In News from Nowhere Morris describes Kelmscott Church, with its little aisle divided from the nave by three round arches, its windows, “mostly of the graceful Oxfordshire fourteenth-century type,” and the interior trimmed with flowers for a village merrymaking. On the day of his burial, by a curious coincidence it was trimmed with fruits of the harvest in preparation for the autumn festival. The service was read by an old schoolfellow and friend, and Morris was left to his rest “from patience and from pain” in the place he had best loved and to which in his final weakness he had longed to return.
In regarding Morris through the medium of his work it is difficult to gain a coherent impression. He turned one side and another to the world with such rapidity of succession as to give a sense of kaleidoscopic change. What new combination of colour and form his activities would take was always impossible to forecast. And the thing that he was doing seemed to him at the time the one thing in the world that was worth doing, the one thing that “a reasonable and healthy man” would make it his pleasure to do. Yet, as we have seen, all these pursuits taken up by him with so much zest and laid down by him with such suddenness, fitted harmoniously and accurately into the plan of his life, which, with the decade of militant Socialism deducted, presented a smooth and even surface, unbroken by any violent change of circumstance or method or motive. He has been described by nearly all who have written of him as “a rebel,” and a rebel he was in the true Quixotic sense, his lance in rest to charge at any moment against any windmill of convention that might offend him. A friend who was once talking with him about a forthcoming election to the London School Board, expressing a hope that the progressive party would win,—“Well,” said Morris, striding up and down, “I am not sure that a clerical victory would not be a good thing. I was educated at Marlborough under clerical masters, and I naturally rebelled against them. Had they been advanced men, my spirit of rebellion would probably have led me to conservatism merely as a protest. One naturally defies authority, and it may be well that the London School Board should be controlled by Anglican parsons, in order that the young rebels in the schools may grow up to defy and hate church authority.” His own “natural” defiance of authority entailed what seems to the ordinary toiler in harness a waste of his extraordinary gifts. His work was most of it in the experimental stage when he left it. He was too content to point the road without following to the end his own direction. “He did not learn a trade in the natural way, from those who knew, and seek then to better the teaching of his masters,” says one of his fellow-workers in arts and crafts, “but, acknowledging no master, except perhaps the ancients, he would worry it out always for himself. He had a wonderful knack of learning that way.”[4] He had a wonderful knack also of persuading himself that there was no other to learn, and Goldsmith’s criticism of Burke—that he spent much of his time “cutting blocks with a razor”—has been happily applied to him. But it is doubtful whether he would have made as strong an impression on his generation as he did if he had devoted his time to one branch of art and worked along conventional lines. His greatest gift was not so much the ability to produce art, artistic though he was in faculty and feeling, as it was the ability to make people see the difference between the kind of beauty to which his eyes were open and the ugliness commonly preferred to it. Nothing is so convincing as to see a man accomplish with his own hands what he has declared possible for anyone to accomplish. Morris’s continual illustration of his theories was perhaps more useful in awakening interest in just the matters which he had at heart than any more patient pursuit of an ideal less readily achieved. He had the habit when listening to questions and criticisms after his lectures of tracing charming rapid designs on paper. On a large scale that is what he did throughout his life: lecture people about the way to make things, and by way of proving his point, turn off delightful examples of the things he describes. “It is very easy” he seems to say; “watch me for a moment, and we will then pass on.”
Considered superficially, he appeared the very prince of paradox. Art was a word continually on his lips, the future and fortunes of art were constantly in his mind, yet for the greatest art of the world he had few words, and the most passing interest. The names of Raphael and Leonardo, Giotto, Dürer, Rembrandt, Velasquez, were seldom if ever on his lips. Art had for him an almost single meaning, namely, the beauty produced by humble workers as an every-day occurrence and for every day’s enjoyment, art by the people and for the people. So individual that he will never be forgotten by those who have once seen him and heard his voice raised in its inevitable protest, he nevertheless preached a kind of communism in which any high degree of individuality must have been submerged.
His preferences among books, as might be assumed, were clearly marked, and a list of his favourite authors contains many contrasts. Once asked to contribute to the Pall Mall Gazette his opinions on “the best hundred books,” he complied by naming those which, he said, had most profoundly impressed him, excluding all which he considered merely as tools and not as works of art. True to himself, he starts the list with books “of the kind Mazzini calls Bibles,” books which are “in no sense the work of individuals, but have grown up from the very hearts of the people.” Among these are “the Hebrew Bible (excluding some twice-done parts and some pieces of mere Jewish ecclesiasticism), Homer, Hesiod, The Edda (including some of the other early old Norse romantic genealogical poems), Beowulf, Kalevale, Shahnameh, Mahabharata, collections of folk tales headed by Grimm and the Norse ones, Irish and Welsh traditional poems.”
After these “Bibles” follow the “real ancient imaginative works: Herodotus, Plato, Æschylus, Sophocles, Aristophanes, Theocritus, Lucretius, Catullus.” The greater part of the Latins were esteemed “sham classics.” “I suppose,” says Morris in his character of reasonable man, “that they have some good literary qualities; but I cannot help thinking that it is difficult to find out how much. I suspect superstition and authority have influenced our estimate of them till it has become a mere matter of convention. Of course I admit the archæological value of some of them, especially Virgil and Ovid.”
Next in importance to the Latin masterpieces he puts mediæval poetry, Anglo-Saxon lyrical pieces (like the Ruin and the Exile), Dante, Chaucer, Piers Plowman, Nibelungenlied, the Danish and Scotch-English Border Ballads, Omar Khayyam, “though I don’t know how much of the charm of this lovely poem,” he says, “is due to Fitzgerald, the translator”; other Arab and Persian poetry, Reynard the Fox, and a few of the best rhymed romances. Mediæval story books follow, the Morte d’Arthur, The Thousand and One Nights, Boccaccio’s Decameron, and the Mabinogion. After these, “modern poets” up to his own generation, “Shakespeare, Blake (the part of him which a mortal can understand), Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Byron.” German he could not read, so he left out German masterpieces. Milton he left out on account of his union of “cold classicalism with Puritanism” (“the two things which I hate most in the world,” he said).
Pilgrim’s Progress heads the department of modern fiction, in which is also included Robinson Crusoe, Möll Flanders, Colonel Jack, Captain Singleton, Voyage Round the World, Scott’s novels, “except the one or two which he wrote when he was hardly alive,” the novels of the elder Dumas (the “good” ones), Victor Hugo, Dickens, and George Borrow. The list concludes with certain unclassified works, Ruskin, Carlyle, the Utopia, and Grimm’s Teutonic Mythology. It may safely be assumed that no other list sent in by the “best judges” who responded to Mr. Stead’s request in the least resembled this one, which was compiled with high sincerity and represented Morris quite fairly on the bookish side of his mind. Mr. Mackail mentions also among the volumes oftenest in his hands and “imposed upon his friends unflinchingly” Surtees’s famous Mr. Jorrocks, and records that he considered Huckleberry Finn America’s masterpiece. For the Uncle Remus stories he had also a peculiar fondness, and for one of his cotton prints he designed what he called a “Brer Rabbit pattern.”
The perversity that one marks in Morris beneath—or, perhaps, on the surface of—his essential seriousness, the tendency to whim and paradox so freely noted by his critics, may be attributed to his extraordinarily childlike spirit. His lack of restraint, his dislike of subtlety, his love of spontaneity, his inability to conform to conventions, his hatred of gloom, austerity, and introspection, his readiness to throw himself into enjoyment of the smallest subject that happened to come within the range of his interest, his unflagging vigour, his unjaded humour, all qualities copiously commented upon by his friends, testify to the youthfulness of his temperament, which was like that of a child, also in a certain apparently unpremeditated reticence, an inability to reveal itself fully or satisfactorily to even his closest intimates. What is most attractive and appealing in him is doubtless due to his freedom from artificialities and from the sophistries that ordinarily come with age, but what is noblest in him, and most impressive in the effect produced by his accomplishment, is due to a quality of which a child is and should be ignorant, a sense of personal responsibility. Without this he would have been a pitiful figure, disoriented, and inharmonious with the world into which he was born. It was his persistent unwearying effort to set the crooked straight by example as well as by precept, and in defiance of a certain paradoxical mental languor that flowed by the side of his energy and impulse, which made him an influence to be counted with among the many conflicting influences of his generation. While he counselled he produced, while he preached he laboured. Declaring that work could and should be lovely, he demonstrated in his own life how intensely one man loved it. He fought for the principle of art with the ardour other men have shown in fighting for the principle of political liberty. He held himself bound to justify his theories in his own action, and while it would be absurd to claim for him complete consistency and freedom from error in even this, it certainly guided him safely past the quicksands of empty and inflated rhetoric by which the expressed philosophy of his own great masters is marred. It will be remembered by those who share his admiration for Dickens that when the proprietor of Dotheboys Hall wished to teach his pupils to spell “window” he had them clean one. The effectiveness of such a method is deeper than the satire, and Morris was its most convincing exponent. What he learned out of books he tried at once to put into practice. He had the highest ideal of service:
How crown ye excellence of worth?
With leave to serve all men on earth,
and nothing deflected him from his efforts thus to serve in his own person the most crying needs of humanity as he conceived them.