Part 1 (1/2)
William Morris.
by Elizabeth Luther Cary.
PREFACE.
The personal life of William Morris is already known to us through Mr.
Mackail's admirable biography as fully, probably, as we shall ever know it. My own endeavour has been to present a picture of Morris's busy career perhaps not less vivid for the absence of much detail, and showing only the man and his work as they appeared to the outer public.
I have used as a basis for my narrative, the volumes by Mr. Mackail; _William Morris, his Art, his Writings, and his Public Life_, by Aymer Vallance; _The Books of William Morris_, by H. Buxton Forman; numerous articles in periodicals, and Morris's own varied works.
I wish to express my indebtedness to Mr. Bulkley of 42 East 14th Street, New York City, for permission to reproduce a number of Morris patterns in his possession, notably a fragment of the St. James's wall-paper.
Much material for the letter-press and for the ill.u.s.trations I have obtained through the Boston Public Library. The _Froissart_ pages were found there and most of the Kelmscott publications from which I have quoted.
The bibliography is that prepared by Mr. S. C. c.o.c.kerell for the last volume of Mr. Morris issued by the Kelmscott Press, under the t.i.tle of _A Note by William Morris on His Aims in Founding the Kelmscott Press_. To the c.o.c.kerell bibliography have been added a few notes of my own.
E. L. C.
BROOKLYN, Sept. 10, 1902.
CHAPTER I.
BOYHOOD.
There is, perhaps, no single work by William Morris that stands out as a masterpiece in evidence of his individual genius. He was not impelled to give peculiar expression to his own personality. His writing was seldom emotionally autobiographic as Rossetti's always was, his painting and designing were not the expression of a personal mood as was the case with Burne-Jones. But no one of his special time and group gave himself more fully or more freely for others. No one contributed more generously to the public pleasure and enlightenment. No one tried with more persistent effort first to create and then to satisfy a taste for the possible best in the lives and homes of the people. He worked toward this end in so many directions that a lesser energy than his must have been dissipated and a weaker purpose rendered impotent. His tremendous vitality saved him from the most humiliating of failures, the failure to make good extravagant promise. He never lost sight of the result in the endeavour, and his discontent with existing mediocrity was neither formless nor empty. It was the motive power of all his labour; he was always trying to make everything ”something different from what it was,” and this instinct was, alike for strength and weakness, says his chief biographer, ”of the very essence of his nature.” To tell the story of his life is to write down the record of dreams made real, of nebulous theories brought swiftly to the test of experiment, of the spirit of the distant past reincarnated in the present. But, as with most natures of similar mould, the man was greater than any part of his work, and even greater than the sum of it all. He remains one of the not-to-be-forgotten figures of the nineteenth century, so interesting was he, so impressive, so simple-hearted, so nearly adequate to the great tasks he set himself, so well beloved by his companions, so useful, despite his blunders, to society at large.
The unity that held together his manifold forms of expression was maintained through the different periods of his life, making him a ”whole man” to a more than usual degree. From the earliest recorded incidents of his childhood we gain an impression not unlike that made by his latest years, and by all the interval between. The very opposite of Rossetti, with whose ”school” he has been so long and so mistakenly identified, his nature was as single as his accomplishment was complex, and the only means by which it is possible to get a just idea of both the former and the latter is to regard him as a man of one preoccupation amounting to an obsession, the reconstruction of social and industrial life according to an ideal based upon the more poetic aspects of the Middle Ages. From first to last the early English world, the English world of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, was the world to which he belonged. ”Born out of his due time,” in truth, he began almost from his birth to acc.u.mulate a.s.sociations with the time to which he should have been native and whose far off splendour lured him constantly back toward it.
The third of nine children, he was born at Walthamstow, in Ess.e.x, England, on the 24th of March, 1834. On the Morris side he came of Welsh ancestry, a fact accounting perhaps for the mingled gloom and romance of his temperament. His father was a discount broker in opulent circ.u.mstances, and his mother was descended from a family of prosperous merchants and landed proprietors. On the maternal side a strong talent for music existed, but in the Morris family no more artistic quality can be traced than a devotion to general excellence, to which William Morris certainly fell heir. For a time he was a sickly child, and used the opportunity to advance his reading, being ”already deep in the Waverley novels” when four years old, and having gone through these and many others before he was seven.
In 1840 the family removed to Woodford Hall, a house belonging to the Georgian period, standing in about fifty acres of park, on the road from London to Epping, and here Morris led an outdoor life with the result of rapidly establis.h.i.+ng his health, steeping mind and sense in the sights and sounds of nature dear to him forever after, and gaining intimate acquaintance with the romantic and mediaeval surroundings by which his whole career was to be influenced. The county of Ess.e.x was well adapted to feed his prodigious appet.i.te for antiquities. Its churches, in numbers of which Norman masonry is to be found, its ancient bra.s.ses (that of the schoolboy Thomas Heron being among many others within easy reach of Woodford), and its tapestry-hung houses, all stimulated his inborn love of the Middle Ages and started him fairly on that path through the thirteenth century which he followed deviously as long as he lived. Even in his own home, we are told, certain of the habits of mediaeval England persisted, such as the brewing of beer, the meal of cakes and ale at ”high prime,”
the keeping of Twelfth Night, and other such festivals. The places he lived in counted for much with him always, and the impressions of this childish period remained, like all his later impressions, keen and permanent. Toward the end of his life he printed at the Kelmscott Press the carol _Good King Wenceslas_, which begins with a l.u.s.ty freshness:
Good King Wenceslas look'd out, On the feast of Stephen, When the snow lay round about, Deep and crisp and even.
Brightly shone the moon that night, Though the frost was cruel, When a poor man came in sight Gath'ring winter fuel.
”The legend itself,” he comments, ”is a pleasing and genuine one, and the Christmas-like quality of it, recalling the times of my boyhood, appeals to me at least as a memory of past days.”
Beside angling, shooting, and riding, he very early occupied much of his time with visits to the old churches, a pursuit of which he was never to weary, studying their monuments and acc.u.mulating an amount of genuine erudition concerning them quite out of proportion to his rather moderate accomplishment along the ordinary lines of study. At an age when Scott was scouring his native heath in search of Border ballads and antiquities, this almost equally precocious boy was collecting rubbings from ancient inscriptions, and picturing to himself, as he wandered about the region of his home on foot or on horseback, the lovely face of England as it looked in the thirteenth or fourteenth century. In one of the earliest of the boyish romances that appeared in the _Oxford and Cambridge Magazine_, he imagines himself the master-mason of a church built more than six centuries before, and which has vanished from the face of the earth with nothing to indicate its existence save earth-covered ruins ”heaving the yellow corn into glorious waves.” His description of the carving on the bas-reliefs of the west front and on the tombs shows with what loving intensity he has studied the most minute details of the work of the ancient builders in whose footsteps he would have rejoiced much to tread.
How far his family sympathised with his tastes it is impossible to say, but probably not deeply. We have few hints of the personal side of his home-life; we know that a visit to Canterbury Cathedral with his father was among the indelible experiences of his first decade, and that he possessed among his toys a little suit of armour in which he rode about the park after the manner of a Froissart knight, and that is about all we do know until we hear of the strong disapproval of his mother and one of his sisters for the career that finally diverted his interest from the Church for which they had designed him.
His formal education began when he was sent at the age of nine to a preparatory school kept by a couple of maiden ladies. There he remained until the death of his father in 1847. In February, 1848, he went to Marlborough College, a nomination to which his father had purchased for him. The best that can be said for this school seems to be that it was situated in a part of England ideally suited to a boy of archaeological tastes, and was provided with an excellent archaeological and architectural library. Here his eager mind browsed on the literature of English Gothic, and his restless feet carried him far afield among pre-Celtic barrows, stone circles, and Roman villas. Savernake Forest was close at hand and he spent many of his holidays within it. It was doubtless the familiarity with all aspects of the woods, due to his pilgrimages through Savernake and Epping Forests and the long roving days idled away among their shadows, that gave rise to the allusions in his books--early and late--to woodland life. The pa.s.sage through the thick wood and the coming at last to the place where the trees thin out and the light begins to s.h.i.+mmer through them is a constantly recurring figure of his verse and of his prose. Frequently the important scene of a romance or of a long poem is laid in a wildwood, as in the story ent.i.tled _The Wood beyond the World_, or in _Goldilocks and Goldilocks_, the concluding poem of the volume of _Poems by the Way_, in which the great grey boles of the trees, the bramble bush, the ”woodlawn clear,” and the cherished oaks are as vivid as the human actors in the drama. His heroes seldom fail of being deft woodsmen, able to thread the tangle of underbrush by blind paths, and observant of all the common sights and sounds of the woodland, rabbits scuttling out of the gra.s.s, adders sunning themselves on stones in the cleared s.p.a.ces, wild swine running grunting toward close covert, hart and hind bounding across the way. They know the musty savour of water dipped from a forest brook, they know how to go straight to the yew sticks that quarter best for bow-staves, they know the feeling of the boggy moss under their feet, and the sound of the ”iron wind” through the branches in the depth of winter; there is no detail of wild wood life of which they are ignorant. This intimacy with Nature in her most secluded moments, in her shyest and most mysterious aspect, forms an element of inexpressible charm in the lovely backgrounds against which Morris delighted to place his visionary figures. He never tired of combining the impressions stored away in his mind on his boyish rambles into pictures the delicate beauty of which can hardly be overestimated.
While he was at school, his already highly developed imagination found an outlet in constant fable-making, his tales of knights and fairies and miraculous adventures having a considerable popularity among his comrades, with whom, however, he himself was not especially popular, making friends with them only in a superficial fas.h.i.+on. Judging from the autobiographic fragments occasionally found in his work, he was a boy of many moods, most of them tinged with the self-conscious melancholy of his early poetry.
Sentiment was strong with him, and a peculiar reticence or detachment of temperament kept him independent of others during his school years, and apparently uninfluenced by the tastes or opinions of those about him, if we except the case of his Anglo-Catholic proclivities, which obviously were fed by the tendencies of the school, but which, so far from diverting him from the general scheme of his individual interests, fitted into them and served him as another link between the present and the much preferred past.