Part 3 (1/2)
The prospectus, in which Mr. Mackail discerns Rossetti's ”slas.h.i.+ng hand and imperious accent,” was not entirely calculated to mollify rival decorators, calling attention to the fact that attempts at decorative art up to that time had been crude and fragmentary, and emphasising the want of some one place where work of ”a genuine and beautiful character could be obtained.” The new firm pledged itself to execute in a business-like manner:
”I. Mural Decoration, either in Pictures or in Pattern Work, or merely in the arrangement of Colours, as applied to dwelling-houses, churches, or public buildings.
”II. Carving generally, as applied to Architecture.
”III. Stained Gla.s.s, especially with reference to its harmony with Mural Decoration.
”IV. Metal Work in all its branches, including jewellery.
”V. Furniture, either depending for its beauty on its own design, on the application of materials. .h.i.therto overlooked, or on its conjunction with Figure and Pattern Painting. Under this head is included Embroidery of all kinds, Stamped Leather, and ornamental work in other such materials, besides every article necessary for domestic use.”
Clearly this was not the usual thing, nor was the business conducted in the usual way. According to Mr. William Rossetti, the young reformers adopted a tone of ”something very like dictatorial irony” toward their customers, permitting no compromise, and laying down the law without concession to individual taste or want of taste. You could have things such as the firm chose them to be or you could go without them.
The finance of the company began, Mr. Mackail says, with a call of one pound per share and a loan of a hundred pounds from Mrs. Morris of Leyton.
In 1862 a further call of nineteen pounds a share was made on the partners, raising the paid-up capital to one hundred and forty pounds, which ”was never increased until the dissolution of the firm in 1874.” A few hundred pounds additional were loaned by Morris and his mother. Each piece of work contributed by any member of the firm was paid for at the time, and Morris as general manager received a salary of a hundred and fifty pounds a year.
[Ill.u.s.tration: PEAc.o.c.k DESIGN FOR COa.r.s.e WOOL HANGINGS]
It is obvious that with this slender financial basis the business required the utmost energy, industry, skill, and talent to keep it from being promptly wrecked on the very uncertain coast of public opinion. During the first year all the members of the firm were active, although even at the first Morris led the rest. A stimulus was provided by the International Exhibition of 1862, whither they sent examples of their work, at the cost, wrote Faulkner, of ”more tribulation and swearing to Topsy than three exhibitions will be worth.” The exhibits attracted attention, and were awarded medals, in the case of the stained gla.s.s, ”for artistic qualities of colour and design,” and in the case of the furniture, hangings, and so forth, for the ”closeness with which the style of the Middle Ages was rendered.” It happened that the chief work in stained gla.s.s in the exhibit of the firm consisted of a set of windows designed by Rossetti, and giving, according to a Belgian critic, ”an impression of colour, dazzling and magnificent, velvety and harmonious, resembling the Flemish stained gla.s.s windows decorating the Gothic cathedrals.” Thus, fortunately, the first appearance of the firm was distinguished by the splendour which Rossetti alone among the group of workers could achieve, but his interest and activity shortly flagged and were absorbed in his individual work outside the company.
At first, despite the lordly prospectus, there were occasional blunders.
Dr. Birkbeck Hill tells of a study table and an arm-chair, neither one of which was so thorough a piece of workmans.h.i.+p as the firm would have turned out later on, and Mr. Hughes remembers a sofa with a long bar beneath projecting six inches at each end so that it tripped up anyone who hastily went round it. These, however, were blunders of a kind soon remedied by experience. So long as the a.s.sociates kept up their enthusiasm there were among them ample skill to grapple with technicalities, and ample artistic faculty to defy all ordinary compet.i.tion. Whoever dropped behind from time to time in this most essential quality of enthusiasm it was never Morris, and all accounts agree in attributing to his energy and industry and unutterable zest the success of the novel and interesting experiment. ”He is the only man I have known,” said Rossetti once, ”who beats every other man at his own game.” The men he had to beat at this game of decoration were for the most part unworthy foes. Decorative art was at a low ebb in the early Victorian age, the age of antimaca.s.sars, stucco, and veneer. From this cheap vulgarity and pretentiousness Morris turned back--as he was wont to do on every occasion that offered excuse--to the thirteenth century as the purest fount of English tradition, where, if anywhere, could be found models showing logical principles of construction and genuine workmans.h.i.+p. His companions either caught from him the infection of the mediaeval att.i.tude or were already in sympathy with it, and the work of the firm took on an emphatically Gothic aspect from the beginning. How great or how important a part each member played in the sum of the production is very difficult to estimate owing to the cooperative plan by which several artists frequently united in executing one and the same piece of work. Sometimes Burne-Jones would draw the figures, Webb the birds, and Morris the foliage for a piece of drapery or wall-paper. Again portions of separate designs would be used over and over in different combinations for different places. This free cooperation, this moving about within the limits of a general plan, suited the restless spirit of Morris, and chimed also with his profound admiration for the way in which the mediaeval works of art were brought about, no one man standing high above the others or trying to preserve his name and the fame of his performance. Working for the pleasure of the work was of the very essence of his philosophy, and nothing could be more unjust than the sneers from time to time launched at him because his venture proved a commercial triumph. Perhaps it would be going too far to say that money-getting was never in his mind, but there is no question that it was never first in his mind, and never in the slightest degree crowded his desire to put forth sincere, fine work, worth its price to the last detail, and worthy of praise and liking without regard to its price.
There was not the slightest suggestion of pose or sham of any kind in his thought when he wrote, as he often did, against the greed of gain and in praise of the kind of labour that may be delighted in without regard to pounds and pence. He could say quite faithfully that he shared the humility of the early craftsmen, of whom he speaks with reverence.
”In most sober earnest,” he says in one of his lectures, ”when we hear it said, as it often is said, that extra money payment is necessary under all circ.u.mstances to produce great works of art, and that men of special talent will not use those talents without being bribed by mere gross material advantages, we, I say, shall know what to reply. We can appeal to the witness of those lovely works still left to us, whose unknown, unnamed creators were content to give them to the world, with little more extra wages than what their pleasure in their work and their sense of usefulness in it might bestow on them.” There is no room for doubt that he approached his work in precisely the spirit here described by him. He was willing to exercise his faculties on the humblest undertakings, with no other aim than to make a common thing pleasant to look upon and agreeable to use.
Half a century ago ”craft” was not the fas.h.i.+onable word for the kind of work with which the firm chiefly concerned itself, and in doing the greater part of what he did Morris was merely writing himself down, in the language of the general public, an artisan. Conforming to the truest of principles he raised his work by getting under it. Nothing was too laborious or too lowly for him. Pride of position was unknown to him in any sense that would prevent him from indulging in manual labour. His real pride lay in making something which he considered beautiful take the place of something ugly in the world. If it were a fabric to be made lovely with long disused or unfamiliar dyes, his hands were in the vat. If tapestry were to be woven, he was at the loom by dawn. In his workman's blouse, steeped in indigo, and with his hair outstanding wildly, he was in the habit of presenting himself cheerfully at the houses of his friends, relying upon his native dignity to save appearances, or, to speak more truly, not thinking of appearances at all, but entirely happy in his role of workman, though frankly desirous that the business should prosper beyond all danger of the ”smash” that would, he owned, ”be a terrible nuisance.” ”I have not time on my hands,” he said, ”to be ruined and get really poor.” It was to the peculiar union of the ideal and the practical in his nature that his success in the fields on which he ventured is due.
[Ill.u.s.tration: PAINTED WALL DECORATION DESIGNED BY MORRIS]
It must be admitted, however, that while his soul and vigour found vent in his designing and in the journeyman work--”delightful work, hard for the body and easy for the mind”--at which he was so ready to lend a hand, his artistic product lacked somewhat in the qualities that come from the exercise of the higher intellectual gifts. It was more than an attempt to revive old Gothic forms; it was an adoption of old forms with an infusion of modern spirit; but it missed the native and personal character of work growing out of contemporaneous conditions and tastes. Imaginative craftsman as he was, Morris was never quite an artist in the strict sense of the word. He had a fine sense of colour and, within certain limits, a right feeling for pattern; but his invention was too exuberant for repose, and he displayed in the greater part of his work an ornamental luxuriance that destroyed dignity and simplicity of effect. He did not like the restraints of art, and he seems to have been incapable of entering the sphere of abstract thought in which the principles governing great art are found. ”No schools of art,” he says with his superbly inaccurate generalisation, ”have ever been contented to use abstract lines and forms and colours--that is, lines and so forth without any meaning.”
Such ornament he deemed ”outlandish.” He wanted his patterns, especially his wall-paper patterns, to remind people of pleasant scenes: ”of the close vine trellis that keeps out the sun by the Nile side; or of the wild woods and their streams with the dogs panting beside them; or of the swallows sweeping above the garden boughs toward the house eaves where their nestlings are, while the sun breaks the clouds on them; or of the many-flowered summer meadows of Picardy,”--all very charming things to think about, but as really pertinent to wall-paper designing as the pleasant memory of a hard road with a fast horse speeding over it would be to the designing of a carpet. He preached the closest observation of nature and the most delicate understanding of it before attempting conventionalisation, but he did not hesitate to break all the laws of nature in his designs when he happened to want to do so. He did not hesitate, as Mr. Day has said, to make an acorn grow from two stalks or to give a lily five petals. Fitness in ornament was one of his fundamental principles, and he made his designs for the place in which they were to be seen and with direct reference to the limitations of opportunities of that place. It was never his way to turn a wall-paper loose on the market for any chance purchaser. He must know, if possible, something of the walls to which the design was to be applied and of the room in which it was to live, and he then adapted his design to his idea of what was required.
This idea, however, was commonly much influenced by certain pre-conceived theories. He believed, for example, that there should be a sense of mystery in every pattern designed. This mystery he tried to get, not by masking the geometrical structure upon which a recurring pattern must be based, but by covering the ground equably and richly, so that the observer may not ”be able to read the whole thing at once.” Thus many of his designs are so over-elaborated as to give the effect of restlessness, whereas ”rest” was the word oftenest on his lips in connection with domestic art. In common with most designers who derive their ideals from mediaeval sources, he was less impressed by the tranquillity gained from calm clean s.p.a.ces, the measure, order, and stateliness brought about by the simple relation of abstract lines, the repose of the rhythmical play of ma.s.s in perfect proportion, undisturbed by decorative detail, than by the charm of highly vitalised imagery. But though he erred on the side of luxuriance--while preaching simplicity--he never allowed his design to sink into vulgarity or petty picturesqueness. He might be intricate but he was not vague. ”Run any risk of failure rather than involve yourself in a tangle of poor weak lines that people can't make out,” he says. ”Definite form bounded by firm outline is a necessity for all ornament. You ought always to go for positive patterns when they may be had.” They might always be had from him. And it is due to his positive quality, his uncompromising certainty of the rightness of the thing that he is doing, that even when he is most imitative he gives an impression of originality, and is in fact original in the sense that he has thought out for himself the methods and motives of the ancient art by which he is consciously and intentionally influenced.
[Ill.u.s.tration: PAINTED WALL DECORATION DESIGNED BY MORRIS]
Finish, it need hardly be said, was not prized by him. It was one of his a.s.sumptions that ”the better is the enemy of the good,” and he preferred the roughness of incompleteness to the suavity of perfect workmans.h.i.+p. He dreaded the suggestion of the machine that lurks in the polished surface and the perfect curve. Nor did he at any time believe in the subdivision of labour by which a workman learns to do one thing with the utmost efficiency, holding that no workman could enjoy such specialised work, and therefore, of course, could not through it give pleasure to others. The following is the creed which, according to his ”compact with himself,”
he made it a duty to repeat when he and his fellow-men came together to discuss art:
”We ought to get to understand the value of intelligent work, the work of men's hands guided by their brains, and to take that, though it be rough, rather than the unintelligent work of machines or slaves though it be delicate; to refuse altogether to use machine-made work unless where the nature of the thing compels it, or where the machine does what mere human suffering would otherwise have to do; to have a high standard of excellence in wares and not to accept make-s.h.i.+fts for the real thing, but rather to go without--to have no ornament merely for fas.h.i.+on's sake, but only because we really think it beautiful, otherwise to go without it; not to live in an ugly and squalid place (such as London) for the sake of mere excitement or the like, but only because our duties bind us to it--to treat the natural beauty of the earth as a holy thing not to be rashly dealt with for any consideration; to treat with the utmost care whatever of architecture and the like is left us of the times of art.”
[Ill.u.s.tration: DESIGN FOR ST. JAMES'S PALACE WALL-PAPER
(_Reproduced by courtesy of Mr. Bulkley_)]
Wall-papers were among the earliest staple products of the firm in Red Lion Square, although Morris always regarded them in the light of a compromise; an altogether unsatisfactory subst.i.tute for the hand-painting, or tapestry or silk or printed cotton hangings, which he considered the proper covering for the bare walls which, of course, no one not in ”an unhealthy state of mind and probably of body also” could endure to leave bare. The first to be designed, the _Trellis_ paper, was the combined work of Morris and Webb, the former being responsible for the rose-trellis intended, we may suppose, to bring with it pleasant recollections of gardens in June and inspired by his own sweet garden at Upton, the latter for the birds that cling to the lattice or dart upward among the heavily thorned stems. In the early papers the designs were very simple and direct, often more quaint than beautiful, as in the case of the well-known _Daisy_ paper, and depending greatly on the colouring for the attractiveness they possessed. Later came such intricate patterns as the _Pimpernel_, the _Acanthus_, so elaborate as to require a double set of blocks and no less than thirty-two printings, and the paper designed for St. James's Palace, as large and magnificent as the environment in which it was to be placed demanded. It is quite obvious from these designs that Morris did not regard his wall-hangings as backgrounds but as decorations in themselves. As a matter of fact he did not fancy pictures for his walls. After his early burst of enthusiasm over Rossetti's paintings he bought few pictures if any, and they do not seem ever to have entered into his schemes of decoration. The wall of a room was always important to him, and despite his discontent with paper coverings for it, he was anxious to have such coverings as ornamental as possible, admitting them to be useful ”as things go,” and treating them in considerable detail in his lectures on the decorative arts. He advised making up for the poverty of the material by great thoughtfulness in the design: ”The more and the more mysteriously you interweave your sprays and stems, the better for your purpose, as the whole thing has to be pasted flat upon a wall and the cost of all this intricacy will but come out of your own brain and hand.”
Concerning colour he was equally specific. In his lecture characteristically called _Making the Best of It_, in which with an accent of discouragement he endeavours to show his audience how at the time of his speaking to make a middle-cla.s.s home ”endurable,” he lays down certain rules which indicate at one and the same time his mastery of his subject and the incommunicability of right taste in this direction, although many of his ideas may be pondered to great advantage by even the mind untrained in colour schemes. He begins with his usual preliminary statement as to the health of those who disagree with him. ”Though we may each have our special preferences,” he says, ”among the main colours, which we shall do quite right to indulge, it is a sign of disease in an artist to have a prejudice against any particular colour, though such prejudices are common and violent enough among people imperfectly educated in art, or with naturally dull perceptions of it. Still colours have their ways in decoration, so to say, both positively in themselves, and relatively to each man's way of using them. So I may be excused for setting down some things I seem to have noticed about these ways.” After thus establis.h.i.+ng friendly relations with his audience, he instructs them that yellow is a colour to be used sparingly and in connection with ”gleaming materials”