Part 9 (2/2)

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE SMALLER KELMSCOTT PRESS-MARK]

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE LARGER KELMSCOTT PRESS-MARK]

[Ill.u.s.tration: DRAWING BY MORRIS OF THE LETTER ”h” FOR KELMSCOTT TYPE, WITH NOTES AND CORRECTIONS]

”After this continuous torrent of production,” says Mr. Mackail, ”the Press for a time slackened off a little,” but the output in 1894 consisted of ten books as against the eleven of the previous year. The first was a large quarto edition of _The Glittering Plain_, printed this time in the Troy type and ill.u.s.trated with twenty-three pictures by Walter Crane. Next came another little volume of mediaeval romance, the story of _Amis and Amile_, translated in a day and a quarter; and after this, Keats's _Poems_.

In July of the same year the bust of Keats, executed by the American sculptor, Miss Anne Whitney, was unveiled in the Parish Church of Hampstead, the first memorial to Keats on English ground. The scheme for such a memorial had been promoted in America, Lowell being one of the earliest to encourage it, and a little notice of the ceremony was printed at the Kelmscott Press with the card of invitation. Swinburne's _Atalanta in Calydon_ followed _Keats_ in a large quarto edition. Next came the third volume of the French romances containing _The Tale of the Emperor Constans_ and _The History of Oversea_. At this point Morris returned again to the printing of his own works, and the next book to be issued from the Press was _The Wood beyond the World_, with a lovely frontispiece by Burne-Jones representing ”the Maid,” the heroine of the romance, and one of the most charming of the visionary women created by Morris. _The Book of Wisdom and Lies_, a Georgian story-book of the eighteenth century, written by Sulkhan-Saba Orbeliani, and translated by Oliver Wardrop, was the next stranger to come from the Press, and after it was issued the first of a set of Sh.e.l.ley's _Poems_. A rhymed version of _The Penitential Psalms_ found in a ma.n.u.script of _The Hours of Our Lady_, written in the fifteenth century, followed it, and _The Epistola de Contemptu Mundi_, a letter in Italian by Savonarola, the autograph original of which belonged to Mr. Fairfax Murray, completed the list of this prolific year. The year 1895 produced only five volumes, the first of them the _Tale of Beowulf_, which Morris with characteristic daring had translated into verse by the aid of a prose translation made for him by Mr. A. J. Wyatt. Not himself an Anglo-Saxon scholar, Morris was unable to give such a rendering of this chief epic of the Germanic races as would appeal to the scholarly mind, and his zeal for literal translation led him to employ a phraseology nothing short of outlandish. At the end of the book he printed a list of ”words not commonly used now,” but his constructions were even more obstructive than his uncommon words. In the following pa.s.sage, for example, which opens the section describing the coming of Beowulf to the land of the Danes, only the word ”nithing” is defined in the index, yet certainly the average reader may be expected to pause for the meaning:

So care that was time-long the kinsman of Healfdene Still seethed without ceasing, nor might the wise warrior Wend otherwhere woe, for o'er strong was the strife All loathly so longsome late laid on the people, Need-wrack and grim nithing, of night-bales the greatest.

Morris himself found his interest wane before the work was completed, but he made a handsome quarto volume of it, with fine marginal decorations, and an exceptionally well-designed t.i.tle-page. A reprint of _Syr Percyvelle of Gales_ after the edition printed by J. O. Halliwell from the MS. in the library of Lincoln Cathedral, a large quarto edition of _The Life and Death of Jason_; two 16mo volumes of a new romance ent.i.tled, _Child Christopher and Goldilands the Fair_; and Rossetti's _Hand and Soul_, reprinted from the _Germ_, brought the Press to its great year 1896. This year was to see the completion of the folio _Chaucer_, which since early in 1892 had been in preparation, and had filled the heart of Morris with anxiety, antic.i.p.ation, and joy. Before it came from the press three other books were issued. Herrick's _Poems_ came first. Then a selection of thirteen poems from Coleridge, ”a muddle-brained metaphysician, who by some strange freak of fortune turned out a few real poems amongst the dreary flood of inanity which was his wont!”

The poems chosen were, _Christabel_, _Kubla Khan_, _The Rime of the Ancient Mariner_, _Love_, _A Fragment of a s.e.xton's Tale_, _The Ballad of the Dark Ladie_, _Names_, _Youth and Age_, _The Improvisatore_, _Work without Hope_, _The Garden of Boccaccio_, _The Knight's Tomb_, and _Alice du Clos_. The first four were the only ones, however, concerning which Morris would own to feeling any interest. The Coleridge volume was followed by the large quarto edition of Morris's latest romance, _The Well at the World's End_ in two volumes, and then appeared the _Chaucer_, the mere printing of which had occupied a year and nine months. The first two copies were brought home from the binders on the second of June, in a season of ”lots of sun” and plentiful apple-blossoms, during which Morris was beginning to realise that the end of his delight in seasons and in books was fast approaching.

Mr. Ellis has declared the Kelmscott _Chaucer_ to be, ”for typography, ornament, and ill.u.s.tration combined, the grandest book that has been issued from the press since the invention of typography.” Morris lavished upon it the utmost wealth of his invention. The drawing of the t.i.tle-page alone occupied a fortnight, and the splendid initial letters were each an elaborate work of art. The ornament indeed was too profuse to be wholly satisfactory, especially as much of it was repeated; nevertheless, the book was one of great magnificence and the glee with which Morris beheld it is not to be wondered at. The Chaucer type had been specially designed for it, and Burne-Jones had made for it eighty-seven drawings, while Morris himself designed for it the white pigskin binding with silver clasps, executed at the Doves Bindery for those purchasers who desired their elaborate and costly volume in a more suitable garb than the ordinary half holland covers which gave it the appearance of a silken garment under a calico ap.r.o.n.

During the remainder of the year 1896 the Press issued the first volumes of the Kelmscott edition of _The Earthly Paradise_, a volume of Latin poems (_Laudes Beatae Mariae Virginis_), the first Kelmscott book to be printed in three colours, the quotation heading each stanza being in red, the initial letter in pale blue, and the remaining text in black: _The Floure and the Leafe_ and _The Shepherde's Calender_. Before _The Shepherde's Calender_ reached its completion, however, Morris was dead, and the subsequent work of the Press was merely the clearing up of a few books already advertised. The first of these to appear was the prose romance by Morris ent.i.tled _The Water of the Wondrous Isles_: this was issued on the first day of April, 1897, with borders and ornaments designed entirely by Morris save for a couple of initial words completed from his unfinished designs by R. Catterson-Smith. To this year belong also the two trial pages made for the intended folio edition of _Froissart_, the heraldic borders of which far surpa.s.s any of the _Chaucer_ ornaments, and the two old English romances, _Sire Degravaunt_ and _Syr Ysambrace_. In 1898 came a large quarto volume of German woodcuts, and three more works by Morris, a small folio edition of _Sigurd the Volsung_, which was to have been a large folio with twenty-five woodcuts by Burne-Jones; _The Sundering Flood_, the last romance written by Morris, and a large quarto edition of _Love is Enough_. These were followed by a ”Note” written by Morris himself on his aims in starting the Kelmscott Press, accompanied with facts concerning the Press, and an annotated list of all the books there printed, compiled by Mr. S. C.

c.o.c.kerell, who, since July, 1894, had been secretary to the Press. This was the end.[2]

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Specimen Page from the Kelmscott ”Froissart”_

(_Projected Edition_)]

Although Morris not only neglected commercial considerations in printing his books, lavis.h.i.+ng their price many times over in valuable time and labour and the actual expenditure of money to secure some inconspicuous detail; but defied commercial methods openly in the character of his type, the quality of his materials, and the slowness of his processes, the Kelmscott Press testified, as most of his enterprises did testify, to the practical worth of his ideals. Quite content to make just enough by his books to continue printing them in the most conscientious and desirable way he knew, he gradually obtained from them a considerable profit. The Press had early been moved to quarters larger than the first occupied by it, and three presses were kept busy. By the end of 1892 Morris had become his own publisher, and after that time all the Kelmscott books were published by him except in cases of special arrangement. A few copies, usually less than a dozen, of nearly all the books were printed on vellum and sold at a proportionately higher price than the paper copies. The volumes were bound either in vellum or half holland, these temporary and unsatisfactory covers probably having been chosen on account of the strength and slow-drying qualities of the ink used, a note to the prospectus of the _Chaucer_ stating that the book would not be fit for ordinary full binding with the usual pressure for at least a year after its issue. The issue prices charged for the books were not low, but certainly not exorbitant when time, labour, and expense of producing them are taken into consideration. They were prizes for the collector from the beginning, the impossibility of duplicating them and the small editions sent out giving them a charm and a value not easily to be resisted, and Morris himself and his trustees adopted measures tending to protect the collector's interests. After the death of Morris all the woodblocks for initials, ornaments, and ill.u.s.trations were sent to the British Museum and were accepted, with the condition that they should not be reproduced or printed from for the s.p.a.ce of one hundred years. The electrotypes were destroyed. The matter was talked over with Morris during his lifetime and he sanctioned this course on the part of the trustees, its aim being to keep the series of the Kelmscott Press ”a thing apart and to prevent the designs becoming stale by repet.i.tion.” While there is a fair ground for the criticism frequently made that a man urging the necessity of art for the people showed inconsistency by withdrawing from their reach art which he could control and deemed valuable, it must be remembered that in his mind the great result to be obtained was the stirring up the people to making art for themselves. Morris rightly counted the joy to be gained from making a beautiful thing as far higher than the joy to be gained from seeing one. He was never in favour of making a work of art ”common” by reproducing or servilely imitating it. He had shown the printers of books his idea of the way they should manage their craft, now let them develop it themselves along the lines pointed out for them. And whether he was or was not consistent in allowing the works of the Kelmscott Press to be cut off from any possibility of a large circulation, his was the temperament to feel all the delight to be won from exclusive owners.h.i.+p. He had the true collector's pa.s.sion for possession. If he was bargaining for a book, says his biographer, he would carry on the negotiation with the book tucked tightly under his arm, as if it might run away. His collection of old painted books gave him the keenest emotions before and after his acquisition of them. Of one, which finally proved unattainable, he wrote, ”_Such_ a book! _my_ eyes! and I am beating my brains to see if I can find any thread of an intrigue to begin upon, so as to creep and crawl toward the possession of it.” It is no matter for wonder if in imagination he beheld the love of bibliophiles for his own works upon which he had so ardently spent his energies, and was gratified by the prevision.

Whether the Kelmscott books will increase or decrease in money value as time goes on is a question that stirs interest in book-buying circles.

They have already had their rise and ebb to a certain extent, and the prices brought by the copies owned by Mr. Ellis at the sale of his library after his death indicate that a steady level of interest has been reached among collectors for the time being at least; only five of the copies printed on paper exceeding prices previously paid for them. The presentation copy on vellum of the great _Chaucer_ brought five hundred and ten pounds, certainly a remarkable sum for a modern book, under any conditions, and nearly a hundred pounds more than the highest price which Morris himself up to the summer of 1894 had ever paid for even a fourteenth-century book. The paper copy of the _Chaucer_ sold at the Ellis sale for one hundred and twelve pounds and a paper copy in ordinary binding sold in America in 1902 for $650, while a paper copy in the special pigskin binding brought $950 the same year. The issue price for the four hundred and twenty-five paper copies was twenty pounds apiece, and for the eight copies on vellum offered for sale out of the thirteen printed, a hundred and twenty guineas apiece. The posthumous edition of _Sigurd the Volsung_, the paper copies of which were issued at six guineas apiece, brought at the Ellis sale twenty-six pounds. _News from Nowhere_, issued at two guineas, has never yet brought a higher price than the five pounds, fifteen s.h.i.+llings paid for it in 1899, while Keats's _Poems_ issued at one pound, ten s.h.i.+llings, rose as high as twenty-seven pounds, ten s.h.i.+llings, also in 1899. As a general measure of the advance in the Kelmscott books since the death of Morris, it may be noted that the series owned by Mr. Ellis, excluding duplicates, and including a presentation copy of _Jason_ and two fine bindings for the paper and the vellum _Chaucer_, represented a gross issue price of six hundred and twelve pounds, ten s.h.i.+llings, and realised two thousand, three hundred and sixty-seven pounds, two s.h.i.+llings. For one decade of the life of a modern series that is a great record, and it would be a rash prophet who should venture to predict future values.

CHAPTER XI.

LATER WRITINGS.

The writings of Morris's later years consist, as we have seen, chiefly of prose romances. The little group beginning with _The House of the Wolfings_ and ending with _The Sundering Flood_ were written with no polemical or proselytising intention, with merely his old delight in storytelling and in depicting the beauty of the external world and the kindness of men and maids. Curiosity had never played any great part in his mental equipment; he cared little to know or speculate further than the visible and tangible surface of life. ”The skin of the world” was sufficient for him, and in these later romances all that is beautiful and winning has chiefly to do with the skin of the world presented in its spring-time freshness. The background of nature is always exquisite. With the landscape of the North, which had made its indelible impression upon him, he mingled the scenes--”the dear scenes” he would have called them--of his childhood and the fairer portions of the Thames sh.o.r.e as he had long and intimately known them; and in his books, as in his familiar letters, he constantly speaks of the weather and the seasons as matters of keen importance in the sum of daily happiness. Thus, whatever we miss from his romances, we gain, what is missing from the majority of modern books, familiarity with the true aspect of the outdoor world. We have the constant sense of ample sky and pleasant air, and green woods and cool waters. The mountains are near us, and often the ocean, and the freedom of a genuine wildwood that is no enchanted forest or ideal vision.

Inexpressibly charming are such pictures as those of Elfhild (in _The Sundering Flood_) piping to her sheep and dancing on the bank of the river, on the bright mid-April day, whose sun dazzles her eyes with its brilliant s.h.i.+ning; and of Birdalone (in _The Water of the Wondrous Isles_) embroidering her gown and smock in the wood of Evilshaw. What could be more expressive of lovely open-air peace than this description? ”Who was glad now but Birdalone; she grew red with new pleasure, and knelt down and kissed the witch's hand, and then went her way to the wood with her precious lading, and wrought there under her oak-tree day after day, and all days, either there, or in the house when the weather was foul. That was in the middle of March, when all birds were singing, and the young leaves showing on the hawthorns, so that there were pale green clouds, as it were, betwixt the great grey boles of oak and sweet-chestnut; and by the lake the meadow-saffron new-thrust-up was opening its blossom; and March wore and April, and still she was at work happily when now it was later May, and the harebells were in full bloom down the bent before her ... and still she wrought on at her gown and her smock, and it was well-nigh done. She had broidered the said gown with roses and lilies, and a tall tree springing up from amidmost the hem of the skirt, and a hart on either side thereof, face to face of each other. And the smock she had sewn daintily at the hems and the bosom with fair knots and buds. It was now past the middle of June hot and bright weather.”

And only less delightful than these glimpses of the natural world are the recurring portraits of half-grown boys and girls, all different and all lovable. The sweetness of adolescent beauty had for Morris an irresistible appeal, and while his characters have little of the psychological charm inseparable in real life from dawning qualities and undeveloped potentialities, they are as lovely as the morning in the brightness of hair, the slimness of form, the freedom of gesture with which he endows them. The shapely brown hands and feet of Ursula, her ruddy colour, her slender st.u.r.diness, and brave young laugh are attractions as potent as the more delicate charm of Birdalone's serious eyes and thin face, or Elfhild's flower-like head and tender playfulness; and all these heroines are alike in a fine capability for useful toil and pride in it. When the old carle says to Birdalone, ”It will be no such hard life for thee, for I have still some work in me, and thou mayst do something in spite of thy slender and delicate fas.h.i.+on,” she replies with merry laughter, ”Forsooth, good sire, I might do somewhat more than something; for I am deft in all such work as here ye need; so fear not but I should earn my livelihood, and that with joy.” Ursula also knows all the craft of needlework, and all the manners of the fields, and finds nothing in work to weary her; and even in the Maid of _The Wood beyond the World_, with her magic power to revive flowers by the touch of her fingers, is felt the preferable human power to make comfort and pleasantness by the right performance of plain tasks.

Nearly if not quite equal to Morris's expression of love for the beauty of nature and of fair humanity is his expression of the love for beautiful handicraft, to which his whole life and all his writings alike testify.

Whatever is omitted from his stories of love and adventure, he never omits to familiarise his readers with the ornament lavished upon buildings and garments and countless accessories; hardly a dozen pages of any one of the romances may be turned before the description of some piece of artistic workmans.h.i.+p is met. Osberne's knife in _The Sundering Flood_ is early introduced to the reader as ”a goodly weapon, carven with quaintnesses about the heft, the blade inlaid with runes done in gold and the sheath of silver,” and the gifts he sends to Elfhild across the flood are ”an ouch or chain or arm-ring” fas.h.i.+oned ”quaintly and finely,” or ”fair windowed shoon, and broidered hosen and dainty smocks, and silken kerchiefs”; much is made of his holiday raiment of scarlet and gold, of his flowered green coat, and of the fine gear of gold and green for which Elfhild changes her grey cloak. In _The Story of the Glittering Plain_, filled as it is with the sterner spirit of the sagas, there is still room for much detail concerning the carven panelling of the shut-bed, in which was pictured ”fair groves and gardens, with flowery gra.s.s and fruited trees all about,” and ”fair women abiding therein, and lovely young men and warriors, and strange beasts and many marvels, and the ending of wrath and beginning of pleasure, and the crowning of love,” and for the account of the painted book, ”covered outside with gold and gems” and painted within with woods and castles, ”and burning mountains, and the wall of the world, and kings upon their thrones, and fair women and warriors, all most lovely to behold.” As for the fair Birdalone, her pleasure in fine stuffs and rich embroideries is unsurpa.s.sed in the annals of womankind. The wood-wife with canny knowledge of her tastes brings her the fairy web, declaring that if she dare wear it she shall presently be clad as goodly as she can wish. Birdalone can be trusted to don any attire that meets her fancy (and to doff it as willingly, for she has a startling habit not uncommon with Morris's heroines of stripping off her garments to let the winds of heaven play upon her unimpeded). The wood-wife places the raiment she has brought on Birdalone's outstretched arms, ”and it was as if the sunbeam had thrust through the close leaf.a.ge of the oak, and made its shadow nought a s.p.a.ce about Birdalone, so gleamed and glowed in s.h.i.+fty brightness the broidery of the gown; and Birdalone let it fall to earth, and pa.s.sed over her hands and arms the fine smock sewed in yellow and white silk, so that the web thereof seemed of mingled cream and curd; and she looked on the shoon that lay beside the gown, that were done so nicely and finely that the work was as the feather-robe of a beauteous bird, whereof one scarce can say whether it be bright or grey, thousand-hued or all simple of colour. Birdalone quivered for joy of all the fair things, and crowed in her speech as she knelt before Habundia to thank her.” Thus Morris carried into his ”pleasure-work of books” the ”bread-and-b.u.t.ter work” of which he was hardly less fond.

But in the deeper realities of life with which even romantic fiction may deal, and must deal if it is to lay hold of the modern imagination, these romances are poor. Not one of his characters is developed by circ.u.mstance into a fully equipped human being thoroughly alive to the intellectual and moral as to the physical and emotional world. His men and women are eternally young and, with the physical freshness of youth, have also the crude, unrounded, unfinished, unmoulded character of youth. They have all drunk of the Well at the World's End, and the scars of experience have disappeared, leaving a blank surface. The range of their emotions and pa.s.sions is as simple and narrow as with children, and life as the great story-tellers understand it is not shown by the chronicle of their days.

In many of the romances, it is true, the introduction of legendary and unreal persons and incidents relieves the writer from all obligation to make his account more lifelike than a fairy-tale; but Morris is never content to make a fairy-tale pure and simple. Marvellous adventures told directly as to a child are not within his method. One of his critics has described _The Water of the Wondrous Isles_ as a three-volume novel in the environment of a fairy-tale, and the phrase perfectly characterises it. A sentimental atmosphere surrounds his figures, and suggests languor and soft moods not to be tolerated by the writer of true fairy-tales, for while love is certainly not alien to even the purest type of the latter, with its witch and its princess and its cruel step-mother and rescuing prince, it is not love as Morris depicts it any more than it is love as Dante or Shakespeare depicts it. In Morris's stories the lovers are neither frankly symbolic creatures of the imagination whose loves are secondary to their heroic or miraculous achievements, and who apparently exist only to give a reason for the machinery of witchcraft, nor are they, like the lovers of the great novels, endowed with thoughtful minds and spiritual qualities. They are too sophisticated not to be more complex. The modern taste is unsympathetic to their endless kissing and ”fawning” and ”clipping,” nor would ancient taste have welcomed their refinements of kindness toward each other or the lack of zest in their adventures. Morris seems to have tried somewhat, as in the case of his handicrafts, to start with the traditions of the Middle Ages and to infuse into them a modern spirit that should make them legitimate successors and not mere imitations of the well-beloved mediaeval types. That he did not entirely succeed was the fault not so much of his method as of his deficient insight into human nature. He could not create what he had never closely investigated.

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