Complete works of willia.., p.785
Complete Works of William Morris, page 785
The seriousness of mind which had been so remarkable in him from the first comes out here again. No great artist was ever less self-conscious about his own work, more absolutely free from either vanity or fatuity. But it was matter of simple duty with him, in a poem as in a design for decoration, to do everything he did as well as he could. It was not with him a matter of inspiration — he never used either the word or the idea — but of sheer honesty and seriousness of workmanship. “That’s jolly!” he would say of a piece of his own work, with the same simplicity as if it were anything else that he admired: yet on the other hand he never spoke, or apparently thought, of poetry as involving more than the craftsman’s qualities: singleness of eye, trained aptitude of hand, and such integrity of mind as would not consciously produce “rubbish,” or slip it in unnoticed among really honest work. “That talk of inspiration is sheer nonsense, I may tell you that flat,” he once said in later years when poetry, not his own, was being discussed: “there is no such thing: it is a mere matter of craftsmanship.” The idea that poetry could, or should, be cultivated as an isolated and specific artistic produce, or that towards its production it was desirable to isolate one’s self from common interests and occupations, and stand a little apart from all the turmoils or trivialities of common life, was one which he found not so much untrue as unintelligible. “If a chap can’t compose an epic poem while he’s weaving tapestry,” he once said, “he had better shut up, he’ll never do any good at all.”
In the fresh satisfaction of seeing “The Life and Death of Jason” in print, and finding that it had given him a recognized position among the English poets, he resumed work on “The Earthly Paradise” with renewed heart, and the speed and sustained excellence of his production for the rest of the year were even for him phenomenal. The verse flowed off his pen. Seven hundred lines were once composed in a single day. During part of the Long Vacation Mr. and Mrs. Burne-Jones and their children were living at Oxford, where Faulkner stayed up and had his mother and sister with him. The Morrises were also there, in lodgings in Beaumont Street, he going up to London now and then for the day to look after the business. Every evening he would read aloud what he had written that day. There were excursions on the river in golden summer weather, long remembered as the happiest in more lives than one. Two of them are recorded in the lovely introductory verses to June and August in “The Earthly Paradise.” The first of these recalls a day on the lonely and beautiful upper river, where issuing from the sad marshland, it takes the steel-blue Windrush by the Gothic arches of New Bridge, passes all in loops and links to Eynsham, and curves round the Wytham hills through the meadows of the Evenlode. His later home by these upper waters was then unknown; it was with a strange premonition of it that he wrote now —
What better place than this then could we find
By this sweet stream that knows not of the sea,
That guesses not the city’s misery,
This little stream whose hamlets scarce have names,
This far-off, lonely mother of the Thames?
The other excursion was down the river to Dorchester, on a day of burning splendour in late August. The long Abbey Church, the weir by Day’s Lock, and the huge prehistoric fortifications on Sinodun Hill and across the meadow-land girt by the arc of the river, are there now unchanged, though havoc has been made among the willow beds, and the kingfisher is seldom seen by the weir.
Across the gap made by our English hinds,
Amidst the Roman’s handiwork, behold
Far off the long-roofed church; the shepherd binds
The withy round the hurdles of his fold,
Down in the foss the river fed of old,
That through long lapse of time has grown to be
The little grassy valley that you see.
Rest here awhile, not yet the eve is still,
The bees are wandering yet, and you may hear
The barley mowers on the trenched hill,
The sheep-bells, and the restless changing weir,
All little sounds made musical and clear
Beneath the sky that burning August gives,
While yet the thought of glorious summer lives.
Even when Morris had to go up to his business at Queen Square he always returned with sheet on sheet of fresh manuscript: and it was for this river party that he brought down with him, and read aloud by the river-side, “The Story of the Wanderers,” the prologue of “The Earthly Paradise” in its second or published form. There could be no more striking instance of his seriousness of workmanship, and his determination not to “let any rubbish pass,” than his resolution to rewrite this story wholly and its completely successful result. The earlier and unpublished version is still extant. It had been composed nearly two years before, and still laboured under the defects of his earlier poetry; unevenness in transitions, a lumbering structure, awkward and often needlessly violent rhythm and diction. What pains Morris took to form a style, as people would say — to get his work right, as he would himself have rather termed it — can be judged from comparison of the two: this crude and laboured poem, and the later version with its quiet refinement, its grace of diction, the melodious music of its verse.
Summer ended; and still the flow of rhyme continued as powerful and as sweet. By the spring of 1868 at least seventeen of the twenty-four tales which were proposed for the complete design had been written: The Son of Crœsus, Cupid and Psyche, Pygmalion and the Image, The Man Born to be King, Atalanta’s Race, The Story of Perseus, The Watching of the Falcon, The Lady of the Land, The Writing on the Image, The Proud King, The Love of Alcestis, Ogier the Dane, The King’s Treasure House, Orpheus and Eurydice, The Fortunes of Gyges, The Dolphins and the Lovers, and The Story of St. Dorothea. The method of publication had been much discussed. The first idea was to produce the complete work in one folio volume, with woodcuts from designs by Burne-Jones. Of these there were to be no less than five hundred. The greatest achievements of the Kelmscott Press were more than anticipated in this project; but it was a generation too soon. The art of producing books had sunk to a deplorable condition, and it became evident that the proposed work was impossible without the organized labour of years. The poet and the designer were prepared with their part; but the type-founder, the compositor, the printer, the wood-engraver, had all to be educated. Upwards of a hundred designs for pictures, including a complete set for the story of Cupid and Psyche, were made by Burne-Jones; and many of them were cut by Morris himself and the professional or amateur workers for the firm, who were still employed, with the old simple audacity, to do their best without any regular training. Morris himself worked hard at wood-cutting, and, according to the opinion of experts, improved rapidly, and at last did it very well. One of these woodcuts, representing the scene of Psyche borne off by Zephyrus, has recently been published as a frontispiece to Mr. S. C. Cockerell’s history of the Kelmscott Press. As to the wood-cutting, Mr. George Wardle writes to me :
“Mr. Morris asked me soon after this to put on wood some drawings Burne-Jones was then making for illustration of the Cupid and Psyche. I was very glad to do so; and here began an experience often repeated when I came to know more of the ways of the firm. It was practically impossible to get the drawings properly cut. Perhaps if Mr. Morris could have given the price which a first-rate cutter would have charged for doing the work with his own hand, they might have come out as they were drawn, but in the ordinary course of the trade it was impossible: I think also that same ‘course’ would have prevented the arrangement, had there been no other difficulty.
“Mr. Morris asked me then if I would try to cut these blocks. This I did, and after a few experiments, he was well enough pleased to give me one and then another; but after that I got no more, and wondered for a while why, as I thought the second was certainly better than the first. The reason was, Mr. Morris became possessed by the idea of cutting the blocks himself: and he took them all in hand and carried them through, not without some lively scenes in Queen Square. He cut with great ardour and with much knowledge, but the work did not always go to his mind. It was necessarily slow and he was constitutionally quick: there were then quarrels between them.”
But when two trial sheets of the folio “Earthly Paradise” were set up at the Chiswick Press, the effect was very discouraging. The page, while not without a certain quality of distinction, suffers from technical defects, in both typography and woodcuts, which are all the more emphasized by the high mark aimed at. Two etchings made by Burne-Jones for the story of “The Ring given to Venus” were not considered more satisfactory in their result as decoration for a page. Gradually, with labour and patience, these difficulties might have been remedied; but only at immense cost and after years of delay. The scheme was therefore laid aside, though not abandoned. “The Earthly Paradise” appeared in the ordinary form: but the great edition of it was on the verge of being realized at the author’s death. “To the very last,” Sir Edward Burne-Jones writes, “we held to our first idea, and hoped yet to see the book published in the Kelmscott Press in all the fulness of its first design.”
Notwithstanding the high pressure of his poetry, the records of the firm show that his work as a decorator was pursued with unremitting diligence. The following letter is addressed to Mr. Guy with reference to the projected decoration of the Chapel in the Forest School at Walthamstow.
“26, Queen Square,
“Nov. 25th, 1867.
“My dear Guy,
“The plan I think perfectly applicable to mosaic, but of course the designs want making out — avoid anything spiky in mosaic, it is too easy, and looks so. I don’t think it is worth while using the material unless the work is very elaborate; and there ought to be a great deal of gold in it; the part between the bands ought also to be at least of marble or alabaster. I don’t want to discourage any reasonable plan, but I should think panelling the proper thing for your east end, picked out with colour and gold if you please; the next best I should think would be hangings. I scarcely fancy mosaics on such a small scale, and they are the proper decorations of curved surfaces, domes, and are the concomitants of a round-arched style and great magnificence of decoration in general. But on the whole panelling is the thing; couldn’t your friend paint some figures and things on the panels? Anyhow, I will help if you wish it, with the designs, whatever you settle on.
“I have to thank you very much for your friendliness with reference to Jason — it makes me laugh to be in the position of nuisance to schoolboys.
“Yours very truly,
“W. MORRIS.”
This same November Burne-Jones had left Kensington for the house in which he lived for the rest of his life, The Grange, in North End Lane, Fulham, then a pleasant quiet place with great elms in the road and surrounded by fields and market-gardens. “As this removed us further from him,” he writes, “I wrote and proposed that he and Webb should come every Sunday to bind us together. A letter he wrote in answer was more full of warm response than he often permitted himself. This was the beginning of our Sundays. There were times of discontinuance, at first, for one reason or another. But for all the later years it was his weekly custom that he should come to breakfast and spend the morning: then we planned our work and talked of our schemes; and so it continued till the end. The last three Sundays of his life I went to him.”
At the beginning of 1868, the plan of a single-volume “Earthly Paradise” in a costly form having been given up, arrangements were made for printing the first half of the work and issuing it separately. It was then meant that the whole work should be in two volumes. But the second half turned out to be so much longer than the first that it had to be broken up and separately issued in two portions, as Part III. and Part IV.: the volume of 1868 comprising Parts I. and II. The reissue in four volumes, each containing one of the four seasons, was only made some years later. The agreement for publication, which is dated the 6th of February, 1868, specifies the whole work as extending to about 34,000 lines. It actually exceeded 42,000.
“To-day,” writes Morris on the 3rd of February, “I took first piece of copy to printer. Yesterday I wrote 33 stanzas of Pygmalion. If you want my company (usually considered of no use to anybody but the owner) please say so. I believe I shall get on so fast with my work that I shall be able to idle.” The book went through the press without delay, and was published at the end of April. The only decoration was the well-known woodcut on the title-page of the three women playing on instruments. It was cut by Morris himself from Burne-Jones’s drawing; it does not, however, represent the best of what he could do in wood-cutting.
“The Earthly Paradise” was published by Mr. F. S. Ellis, whose recent acquaintance with Morris had already become a warm friendship. Their relations as author and publisher were ended in 1885 by Mr. Ellis’s retirement from business, but they remained attached friends through the rest of Morris’ life; Mr. Ellis was much with him in his last illness and was one of his executors. The acquaintance had begun about the year 1864. Mr. Ellis was then in business in King Street, Covent Garden, principally as a dealer in manuscripts and rare printed books. Morris was first brought there by Swinburne, and afterwards often looked in on his way from Red Lion Square to London Bridge Station when he was going down to Upton in the evening. When he came to live in London his visits grew more frequent and less hurried. His knowledge of and admiration for fifteenth-century printing, generally thought of as a new development of his later years, was then already fully grown.
“The first dealing of any importance,” Mr. Ellis writes, “that we had, was over a very fine copy of the 1473 Ulm edition of Boccaccio’s ‘Die Claris Mulieribus’ with the famous woodcuts. I had bought it at a sale in Paris for £23 — considered in those days to be quite an extravagant price.” (The volume would now fetch at least three times as much.) “It was a very fine clean crisp copy bound in sixteenth-century vellum stained yellow. This took his fancy hugely, but the price which I asked, £26 or thereabouts, was a matter for consideration, and he asked me to keep the book till he could bring a friend to advise with him. In a day or two he called in company with his friend, a pale and fragile-looking young man. This was Burne-Jones. ‘Buy the book by all means,’ was the advice of the counsellor; ‘how much better worth it is than any number of books of less value.’ Years afterwards this volume was sacrificed at the altar of Socialism, and passed into the hands of a wealthy collector, who stripped off its yellow cover and put it into a gorgeous modern binding.”
When the first edition of “Jason” was published in 1867, Morris gave a copy to Ellis, remarking that it was hard luck to have to publish a poem at one’s own expense. Bell and Daldy, the publishers of the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine and of “The Defence of Guenevere,” had brought “Jason” out, and in view of their experiences with the earlier volume it was not surprising that they should decline to undertake any risk. But when the first edition was exhausted, as it was within a few months, Mr. Ellis had become his adviser, and the publishers paid a substantial sum for the right to print a second. After this second edition, “Jason” was transferred to Ellis, who had already, entered into an agreement to publish “The Earthly Paradise.” It may be added, that the sale of the first volume of “The Earthly Paradise” proved so satisfactory that this first agreement was cancelled, and replaced by another which gave to the author a larger share in the profits.
“How much,” Mr. Ellis writes to me, “I owe of the bright side of life to him I cannot reckon. He was the very soul of honour, truthfulness, and justice. Not only would he never deviate from the truth, but in thinking carefully over the matter I do not remember him ever to have made plausible excuses for doing or not doing a thing — he would always say straightforwardly exactly what he meant.” The relation of author and publisher, so often one of jealousy and discontent, was in this case without a shadow. Mr. Ellis is even willing to generalize from his own experience: “any publisher,” he adds, “unless he be dishonest, can get on with an author, whose books sell, with perfect ease. Difficulties and heartburnings usually arise with authors whose books will not sell.” Publishers, as a body, have a bad name with the general vague opinion of the public. That this is so, seems mainly due to a fault for which they are indeed responsible, but responsible only in the second degree — their readiness, for the sake of small but secured gains, to abet incompetent authors in forcing essentially unsaleable books upon the market.
At the end of the first volume of “The Earthly Paradise” was an announcement of the contents of the second, or concluding, volume. The twelve new tales there promised were as follows: six from Greek sources; The Story of Theseus, Orpheus and Eurydice, The Story of Rhodope, The Dolphins and the Lovers, The Fortunes of Gyges, and The Story of Bellerophon: other six from mediæval sources, Eastern or Western; The Hill of Venus, The Man who never Laughed again, The Palace East of the Sun, Dorothea, The Ring given to Venus, and Amis and Amillion. But after the publication of the first volume the scheme underwent large changes, partly from his replacing a number of the stories already written or planned by others, and partly from the introduction into his life, where it soon took a place second to no other interest, of the heroic literature of Iceland. The first-fruits of this new field appeared in the next portion of “The Earthly Paradise” published. Of the six stories it contained, only three belonged to the original scheme: The Story of Rhodope; The Palace East of the Sun, with its title altered to “The Land East of the Sun and West of the Moon”; and the single story drawn from Oriental sources, The Man who never Laughed again. To fill the remaining three places, two short Greek stories, “Acontius and Cydippe,” and “The Death of Paris,” were brought up from his reserve stores, and replaced the long and elaborate tales of Orpheus and Theseus, for which there was not room; and ending the volume, on a scale more than double that of any of the tales hitherto printed, came the noble version of the Laxdaela Saga, entitled “The Lovers of Gudrun.”
