The list of works selected to be issued from the Press is interesting, indicating as it does a line of taste somewhat narrow and tangential to the popular taste of the time. Before the three volumes of The Golden Legend (“the Interminable” it was called) were out of his hands, Morris had bought a second large press and had engaged more workmen with an idea in mind of printing all his own works beginning with Sigurd the Volsung. He had already, during 1891, printed in addition to The Glittering Plain, a volume of his collected verse entitled Poems by the Way, the final long poem of which, Goldilocks and Goldilocks, he wrote on the spur of the moment, after the book was set up in type, to “plump it out a bit” as it seemed rather scant. During the following year, before the appearance of The Golden Legend, were issued a volume of poems by Wilfrid Blunt, who was one of his personal friends; the chapter from Ruskin’s Stones of Venice on “The Nature of the Gothic,” with which he had such early and such close associations, and two more of his own works, The Defence of Guenevere and The Dream of John Ball. In the case of the four books written by himself he issued in addition to the paper copies a few on vellum. All these early books were small quartos and bound in vellum covers. Immediately following The Golden Legend came the Historyes of Troye, two volumes in the new type, Mackail’s Biblia Innocentium, and Caxton’s Reynarde the Foxe in large quarto size and printed in the Troy type. The year 1893 began with a comparatively modern book, Shakespeare’s Poems, followed in rapid succession by Caxton’s translation of The Order of Chivalry, in one volume with The Ordination of Knighthood, translated by Morris himself from a twelfth-century French poem; Cavendish’s Life of Cardinal Wolsey; Caxton’s history of Godefrey of Boloyne; Ralph Robinson’s translation of Sir Thomas More’s Utopia; Tennyson’s Maud; a lecture by Morris on Gothic Architecture, forty-five copies of which he printed on vellum; and Lady Wilde’s translation of Sidonia the Sorceress from the German of William Meinhold, a book for which both Morris and Rossetti had a positive passion, Morris considering it without a rival of its kind, and an almost faultless reproduction of the life of the past. The year ended with two volumes of Rossetti’s Ballads and Narrative Poems, and The Tale of King Florus and Fair Jehane, translated by Morris from the French of a little volume that forty years before had served to introduce him to mediæval French romance and had been treasured by him ever since.
THE SMALLER KELMSCOTT PRESS-MARK
THE LARGER KELMSCOTT PRESS-MARK
DRAWING BY MORRIS OF THE LETTER “h” FOR KELMSCOTT TYPE,
WITH NOTES AND CORRECTIONS
“After this continuous torrent of production,” says Mr. Mackail, “the Press for a time slackened off a little,” but the output in 1894 consisted of ten books as against the eleven of the previous year. The first was a large quarto edition of The Glittering Plain, printed this time in the Troy type and illustrated with twenty-three pictures by Walter Crane. Next came another little volume of mediæval romance, the story of Amis and Amile, translated in a day and a quarter; and after this, Keats’s Poems.
In July of the same year the bust of Keats, executed by the American sculptor, Miss Anne Whitney, was unveiled in the Parish Church of Hampstead, the first memorial to Keats on English ground. The scheme for such a memorial had been promoted in America, Lowell being one of the earliest to encourage it, and a little notice of the ceremony was printed at the Kelmscott Press with the card of invitation. Swinburne’s Atalanta in Calydon followed Keats in a large quarto edition. Next came the third volume of the French romances containing The Tale of the Emperor Constans and The History of Oversea. At this point Morris returned again to the printing of his own works, and the next book to be issued from the Press was The Wood beyond the World, with a lovely frontispiece by Burne-Jones representing “the Maid,” the heroine of the romance, and one of the most charming of the visionary women created by Morris. The Book of Wisdom and Lies, a Georgian story-book of the eighteenth century, written by Sulkhan-Saba Orbeliani, and translated by Oliver Wardrop, was the next stranger to come from the Press, and after it was issued the first of a set of Shelley’s Poems. A rhymed version of The Penitential Psalms found in a manuscript of The Hours of Our Lady, written in the fifteenth century, followed it, and The Epistola de Contemptu Mundi, a letter in Italian by Savonarola, the autograph original of which belonged to Mr. Fairfax Murray, completed the list of this prolific year. The year 1895 produced only five volumes, the first of them the Tale of Beowulf, which Morris with characteristic daring had translated into verse by the aid of a prose translation made for him by Mr. A. J. Wyatt. Not himself an Anglo-Saxon scholar, Morris was unable to give such a rendering of this chief epic of the Germanic races as would appeal to the scholarly mind, and his zeal for literal translation led him to employ a phraseology nothing short of outlandish. At the end of the book he printed a list of “words not commonly used now,” but his constructions were even more obstructive than his uncommon words. In the following passage, for example, which opens the section describing the coming of Beowulf to the land of the Danes, only the word “nithing” is defined in the index, yet certainly the average reader may be expected to pause for the meaning:
So care that was time-long the kinsman of Healfdene
Still seethed without ceasing, nor might the wise warrior
Wend otherwhere woe, for o’er strong was the strife
All loathly so longsome late laid on the people,
Need-wrack and grim nithing, of night-bales the greatest.