Pretentiousness was his least defect. No priggish sense of virtue interfered with his consecration to what he believed were the highest interests of his fellow-men. The cant of the moralist was absolutely unused by him, and he was innocent of any intention to improve the morals of his companions. Get them happy, he thought, with a faith little less than magnificent, get them happy and they will be good. Nor was he guilty of æsthetic priggishness. Art was the concern of his mind and the desire of his heart, but it was by no means his meat and drink. He liked good food, and was proud of his connoisseurship in matters of cookery, and wines. Few things pleased him better than himself to take the cook’s place and prove his practical skill. When asked for his opinions on the subject of temperance, he replied that so far as his own experience went he found his victuals dull without something to drink, and that tea and coffee were not fit liquors to be taken with food. He smoked his briarwood pipe with much satisfaction. In his daily habits he was thoroughly, aggressively human, and in nothing more so than in his candid admiration of the work of his own hands, a feeling in which there was no fatuity.
His biographer comments on the singular element of impersonality in his nature, speaking of him as moving among men and women “isolated, self-centred, almost empty of love or hatred,” and quotes his most intimate friend’s extreme statement that he lived “absolutely without the need of man or woman.” In this idea of him those who knew him best seemed to agree, but from his own letters as represented in the biography, a stranger to him gains a different impression. His letters to his invalid daughter are in themselves sufficient to evoke in the mind of the reader an image of unlimited and poignant tenderness impossible to associate with the aloofness and lack of keen personal sympathy said to be characteristic of him. He did not give himself readily or rashly to intense feelings; but he seemed to feel within himself capacity for emotions of force so violent as to be destructive. When his friend Faulkner was stricken with paralysis and other trouble came upon the family, we find him writing: “It is such a grievous business altogether that, rightly or wrongly, I try not to think of it too much lest I should give way altogether, and make an end of what small use there may be in my life.” Leaving out the case of Rossetti, there is no record of his having relinquished any friendship of importance, nor did he weary of constant intercourse with his friends. His habit of breakfasting with Burne-Jones on Sunday mornings and dining with him on Wednesdays was unbroken for many years. “The last three Sundays of his life,” says this oldest and closest friend, “I went to him.”
Loyalty, sincerity, simplicity, and earnestness, these are the qualities conspicuous in the fabric of his life. His influence upon his generation, so far as it may now be observed, has been definite but diffused. It may be doubted whether he would not have been best pleased to have it so, to know that his name will live chiefly as that of one who stimulated others toward art production of and interest in beautiful handiwork. But the last word to be said about him is that he was greater than his work.
BIBLIOGRAPHY[5]
1. The Story of the Glittering Plain. Which has been also called The Land of Living Men or The Acre of the Undying. Written by William Morris. Small 4to. Golden type. Border 1. 200 paper copies at two guineas, and 6 on vellum. Dated April 4, issued May 8, 1891. Sold by Reeves & Turner. Bound in stiff vellum with wash leather ties.[6]
This book was set up from Nos. 81-84 of The English Illustrated Magazine, in which it first appeared; some of the chapter headings were rearranged, and a few small corrections were made in the text. A trial page, the first printed at the Kelmscott Press, was struck off on January 31, 1891, but the first sheet was not printed until about a month later.[7] The border was designed in January of the same year, and engraved by W. H. Hooper. Mr. Morris had four of the vellum copies bound in green vellum, three of which he gave to friends. Only two copies on vellum were sold, at twelve and fifteen guineas. This was the only book with wash leather ties. All the other vellum bound books have silk ties, except Shelley’s Poems and Hand and Soul, which have no ties.