William Morris. Arthur Clutton-Brock
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and in all architecture since, the workman only did exactly what the architect told him to do. Thus Gothic missed the arrogant and determined perfection of Renaissance, but it had an eager life and growth of its own, like that of a State, which recognises the human rights of all its members. There were, of course, different tasks for all the workmen according to their ability, but each to some extent expressed his own will in what he did. To Morris this chapter was a gospel and all his own ideas about art grew out of it; indeed he was unjust to the art of the Renaissance, not merely through a caprice of personal taste, but because it seemed to him that at the Renaissance European society had taken a wrong turn, arriving at the dull follies of the industrial age. He knew, of course, that there were great artists during the Renaissance, but in their work he saw a foreboding of what was to come of it. For him it expressed, however splendidly, a state of mind that seemed wrong, and he refused to be dazzled by the triumphs of Michelangelo, as by the victories of Napoleon.
20. Wandle, 1884. Indigo-discharged and block-printed cotton, 165 × 92 cm. Victoria & Albert Museum, London.
21. Little Flowers. Pattern for chintz. Victoria & Albert Museum, London.
If he had been a critic, this prejudice of his against the Renaissance would have been a mere prejudice harmful to his work; but he was to be an artist, and afterwards a revolutionary, that is to say a man of action on both stages. Therefore he rightly and naturally judged all art and all ideas by their practical value to himself. And even when he was an undergraduate at Oxford he saw what would be of practical value to him. He knew already what he wanted both in life and in art and he had only to learn how to do and to get what he wanted.
In the long vacation of 1854 he went abroad, for the first time, to Northern France and Belgium, where he saw the greatest works of Gothic architecture and the paintings of Van Eyck and Memling. He said long afterwards that the first sight of Rouen was the greatest pleasure he had ever known; and Van Eyck and Memling remained always his favorite painters, no doubt because their art was still the art of the Middle Ages practiced with a new craft and subtlety.
In the same year he came of age and inherited an income of £900 a year. Thus he was already his own master and his freedom only determined him to make the best possible use of it. In the next year he and Burne-Jones finally resolved to be artists not clergymen. Morris had been drawn into the High Church Movement, no doubt because it was part of the general reaction against modern materialism and ugliness. But the beliefs which were forming in his mind were not religious, however harmonious with the true Christian faith. He changed his purpose not in any violent reaction against it, but because he had a stronger desire to do something else. He had already begun to write poetry, which he did quite suddenly and with immediate success. Canon Dixon tells how he went one evening to Exeter and found Morris with Burne-Jones. As soon as he entered the room. Burne-Jones exclaimed wildly, “‘He’s a great poet.’ ‘Who is?’ asked we. ‘Why, Topsy.’” Then Morris read them The Willow and the Red Cliff, the first poem he had ever written in his life. Dixon expressed his admiration and Morris replied, “Well, if this is poetry, it is very easy to write.” “From that time onward,” says Dixon, “for a term or two, he came to my rooms almost every day with a new poem.”
Morris destroyed many of his early poems, but some pieces and fragments remain of them and they are, as Dixon thought when he first heard them, quite unlike any other poetry. We can believe, too, that they were easy to write, for they sound as if they had come into his mind as tunes come into the minds of musicians:
Christ keep the Hollow Land
All the summer-tide;
Still we cannot understand
Where the waters glide;
Only dimly seeing them
Coldly slipping through
Many green-lipped cavern-mouths,
Where the hills are blue.
22. Edward Burne-Jones, William Morris and John Henry Dearle (for the design) and Morris & Co. (for the production), Holy Grail Tapestry – Quest for the Holy Grail Tapestries – The Arming and Departure of the Knights (II), 1895–1896. High warp tapestry, wool and silk weft on cotton warp, 360 × 244 cm. Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery, Birmingham.
23. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Before the Battle, 1858, retouched in 1862. Transparent and opaque watercolour on paper, mounted on canvas, 41.4 × 27.5 cm. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Morris afterwards became the best storyteller of all our modern poets; but because he had this power of making verse that was almost musical, verse that needed no context or preparation but cast an instant spell upon the mind through the ear, he was always a poet as well as a storyteller. In his life as in his poetry there was the same contrast and yet harmony of the visionary and the practical, and the same power of making the one serve the other. At this time in his poetry he was a pure visionary. Things that delighted his eyes or his mind came into his verse as such things come into dreams. He might, no doubt, have cultivated this poetry of the sub-consciousness; but he was not long content to be only a visionary either in life or in art. It may be that the prose romances, which he began to write in 1855, gave him a disgust of this kind of writing. They too are unlike anything else in English literature, but far inferior to the poems. For that vagueness of sense, which in the verse is combined with a curious intensity of sound, bewilders and disappoints in a prose story, the more so because the style is uncertain and not always suited to the subject. Indeed at this time Morris wrote prose as minor poets write verse, seeming now and then to adopt a sentimental character not his own and to express what he wanted to feel rather than what he did feel. Thirty years later, when he again began writing prose, he was a complete master of it; but in 1855 he first read Chaucer and was turned back from prose to verse, and to verse about subjects he chose consciously.
He and his friends had a young and generous desire to work some great change upon the world. They had vague notions of founding a brotherhood, they saw that the condition of the poor was horrible, they wanted to do something at once; and, not knowing precisely what they wanted to do, they naturally determined to start a magazine. Dixon first proposed it to Morris in 1855 and the whole set were delighted with the idea. Since they had friends at Cambridge they determined that these too should write for it; and so, when it came into being, it was called the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, though it was nearly all written by Oxford men. The first issue appeared on January 1, 1856, and it ran for twelve issues, appearing monthly. Morris financed and wrote eighteen poems, romances and articles for it. No other contributor came near him in merit except Dante Gabriel Rossetti, whom Burne-Jones had met at the end of 1855 and who already admired Morris’s poetry. Both Tennyson and Ruskin praised the magazine; but it sold few issues, confirming the fears of Ruskin, who said that he had never known an honest journal get on yet.
24. La Belle Iseult, 1858. Oil on canvas, 71.8 × 50.2 cm. Tate Gallery, London.
25. The Adoration of the Magi, 1888. Tapestry woven in wool, silk and mohair on a cotton warp, 345.3 × 502.9 cm. Castle Museum, Norwich.
The Influence of Rossetti
In 1855 Morris took his degree, and in January 1856 he was articled to George Edmund Street, one of the chief architects of the Gothic Revival and the designer of the Law Courts. He was, as Morris said, “a good architect as things go now”; but he produced imitation Gothic under conditions utterly different from those in which the real Gothic had grown, and it was impossible that Morris should be satisfied with the work he did or should wish to do work like it. Morris became his pupil, no doubt, because he was more interested in architecture than in any other art; but he was not born to be an architect, at least under conditions at that time. This he soon discovered, but in Street’s office he learnt some useful things and met Philip Webb,