William Morris: The Man and His Work

“WHEN Topsy dies, people will say, ‘ There goes the last of the Vikings.’”

It is, alas, some fifteen years since I heard Dante Gabriel Rossetti speak these words in his studio one evening. Tired with his day’s painting, he was talking of some early work which he, William Morris, and Burne-Jones had done in a common spirit, and this led to a discussion as to what was Morris’s best achievement as a poet. One of the two others who were present declared for The Earthly Paradise; the other preferred the Volsung epic. Rossetti said that, speaking along the line of poetry as poetry, Topsy (a favorite name for Morris, almost invariably used by Rossetti, if I remember aright, first given by him on account of the shaggy locks and “ Berserker appearance of his friend) had never done anything to surpass his first volume, The Defence of Guenevere. Thereafter, alluding to some stupid remark that had been made in public about William Morris being merely a craftsman who also wrote poetry, he spoke of him with the utmost enthusiasm, of the man as poet, as creative artist, as a craftsman of extraordinary skill, knowledge, and initiative, and of the rare worth of the man as a man. It was then, apropos of his appearance, manner, and northern intensity of vigor, that he added, “ When Topsy dies, people will say, ‘ There goes the last of the Vikings.’ ” Another frequent name for Morris with Rossetti, and one readily adopted by other friends, was “ the Skald.” The circumstances which gave rise to the nickname are indicated in a letter from Rossetti (dated August, 1871) when he was staying at Kelmscott Manor, which at that time he shared with William Morris.

“ Morris is expected here in about a month now, doubtless with wonderful tales of Iceland. But what is the use of going there if you are not allowed to make people stare well when you come back ? An Icelandic paper which he sent, reporting his arrival, describes him, as ‘ William Morris, Skald.’ ”

For a long time thereafter, Morris was called by this appellation, which delighted him. Hammersmith, with all its commonplace and ignominious littlenesses, fell away from him when he could think of himself, or hear himself spoken of, as a skald, as the weaver of sagas, of heroic; poems and chronicles for heroic men.

A skald, a viking indeed, was William Morris. I have never met any man who gave an impression of more exhaustless vitality. There never was a man who lived a fuller life ; he was the very incarnation of ceaseless mental and bodily energy. Once he was asked if he were subject to that extreme despondency which so often accompanies the essentially poetic temperament. “ I daresay I am,” he answered, “ but I’ve never had time to think about it, so I really can’t say.” Probably one of the few despondent remarks that Morris ever made was quite recently ; when told of Millais’ death he answered, half jocularly, “ I ’ll be seeing the old boy before long.”

There are not many now alive who can remember William Morris as a boy or youth ; but I have heard from one or two of his early friends that his was a most striking personality even when he was still in his teens. Strangely enough, one of these friends speaks of him as a rather sensitive and delicate youth, with little promise of that robustness of manner as well as physique which afterwards brought him his nickname “ the Viking.”He was a romantic youngster, and was so dreamy that his intimates thought “ Bill Morris ” would never do anything but moon away his time. Before he was of age, however, he must have dissipated this idea, for, though his early writings were of an ultra-romantic and occasionally sentimental caste, he had already begun to show unmistakable signs of originality and power. It will probably be a long time before the full story of William Morris’s life is written. When it is, his admirers will be interested to learn how much he owed to his love for the beautiful woman who became his wife, and who may be thus alluded to without offense, as for twenty years or more her face has been familiar to lovers of Rossetti’s art, — for in her (and his noble Proserpine may be taken as a typical example) the poet-painter found his ideal of tragic beauty. As some misleading and even wholly perverse statements concerning Morris’s first meeting with this lady have gained currency, it may be as well to give here the actual facts.

By 1856, when he was in his twentysecond year, Morris had left Oxford. In the following year, however, he returned to that city, because of his selection as one of those commisssioned to decorate the walls of the Oxford Union Debating - Room. This now famous scheme resulted rather disastrously, for before long the mural decorations began rapidly to fade. “ I’ve come to my Oxford Union ” was at one time a colloquialism, among the Rossetti-Morris circle, for the vanishing point in worldly means. What inspired Morris was the prospect of collaboration with two young men: one, Edward Burne-Jones, his chief friend at Oxford, and the other, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, whose acquaintance he had made in London. The subjects of these frescoes were legends from the Arthurian cycle ; and unmistakably to his preoccupation with the central subject, and to Rossetti’s enthusiastic mediævalism, we owe the wonderful atmosphere and color of The Defence of Guenevere — that remarkable first volume, which appeared in 1858, and has at this day as rare a poetic beauty as it had then, and an influence scarcely less potent, if more limited.

But to return. Whatever direct result the painting at the Oxford Union had for Morris, it was ever memorable to him for another reason. I may give the statement in the words of the late William Bell Scott. “ After the labors of the day, the volunteer artists of the Union regaled themselves by coming to the theatre, and there they beheld in the front box above them what all declared to be the ideal personification of poetical womanhood. In this ease, the hair was not auburn, but black as night; unique in face and figure, she was a queen, a Proserpine, a Medusa, a Circe — but also, strangely enough, a Beatrice, a Pandora, and a Virgin Mary. They made interest with the family, and she sat to them. Morris was at that time sworn to be a painter. She sat to him. . . . He proposed marriage, and the next I heard of them was that they were starting for his new house at Upton.”

The lady was a Miss Burdon. The children of their marriage were two daughters, one of whom, Miss May Morris, a few years ago married Mr. Halliday Sparling, who edited Mr. Morris’s socialistic paper, The Common Weal. After their marriage Mr. and Mrs. Morris lived for a time at Bexley Heath, near London ; thereafter at Queen’s Square and at Turnham Green. It was not till 1878 that he occupied the now celebrated house in Hammersmith, which, by the way, was formerly tenanted by George Macdonald, the novelist. Morris’s favorite residence, however, was always that old mansion of Kelmscott, near Lechlade, in Oxfordshire, a building of the Jacobean date and type. As the country residence of two of the greatest poets of our time, and as the place where Rossetti and William Morris dreamed some of their most beautiful dreams, and wrought some of their finest work, Kelmscott Manor must always be a shrine for those who love to do homage.

A few words as to the early incidents of Morris’s life.

Born at Walthamstow in Essex, on March 24, 1834, his birth is associated with the year wherein Lamb and Coleridge died. In a prolific period, it is interesting to note that this year has given us no other eminent poet or writer, the most noteworthy being James Thompson, the author of The City of Dreadful Night. The cynical saying, “Tell me what a son’s father is, and then I ’ll know what that son is not,” was exemplified in the case of Morris. His father was a well-to-do city merchant of London, and a hard-and-fast evangelical Tory of the old type. William was the eldest in a family of nine children, and was about fourteen years old when Mr. Morris died. Fortunately there were ample means for the large family. Morris passed from a small academy at Walthamstow to Marlborough Public School; whence, after a year’s reading with a private tutor, he went in 1852 to Exeter College, Oxford. Already he had shown unmistakable artistic bias, though principally in archæology and architecture. The first definite force from outside came from the now famous organ of the pre-Raphaelites, The Germ, He was not only inspired to original work of his own by the ardent enthusiasm, the originality, and here and there the signs of new genius displayed in this brief-lived periodical, but through it he made the two chief friendships of his life, those with Edward Burne-Jones and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. At Oxford itself he distinguished himself in no way: no doubt fortunately for English literature. It is well that a thousand youths should be strictly trained in the way they should go; but it is better fortune when a youth of genius “ gangs his ain gate.” During his last year at Oxford, Morris and BurneJones became intimate. Their first coming together was through a common enthusiasm for the poetry of a then unknown young man, whose very name, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, was as unfamiliar in English ears as his verse was to English critics. Both young men formed the idea of seeking out this foreignnamed new writer, and of associating themselves with him. But first Morris articled himself in Oxford to an architect, who has since become famous, Mr. G. E. Street. Tiring of office work, however, Morris, though he had paid his premium, left Oxford for London.

The earliest prose writings of William Morris appeared, just forty years ago, in the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine. Collectors have long sought certain odd numbers of the old Oxford and Cambridge, and, to use a hackneyed phrase, these are now, because they contain some of the early writings of William Morris, Rossetti, and others of that potent clan of new “makers,” literally worth their weight in gold. He was often importuned to reprint these strange archaic romances, but for one reason or another never consented. If it is certain that he wished them to remain in that relative obscurity, there they should be allowed to stay ; otherwise there must be thousands who would welcome a reprint of the earliest imaginative work of the author of The Earthly Paradise.

When did Morris do all his work ? That was a question often asked twenty years ago in Rossetti’s studio, then a gathering-place for the elect of the circle —a question asked, indeed, and with good reason, much more frequently of late years. He had time to read, to study, — and some of his Scandinavian studies, in particular, involved prolonged time and absorption, — to write incessantly in imaginative prose, in verse; to occupy himself with socialistic labors, humanitarian pamphlets, speeches, papers ; to make his house a centre for the “ advanced wing ; ” to work daily at some one or other of his innumerable decorative undertakings ; and to superintend a busy and complex business, for a business in the ordinary sense the manufacture of decorative tapestry and other craft-productions unquestionably was. Some of his friends aver that the strain of all this complex and unceasing activity undermined his vitality, and so in a sense killed him ; others make a scapegoat of uncongenial business prebceupations and responsibilities ; and others, again, attribute the dissipation of his energies to his active sympathy with every “ socialistic crank,” and his practical identification with innumerable schemes to better the mental, moral, and bodily welfare of his fellows. Morris himself would never have admitted either of the two latter at any rate, He loved his decorative craft-work to enthusiasm, and his whole big heart was in his unselfish thought and labor for the common weal. Books like his Dream of John Ball, and News from Nowhere were not the “ fails ” of a dreamer with spare time, but the impassioned if controlled expression of what were vital truths and necessitous warnings. Of late years especially, William Morris thought much more of what he might do than of anything he had done ; and perhaps if he had found it necessary to throw over the edge of oblivion any one big achievement of his, of a literary nature, it would have been his so-called chief work, The Earthly Paradise. “ The best thing about it,” he said once, “ is its name. Some day or other that will inspire others when every line of the blessed thing is forgotten. That ’s what we ’re all working for.” I have heard, though at the moment I cannot recall whether from a trustworthy source, that he once pooh-poohed the ideal beauty of The Earthly Paradise, and said that there was “ more real ideal "in News from Nowhere. Indeed, his most famous book was that which he least liked to hear about, and there was even a time when he was sick of the very name, if obtruded upon his notice. I remember once journeying Hammersmith-ward with him in the open thirdclass of an underground train, and his pleasure in the brusque frankness of a laboring man who recognized him. “ They tell me you ’re a pote, Mr. Morris. Well, I know nuthin’ about potes or pote’ry, but I ’m bloomin’ well sure I know a man, an’ you ’re one, by God ! ” “ That’s the stuff,” he said to me afterwards,— “ that ’s the stuff we want; and, mark you, that ’s the stuff, too, that in the long run I ’m working for in prose and poetry as well. I believe in the common blood.” Again, at the time when he started the socialistic paper The Common Weal, he was taken to task by an old friend for thus “ giving himself away.” “ You ’ll never be laureate now,” the objector added, “ not even though Tennyson, Browning, and Swinburne go off at one fell swoop.” Morris laughed in genuine amusement. "As to the giving myself away,” he added, “ it ’s not much to give at the best, either for me or for any of us. But what you say about the laureateship is too funny.

Let it go to So-and-so or So-and-so, and welcome. If I can’t be the laureate of reading men, I ’ll be the laureate of sweating men.”

“ The laureate of sweating men.” I have thought of that phrase again and again since the news of the death of that brave viking of modern life who was not ashamed to be both dreamer and worker, poet and socialist, the aristocrat of the imagination, and a citizen of the human republic. At the time of Lord Tennyson’s death, William Morris was, of course, one of the two poets of whom every one thought as successor to the laureateship. “ It’s bound to be either Topsy or Swinburne,” said some one in his hearing ; to which he replied at once, “ Don’t be a fool; you must know quite well it won’t be either.” Among the absurd objections to Morris’s claims was that of superfine bardlets and criticasters, —that “ Morris, as poetlaureate, would be too much of a good thing.” I have heard him alluded to as though he were a redshirt of the Commune, or at best as a boor. None who once visited him in his fascinating house in Hammersmith, or in his beautiful Oxfordshire summer-house, Kelmscott Manor (immortalized by Rossetti), and enjoyed the poet artist’s frank cordiality, and genial, sunny, ardent, hopeful nature, could possibly fall into such an error. In his personality and views, Morris might be spoken of as Shelley translated into a viking. He was like Trelawney in one thing, — that his appearance suggested to the stranger the mien and manner of a sea-captain. When people who knew nothing of the poet save as the author of The Earthly Paradise had their attention directed to him, they could hardly believe that, in the robust, square-set, ruddy-faced, blue-eyed, pilot-coated, blue-shirted, seacaptain-looking man, they beheld “ the idle dreamer of an empty day.” “ What is William Morris like ? ” an American admirer of the poet asked me recently, and I could think of nothing more apt than to say that he was like Ibsen if one could think of Ibsen as the jolly skipper of a North Sea trawler.

He was a misleading man to meet with in literary circles — a phrase itself somewhat misleading, for William Morris was rarely to be found in what are called literary circles. “ Afternoons ” saw him not, or if ever he turned in at a friend’s gathering, it was because that friend was of old standing, and probably because some personal obligation was involved. "Evenings” of the “at home ” kind, he disliked equally. I do not remember ever having seen him even at any of the literary gatherings where he might have been expected to put in an appearance, such as the Authors’ Society’s Annual Dinner, the less formal Vagabonds, the more select Odd Volumes, or the chief of our literary associations of the kind, the Omar Khayyám Club. His method of enjoyment was “ to do something,” and it fretted him to sit long or even to listen long. Indeed, this physical impatience often rendered him apparently more heedless to music, the theatre, lectures, than he really was ; though when heart and brain were both under a spell, as when a speaker was urging in a new and vigorous way the claims of the people, or the rights and wrongs of some “ case,” or again when a friend was reading from the manuscript of a poem or other imaginative production, he would listen intently, leaning forward, with his vivid blue eyes gleaming out of his ruddy face, and his broad brows beneath his mass of upstanding and outstanding grizzled gray hair. In music he took keen delight, having a sensitive and trained ear. I have watched him at times, when the man whom I have heard spoken of as boorishly indifferent to others was so eagerly interested that it was possible to see the nervous life within him. That he could be, that he habitually was, genial, cordial, and courteous, is a commonplace to those who really knew him. At the same time it is true he was apt to freeze into a grumpy silence if he were bored, and he had also a strange kind of shyness. Once in quite late years he went to a literary afternoon, because the host was the late Ford Madox Brown, an old and intimate friend — and, indeed, not long before the veteran painter took the fatal turn in the complaint which ultimately killed him. There was a man present who for some reason exceedingly annoyed William Morris. As fate would have it, this individual drifted alongside of the poet at a moment when, for a wonder, the latter was disengaged. “ Ah, I ’m very pleased to meet you, Mr. Morris,” the gentleman began, in a condescending voice; “ I don’t read your prose, you know, but I ’m a great admirer of The Earthly Paradise, and ” — but here Morris broke in with, “ But you have met me before ; you addressed me in the studio a few minutes ago. And I’m really not interested in The Earthly Paradise, and if you ’ll excuse me, we ’ll drop the subject.” And with that the ruffled poet turned to a friend, and began an obviously private chat.

There were, of course, two individuals known as William Morris. The William Morris who, of an evening at Hammersmith, discoursed philosophic and practical Socialism with difficult gentry of “ the left wing ” ("the extreme rearward feather,” as Rossetti once called the forlorn little band of ultra-socialistic reformers) was a very different man from William Morris who of a summer day on the Thames, or of an autumn evening at Kelmscott Manor, would read with a peculiar chanting intonation some translation of an Icelandic saga, or pages from one or other of those Old World romances which he delighted to write.

Probably the three things which in recent years gave him most pleasure were his preoccupation with his archaic prose tales, his Icelandic and Scandinavian studies and writings, and the Kelmscott printing-press. It was a source of keen gratification to him that his efforts to make a fine art of printing and binding met with so much practical approval, but probably no one took more delight than he did in the beautiful books which have issued from the Kelmscott Press. Among recent undertakings he was especially interested in the production of a limited edition of the long-expected poems of his friend Mr. Theodore Watts, or Mr. Theodore Watts-Dunton, as he must now be called. Not only had he a very deep and sincere admiration for Mr. Watts-Dun ton’s poetry, but he valued the author as one of his oldest and most intimate friends. Even when busiest he had always time to see and talk with this good friend, and it is pleasant to know that among his latest occupations was the printing of a book in whose fortunes he was so profoundly interested, both for its own sake and for that of the friendship between the author and himself.

It is unnecessary in an article such as this to dwell in detail on the literary and artistic achievements of William Morris. The main facts of his career are common property.

As a poet, he first attracted the attention of the literary world in general by his Life and Death of Jason (1867), and, in quick succession (1868-1870), that of the great reading public, by his four volumes of The Earthly Paradise. It is interesting to know that Jason was originally one of the tales told by the elders of the town, in The Earthly Paradise ; but grew so long that it was published in a volume by itself, and independently of the larger and later collection. In Jason the stories are arranged under the signs of the zodiac, with one classical and one mediæval legend for each month of the year; and lovers of poetic statistics will be interested to know that The Earthly Paradise extends to forty thousand lines.

In this disconnected epic, if one may so call a collection of narrative poems occupied with epical themes, there are one or two of those beautiful Scandinavian legendary romances in which Morris, as he said once, found the reflection of his heart. In fact, the noblest poetic narrative in the whole sequence of The Earthly Paradise is The Lovers of Gudrun, in the third volume. Here is, indeed, a noble music. Who can forget those lines where Kiartan bids farewell to Gudrun ? —

Almost concurrently with the issue of the fourth volume of The Earthly Paradise, Morris published the first of those re-creations of ancient Scandinavian literature with which his name is now so intimately associated. In collaboration with one or other Norse friend, he produced saga after saga out of the Icelandic tongue. The first of the series was Grettis’ Saga, issued in 1869, and written in collaboration with Mr. Asmundasson. Later, he worked along with his intimate friend, Mr. Eric Magnusson, with whom he made his first visit to Iceland. The most important result of this visit was the publication in 1870 of the Volsunga Saga. Since then, volume after volume of saga literature, due to joint enthusiasm and energy, has appeared.

But, so far as English literature is concerned, by far the most noteworthy outcome of William Morris’s Scandinavian studies was his superb epic narrative in verse, Sigurd the Volsung, and the Fall of the Niblungs. It is now twenty years since the publication of Sigurd. Then, it was hailed as a noble tale nobly retold ; to-day, it is accepted as one of the highest poetic achievements of the Victorian Age. Morris himself ranked it high above any other literary work of his. On the day of its publication, he exclaimed : “ There, I have touched my high-water mark ! ” Certainly, in the score of years that have elapsed since then, he published nothing which can for a moment be compared with that epic ; and it is more than probable that the disengaged criticism of succeeding generations will find that he published nothing so wholly satisfactory before it. In this great work we come upon William Morris as the typical saga-man of modern literature. The breath of the North blows across these billowy lines, as the polar wind across the green waves of the North Sea. The noise of waters, the splashing of oars, the whirling of swords, the conflict of battle, cries and heroic summons to death, reëcho in the reader’s ears. All the romance which gives so wonderful an atmosphere to his earlier poems, all the dreamy sweetness of The Earthly Paradise and creations such as Love is Enough, are here also ; but with them are a force, a vigor and intensity, of which, save in his translation of the Odyssey, there are few prior indications. True, intensity is at no time a characteristic of Morris’s poetic expression, at any rate at no time since the early Defence of Guenevere : it is in the mass, in the main effect, that his work can with justice be called intense. His individual lines are oftener “ of linkëd sweetness long drawn out; ” they march rather to Lydian airs than to martial measures, perhaps rather to those Dorian flutes to which the Spartans of old, ironically discarding the frenzy of fife and clarion, went forth to battle. But in cumulative effect, how few long poems of our time can be compared with the Sigurd. It is here, and in the later works of the kind, whether in prose or in verse, that he moves with a mien as of a prince come into his own. The North was native to him. In that land of dream, wherein he delighted to sojourn, he was a powerful Goth, conscious of his delayed war-galley, of his recumbent spear, of his dissuaded sword. But when he tells the story of Sigurd, or relates the fall of the Volsungs, we hear the clank of the hero’s sword, we see the shine of his spear ; in the air is the rushing sound of his viking galley — as the men of old said, “ It drinks the blue wine of the waves.”

It is far too soon to attempt an estimate of the place which William Morris will hold in contemporary poetry. We are still, as it were, among the hedges which surround the earthly paradise which his genius wrought out of dream and his passionate devotion to beauty. We are too close to the fair structure to see whether it is withstanding the ruining breath of time, or whether its fabric is too exquisitely delicate to sustain the shrewder air of a later period. Morris himself realized that he had conveyed into his work an element of dream-life out of proportion to that atmosphere of actuality which is an elemental necessity to literature that shall endure. In later years, he wearied greatly of praise of his earlier writings, and himself found, what many critics complained of, that his fluent and melodious chronicles of a past time had ceased to stimulate the ever adventurous imagination or to solace the world-weariness of “ the idle dreamer of an empty day.” Strangely enough there is no one line in the whole immense range of his writings which has passed so universally into current phraseology as this famous refrain from The Earthly Paradise, — strangely, because it is so uncharacteristic of the stronger part of Morris’s life-work ; but mainly because it is so untypical of the man. Of no man of his time could it with less justice be said that he was the idle singer of an empty day. William Morris was the most strenuous man of genius whom our age has produced : his one dominant aim was to prove that the day was not idle and that idlers were no more than cumberers of the ground. With him beauty was a practicable, a realizable, dream. Beauty, he once declared, is “ in one sense the most common thing in the world : for it is everywhere. Wherever there is the rhythm of light, there is some transmutation into beauty.” To him it was no impossibility that the human mind might become no less a magician with the alchemy of thought, than sun and wind with their cosmic chemistry. To a man such as this, no time or period could be empty; still less could he himself be, in his own estimation or that of others, “the idle singer of an empty day.” It is possible, indeed, that Morris’s very preoccupation with the intensely absorbing aspects of the beautiful, as he tried to capture them into the woof of temporal and common things whereat he wove so industriously, may in some measure have interfered with that robust expression in the art of words which would seem to be most natural to him. The law of contraries, in the arts, has often been demonstrated. There is no cry so poignant for the joy of vigorous life, as that of the consumptive and delicate Robert Louis Stevenson ; there is no greater insistence on sanity of thought and action than that of Rousseau himself, morbid to the extremes of sanity. The most passionate cry to the divinity of health, for the Greek ideals of beauty, came from the feeble and laboring lungs of Richard Jefferies. It is not surprising, therefore, that the man oppressed by the commonplaces and weary routine of conventional life should thirst for swift adventure and heroic deeds, and the supremacy of the old pagan laws of strength and daring. Not more surprising is it, again, that one like Morris, with every hour of his life surcharged with an intense active living, should find mental and spiritual relief in the embroidering anew along the fringes of contemporary life traceries of a beautiful past, apparently content to be wholly “ unpractical,” wholly “ unutilitarian,” — in a word, “ the idle singer of an empty day.”

It is a mistake of some to think that Morris believed the triumph of democracy might mean the wane of art. He held exactly the opposite view. In some noble lines in his Chants for Socialists he gives expression to the faith within him as to the ultimate weal of which he dreamed: —

It is interesting to note the continuity of William Morris’s mind, indeed of his style. Before the public had heard of him at all he had written those wonderful short stories of his, still unpublished, which appeared in the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine. From these stories of 1856 to The Well at the World’s End of 1896, there is simply the evolution of a native style. There is not a passage in this last-named book, or in any of the archaic romances of the House of the Wolfings kind, which does not bear the unmistakable idiosyncratic signs of their actual authorship; and in books externally so diverse as any of these, and the socialistic visionary romances, there is practically no divergence in method or manner. Forty years ago Morris began thus, in that now so rare undergraduates’ magazine at Oxford, his beautiful story of Gertha’s Lovers : —

“ Long ago there was a land, never mind where or when, a fair country, and good to live in, rich with wealth of golden corn, beautiful with many woods, watered with great rivers and pleasant trickling streams ; moreover, one extremity of it was bounded by the washing of the purple waves, and the other by the solemn watchfulness of the purple mountains.”

It is this ideal land of his youth for which he never ceased to yearn. With him, too, that land was to be found only in the realm of dream; but, on the other hand, the life of dream was as actual, as vivid, as inevitable, and as necessary, as the life of outward action. He begins his socialistic romance, The Dream of John Ball, thus : —

“ Sometimes I am rewarded for fretting myself so much about present matters by a quite unasked-for pleasant dream.”

The unasked-for pleasant dreams were the delight and solace of Morris’s feverishly strenuous life, and are the solace and delight of innumerable readers to whom he has given them as his best gift to his fellows. His eyes are ever upon the ideal landscape ; an ideal civic vision is ever before him, an ideal fellowship, a self-sustaining, self-sufficient commune. The heroism of his earlier stories is not merely that of the battle-axe or the sword of chivalry, but is seen in the minds as well as in the actions of his personages. There may seem a wide gulf between a poem such as The Earthly Paradise, or one of those early stories such as The Hollow Land, and The Dream of John Ball ; but here, too, the first thing he sees is some familiar English aspect touched by the light of dream into ideal beauty. Even in the actual dreams of sleep, he tells us there is no disarray of images, there is no grotesque or merely fantastic, and above all no disorderly, incompleteness in the mental architecture shaped by the master-spirit within the brain. "Sometimes,” he says, “it is a splendid collegiate church untouched by restoring parson and architect, standing amid an island, shapely trees, flower-beset cottages of thatched gray stone and cob, amidst the narrow stretch of bright green water-meadows that wind between the sweeping Wiltshire downs. Or, again, some new scene and yet familiar cluster of houses in a gray village of the Upper Thames, overtopped by the delicate tracery of a fourteenth century church; or, again, as once when I was journeying (in a dream of the night) down the well-remembered reaches of the Thames betwixt Streatly and Wallingford, where the foothills of the White Horse fall back from the broad stream, I came upon a clear-seen mediæval town, standing up with roof and tower and spire within its walls, gray and ancient, but untouched from the days of its builders of old.”

It is difficult not to believe that the literary historians of the future will indorse the opinion of William Morris held by his great compeer, Rossetti. In Fraser’s Magazine for February, 1869, there was an article on Morris’s work by Mr. Skelton ("Shirley”). A few days after the appearance of the number, Rossetti wrote as follows in a letter to Mr. Skelton : “ I think all you say of Morris is very completely and excellently said. It indicates, I should say, on the whole, the same estimate of him which I have long entertained, as being — all things considered — the greatest literary identity of our time. I say this chiefly on the ground of that highest quality in a poet — his width of relation to the mass of mankind : for inexhaustible splendor of execution, who can stand beside Swinburne ?— not to speak of older men. . . . You know Morris is now only thirty-five, and has done things in Decorative Art which take as high and exclusive a place in that field as his poetry does in its own. What may he not yet do ? The second volume of The Earthly Paradise is getting forward ; ... in some parts the poet goes deeper in treatment of intense personal passion than he has yet done. After this work is finished, I trust his next step will be in dramatic composition, in which I foresee some of his highest triumphs.”

This letter is profoundly interesting and suggestive. There are many who have considered Rossetti himself to be the greatest literary identity of his time ; but probably he is right in his generous judgment as to Morris. Again, one is glad to note that Rossetti, commonly supposed to be so remote in his sympathies, recognizes that the test of the highest quality in a poet is his width of relation to the mass of mankind. Although, it is true, Morris never achieved success as a dramatist, Rossetti was certainly light in his belief that in dramatic composition his friend might attain to some of his highest triumphs. It was more because Morris disbelieved in the public taste for the higher drama, and was too profoundly dissatisfied with the recent and present conditions of the stage, than from indifference or lack of impulse that he refrained from direct participation in dramatic literature. Those who knew him intimately, however, were aware that he not only acted occasionally himself, but once or twice proved himself as able at stagecraft as though he had been long in training, and had none of his innumerable distractions to dissuade him from his current preoccupation.

Rossetti, in a letter to a friend early in 1857, writes : “ Two young men, projectors of the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, have recently come to town also from Oxford, and are now very intimate friends of mine. Their names are Morris and Jones. They have turned artists instead of taking up any other career to which the University generally leads, and both are men of real genius. Jones’s designs are marvels of finish and imaginative detail, unequaled by anything unless perhaps Albert Dürer’s finest works ; and Morris, though without practice as yet, has no less power, I fancy. He has written some really wonderful poetry, too.”

Later in the same year, Rossetti wrote again : “ Morris has as yet done nothing in art, but is now busily painting his first picture, Sir Tristram after his Illness, in the Garden of King Mark’s Palace, recognized by the Dog he had given to Yseult, from the Morte D’ Arthur. It is being done all from nature, of course, and I believe will turn out capitally.”

The “ really wonderful poetry ” was soon to convince the few lovers of poetry for poetry’s sake — though Richard Garnett, himself then a youthful poet and writer of extraordinary ability, was almost alone in influential recognition of The Defence of Guenevere, at the time of its appearance. On the other hand the lengthily named picture fell short of the expectations of both the artist and his friends. Rossetti himself, ever generously prone to enthusiasm in connection with the achievement of his friends, came at last to believe that Morris’s abilities were those of a decorative artist rather than of a painter of pictures in the ordinary sense of the words. He declared once, whimsically, that Morris must have seen the error of his ways, for on his (Rossetti) entering his friend’s studio he saw a grotesque parody of the ambitious “masterpiece,” re - worded thus: “ Sudden Indisposition of Sir Tristram, in the Garden of King Mark’s Palace, recognizable as Collywobbles by the pile of gooseberry-skins beside him, remains of the unripe gooseberries devoured by him while he was waiting for Yseult.”

Considering the high opinion that Rossetti always held concerning his friend — “ the only man I have known who beats every other man at his own game,” he said to me once — it is interesting to know what Morris thought of Rossetti. “ It is,” he wrote, — “ it is certainly to be wondered at that a master in the supremely difficult art of painting should have qualities which enable him to deal with the other supremely difficult one of poetry ; and to do this not only with the utmost depth of feeling and thought, but also with the most complete and unfaltering mastery over its material; that he should find in its limitations and special conditions, not stumbling-blocks or fetters, but just so many pleasures, so much whetting of invention and imagination. In no poems is the spontaneous and habitual interpenetration of matter and manner, which is the essence of poetry, more complete than in these. Among pieces where the mystical feeling is by necessity of subject most simple and most on the surface, The Blessed Damozel should be noticed : a poem in which wild longing, and the shame of life, and the despair of separation, and the worship of love, are wrought into a palpable dream ; in which the heaven that exists as if for the sake of the beloved is as real as the earthly things about the lover — while these are scarcely less strange, or less pervaded with the sense of his passion, than the things his imagination has made. ... I think these lyrics, with all their other merits, the most complete of their time. No difficulty is avoided in them, no subject is treated vaguely, languidly, or heartlessly. As there is no commonplace or second-hand thought left in them, to be atoned for by beauty of execution, so no thought is allowed to overshadow that beauty of art which compels a real poet to speak in verse and not in prose. Nor do I know what lyrics of any time are to be called great, if we are to deny that title to these.”

Where, at the close of the sixth decade in our century, Morris was known at all, it was only, except among a few enthusiasts, to be derided either as an affected mediævalist or as a mere impracticable dreamer. By Rossetti, BurneJones, and the group of workers in the several arts, he was already hailed as a man of remarkable genius ; for the rest, he and his aims were hopelessly misunderstood. At this period, I may add, from what I have on the best authority, Morris was not only no socialist, but was addicted, to that most arrogant of aristocratical obsessions, the preoccupation of the artist with his own point of view as the only one of any value or even interest. He had a theory that a beneficent tyrant would be the ideal monarch — and this not without a lurking idea that he knew where he could find a modest and retiring, but highly qualified autocrat ! I remember being told years ago, though I do not recollect on what authority, that in one of his Oxford deliverances he maintained that there were only two sovereign overlords in the world, — Queen Art and King Sword.

However, “the idle dreamer “ proved that he had a shrewd head — justifying Rossetti’s parody many years later, “ The busy Morris of a twelve hours’day.”In the year 1861, he gave money, energy, thought, and enthusiasm to the formation of an “ arts and crafts “ association, — an enterprise successful from the first, though for a time very moderately so, and of late years one of the most potent factors in the evolution of domestic decoration, the domestic arts and crafts generally, in Great Britain and America. For colleagues he had Rossetti, BurneJones, Madox Brown, and his friend Webb. The business was located in Red Lion Square, and from that unpromising region went forth the stained glass and ornamental furniture which was then almost grotesquely unpleasing to ordinary taste, and is now so familiar and generally admired. Recognition, however, came soon, for in 1862 a gold medal was obtained at the Exhibition for the stained glass. “ Morris & Co.”now branched out into the manufacture of paper-hangings and textile fabrics — with what extraordinary results is now common knowledge.

It is not generally known, even in the Morris circle, that at this juncture the firm nearly collapsed. The leading members simultaneously developed a feverish energy in creative work of their own, and each revolted against “ the sordid purlieus of Red Lion Square.”Again Morris came to the rescue. His archæological and architectural studies had made him familiar with every building of historic interest in or near London, and it occurred to him that an old Norman abbey, which had been desecrated by “ a falsely utilitarian factory,”might be reconsecrated, in a sense, by its selection as the Home of the New Art, — in other words, of “ Morris & Co.” This old building, familiar as Merton Abbey, near Wimbledon, is known in history as the Norman Abbey where the Parliament of 1236 was held, and where the Barons gave their famous answer “ Nolumus leges Angliæ muturi.” Here, then, the art factory was established, and soon all went well. While Morris from the first gave the utmost attention to the comfort and even culture of his workmen, and saw that each man was paid adequately, it is a common mistake that he adopted, much less inaugurated, the coÖperative method of remuneration. True, the heads of departments shared on this principle; but all the artisans were paid in the usual way, by piece work. “Socialist as he was,” writes one familiar with his system and principles. “ or rather because he was a socialist, Mr. Morris had no faith in the coÖperative system, which he regarded as only a delusive palliative of the evils of competition. The object of the Merton workshop was not in the least to make philanthropic experiments on the relations of capitalist and laborer, but simply to supply goods of honest and beautiful workmanship in which the individual skill and fancy of the craftsman and the artist, and not the mere power of machinery, should be shown.”

Despite the immense and incessant expenditure of energy, and this in so many directions, Morris was, until the spring of this year, at any rate, as full of ambitious schemes as ever. There were to be books written, periods re - created, problems examined, remedial schemes demonstrated, wrongs righted, abuses exposed, crafts stimulated, and a higher excellence in decorative art and in printing obtained even than that already achieved. “ I look to see the bloom on the first fruits of the social revolution,” he said once, at one of those gatherings at his Hammersmith home, where the flag of enthusiasm never drooped. Perhaps, after all, he has seen this bloom, tasted the sweets of those first fruits. No one could have lived such a life as he did and failed to find some tangible, some palpable assurance of the reality of his hopes, of the actuality of his efforts.

When the life-work of William Morris comes to be estimated, most, even of those who are fairly familiar with his ceaseless energy, will be astonished at the amount he achieved and produced. Even if there were not a printed line to his credit, his life would still afford a record of exceptional fullness and activity, would still be far and away beyond that led by most of his fellows. But, apart from that full and busy life of his as a craftsman, and away from all his innumerable other distractions, what an imposing record his mere literary achievement is ! From The Defence of Guenevere to the latest of his prose romances, his work, in mere output, is quite Balzacian in quantity. It is his high distinction that he has never published anything which an enemy could blame as unworthy of a poet and artist. Of course it is by his poetry that he will be remembered. Poetry endures when marble monuments crumble and fall away. The high hopes he had, and lit in others, — these in other brains will remain alight ; the immense impulse he gave to the decorative arts will not be lost; all that in his ceaseless activity he achieved will pass into the sum of a general good. But these are influences which do not come and go with the individual. They are eddies of the wind of the human spirit, and when once a man like William Morris dies they pass into the larger world and are lost therein,—lost so far as individual identification is concerned. But the work survives. All that is controversial and accidental in the literary work of William Morris will necessarily perish, and perish soon; much even of his beautiful and fascinating prose cannot survive the disintegration of time and change of front which is ever taking place ; but the best of his achievements, the nobler residuum of his poetic life, has become part of our literature, and will keep his name and memory green. “ Sic itur ad astra.”

As for some last word of William Morris here: it is characteristic of the man that we should seek to find it, not in those dreams of poetic beauty with which his name is most associated, but rather among those writings wherein his fervent idealism was directed towards a practicable end — the one end for which he really cared much in life, the amelioration of the lot of the toiling generations, and their ultimate redemption from themselves, as well as from their oppressors and adverse circumstances, by the gradual expansion towards an ideal of beauty to be realized in every phase of life, from the most mechanical actions and contrivances to the controlled pleasures, excitements, and energies of the impatient human heart, the dauntless human spirit.

It is not, therefore, to The Earthly Paradise that we should turn ; not even to those masterpieces of a heroic genius expressing itself through the atmosphere of dream, Sigurd and Jason; though these do, indeed, in common with the most dreamlike of his works, Love is Enough, contain the same beautiful message which impelled him from the first; but rather to books sneered at, or even ignored, as they are, by those to whom Morris’s genius was clouded, not clarified, by his passionate spirit of revolt and of reform, — books such us News from Nowhere and The Dream of John Ball. In one of the many obituary notices of him, there is a statement to the effect that his best work will endure, though neither his own time nor any later period is likely to be the better of such misdirected writings as “ these socialistic romances.” Not so thought William Morris himself ; not so think those who with him believe that a man’s work in the world is something better merely than to dream, though to dream, indeed, is well.

With the sound of the falling sods still in one’s ears, where the great poet and strenuous artist lies at rest in that remote Oxfordshire village which he loved so much, it is well to repeat one passage from this nobly conceived and nobly wrought book which has been so much misunderstood: for here, indeed, we have William Morris the man, as well as the dreamer, the poet, the artist, the worker, the visionary, the socialist. Here we have that wonderful and alert genius who, more than any other of our time, for forty years of unceasing mental activity, was able to dream through the past and through the present to the future, to face both ways, to see clearly down both vistas, and to discern the meeting horizons of the dreamlands of the past and of the dreamlands of the future.

“ And how shall it be,” says John Ball in his unforgettable speech to the Men of Kent, — “ how should it be, then, when these cumberers of the ground are gone ? What else shall ye lack when ye lack masters ? Ye shall not lack for the fields ye have tilled, nor the houses ye have built, nor the cloth ye have woven; all these shall he yours, and whatso ye will of all that the earth beareth. Then shall no man mow the deep grass for another, while his own kine lack cow-meat; and he that soweth shall reap, and the reaper shall eat in fellowship the harvest that in fellowship he hath won; and he that buildeth a house shall dwell in it with those that he biddeth of his own free will ; and the tithe barn shall garner the wheat for all men to eat of when the seasons are untoward, and the rain-drift hideth the sheaves in August; and all shall be without money and without price. Faithfully and merrily, then, shall all men keep the holidays of the Church in peace of body and joy of heart. And man shall help man, and the saints in heaven shall be glad, because men no more fear each other; and the churl shall be ashamed, and shall hide his churlishness till it be gone, and he be no more a churl; and fellowship shall be established in heaven and on the earth.”

“ Hard it is for the old world to see the new.” Thus is headed one of the chapters in The Dream of John Ball. In the life-work which is the dream of William Morris, hard also is it for our old world to see the new ; but at least he has pointed out to us the way.

William Sharp.