William Morris: Poet, Craftsman, Socialist

by Elisabeth Luther Cary

In 1878 Morris took a London house on the Upper Mall, Hammersmith, which he occupied alternately with Kelmscott Manor. This place, which Mr. Mackail describes as “ugly without being mean,” was also on the banks of the river, and Morris gained much satisfaction from the thought that the water flowing by it had come in its due course past the beloved Kelmscott garden. A somewhat inconvenient touch of sentiment caused him to give his Hammersmith home the name of “Kelmscott House” in compliment to the home actually situated at Kelmscott, the latter being distinguished by the title of “Manor,” a title that seems to belong to it by courtesy alone.

From the great fondness felt by Morris for these places on which he lavished his art until they spoke more eloquently than his words of the aims and theories so dear to him, the domesticity of his life would naturally be inferred. Nor was he an eager traveller judged by modern standards. Nevertheless, he managed to find time for some extended trips just as he found time for everything that came in his way with an appeal to his liking. The most important of these was a voyage to Iceland, made in company with Faulkner and two other friends during the summer of 1871, just after the acquisition of Kelmscott Manor, in which he left Rossetti. His mind was ripe for the experience. He had already published translations from the Icelandic sagas made in collaboration with Mr. Magnusson, and his interest in the bracing Northern literature was reaching its height. Long years after, Rossetti said of him, “There goes the last of the Vikings!” and his mood in visiting Iceland was not unlike that of a modernised Viking returning to his home. Thoughts of the country’s great past were constantly with him. The boiling geysers, the conventional attraction for tourists who “never heard the names of Sigurd and Brunhild, of Njal, or Gunnar, or Grettir, or Gisli, or Gudrun,” were a source of irritation to him. His pilgrimages to the homes of the ancient traditions were the episodes of his journey worth thinking about, and about them he thought much and vigorously, seeing in imagination the figures of the old heroes going about summer and winter, attending to their haymaking and fishing and live stock, eating almost the same food and living on the same ground as the less imposing Norsemen of the present. “Lord!” he writes, “what littleness and helplessness has taken the place of the old passion and violence that had place here once—and all is unforgotten; so that one has no power to pass it by unnoticed.” His two months spent among the scenes of the greater sagas left him with an intense impression of a land stern and terrible, of toothed rocks and black slopes and desolate green, a land that intensified his melancholy by its suggestion of short-lived glory and early death, and intensified also his enjoyment of life by the sense of adventure, the rugged riding, and the fresh keen air. One of the important events of the trip was the exploration of the great cave at Surts-hellir, and twenty years after, many of its incidents were embodied in the book called The Story of the Glittering Plain, wherein Hallblithe and the three Seekers make their way through the stony tangle of the wilderness seeing “nought save the wan rocks under the sun.”

Two years later he made a still more adventurous journey across the arid tableland occupying the central portion of Iceland and across the northern mountains to the sea. It was highly characteristic of him that for the time he yielded himself utterly to the influence of the strange and awful land upon his imagination, and that for years afterward his writing was flooded by the impressions that continually swept back upon his mind as he reverted to these experiences. Mr. Mackail gives an amusing instance of the way in which the interest uppermost with him became an obsession leading to the most childlike extravagances. During a holiday tour in Belgium he came to a place where neither French nor English was spoken. He therefore “made a desperate effort at making himself understood by haranguing the amazed inn-keeper in Icelandic.” His first visit to Italy, made between the first and second visits to Iceland, took faint hold upon him, nor was the second Italian journey, made some years later, and marked by a troublesome attack of gout, notably successful. He was a man of the North as surely as Rossetti was a man of the South, and it would have been a renaissance indeed that could have turned him into a Florentine or a Venetian.

DESIGN BY ROSSETTI FOR WINDOW EXECUTED BY MORRIS & CO.
(THE PARABLE OF THE VINEYARD)

DESIGN BY ROSSETTI FOR STAINED-GLASS WINDOW EXECUTED BY THE MORRIS CO.
(THE PARABLE OF THE VINEYARD)

During this middle period of his life, at the height of his great activity, an event occurred involving the element of tragedy, if the breaking of friendships be accounted tragic. In 1875 the firm was dissolved. Following Mr. Mackail’s account of the circumstances that led to the dissolution, we find that the business had become one in which Morris supplied practically all the capital, invention, and control. It was also the chief source of his income. On the other hand, his partners might find themselves at any time seriously involved in the liabilities of a business which was rapidly extending. Hence the desirability of the dissolution and reconstitution of the firm. But in connection with this step an embarrassing situation arose. Under the original instrument, each partner had equal rights in the assets of the firm. After the first year or two the profits had never been divided, and the six partners of Morris, for the hundred and twenty pounds by which they were represented in the contributed capital at the beginning, had now claims on the business for some seven or eight thousand pounds. If these claims were insisted upon, Morris would be placed in a position of considerable financial difficulty. Burne-Jones, Webb, and Faulkner refused to accept any consideration. “The other three,” says Mr. Mackail, “stood on the strict letter of their legal rights.” Naturally the relations between Morris and the latter became grievously strained, and with Rossetti the break was absolute and irremediable. In passing out of Morris’s life, as he then did, he certainly left it more serene, but with him went also the vivifying influence of his genius. In considering the very unfortunate part played by him in the conflict among the members of the firm, it is fair to give a certain weight to details emphasised in Mr. William Rossetti’s account as modifying—to a slight degree, it is true, but still modifying—the sordid aspect of Rossetti’s action. Madox Brown, who was one of the partners wishing not to forego their legal rights, was getting on in years and was a comparatively poor man. He had always counted on the firm “as an important eventual accession to his professional earnings.” No one familiar with Rossetti’s character can doubt that a desire to stand by his old friend and teacher in such a matter would have a strong influence with him. To his brother’s mind, his attitude was throughout “one of conciliation,” with the wish “to adjust contending claims had that but been possible.” “He himself,” says Mr. William Rossetti, “retired from the firm without desiring any compensation for his own benefit. A sum was, however, assigned to him. He laid it apart for the eventual advantage of a member of the Morris family, but, ere his death, circumstances had induced him to trench upon it not a little.” It is easy to imagine circumstances trenching upon any sum of money under Rossetti’s direct control, and in the absence of any testimony the reader acquainted with his prodigal disposition may very well be pardoned for doubting whether any member of the Morris family became appreciably the richer for his impulse. Nevertheless, it is a reasonable conclusion that he was not actuated by a sordid motive in opposing the essentially just claim made by Morris, but was to his own mind acting in accordance with the demands of a friendship older and closer than that between him and Morris. It must be noted, however, that a reconciliation was effected in the course of time between Morris and Madox Brown, while in Rossetti’s case the wound never healed. The outcome of the negotiations was that Madox Brown was bought out, “receiving a handsome sum,” says Mr. William Rossetti, and the business went on under the sole management and proprietorship of Morris.

In addition to the annoyance and real trouble of mind caused Morris by these transactions, he had the further anxiety at about this time of a breakdown of a serious and permanent nature in the health of his eldest daughter. This he took deeply to heart, losing spirits to a marked degree, but nothing human had power to stay his fertile brain and busy hand.