Complete Works of William Morris, page 826
In the course of the year Morris had made one more experiment in the use of type other than his own. This was a small edition of his own translation of the Gunnlaug Saga, which he had printed at the Chiswick Press in a Gothic type copied from a fount used by Caxton. The initials in this little book were left blank in order to be rubricated by hand; and Morris put them in himself on two or three copies: but the whole project went no further, and the little book was never published.
On the last day of the year he writes to Ellis:
“I am very glad that you are getting on so well and like the work. As for me I expect to have my type in a month, and shall take a room and see about comps. at once. The paper also will not be later, though this matters less as to our date of beginning. One thing may disappoint you — to wit, that we cannot make a double-column page of it, the page will not be wide enough. For my part, I don’t regret it: double column seems to me chiefly fit for black letter, which prints up so close. Jenson did not print even his Pliny in double column. But it is a case of a fortiori in modern printing: because we have no contractions, few tied letters, and we cannot break a word with the same frankness as they could: I mean we can’t put whi on one side and ch on the other. This makes the spacing difficult, and a wide page desirable.
“Would you kindly give me the Initial letters of the first few sheets of our copy; I mean state whether they are A’s B’s and what not; I want this for our ‘blooming-letters,’ so that I may get ready those which are most wanted.”
With the beginning of 1891 the Kelmscott Press actually started working. Its first premises, a cottage on the Upper Mall of Hammersmith a few yards from Kelmscott House, were taken possession of on the 12th of January. A proof-press and a printing-press were got and set up there. The first sample of the paper arrived on the 27th, and the first full trial page was set up and printed on the 31st. During February a sufficient working stock of both type and paper was delivered, and the regular working of the Press began. Mr. Bowden’s son, who continued to work at the Press until it was closed, was engaged as compositor, and a third workman as pressman.
Meanwhile his research after fine specimens of fifteenth-century printing went on with unabated zeal. The following letter to J. H. Middleton refers to some of his most recent purchases, made from a dealer named Olschki, whose prices Morris thought rather exorbitant. Middleton was also in dealings with Mr. Olschki on behalf of the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge, of which he was then Director.
“Kelmscott House,
“Jan. 20th, 1891.
“My dear Middleton,
“One of those books of Olschki’s is a fine book otherwise (John Zeiner, Ulm, 1474) and rare doubtless, and has moreover a very fine woodcut border to first page and some curious initials: I am not buying it because there is, oddly enough, the same border in another of his books (by the same printer, 1475) which is much cheaper. This border is however so fine and so very well printed that I thought you might like it for the Fitzwilliam, since though I think it Jew-dear, I should have kept it if I had not got the other. The price is £15, but I daresay O. would take less. Shall I send it you to look at? I have just bought a very fine and interesting book: Speculum Humanæ Salvationis (in Dutch), Culembourg, Veldener, 1483. That says little; but the point of it is that it has in it all the cuts from the block-book Speculum (116) and 12 more seemingly of the same date. These are not recut, but are printed from the original blocks sawn in two down the columns of the canopies: some of these cuts are to my mind far away the best woodcuts ever done, and generally the designs are admirable: at once decorative, and serious with the devotional fervour of the best side of the Middle Ages. The date of the cutting you know is probably about 1430.
“Do you know if they have a copy at the University Library? If they have not I should like to show Mr. Jenkinson the book when I come your way. My copy belonged to the Enschede people, who you may know were a very old firm of type-founders.
“By the way I expect my press will be at work in about a month.
“Yours affectionately,
“WILLIAM MORRIS.”
On the 11th of February he writes to Ellis:
“This is the state of things. The punches all cut, and matrices all struck: I had a little lot of type cast to see if any alterations were required, and set up a page of the 4to as there was not enough for the folio; I had the g recut because it seemed to me too black. I then ordered five cwt. of the type, which I am told is enough, and am expecting to have it towards the end of this week or beginning of next. As soon as I get it I will set up a trial page of the G. L.
“Then paper — the trial lot turned out not quite right, not sized quite hard enough, though I think better than any modern paper I have come across. He is going to size it harder. But it is only a little lot (9 reams), therefore I intend printing a little edition of the Glittering Plain on it. Moreover we had better not be too cocksure about the paper, we might find it desirable to make a bigger sheet. In any case however we might set up a section or so of the G. L. and let the type be till we had got the paper right. I was not going to send you a specimen of the type till we could set up a page of the G. L. But I can sympathize with my pardner’s anxiety; and accordingly send him a page of the G. P., of course full of defects, but on the paper and with the types. I don’t know what you will think of it; but I think it precious good. Crane when he saw it beside Jenson thought it more Gothic-looking: this is a fact, and a cheerful one to me.”
The first sheet of “The Story of the Glittering Plain,” which owing to this accidental collocation of circumstances was the first book printed at and issued from the Kelmscott Press, was printed off on the 2nd of March, and the last on the 4th of April. Only two hundred copies on paper, besides six on vellum, were printed. It was issued in May by Messrs. Reeves and Turner, Morris’ ordinary publishers. The printing had been carried through under great difficulties. Towards the end of February Morris was laid up for several weeks with a severe attack of gout, attended by other symptoms of an alarming kind. On consultation the kidneys were found to be gravely affected; and he was told that henceforth he must consider himself an invalid to the extent of husbanding his strength and living under a very careful regimen.
In the height of the attack, and before he was able to hold a pen,— “my hand seems lead and my wrist string” — he writes to Ellis with unconquerable spirit:
“And now as to the joint enterprise: I have got my type and am hard at work on the Glittering Plain, which I hope to get out in about six weeks time; about the same time I expect the first instalment of my due stock of paper; and I don’t see why we then should not be ready to go ahead with G. L., only I certainly must see you before we settle matters. Meantime, as soon as I can stand up, or before, I will get a mere trial page or two of the G. L. set up, and then you can get some idea of the number of pages.
“Yes, ’tis a fine thing to have some interesting work to do, and more than ever when one is in trouble — I found that out the other day.”
From Folkestone, where he had gone to pick up his strength after this illness, he writes a month later, “I think I shall make some scratch of a border to each life or section. I want to make it grand. I have a specimen of the new paper this morning, it is admirable — couldn’t be better.” While there, he designed the ornamental border for the first page of “The Golden Legend,” and several of the large floriated initials, or “bloomers,” as they are called in the traditional slang of the press. As soon as he came back to London, a regular pressman was permanently engaged (the one got in to help in the printing of “The Story of the Glittering Plain” had only been taken for the job) and the printing of “The Golden Legend” began to go steadily on. The first sheet was printed off by the middle of May: and before the end of that month the Press had been removed into larger premises in Sussex House, next door to the cottage first occupied by it.
“The new printed sheets of the G. L. look very well indeed,” says a letter of the 20th of May. “Pleased as I am with my printing, when I saw my two men at work on the press yesterday with their sticky printers’ ink, I couldn’t help lamenting the simplicity of the scribe and his desk, and his black ink and blue and red ink, and I almost felt ashamed of my press after all. I am writing a short narrative poem to top up my new book with. My wig! but it is garrulous: I can’t help it, the short lines and my old recollections lead me on.”
The volume of his own collected verses which, under the title of “Poems by the Way,” was the second book issued from the Kelmscott Press, did not actually begin to be printed till July: but during May he was busy in collecting and passing judgment on those shorter unpublished poems of his own which were to form its main contents. He was habitually careless about his own manuscripts, and kept no record of what he had written or even of what he had published. Without the help of Mr. Fairfax Murray, into whose hands a number of the unpublished manuscripts had passed, and who had kept a record of all the poems which had ever been printed in magazines or elsewhere, the collection could hardly have been made. As it is, a number of his poems, which would have come within the general scope of the book, escaped his notice altogether. Apart from the longer narrative poems belonging to the period of “The Earthly Paradise,” there are still sufficient of these yet unpublished pieces, — lyrics, sonnets, and ballads, — to make up a second volume of “Poems by the Way” as large as the first.
Among the pieces which had been rescued from total disappearance by Mr. Murray were a few belonging to the earliest years, the period of “The Defence of Guenevere.” Of two of them he writes to Murray, “Catherine puzzles me: I have not the slightest recollection of any stanza of it. Did I write it? Is it a translation? I think not the latter; but it is devilish like. It is much too long, and I fear it is too rude to be altered. The Long Land I like in a fashion. But O the callowness of it! Item it is tainted with imitation of Browning, as Browning then was.” None of these very early pieces were finally included in the volume published. The poem of “Goldilocks and Goldilocks,” which concludes the volume, was the only one written for it now: the remainder of its contents, which are placed in a studied disarrangement, fall into two groups. One of these consists of poems written in the six or seven years between 1867 and 1874, the period which begins with “The Life and Death of Jason” and ends with “Love is Enough.” The other is made up of poems of a period divided from the former by an interval of ten years. It begins with the first of the “Chants for Socialists” of 1884; and includes the political verses, as they might be called, of militant Socialism, the fragments which he thought most worthy of survival from his versified Socialist romance of the “Pilgrims of Hope,” and the ballads and romantic pieces of the three or four years which had elapsed since the beginnings of his return to literature. Intermediate between the two main groups, and of very various dates, are the verses for his own tapestries, or for Burne-Jones’s pictures, of which between thirty and forty are printed in the volume. Only one poem previously unpublished, “The Folkmote by the River,” belongs to the more recent years.
Some of the poems of the earlier period have a special history or association. “The God of the Poor” (which had already been printed in the Fortnightly Review for August, 1868) was almost, if not quite, the first piece he wrote when he resumed the writing of poetry after he had left Red House. The two beautiful lyrics, “From the Upland to the Sea” and “Meeting in Winter,” are songs from “The Story of Orpheus,” which had been written for “The Earthly Paradise,” but never published. “A Garden by the Sea” is a later version of the song of the water-nymph to Hylas in the fourth book of “The Life and Death of Jason.” The minute differences in language, in one of the most haunting and exquisitely finished of all his lyrics, are of no little interest. The lines “To the Muse of the North,” it may be worth while to note, were written before his first visit to Iceland, and show more clearly than any comment how the land and all that had come from it filled his imagination. The curious poem entitled “Pain and Time Strive Not,” which is of a date somewhere between 1871 and 1873, is remarkable as the single instance in which Morris, after the first enthusiasm of his early years in London had cooled, has distinctly imitated the manner and versification of Rossetti.
“The title of my new book,” Morris wrote to his publishers in June, “will be Poems by the Way; the format the same as the Glittering Plain. It will be printed in red and black. The poems will include some recently written and some written many years ago. Some have appeared in magazines, but with the two exceptions of a little piece out of the Jason and one out of the Ogier, they will none of them have been printed in any book of mine.”
The “little piece out of the Jason” is the one just mentioned; that from “Ogier the Dane,” which was in the end not included, was one of the versions of the song beginning In the white-flowered hawthorn brake, in that poem. These two lyrics are, in the opinion of many judges, the most beautiful of all he ever wrote, and both are among the rare instances of lyrics which remained for years in his mind, and which he remodelled or retouched again and again. Two earlier versions of this latter piece are extant: its original form, as a lyric in the “Scenes from the Fall of Troy,” has been already quoted. An intermediate version occurs in the cancelled and rewritten Prologue to “The Earthly Paradise.” Whether the lyric which he proposed to insert in the new volume was one of these two earlier versions, or (as in the case of the lyric from “Jason “) a later version than that already published, and in that case a fourth version of the same piece, there are now no means of discovering.
In this pleasant work, and in the active joy of returning health, the spring and summer passed easily away. “The blossom is splendid,” he writes on the 10th of May. “London in the older parts like the Inns of Court really looks well in this spring-time with the bright fresh green against the smoky old walls. Spring over, it becomes London again, and no more an enchanted city.”
“I have the usual complaint at my pen’s end of nothing to tell,” he. adds two days later. “The weather is beautifully bright and quite hot; the pear and cherry blossom is going off, and spring will soon have slid into summer, though the lilac is yet to come.”
“It is a hottish close morning,” says a letter of the 3rd of June, “rather dull with London smoke. I have just been down the garden to see how things were doing, and find that they are getting on. Not so many slugs and snails by a long way, and the new planted things are growing now; the sweet peas promising well, the peonies in bud, as well as the scarlet poppies. All well at the press: we are now really getting on, so that finishing the Golden Legend is looking something more than a dream.”
At the end of July he writes from Folkestone to Mrs. Burne-Jones just before starting on a tour in Northern France with his daughter Jenny :
“I am ashamed to say that I am not as well as I should like, and am even such a fool as to be rather anxious — about myself this time. But I suppose the anxiety is part of the ailment. I hope you are better, as I have still some anxiety left for the service of my friends.
“On Sunday we had a strange show: a sea-fog came on in the afternoon after a bright morning, which gradually invaded the whole land under the downs; but we clomb to the top of them and found them and all the uplands beyond lying under a serene calm sunny sky, the tops of the cliffs towards Dover coming bright and sharp above the fog, and throwing a blue shadow on it; below a mere sea of cloud, not a trace of the sea (proper), wave on wave of it. It looked like Long Jokull (in Iceland), only that was glittering white and this was goose-breast colour. I thought it awful to look on, and it made me feel uneasy, as if there were wild goings on preparing for us underneath the veil.”
The French tour of three weeks in August was the renewal of one of his earliest affection: and he writes that his delight in the country, “the river-bottoms with the endless poplar forest, and the green green meadows,” and in the beautiful churches, was as keen and as unclouded as it had been thirty-three years before. “I have given myself up to thinking of nothing but the passing day and keeping my eyes open.”
The two letters which follow were written to Mr. Emery Walker on the journey. In the first, the reference at the beginning is to the fount of Gothic type which he had just designed for the Kelmscott Press, and which was now in course of being cut by Mr. Prince. “By the Way” in the second was the familiar and disrespectful title of his new volume of poems.
“Beauvais,
“August 13th, 1891.
“My dear Walker,
“Many thanks for your letter and inclosures. I chuckled over the upside down A. I have written to Prince: he has now done eihlnoprt. The t does not look well: I think I shall have to re-design it. The e also looks a little wrong, but might be altered. The rest look very well indeed. I shall be pretty certainly at home on August 30. I leave for Soissons to-morrow, and I suppose shall get to Reims on Saturday. But I don’t think we shall find any place better than this: the town is delightful quite apart from the Cathedral and St. Stephen’s. Also our inn is comfortable, which is something. We went a long drive yesterday (morning drizzly, afternoon downright wet, but a jolly drive of near twenty miles and back) and saw the two churches of Gournay en Bray, and St. Germer en Fly: both early and interesting; the second exceedingly beautiful: a huge church, Norman, with vaulting and insertions of transitional, and a long lady-chapel with its vestibule, time of St. Louis (late thirteenth century). The chapel (not the vestibule) had been restored, pretty badly; but had three stained windows (of its own date) about as good as any I ever saw. The rest of the church quite unrestored: also there are grills of twelfth century round the choir. The west end, traditionally said to have been burned by the Burgundians (c. 1470), is very defestive, but a plain (but good) abbey gateway remains. Altogether a wonderful church. Gournay, a much smaller church; the nave very early Norman (before the middle of century I should say), but with transition vaulting: transepts and choir mainly transition with each a big early decorated window in it: east end square and window coming low down. The carving on caps of nave very curious, no two alike; mostly rude (some very), but many beautiful. I am sorry to say that this admirable nave has been badly restored, even to the recutting of some of the caps: perhaps the French Society might stop this game, as those that are left are extraordinarily valuable. As to the west front it was thirteenth century; but is now nineteenth, and bad at that; they have even done new sculptures for the tympanums. As for the town of Gournay it is uninteresting, but they make cream cheeses of the very best: crede mihi experto.
