Complete Works of William Morris, page 805
A month later he writes again:
“How people talk as if there were no wrongs of society against all the poor devils it has driven demented in one way or other! Yet I don’t wonder at rich men trembling either: for it does seem as though a rising impatience against the injustice of society was in the air; and no wonder that the craziest heads, that feel this injustice most, breed schemes for setting it all right with a stroke of lightning. There was a curious and thoughtful letter from America in Tuesday night’s Echo, the writer of which seemed to have been struck by this thought as to matters over there: quoth he, there is no respect for people in authority there: every one knows that they are there by virtue of a bargain struck by selfishness and selfishness, (I quote his matter only,) and a sort of despair besets people about it. All political change seems to me useful now as making it possible to get the social one: I don’t mean to say that I myself make any wide distinction between political and social; I am only using the words in the common way.”
And once more three weeks later:
“I don’t quite agree with you in condemning grumbling against follies and ills that oppress the world at large, even among friends; for you see it is but now and then that one has a chance of speaking about the thing in public, and meantime one’s heart is hot with it, and some expression of it is like to quicken the flame even in those that one loves and respects most, and it is good to feel the air laden with the coming storm even as we go about our daily work or while away time in light matters. To do nothing but grumble and not to act — that is throwing away one’s life: but I don’t think that words on our cause that we have at heart do nothing but wound the air, even when spoken among friends: ’tis at worst like the music to which men go to battle. Of course if the thing is done egotistically ’tis bad so far; but that again, how to do it well or ill, is a matter of art like other things.”
A matter of art like other things! from this position he strayed far, in the opinion of many of his perplexed friends and jeering opponents, in the years when he was an active worker for the Socialist cause: and certainly the storm-laden air that he began to feel round him was partly at least an atmosphere of his own creation: a mirage, a fool’s paradise, it was freely called by those who, if they ever strayed into a fool’s paradise of their own, would at all events never be lured towards it by any super-flux of sympathy or any ardour of imagination. Yet to look a little deeper, this atmosphere, imagined or created, and created so far as really imagined, is just what art and art alone gives; and it is well to realize that mankind, if they propose to do without such dreams as this, can buy release from them only by the deliberate destruction of art and renunciation of beauty. Whether the result would be worth the price is a remote and rather abstract question; the price is unpayable.
These last letters are from Kelmscott. The return to London had its natural effect of shaping more or less vague broodings into matters of clear visible right and wrong. “As to my ‘symptoms’ on being pitchforked into the dirt and misery of the Centre of Intelligence,” he breaks out on his return, “I must hold my peace about them, I suppose: only in sober earnest I must ask you to believe that they are not wholly selfish; since I could, if I would, more or less escape from this captivity, and would do so if it were not for the cause.”
The reference in the use of the word “symptoms” may not be at once obvious. It is explained by another letter written a few months before. He knew — or if he did not know it was not for want of telling — that discontent with the existing order of things might be traceable to some merely physical cause, some pressure on the brain, some disorder of the liver, some acrid humour in the blood, that poisoned the springs of energy. His own temper was naturally passionate, and his gouty habit, with all which that involves when the subject is gathering up for an illness, did not, of course, tend to make him less irritable. That in spite of this his temper sweetened with years was due to an amount of self-control which it is very easy for natures more phlegmatic or of more perfect physical balance to under-estimate. How sane, how full of ordinary common sense his view of such things was, is illustrated by that other letter, one of his rare excursions into literary criticism. Even here the criticism passes almost at once, and almost insensibly, into the larger sphere of a criticism of life.
“Last night I took me a book and read Carlyle on Mrs. Carlyle, having read his James Carlyle and Jeffrey before. I think I never read anything that dispirited me so much; though read it through one must after having once begun it. What is one to say of such outrageous blues as this? As to what he says about this, that, and the other person now living, I can’t see that he gives much offence, I mean to say personally; he is generally very unfair and narrow and whimsical about his likes and dislikes, but ’tis something in these days of hypocrisy that he makes distinctions at all — only one wishes his distinctions were something more than whims. But all that is nothing to the ferocity of his gloom; I confess I had no idea of it till I read the book: and yet I find it difficult to say that it ought not to have been printed, and I am sure it ought not to have been garbled, as some folk think it should. Only should it not have been called, The history of a great author’s liver? Not to mention symptoms too much, I in a small way understand something of that: to look upon your own natural work, which you have chosen out of all the work of the world, with a sick disgust, when you are not at it: to be sore and raw with your friends, distrustful of them, antagonistic to them, when you are not in their company: to want society and to hate it when you’ve got it : — all these things are just as much a part of the disease as physical squeamishness: but you see, poor chap, he was so always bad that he scarcely had a chance of finding that out. But mind you, I don’t believe he didn’t enjoy writing his books more or less, even ‘Frederick,’ the dullest of them and the one he groans over most. After all, my moral from it all is the excellence of art, its truth, and its power of expression. Set Sartor Resartus’ by all this, and what a difference!
“The story of the old father is touching in spite of its clannishness (which perhaps is not so bad a thing; holds the world together somewhat). He really must have been a good fellow not to have bullied his queer son. Only they wouldn’t have been the worse for a touch of definite art up there; even among those beautiful mountains and moors.”
But “the cause,” a term perhaps specifically used by Morris for the first time in the letter quoted above, was now shaping itself in his mind to something on which the whole of his life both as an artist and as a human being converged: and it was in London, where he saw the misery of the present most acute, that he also discerned, or thought he discerned, some lifting on the horizon, and some glimmer of future hope. To retreat from the pressure of social problems into “a little Palace of Art of one’s own” (in the phrase of five and twenty years back) was now as before possible — was more possible than ever now, when his business as a manufacturer and decorator was firmly established and capable of large expansion. Just at this time he was carrying out decorations on a large scale at St. James’s Palace, which included the hanging of the Throne and Reception rooms with specially designed silk damask, the hand-painting of the ceilings and cornices, and the designing of a special paper for hanging the main staircase. This work was, of course, very widely known; and it had attracted not merely additional attention, but additional respect, to the unique quality of his design and workmanship as a decorator. He had only to accept ordinary commercial conditions and use them for what they were worth, to become a wealthy man, who might live where he chose, and surround himself with a sort of barbed wire fence of beautiful objects. This was just what he would not do: nor would he consent to the less distasteful compromise of giving up the conditions of active production to settle down in quietness at his beloved Kelmscott. The actual problem of civilization, as it was focussed and concentrated in the welter of London, drew him towards it with an invincible attraction; and upon senses always acutely open, and a brain that never ceased sounding among the bases of things, there fell with ever increasing urgency the cry of a bewildered and unhappy people — confusæ sonus urbis et illætabile murmur.
CHAPTER XIII. MERTON ABBEY. 1881
EVER since the days when Red House was to have been made the centre of a little manufacturing community, the idea of transferring the works of the firm to some place out of London had been in Morris’ mind; and now not only was his dislike of London greater than ever, but the increasing scale and complexity of the business made migration more practically urgent. Weaving, dyeing and cotton printing, the three new staples of the firm’s work, are all industries that require spacious workshops; for dyeing and its subsidiary processes of bleaching, the necessary air and water could only be had out of London for anything beyond mere experimental work. But in nearly every branch of the business there were difficulties involved by want of proper premises. At every hand something essential to the production of the finished goods had to be procured or executed elsewhere: in some cases the raw material could only be laboriously obtained from Yorkshire manufacturers; in others the designs made at Queen Square had to be sent out to manufacturers for execution. In neither case was it possible to secure the same results as when the whole work was carried out by men trained in Morris’ own methods, and working under his own eye. The least that was wanted was a single place in which the business could be so far concentrated that he could dye his own silks and cottons and wools, weave his own carpets and tapestries and brocades, print his own chintzes, and put together his own painted windows. When the separate counting house and showrooms in Oxford Street were set up, there was no insuperable difficulty in the way of transferring the manufacturing part of the business from Queen Square and Hammersmith to any centre that might be fixed upon.
To transfer the works to the neighbourhood of Kelmscott was an obvious and tempting solution, if the place had not been so remote and so far from a railway. But not many miles off lay that Cotswold country which in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had been one of the principal manufacturing centres of England, and whose prosperity had only given way towards the end of last century before northern water-power and the energy of Yorkshire masters. The slopes and valleys of the Cotswolds, where the Thames and its tributary rivers break from the hills, are still thickly set with little towns that were once thriving seats of commerce, and that still retain in their decay the traces of older opulence. So early as the autumn of 1878 the idea of resuscitating the old local industry in one of these beautiful villages was in Morris’ mind. He had gone over from Kelmscott to stay for a few days with Price at Broadway Tower. From Broadway he and Price drove over on the 1st of September to the village of Blockley, near Chipping Campden. The village stands high up in one of the lateral valleys, looking down to the plain along which the Roman Foss-way runs on its straight course northeastward. A stream runs down the little valley and is gathered in ponds to work several mills, once busily employed in turning out silk yarn for the Coventry manufacturers. One after another they had succumbed to altered conditions and the fierce competition of more modern machinery: and now they stood empty. The notices of the last reduction of wages made, before they had to give up the struggle for life altogether, were still pasted on the workshop doors. Morris fell in love with the place. An ideally beautiful landscape; clean air and water in abundance; a railway station within easy distance; skilled workmen still lingering in the half-deserted village, and owners who would have been glad to make easy terms for what was becoming almost unsaleable property, seemed enough to counterbalance the disadvantage of being nearly a hundred miles from London and more remote still from other manufacturing centres. But to the less enthusiastic mind of his manager the risks of the scheme seemed much too great; and at last Morris reluctantly abandoned it. As time went on, too, the feeling grew on him that, as a Londoner, he ought to be loyal to London and do the best by her.
The neighbourhood of London was searched all round. William De Morgan, who was about to set up pottery works for the manufacture of his lustred tiles and majolica, joined in the search, and it was agreed that both factories should be placed together if possible. At the beginning of 1881 the matter became really pressing. “We shall have to take the chintzes ourselves before long,” Morris wrote to his wife on the 23rd of February, “and are now really looking about for premises. Edgar went to look at the print-works at Crayford on Monday. They seemed promising: how queer it would be if we were to set up our work there again. By choice, if ’tis to be had, I had rather get hold of some place on the Colne, say about West Drayton: it would take no longer getting down there, or not so long, as I am to Queen Square now.”
On the 3rd of March, “W. De M. is all agog about premises and has just heard of some at Hemel Hempstead near St. Albans. Webb and Wardle are going on Saturday to walk up a stream that runs into Thames at Isleworth.”
“I went with De Morgan to Crayford on Monday,” he writes to Mrs. Morris again a week later; “the whole country about seems much spoiled since we were there; but Crayford itself less than most places. However, it wouldn’t do: though the buildings were big and solid and very cheap: for one thing the time of getting there is unconscionable, over an hour — on the whole it wasn’t to be thought of. I saw Hall Place once more and it made the stomach in me turn round with desire of an old house.”
The place finally chosen was nearer London than any of these. “On Monday,” he writes on the 17th of March, “De M. and I went to look at premises at Merton in Surrey, whereof more hereafter: they seem as if they would do, and if so, and we can get them, then am I for evermore a bird of this world-without-end-for-everlasting hole of a London.” The premises were disused print-works, on the high road from London to Epsom, just seven miles from Charing Cross. They had originally been a silk-weaving factory, started early in last century by some of those Huguenot refugees who had settled in large numbers in the neighbouring districts of Wandsworth and Streatham. The river Wandle, clear and beautiful then, and even now but little spoilt, runs through them, turning a water wheel and supplying water of the special quality required for madder-dyeing. This was one of the prime requisites, and limited the choice of sites materially. “We brought away bottles of water for analysis,” Mr. De Morgan says in describing the various searches after the desired factory, “to make sure that it was fit to dye with. I recollect Morris’ delight when a certificate was sent from an eminent analyst to the effect that a sample taken from pipes supplying all Lambeth was totally unfit for consumption and could only result in prompt zymotic disease: ‘There’s your science for you, De Morgan!’ said Morris. I explained that if the analyst had known that 250,000 people drank the water daily he would have analyzed it different. This was in Battersea and never came to anything.”
The works stood on about seven acres of ground, including a large meadow as well as an orchard and vegetable garden. They were old-fashioned, though still in good repair. The riverside and the mill pond are thickly set with willows and large poplars; behind the dwelling-house a flower garden, then neglected, but soon restored to beauty when it came into Morris’ hands, runs down to the water. The workshops, for the most part long wooden two-storied sheds, red-tiled and weather-boarded, are grouped irregularly round the mill lade. Beyond the meadow are the remains of a mediaeval wall, the sole remaining fragment of Merton Abbey. Within a stone’s throw Nelson had lived with the Hamiltons for the two years which followed the peace of Amiens, until he went out to the Mediterranean as Commander-in-Chief in 1803. But his house had been pulled down many years before. One drawback to the place was its extreme inaccessibility, considering the smallness of the distance, from Morris’ house at Hammersmith, or indeed from almost any part of London. The District Railway was not then extended either to Wimbledon or to Turnham Green. To reach Merton from Kelmscott House Morris had to go by the underground railway from Hammersmith to Farringdon Street, cross the City, and then go down to Merton from Ludgate Hill, a journey that took about two hours. He could, however, stay the night at Merton when there was much to be done. A couple of rooms were fitted up for his private use as at Queen Square: “Papa will have a delightful sort of Quilp establishment there,” his daughter wrote when the move was being made.
On the 8th of April he notes that he had “pretty much come to the conclusion” with the owners. But there were the usual delays and hagglings: it was desired to have power to build kilns for tiles and glass, so that covenants with regard to chimneys had to be drawn up: and the lease was only signed on the 7th of June. The next day he went down with Webb, De Morgan, and George Wardle, and the alterations began to be arranged. Morris would not pull down any of the picturesque and prettily-weathered workshops; but roofs had to be heightened to give free space for looms, and foundations trenched and puddled to keep out damp (for at Merton water lies four feet below the surface of the ground), besides the heavy work of furnishing, the building of carpet-looms, the digging and lining of pits for indigo vats, and the general adaptation of both buildings and grounds to their new uses. One of the first things he did when the season allowed was to plant poplars round the meadow on which the grounds of the calico prints were to be cleared by exposure to the air. Meanwhile he was designing for chintzes with extraordinary rapidity and success; a whole series of these designs, including many of his very best, were turned out during this summer to be ready for the new works to start upon. The move was made at the beginning of winter. His impatience at the inevitable delays was great. “I am in an agony of muddle,” he writes early in November; “I now blame myself severely for not having my way and settling at Blockley; I knew I was right; but cowardice prevailed.” The agony, Mr. George Wardle tells me, was merely because everything could not move as easily and quickly as he wished. He “could never imagine difficulties,” and chose to think that everything would have gone smoothly at Blockley. But before Christmas everything had been cleared out from Queen Square and its annexes, and the new works were fairly set a-going.
