Complete Works of William Morris, page 804
“So here I am again on the lower Thames, finding it grimy; I have just been busy over my carpeteers; all going pretty well. The ‘Orchard’ being finished is a fair success as manufacture — lies flat on the whole — and as a work of art has points about it, but I can better it next time.”
“I can’t pretend,” he writes again, when on the point of leaving Kelmscott finally that autumn, “not to feel being out of this house and its surroundings as a great loss. I have more than ever at my heart the importance for people of living in beautiful places; I mean the sort of beauty which would be attainable by all, if people could but begin to long for it. I do most earnestly desire that something more startling could be done than mere constant private grumbling and occasional public speaking to lift the standard of revolt against the sordidness which people are so stupid as to think necessary.”
The river expedition was repeated in the following year. William De Morgan and Faulkner again joined in it. The party also included De Morgan’s sister, and two girls, Miss Bessie Macleod and Miss Lisa Stillman, who came full of the high spirits of youth. “On the whole the hazardous experiment of trying the same expedition twice over has succeeded,” was Morris’ report after it was over. “Our spirits sank somewhat I think as we neared Kelmscott last night; a thing done and over always does that for people, however well it has gone. For my part I didn’t so much feel that as the coming in to Oxford. A kind of terror always falls upon me as I near it; indignation at wanton or rash changes mingles curiously in me with all that I remember that I have lost since I was a lad and dwelling there; not the least of losses the recognition that I didn’t know in those days what a gain it was to be there. Perhaps if one dreads repeating a pleasure at my time of life it is because it marks too clearly how the time has gone since the last time, and certainly I feel more than one year older since I came up the water in 1880. At any rate the younger part of us have enjoyed themselves thoroughly; and indeed so have I. You know my faith, and how I feel I have no sort of right to revenge myself for any of my private troubles on the kind earth: and here I feel her kindness very specially and am bound not to meet it with a long face.”
With a long face he did not meet it, whatever his private troubles and perplexities might be. “According to my recollection,” Mr. William De Morgan says of these voyages, “we none of us stopped laughing all the way. The things that come out prominent in my recollection of the two journeys, just as they come, are: 1. Morris sitting cooking the dinner inside the house-boat with the window closed to keep the wind off the spirit lamp, and ourselves outside looking at him through the glass. 2. The party sitting in a circle at dinner on the river-bank, and Morris starting straight off with an Icelandic or other story which kept us all quiet and well-behaved till washing-up time. 3. Detection and conviction by Morris of the Thames Conservancy, which he was always catching at some new misdemeanour. 4. A battle royal at Henley at the hotel where we put up, about whether Mrs. Harris was or was not an abstraction. It began like this: we played Twenty Questions, and Mrs. Harris was the subject to be guessed — I think by me, as I was sent out of the room while the discussion proceeded how my first question, ‘abstract or concrete?’ should be answered. I remember being outside the door when the waiter came up from the people in the room underneath to know if anything was the matter. It was a warm discussion; virtually between Charles Faulkner and Morris. Faulkner maintained that Mrs. Harris was just as much a concrete idea as any other character in fiction. Morris repudiated this indignantly, affirming that she wasn’t even a character in fiction, as she doesn’t occur in the story except as an invention of Mrs. Gamp, who is herself a character in fiction. It is a delicate question: I recollect discussing it afterwards with Morris in the Merton Abbey days, when I was putting down the foundations of my building there — it was recalled to our minds by the concrete, naturally.”
From Kelmscott he wrote on the 4th of September after the second of these voyages: “It has been a great pleasure to see man and maid so hard at work carrying at last. Hobbs began at it on Wednesday morning, and by the next morning the thatchers were putting on the bright straw cap to the new rick: yesterday they were carrying the wheat in the field along our causeway and stacking it in our yard: pretty as one sat in the tapestry-room to see the loads coming on between the stone walls — that was for the other rick though, just beyond the little three-cornered close in front of the house. I am afraid that the last winter has killed us a great many birds here; small ones especially: I don’t see the blue tits I look for at this time of the year. I have seen but one moor-hen (yesterday) and was glad to see him, as I feared they were all dead: plenty of rooks however; they have just left off making the parliament-noise they began about six this morning: starlings also, but they haven’t begun to gather in our trees yet.
“The other morning as I was coming up the river by our island I heard a great squealing of the swallows, and looking up saw a hawk hanging in the wind overhead, and the swallows gathered in a knot near him: presently two or three swallows left their knot and began skirting Mr. Hawk, and one swept right down on him and fetched him a crack (or seemed to). He considered for a minute or two, then set his wings slant-wise and went down the wind like lightning, and in an instant was hanging over Eaton Hastings: I remember seeing something like this in the flats about the Arun before.”
“We went a most formal expedition on Saturday,” says a letter of a fortnight later. “By water to Lechlade: then took a trap there and drove to Cirencester, which turned out a pleasant country town, and to us country folk rather splendid and full of shops. There is a grand church there, mostly late Gothic, of the very biggest type of parish church, romantic to the last extent, with its many aisles and chapels: wall-painting there and stained glass and brasses also: and tacked on to it an elaborate house, now the town hall, but built doubtless for lodging the priests who served the many altars in the church. I could have spent a long day there; however, after mooning about the town a bit, we drove off again along the long stretches of the Foss-way (Roman) over a regular down country, the foot-hills of the Cotswolds, pleasant enough, till we came to the valley which the tiny Coln cuts through, where we set ourselves to seeking the Roman villa: said valley very beautiful, the meadows so sweet and wholesome. Two fields were grown all over with the autumn crocus, which I have not seen wild elsewhere in England, though there was plenty of it near Ems. The Roman villa was very interesting, for a show place with a gimcrack cottage ornée in front of it, and the place was lovely: we spent our time with the utmost recklessness, so that by then we had had tea at a nice little public by a bridge, and were ready to start down the Coln towards Fairford, it was 6.30, and getting towards twilight. However we saw the first two villages well enough and had some inkling of the others: the scale of everything of the smallest, but so sweet, and unusual even; it was like the background of an innocent fairy story. We didn’t know our way till we had reached the last of the Coin villages, and kept asking and knocking at cottage doors and the like, and itwas all very delightful and queer. Our trap put us down at St. John’s Bridge, and we trudged thence into Kelmscott, on a night so dark that even Kelmscott lights made a kind of flare in the sky.”
It was in the strength of that autumn’s stay at Kelmscott, and all the thoughts through which it led him, that he reached a point to which he had not till then attained in width of outlook and depth of insight. An address delivered by him on the 13th of October at the annual meeting of the School of Science and Art connected with the Wedgwood Institute at Burslem, though only published in a locally circulated report, and not at any time very widely known, is both one of the most brilliant and one of the most significant of his published writings. It contains, in a way which none of his other published lectures of that period seem to approach, the sum of all his earlier and the germ of all his later doctrine.
“I myself,” he said in that address, “am just fresh from an out-of-the-way part of the country near the end of the navigable Thames, where within a radius of five miles are some half-dozen tiny village churches, every one of which is a beautiful work of art. These are the works of the Thames-side country bumpkins, as you would call us — nothing grander than that. If the same sort of people were to design and build them now, they could not build anything better than the ordinary little plain Nonconformist chapels that one sees scattered about new neighbourhoods. That is what they correspond with, not an architect-designed new Gothic church. The more you study architecture the more certain you will become that I am right in this, and that what we have left us of earlier art was made by the unhelped people. Neither will you fail to see that it was made intelligently and with pleasure.
“That last word brings me to a point so important that, at the risk of getting wearisome, I must add it to my old sentence and repeat the whole. Time was when everybody that made anything made a work of art besides a useful piece of goods, and it gave them pleasure to make it. Whatever I doubt, I have no doubt of that.
“I know that in those days life was often rough and evil enough, beset by violence, superstition, ignorance, slavery; yet sorely as poor folks needed a solace, they did not altogether lack one, and that solace was pleasure in their work. Much as the world has won since then, I do not think it has won for all men such perfect happiness that we can afford to cast aside any solace that nature holds forth to us. Or must we for ever be casting out one devil by another? Shall we never make a push to get rid of the whole pack of them at once?
“As I sit at my work at home, which is at Hammersmith, close to the river, I often hear some ofthat ruffianism go past the window of which a good deal has been said in the papers of late, and has been said before at recurring periods. As I hear the yells and shrieks and all the degradation cast on the glorious tongue of Shakespeare and Milton, as I see the brutal reckless faces and figures go past me, it rouses the recklessness and brutality in me also, and fierce wrath takes possession of me, till I remember, as I hope I mostly do, that it was my good luck only of being born respectable and rich, that has put me on this side of the window among delightful books and lovely works of art, and not on the other side, in the empty street, the drink-steeped liquor-shops, the foul and degraded lodgings. I know by my own feelings and desires what these men want, what would have saved them from this lowest depth of savagery: employment which would foster their self-respect and win the praise and sympathy of their fellows, and dwellings which they could come to with pleasure, surroundings which would soothe and elevate them; reasonable labour, reasonable rest. There is only one thing that can give them this — art.”
Two other passages from the same address are memorable. The first expresses with great lucidity and sympathy the mixture of admiration and impatient despair with which he regarded the work of the Pre-Raphaelite school of painting as it culminated in the art of Burne-Jones.
“The work which is the result of the division of labour, whatever else it can do, cannot produce art: which must, as long as the present system lasts, be entirely confined to such works as are the work from beginning to end of one man — pictures, independent sculpture, and the like. As to these, on the one hand they cannot fill the gap which the loss of popular art has made, nor can they, especially the more imaginative of them, receive the sympathy which should be their due. As things go, it is impossible for any one who is not highly educated to understand the higher kind of pictures. The aspect of this as regards people in general is to my mind much more important than that which has to do with the unlucky artist: but he also has some claim upon our consideration; and I am sure that this lack of the general sympathy of simple people weighs very heavily on him, and makes his work feverish and dreamy, or crabbed and perverse.”
The other passage is a piece of straightforward practical advice to designers. In the artist, and therefore in his art, a certain moral quality was before all things essential: the qualities fatal to art were not technical: they where”vagueness, hypocrisy, and cowardice.” And of these three, vagueness was to Morris as immoral, and therefore as inartistic, as either of the other vices.
“Be careful to eschew all vagueness. It is better to be caught out in going wrong when you have had a definite purpose, than to shuffle and slur so that people can’t blame you because they don’t know what you are at. Hold fast to distinct form in art. Don’t think too much of style, but set yourself to get out of you what you think beautiful, and express it, as cautiously as you please, but, I repeat, quite distinctly and without vagueness. Always think your design out in your head before you begin to get it on the paper. Don’t begin by slobbering and messing about in the hope that something may come out of it. You must see it before you can draw it, whether the design be of your own invention or nature’s. Remember always, form before colour, and outline, silhouette, before modelling, not because these latter are of less importance, but because they can’t be right if the first are wrong.”
The progress of his mind towards active Socialism during these two years is recorded in the private letters where he set down his thoughts or his beliefs from one day to another with complete transparency. Through many fluctuations of mood one may trace a gradual advance. Some people, even among those who knew him well, thought of his Socialism as a sudden and unaccountable aberration; or at all events fancied it a movement into which he flung himself in a sudden fit of enthusiasm, without having thought the matter out, and acting on a rash impulse. How much this is the reverse of the truth becomes plain when one traces the long struggle, the deep brooding, through which he arrived at his final attitude, and notes the distaste and reluctance which he often felt for the new movement, which at other moments shone out to him as the hope of the world.
“I am in rather a discouraged mood,” he writes in a New Year’s letter in 1880, “and the whole thing seems almost too tangled to see through and too heavy to move. Happily though, I am not bound either to see through it or move it but a very little way: meantime I do know what I love and what I hate, and believe that neither the love nor the hatred are matters of accident or whim.” Beyond all he seems to have been oppressed by a sense of loneliness in his new thoughts. Any moral support from whatever quarter was hailed by him with touching gratitude. To misconstruction he had long been accustomed. “I have had a life of insults and sucking of my brains,” he once said, with no exaggeration of the truth. A man of means and University education who deliberately kept a shop, a poet who chose to exercise a handicraft, not as a gentleman amateur, but under the ordinary conditions of handicraftsmen, was a figure so unique as to be all but unintelligible. Sometimes, though rarely, he turned upon his persecutors. “It is a real joy to find the game afoot,” he breaks out a few months later; “that the thing is stirring in other people’s minds besides mine, the poetic upholsterer, as Sir Ed. Beckett calls me, meaning (strange to say) an insult by that harmless statement of fact.”
In another letter written on the New Year’s Day of 1881 I he regards the matter with a greater sense of responsibility and a more practical seriousness.
“I have of late been somewhat melancholy (rather too strong a word, but I don’t know another), not so much so as not to enjoy life in a way, but just so much as a man of middle age who has met with rubs (though less than his share of them) may sometimes be allowed to be. When one is just so much subdued one is apt to turn more specially from thinking of one’s own affairs to more worthy matters; and my mind is very full of the great change which I hope is slowly coming over the world, and of which surely this new year will be one of the landmarks. Though to me, as I suppose to you, every day begins and ends a year, I was fain to catch hold of ancient custom; nor perhaps will you think it ceremonious or superstitious if I try to join thoughts with you to-day in writing a word of hope for the new year, that it may do a good turn of work toward the abasement of the rich and the raising up of the poor, which is of all things most to be longed for, till people can at last rub out from their dictionaries altogether these dreadful words rich and poor.”
Six months later he speaks for the first time clearly of the new day as a thing which (as in the Northern Mythology) can only arrive through some Night of the Gods, and faces the thought that true civilization may have to be reached through the destruction, and not the transformation, of the existing order.
“I suppose you have seen about the sentence on Herr Most and read Coleridge’s most dastardly speech to him: just think of the mixture of tyranny and hypocrisy with which the world is governed! These are the sort of things that make thinking people so sick at heart that they are driven from all interest in politics save revolutionary politics: which I must say seems like to be my case. Indeed I have long known, or felt, say, that society in spite of its modern smoothness was founded on injustice and kept together by cowardice and tyranny: but the hope in me has been that matters would mend gradually, till the last struggle, which must needs be mingled with violence and madness, would be so short as scarcely to count. But I must say matters like this and people’s apathy about them shake one’s faith in gradual progress.
“As to the Anti-Scrape, I have little comfort there I must say: we have begun too late and our foes are too many; videlicet, almost all people, educated and uneducated. No, as to the buildings themselves, ’tis a lost cause; in fact the destruction is not far from being complete already. What people really say to themselves is this: I don’t like the thing being done, but I can bear it maybe — or certainly, when I come to think of it — and to stir in it is such obvious suffering; so I won’t stir. Certainly to take that trouble in any degree it is needful that a man should be touched with a real love of the earth, a worship of it, no less; and I think that as things go, that is seldom felt except by very simple people, and by them, as would be likely, dimly enough. You know the most refined and cultured people, both those of the old religions and these of the new vague ones, have a sort of Manichean hatred of the world (I use the word in its proper sense, the home of man). Such people must be both the enemies of beauty and the slaves of necessity, and true it is that they lead the world at present, and I believe will do till all that is old is gone, and history has become a book from which the pictures have been torn. Now if you ask me why I kick against the pricks in this matter, all I can say is, first because I cannot help it, and secondly because I am encouraged by a sort of faith that something will come of it, some kind of culture of which we know nothing at present.”
