William Morris: Poet, Craftsman, Socialist

by Elisabeth Luther Cary

ILLUSTRATION BY BURNE-JONES FOR PROJECTED EDITION OF
“THE EARTHLY PARADISE,” CUT ON WOOD BY MORRIS HIMSELF

The first move was to Queen Square, London, where Morris and the business became house-mates in the autumn of 1865, remaining together there, with more or less interruption, for seven years. Queen Square is in Bloomsbury, not far from the British Museum, and a part of the ugly London middle-class region for which Morris had so little liking, but as a place to carry on the rapidly increasing work of the firm it possessed great advantages. The number of the house was 26, and adjacent buildings and grounds were used for the workshops. At this time Mr. George Warrington Taylor was made business manager for the company, and Morris gained by his accession much valuable time, not only for designing and experimenting, but for the literary work that again began to claim his attention. He was still, however, a familiar figure in “the shop,” acting as salesman, showman, designer, or manual labourer. His aspect as he strode along the streets of the dull neighbourhood must have been refreshing. Those who knew him have repeatedly described him as the image of a sea-captain in general appearance. He wore habitually a suit of navy-blue serge cut in nautical fashion, and his manner was bluff and hearty as that of the proverbial seaman. Mr. Mackail gives a breezy picture of him in his workman’s blouse, hatless, with his ruddy complexion and rocking walk, bound for the Faulkners’ house where once upon a time a new maid took him for the butcher. To have seen him in these days was to have seen one of his own ideal workmen out of News from Nowhere. As a master of men he seems to have been singularly successful, despite the temper which led him at times to commit acts of positive violence. His splendid zest for work must have been stimulating and to a degree contagious. Merely to be in the company of one who thought hearty manual labour so interesting and so pleasant and so heartily to be desired by everyone, must have had its vivifying effect. He was stating the simple truth when he said that he should die of despair and weariness if his daily work were taken from him unless he could at once make something else his daily work, and he is constantly drawing persuasive pictures of the charm of the various handicrafts—that of weaving for example, his description of which would invite the most discontented mind. He does not call the weaver’s craft a dull one: “If he be set to doing things which are worth doing—to watch the web growing day by day almost magically, in anticipation of the time when it is to be taken out and one can see it on the right side in all its well-schemed beauty—to make something beautiful that will last out of a few threads of silk and wool, seems to me not an unpleasant way of earning one’s livelihood, so long only as one lives and works in a pleasant place, with work-day not too long, and a book or two to be got at.” His own weavers were some of them boys trained in the shop from a condition of absolute ignorance of drawing and of the craft to such an efficiency as enabled them to weave the Stanmore tapestry, one panel of which took two years to the making, and which was of the utmost elaboration and magnificence of design. The exigencies of the business presently made it necessary to devote the whole of the premises in Queen Square to the work going on there, and the Morris family removed in 1872 to a small house between Hammersmith and Turnham Green, near Chiswick Lane, Morris retaining a couple of rooms in the Queen Square house for his use when busy there. Even the extended quarters soon proved insufficient, however, and in 1877 rooms were taken in Oxford Street for showing and selling the work of the firm, the manufacturing departments being still ensconced in Queen Square. In 1881 these also were transferred to more suitable premises. The dyeing and cotton-printing demanded workshops by the side of some stream of clear water “fit to dye with,” and after much search Morris found an ideal situation on the banks of the little Wandle River, near Wimbledon. There were the ruins of Merton Abbey where the Barons once gave their famous answer “Nolumus leges Angliæ mutari,” and there manufactures had been carried on for centuries. In the long low-roofed worksheds on the river’s bank his workmen could move about in ample space, practising ancient methods of dyeing, printing, and weaving, seven miles from Charing Cross. It is anything but a typical manufactory that has been depicted by visitors to the Merton Abbey works. We read of an old walled garden gay with old-fashioned flowers and shrubs, of the swift little Wandle River rushing along between the buildings, its trout leaping under the windows, a water-wheel revolving at ease, hanks of yarn, fresh from the vats, drying in the pure air, calico lying “clearing” on the meadow grass in an enclosure made by young poplar trees, a sunlit picture of peaceful work carried on by unharried workers among surroundings of fresh and wholesome charm. Women and men were both employed, some of them old and not all of them competent, but none of them overworked or underpaid. Though Morris had somewhat scant courtesy of manner toward those who worked for and with him, he had at least the undeviating desire to promote their welfare. If he expected work of his work-people, as certainly he did, he expected it only under the most healthful and agreeable conditions. Judging others by himself, he could not conceive anyone as happy in idleness, but neither did he expect anyone to be happy without leisure. In his own business he proved what the nineteenth century found hard to believe, that honest, thorough, and artistic workmanship, accomplished under reasonable exactions by people enjoying their occupation, could be combined with commercial prosperity. That the products of such labour could not be bought by the poorer classes was due, he argued, to a social order wrong at the root. The time when art could be made “by the people and for the people, as a happiness to the maker and the user,” was a far-off dream.

Kelmscott Manor House

Kelmscott Manor House

Shortly before Morris abandoned Queen Square as a place of residence, he discovered for himself a “heaven on earth,” in which he could spend his vacations from town, and free himself from the contamination of London streets. This was Kelmscott Manor House, which he rented—at first jointly with Rossetti—in 1871, and in which he took infinite satisfaction for the remainder of his life. The beautiful old place was in its way as characteristic of him and of his tastes as the Red House had been, and has become intimately associated with him in the minds of all who knew him during his later years, his passion for places investing those for which he cared with a sentiment not to be ignored or slighted in making up the sum of his interests. For a couple of years Rossetti was an inmate of Kelmscott Manor, and through his letters many vivid glimpses of it are obtained. The village of Kelmscott was at the time no more than a hamlet containing a hundred and seventeen people, and situated two and a half miles from the nearest town, Lechlade, to whose churchyard Shelley lent distinction by writing a poem there. The nearest station-town was Farringdon, so far off that the carrier who brought railway parcels to the occupants of the Manor charged six shillings and sixpence for each trip. “Thus,” writes Rossetti, who was chronically short of money, “a good deal of inconvenience tempers the attractions of the place.” Nothing, however, unless the presence of Rossetti, who was “unromantically discontented” there, tempered them for Morris. In an article for The Quest for November, 1895, he describes the house in the most minute detail, accentuating its charms with a touch of comment for each that falls like a caress. The roofs are covered with the beautiful stone slates of the district, “the most lovely covering which a roof can have.” The “battering” or leaning back of the walls is by no means a defect but a beauty, “taking from the building a rigidity which otherwise would mar it,” and the stout studded partitions of the entrance passage are “very agreeable to anyone who does not want cabinet work to supplant carpentry.” To the building of it all must have gone, he thinks, “some thin thread of tradition, a half-anxious sense of the delight of meadow and acre and wood and river, a certain amount (not too much, let us hope) of common-sense, a liking for making materials serve one’s turn, and perhaps at bottom some little grain of sentiment.” And from Rossetti we hear of the primitive Kelmscott church “looking just as one fancies chapels in the Mort d’Arthur,” of clouds of starlings sinking in the copses “clamourous like mill-waters at wild play,” of “mustering rooks innumerable,” of a “delicious” garden and meadows leading to the river brink, of apple blossoms and marigolds and arrow-heads and white lilies “divinely lovely,” of an island by the boat-house rich in wild periwinkles, and of many another exquisite aspect of a place whose unvexed quietness was nevertheless powerless to soothe the turmoil of that tormented soul.

To realise fully how Morris himself felt toward it, one must turn to his description in News from Nowhere. There he is supposed to see it through the kindly mist of time, returning to it from a regenerate and beautified world, and his problem is to write of it with the penetrating eloquence and melancholy associated with remembered happiness. It is supremely characteristic of him that he could perfectly strike this note while still living in hale activity upon the spot he is to praise with the tenderness of reminiscence. The great virtue of his temperament lay in this peculiar intensity of realisation. He needed neither loss nor change to spur his sensibility and awaken his recognition of the worth or special quality of what he loved. Vital as few men are, he seems, nevertheless, always to have dwelt in sight of death and to have grasped life as though the next moment he was to be torn from it. The burden of the song which Ogier the Dane hears on a fair May morning:

Kiss me love! for who knoweth
What thing cometh after death?

so often quoted in evidence of his fainting and dejected spirit, embodies indeed the sentiment of his attitude toward the pleasures and satisfactions to be drawn from the visible and perishable world, but does not hint at the energy with which he seized those pleasures, the sturdiness with which he filled himself with those satisfactions. When News from Nowhere was written, Morris had lived the better part of twenty years in close relation with the Kelmscott house, but custom had not staled for him its infinite variety. This is what he writes of it and of its surroundings in his romance of An Epoch of Rest: He and his companions have approached it by way of the river.