Nothing is further from the truth than the common assertion that Morris in his art turned from a life of realities to a dream-world, if by a dream-world is meant, and I can apply no other meaning, a world intangible, unrealizable, and remote from practical considerations. We have seen that the earth was to Morris from boyhood in some sort a sacred thing. And the people of the earth were no less. His one overmastering passion was for a world wherein men and women lived in full responsiveness to the beauty of the earth, labouring with their hands and adventurous and capricious in spirit, finding joy in their work and in contact with each other, and rejecting all the things of civilization that were dulling and mechanical. To object that in a commercial civilization so superficially complex—the complexity is really a thing without the subtlety of humanity in it, relatively fixed and reducible to exact formulæ—this passion was in effect no more than a rather futile dream, might be reasonable if Morris himself had not wholly answered the objection in his work. He found people not only indifferent to the loveliness of earth, but destroying it on every hand; not only forgetting the joy of labour, but debasing it into a daily burden; measuring the value of all work not by the meaning of the work and the spiritual satisfaction that it brought but by the wage that it earned, and fettered in all their relations to each other by countless considerations imposed by external conditions that were not essential factors in humanity, but the whims of a social scheme that mastered men instead of being their servant. From the first he realized that out of such a life no supreme art could spring; the material that they offered was ugly and devitalized, and art can only accept for its service material beautiful and strong. The world as he found it was fettered and numbed, and he sought in his art to create a world free and exultant, one peopled by perfectly normal people whose sorrows were the sorrows of common experience and whose sins were the expression merely of the darker, but not diseased, passions of humanity. When active socialism became part of his work, his sole purpose was, in his own words, to make socialists, which meant, for Morris, to bring men to a sense of the possibility of the life of large simplicity that he had created as poet. His practice and experiments in handicraft and manufacturing process were all experiments of the same spirit; throughout his many-sided activities an extraordinary unity of intention can be clearly traced. Morris at the loom, or decorating a page, or riding his pony through the Icelandic fords, or proving colours in the vats, or moving among the haymakers in the Kelmscott meadows, was but one of the men with whom he peopled his stories. He wanted all men to attain to this same joyous energy, and the fierce denunciations and charges of his socialistic days were no more than another expression of this desire.
At Oxford the good beginnings of Woodford Hall and Savernake were given every opportunity to develop. He found himself associated with men whose ideals and enthusiasms were as his own. He went into residence in the same term as Edward Burne-Jones, and quickly laid the foundations of a lifelong friendship of more than common loyalty. It is usual to speak regretfully of the growth of modern Oxford. The mediæval town has, indeed, surrounded itself with reaches of quite unlovely slums and suburbs giving just reason for the regret. But, as was said in reply to one who was deploring the vulgarities which have been carried into modern Venice, 'Exactly, but what else in the world is there like it?' Oxford has suffered a change, but in Oxford there are yet survivals scarcely to be found elsewhere in England. The quadrangles, the bye-streets that curl between the colleges and churches, the succession of spires and grey walls, still preserve unbroken a tradition that goes back to the days when men lived, or so Morris believed, as the men of whom he sang. And in 1853 the tradition, if not clearer, was less threatened by opposing interests than it is to-day. With the scholastic discipline, or lack of it, at Oxford in his time Morris had little or no concern, but he could have found no place more fitting in which to shape his imaginative powers. With Burne-Jones and others of his friends he spent many priceless hours determining all things in heaven and earth with the fine certainty of youth, reading mediæval chronicles and Thorpe's "Northern Mythology," exploring the enchanted worlds of the poets and stirred to new enthusiasms by the latest word of Ruskin or the newly-discovered revelation of some prophet of an older day. Architecture had already taken its place in his mind as one of the noblest of the expressions of man's exultation in his work, and the intention which he had at this time of entering the church was manifestly inspired rather by ecclesiastical art than by any doctrine or dogma. The long vacations of 1853 and 1854 he spent in visiting the churches of England and Northern France, and in making his first acquaintance with the work of Van Eyck and Memling and Dürer. In painting, as in the other arts, he looked already for the grave yet vigorous simplicity, and that sense of the profound seriousness of joy that were to be the essential characteristics of his own work. His love for mediævalism was neither accident nor the fruit of any refusal to face his own age. It was the logical outcome of this intense conviction that most of the men about him were exhausting their energies and deadening their faculties in the conduct of trivial and inessential things. In the records of the mediæval spirit, in its art, he found the temper which more clearly than any other was at once a warning and a corrective to this wastage. A year spent at Oxford in the company of men who shared his enthusiasms had sharpened his imagination and quickened his creative instinct. He was now ready for Malory and Chaucer and the revelation of Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelites. With a perfectly defined ideal already developed in his consciousness, he was beginning to write. It only needed contact with these new influences to make his utterance certain and invest the ideal with artistic expression.
When in 1855 he came of age, Morris found himself the possessor of an annual income of £900, the result of a fortunate business transaction made by his father a short time before he died. Burne-Jones had already announced, in a letter to a friend, his intention of forming a 'Brotherhood,' the purpose of which, shared by Morris among others, was, of course, nothing less than the regeneration of mankind. Sir Galahad was to be the patron of the order, the nature of which was to be a strange blending of social activity and monastic seclusion. The scheme in detail—if it ever reached so advanced a stage—passed into the splendid story of youthful enthusiasms, but its principal projectors never wavered in their loyalty to its spirit. To a man so fired, the possession of £900 a year was a responsibility not to be lightly considered. It left him free to choose his course, and it was an integral part of his faith that that course should be laid wholly in the service of his ideal. For a time his choice was uncertain; his original intention of entering the church led to a momentary idea of founding a monastery with his money. But the gradually widening influence of the adventurousness of art that was working in him made him less and less willing to commit himself to any irrevocable step. He was beginning to realize his powers; his friends, who were no dishonest critics, confirmed his own feeling that his earliest poems were signs of a remarkable creative faculty. But he was not yet certain as to the ways into which his art would lead him. Painting and architecture divided his allegiance with literature, and behind his consideration of all was the vague but unalterable determination to use his art in the service of mankind. His decision was wisely deferred until it should force itself upon him.
The first practical step taken by the Brotherhood—the friends retained the original name whilst renouncing all their monastic intentions—was the foundation of "The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine." Chaucer had been discovered, and the group's somewhat austere asceticism had been sweetened by the charity of the poet to whom Morris was henceforth never to fail in discipleship. A copy of the Pre-Raphaelite "Germ" had also established Rossetti in the friends' worship, and they had seen some of his paintings, together with those of Millais and Holman Hunt and Madox Brown. In all these things Morris found the conception of life that he had already made his own, in beautiful and more or less complete expression. Twelve numbers of the magazine appeared, financed by Morris. Its aim was the expression of the Brotherhood's artistic creed and its loyalty to the essential idea of the identity of art with life. Rossetti was among its contributors. Of Morris's own work in the venture, his earliest poems and prose romances, something will be said in the next chapter.
Before leaving Oxford Morris and Burne-Jones together definitely abandoned their idea of entering the church. The latter decided on the work to which his life was to be devoted, whilst Morris formally adopted architecture as a profession. Arrangements were made for him to enter G. E. Street's Oxford office, and after a second visit to France and its churches and passing his Final schools, he took up his new work at the beginning of 1856. In his spare time he continued his writing and tried his hand at craftsmanship. Burne-Jones went up to London a few months later. Morris followed shortly when Street moved his headquarters. Together they formed a close acquaintance with Rossetti. That dominating personality was not slow to recognize the powers of his new friends, and insisted that Morris should turn painter, asserting, with an inconsequence worthy of one of Oscar Wilde's creations, that everybody should be a painter. His proposal, although it had no permanent effect on Morris, showed that the election of architecture was not unalterable. For a time Morris painted, throwing into the work the energy that was inseparable from all his undertakings, but he was quick to realize that with all his understanding of the painter's art he could not achieve its mastery. The fact that he had been tempted to alter his choice even tentatively, however, was enough to make him suspicious of the choice itself. Without any conviction as to the possibility of a career as a painter, he abandoned his profession as architect at the end of a year. His state was one of considerable danger. Rich enough to make work unnecessary as a means of living, exposed to an influence so impetuous as Rossetti's, already showing considerable power in several forms of expression as an artist, wholly unable to dissociate one from the other, seeing but one purpose behind them all, there was a probability, in the light of experience almost a certainty, that he would become an excellent amateur of the arts, practising many things with credit and triumphant in none, a generous patron, a kind of titanic dilettante. The manner in which he overcame this danger is one of the most remarkable things in the history of art. Had some circumstance, external or internal, forced him to concentrate himself on one or another of the forms with which he was experimenting, the escape would have been normal and relatively free of difficulty. But there was no such circumstance. His activities daily became more diffused rather than more concentrated. Carving, modelling, illuminating, designing, painting, poetry and prose-writing, all became part of his daily scheme. Painting, indeed, he left, save for incidental purposes, but the scope of his practice widened with every year. And instead of becoming, as would seem to have been inevitable, an accomplished amateur, he became a master in everything he touched. He revolutionized many manufacturing processes and invested craftsmanship with a vitality that it had not known for centuries; he rediscovered secrets of mediæval artistry that were supposed to be finally lost, and re-established the union between beauty and things of common use; he became printer, and the books from his press are scarcely excelled in the history of printing; he wrote prose romances which in themselves would have secured him an honourable place in literature, and yet all these achievements might be cancelled and he would still stand as one of the greatest poets of his age; or, indeed, of any age. It is all an astonishing testimony to the vitality of his artistic conscience. However uncertain might be the expression of his art in these early days, the fundamental significance of art was rooted in his being with an unassailable strength. In the light of his life-work these first more or less indefinite gropings appear no longer as the whims of a nature uncertain of itself. The impulse within him was not to be satisfied by any partial expression. If it was to create a new world in poetry, it must also strive to bring that world in some measure into the affairs of daily life. It was not sufficient for Morris that the dishes and goblets on the king's table in his song should be beautiful or that he should commemorate Jason in halls hung 'with richest webs.' The furnishings of his own table must be comely too, and the 'richest webs' should not be a memory alone. No more perfect example of critical stupidity could well be found than the notion that Morris, as a creative artist, separated himself from the affairs of the life about him, as if in retreat. Every line of poetry that he wrote was the direct expression of the spirit in which he ordered his daily practice.
Morris's feeling for mediævalism must not be misunderstood. He was fully conscious of the fact that a few centuries are as but a moment in the development of man, and he did not turn to early art as to the expression of a humanity differing in any fundamental way from the humanity of his own day. Nor did he turn to that aspect of mediævalism which has given it the name of the Dark Ages, but to the life that produced Giotto and Angelico, Van Eyck and Dürer, and Holbein and Memling, the monks whose illuminated books he prized so dearly, and Chaucer.[[1]] He was not indifferent to the masterpieces of the modern world. The range of Shakespeare's humanity, Shelley's spiritual ardour, the passionate identification of truth with beauty which was as a gospel to Keats, the earlier poems of Tennyson and Browning, he accepted as revelations. Wordsworth and Milton he professed to dislike, but he more probably disliked the people who liked them wrongly. Nothing is more provocative than the praise of fools. But it was in the work of those early artists, the men from whom the Pre-Raphaelites took their name, that he found the most perfect and satisfying expression of the spiritual life which was for him the only true salvation on earth. It has been said by Paul Lacroix that in the painting of Jan Van Eyck 'the Gothic school decked itself with a splendour which left but little for the future Venetian school to achieve beyond; with one flight of genius, stiff and methodical conceptions became imbued with suppleness and vital action.' The same is substantially true of Chaucer in poetry. Some lessons in rudimentary technique might have been learned by these men from their predecessors, but their powers of expression were vibrant as some newly-discovered energy, and they used them in all their freshness to embody a sane, simple view of life such as Morris himself held. The subtlety which might follow in the evolution from these beginnings, the greater intricacy of achievement, would take their place in his consciousness, but nothing could ever displace his worship of these frank and exultant records of man's joy in his work, a joy that he hoped would yet be regained. They and their kind remained for him, throughout his life, the supreme examples of the meaning of art.
When he gave up his work in Street's office, Morris moved with Burne-Jones to rooms in Red Lion Square. They were unfurnished, and out of this circumstance really sprang the beginnings of 'Morris and Company,' although the firm was not actually founded until 1861. The two artists found nothing in the shops that was tolerable, so Morris made rough designs of furniture and commissioned a carpenter to execute them in plain deal. Chairs, a massive table, a settle and a wardrobe were among the first acquisitions. Rossetti painted two panels of the settle, and Burne-Jones decorated the wardrobe with paintings from Chaucer. When Morris built his own house this process was carried out on a larger scale, but the beginnings of the revolution of house-furnishing in England are clearly traceable to the rooms in Red Lion Square.
In the Long Vacation of 1875 Rossetti conceived the ill-fated scheme of mural paintings for the new hall of the Oxford Union. The story need not be told here in any detail. Morris and Burne-Jones were pressed unto the service with some six or seven others, and each painted one picture, Morris in addition designing and carrying out the decoration of the ceiling. No proper preparations were made for the work, and the paintings have perished. The undertaking is interesting to us here as throwing sidelights on certain aspects of Morris's temperament. He had begun and finished his picture long before any of the others, and while they were still engaged on their appointed shares he had voluntarily set himself to the ceiling design. His capacity for work, of which this is the first striking example, was always enormous, and it is not surprising to hear that a distinguished doctor, speaking of his comparatively early death at the age of sixty-three, said, 'I consider the case is this: the disease is simply being William Morris and having done more work than most ten men.' It was on this occasion, too, that his strange store of assimilated knowledge was put to practical use. The paintings were all taken from the "Mort d'Arthur," and models were required for arms and armour. They were not to be found, and Morris, unaided by books of reference, designed them, and they were made by a jobbing smith under his supervision. When the Union work was finished he took rooms in Oxford instead of returning to London, and among the new friends that he made was Swinburne, then an undergraduate at Balliol. He continued his apprenticeship as a painter with enthusiasm but lessening conviction, but poetry was already becoming a first consideration with him. He had already published a few poems, as we have seen, in the "Oxford and Cambridge Magazine," and several others were written during his temporary residence in Oxford.
He was a man of fine physique and a remarkable vehemence of temper. Burne-Jones tells us that when they were painting the Union walls and needed models they sat for each other, and that Morris 'had a head always fit for Lancelot or Tristram.' To think a thing was generally to say it. His intolerance of everything vulgar and mean and disloyal in art and life found immediate and forceful expression. A friend who knew him well tells me of an occasion when he went with Burne-Jones to the theatre. They were sitting in the pit, and one of the actresses was incurring Morris's particular displeasure by reason of her misuse of her mother-tongue. At a moment of tension she had to enter and announce that her father was dead. She did so, but to the effect that her 'father was dad.' Morris could bear it no longer, and standing up with his hands clenched he roared across the theatre, 'What the devil do you mean by dad?' to the utter discomfiture of his companion. Insincerity—and incompetence he took to be a form of insincerity—at all times exhausted his patience, and he was never careful to conceal his feelings.
The time of preparation was now passing into the time of achievement. Morris's nature had been spared much of the shock and stress to which it might have been subjected in its growth by the vulgarity and violent uncertainty of his age, by the fortunate contact with men who were in revolt. The movement that they represented and of which he was a part was large and strong enough to make a positive and progressive life of its own instead of being merely an isolated expression of turbulent disagreement. It was one of those rare manifestations, a revolt the first purpose of which was not to destroy but to create. To this influence had been added that of a countryside gravely beautiful, one full of the shadows and colour of romance, or, more precisely, of the northern romance to which he was always to lend his most faithful service. It must not be supposed that this implies any coldness in his nature, which was at all times finely passionate. But it was, always, also simple, and simplicity of passion is the ultimate distinction of the North. The luxuriance of the South, with all its beauty, tends to obscurity. Nothing is further from wisdom than to suppose that the passion of the North is cold; it is merely naked. His characteristic simplicity of outlook was not yet impressing itself with its final certainty on his work, but it was already in being, as is clear from the records of his personality as it appeared to his friends at the beginning of his career.