Complete works of willia.., p.825
Complete Works of William Morris, page 825
Throughout the year the protect of his new printing press and the work to be done in connexion with it had swallowed up all other interests. Even his own work in romance-writing and translating Sagas from the Icelandic took a second place to it. But at these employments, and at his Merton Abbey work, he was also fairly busy, and well contented with them all. In February the magnificent Arras tapestry of the Adoration of the Kings which now hangs in Exeter College Chapel was finished to his complete satisfaction; nothing better of the kind, he said, had ever been done, old or new. The admission to partnership in the firm of Morris & Co. of Messrs. F. and R. Smith, the two principal sub-managers after Mr. George Wardle’s retirement, had relieved Morris from a great deal of the purely mechanical or commercial details of management. The romance entitled “The Story of the Glittering Plain” was written this spring, and was published in the English Illustrated Magazine, in the four numbers for the months of June to September. It is perhaps best known as the first book printed at the Kelmscott Press. But it is likewise notable as marking the full and unreserved return of the author to romance. In “The House of the Wolfings,” and even to some degree in “The Roots of the Mountains “ also, there had been a semi-historical setting, and an adherence to the conditions of a world from which the supernatural element was not indeed excluded, but in which it bore such a subordinate place as involved no violent strain on probability. Here the imagined world is of no place or time, and is one in which nothing is impossible. The dreamer of dreams has returned to that strange Land East of the Sun, mingled of Northern Saga and Arabian tale, through which the Star-Gazer had passed two and twenty years before in the days of “The Earthly Paradise”: a land in which, like Odysseus and his comrades in the isle of Circe, “we do not know where is the dusk nor where the dawn.” The book which the King’s daughter shows to Hallblithe in his dream on the Acre of the Undying is a sort of figure of that glittering world, rich with all imagined and unimaginable wonders, into which Morris had entered long ago, and the door of which always remained open to him.
“She had in her hand a book covered outside with gold and gems, even as he saw it in the orchard-close aforetime: and he beheld her face that it was no longer the face of one sick with sorrow; but glad, and clear, and most beauteous. Now she opened the book and held it before Hallblithe and turned the leaves so that he might see them clearly; and therein were woods and castles painted, and burning mountains, and the wall of the world, and kings upon their thrones, and fair women and warriors, all most lovely to behold, even as he had seen it aforetime in the orchard when he lay lurking amidst the leaves of the bay tree.
“So at last she came to the place in the book wherein was painted Hallblithe’s own image over against the image of the Hostage; and he looked thereon and longed. But she turned the leaf, and lo! on one side the Hostage again, standing in a fair garden of the spring with the lilies all about her feet, and behind her the walls of a house, grey, ancient, and lovely: and on the other leaf over against her was painted a sea rippled by a little wind and a boat thereon sailing swiftly, and one man alone in the boat sitting and steering with a cheerful countenance; and he, who but Hallblithe himself. Hallblithe looked thereon for a while and then the King’s daughter shut the book, and the dream flowed into other imaginings of no import.”
“News from Nowhere” had been revised about the same time and was published as a cheap volume in paper covers, which had a large circulation. It is a curious fact that this slightly constructed and essentially insular romance has, as a Socialist pamphlet, been translated into French, German, and Italian, and has probably been more read in foreign countries than any of his more important works in prose or verse. The romance itself — if it would not be more correct to speak of it as a pastoral — is of such beauty as may readily win indulgence for its artificiality. A pastoral, whether it places its golden age in the past or the future, is by the nature of the case artificial, and perhaps as much so, though not so obviously, as when it boldly plants itself in the present. The immediate occasion which led Morris to put into a connected form those dreams of an idyllic future in which his mind was constantly hovering was no doubt the prodigious vogue which had been obtained the year before, by an American Utopia, Mr. Bellamy’s once celebrated “Looking Backward.” The refined rusticity of “News from Nowhere” is in studied contrast to the apotheosis of machinery and the glorification of the life of large towns in the American book; and is perhaps somewhat exaggerated in its reaction from that picture of a world in which the phalanstère of Fourier seems to have swollen to delirious proportions, and State Socialism has resulted in a monstrous and almost incredible centralization.
Indeed a merely materialist Earthly Paradise was always a thing Morris regarded with a feeling little removed from disgust. That ideal organization of life in which the names of rich and poor should disappear, together with the things themselves, in a common social well-being, was in itself to him a mere body, of which art, as the single high source of pleasure, was the informing soul. “Mr. Bellamy worries himself unnecessarily,” he had said in an article in the Commonweal on this very book and its ideas in June, 1889, “in seeking, with obvious failure, some incentive to labour to replace the fear of starvation, which is at present our only one; whereas it cannot be too often repeated that the true incentive to useful and happy labour is, and must be, pleasure in the work itself.” That single sentence contains the sum of his belief in politics, in economics, in art.
The thought is thus expanded in the same article. “It is necessary to point out,” he writes, “that there are some Socialists who do not think that the problem of the organization of life and necessary labour can be dealt with by a huge national centralization, working by a kind of magic for which no one feels himself responsible: that on the contrary it will be necessary for the unit of administration to be small enough for every citizen to feel himself responsible for its details and be interested in them; that individual men cannot shuffle off the business of life on to the shoulders of an abstraction called the State, but must deal with it in conscious association with each other: that variety of life is as much an aim of true Communism as equality of condition, and that nothing but an union of these two will bring about real freedom: that modern nationalities are mere artificial devices for the commercial war that we seek to put an end to, and will disappear with it: and finally, that art, using that word in its widest and due signification, is not a mere adjunct of life which free and happy men can do without, but the necessary expression and indispensable instrument of human happiness.”
On the 10th of June Morris writes from Kelmscott House to Mrs. Burne-Jones:
“I have had three outings, — no, four — two of them business though. Item to Chislehurst after a job: villas (some desperately ugly, others according to the new light) in the beautiful woods with lots of oak growing in them which to me is a treat, as I see so little oak about Kelmscott. Yes, villas and nothing but villas save a chemist’s shop and a dry public house near the station: no sign of any common people, or anything but gentlemen and servants — a beastly place to live in, don’t you think?
“Next place was better — in a way — a house of a very rich — and such a wretched uncomfortable place! a sham Gothic house of fifty years ago now being added to by a young architect of the commercial type — men who are very bad. Fancy, in one of the rooms there was not a pane of glass that opened! Well, let that flea stick on the wall. Stanmore is the name of the place: it is really quite pretty about, though only about ten miles from London (near Harrow), great big properties all about, the wall of one park next to the wall of another, which has at any rate preserved the trees. Smith and I walked thence to Edgware over most beautiful meadows with scarce a house to be seen till you come to Edgware, which is a little melancholy town or large village; old, not ugly, but too visibly the home of most abundant poverty.
“The next outing was an Anti-Scrape one to Lincoln. That was exceedingly delightful to me. The town has a terrible blot on it, a great factory for machines down by the river, which seems to take a pleasure in smoking; indeed I suppose its masters are practically the masters of the whole town. However that is the worst of it: there is a longish oldish street on the flat, and at the end of it a beautiful gate across, now the Guildhall, and it rises steeper and steeper till before you come to the close you almost have to crawl, and most of the way the long leaden roof of the minster is the horizon; the houses mostly oldish red brick and pantiles. There is another most beautiful gate into the close, over which show the different planes of the minster most wonderfully. The whole place is chock full of history: there is work of the first Norman bishop, Remigius, who strangely enough moved his see there from Dorchester on the Thames, so well known to me. The rest (and almost all) is in gradated periods of Early Pointed; outside one may perhaps find fault with parts, especially the East Front (only I had a pleasing feeling that I was not responsible for them). But when we got inside all criticism fell, and one felt — well, quite happy — and as if one never wanted to go away again. I had seen it all more than twenty years ago, but somehow was much more impressed this time: the church is not high inside, though it is long and broad, but its great quality is a kind of careful delicacy of beauty, that no other English minster that I have seen comes up to: in short a miracle of art, that nowhere misses its intention. There is a little stained glass (early thirteenth century) as good as the best, and some of the sculpture at least belongs to the best work of the time. Outside the church and close to it is a huge Norman Castle, the enceinte quite complete, a piece of the keep left: a horrible modern prison and court house inside the old walls. Five minutes from the close gate towards the open country you come on the gate of the Roman town, quite unornamented, but sound and well-built. Down the slope of the hill are still left two twelfth-century houses. One of them, in honour surely of little Sir Hugh, is called the Jew’s House; I cheapened an old chest there of a lady somewhat of Mrs. Wilfer’s type, who received us with the dignity of a fallen Queen.”
The fourth outing was a brief visit to Kelmscott. “I am steadily at work,” he writes ten days later, “reading my own poems, because we are really going to bring out a one-volume ‘Earthly Paradise’ this autumn. Some people would say the work was hard. ‘The Glittering Plain’ I have finished some time, and begun another.”
On the 8th of July he writes again: “I have undertaken to get out some of the Sagas I have lying about. Quaritch is exceedingly anxious to get hold of me, and received with enthusiasm a proposal to publish a Saga Library: item he will give me money (or perhaps I ought to say old books). We have got six letters of our new type done and have even had a scrap printed.”
This type, the first produced for the Kelmscott Press, cost Morris almost infinite pains. “What I wanted,” he writes of it himself in the Note on his aims in founding the Kelmscott Press, “was letter pure in form; severe, without needless excrescences; solid, without the thickening and thinning of the line which is the essential fault of the ordinary modern type, and which makes it difficult to read; and not compressed laterally, as all later type has grown to be owing to commercial exigencies. There was only one source from which to take examples of this perfected Roman type, to wit, the works of the great Venetian printers of the fifteenth century, of whom Nicholas Jenson produced the completest and most Roman characters from 1470 to 1476. This type I studied with much care, getting it photographed to a big scale, and drawing it over many times before I began designing my own letter; so that though I think I mastered the essence of it, I did not copy it servilely; in fact, my Roman type, especially in the lower case, tends rather more to the Gothic than does Jenson’s.”
By the middle of August eleven punches had been cut for the new fount, and Morris had determined that Caxton’s “Golden Legend” should be the first large work produced by his press. He himself had recently acquired a copy of the edition of 1527 printed by Wynkyn de Worde. The Kelmscott “Golden Legend “ was, however, set up, not from this, but from Caxton’s own first edition of 1483. The almost priceless original was borrowed, under a heavy bond in case of loss or injury, from the Cambridge University Library for this purpose. It was transcribed for the press — a work of such laborious magnitude, and one executed so patiently and carefully as to deserve commemoration — by Miss Phillis M. Ellis, the daughter of his old friend and collaborator. Ellis himself took the chief part in superintending the accuracy of the text, a work of no small difficulty.
On the 29th of August, 1890, Morris writes to him from Kelmscott:
“Please pardon me for not answering your letter sooner; you know my little ways. Also I did want to weigh between the Golden Legend and the Troy book for reprinting: now I have borrowed a Recueil of the Histories of Troy (the Wynkyn de Worde of course) from Quaritch, and have no doubt that the G. L. is by far the most important book of the two: so I accept your kind offer with many thanks indeed, and will begin printing as soon as the type is free from the Glittering Plain, which I take it will be the first book printed in the regenerate type or Jenson-Morris.
“I inclose a specimen (over-inked) of as far as we have gone at present. I hope you admire its literature — due of course to the compositor. Kind regards to the young she-scribe that is to be.”
The idea of becoming a publisher as well as a printer was one which had not yet occurred to him. An experiment was talked of later, but never carried out, of dispensing with a publisher by printing off a book and then selling the whole edition by auction. For “The Golden Legend” an agreement for publication was entered into with Mr. Bernard Quaritch. “I don’t mind having a publisher,” Morris said, “so long as he has nothing whatever to do with any question except purely business ones. As to the ‘prophet’ I want none of him: I only want not to have to drop much, say not above £100.” On this footing it was arranged. The agreement, signed on the 11th of September, 1890, provides that the publisher shall pay for the expenses of paper, printing, and binding, and that Morris is to have sole and absolute control over choice of paper and type, size of the reprint, and selection of the printer. The last-named provision indicates that Morris was then still uncertain whether to start a press of his own or to have his new type printed from by some existing firm of printers. The following two letters to Ellis continue the details of the enterprise. Kelmscott House,
“Kelmscott House,
“Sept. 7th, 1890.
“My dear Ellis,
“I gave Quaritch your letter in person, and we had a talk about the matter: by this time you will have had a letter from him. It seemed to me a matter of course to agree, as far as I am concerned, with his proposition to take the whole expense on himself and do what he can with the 250 copies, since it will then cost us nothing but our work: only it seems to me that your share of the work will be so much the heaviest that I feel rather uncomfortable about it, and think it somehow ought to be made up to you. What I have now chiefly to do is to push on the type-founding side of matters: I will do all I possibly can on this side, so that we may begin as soon as possible. I should think that we might get some type about Christmas time; but of course I cannot be sure. Wishing you good luck (I had little with the gudgeons),
“I am yours ever,
“WILLIAM MORRIS.”
“Kelmscott,
“Sept. 14th, 1890.
“My dear Ellis,
“I have sent on Q.’s copy and now send back yours. Of course I should like the reprint to be of the same form as the original if the Roman type can do it, which I doubt, as black letter takes up less room: in any case some kind of folio it will have to be. As to paper I have heard of two people who may help us, one whom Walker knows and whose mill I propose to visit with Walker almost at once; and one employed by Allen, Ruskin’s publisher. We can do nothing with Whatman but take what he has on the shelves. In one thing I think I differ from you a little, i.e., about the joined letters or queer signs: since our book is to be a reprint, not a fac-simile, I do not think that we need reproduce these: indeed I should extend the abbreviations in order to make the book more readable. However I am open to correction on this point. Don’t rest too much on my date of Christmas for the type: we seem to be getting on very slowly with it at present, and I have only eleven letters cut yet. I can only hope for the best.
“Yours ever,
“WILLIAM MORRIS.”
By the middle of October “the type is getting on: I have all the lower case letters (26), also I have been designing ornamental letters, rather good I think.” His excitement over the work was so great that for once he left Kelmscott, when autumn ended, with little regret. “We are coming to London to-day,” he writes from there on the 16th of October. “The weather has been very good; our best day was Monday, when I hear you had a fog; it was a miracle of a day here: the sort of day when you really can do nothing but stand and stare at it. I am not sorry to come to town. I want to cease from being bumbled up and down. I want to work hard at my easy work.”
The breaking up of the Socialist League and the constitution of the Hammersmith Socialist Society, though it took up a measure of his time for the next six weeks in London, hardly disturbed him materially, and did not check the progress of his other work. By the end of the year all but two of the punches for the type, both upper and lower case, were completed, and a compositor and pressman, Mr. William Bowden, had been engaged. The paper was made from linen rag by Messrs. Batchelor & Son of Little Chart, near Ashford, after an Italian pattern of the fifteenth century, which Morris supplied. Such care was taken in its manufacture, that the wire moulds were woven by hand to reproduce the slight irregularity in the texture of those used by the earliest printers. Morris went down to Little Chart himself with Mr. E. Walker to see about this paper. With unabated interest in any form of manual art, he must take off his coat and try to make a sheet of paper with his own hands. At the second attempt he succeeded in doing very creditably what it is supposed takes a man several months to master.
