Portrait of Jane Burden (Mrs. Morris)By Rossetti
One defect, calculated to interfere with a warm reception of the volume on the part of the general public, Morris shared with Browning, possessing evenmore than Browning the merit attending it. Familiarity with the art and literature of the Middle Ages made it natural for him to preserve the thin new wine of his youthful poetry in the old bottles of the defunct past, using motives and scenes and accessories alien to our modern life, and only dimly understood by the modern reader. The true spirit of that past it is hardly necessary to say he did not revive,—no writer has ever revived the true spirit of any age antecedent to his own,—and Morris, with his remarkable faculty for eliminating from his mental conceptions whatever did not please his taste, was wholly unfitted by temperament, however well fitted by his acquirements, to carry through successfully a task so tremendous.
The Defence of Gueneverewas received by the public without enthusiasm. About half an edition of five hundred copies was sold and given away, and the remainder lingered for a dozen years or more until the publication ofThe Earthly Paradisestimulated the interest of readers in the previous work of its author.
Whatever disappointment Morris may have felt must soon have given way to the excitement of the plunge he now made into a new life and the most intense personal interests. On the twenty-sixth of April, 1859, he was married to Jane Burden, and after a brief interval of travel he began to build the beautiful house which he then supposed would be his home for the rest of his days.
His personal attractiveness at this time was keenly felt by his companions. He had been “making himself,” as the phrase is, since his childhood, and if Stevenson’s dictum—to know what you like is the beginning of wisdom and of old age—be applied to him he can never have been wholly ignorant or a child. Knowledge of what he liked, and even more definitely of what he did not like, was his earliest as well as his most notable acquirement. But he was a boy, too, in his excessive restless vitality, and hitherto with all his enthusiasms he had been a somewhat cold boy. Just now he was beginning to “take a fancy for the human,” as one of his friends put it. He was connecting his vague schemes and ambitions with a personal and practical enterprise. His ideals dropped from a region always too rare for them to an atmosphere of activities and interests in which the vast general public could breathe as easily as he. In building his new home to his fancy he was unconsciously laying the corner-stones of the many homes throughout England into which his influence was afterward to enter. He was just twenty-five, filled with energy, generous impulse, honesty, and kindness. The bourgeois touch which his biographer declares was inherent in his nature was far from obvious as yet. Society for its own sake he liked little, and was not above getting out of unwelcome invitations by subterfuge, if fair means would not avail. He affected a Bohemian carelessness in dress, and his hair was uniformly wild. His language wasgenerally forcible, often violent, always expressive. He lived in the company of his intimates and cared for nothing beyond the range of his fixed interests. The remark made long after—“Do you suppose that I should see anything in Rome that I can’t see in Whitechapel?”—was perfectly indicative of his mood toward everything that failed to arouse his intellectual curiosity. But the places and things that did arouse it were never tawdry or valueless, and his reasons for caring for them, of which he was always remarkably prolific, were such as appeal strongly to the mind in which homely associations hold a constant place. It must be an out and out classicist who fails to detect in himself a pulsation of sympathy in response to the wail which Morris once sent home from Verona: “Yes, and even in these magnificent and wonderful towns I long rather for the heap of grey stones with a grey roof that we call a house north-away.”
WALL-PAPER AND COTTON-PRINT DESIGNS(Reproduced from examples obtained by courtesy of Mr. A. E. Bulkley)
His first house, in which he took unlimited delight, was not, however, a heap of grey stones, but a structure of brick, its name, the Red House, indicating its striking and then unusual colour. Its architect was Philip Webb, who had been an associate of Morris during the brief period passed in Mr. Street’s office. Situated not far from London, on the outskirts of the village of Upton and in the midst of a pleasant orchard, whose trees dropped their fruit into its windows, the Red House wore an emphatically Gothic aspect. It was L-shaped, with numerous irregularitiesof plan, and entirely without frippery of applied ornament. Its great sloping roof, the pointed arches of its doorways, the deep simple porches, the large hall, with its long table in place of an entrance alley the open-timbered roof over the staircase, the panelled screen dividing the great hall from a lesser one,—all these were characteristic of the old English house before the day of Italian invasion, while the mobile Gothic style, adapting itself readily to individual needs, prevailed. It stood among the old and gnarled trees, only two stories in height, but with an effect of rambling spaciousness and hospitality, and the garden that lay close to it was as individual and old-fashioned as itself. Morris prided himself, Mr. Mackail tells us, on his knowledge of gardening, and his advice to the Birmingham Society of Artists in one of the lectures of his later years shows how thoughtfully he considered the subject. As he always acted so far as he could upon his theories, we may be fairly sure that the Red House garden was planned in conformity with the ideal place sketched in this lecture, and may assume in it a profusion of single flowers mixed to avoid great masses of colour, among them the old columbine, where the clustering doves are unmistakable and distinct, the old china aster, the single snowdrop, and the sunflower, these planted in little squares, divided from each other by grassy walks, and hedged in by wild rose or sweet-briar trellises. We may be sure the place contained no curiosities from the jungle or tropical waste, thateverything was excluded which was not native to the English soil, and that ferns and brakes from the woodland were not enticed from the place of their origin to take away the characteristic domestic look of a spot that ought to seem “like a part of the house.” “It will be a key to right thinking about gardens,” says Morris, “if you consider in what kind of places a garden is most desired. In a very beautiful country, especially if it be mountainous, we can do without it well enough, whereas in a flat and dull country we crave after it, and there it is often the very making of the homestead; while in great towns, gardens both private and public are positive necessities if the citizens are to live reasonable and healthy lives in body and mind.”
Passing from this first necessity of reasonable and healthy living through the rose-masked doorway into the Red House itself, we find it equally suggestive of its master’s personal tastes and beliefs. For everything Morris had his persuasive reason. His windows had small leaded panes of glass, because the large windows found “in most decent houses or what are so called,” let in a flood of light “in a haphazard and ill-considered way,” which the indwellers are “forced to obscure again by shutters, blinds, curtains, screens, heavy upholsteries, and such other nuisances.” By all means, therefore, fill the window with moderate-sized panes of glass set in solid sash bars—“we shall then at all events feel as if we were indoors on a cold day”—as if we had a roof over ourheads. The fact that small windows were used in mediæval times and must therefore of necessity be superior is not brought forward in this argument, and the charm of the reasoning is not marred by any reminder of the actual conditions of which small heavily leaded windows are a survival—such as the fortress style of building belonging to a warlike time, and the great costliness of glass, and the inability to support large panes by leads.
Morris could always be trusted to support his fundamental liking for a thing by a host of assurances as to its sensible merits and practical advantages, but the mere fact that he liked it was quite sufficient for his own satisfaction of mind. When one of his comrades once suggested to him that personal feeling ought not to count for too much, and that not liking a thing did not make it bad, he replied: “Oh, don’t it though! What we don’t likeisbad.” And he had a fashion which must have produced an irritating effect upon some of his hearers, of declaring that the people who did not hold his ideas must be unhealthy either in body or mind or both. Certainly the aspect of the Red House suggested health within its walls. With a slight stretch of imagination one could argue from its furnishings that its master was a northerner, a middle-class man, the admirer of a rough age, a sturdy art, a plain habit of life; that he was a worker whose dreams tormented him to speedy and vigorous action, a creature whose vitality was too great even for his strong frame and physical power. He liked amassive chair, and well he might, for one of his amusements was to twist his legs about it in such a way that a lightly built affair must instantly succumb. He liked a floor that he could stamp on with impunity; he liked a table on which he could pound with his fists without danger to its equilibrium. In the Red House these requirements were fully met. In the lecture calledThe Beauty of Lifeis an account of the fittings “necessary to the sitting-room of a healthy person.” Beside the table that will “keep steady when you work upon it,” and the chairs “that you can move about,” the good floor, and the small carpet “which can be bundled out of the room in two minutes,” there must be “a bookcase with a great many books in it,” a bench “that you can sit or lie upon,” a cupboard with drawers, and, “unless either the bookcase or the cupboard be very beautiful with painting or carving,” pictures or engravings on the wall, “or else the wall itself must be ornamented with some beautiful and restful pattern,” then a vase or two, and fireplaces as unlike as possible to “the modern mean, miserable, and showy affairs, plastered about with wretched sham ornament, trumpery of cast iron, and brass and polished steel, and what not—offensive to look at and a nuisance to clean.” To these necessaries, “unless we are musical and need a piano, in which case as far as beauty is concerned we are in a bad way,” we can add very little without “troubling ourselves, and hindering our work, our thought, and our rest.”
In accordance with these opinions, but with a fulness and richness of ornament not suggested by the simplicity of their expression, the pleasant building at Upton gradually took on great beauty and individuality. The walls were hung with embroidered fabrics worked by Mrs. Morris and her friends, or painted by Burne-Jones, who, undeterred by the Oxford episode, started an elaborate series of mural decorations in illustration of the wonderful adventures of Sire Degravant, the hero of an ancient romance. Another series of scenes from the War of Troy was started for the walls of the staircase, and although both schemes were abandoned, enough was done to give an effect of splendour to the rooms. Up to the large drawing-room came the ponderous and mighty settle which had cost so many expletives in the course of its adjustment to the old room in Red Lion Square, and which was now embellished by a balcony at the top to which a stairway led up. All minor accessories were thoughtfully considered and for the most part designed by Morris or by friends pressed into service at his eager demand. He found little to content him in the articles of commerce on sale at the orthodox shops in the early sixties. “In looking at an old house,” he says in one of his books, “we please ourselves by thinking of all the generations of men that have passed through it, remembering how it has received their joy and borne their sorrow and not even their folly has left sourness on it; and in looking at a newhouse if built as it should be, we feel a pleasure in thinking how he who built it has left a piece of his soul behind him to greet the newcomers one after another, long after he is gone.” Such an impress he left upon the Red House, so that no one passing it or even hearing of it can fail to think of it as belonging to William Morris, whoever may have the fortune to live in it hereafter, and fall heir to the associations with which he invested it.
“THE STRAWBERRY THIEF”DESIGN FOR COTTON PRINT
During the time of building and furnishing he was exuberantly happy and wholly in his element. Turning constantly from one thing to another, yet keeping along the line of his united interests, giving his magnificent energy free scope in doing and accomplishing, seeing grow into visible form the theories and tastes so dear to his heart, letting out his enthusiasms and carrying others along on their current, setting a practical example in what he believed to be of the deepest importance by requiring for himself artistic handicraft, acting out a vigorous protest against the mechanical arts and the shams of the commercial world,—all this was meat and drink to him, and out of it grew an enterprise representing what to the public has been probably the most valuable side of his many-sided career, the establishment of a firm engaged in various forms of decorative art. At about this time he adopted, after the fashion of the master-workman of the Middle Ages, a device or legend expressive in one way or another of his aim. He chose the one used by Van Eyck, “Als ichkanne,”—if I can,—and distributed it in French translation and in English over his house, on windows and tiles and in tapestry hangings. The modesty of the words was no doubt as sincere in his case as in the case of the old Flemish painter who excelled all his contemporaries, but the extent to which he could and did in the new business on which he was about to enter has been the wonder of his followers.
MORRIS AND COMPANY.
Theformation of the firm of “Morris, Marshall, Faulkner, & Company,” as it was first called, appears to have been highly incidental in character, despite the assertion of Morris himself in a letter to his old tutor, that he had long meant to be a decorator, and to that end mainly had built his fine house. “One evening a lot of us were together,” says Rossetti, in the account given by Mr. Watts-Dunton, “and we got to talking about the way in which artists did all kinds of things in olden times, designed every kind of decoration and most kinds of furniture, and someone suggested—as a joke more than anything else—that we should each put down five pounds and form a company. Fivers were blossoms of a rare growth among us in those days, and I won’t swear that the table bristled with fivers. Anyhow the firm was formed, but of course there was no deed or anything of that kind. In fact it was a mere playing at business, and Morris was elected manager, not because we ever dreamed hewould turn out a man of business, but because he was the only one among us who had both time and money to spare. We had no idea whatever of commercial success, but it succeeded almost in our own despite.”
In the mind of Morris it doubtless promised to be the sort of association about which he was constantly dreaming; a group of intelligent craftsmen interested in making the details of daily life as full as possible of beauty, each man fitted to his task and loving it, each in his way a master-workman of the guild, counting his craft honourable and spending his best thought and labour on it. There was ground enough for faith in the artistic if not in the commercial outcome of the enterprise. The associates, beside Morris, Rossetti, and Burne-Jones, were Madox-Brown, then an artist of established reputation, Webb, the architect of the Red House, who was also a designer of furniture and ornament; Peter Paul Marshall, to whom Mr. William Rossetti ascribes the first suggestion of the formation of the firm, a “capable artist” although an amateur; and Charles Faulkner of the Oxford group, who had followed his mates to London unable to endure the loneliness of Oxford without them. They proposed to open what Rossetti called “an actual shop,” and sell whatever their united talent produced. “We are not intending to compete with ——’s costly rubbish or anything of that sort,” Rossetti wrote to his friend Allingham, “but to give real good taste at the price as far as possible of ordinary furniture.”
TULIP DESIGN FOR AXMINSTER CARPET
In the Spring of 1861, premises were taken over a jeweller’s shop at 8 Red Lion Square. Two floors and a part of the basement were used by the firm, and about a dozen men and boys were presently employed. There were regular weekly meetings carried on with the boisterousness of youth and high spirits, but with thorough efficiency, nevertheless, where plans that were to modify and influence the household decoration of all England were gaily formed and put into practice.
The prospectus, in which Mr. Mackail discerns Rossetti’s “slashing 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 Glass, 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 materialshitherto 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.
PEACOCK DESIGN FOR COARSE 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 glass, “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 glass 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 glass 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 workmanship 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 anyonewho hastily went round it. These, however, were blunders of a kind soon remedied by experience. So long as the associates kept up their enthusiasm there were among them ample skill to grapple with technicalities, and ample artistic faculty to defy all ordinary competition. 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 antimacassars, 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 workmanship. His companions either caught from him the infection of the mediæval attitude 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 coöperative plan by which several artists frequently united in executing one and thesame 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 coöperation, 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 mediæval 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 hislectures, “when we hear it said, as it often is said, that extra money payment is necessary under all circumstances 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 fashionable 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 werein 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 rôle 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.
PAINTED WALL DECORATIONDESIGNED 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 hisinvention 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 fivepetals. 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 mediæval sources, he was less impressed by the tranquillity gained from calm clean spaces, the measure, order, and stateliness brought about by the simple relation of abstract lines, the repose of the rhythmical play of mass in perfect proportion, undisturbed by decorative detail, than by the charm of highly vitalised imagery. But though he erred on the side of luxuriance—whilepreaching 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.
PAINTED WALL DECORATIONDESIGNED BY MORRIS
Finish, it need hardly be said, was not prized by him. It was one of his assumptions that “the better is the enemy of the good,” and he preferred the roughness of incompleteness to the suavity of perfect workmanship. 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-shifts for the real thing, but rather to go without—to have no ornament merely for fashion’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.”
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 substitute 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, theTrellispaper, 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-knownDaisypaper, and depending greatly on the colouring for the attractiveness they possessed. Later came such intricate patterns as thePimpernel, theAcanthus, 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 calledMaking 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-class 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 establishing friendly relations with his audience, he instructs them that yellow is a colour to be used sparingly and in connection with “gleaming materials” such as silk; that red to be at its finest must be deep and full and between crimson and scarlet; that purple no one in his senses would think of using bright and in masses, and that the best shade of it tends toward russet; green, he continues, must seldom be used both bright and strong. “On the other hand,” he adds, “do not fall into the trap of a dingy, bilious-looking yellow-green, a colour to which I have a special and personal hatred, because (if you will excuse my mentioning personal matters) I have been supposed to have somewhat brought it into vogue.” Dingy colours were abhorred by him in all cases, and his patience with those customers who demanded them was extremely limited. Blue was his “holiday colour,” and “if you duly guard against getting it cold if it tend toward red, or rank if it tends toward green,” you “need not be much afraid of its brightness.”
EARLY DESIGN FOR MORRIS WALL-PAPER “DAISY AND COLUMBINE”
CHRYSANTHEMUM DESIGN FOR WALL-PAPER
From his hatred of mechanical methods grew his preferences among the lesser arts. He once complained that he never could see any scene “with a frame as it were around it,” and the less necessity there was for bounding and limiting his design the happier he was in making it. Embroidery he loved, for here the worker had an almost absolutely free hand. There was no “excuse” in embroidery for anything short of striking beauty. “It is not worthdoing,” he said, “unless it is either very copious and rich, or very delicate—or both. For such an art nothing patchy or scrappy, or half-starved should be done.” Tapestry-weaving stood next in freedom of method, and this was not only a favourite art with him, but one which he carried to an extraordinary degree of perfection, he and Burne-Jones combining their designs to produce results coming nearer to the old Arras effects than to the work of modern weavers. In tapestry-weaving Morris used thehaute lisseor “high loom,” the weaver holding apart with his left hand the threads of the warp which stands upright before him as with his right hand he works his bobbins in and out, seeing the picture he is making in a mirror placed on the other side of the loom. The interest of Morris in the weaving craft is said to have been first awakened by the sight of a man in the street selling toy models of weaving machines, one of which he promptly bought for experimental purposes. It was many years before he could find a full-sized loom of the kind he wanted, which had become obsolete or nearly so, and which was the only style of loom he would consider using as it was most like the looms on which the splendid fabrics of mediæval times had been woven. By such difficulties he was rarely baffled. In the case of his tapestries the method he proposed to revive had died out in Cromwell’s time and there was no working model which could be used as a guide. But there was an old French official handbook that came in his way,from which he was able to pick up the details of the craft and this sufficed. His personal familiarity with his process is apparent in his various discussions of it. He speaks with the authority of a workman whose hand has held the tool. This practical and positive knowledge saved him from the sentimentalism into which his theories might otherwise have led him. He designed his patterns fully aware of the way in which they were going to behave in the process of application. When in 1882 he was called upon to give evidence before the Royal Commission appointed to inquire into the subject of technical instruction, he urged the necessity of this working-knowledge on the part of every designer. “I think it essential,” he said, “that a designer should learn the practical way of carrying out the work for which he designs; he ought to be able to weave himself.” In all his talk about art he tried to tell people how to do only the things he himself had done, in which he differed widely and wholesomely from his master Ruskin whose teachings were so often on his lips. The activity of his hand was a needed and to a great extent an effective check upon the activity of his sentiment. But—like Ruskin here—he found it hard to stay long away from the moral or emotional significance of the art he was discussing. The art that speaks to the mind he did not completely understand. The art that speaks to the senses he abundantly explained. The amazingly ingenious point of view from which he defends his preoccupationwith what he has named “the lesser arts” is displayed in the following passage, beginning with the almost inevitable formula:
“A healthy and sane person being asked with what kind of art he would clothe his walls, might well answer, ‘with the best art,’ and so end the question. Yet out on it! So complex is human life, that even this seemingly most reasonable answer may turn out to be little better than an evasion. For I suppose the best art to be the pictured representation of men’s imaginings: what they have thought has happened to the world before their time, or what they deem they have seen with the eyes of the body or the soul; and the imaginings thus represented are always beautiful indeed, but oftenest stirring to men’s passions and aspirations and not seldom sorrowful or even terrible.
“Stories that tell of men’s aspirations for more than material life can give them, their struggle for the future welfare of the race, their unselfish love, their unrequited service; things like this are the subjects for the best art; in such subjects there is hope surely, yet the aspect of them is likely to be sorrowful enough: defeat, the seed of victory, and death, the seed of life, will be shown on the face of most of them.
“Take note, too, that in the best art all these solemn and awful things are expressed clearly and without any vagueness, with such life and power that they impress the beholder so deeply that he isbrought face to face with the very scenes, and lives among them for a time: so raising his life above the daily tangle of small things that wearies him to the level of the heroism which they represent. This is the best art, and who can deny that it is good for us all that it should be at hand to stir the emotions; yet its very greatness makes it a thing to be handled carefully, for we cannot always be having our emotions deeply stirred: that wearies us body and soul; and man, an animal that longs for rest like other animals, defends himself against that weariness by hardening his heart and refusing to be moved every hour of the day by tragic emotions,—nay, even by beauty that claims his attention overmuch. Such callousness is bad, both for the arts and our own selves, and therefore it is not so good to have the best art forever under our eyes, though it is abundantly good that we should be able to get at it from time to time.
“Meantime, I cannot allow that it is good for any hour of the day to be wholly stripped of life and beauty, therefore we must provide ourselves with lesser (I will not say worse) art with which to surround our common work-a-day or restful times; and for those times I think it will be enough for us to clothe our daily and domestic walls with ornament that reminds us of the outward face of the earth, of the innocent love of animals, or man passing his days between work and rest as he does. I say with ornament that reminds us of these things and sets ourminds and memories at work easily creating them; because scientific representation of them would again involve us in the problems of hard fact and the troubles of life, and so once more destroy our rest for us.”