Victorian worthies

by George Henry Blore

But it was less in literature than in art that he influenced his generation, and we must return to the history of the firm. From small beginnings it had established itself in the favourable esteem of the few, and, thanks to exhibitions, its fame was spreading. Though as many as twelve branches are mentioned in a single copy of its prospectus, there was generally one department which for the moment occupied most of the creative energy of the chief.

Painted glass is named first on the prospectus, and was one of the earlier successes of the firm. As it was employed for churches more often than for private houses, it is familiar to many who do not know Morris's work in their homes; but it is hardly the most characteristic of his activities. For one thing, the material, the 'pot glass', was purchased, not made on the premises. Morris's skill lay in selecting the best colours available rather than in creating them himself. For another, he knew that his own education in figure-drawing was incomplete, and he left this to other artists. Most of the figures were designed by Burne-Jones, and some of the best-known examples of his windows are at St. Philip's, Birmingham, near the artist's birthplace, and at St. Margaret's, Rottingdean, where he died.[52] But no cartoon, by Burne-Jones or any one else, was executed till Morris had supervised the colour scheme; and he often designed backgrounds of foliage or landscape.

To those people of limited means who cannot afford tapestries and embroidery (which follow painted glass on the firm's list), yet who wish to beautify their homes, interest centres in the chintzes and wall-papers. These show the distinctive gifts by which Morris most widely influenced the Victorian traditions. It is not easy to explain why one design stirs our curiosity and quickens our delight, while another has the opposite effect. Critics can prate about natural and conventional art without helping us to understand; but a passage from Mr. Clutton-Brock seems worth quoting as simply and clearly phrased.[53] 'Morris would start', he says, 'with a pattern in his mind and from the first saw everything as a factor in that pattern. But in these early wall-papers he showed a power of pattern-making that has never been equalled in modern times. For though everything is subject to the pattern, yet the pattern itself expresses a keen delight in the objects of which it is composed. So they are like the poems in which the words keep a precise and homely sense and yet in their combination make a music expressive of their sense.' Beginning with the design of the rose-trellis in 1862, Morris laid under contribution many of the most familiar flowers and trees. The daisy, the honeysuckle, the willow branch, are but a few of the best known: each bears the stamp of his inventive fancy and his cunning hand: each flower claims recognition for itself, and reveals new charms in its appointed setting. Of these papers we hear that Morris himself designed between seventy and eighty, and when we add chintzes, tapestry, and other articles we may well be astonished at the fertility of his brain.

Even so, much must have depended on his workmen as the firm's operations extended.

Mr. Mackail tells us of the faith which Morris had in the artistic powers of the average Englishman, if rightly trained. He was ready to take and train the boy whom he found nearest to hand, and he often achieved surprising results. His own belief was that a good tradition once established in the workshops, by which the workman was allowed to develop his intelligence, would of itself produce good work: others believed that the successes would have been impossible without the unique gifts of the master, one of which was that he could intuitively select the right man for each job.

The material as well as the workers needed this selective power. The factories of the day had accustomed the public to second-rate material and second-rate colour, and Morris was determined to set a higher standard. In 1875 he was absorbed in the production of vegetable dyes, which he insisted on having pure and rich in tone. Though madder and weld might supply the reds and yellows which he needed, blue was more troublesome. For a time he accepted prussian blue, but he knew that indigo was the right material, and to indigo he gave days of concentrated work, preparing and watching the vats, dipping the wool with his own hands (which often bore the stain of work for longer than he wished), superintending the minutest detail and refusing to be content with anything short of the best. But these two qualities of industry and of aiming at a high standard would not have carried him so far if he had not added exceptional gifts of nature. With him hand and eye worked together as in few craftsmen of any age; and thus he could carry his experiments to a successful end, choosing his material, mixing his colours, and timing his work with exact felicity. And when he had found the right way he had the rare skill to communicate his knowledge to others and thus to train them for the work.

Queen Square, Bloomsbury, was the first scene of his labours; but as the firm prospered and the demands for their work grew, Morris found the premises too small. At one time he had hopes of finding a suitable spot near the old cloth-working towns at the foot of the Cotswolds, where pure air and clear water were to be found; but the conditions of trade made it necessary for him to be nearer to London. In 1881 he bought an old silk-weaving mill at Merton near Wimbledon, on the banks of the Wandle, and this is still the centre of the work.

To study special industries, or to execute a special commission, he was often obliged to make long journeys to the north of England or elsewhere; but the routine of his life consisted in daily travelling between his house at Hammersmith and the mills at Merton, which was more tiresome than it is to-day owing to the absence of direct connexion between these districts. But his energy overbore these obstacles; and, except when illness prevented him, he remained punctual in his attendance to business and in close touch with all his workers. Towards them Morris was habitually generous. The weaker men were kept on and paid by time, long after they had ceased to produce remunerative work, while the more capable were in course of time admitted as profit-sharers into the business. Every man who worked under him had to be prepared for occasional outbursts of impatient temper, when Morris spoke, we are told, rather as a good workman scornful of bad work, than as an employer finding fault with his men; but in the long run all were sure to receive fair and friendly treatment.

Such was William Morris at his Merton works, a master craftsman worthy of the best traditions of the Middle Ages, fit to hold his place with the masons of Chartres, the weavers of Bruges, and the wood-carvers of Nuremberg. As a manager of a modern industrial firm competing with others for profit he was less successful. The purchasing of the best material, the succession of costly experiments, the 'scrapping' of all imperfect work, meant a heavy drain on the capital. Also the society had been hurriedly formed without proper safeguards for fairly recompensing the various members according to their work; and when in 1875 it was found necessary to reconstitute it, that Morris might legally hold the position which he had from the outset won by his exertions, this could not be effected without loss, nor without a certain friction between the partners. So, however prosperous the business might seem to be through its monopoly of certain wares, it was difficult even for a skilful financier to make on each year a profit which was in any way proportionate to the fame of the work produced. But in 1865 Morris was fortunate in finding a friend ready to undertake the keeping of the books, who sympathized with his aims and whose gifts supplemented his own; and, for the rest, he had read and digested the work of Ruskin, and had learnt from him that the function of the true merchant was to produce goods of the best quality, and only secondarily to produce a profitable balance-sheet.

How it was that from being the head of an industrial business Morris came to be an ardent advocate of Socialism is the central problem of his life. The root of the matter lay in his love of art and of the Middle Ages. He had studied the centuries productive of the best art known to him, and he believed that he understood the conditions under which it was produced. The one essential was that the workers found pleasure in their work. They were not benumbed by that Division of Labour which set the artisan laboriously repeating the same mechanical task; they worked at the bidding of no master jealously measuring time, material, and price against his competitors; they passed on from one generation to another the tradition of work well done for its own sake. He knew there was another side to the picture, and that in many ways the freedom of the mediaeval craftsman had been curtailed. He did not ask history to run backwards, but he felt that the nineteenth century was advancing on the wrong line of progress. To him there seemed to be three types of social framework. The feudal or Tory type was past and obsolete; for the richer classes of to-day had neither the power nor the will to renew it. The Whig or Manchester ideal held the field, the rich employer regarding his workmen as so many hands capable of producing so much work and so much profit, and believing that free bargaining between free men must yield the best economic results for all classes, and that beyond economic and political liberty the State had no more to give, and a man must be left to himself. Against this doctrine emphatic protests had been uttered in widely differing forms by Carlyle and Disraeli, by Ruskin and Dickens; but it was slow to die.