William Morris: Poet, Craftsman, Socialist

by Elisabeth Luther Cary

Was ever a craftsman of the ancient guilds so at pains to make clear the propriety and usefulness of his wood-carving or enamelling or niello! Like the early workman, however, he moved with marvellous facility from one branch of his art to another. From wall-papers it was but a step to cotton prints which in a way were the playthings of a mind at leisure. They might be as gay as one chose to make them, and “could not well go wrong so long as they avoided commonplace and kept somewhat on the daylight side of nightmare.” From the weaving of hangings to the weaving of carpets was a step as easily taken, and when the impulse seized him to carry on the great but dying art of Persia in this direction, Morris so effectively applied himself to mastering the conditions under which the beautiful Eastern carpets were brought to their perfection as to produce at least one example—that called The Buller’s Wood Carpet—that fairly competes with the splendour of its prototypes. Stained glass for a time baffled him. “His was not the temperament,” says one of his critics, “patiently to study the chemistry of glass colour; or to prove by long experiment the dependence to be placed upon a flux.” Although many windows were made by the firm, the larger number of them designed by Burne-Jones, Morris being responsible for the colour, he never seemed to forget that he had come near to being worsted in his fight with the technical difficulties of this most difficult art, and economised his enthusiasm for it accordingly. Hand-painted tiles, however, which he was the first to introduce into England, were favourites with him, and in them he perpetuated some of his attempts at drawing the human figure. Furniture, though an important feature of the work undertaken by the firm, did not appeal to him, and he left it to his associates. His experiments in vegetable dyes produced interesting results, although here also his technical knowledge was not entirely adequate to his task. In connection with his textile work he early felt the imperative necessity of having finer colours than the market offered. To get them as he wanted them he was obliged to go back as far as Pliny, but this was a small matter to one whose mind was always ready to provide him with an Aladdin’s carpet. Back to Pliny he went to learn old methods, and in addition he called to his aid ancient herbals and French books of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, finally setting up his own vats and becks and very literally plunging in. At first he complained of “looking such a beast,” but his enthusiasm soon overcame this rather remarkable display of concern for his personal appearance, and he wrote most joyously of working in sabots and blouse in the dye-house “pretty much all day long.” Out of his vats came the blue of his indigo, the red of his madder, the yellow of weld or Persian berry, the rich brown of walnut juice, making beautiful combinations, which, when they faded, changed into paler tints of the same colour and were not unpleasant to look upon. The aniline dyes, which in 1860 were the latest wonder of science, and in a very crude stage of their development, called out his most picturesque invective. Each colour was hideous in itself, crude, livid, cheap, and loathed by every person of taste, the “foul blot of the capitalist dyer.” In brief, the invention supposed to be for the benefit of an art “the very existence of which depends upon its producing beauty” was “on the road; and very far advanced on it, towards destroying all beauty in the art.” The only thing to do was to turn one’s back on the chemical dyes, relegate them to a museum of scientific curiosities, and go back “if not to the days of the Pharaohs yet at least to those of Tintoret.” It was highly characteristic of him that he chose the remedy of “going back” in place of progressing with the new material as far as possible.

PORTION OF HAMMERSMITH CARPET

His work with silks and with wools was naturally greatly enriched by his use of his own full, soft and brilliant colours, and his personal attention to the art of dyeing counted for so much that one of his most accomplished pupils in embroidery is quoted by Mr. Mackail as saying that she promptly felt the difference when Morris ceased to dye with his own hands, that the colours became more monotonous and prosy and the very lustre of the silk was less beautiful. It is, however, difficult to impress yourself upon the public precisely as you are, whatever vigour your personality may have. Morris, with his intense love of bright full hues, has come down as the promoter of the so-called “æsthetic” dulness of colour, and his name has been especially associated with the peacock blue and the “sage-green” to which he had an especial aversion. It was one of his doctrines that a room should be kept cheerful in tone, and how happily he could carry out this doctrine is seen in more than one of the rooms decorated by the firm. A visitor to Stanmore Hall, for example, has noted the delicate tones of the painted ceilings as looking like embroidery on old white silk, giving a bright yet light and aërial effect, and forming with the woodwork of untouched oak an impression of delightful gayety.

That Morris made himself a master of so many crafts and grappled even so successfully as he did with the technical difficulties involved would be somewhat remarkable had he attempted none of the other undertakings in which he gained for himself a name to be remembered. His eagerness to express his ideals in a practical form led him on indefinitely. To the very last a new world to conquer roused his spirit and made him tingle to be off. For a man with the trace of the plodder in him such a career would have been an impossible one, but Morris went blithely from craft to craft by a series of leaps and bounds. He stayed with each just long enough to understand its working principles and to make himself efficient to teach others its peculiar virtues and demands, and he then passed on. “Each separate enterprise on which he entered,” says one of his biographers, “seems for a time to have moved him to extraordinary energy. He thought it out, installed it, set it going, designed for it, trained men and women in the work to be done, and then by degrees, as the work began to run smoothly and could be trusted to go on without him, his interest became less active: a new idea generated in his mind, or an old one burst into bud, and his energies burst out afresh in some new doing.” As time went on he had less and less practically to do with the firm of which he was the head and of which he continued to the end to be the consulting adviser. He gathered about him coöperators who not only were sympathetic with his methods but absorbed his style. His distinction as a designer was neither so great nor so personal that it could not to a considerable degree be communicated, and this accounts for the enduring quality of his influence which has been handed down to us through others without too much subtracted from it, with many of the characteristics most to be cherished still present. Greater decorators have existed, indeed, but it may be questioned if anyone has been quite so inspiriting; has had the matter quite so much at heart. He persuaded the multitude from the intensity of his own conviction, and he persuaded them on the whole toward good things and toward beauty. He made other men’s ideas his own but he adopted them body and soul. He followed his own fashion, inveighing with vigour and frequently with logic against nearly all the fashions of his time. It is not surprising that he himself became the great fashion of the nineteenth century in matters of decoration. And this certainly was what he wanted, in the sense of wanting everyone in England to see as he did the possibilities of household art and to share in furthering them by turning their backs upon the sham art with which the commercial world was largely occupied. But he made no effort toward gaining the patronage of those unwilling to admit that what he disliked was intolerable. His was never a conciliatory policy. The following passage from his lecture on The Lesser Arts reveals his attitude in his own phrasing:

“People say to me often enough: If you want to make your art succeed and flourish, you must make it the fashion: a phrase which I confess annoys me: for they mean by it that I should spend one day over my work to two days in trying to convince rich, and supposed influential people, that they care very much for what they really do not care in the least, so that it may happen according to the proverb: Bell-wether took the leap and we all went over; well, such advisers are right if they are content with the thing lasting but a little while: say till you can make a little money, if you don’t get pinched by the door shutting too quickly: otherwise they are wrong: the people they are thinking of have too many strings to their bow, and can turn their backs too easily on a thing that fails, for it to be safe work trusting to their whims: it is not their fault, they cannot help it, but they have no chance of spending time enough over the arts to know anything practical of them, and they must of necessity be in the hands of those who spend their time in pushing fashion this way and that for their own advantage.

SOFA DESIGNED BY THE MORRIS CO.
(Reproduced by courtesy of Mr. Bulkley)

SECRETARY DESIGNED BY THE MORRIS CO.
(Reproduced by courtesy of Mr. Bulkley)