William Morris: Poet, Craftsman, Socialist

by Elisabeth Luther Cary

Portrait of Mrs. Morris
By Rossetti

The Pilgrims of Hope appeared serially in The Commonweal during 1885-1886. It was soon followed by a romance called The Dream of John Ball. This subject with its mediæval setting suited Morris well, and was treated by him in his ripest and strongest vein. Although the story opens in a lightly facetious manner, never a particularly happy one with him, its tone as it proceeds is that of subdued and stately pathos. The writer dreams himself in a village of Kent, where men are hanging upon the words of that poor tutor of Oxford, the “Mad Priest,” preaching the equality of gentle and villein on the text

When Adam dalf, and Eve span
Who was thanne a gentilman?

Apparently the dream is the result of a mournfully retrospective mood. The dreamer hears the plain and stirring speech of John Ball, listens to his eager appeal to the men of Kent that they help their brethren of Essex cast off the yoke placed upon them by bailiff and lord, and to his prophecies that in the days to come, when they are free from masters, “man shall help man, and the saints in heaven shall be glad, because men no more fear each other ... and fellowship shall be established in heaven and on the earth.” But knowledge of the later time penetrates the dream, and the dreamer ponders “how men fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes it turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name.” At this time Morris was realising in some bitterness of heart that the thing for which he had fought was turning out to be not what he had meant, and the talk between John Ball and the dreamer concerning the future, of which the latter can reveal the secret, is eloquent of sober and noble resignation. The reformer of the earlier age receives with serenity the assurance that his sacrifice will count only as failure in the eyes of the coming generations, since with it goes the further assurance that men will continue to seek a remedy for their wrongs. But we read in the conception the author’s foreboding that his own efforts toward the reconstitution of society are also doomed. The dreamer meditates, with an insight born of personal experience and disappointment, upon the darkness of our vision and the difficulty of directing our steps toward our actual goal. Morris obviously traced in John Ball’s action a parallel to his own. What happened to the one was what might happen to the other. The hope that inspired the one was the same as inspired the other. The mistakes of the one were akin to the mistakes of the other. Thus, this prose romance, of all that Morris wrote, is warmest and most personal. The historical setting is an aid, not an obstacle, to the imagination. The pathos of the real life touched upon, the knowledge that the hopeful spirit of the preacher was once alive in the land, and that the response of the men of Kent was given in truth and with the might of angry, living hearts, lends a certain solidity and vitality to the figures and inspires Morris to a sturdier treatment of his material than legends could force from him. Had some of the marvellous activity that later went toward the making of purely imaginary situations and characters been spent upon realising for us the individual lives of more of the mediæval workers and thinkers, so vivid to Morris and so dim to most of us, the result might not have been history, but it would have been literature of a rare and felicitous type.

In April, 1888, The Dream of John Ball was reprinted from The Commonweal in one volume, together with a short story based on the life of Matthias Corvinus, King of Hungary, and called A King’s Lesson. This also had appeared in The Commonweal under the title of “An Old Story Retold.”

Hard upon this little volume followed The House of the Wolfings, a war-story of the early Middle Ages, and significant as forming, with its immediate successor, a link between old interests and new, marking its author’s return to the writing of pure romance, and also his first awakening to an active interest in the typography of his books. The subject is derived from the ancient literature, half myth, half history, in which he had long been steeped, but in its treatment lurks a suggestion of the great moral excitement of the Socialist campaign. Thiodulf, the hero, beloved by a goddess, is the war-duke of a Gothic host and, on the verge of battle with Roman legionaries, is deceived into wearing a hauberk wrought by the dwarfs, the peculiar quality of which lies in its power to preserve the wearer’s life at the cost of defeat for his army. Learning of this, Thiodulf removes the magic armour in time to gain his victory, but in the moment of triumph he is killed. His exaltation of mood in thus renouncing life suggests a spiritual ambition different from that commonly associated with the gods and heroes of the early world, and conveys the message by which Morris was at once burdened and inspired: that individual life may cheerfully be sacrificed if the life of the many is saved or elevated thereby. How far a war-duke of the Goths would have felt the compensatory sense that he was gaining immortality through the effect of his deeds on the destiny of his people was probably not in his mind. He himself, despite his constitutional horror of death, would perhaps not have been sorry at this time to lay off his hauberk if he could have been certain of the victory. Throughout the history of Thiodulf runs an elevated ethical intention absent from Morris’s later romances. The dignity and seriousness of the women, the nobility of the men, the social unity of the Marksmen, and the high standard of thought and action maintained by them as a community place the interest on a high plane. The shadow of an idealised Socialism intensifies the relations of the characters to one another, and the reader familiar with the course of the author’s life interprets the narrative as an expression of personal feeling and moral conviction not without pathos in its contrast to the actual world in which Morris was moving and in which he found what he conceived to be his duty so repugnant to his tastes.

Indirectly the book was to open the way for his escape by filling his mind with an enthusiasm along the natural line of his gifts, a zest for further accomplishment in the field he loved that was not to be withstood. It was printed at the Chiswick Press, and owing to a new interest in fine printing due to his intercourse with Mr. Emery Walker, Morris chose for it a quaint and little-known fount of type cut by Howard half a century before, and gave much attention to the details of its appearance. With all his familiarity with mediæval books, and his delight in illustration and illumination, he was still ignorant of the art of spacing and type designing. He had characteristically concentrated his attention on the special feature in which he was interested,—in the case of the old books, the woodcuts and ornaments,—and had passed over even the most marked characteristics which later were to absorb his whole attention. An anecdote told by Mr. Buxton Forman shows the extent to which he subordinated all other questions to the now supreme problem of a handsome page, and also the adaptability of his mind, never at a loss to meet an emergency. Mr. Forman had run across him at the Chiswick Press, whither he had repaired to settle some final points concerning his title-page. Presently down came the proof of the page. “It did not read quite as now,” says Mr. Forman; “the difference, I think, was in the fourth and fifth lines where the words stood ‘written in prose and verse by William Morris.’ Now unhappily the words and the type did not so accord as to come up to Morris’s standard of decorativeness. The line wanted tightening up; there was a three-cornered consultation between the Author, the Manager, and myself. The word in was to be inserted—‘written in prose and in verse’—to gain the necessary fulness of line. I mildly protested that the former reading was the better sense and that it should not be sacrificed to avoid a slight excess of white that no one would notice. ‘Ha!’ said Morris, ‘now what would you say if I told you that the verses on the title-page were written just to fill up the great white lower half? Well, that was what happened!’” The verses thus produced to fill a purely decorative need were the following, as delicate and filled with tender sentiment as any written by Morris under the most genuine inspiration—if one may assume that any inspiration was more genuine with him than the spur of a problem in decoration:

Whiles in the early winter eve
We pass amid the gathering night
Some homestead that we had to leave
Years past; and see its candles bright
Shine in the room beside the door
Where we were merry years agone
But now must never enter more,
As still the dark road drives us on.
E’en so the world of men may turn
At even of some hurried day
And see the ancient glimmer burn
Across the waste that hath no way;
Then with that faint light in its eyes
Awhile I bid it linger near
And nurse in wavering memories
The bitter-sweet of days that were.

In glee over the fine appearance of The House of the Wolfings as it came from the press, Morris passed on to his next book, The Roots of the Mountains, also a romance suggesting the saga literature, but without the mythological element. The setting hints at history without belonging to any especial time or place. The plan is quite complicated in incident, and the love-story involved has a modern tinge. Gold-mane, a chieftain of Burgdale, is betrothed to a damsel somewhat prematurely named the Bride. By a magic spell he is drawn through the woods to the Shadowy Vale where he meets a daughter of the Kindred of the Wolf, called Sunbeam, with whom he falls in love. It is a touch characteristic of Morris that makes Gold-mane in describing his old love to the new loyally give the former all the credit of her charm. “Each day she groweth fairer,” he says to the maiden who is already her rival in his affections; “there is no man’s son and no daughter of woman that does not love her; yea, the very beasts of field and fold love her.” Presently an alliance is formed between the men of Burgdale and the Kindred of the Wolf for the purpose of attacking their common enemy, the Dusky Men, who belong to a race of Huns. Attached to the allied forces is a band of Amazons, and the two brave ladies, the Sunbeam and the Bride, show themselves valorous in battle. The attack on the Dusky Men is victorious, and peace returns to the valleys. In the meantime Gold-mane has firmly, though with gentle words, told the Bride of his intention of breaking his pledge to her, and the Sunbeam’s brother, Folkmight, has been moved by compassion and finally by love for the deserted maiden, who consents to be his wife. It is quite in accord with the ideal established by Morris in his works of fiction, as indeed in his life, that sincerity takes the leading place among the virtues of his characters. It requires a certain defiance of the conventional modern mood to tolerate Gold-mane, the deserter, as he deals out cold comfort to the Bride, yet the downright frankness of all these people is a quality so native to their author as to pierce their unreality and give them the touch of nature without which they would be made wholly of dreams.

The Roots of the Mountains was written rapidly and issued with unrelaxed attention to typographical problems. Its title-page was made even more satisfactory than that of its predecessor, and the device of introducing a little poem to fill up the ugly white space in the centre was again employed. The lines in this case have nothing to do with the contents of the book, though forced into a relation with the author’s purpose of providing “rest” for the reader. They were, in fact, founded upon an incident of a railway trip when the train passed through meadows in which hay-making was going on. Mr. Emery Walker was with Morris, and as they saw the hay-cocks defrauded by the summer breeze he exclaimed, “A subject for your title-page!” “Aye,” said Morris, and jotted it down in his manuscript book.