Complete Works of William Morris, page 789
“When you turn down from the church towards the Thames you come at a corner of the road on the base of the village cross (probably of the 15th century), and then, turning to the left and bearing round to the right, all of which transaction takes place in about two hundred yards, you come face to face with a mass of grey walls and pearly grey roofs which makes the house, called by courtesy the Manor House, though it seems to have no manorial rights attached to it, which I have held for twenty-three years. It lies at the very end of the village on a road which, brought up shortly by a backwater of the Thames, becomes a mere cart-track leading into the meadows along the river.
“Through a door in the high unpointed stone wall you go up a flagged path through the front garden to the porch. The house from this side is a lowish three storied one with mullioned windows, and at right angles to this another block whose bigger lower windows and pedimented gable-lights indicate a later date. The house is built of well-laid rubble stone of the district, the wall of the latter part being buttered over, so to say, with thin plaster which has now weathered to the same colour as the stone of the walls; the roofs are covered with the beautiful stone slates of the district, the most lovely covering which a roof can have, especially when, as here and in all the traditional old houses of the country-side, they are ‘sized down’; the smaller ones to the top and the bigger towards the eaves, which gives one the same sort of pleasure in their orderly beauty as a fish’s scales or a bird’s feathers.
“The farm buildings stand to the south of the house: a very handsome barn of quite beautiful proportions, and several other sheds, including a good dove-cot, all built in the same way as the house, and grouping delightfully with it.
“The garden, divided by old clipped yew hedges, is quite unaffected and very pleasant, and looks in fact as if it were, if not a part of the house, yet at least the clothes of it: which I think ought to be the aim of the layer out of a garden.
“Going under an arched opening in the yew hedge which makes a little garth about a low door in the middle of the north wall, one comes into a curious passage or lobby, a part of which is screened into a kind of pantry by wooden mullions which have once been glazed. The said lobby leads into what was once the great parlour (the house is not great at all remember) and is now panelled with pleasing George I. panelling painted white: the chimney-piece is no doubt of the date of the building, and is of rude but rather amusing country work; the windows in this room are large and transomed, and it is as pleasant as possible; and I have many a memory of hot summer mornings passed in its coolness amidst the green reflections of the garden.
“The tapestry room is over the big panelled parlour. The walls of it are hung with tapestry of about 1600, representing the story of Samson; they were never great works of art, and now when all the bright colours are faded out, and nothing is left but the indigo blues, the greys and the warm yellowy browns, they look better, I think, than they were meant to look: at any rate they make the walls a very pleasant background for the living people who haunt the room; and, in spite of the designer, they give an air of romance to the room which nothing else would quite do.
“Another charm this room has, that through its south window you not only catch a glimpse of the Thames clover meadows and the pretty little elm-crowned hill over in Berkshire, but if you sit in the proper place, you can see not only the barn aforesaid with its beautiful sharp gable, the grey stone sheds, and the dove-cot, but also the flank of the earlier house and its little gables and grey scaled roofs, and this is a beautiful outlook indeed.
“A house that I love; with a reasonable love I think: for though my words may give you no idea of any special charm about it, yet I assure you that the charm is there; so much has the old house grown up out of the soil and the lives of those that lived on it: some thin thread of tradition, a half-anxious sense of the delight of meadow and acre and wood and river; a certain amount (not too much let us hope) of common sense, a liking for making materials serve one’s turn, and perhaps at bottom some little grain of sentiment: — this I think was what went to the making of the old house.”
To this account of Kelmscott may be added a few observations made by Mr. Webb from his further knowledge as a professional architect:
“From my earliest recollections this general kind of house was familiar to me, where the coarse oolite stone of Thames valley gave the peculiar character to the old buildings in and around Oxford. There are still remaining, in more or less perfect state, many houses of the same quality, though some are more architecturally marked than at Kelmscott.
“It is a known fact that in outlying places, where stone mason’s work is the chief part of the building, and there are many quarries giving the same formation of stone, the prevailing traditions of building lasted longer in one place than another. This makes it often difficult in such places to be sure of dates from the style of the masonry, and more particularly in the last centuries, as the masons worked so much in the older way, when in busier places, or districts, changes of fashion told more quickly.
“W. M. often spoke of what was recorded here and there, and of what he had gathered from the natives, as to dates of the Kelmscott house building: I came to no conclusion — save, that the work was really later than it looked to be.
“For so late a time of genuine native building, and from the modesty of the house altogether, it was singular how the regular plan of the old English form, of all degrees of importance, was inclosed in the earlier part of it. There was the entrance doorway in the front wall leading through to the opposite doorway in the back wall, with the hall on the right hand, cut off from the passage by the screen, with the kitchen and other offices on the left: the parlour (or ‘solar’) at the other end of the hall, by the side of the stairs, with cellar under; all of which was of the smallest and least pretentious work. Then, a comparatively few years later, the large square parlour was built with the tapestry room over, in loftier range, and in a style clearly showing the Renaissance influence, chiefly marked by the two large fire-places, and the small classically shaped windows in the gables of attics in the roofs.
“No unprejudiced person could read the last chapter of ‘News from Nowhere’ without being obliged to allow that W. M. had read the influences of the beautiful place in its entirety clearly, and without transformation by imagination; the real wanting no fanciful improvement. The price he paid for this joy in the house and all lying about it was the shadow of the coming change which overhung it: no efforts on his part — and they were many — could stay the piecemeal fungus-growth of disease in building which had begun to eat into the fringe of the surroundings: for each inevitable new element of change had tenfold brutal force in its vulgarization from the collected purity and simplicity on which it was settling down.”
The country in which Kelmscott lies is among the sleepiest and loneliest of southern England. With little bold or striking beauty, it has a charm of unequalled subtlety and lastingness. The young Thames winds through level pastures, among low surrounding hills, in a landscape that seems as if little change had passed over it since the English settlement. Beyond the level and often flooded river-meadows the ground rises imperceptibly northwards towards the spurs of the Cotswolds, out of which half-a-dozen small rivers break to mingle with the Thames. Bibury, one of these little-known Cotswold villages, “lying down in the winding valley beside the clear Colne,” was described by Morris as “surely the most beautiful village in England.” Churches, houses, barns, the dry walls of the fields, are all alike built of the golden-grey limestone underlying the soil. Hardly a village is without a beautiful church, generally dating back to the thirteenth century. Broadwell, the parish next but one to Kelmscott, has a tower and spire built by the same masons as those who built the tower and spire of Oxford Cathedral, and on their smaller scale equal in beauty. At Langford, a mile off, part of the church dates from before the Norman Conquest. The parish church of Burford on the Windrush, a sumptuously decorated building of less ancient date, is an epitome of the whole civic life and art of the later Middle Ages. Much of the domestic building of this region is little inferior to the churches either in age or architectural beauty. The most splendid example is the tithe barn at Great Coxwell, a noble structure of the middle of the thirteenth century, “unapproachable in its dignity, as beautiful as a cathedral, yet with no ostentation of the builder’s art,” its hundred and fifty feet of grey roof raised on a forest of orderly set oak timbers. It was always upheld by Morris as one of the finest buildings in England or in the world. The grey pointed arches over the Thames, on the solitary highway leading south out of the Royal Forest of Wychwood, are as beautiful now as when, six hundred and fifty years ago, they received their still surviving name of the New Bridge. A little further off, under the feet of the Cotswolds, is Chastleton, the finest and most complete of all surviving Jacobean houses. In a land remote from commerce, full of beautiful building, and with perfect building material everywhere close at hand, it is not strange that the tradition of beauty should have survived longer than elsewhere.
This upper Thames valley, well-wooded and abundantly watered, is a land of birds. The blackbirds sing at Kelmscott after they have fallen silent elsewhere. The little island formed by the backwater close to the house was always filled with song from a hundred throats. In Morris’ letters from Kelmscott there are constant allusions to the bird-life about it. The two following passages belong to the season of late summer:
“The birds were very delightful about us; I have been of late so steeped in London that it was a quite fresh pleasure to see the rooks about, who have been very busy in this showery weather. There was no lack of herons in these upper waters, and in the twilight the stint or summer snipe was crying about us and flitting from under the bank and across the stream: such a clean-made, neat-feathered, light grey little chap he is, with a wild musical little note like all the moor-haunting birds.”
“We have had all the birds here again. The herons have been stalking about the field in the gravest manner; and I have seen the kingfishers very busy. One ducked down into the water before me and came out again with a little fish. I saw an owl last night come sailing along, and suddenly turn head over heels and down in the grass; after a mouse I suppose: such a queer action I never saw.”
Another letter in a few brief vivid touches gives a picture of the birds in October:
“The western sky is getting leaden grey and the wind is rain-cold. I heard a heron ‘squark’ just now, and saw two of them sailing overhead. I have seen the kingfishers twice: one sat three yards from me for two or three minutes and talked to himself before he saw me: he was a beauty.”
And again soon after Christmas:
“Bossom told me that the hard winter had killed a huge number of the moor-hens. He said that when the frost was on they would come down to the open water by his barge and drink a drop or two and then die, poor things.”
The creek, with its wooden bridge and boat-house, has now been cut off from the house by an earthwork and deep ditch formed to keep out the winter floods from the village, and the weir and gate-house across the meadow have been rebuilt; otherwise there is scarcely a change from thirty years ago in the manor-house and its immediate surroundings.
“The house was then kept,” Mr. Ellis says, “by an old couple, Philip Comely and his wife, who were the ideal English villagers, capable, careful, frugal, and industrious. But Morris was much embarrassed by the apparently mechanical arrangement, ‘as though it were a trick of machinery,’ by which Philip’s hand rose to the brim of his hat, or lacking that to his forelock, with every word he uttered. Philip’s cottage served as a sort of lodge to the manor-house, rented for a shilling a week, with a good-sized and fruitful garden.”
Kelmscott was at first taken by Morris in joint-tenancy with Rossetti. The breakdown in Rossetti’s health, which had begun two or three years earlier, was now very marked, and it was hoped that quiet life in a remote country house might do much to restore him to bodily health and relieve his morbid imaginations. For a while he was much more there than Morris, who could not easily be away from London and his work for a long time together. He was there through the summer and autumn of 1871. In 1872 the dangerous illness of which details are given in his biography was followed by a long visit to Scotland, but he was at Kelmscott again from September all through the winter of 1872-3, and for the greater part of the following twelve months. In the summer of 1874 he finally left it; not a little to Morris’ relief for many reasons. The manor-house soon resumed its quietness and simplicity. The expense of keeping up a country house in permanence was as yet rather a severe strain on Morris’ unaided means; and the joint-tenancy was for some years resumed with Mr. Ellis as the partner. From this time forth it was the haven of rest to which he always returned with a fresh and deep delight. All seasons there were alike sweet to him. The following extracts are taken almost at random from familiar letters of different years.
February. “The waters are out a little, owing to the melting snow. It is a cold rather windy day, but not unpleasant; brilliantly sunny at first, now cloudy with gleams of sun at times. It froze last night; but took to a sharp shower in the morning. As to the garden, they are late here; there are two or three crocuses out, but most of them are not above ground even; the winter aconite is not fully in blossom, and the yellow jasmine is over. Snowdrops are everywhere, but mostly double, however they give one a delightful idea of spring about: there are a few violets out and here and there a coloured primrose; and some of the hepatica roots have flowered, but show no leaves. But how pretty it looks to see the promise of things pushing up through the clean un-sooty soil. I think we shall have a beautiful garden this year.”
April. “I never yet till now understood how green the grass could be in spring; it is so green that it brings all the distance near and flattens the landscape into a mediæval picture. It is most beautiful; and when we were here in the middle of March the grass was all as grey as grey. You see just now there are not many daisies out, and the bents have not begun to grow, so that the grass is all grass and deep green. It has just been raining May butter, as Izaak Walton says: looked for an hour as if it would never stop raining again; then it got a little lighter, and then of a sudden was the bright sun and a rainbow. Item, I have eaten asparagus and heard the cuckoo: the blackbirds wake me about 4 o’clock a.m.: as for the rooks they never stop all day long. I saw a leash of plovers yesterday squawking away, and making believe that they had no nest close at hand. The garden is full of bullfinches, which are fat pretty dears, and sing a little short song very sweetly.”
May. “The fields are all butter-cuppy. The elms are mostly green up to their tops: the hawthorn not out, but the crabs beautiful, and also that white-beam (I think they call it) with the umbelliferous flowers. In the garden we have lots of tulips out looking beautiful; the white bluebells and some blue ones: some of the anemones are in blossom and they all soon will be: they are very lovely. Apple-blossom for the most part only in bud, but that cherry-tree near the arbour opposite my window is a mass of bloom. The heartseases are beautiful; a few of the Iceland poppies are out: the raspberries are showing for blossom.”
August. “The fishing is pretty much as it was; the river higher and the weeds uncut, though not very visible at the first glance because the water is high. Altogether a very pleasant river to travel on, the bank being still very beautiful with flowers; the long purples, and willow-herb, and that strong-coloured yellow flower very close and buttony, are the great show: but there is a very pretty dark blue flower, I think mug-wort, mixed with all that, besides the purple blossom of the house-mint and mouse-ear and here and there a bit of meadow-sweet belated. As to the garden it seems to me its chief fruit is — blackbirds. However they have left us some gooseberries, and I shall set to work this morning to get some before their next sit-down meal. As for flowers, the July glory has departed as needs must, but the garden looks pleasant though not very flowery. Those sweet sultans are run very much to leaf, but the beds in which they and the scabious are look very pretty, the latter having very delicate foliage. There are two tall hollyhocks (O so tall) by the strawberries, one white, one a very pretty red: there are still a good many poppies in blossom. Few apples, few plums, plenty of vegetables else. Weather doubtful; I woke up this morning to a most splendid but very stormy sunrise. The nights have been fine, and the moon rises her old way from behind the great barn.”
Oftober. “The garden is nearly over now till spring comes again, except that there are a good many roses, and amongst them, a pale sweet-briar blossom among the scarlet hips, that I am sure I never saw before. The weather has been wild, stormy and rough, with the bar of flood-water lying between us and our little outings. It is bright enough just now, though the wind is still talking threateningly. Tuesday and Wednesday nights cost us four more of the elms on the island, which is now sadly thin.”
Such was the rich and perpetually varying background on which life unrolled itself here. His love for the place grew with the years, and his joy in it was only troubled by a sense of stolen sweetness which sometimes came over him when he thought of work and duty in London. “I rather want to be in London again,” he writes once on a golden day of early September, “for I feel as if my time were passing with too little done in the country: altogether I fear I am a London bird; its soot has been rubbed into me, and even these autumn mornings can’t wash me clean of restlessness.”
But in the summer of 1871 the visit to Iceland, which he had planned since “The Earthly Paradise” was off his hands, was occupying all his thoughts, and he saw little of Kelmscott till afterwards. At Whitsuntide Webb went down with him to look over it, and Faulkner joined them from Oxford. The house was reported to be in sound condition, and was taken from midsummer. At the beginning of July Morris took his wife and children down, returning himself at once to make the last preparations for his northern voyage.
