Complete works of willia.., p.794
Complete Works of William Morris, page 794
The architectural Instinct, the faculty of design in its highest form, which was the quality in which Morris’ unique strength lay, was never applied by him with more certain and delicate a touch. And the ingenuities of the metrical treatment in which this design is worked out are almost equally striking. The rhymed iambic verse, whether of eight or of ten syllables, was his old familiar medium; nor is it used here with greater skill than he had used it in “The Earthly Paradise,” though even here we may find subtle adaptations to the dramatic method. But the rhymed dactylics to which reference has been made — a metre at once one of the rarest, one of the most difficult, and if successfully used, one of the most hauntingly beautiful, which the English language uses — are a noble development of that single exquisite fragment, “Pray but One Prayer for Me,” which had been one of his very earliest achievements in poetry. And the alliterative metre which he invented, or re-invented, for the body of the play deserves a more serious notice.
The fact that the whole of English poetry, from the sixteenth century downwards, is written in metres of foreign origin, only naturalized in English through the long and difficult practice of centuries, is one which, however familiar to students of mediæval literature, is little realized beyond the circle of historians and scholars. As was the case in Latin literature for a period of about the same length, the foreign metres, after a time of struggle during which the native metre produced its finest achievements, conquered it and drove it completely below the surface. But, as was the case in Latin literature, the native metre not only had a deep influence on the special development of the imported metres, but retained an affinity to the stricture of the language which made it tend to reappear when the dominant metrical forms were exhausted from over-use. Here, at the present day, the parallel ceases. But if the argument from the Latin analogy were seriously pressed, it might be conjectured that the future forms of English poetry would be, not, indeed, the form of the mediaeval English alliterative metre, — for the English language, like the Latin, has developed too widely and changed too deeply in structure to revert to its Saturnians, — but forms essentially based on the same metrical principles. Of the experiments in this direction — still no more than tentative efforts amid the overwhelming predominance of the normal rhymed iambic metres— “Love is Enough “ is one of the first and the most successful.
It was not indeed from any such wide and general considerations that Morris was led to essay its use. He simply went by known facts. As he had followed the metres of Chaucer for his narrative poems, he followed the metres of the earliest English plays for this dramatic poem. In these he found the alliterative Middle English verse, freed from the rigid rules which had governed it up to the close of the fourteenth century, and adapted to the changed modulation of a language which had by that time dropped its weak vowel-endings; but at the same time cramped and slightly vulgarized by an attempt to add the foreign enrichment of rhyme. For this metre, he instinctively felt, rhyme was unsuited, unless where it was desired, for special occasions, to raise it by this additional ornament to a lyric tension. But rhyme was for the metre a purely artificial importation: the solution, then, was quite simple: do away with the rhymed endings, and there is left a verse as elastic and varied as the regular alliterative verse native to England, less difficult to write, and better adapted to modern vocabulary and intonation of speech. The experiment has remained an isolated one. He never repeated it himself; for his translation of “Beowulf,” a tour de force executed for a special object, keeps as closely as possible to the original metre of early English poetry, with its rigid metrical laws, and its mouldings (if a metaphor from architecture be allowed) axe-hewn, rather than undulating under the chisel. Nor did he succeed in reconstituting the fine and flexible Middle English metre as a practical form of verse for modern poetry. Morris himself felt that this new poem was both tentative and difficult, and its failure to make any impression on a large audience was received by him with perfect equanimity. It was a thing he had done to please himself, and he thought highly of it, but he did not expect it to please other people to anything like the same degree.
Once more the attempt to produce a volume in a beautifully decorated outward form had to be abandoned. He designed, and cut on wood, borders for the pages of what would have been a very beautiful small quarto.
In some copies these were to have been filled in with colours and gilding, so that it would have been another illuminated book, with the text printed, not written. Besides the borders, there were to have been pictures, to which the whole scheme of the book lends itself with special aptness. Some of the scenes are written, as it were, directly for illumination. In the first scene of the play, there is a series of ornate comparisons — Nimrod carved on the high-seat in the hall, Argo woven on the hangings of the guard-room, Mars painted in the window of the council-chamber-which are introduced with exactly the decorative effect of pictures within the great initial letters of a painted book. The transitions, too, from one part of the poem to another call out to be made through some reinforcement of either music or pictures.
“Love is Enough “ bears the marks of all the varied sources of romance from which its author had drawn in earlier work, perhaps with the affect of a structure too composite for easy apprehension. The story, at least in its main outline, the theme of a king who gives up his kingdom for love in the valley, is taken from the Mabinogion, and is in feeling intimately Celtic. The names of Pharamond and Azalais-Teutonic words made musical by the speech of Central or Southern France — carry the mind back to some dim Merovingian epoch in which the ox-wagons of Frankish kings rolled through the mountain gorges of Auvergne and the vineyards of Burgundy. The representation of the play before an Emperor and Empress brings it vaguely within the central current of European art towards the close of the Middle Ages: and touches of landscape here and there show that the author’s mind was still full of Iceland.
It was the last complete poem of any magnitude which Morris wrote for several years. For some time he had been feeling about for new methods of literary expression: after this poem was written he became once more absorbed in handicraft and the productions of his workshops or of his own unaided hand. Some months before, this feeling after new vehicles had led him to begin what is certainly the most singular of his writings, a novel of contemporary life. The story dealt with the love of two brothers for the same woman, and was evidently going to take a tragic turn. As far as the development of the story gives any indication, rather more than one-third of it had been written when it was abandoned. The fragment was swiftly written and never revised. But revision was, as has been already noted, at no time a thing much to his taste, or for which he had any aptitude. No further criticism need be passed on the fragment than what was said of it by Morris himself a year later. Mrs. Baldwin, to whom he had given sympathetic counsel in her own first efforts at narrative prose, had expressed a wish to see what he had done. He sent her the manuscript with the following letter :
“Queen Square,
“June 22nd, 1872.
“Dear Louie,
“Herewith I send by book-post my abortive novel: it is just a specimen of how not to do it, and there is no more to be said thereof: ’tis nothing but landscape and sentiment: which thing won’t do. Since you wish to read it, I am sorry ’tis such a rough copy, which roughness sufficiently indicates my impatience at having to deal with prose. The separate parcel, paged 1 to 6, was a desperate dash at the middle of the story to try to give it life when I felt it failing: it begins with the letter of the elder brother to the younger on getting his letter telling how he was going to bid for the girl in marriage. I found it in the envelope in which I had sent it to Georgie to see if she could give me any hope: she gave me none, and I have never looked at it since. So there ‘s an end of my novel-writing, I fancy, unless the world turns topsides under some day. Health and merry days to you, and believe me to be
“Your affectionate friend,
“WILLIAM MORRIS.”
Henceforth, but for a few lyrics, original or adapted from Icelandic and Danish ballads, his writing was confined to translation until he began his great epic of “Sigurd the Volsung.”
The workshops at Queen Square had been slowly encroaching on the living part of the house. The manager was continually appealing for more room to carry on the work, which was cramped as it was, and which Morris was always, almost without his will, extending in one direction or another by fresh inventions or experiments. “I am going with Janey to-morrow,” he writes on the 25th of November, “to look at a house in Hammersmith in Theresa Terrace: it is Mason the painter’s house, who died about a month ago. We must, it seems, turn out of this house next spring, for Wardle wants it all for the business.” Towards the end of 1872 the family removed from Queen Square. Morris himself kept two rooms for his own private use, and the rest of the house was turned over to the use of the firm, the drawing-room being made into a much-needed show-room, and the upper floors into additional workshops. The new house was not the Hammersmith one, but another not far from it, on the high road between Hammersmith and Turinham Green, in a rambling suburb of orchards and market-gardens, and with easy access to the Thames down Chiswick Lane. Before the building of the District Railway it was a pleasant, if somewhat remote, suburb. The house itself was very small, “a very good sort of house for one person to live in, or perhaps two,” as its mistress afterwards described it; but there was a large garden, and the quiet was complete. Here Morris lived for six years. The parting from Queen Square took place with little effusion of sentiment. Morris himself was too elated by the prospect of setting up a little dye-shop in the empty basement to care much about the abandonment of the house. It had never been more than a temporary home forced on him by disagreeable necessity.
On the 23rd of January, 1873, he writes, “We have cleared out of Queen Square as far as our domesticity is concerned: I keep my study and little bedroom here, and I daresay, as time goes on, I shall live here a good deal: for the rest, we have taken a little house on the Turnham Green road, about twenty minutes’ walk from the Hammersmith Station; and otherwise easy to get at because of the omnibuses: it is a very little house with a pretty garden, and I think will suit Janey and the children: it is some half-hour’s walk from the Grange, which makes it quite a little way for me; on the other hand, I can always see any one I want at Queen Square quite safe from interruption, so in all ways it seems an advantage — does it not? Withal I never have had any sentiment of affection for this house, though so much has happened to me while I have lived here. I have always felt myself like nothing but a lodger here. Nevertheless, there is something profoundly dismal about the empty rooms here that strikes a chill on one.”
“I am going to have the little ones home,” he writes the following day, “to Turnham Green to-day; ’tis a month since I have seen them. Jenny is twelve years old now: bless us, how old I’m getting. Except the work for the firm, in which I am rather busy, I am doing nothing now but translations: I should be glad to have some poem on hand, but it’s no use trying to force the thing; and though the translating lacks the hope and fear that makes writing original things so absorbing, yet at any rate it is amusing and in places even exciting.”
The following letter was written a few days later to Mrs. Coronio, who was then living at Athens. The friendship between her and Morris was affectionate and unbroken through life.
“26, Queen Square,
“Feb. 11th, 1873.
“My dear Aglaia,
“You see our letters crossed: and I’m glad I wrote to excuse myself before I got your letter taking me to task. I am in much better condition now than I was when I wrote last: I suppose the change has done me good: we are quite settled in our new house, and I find it very pleasant: my own room is particularly cheerful and pretty, and I can work in it with a much better heart than in the dingy room at Queen Square. I go most days to the Square though, and come back when I feel inclined, or not at all when I feel inclined: all this involves a good deal of walking, which, no doubt, is good for me: it seems quite a ridiculously little way to the Grange now, after the long way it used to be. Last Sunday, Ned came to breakfast with me, and we had a pleasant hour or two. I am very hard at work at one thing or another; firm’s work for one thing. I should very much like to make the business quite a success, and it can’t be, unless I work at it myself. I must say, though I don’t call myself money-greedy, a smash on that side would be a terrible nuisance; I have so many serious troubles, pleasures, hopes and fears, that I have not time on my hands to be ruined and get really poor: above all things it would destroy my freedom of work, which is a dear delight to me. My translations go on apace, but I am doing nothing original: it can’t be helped, though sometimes I begin to fear I am losing my invention. You know I very much wish not to fall off in imagination and enthusiasm as I grow older: there have been men who, once upon a time, have done things good or noteworthy, who have got worse with time and have outlived their power; I don’t like that at all. On the other hand, all great men that have not died young have done some of their best work when they were getting quite old. However, it won’t do to force oneself about it, and I certainly enjoy some of the work I do very much, and one of these days my Heimskringla will be an important work.
“Iceland gapes for me still this summer: I grudge very much being away from the two or three people I care for so long as I must be, but if I can only get away in some sort of hope and heart I know it will be the making of me. I am very much disappointed that you are not coming back before: I quite looked for you this month.
“Yes, truly, letters are very unsatisfactory; they would do very well if one could write them at our best times; but continually one has to sit down to them dull and cold and worried, with the thoughts all slipping away from us, till the sheet is filled up with trivialities — as this will be I fear — only there is something about the look of the writing of anyone one is fond of, that is familiar and dear and saves one from utter disappointment, and one feels that the stiff awkward sentences all about nothing or little have still something of a soul in them. Think what an excitement that day was for me when I got letters after eight weeks in the Iceland journey: lord! how my heart did go thump thump as I galloped up to the post-office at Reykjavik!
“I wonder how you will feel at the changes in the house here: Janey’s room has already got the workmen’s benches in it: the big room is bare and painty; there is hammering and sawing and running up and down stairs going on; and all looks strange, and as yet somewhat wretched. It doesn’t touch me very much I must say though: for this long time past I have, as it were, carried my house on my back: but the little Turnham Green house is really a pleasure to me; — may all that be a good omen! Yet you must come and see me here too when you come home, if you won’t be too much terrified at my housekeeper, who is like a troll-wife in an Icelandic story: with a deep bass voice, big and O so ugly!
“We have had cold weather enough lately, snow and. a dreadful east wind; all of which I don’t care a penny about to say the truth.
“On Saturday I am going down to Cambridge, to Magnússon, to do Icelandic: as stupid over the language as you others who are such quick linguists would think me, I am really getting on with it now: when I am down there, which has been once or twice, we all talk nothing but Icelandic together.
“Well, I had best make an end now before I get too dull. Once again forgive me for not writing to you oftener: I have really had a hard time of it: but I hope things have taken a long turn now, and that I shall be something worth as a companion when I see you again; which I look forward to very much indeed. Write soon again, please, and tell me how you are.
“Good-bye, then, with love and best wishes.
“I am your affectionate
“WILLIAM MORRIS.”
With a mind still so full of his first journey to Iceland and so excited at the prospect of a second, it is not surprising that his first visit to Italy, which took place this spring, was something of an anti-climax. It was a very short one, and gave him little satisfaction. With the noble Italian art of the earlier Renaissance he had but little sympathy: for that of the later Renaissance and the academic traditions he had nothing but unmixed detestation. Some time in these years his old fellow-pupil, Mr. Bliss, then engaged on researches among the archives of the Vatican, met him in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, and pressed him to come with him to Rome. His reply was too characteristic to be forgotten. “Do you suppose,” he said, “that I should see anything in Rome that I can’t see in Whitechapel?”
Even the earlier and, to his mind, the far more interesting and beautiful work of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in Italy did not appeal to him in the same way as the contemporary art of England or Northern France. On this occasion he only saw Florence and Siena, and returned after a fortnight. Burne-Jones, with whom he went out, and who himself made a more prolonged stay, found him a rather exacting companion, and a little determined to make the worst of things. The interior of the Duomo at Florence depressed him with its chilly bareness: San Miniato was unfortunately in the death-agonies of a thorough restoration; and even the more unspoiled Siena failed to excite him. Indeed it was from the natural beauty of Italy, both now and on later visits, that he drew far more pleasure than from its art. The descent to Turin from the Mont Cenis “on the most beautiful of all evenings, going, still between snow-capped mountains, through a country like a garden, green grass and feathery poplars and abundance of pink-blossomed leafless peach and almond trees,” roused him to real enthusiasm, as did also the passage of the Apennines between Bologna and Pistoja. In Florence, the cloisters of Santa Maria Novella were what he found most to his mind; at Siena, even the wonderful cathedral library, all as bright as a painted book, could not please him because he wanted it to have been painted by some one at least a century before Pinturicchio. The exterior of the Duomo of Florence he did indeed afterwards, a little grudgingly, admit to be the finest exterior of any building in the world.
