Complete Works of William Morris, page 808
Between seventy and eighty designs in wall-papers, and nearly forty in chintzes, were invented by Morris and carried out under his eye in the course of his business life. These numbers do not take account of the variant designs where a different scheme of colours is applied to the same pattern. If these be counted separately, the total number of designs from his own hand amounts to four hundred. In all of them the drawing and the choice of colours were alike his own individual work. The cutting of the blocks was done by workmen; but the cutter’s tracing was always submitted to Morris for retouching before it was rubbed off on the wood; and he kept till late years a vigilant eye both on his own dye-vats and on the colour-pots of the paper-makers. It may give some idea of the prodigious mass of his work as a designer to add that the sum total of his designs for paper-hangings, chintzes, woven stuffs, silk damasks, stamped velvets, carpets, and tapestries (excluding the hand-made carpets and the Arras tapestries, which were each specially designed, and as a rule not duplicated) which were actually carried out, amounts to little short of six hundred, besides countless designs for embroidery.
“Of the work at Merton,” Mr. Wardle says, looking back on it perhaps through something of that enchantment that is lent by distance, “there seems nothing to say except that it was altogether delightful.” It went on in the ordered tranquillity of spacious and even beautiful surroundings. There were pure water, light, and air in abundance; and the change from the cramped quarters and grimy atmosphere of Bloomsbury reacted on the master’s own temper. “It is noticeable,” says Mr. Wardle, “in remembering his nervous temperament, that at Merton, though he disliked the journey by rail intensely, he showed no irritation on arriving. There remained a certain impetus in his manner, as if he would still go at twenty miles an hour and rather expected everything to keep pace with him.” It was not in his workshops alone that he seemed to expect this, nor was it in his workshops that the expectation was oftenest disappointed.
But indeed even to the present day, as one turns out of the dusty high road and passes through the manager’s little house, the world seems left in a moment behind. The old-fashioned garden is gay with irises and daffodils in spring, with hollyhocks and sunflowers in autumn, and full, summer by summer, of the fragrant flowering shrubs that make a London suburb into a brief June Paradise. It rambles away towards the mill pond with its fringe of tall poplars; the cottons lie bleaching on grass thickly set with buttercups; the low long buildings with the clear rushing little stream running between them, and the wooden outside staircases leading to their upper story, have nothing about them to suggest the modern factory; even upon the great sunk dye-vats the sun flickers through leaves, and trout leap outside the windows of the long cheerful room where the carpet-looms are built. “To Merton Abbey,” runs an entry in a visitor’s diary on a day at the end of April, 1882, when the new works had settled fairly down to their routine: “white hawthorn was out in the garden: we had tea with Mr. Morris in his room in the house, and left laden with marsh-marigolds, wallflowers, lilac, and hawthorn.” Of these flowers, and of others in their seasons, Morris often used to bring back bunches to London with him, and wonder why any one should be laughed at — as in London one then still was — for carrying flowers.
Nor did it prove to be the case that these humanized conditions, these pleasant surroundings of the work carried on at Merton Abbey, were in any way fatal to the success of the business as a matter of ordinary commerce. It was not from any disastrous experience of his own that Morris was led to despair of the existing order of things. In the most striking passage of his evidence before the Technical Instruction Commission he speaks of the prospects of art in a spirit of confidence and even of cheerfulness. “On the whole,” he said, in words which must have been at the time quite sincere — for irony was a figure which he never used— “one must suppose that beauty is a marketable quality, and that the better the work is all round both as a work of art and in its technique, the more likely it is to find favour with the public.” And the use of technical education was not, to his mind, to train a select caste of skilled designers and workers, but one more broadly and indeed quite universally applicable: “that the public should know something about it, so that you may get a market for excellence.”
This market for excellence he conquered himself, partly by the mere force of his genius, and partly by real business ability. He approached matters of business in so peculiar a spirit, that the question whether he was really a good business man or not was often debated, and is still debateable. Some of the qualities which go to make up that character he undoubtedly possessed in a high measure: above all perhaps, a certain indefinable driving power — a quality as rare as it is valuable — which was quite distinct from his own energy or industry, and which hardly ever failed to affect those with whom he came into personal contact. In his immediate subordinates — Mr. George Wardle first, and the Messrs. Smith afterwards — he was fortunate in finding men who caught this energy from him and yet retained with it a full measure of shrewdness and caution. But such good fortune, according to the Greek proverb so often quoted by Aristotle, is in itself nearly akin to skill; and the choice of a good manager is in effect good management.
But for the ordinary processes of competitive commerce, and this as much before as after he adopted any distinctively Socialistic views, his qualities, whether intellectual or emotional, were not such as are calculated to lead to conspicuous success. The truth is that commercial success is an art which must be seriously pursued, and which he, quite apart from any question of morality, was at once too imaginative, too soft-hearted, and too much engrossed by wholly different interests, to pursue seriously. He carried on his business as a manufacturer not because he wished to make money, but because he wished to make the things he manufactured. The art of commerce as it consists in buying material and labour cheaply, and forcing the largest possible sale of the product, was one for which he had little aptitude and less liking. In every manual art which he touched, he was a skilled expert: in the art of money-making he remained to the last an amatuer. Throughout he regarded material with the eye of the artist, and labour with the eye of a fellow-labourer. He never grudged or haggled over the price of anything which he thought really excellent of its kind and really desirable for him to have; he would dye with kermes instead of cochineal if he could gain an almost imperceptible richness of tone by doing so; he would condemn piece after piece of his manufacture that did not satisfy his own severe judgment. And in his relations to his workmen he had adopted the principle of the living wage, and even of profit-sharing, before he began to study such questions from a larger point of view. He could hardly ever be induced to discharge a workman even for habitual negligence or, in some cases which could be quoted, for actual dishonesty. Of the feelings of his social inferiors — or indeed of his social equals — he was sometimes strangely inconsiderate; but towards their weaknesses he was habitually indulgent.
So far did he carry this interest in producing the best work regardless of expense and this careless confidence in the honesty of his workmen, that without some other responsible business manager Merton Abbey would have wrecked the fortunes of the firm. It was encumbered with old or incompetent workmen paid by time, while the more skilled hands were put on piece-work; and similarly in the office the inferior clerks had fixed salaries for so many hours’ work a day and no more, while the upper clerks were to a certain extent profit-sharers in the proceeds of the business. This system of profit-sharing was, even during the later years at Queen Square, in process of extension among the higher grades of the workmen. The result of this mingled generosity and slackness was that in the staple product of printed cottons the Staffordshire manufacturers, with their keen eye to profit and machine-like organization, could supply goods, purporting at least to be the same in quality, forty per cent. cheaper than they were turned out at Merton: and till the works were put under more stringent management, the profits of Oxford Street were almost wholly absorbed by the experiments and the leakage of Merton.
In Morris’ lectures on Art, and more especially on those lesser arts of life which, though his eye always remained fixed on the greater arts in their culminating glories of architecture and poetry, he had chosen for his own daily province in practice, the outcome of those instincts which had made him a manufacturer, and of that experience which his work as a manufacturer had given him, is visible in many passages of humour or wisdom. In the lecture entitled “Making the Best of it,” it is himself whom he describes with complete accuracy in his description of “a handicraftsman who shall put his own individual intelligence and enthusiasm into the goods he fashions. So far from his labour being ‘divided,’ which is the technical phrase for his always doing one minute piece of work and never being allowed to think of any other, so far from that, he must know all about the ware he is making and its relation to similar wares; he must have a natural aptitude for his work so strong, that no education can force him away from his special bent. He must be allowed to think of what he is doing, and to vary his work as the circumstances of it vary, and his own moods. He must be for ever stirring to make the piece he is at work at better than the last. He must refuse at anybody’s bidding to turn out, I won’t say a bad, but even an indifferent piece of work, whatever the public want, or think they want. He must have a voice, and a voice worth listening to, in the whole affair.”
Such is the ideal handicraftsman whom he thus drew from his own likeness. For what lay at the root of his belief was that this life, the life which he had himself deliberately chosen, should be, and might be, accessible to all. He recognized no essential difference between an artist and a workman. Until a state of society were realized in which (according to his version of the Platonic paradox) artists should be workmen, and workmen artists, no really sound, and living, and permanent art could exist. And the hire of the workman in any really civilized community should be precisely, neither more nor less, what he claimed as his own due, and what he was satisfied with as his own recompense: “Money enough to keep him from fear of want or degradation for him and his; leisure enoughfrom bread-earningwork (even though it be pleasant to him) to give him time to read and think, and connect his own life with the life of the great world; work enough of the kind aforesaid, and praise of it, and encouragement enough to make him feel good friends with his fellows; and lastly (not least, for ’tis verily part of the bargain) his own due share of art, the chief part of which will be a dwelling that does not lack the beauty which Nature would freely allow it, if our own perversity did not turn Nature out of doors.”
In this last clause of his definition of the ideal life, not for isolated individuals, nor for a cultured class, but for universal mankind, he returns to his perpetual insistence on the value of architecture, in its widest sense, as the beginning and end of all the arts of life. To him, the man lived in the house almost as the soul lives in the body. The degradation of architecture and of its subservient arts of decoration was at once the cause and the effect of the whole degradation of human life.
But how to begin? His own work as a decorator led him to see that in the furnishing of the house, such as it was, a practical beginning, however slight, might be made by every one. Hence he was led to the formulation of his celebrated rule — a rule that, as he said without boasting, will fit everybody; “Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.” There is no more brilliant example of a rule that is at once completely universal in its scope, and completely certain in its application.
“To my mind,” he says in another lecture, “it is only here and there (out of the kitchen) that you can find in a well-to-do house things that are of any use at all.” By this accumulation of useless things not only are beautiful things kept out, but the very sense of beauty is perpetually dulled and ground away. If this pressure were once removed — so at least he thought, and it can hardly be considered an utopian belief — the natural sense of beauty would slowly begin to recover itself, and at last the house that had in it nothing but what was known to be useful would come to have in it nothing but what was really beautiful; the mistaken or bewildered belief in the beauty of ugly things would disappear, and with the dwindling demand for them they would gradually cease to be produced, and fade away bit by bit out of the world.
Closely connected with this doctrine was his second cardinal axiom: “No work which cannot be done with pleasure in the doing is worth doing.” That “natural aptitude for his work so strong that no education can force him away from his special bent” was a quality in him which he could not believe to be unique or even peculiar. “I tried to think what would happen to me,” he says in another lecture, that entitled “The Prospects of Architecture in Civilization,” “if I were forbidden my ordinary daily work; and I knew that I should die of despair and weariness. It was clear to me that I worked not in the least in the world for the sake of earning leisure by it, but partly driven by the fear of starvation or disgrace, and partly, and even a very great deal, because I love the work itself.” As he accounted labour without pleasure inhuman, so he claimed as the labourer’s right an amount of spontaneity in his work that was far removed from the actual conditions of common labour. What he could least bear, he used to say, if he were a workman, was the uninterrupted work required of them during working hours, and he was sorry for men who had to do it. While he was working himself it was always noticeable how he would break off every now and then to get up and look out of the window, or walk up and down the room, and yet his actual output would be faster and more continuous than that of any workman who never stirred from his bench or took his hand off his machine. His horror of pleasureless labour made him keenly sympathetic with the working man even in his least lovely phases. “If I were to work ten hours a day at work I despised and hated, I should spend my leisure, I hope in political agitation, but I fear in drinking.” Even of the ideal workman described above, the workman who is an artist, he confesses that “the capitalist will be apt to call him a troublesome fellow; and in fact he will be troublesome, mere grit and friction in the wheels of the money-making machine, yes, will stop the machine perhaps.” And so for the workman who was troublesome without being an artist, who was grit in the wheels from no high discontent or haunting ideal, but only from the incompetence and vice he had inherited from a degraded ancestry and developed in an inhuman environment, he made the largest allowances and had almost inexhaustible patience.
Thus it was that, before and after the adoption of his final political creed, Morris carried on his work patiently from day to day, and thus it was that he exhorted others by word and example to carry on theirs; “not living like fools and fine gentlemen, and not beaten by the muddle, but like good fellows trying by some dim candlelight to set our workshop ready against to-morrow’s daylight.” Blessed is that servant, whom his lord when he cometh shall find so doing.
CHAPTER XIV. CONCENTRATION. 1882
OF the year between the establishment of the works at Merton Abbey and the return of Morris to active political life as a member of the Socialist party at the beginning of 1883, it so happens that there are unusually few records. Perhaps their scarcity is not altogether accidental. He was working out new theories of life; he was doing this very much alone; and he had less leisure than usual, and perhaps less inclination than leisure, for correspondence, or for holiday-making, or for anything beyond work and thought. “I feel a lonely kind of a chap,” he says of himself, half humorously and half self-pityingly. Early in the year he had gone down with his elder daughter to the little house at Rottingdean which Burne-Jones had bought the year before. From there he wrote to Mrs. Burne-Jones on the 10th of January:
“Here we are: having just come back from an expedition to Brighton: we spent an hour or more in the aquarium (where our presence caused astonishment, YE Old English Fair not having begun till the afternoon, nor the other damnations which are strung on the much neglected fish). I think I saw more ugly people in Brighton in the course of an hour than I have seen otherwise for the last twenty years: as you justly remark, serves me right for going into Brighton: but you see we went there to do a little shopping. Yesterday was a lovely day, and we took a trap and drove to Lewes: you have to go a long way round, as the wheel-roads across the downs are doubtful it seems: it is very beautiful when you get on to the brow of the hill above Falmer: a long way off to the right you can see Lewes lying like a box of toys under a great amphitheatre of chalk hills: the whole ride is very pleasant: Lewes when you get there lies on a ridge in its valley, the street winding down to the river (Ouse) which runs into the sea at Newhaven: on the whole it is set down better than any town I have seen in England: unluckily it is not a very interesting town in itself: there is a horrible workhouse or prison on the outskirts, and close by a hideous row of builders’ houses: there are three old Churches in it, dismally restored, but none of them ever over-remarkable: there is the remain of a castle, 14th century: but it is not grand at all. Never the less it isn’t a bad country town, only not up to its position.
“The house is very pleasant and agreeable and suits me to a T; and I am in very good order, and quite satisfied, bating a little unavoidable anxiety, though J. has been hitherto quite well and seemingly very happy. I am hard at work on my Birmingham lecture: I don’t feel as if I had much left to say, but must do all I can to say it decently, so as not to discredit the cause.”
To write a new lecture was still immense labour and pain to him: “I know what I want to say, but the cursed words go to water between my fingers “; and the discouragement in which he writes to Mrs. Burne-Jones again on his return to London a week later is partly no doubt the effect of this struggle over the lecture on “Some of the Minor Arts of Life,” which he was now preparing. It was delivered at the Midland Institute, Birmingham, on the 23rd of January, and was afterwards printed, under the title of “The Lesser Arts of Life,” in the volume of lectures on Art published that year in aid of the funds of the Society for Protection of Ancient Buildings. In both letters it will be noticed that the “cause” still means to him primarily and specifically that of art, though the name of art has taken to him a new and a more profound meaning.
