Baltic sea-captain. In those days he had not yet adopted the blue cotton shirts which, in later years, became his invariable dress and almost of the essence of his appearance. The capacity for producing and annexing dirt, noted by Rossetti, remained strong in him; and when he began to add dyeing to the other handicrafts which he practised, ap-, pearances were completely given up. After he ceased to live at Queen Square in 1872, he very often went to lunch at the Faulkners’ house a few doors off. He went along, if the day were fine, without a hat and in his French workman’s blouse; and a new housemaid of the Faulkners’ when she let him in thus dressed for the first time, went down to the kitchen in some perplexity, describing him to the cook as the butcher. Mr. Ellis, in the days of their first acquaintance, was privately warned by his confidential clerk “not to let that Mr. Morris run up a long account.” How he looked to other people was a matter that never entered his head, and he never looked at himself. He had a curious dislike of mirrors. One of the most obvious peculiarities of his house at all times was the absence of mirrors or looking-glasses; there were none at all in any of the living rooms, and none in his bedroom.
