Complete Works of William Morris, page 796
The visit to Naworth, on which he was accompanied by Burne-Jones, had the additional pleasure of a meeting with Dixon and a renewal of the affection and enthusiasm of Oxford days. “I saw Ted and Morris,” Canon Dixon wrote to Price, “at the abode of splendour last week — slept there, and we were most jolly. Ned is in poor health I grieve to find, and a little quieter in manner, otherwise unaltered: Topsy genial, gentle, delightful; both full of affection: it was a most happy meeting.”
“I would like you to understand,” Morris wrote to Mrs. Howard after his visit to Naworth, “as well as my clumsy letter-writing will let you, how very happy I was these few days in the north. I hope you will let me come again some time: and that then you will think me less arrogant on the — what shall I say? — Wesleyan-tradesman-unsympathetic-with-art subjects than you seemed to think me the other day: though indeed I don’t accuse myself of it either: but I think to shut one’s eyes to ugliness and vulgarity is wrong, even when they show themselves in people not un-human. Do you know, when I see a poor devil drunk and brutal I always feel, quite apart from my æsthetical perceptions, a sort of shame, as if I myself had some hand in it. Neither do I grudge the triumph that the modern mind finds in having made the world (or a small corner of it) quieter and less violent, but I think that this blindness to beauty will draw down a kind of revenge one day: who knows? Years ago men’s minds were full of art and the dignified shows of life, and they had but little time for justice and peace; and the vengeance on them was not increase of the violence they did not heed, but destruction of the art they heeded. So perhaps the gods are preparing 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 dull and ugly for ever. Meantime, what is good enough for them must content us: though sometimes I should like to know why the story of the earth gets so unworthy.”
When the autumn holiday ended, worries awaited him which lasted through the winter and were not finally adjusted — so far as any adjustment was possible — till the following spring. The formation of the firm of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. in 1861 has been already recounted: and it has sufficiently appeared how, as the years went on, the business became one in which capital, invention, and control were supplied practically by Morris alone. The business, in which he had embarked all his means, had become not only the daily work of his life, but the main source of his income; and it became necessary, now that he was a man in middle life with a growing family, to put things on a proper footing, and secure a provision in case of need for his children. On the other hand, his partners from their side saw not without uneasiness the extension of a business in whose liabilities — for the firm, formed before the passing of the Act of 1862, was not a limited company — they might at any moment find themselves seriously involved. On both sides, therefore, the dissolution and reconstitution of the firm was indicated as desirable or even necessary.
Under the original instrument, each of the seven partners had not only an equal voice in the management, but an equal interest in the assets of the firm. The profits had never, after the first year or two, been divided: partly because for years there were none to divide, partly because the legal rights of the partners had since then practically been allowed to lapse. But these legal claims now represented sums which involved intricate calculation, and which, in any case, were a formidable drain on the resources of the business, that is to say, on Morris’ own fortune. It was plain that if they were insisted on, he would be placed in a position of great financial difficulty, if indeed he could continue to carry on the business at all. It will be remembered that the capital contributed by the partners at the inception of the business, in respect of which these profits were now claimable, was £20 each, and it seems uncertain whether even this was in every case actually paid. In respect of the £120 purporting to have been embarked in the firm by the whole six, they had claims on the business for some seven or eight thousand pounds.
The story is not wholly a pleasant one, but it is proper that the truth should be told. Three of the partners, Burne-Jones, Faulkner, and Webb, refused to accept any consideration in respect of their claims as partners. The other three stood on the strict letter of their legal rights. The position they took up is given in the words of Madox Brown’s solicitor, at a meeting — one of many during this winter — held on the 4th of November: “that as in the inception of the firm no member invested money, nor gave any time or labour without being paid at an agreed rate, the position of the several members ought to be considered as equal in respect to their claims on the assets of the firm; and further, that he, Mr. Brown, considers that the goodwill ought to be taken at three years’ purchase and ought to be included in the said assets.” In other words, the terms of partnership were such that each of the other partners, who had confessedly contributed nothing beyond a trifling sum towards capital, and who had been paid at the time for any assistance they gave towards the conduct of the business, was entitled to an equal share of the value of the business which had been built up by the energy, the labour, and the money of Morris alone.
Such, however, was their legal claim if they chose to stand upon it. The calculations and negotiations were long and intricate; it was not till March, 1875, that they were complete, and the dissolution of the firm finally effected. On the 31st of March a circular was issued announcing that the firm had been dissolved and that the business would thenceforward be caried on under Morris’ sole management and proprietorship. It was added that Burne-Jones and Webb, though no longer partners, would continue to help with designs for stained glass and furniture as before. The name of the business remained Morris & Co., a name which had already for some years practically superseded the longer title of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co., under which it had been originally registered.
This transaction finally snapped the chain of attachment between Morris and Rossetti, which had, for other reasons, long been wearing thin. “They never throve together,” says an intimate friend who survived them both, “after the first year or two.” In the previous summer Rossetti had finally left Kelmscott and given up his share in the tenancy, to Morris’ great relief. From the first almost he had been “unromantically discontented” with it: “he has all sorts of ways so unsympathetic with the sweet simple old place that I feel his presence there as a kind of slur on it.” The action which, together with Madox Brown and Marshall, he now took over the dissolution of the partnership, caused Morris intense pain and mortification. With Madox Brown the breach did not remain unhealed; in his last years he was again on cordial relations with Morris, and this trouble was forgotten. But from this time forward Morris was no longer to be seen in Rossetti’s house at Cheyne Walk, and the estrangement between the two powerful and self-centred personalities was final.
CHAPTER X. PERIOD OF DYEING: THE ÆNEIDS: SIGURD THE VOLSUNG. 1875-1876
ON the 25th of March, 1875, when the dissolution and reconstitution of the firm was just completed, Morris wrote to Mrs. Baldwin from Queen Square :
“It was very kind of you and I thank you very much for remembering me and my birthday: I have been a happy man with my friends, nor do I think, as far as my constant affection and good wishes are concerned, that I have done otherwise than to deserve the good hap. I am in the second half of my life now; which is like to be a busy time with me, I hope till the very end: a time not lacking content too, I fancy: I must needs call myself a happy man on the whole: and I do verily think I have gone over every possible misfortune that may happen to me in my own mind, and concluded that I can bear it if it should come.
“You would like to see my babies: they are such big girls — and so good; and even so handsome. Me! what a boy I feel still to have that responsibility on me, for in spite of my forty-one years I really don’t feel a bit older than when Ned and I were living within sound of those tin-pot bells of St. Pancras: well-remembered days when all adventure was ahead! Nay, in some things I have run through a time when I was older — but by no means wiser — than I am now, between those days and these.
“I shall be not very far from you next week: for I am going with Charley Faulkner, my inevitable travelling-fellow, to look at my fatherland. We are going to Shrewsbury, and thence to a college farm of his on the very head waters of Severn and Wye, where we are to have ponies and go over the hills and far away, only for about a week in all though: ’tis a short journey, but I think I shall love it. I think one sign of my increasing years is an increasing desire for travel, that I may see the wonders of the world before it is all gone from me: but I suppose I shall get less and less of that pleasure for some time to come: for I am very busy both with my bread and cheese work, and also with my pleasure work of books. I am publishing a little set of Icelandic stories very soon: also this summer a translation of the Æneids, which has been my great joy for months of late.”
With such equanimity, even with such elation, it was that he entered on a fresh and crowded period of his life. Out of years of much restlessness and great emotional tension he had emerged, as a traveller might issue from some mountain gorge to a shining and fertile table-land lying broad under the sun. The brooding over death which had for years filled so much of his imagination seemed to fall quite away from him; and with it, as part of the same process, fell away the striving after things impossible. Before him now lay a life more equable in impulse and more rich in achievement; sweeter tempered, and yet more full than ever of the tears of things, of the desire to do good and to contend against evil, and of unquestioning pursuit of duty not without the courage of hope.
His “pleasure work of books” was still to issue in what he himself regarded as his highest achievement in literature, the epic of “Sigurd the Volsung.” But during the year or eighteen months in which it was composed, his principal daily occupation, on what he calls the bread and cheese side of his activity, was the study and practice of dyeing and the cognate arts. This was necessary in order to lay a secure foundation for the production of textiles of all kinds: and it was not till he had mastered its processes that he was able to give his invention and his manual dexterity full scope, and produce what he wished, instead of being restricted to what he could make out of the bad or imperfect material supplied to him by the ordinary channels of commerce. From the very beginnings, the work of the firm had been hampered and often crippled by the difficulty of getting material, either raw or manufactured, which came near Morris’ standard. “I remember,” he said at the opening of the Manchester Art and Industrial Exhibition in 1882, “when I was first setting up house twenty-three years ago, and two or three other friends of mine were in the same plight, what a rummage there used to be for anything tolerable. On the whole I remember that we had to fall back on turkey-red cotton and dark blue serge.” There was now indeed a noticeable improvement in some directions. Industrial art was no longer, as it had been in the fifties, absolutely debased. From centres of education at South Kensington and elsewhere there had been a slow and partial diffusion of knowledge, and ugliness or dishonesty, or both, did not now reign uncontrolled over the whole field of decorative production. Adulteration had been checked: but the traditions of the great age of adulteration had become a fixed habit. On every side Morris was confronted by the double barrier of material that would not take good colour, and colour which in its own substance was uniformly bad. The coarse serges used in the early days of the firm as the ground for embroideries could only be had dyed in one of two ways, in bright anilines, or in colours which were quiet but muddy and without character. When it came to a question of carpets and woven hangings the difficulties were even greater. The dyes in use for carpet-work were both crude and fugitive. Those used in modern French silks he found almost as untrustworthy. “To-day we have bad accounts,” is a doleful note of his about this time, “of another set of silk curtains of our selling: green this time, dyed at Lyons: as far as dyers are concerned I wish the days of Colbert back again: it was red last time, and Tours.” “I am most deeply impressed,” he writes at the end of 1875, “with the importance of our having all our dyes the soundest and best that can be, and am prepared to give up all that part of my business which depends on textiles if I fail in getting them so.” All that could be done was to select the best and make the most of such combinations of them as were possible. “Mr. Morris showed his usual sagacity,” Mr. George Wardle notes, “in adopting this system of colour so long as the production of the colours themselves was beyond his control. His skill as a colourist 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 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. As soon as he was able to set up his own dye-house he turned at once to the frank full hues of the permanent dye-stuffs-indigo blue, madder red, weld yellow, etc. — and with these he produced the beautiful Hammersmith carpets and the Merton tapestries and chintzes.”
It may be added that, like most great masters of colour, and following in this matter the best traditions of Oriental art, he used but few colours, and gained his effects by skilfully varied juxtaposition and contrast. In November, 1875, he wrote to Mr. Thomas Wardle, at Leek, giving a complete list of the steam-colours which he required for his own designs. They consist of two blues, one blue-green, two greens, two yellows, and one brown. “To these,” he goes on, “one might add a black (if such a thing is to be got fast in steam-colours), and a shade or two of rust-yellows or buffs, which would present no difficulty, as they would be such as are ordinarily used. With the above colours I can carry out any design I should care for that did not need the madder colours, and setting indigo apart. As to the indigo, when we once get it, Prussian blues and greens will be things of the past with us.”
Curiously enough, those provisional colours with their dull neutral tints were what clung to the minds of buyers and imitators long after Morris had been able to discard them entirely. The so-called peacock-blue, which he gave up at once when he had revived the use of the indigo vat, and the more appropriately named sage-green, which was one of his particular aversions, became obstinately associated with his name through ignorant imitation as much as by careless or malicious detraction. An incident which occurred in the Oxford Street show-room a few years later gives an instance of what he had perpetually to bear from this invincible ignorance, and of how he sometimes found it past bearing. A person of importance called to discuss the carpeting of his new house. The best specimens of the Hammersmith carpets, then produced in a complete range of pure bright colour, were submitted to his inspection. He gave to them a somewhat impatient and wandering attention. “Are these all? “ he asked. He was told yes. “But I thought,” he went on, “your colours were subdued? “ At this Morris, who had been gradually boiling up during the interview, boiled over. “If you want dirt,” he broke out, “you can find that in the street.” To the street the offended customer turned, and that was the end of his dealings with Morris & Company.
In the beautiful little essay “Of Dyeing as an Art” which Morris contributed to the catalogue of the second exhibition of the Arts and Crafts Society in 1889, he gives an account, at once lucid and fascinating, of the processes which he himself had to recover from abuse or disuse through laborious researches and experiments. “The art of dyeing,” he says there in summing up the matter, “is a difficult one, needing for its practice a good craftsman, with plenty of experience. Matching a colour by means of it is an agreeable, but somewhat anxious game to play.” The theory for this practice he sought out of old books, mainly French of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the ancient practice itself being almost extinct. Gerard’s “Herbal,” the old favourite of his boyhood, supplied useful information about certain disused vegetable dyes. He even went back to Pliny in the search after old methods. “I have sent you a copy of Philemon Holland’s Pliny,” he writes in August, 1875, to Mr. Thomas Wardle, “a most curious book in itself, and the translation a model of English: altogether one of the most amusing books in the world to my mind.” Other old herbals which he acquired, both for their woodcuts and for the information they gave as to dyeing, were those of Matthiolus (Venice, 1590) and Fuchsius (Basle, 1543), the latter of which he notes as the best of all the herbals for refinement of drawing in the illustrations. “I have got a copy of Hellot (Paris, 1750),” he writes in June, 1876, “who is only about wool-dyeing: he is very minute about the management of the vats, and I think might be of some use in that quarter, as he wanted to do with his vats as we do, viz., make all the shades of blue to be used: he has an interesting chapter on kermes, which he praises as the best and fastest of colours. I can’t help thinking that there might have been some foundation for the old idea that pastel and woad were faster than indigo: Hellot says that a vat of pastel only is better for the light colours, as it is hard to get them evenly dyed in a healthy indigo vat, and if they are dyed in an old and weak vat they are apt to be dirty.” “We have been trying the ‘Cuve d’Inde’ here after Hellot,” he writes a little later, “but cannot make much of it. I was at Kelmscott the other day, and betwixt the fishing, I cut a handful of poplar twigs and boiled them, and dyed a lock of wool a very good yellow: this would be useful if fast, for the wool was unmordanted. The fishing by the way was so-so, no perch but one, but the pike rather good: I got one of 5 lb. on the paternoster.” He studied these treatises, “Le Teinturier Parfait” and others, with such ardour and imagination that he felt himself quite at home among the processes as soon as he got the necessary vats and becks set up. His first dyeings were all done with his own hands, with no help beyond that of a boy who had till then been employed as errand-boy to the glass-painters’ workshop. “So well had he prepared himself,” Mr. George Wardle says, “that I do not think a single dyeing went wrong, nor was any appreciable quantity of yarn wasted.” But in the little dye-house at Queen Square nothing could be done beyond what might be called laboratory experiments: to dye on the scale required for the firm’s wants meant falling back on regular dye-works. For these he went to Mr. Thomas Wardle at Leek. He was the brother-in-law of Morris’ own manager at Queen Square, and was then already becoming known as one of the first practical authorities on dye-stuffs and the art of dyeing, chiefly as applied to silk and cotton. Morris found him full of interest in the revived methods which had long gone out of use, but which Mr. Wardle remembered as going on in his own boyhood, and which some of his older workmen had themselves practised. For about two years from the summer of 1875 Morris paid numerous and often protracted visits to Leek, where he and Wardle actually restored vegetable dyeing to the position of an important industry.
