Complete works of willia.., p.822
Complete Works of William Morris, page 822
“Yesterday I went to Birmingham all by myself to see the new window: my work was over there in five minutes, for it was quite satisfactory; it was rather a long journey for so short a piece of work. Well, I must tell you about the Norwich journey, my dear. We went down rather a jolly company though the day was dull. The comrades work one pretty hard when they get hold of one in Norwich, and I left most of my voice behind me there. I spoke three times on the Sunday, twice in the market-place, once indoors, and twice in the market-place on the Monday, besides taking the chair for Mrs. Besant in the evening indoors; and being photographed (in groups) twice, and going a row (in five boats, cost 15d.) in the afternoon. However I enjoyed it all and was pleased that it was so successful: there were between seven and eight thousand people present at the meeting in the market-place on Sunday afternoon; and all the meetings were good. After the Sunday afternoon meeting Mrs. Besant proposed a walk, and we went down towards the Close; but Lord! such a tail as we took with us, including a lot of boys who were fascinated by us, expected I think to see us hanged presently; the others except the boys mostly tailed off when we got into the Close, but not the boys; the only resource we had was to cross the ferry at the other side of the Close,which charges ½d . for the transit; this threw out our younger brethren and we got away quietly.
“The river I went on was a branch of the Wensum; it was very beautiful; the water awash with the green banks, willows nearly meeting over the water; no rushes or reeds, no weeds except some kind of long grass growing up from the bottom, no stream scarcely, and the water deep and clear as glass. All quite different from the rivers I am used to: in fad: I always feel in a foreign land when I go to Norwich.”
August 21st. “I suppose your mother told you we are going down to Kelmscott to-day: you see your mother doesn’t like it to eat its head off, and for my part I have been rather driven lately and want to be quiet. I am taking down a piece of Oxford Street work which I must do, and I shall hope to get on with my story, perhaps nearly finish it.”
August 28th. “We had a beautiful day on Sunday: we all went up the water along with Mr. Radford, who suddenly turned up on Saturday evening on a bicycle, asking for lodging, having come over from Didcot through Wantage. The morning opened most lovely; we started at eleven, and by twelve were sheltering ourselves from a driving rain under Mr. Birchall’s yew tree; then it cleared a little, and we got to dinner close to where we dined so merrily, my dear, with Ellis, and lo by two the sun was hot and bright, and the day straight on most lovely. We got out at the Round House, and walked nearly a mile up the canal, which is really very pretty, the water without stream and clear and bright: it made me long for an expedition. Your mother and Crom and I went up to the Church afterwards over perilous ditch-bridges, leaving Radford and May lazing by the boat. It went to my heart on that beautiful afternoon to see the neglect and stupidity that had so marred the lovely little building: yet it still looked lovely. As we passed by Buscot, there were the Birchalls in their goat-mead, and we exchanged a few words with them, as we rather expected Walker to meet us: we had left the house quite empty of Frank and everybody, the key under the doormat and a letter pinned to the door for Walker, who duly came and walked on to meet us and fell in with us just as we were opening Buscot Lock. So we had a merry evening together, and I so wished you had been with us, my darling.”
September 6th. “Yesterday the weather, which had been drizzly in the morning, clearing up somewhat in the afternoon, we set off about 2.30 to go to Rushey, thinking we might get to Bampton, which your mother has never seen, and we got down there comfortably enough: we intended coming straight back by boat, as we seemed too late to get up to Bampton and back, (it is two miles from the lock there,) but strolling up towards the town over the fields we thought we would go there and get a trap for the ladies, and that Walker and I would go back and pull the boat home: so we did this; but Mrs. Walker could only go so slow that it was quite late before we got to Bampton. However we managed to see the church, which is a very fine one, but has been shockingly restored. There is Norman work in it, and transition; and a fine decorated nave with a most beautiful western doorway. The tower and spire is very pretty; much the same date as Broadwell but handsomer. Near the church is a very pretty little house used as a grammar school, and another house called the Deanery. The town is the queerest left-behind sort of a place: when Walker and I first came into the street there were two other persons visible, a small boy and a small girl. Well, it was nearly dark when W. and I set off to walk to Rushey, and quite dark before we were well under way. I had to steer all the way, as Walker didn’t like the job. It was a very dark night with drizzle now and then, and often one could barely see the bank. However we scarcely touched the bank at all, and got in about 10 o’clock. Frank had been sent out with a lantern to meet us, and we perceived the same as we came to Welly-Hole Reach, looking like a ‘bright particular star.’ It seems he had been nearly down to the Old Weir to look for us.”
The autumn holiday lingered late. On the 8th of October he wrote to Ellis, who had been staying with him at Kelmscott :
“I am really surprised at your not liking ‘Tom Sawyer,’ especially as it so very like Shakespeare, not to say Shelley.
“I went out in the afternoon of Saturday, and a most grim and stormy afternoon it was: I caught nothing except that just as I was going away a ½ lb. chub took my gudgeon and insisted on being caught. Saturday night was as cold as need be; but yesterday was better, and to-day is a mild beautiful morning: unhappily there is no river for me to-day, as we are all going to Fairford.
“I wish you had been here instead of the new comer, whose shortcomings I am not used to like I am to yours and mine; so that we have no standing cause of quarrel; which I think is a necessity to a really good understanding.”
At the end of October, when “the river has grown small and bright and the fish won’t bite,” he regretfully left Kelmscott. On the 1st of November he lectured on Tapestry-weaving at the first Exhibition of the Arts and Crafts Society, to the catalogue of which he had already contributed a short paper on Textiles. Three Arras tapestries from the Merton Abbey looms were among the objects exhibited. The great series of tapestries from the Morte d’Arthur now hung at Stanmore Hall were then being put in hand. “The House of the Wolfings,” too, had been finished during the autumn, and was through the press early in December.
Apart from other reasons this book has a special interest as marking the beginning of Morris’ practical dealings with the art of typography. Hitherto he had been content to let his books be printed in the common way, without any special attention to matters of type or arrangement of page. His attention had been lately turned to the matter through an increasing intimacy with his neighbour at Hammersmith, Mr. Emery Walker, whose enthusiasm for fine printing was accompanied by a thorough practical acquaintance with it as a modern handicraft. The early printed books, which Morris had hitherto collected and prized mainly for their woodcuts, now took a fresh interest and value to him as specimens of beauty in type. In consultation with Mr. Walker he fixed on a fount of type belonging to Messrs. Whittingham for the new book. It had been cast as an experiment about half a century before, and was modelled on an old Basel fount; and it had already been used in some of the trial pages of the illustrated “Earthly Paradise “ which had been set up in 1868. “It will be a pretty piece of typography for modern times,” Morris said of the book before it appeared; and so pleased was he with it, that he could not bear for a while to hear any adverse criticism even on the demerits of the type, especially on an over-conspicuous e of the lower case which he silently altered in his next book, “The Roots of the Mountains.”
The story itself well deserved the words “your delightful and wonderful book,” with which it was hailed by Mr. Swinburne. For the first time since “The Earthly Paradise” had been completed, Morris was writing with complete enjoyment and perfect ease. The life of the Germanic tribes of Central Europe in the second or third century was one which was at once sufficiently known to allow of copious and detailed description and sufficiently undetermined to give full scope to a romantic imagination. The use, as the vehicle of the story, of a mixed mode of prose and verse, was a device not perhaps suited for frequent repetition, but excellently adapted for this particular purpose. It was suggested by the Icelandic Sagas, but used in a fresh and quite delightful way. By the use of prose for the main narrative, he avoided the languor which is almost inseparable from verse as a medium of continuous narration; and in speeches and ornate passages, where prose in its turn would flag, the rolling verse — that of “Sigurd the Volsung “ revived in much of its first freshness — seems the natural medium of the heightened emotion.
Like “The Roots of the Mountains,” it belongs to what may be called the epic or Icelandic side of the author’s imagination. In the later prose tales he reverted to a softer and sweeter world, that of a vaguely mediaeval life, with churches in it and houses of monks, and a faint air of the thirteenth century, the world of his own earlier masterpiece in the story of “The Man Born to be King.” This primitive Gothic world of older gods and more heroic men was less fully his own. In “The Roots of the Mountains,” though the supposed date of the story can hardly be later than the seventh century, he tends to slip back now and then into the later romantic world, full of beautifully forged armour and grey carved stone, and gardens standing thick with pinks and lavender. But here all the sensuous ornament of mediaeval romance is as strictly excluded as it is from the stories of Sigurd and of the dwellers in Laxdale. Even when the hero makes pictures for himself of some golden life that is to be when fighting is over, it is no such world of cloistered green places, “faint with the scent of the overworn roses and the honey-sweetness of the lilies,” to which his dreams turn, but the hard open life of the earlier world. “There he was between the plough-stiltsin the acres of the kindred when the west wind was blowing over the promise of early spring; or smiting down the ripe wheat in the hot afternoon amidst the laughter and merry talk of man and maid; or far away over Mirkwood-water watching the edges of the wood against the prowling wolf and lynx, the stars just beginning to shine over his head; or wending the windless woods in the first frosts before the snow came, the hunter’s bow or javelin in hand; or coming back from the wood with the quarry on the sledge across the snow, when winter was deep, through the biting icy wind and the whirl of the drifting snow, to the lights and music of the Great Roof, and the merry talk therein and the smiling of the faces glad to see the hunting-carles come back; and the full draughts of mead, and the sweet rest a night-tide when the north wind was moaning round the ancient home.”
His first satisfaction in the appearance of the book was soon replaced by a keener desire to improve upon it. “I am very glad that you like the new book,” he writes to Ellis a few days after it was published. “I quite agree with you about the type; they have managed to knock the guts out of it somehow. Also I am beginning to learn something about the art of type-setting; and I now see what a lot of difference there is between the work of the conceited numskulls of to-day and that of the 15th and 16th century printers merely in the arrangement of the words, I mean the spacing out: it makes all the difference in the beauty of a page of print. If ever I print another book I shall enter into the conflict on this side also. However this is all grief that comes of fresh knowledge and I am pretty well pleased with the book as to its personal appearance.”
On the 10th of January he writes to his daughter:
“Dearest own Jenny,
“I came back yesterday from Hadham; Auntie was pretty well, and the Granny in very good spirits but very deaf. She went a walk with me to the Church in the morning: they are ‘restoring’ the nave; a wanton piece of stupidity, as there was really nothing to do with it. However there was no excuse for touching the roof, which is quite sound; so they left that alone: in short the only harm is the new plaister, and the new modern glass, but that is considerable. They have found one or two bits of painting, which they have left: one a good patch of that imitation of patterned stuff such as we know at Fairford and Burford, but not so elaborate; a rough bold good pattern. I went to see the Berrys with them; and thought the house very nice; it is really a 16th century building much faked up: but the rooms with that pleasantness of an old house: some of them with that regular old panelling in them where the mouldings are not ‘mitred,’ but the horizontal ones die off before they meet the vertical. I was there two nights and played backgammon both with Auntie and Granny: the latter beat me one night (to her great delight), but they, and especially Auntie, played with the utmost recklessness.
“This is a bad business of the burning of Clouds, isn’t it? When I saw it (the year before last I think) it looked so solid that one could not think of its being destroyed. I was at the Grange this morning and Aunt Georgie read me a letter to Margaret from one of the daughters which gave a really good account of the scene. It was touch and go for some of them. I saw Webb yesterday, and he made light of it, as he would be likely to do. It seems it will be rebuilt, which is a good thing; but there is a certain feeling of weariness in the proceeding, isn’t there, dear? Webb says that some of the walls may be all right, especially as they are mostly built of sandstone, not limestone: the lower rooms, or some of them, were not burnt. The walls were 3 feet thick. One of Uncle Ned’s cartoons that he did for the church in Rome was there and was burnt; but that is the only important unreplaceable thing I have heard of. Our long carpet was, I imagine, saved.
“The weather changed on Tuesday and yesterday, which was a bright beautiful day: but to-day is cold; rainy, sleety, but not frosty. I think I should care mighty little about it (in January) if I were at Kelmscott, but bad weather, especially fog, does make London wretched: indeed I feel very like not going out in it this evening; but I think I must, as it is a Ways and Means evening at the League.
“will, darling Jenny, good-bye with this not very brilliant letter. By the way you will be glad to hear that Faulkner shows signs of mending. Good-bye, my dearest child.
“Your loving father,
“WILLIAM MORRIS.”
Charles Faulkner, the constant friend ot so many years, had been struck down by paralysis in the previous October. He lingered in a state of living death for upwards of three years, with just so much intelligence left as allowed of his being amused a little by the company of his friends. Through all that period, his sister, Miss Kate Faulkner, was his devoted and unweariable nurse; and next to her, his old companions, Webb and Morris, were the most constant in their attention. Between Morris and Faulkner the intimacy and affection was perhaps the stronger that it was founded on a deeper and subtler bond than community of tastes or even association in work. A fine mathematician and a man of high proficiency in the mixed mathematics of engineering, Faulkner had no native bent towards art, and no apparent creative power. He had, however, qualities at least as attaching: unconquerable courage, transparent honesty, and deep-rooted affection; and his devotion to Morris knew no limit. He had followed him into the Socialist League as he had followed him into the firm of Red Lion Square, and lectured on Socialism for him as he had painted tiles and cut wood-blocks five and twenty years earlier, with perfect simplicity and sincerity. The work and all the load of toil and obloquy it involved had almost been too much even for Morris’ immense energy and abounding vitality: on the weaker constitution of Faulkner it would seem to have acted with dangerous and finally fatal result.
“The Roots of the Mountains” had been begun as soon as “The House of the Wolfings “ was through the press. “Did I tell you in my last,” he writes to his daughter on the 29th of January, “that I had begun a new tale? I don’t know whether it will come to anything, but I have written about twenty pages in the rough. This time I don’t think I shall ‘drop into poetry,’ at least not systematically. For one thing the condition of the people I am telling of is later (whatever their date may be) than that of the Wolfings. They are people living in a place near the Great Mountains. I don’t think it is worth while telling you anything more of it till you hear some of it done, as the telling the plot of a story in cold blood falls very flat.”
Though he still lectured regularly for the Socialist League, addresses on Art, principally given to the students of Art Schools, were taking a more and more prominent place in his activity. The way in which the two kinds of work were at present combined is well illustrated by a letter of this February. “I go to-morrow, Saturday,” he writes from Hammersmith, “by night train to Glasgow, and lecture for the branch on Sunday evening. On the Monday I lecture to certain art students on Gothic Architecture, which I daresay will be rather a new subject to them, and will a good deal surprise them. On the Tuesday I give an address at the School of Art on Arts and Crafts. On Wednesday I go to Edinburgh and lecture for the branch there: on Thursday I go to Macclesfield and lecture (Arts and Crafts) to the School of Art there: Friday I come home, with pretty well enough of it.”
On this visit to Glasgow, “I went,” he says, “to Professor Nichol to guest: he is a ‘literary man,’ not with a wooden leg; but there is something crippled about his mind all the same; a very clever and able man, but soured and disappointed; mainly I think because his capacity is second- and his ambition first-rate. He is talkative and amusing, and was very cordial with me. That day I lectured on Gothic Architecture to an Institute of students. I am afraid that they did not know much about the subject, so that my matter was rather over their heads. Lecture over, I underwent a bore — to wit dining at a solemn dinner at the Arts Club: Lord Provost (i.e., Mayor) present, also professors and big-wigs. The business of the evening to make speeches; toasts and thanks for them. I had to return thanks for Music and Literature, curious conjuncture! which I turned the flank of by alluding to the Scotch Ballads and their old tunes. Tuesday I had to address the art-school after a sort of private public dinner; the place was full, although J. Chamberlain was speaking to a big meeting elsewhere, and the folk seemed pleased.”
